Hey all-- I hope your New Years is warm and sweet (cause I'm freezing my feet off here!) To celebrate New Years, I'm participating in ZA Maxfields Progressive Dinner-- which means you can visit all of the blogs there at the link and see an entire dinner array of blogs!  My blog is not so much a recipe as a way to recover from a failed recipe, but I hope you'll forgive me, because, well, CAKE BALLS!  *dissolves into laughter*  There is a prize at the end if you go to every blog and leave a comment, so sit down, drink something hot and sweet, and enjoy the show :-)


Accidentally Awesome


Okay—so Mate is actually the recipe follower here.  He’s the maker-of-fudge, the soup-party impresario, the, “Hey, let’s make this!” guy.  And as his candy-making expertise has gained weight in the family mythos, he’s become the King of Following the Recipe in the realm of our family and friends.


So this year, high on the successes of the previous year, wherein we sent fudge to half the people I know in the entire world after Christmas, he decided he was going to make cake-pops.


He had PLANS for the cake-pops.  There was going to be sprinkles and decorations, and they were gonna look like Christmas and omigod and gloryhallelujia! They were gonna be frickin’ amazing cake-pops.

Anyone out there who has ever made cake-pops knows where this is going.

It’s like a zillion step process.

First you bake a cake—yay! Then you let it cool, and mix it with frosting—that’s right, like, mix the cake, with the frosting, crumbling it up and mashing it in your fingers like playdough, and then you make balls.  (Heh heh heh… cake balls! Heh heh heh… yeah. I’m twelve.)  Anyway—after you make the balls, you melt the chocolate and dip the sticks in the chocolate and then poke the balls (heh heh heh) and then put them in the freezer to firm up. (Omigod… this doesn’t get any less dirty!) When the balls are firm and good, you dip them in the chocolate, and then set them out to cool.

Now see, some of you are seeing that this looks relatively simple.

Some of you are seeing all the myriad ways this can go heinously wrong.

Let’s start with the cakes, which did not all cook the same.  The dry one didn’t make good balls, and the wet one made balls that stuck together but also fell apart.  Then move on to the chocolate, which claimed to be microwaveable but was not, and Mate tested this with his mouth because the crumbles didn’t look hot since they weren’t melty, and it turned out that crumbled microwaved chocolate was hotter than the temperature of the sun and he had blisters on his lips!  (Poor guy. He’s giving these desserts to my family, you understand, since he works with a bunch of fitness enthusiasts who don’t allow processed sugar to grace their well-shaped, chiseled, manly lips.) 

So he had to melt new chocolate and then try to stick the balls (nope, still laughing) and then, after they chilled, try to bathe them in the new chocolate while they were bound and determined to fall apart.

Yeah.

It was a disaster.

At the end, he had a tray full of broken balls, half covered in chocolate. 

He saw failure. I saw potential comedy with a candy coating.  I also saw processed sugar gold.

“So, just spread it in a cake pan!” I said, all enthusiasm.

“And then what? Broken cake?”

“No! Then pour the chocolate over it, and serve it with a spatula.  You add some whipped cream or ice cream, and girls will be swarming over it like flies!”

“Flies will be swarming over it like flies. It looks awful.”

“Nom-nom-nom-nom…”  Well, I may have said that. I was definitely salivating though, that I do remember.

So, Christmas arrived.  We gave giant packets of three kinds of fudge to everybody, and felt pretty stupid because my family makes Martha Stewart look like a slacker, and I haven’t actually made anything Christmassy since Mate started making fudge.  And the little tray of cake-ball-cake sat unnoticed in the corner.

Until dessert time.

“What’s this?” my nephew said, looking strapping and handsome at twenty years old.  (This is important—until he hit about sixteen, I could swear he’d look like Dopey for his entire life. That he looks “strapping and handsome” means that it really does get better, and all adolescents should have hope!  His ears even stick out less!)

“That’s failed cake-pops, covered in chocolate,” I said.  (Notice that I called them “cake-pops” because I didn’t want him to launch into some silly adolescent snark about “cake-balls”.  That’s my department.)

His mouth made the little “o” shape associated with extreme anticipation. I think he may have drooled a little. 

“Hold on a second,” he told me.  “Let me get the whipped cream.”

So we sat for about fifteen minutes, and he told me about his life while eating probably half of that sinful, decadent failed dessert. I loved that moment—I don’t get enough of them with my sister’s sons, and it was one of the highlights of my Christmas.

“So, the cake-balls didn’t get all eaten,” Mate said glumly.

“Yeah—Nate ate about half the plate.”

“But not everybody loved them. That sort of sucked.”

“I think that depends on how you look at it,” I said philosophically.  “I think the person who ate half the cake really liked them.”

Mate grunted and shook his head.  “Man, I don’t know if I should try those again or not.”

“Go ahead and try them again,” I said.  “You never know what may happen.”

So, that’s not really a recipe for dessert.  But, it could be a recipe for salvaging a failed dessert, right?  Or even just a lesson that if you mix your cake with the frosting and then add chocolate, there is no bad way to do it. 

Or even just a wish to have a happy holiday, and may your New Year be filled with nothing more serious than a failed chocolate cake-ball, with a dipped stick.  (Buahahahahahahahahaha!!!)

Happy New Year!

Chocolate Covered Chocolate

 

By

 

Amy Lane

 

 

Quick! What’s your favorite Steven Spielberg movie?

Jurassic Park? Schindler’s List? Saving Private Ryan? Jaws?

Maybe you’re more a fan of the movies he’s produced.  Maybe you’re heavily into DreamWorks.  Shrek? Penguins of Madagascar? Kung Fu Panda? How to Train Your Dragon?

Quick! Which one was better? Which one was cleaner? Better written? Better acted? Had the most exciting subject matter? Choose your favorite right now!

Bet you can’t.

I know I can’t.

Because they’re so different, right? I mean, Jurassic Park and Jaws had some similarities, but the differences—wow! And even though Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan were both about WWII, they were both such different parts of it, right? I mean, all of those movies have his signature on them, right?  The everyman heroes, the sense that the conflict—be it war, Mother Nature, or human folly—is so great that the everyman is the only one who can survive, but that he’ll never really triumph… the list goes on. Spielberg makes great movies. He makes great movies with a personal stamp. But he makes different movies.  So much of which movie is his “greatest” goes into the perspective of the person viewing the movie—but his artisanship is present in every frame. (Or, if you hate Spielberg’s movies, you can declare it his lack of artisanship and argue about which one is his worst movie—but the same idea applies.)

So…

About craft.

I talk about craft and craftsmanship a lot because so much of what we do is subjective. Some people will loftily tell you that first person storytelling is easy and irritating, and so they will mark it down because really, how good could a story told in first person be? Some people will tell you that angst is cheap and stupid, and that real writing doesn’t rely on such emotional tripe to be meaningful.  Some people will sneer at romantic comedies because they’re vapid and meaningless, and the conflict is so trite.

Honestly, as important as all of that criticism is to the reader, it is nothing that the writer can control.  Trying to predict how two thousand (or twenty thousand or two-hundred thousand) readers are going to react to the same piece of work is like trying to predict whether the cats are going to love the new puppy or hate the new puppy. It all depends on the cats, the puppy, and the day. All a writer can rely on—all a writer can ever rely on—is the thoroughness of his or her own craft.

Writing romance is literally like putting together the box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get. Except you know there will be chocolate. And sweet. And possibly some nuts. And sometimes some cherries and sometimes not. And maybe nougat or toffee or caramel. Bugs if you’re kinky, pretzels if you’re lucky, but definitely chocolate.

Definitely the fucking chocolate. Because no matter how many times people say they want different or new or exciting, the fact is, if they have picked up a romance of any sort, they want at least two people working shit out.

Period the end. That’s the fucking chocolate. Every romance has it. It is inescapable.

When people get that box of chocolate, we don’t know if they’re going to like the nuts, the cherries (or lack thereof), the nougat, the toffee, the crickets, the pretzels, or the caramel. All we can control is that the chocolate is the smoothest, most quality chocolate we can possibly produce, that the nuts are fresh, the cherries sufficiently pickled (or lubed), the nougat chewy, the toffee completely cooked, the pretzels crisp, the caramel smooth and the crickets… well,  I’m not sure what you want in a chocolate covered cricket, but someone research that and make sure their crickets are as kinky as kinky gets.

The point is, some people are going to spit that cricket out, and some people are going to think it’s a delicacy. Some morons are going to stick their fingers in the bottoms of all the chocolates and only eat the crèmes. Some people are going to take little nibbles of a few of them and declare the whole box bad, and some people are going to eat the entire two-pound gift box and lick the corners.

All of that--all of that—is completely beyond our control.

I bring this up because I am writing happy.

Yes—I am the queen of angst, and I am writing a happy book. Now, I do this regularly when I write my Christmas stories, and sometimes I get really edgy and write a full-length story like Shiny! Or Gambling Men. The point is, instead of “Angst and Pain, Amy Lane!” the reader is getting happy. No toffee, nougat, caramel, pretzels or crickets—just chocolate.

The reviewer reaction to this is usually surprisingly depressing. “Well, if it was another storyteller, I’d think it was good, but it’s Amy Lane, and she can do better.”  (I shit you not—look under any of my “happy titles” from It’s Not Shakespeare to Going Up! to Shiny! And you will find at least four reviews that say that. Excuse me while I ice my nads. Ouch.)

However, the sales reaction to this is usually very very… cheerful! People love to buy happy. They just feel really guilty about enjoying it. “Well, it was fun, but it was only romantic comedy, so my enjoyment is tainted somehow with the lack of feeling my insides twisted into a double knot and punctured with pins.”  I don’t get it myself—I love myself a good happy—but I’ve learned not to question the things I cannot change.

And I’ve learned not to feel bad about writing happy.

I am putting craftsmanship into every word. I am thinking painstakingly about every character reaction. I am trying hard to fill my story with as many details that give readers a place to grasp the story emotionally as I do with my more serious, pain-laden stories. I don’t want to write the same story every time. Writing The Locker Room or Beneath the Stain 365 days a year would kill me. If I am going to fill my box of chocolates with variety, some of those chocolates are going to have to be garden-variety chocolate crèmes. As long as they’re as carefully crafted as the chocolate covered crickets, I have done my job.

Of course, saying this out loud takes a great deal of cheering from my long-suffering beta reader—it’s hard to buck public opinion with the knowledge that I’m doing my best.

“It’s good,” my beta reader assures. “I love it. If you give this character an incurable disease or kill off a parent, I’ll fly 3,000 miles and smack you.”

“Are you sure? I mean, it’s really a very simple romance, very immediate and character driven. Not… you know. Bells, or Stain, or Keeping Promise Rock. Not… epic.”

Well, my beta reader has put up with a lot, recently. She gets cranky when I say things like this.

“Listen, you.  The last year has been a horror. Dead boyfriends, WWII, Alzheimer’s, mental illness, children leaping from parapets, rape, murder, and HEA after life. I love you, but I love this book too. If you hurt these people, I will hate you. Yes, your reviews might be great if suddenly the fucking dog dies or somebody’s parent takes a turn for the worse, but right now this is rich, simple romance. This is two guys working shit out. Just leave it.”

Uhm, my beta reader writes pretty much exactly what I love to read. If I don’t trust her on matters like this, I am wasting the precious time she needs to be spending writing me some more goddamned happy. 

I need to read the happy—not just hers, I can read anybody’s happy, but she’s the one whose time I’m stealing right now. So I need the happy. And the action. And the violence. It fills something in my soul. It is something I don’t write all the time, and it makes me shiver with impossible hope. If I am going to be using the time she should be using writing, I had better listen to what she has to say.

So I am writing me some happy. Rich, smooth, creamy milk chocolate and nothing else. I will not add bite or crickets or chocolate covered cherries. (Heh heh, cherries!) There may be nuts—it is after all, gay romance—but for the most part?

My box of chocolate needs some of these confections. I shall craft them the best I can, wrap them in the shiniest ruffled foil, make the ribbon on the box big and red and exciting, and I shall ignore the people who think I can do better.

I am writing something I love with all of the skill I possess. There is nothing better than this.

Wellspring

 

I actually had a whole other topic halfway written for this month’s (exceedingly late) Amy’s Lane, but I couldn’t write it.

It wasn’t controversial or difficult or even challenging—it was about sequels, and I’ll probably post it next month (on time, I hope) because it was good stuff, but I just couldn’t write it.

First I sproinged a nerve in my shoulder and then I got sick—fever, crud, headache, I-hate-everything-on-earth-because-it-moves kind of sick, and while I’m still shaking off that last part, the fact is, the sick didn’t keep me from writing. 

It just kept me from writing that particular piece.

So that’s what I’m going to talk about instead.  It’s going to be a ramble.  Get your prose-hiking boots on, and be sure to hydrate.  There’s going to be lots of creative underbrush and strange fauna ahead.

One of my biggest influences as a writer has been Stephanie Pearl-McPhee.  No, she’s not a romance writer—she is, in fact, a blogger in the most traditional sense of the word.  She knows how to write essays.  Having taught English for twenty years myself, I have a high respect for someone who uses the media in the old fashioned way of putting together a cogent argument, complete with thesis statement and support details, because God knows, that shit ain’t easy to teach. 

Anyway—Stephanie once had to go to a mountain retreat to write a book.  And when I’m talking mountain retreat, I’m saying the woman lives in Canada, and this was like, outer Canada.  I remember reading her blogs talking about things like, “Minus fifteen degrees Celsius” and, “I can only stay outside for twenty minutes or I’ll get hypothermia and die.”  She once had me wetting my pants because she almost twisted her ankle twenty feet from her cabin in a snowstorm. I know knitters, we aren’t action heroes, and that shit was dire.  But she went to this cabin to finish a book and she needed to finish a book, and dammit, that’s what she did.

What she didn’t do was knit. 

And I thought this to be really telling.  She wrote an entire essay about how when she was pouring her creativity into one place, she had nothing left for the other.  So when she was pouring her creativity into her writing, she had nothing left for her other favorite creative endeavor, knitting—and I have to say, the more I write the less I knit, mostly from a time constraints, but still. Spot on.

But Stephanie wasn’t a fiction writer—and I am.  (She wasn’t bicraftual either, but I’m going to stay away from crochet for this essay.  Whole other critter. Very bumpy.)  I think maybe this topic needs to be addressed again from someone who writes fiction, because the difference between fiction and non-fiction is a very tricky fish.  Alas, in spite of the fishing metaphor, I have no knowledge of the Canadian Rockies, and would probably die in the wilderness if anyone left me there to write. There will be no excitement or life-threatening action in this essay.  My apologies to you all.

See, the thing is, I just read that the RWA has revamped their bylaws, and that people need to prove that they really are trying to be writers in order to stay in the guild.  I have to say—and please don’t judge me when I say this—I was a little amused by the fact that they had to defend themselves over, what was it? 20,000 words?  The guild passed a resolution that said their members had to prove they were trying to be professional writers by showing that they had written at least 20,000 words with the goal of publication in the span of a year.  (Or was it two years? I’m still boggled.) 

There are writers out there who can only write 20,000 words in a year?

I’d die. 

I’d explode.

I’d rip people’s faces off. 

All of this… this… thing, rocketing around my brain, and I only dribbled 20,000 words of it on paper?  In a year?  I wrote 200,000 words a year when I was teaching full time!  I had to.  I was miserable, furious, elated, depressed, joyous and raging against the machine.  Where else was that going to go but my fiction!

It wasn’t until later that I started the blog and remembered that, yes, I could write essays too, as well as teach other people how to write them. 

And yes, some of my rage/elation was channeled into that, as well.

But in different ways—and that’s where things get interesting.

One of the interesting facts about publication is what I sort of think of as the concentric circle theory of types of writing. 

Autobiography sells best.  Biography is a close second. Essays or nonfiction, right up there.  When we make the leap to fiction, it’s contemporary fiction, then urban fantasy fiction, then high fantasy and science fiction.  You see what I’m talking about?

We start with an “I” narrator, and the reader can easily identify with the “I” narrator and say, in black and white terms, “This is reality according to this real person, and I don’t have to stretch my mind any further than that.”

This is the basis on which most of the reality television industry is formed, by the way, and why reality TV does so well.  Yes, we know that there is a fictional narrative engineered into the fabric of the show, but the casual onlooker does not, and the leap, from a person’s everyday life to what they see on the screen requires minimum energy and imagination and most especially, that hardest of human brain functions, empathy, which is why these shows do so well. 

So, autobiography and biography easy.  A well-written essay can take our brains by the hand and lead us to a conclusion—if we aren’t constantly challenging these conclusions, again, that’s easy.  (Which is why every time I see a book written by Rush Limbaugh a part of my soul dies.  The logic dysfunctions abound, but the people who are picking up the book don’t read it to question it—thinking is often the last thing on their minds!)

And once we leap to fiction, the trend continues.  Contemporary stories sell best—I’ve heard my publisher say it a thousand times.  Yes, there are exceptions—Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, Twilight—but for the most part, contemporary sells best. 

Because it’s easier to digest and easier to empathize with characters who are (as it may seem) “closer to real.”  After contemporary comes “werewolf and vampire” stories—or, urban fantasy.  So, we get our fun supernatural elements, but in a landscape people recognize, and, again, “closer to real.”  Fantasy, science fiction, steampunk? 

Yeah.  For a lot of readers, the painstaking work that goes into building a believable world is the same machinery that intrudes between a reader and his or her understanding of the characters.  It is harder to read fantasy and science fiction—it takes more work, more imagination, more empathy to read advanced alternative world fiction than it does to read contemporary fiction.  This makes the reader base smaller. 

So there’s the progression—from a reader’s standpoint.  Nonfiction to fiction, autobiography to high concept alternative universe fiction.  Ripples in the psyche extending out ward from the “me” to incorporate other, more complex of “me’s”-- you can see it.

It doesn’t work the same way from the writer’s standpoint.

Everything we write has its own challenges for one.  Are we writing biography or autobiography? (A blog post recounting our weekend, perhaps?) This writing requires we impose a narrative on a collection of facts or memories, and while it’s easier to read, it’s often difficult to write.  There is a process of reason going on here, an organization, a grouping of one idea after another that must be meshed in with a timeline.  It’s almost a mathematical process, and it requires a sense of linear thinking.  (For, aherm, some of us, this isn’t the easiest thing in the world.)

If we’re writing an essay (again, blog posts and articles fall into this category)—the same thing is needed. We are required to make a point and sustain it, even if it’s a “random” post, and all we’re doing is sustaining the point throughout the length of a paragraph.  Linear thinking is required, grouping, categorization, organization, and the ability to articulate the progression from detail A to point B. As I used to tell my students, the thesis is a subject + an opinion.  The details about the subject support the opinion.  The reasoning about the details explains why.

This isn’t an easy thought process.  It’s painful sometimes, especially when the connection between subject and opinion seems obvious to us.  Making that articulation between the fact and the opinion is difficult—and, yes, it requires imagination and empathy—almost to an excruciating degree. 

Fiction is an equally difficult fish to latch onto—but it’s a very different fish. 

Fiction is a fish in the sense that there is a subject and an opinion.  Yes—I’m serious.  Even in romance, there is a subject and an opinion, and usually the opinion is that love gives us hope, and that we have hope there is love. But still—that means we need to make the people and the conflicts in our head behave in such a way that this hope is made apparent to the reader. 

This would appear to be actually the harder job. 

Add in a paranormal element, or a completely different Alternative Universe element, and it’s even more difficult to create.

But…

But it’s difficult to create in a different part of our brain. 

The places where our characters interact, where they have conversations, where they’re being motivated to do the stupid things that they then have to bail themselves out of—that’s not the same part of our brains where our logic lives.  The logic happens, or our characters wouldn’t feel real.  But it’s not the piece-by-piece, painful articulation of non-fiction prose. 

Now I’m sure there’s a neurological study to back this up, and I have my own physical proof.  Very often I tell the story of the time I ran to aqua aerobics class (late, of course) when I had been deeply in the middle of writing Under the Rushes.  Even while I swam—and I do deep-water aerobics, no buoyancy belt—my brain was still engaged in the story.  Mechanically, I followed the instructions of the aqua instructor until she told us to tilt to a forty-five degree angle to our left, and bicycle.

And I almost drowned.

Because that was where all of my brain activity was happening, and I couldn’t disengage fast enough to make my body work.  It was terrifying.  One minute, my body was working independently, following a logical progression, and the next minute I was flailing around in my element while my brain frantically tried to disengage from the all consuming task of building worlds and creating real, breathing people. 

It’s happened a couple of times since--although I try to pull my head out of what is literally my own ass before I go work out now—but the truth remains. 

When we’re that deep into creativity, we don’t engage the same part of our brain that we use for the painful logical progression of an essay.

So let’s get back to my first failed article on sequels, and why it didn’t get written.

It didn’t get written because I was sick and miserable, and my body was betraying me as the giant lump of useless flesh that it has become.  Because reasoning my way through even the most basic essay interfered with the process of sitting up, breathing, and making my fingers work without melting into a miserable little ball and whimpering until I fell asleep. 

However, during that same week, I wrote nearly 20,000 words of fiction.

Why?

Because the part of my brain making my body work could flounder and fail (and believe me, it did) but the part of my brain making my characters work? 

Was happily engaged doing just that.  And, frankly, it was a better place to be than the rest of my body, so I sat at my keyboard and lived there for a while, until I could stay awake long enough to write this article on where creativity comes from. 

And so you are asking yourselves (as you often do when you read my articles, because it takes me forever to get to the point) “Yes, Amy, we’re glad you’re feeling better but why did you just waste our time?”

Because even though our job title may be “fiction writer” the fact is, we’re called upon to do a lot more than that.  We’re called upon to edit, to blog, to write articles, and to e-mail.  We’re called upon to give face time to social media and to lecture and to be on panels and to have lunch with people who love books as much as we do, and who want to see our books sell really well and would like to help us do that.

We’re called upon to access more than just our “fiction brain” in order to be “fiction writers” and knowing where these different creative processes come from is important for us to understand. 

Are we pissed off at our spouses and thinking up worst-case scenarios for our marriage?  What do we want to do with that energy?  Channel it into fiction where it can create angst?   Channel that into non-fiction where it can create a strong and passionate argument?    Channel that into knitting where it can create little teeny hats because our stitches are so tight and small with suppressed emotion?  Or channel that into an argument that may result in great makeup sex?  Where is that energy going?  You may want to make sure it’s not going into an e-mail with your publisher or agent, or on social media, but there are places to take it where it could help you—and that’s good to know.

Are we happy and exuberant and excited about the world?  Well, do we want that in fiction, or do we want that in social media?  Do we want it in our stories?  Do we want it in our blog-post, because that sort of energy is always very attractive?  Or do we want to take a day off the computer and give that energy to our family, because God knows, we sacrifice some of the best parts of ourselves to our computers, and they deserve something besides the crumbs now and then?

Or are we sick and exhausted, and hunching at our computers because it’s all we have energy to do, and wondering how to make the most of this valuable writing time and not squander it checking to see if our GoodReads number has become unstuck from where it was a week ago?

For me, retreating to fiction when I felt miserable was a comfort beyond measure.  I urge everybody to know where your writing comes from, and what your limits are and aren’t depending on how you feel.  I get asked about writer’s block all the time, and truth is, I rarely get it.  I can always write something.  My trick is usually knowing what it is that I can write when I’m feeling the way I feel.  I think this can be everyone’s trick—and that it’s a very useful one indeed. 

That, and knitting or crocheting. 

Because I’m telling you, when I could no longer write, and all I wanted to do was hunker down in misery and create that way. 

But the point is to know your wellsprings—where does your creativity come from?  Use the appropriate well for the appropriate taste, and the spring will continue to flow.

 

* Note- this is my traditional RRW post, that I crosspost here.  Also?  The picture is a picture of my cat, on my porch, taken from my car.  I thought it was appropriate ;-)


Around the Writer’s Block

 

 It doesn’t happen often, and usually it’s with non-fiction, but still.  I’m not immune. 

Holy mother of almighty fuck, I’ve got an article due!

And I don’t know what to write.

I hit up my friends—who all have good suggestions, but none of them are quite right.

Setting as character!  Says Damon.  How to have a good book signing!

I need to dwell on the first one, and I don’t know anything about the second one—but hey, at least I know what to write next month, and I’m grateful.

How to destroy a website in less than two seconds without even trying!

Well, Rhys Ford as a right to be bitter as she cleaned up my mess last night, but I swear if I even knew what I did I would be all over telling people how not to do that!

World building! Texts Mary.  Convention survival! 

I’ve done them both!

Yeah, but you’re good at them!

And that’s what it is to have a friend who loves you unconditionally.  Speaking of…

Friendship and how you incorporate them in your stories! Say all my FB people. 

Okay.  True story.  Until I came to life as Amy Lane, I had some spectacularly failed friendships under my belt.  I don’t even want to talk about it.  Suffice it to say, one of the ways I write really awesome friends is to write people who do the exact opposite of what I have done in the past.  So, a good suggestion, but painful.  And, uhm, no.

And it’s not until I’m driving down the street to pick up the kids at the end of a particularly frustrating work day doing pretty much nothing that I know what to write about.

I’m going to write about writer’s block.  Because there’s a reason I don’t get writer’s block much—at least on the fiction front—and I thought maybe folks might like to know why that is.

Everybody remember Alice In Wonderland or The Matrix or a host of other sci-fi/fantasy shows in which someone touches a mirror and is suddenly sucked into a world of boundless possibilities?

Yeah. 

See, I’ve always been a little nearsighted.  Always.  And the idea of cleaning windows is foreign to me because seriously, isn’t the world outside of my own brain that fuzzy always? 

So driving down the road, a molten coat of golden drought dust layering my windshield, the light of the October sun so slanted the world’s colors seem almost distorted, I realize that to me, with my fuzzy grasp of reality and vision, my entire world is one of those mirrors.

All I have to do is reach out, touch that elusive barrier at my fingertips, and suddenly I’m through that looking glass and walking around an alternative world as somebody else.

Somebody’s son is riding his bicycle.  Who is he?  He’s taunting his sister, who is crying on a raggedy patch of lawn on a part of the street that’s not famous for long term residents.  Who is this kid?  Who is this girl?  What is their future?

There is a plethora of young men—angry men—out today, walking by themselves.  Almost to a one they have their shirts pulled around their necks in deference to the nearly 100 degree heat, and they wear their brutal tattoos or their square brimmed hats or their savagely hollowed cheeks as they pull on a cancer stick like some sort of badge: I’m bitter, my future is limited, and I am walking in the heat down this distorted suburban landscape to a place that is as indifferent to me as I am to hope.  What does it take to get out of that place?  Which ones will make it to see truly blue sky?

A month ago I had to slow down as I was driving down this street because a mama duck was leading her goslings to safety.  I look around anxiously, hoping she doesn’t decide to relocate, and I see bright green poster board, hopefully drawn on in Sharpie: DUCK X-ING. Who made those signs?  A boy like mine, whose prickly oddness is defined by a singular tenderness to creatures?  A girl like mine, whose whole proactive little person would simply assume that those signs would stand as guardians over the vulnerable?  Was there an indulgent parent, hoping not to spy any fractured little bodies every day of the school commute?   Or does somebody just like ducks?

Drought, drought, everywhere, my state is about to explode into red-gold dust.  What if we never see water again?  Will we cut a hole in the bottom of our shower and try to grow a garden from a few measly drops of rain?  Will we be forced to abandon electricity and will I become the sole support of the family, using my knitting and quilting supplies to provide something concrete and useful for seeds in order to survive?  What kind of world would emerge from the slowly strangling ecological disaster of prolonged drought?  Would I be able to send my children to dangerous places of storms, that did not miss the sweet release of water?

Wow.  Look at those people at the bus stop.  The homeless man in the several layers of overalls, the nurse still in scrubs, the woman in cammies, smoking in boredom, the receptionist with heels in her pocket, dyed red hair going gray, the young hipsters with more hair than a yeti on hormones… holy fuckin’ jebus where in the flaming sphincter of hades is that bus going?

 

Could I go on? 

Oh Goddess, yes.  I could go on.

So you ask, what is the point?  Great—Amy’s brain is on speed, we are not surprised how in the hell does that help us?

See—here’s the thing.

I’ve always been imaginative and I’ve always been good with words—to the extent that the rest of the world outside my nearsighted brain is not always quite… real.  And I might have stayed just that way—imaginative but unmoved by the outside world, except a couple of things happened.

One, was that when Mate and I moved out of the house, we moved into the shittiest apartment known to man.  In one year, our ceiling collapsed twice and filled our bathtub with sewage, our toilet fountained shit, two litters of dying kittens were dropped on our doorstep because we were the only suckers who’d care for them, we watched a large frightening woman shatter all the windows of the apartment her boyfriend was keeping with his mistress, we heard the prostitute in the room above us keep regular appointments, our cars got broken into, our laundry got stolen, and we had to walk through knife fights in the parking lots to get to our cars.

Amy had to pull her head out of her ass right quick and make other people and their less than savory motivations real in her own mind, or she and Mate weren’t going to survive.

Another thing was that Amy got her teaching credential in a time when teachers were expected to make peace, not war.  The administration would not back us in the advent of student misbehavior unless we had detailed evidence that we’d tried non-authoritarian measures to modify behavior first.

And Amy worked in a shitty part of town.  Even student teaching, Amy worked in a shitty part of town.

This meant that Amy needed to gauge the psyche of thirty-five kids at a time, and try to find a way to stave off violence at the drop of a hat.  I once had two brothers throw down in my freshman English class, because one of them had dropped out of the gang and the other was still dedicated.  I got called in front of the principal and had to say, “Man, I do not know what happened!” and that was not good enough.  Suddenly that imagination that Amy had used to invent happy fairies and happy families had to go a little deeper into the more complex and painful motivations of people who didn’t have a lot to lose.  And Amy had to find a way to give them something to win.  It was that simple.

The third thing that happened was that Amy’s son was born. 

His speech wasn’t comprehensible until he was nearly seven.

And getting into the head of someone who wasn’t so great with words, and had no verbal recourse became second nature.

What did all of this mean?

Well, I still have an active brain.  I still have a more than active imagination.  But these three areas of life experience gave me a bridge.  Suddenly I could reach beyond my own arm’s length into the world and the minds of people who were once decidedly outside my sphere. 

And I never stopped.

So what is my advice to people with writer’s block?

Walk around your neighborhood and start asking questions.  Start stepping through the looking glass into places you’ve never thought of.  Stop drawing lines in your mind of things you won’t write because that’s not who you are, and start looking into the hearts of the people you aren’t. 

There are worlds to write about in every person you pass on the street.  There are novels in every tree, every ragged patch of lawn, every DUCK X-ING sing, every wandering dog, every jogger sweating it out in 102 degrees in October. 

Walk around the block and through the looking glass.  You’ll be surprised at what awaits.

A Proper Goblin Party

 

By Amy Lane

 

(*Note—I should admit that having just finished Melanie Tushmore’s delightful book Goblins, I was a wee bit biased when it came to choosing a supernatural creature with which to create a metaphor for writers.  I hope Melanie can forgive me—her goblins were just such wonderful companions—particularly Quiller, for whom I have great affection.)

 

Writing is a solitary occupation—everybody knows that.

We all have our desks, our caves, our tables, our spaces, the glowing box, the scribbled on pad, archaic typewriter, and we hunch over our implements of me-hood like a particularly feral breed of goblin. 

Go away, ’tis mine!  All the stories within are mine!  Don’t touch, don’t look, ‘TIS MINE!

 

But even goblins have wild revels in dark corners, where we dance unholy rites, pound mojitos and, best of all, talk to each other.  And when we talk to each other, a strange thing happens.  We open up, we flower, we…share. 

This shouldn’t surprise us, but it does.  The whole time we’re writing, the we’re dreaming of sharing what we write, dreaming of having someone else reading it and living in our little kingdom of one with us.  All those pesky details—the stone castle walls or the marble?  Should the kingdom grow wheat or corn?  Should the shapeshifters convert by mass or do we throw physics out the window?  We can have some help making those decisions, we can share a vision, we can blend two feral, night-twitching brains together and make magic!

Oh my Goddess, we can collaborate!

So yes!  Collaboration!  It sounds like as much fun as an evil scientist convention in a really peachy hotel in Vegas, right?  All those great minds thinking alike—we can change the world!

But like all good mad scientist plans, the question is, should we?

I was in high school when the first Thieves World collection came out, and from that moment on, I was hooked.  The idea of a world constructed by writers, and then randomly written into was just so… delicious!  I was already an Anne McCaffrey fan, and she had introduced the word gestalt to my vocabulary—the concept that many brains working in concert produced something larger, and more powerful than each discrete part—and the idea of writers collaborating seemed like real magic—creative magic—in action. 

When I became a writer myself, I hungered to be a part of such collaboration, and, lucky me, I have been.  The experiences have been just as amazing as I imagined—but they’ve also had a learning curve.  I had to learn a lot about the things I could and could not do as a writer in order to be successful working with someone else. 

For those folks out there thinking about collaborating with someone, here are some things to keep in mind.

The first thing to keep in mind is that it’s not all Thieves World.

There are actually several ways to write collaborative fiction—and the model I fell in love with in Thieves World is probably the most elaborate, and possibly the most rare.  In fact, I can think of a few basic collaborative models, and the first one often needs nothing more than authors invested in a common theme.

The theme anthology has been around forever and is simply a bunch of stories gathered around one single idea. My first experience reading a theme anthology was Carmen Miranda’s Ghost is Haunting Space Station Three.  The anthology started with a bunch of drunk (or punch drunk—I could never figure which) sci-fi writers, one lively “filk” (fake folk) song, and an artistic free-for-all.  The stories bounced all over the place—horror?  Comedy?  Soft-core?  Oh yeah—this anthology had it.  And as collaborations go, this one here was relatively stress free.

In the modern e-book age, the theme anthology may or may not be gathered into one volume.  For example, the fairy tale series for which I wrote Truth in the Dark and Hammer & Air was a matter of authors choosing covers and volunteering to write the story to match the cover.  The collaboration was mostly between us and our publisher, and we only really talked to each other because we all loved fairy tales and wanted to share ours.  The Dreamspinner Press Advent calendar and Daily Dose anthologies are other examples of this, and really, they’re the “getting the toes wet” stage of collaborative work.

When you take this sort of idea and condense it into one volume, you tend to intensify the need for collaboration.  When Andrew Gray, Mary Calmes and I all worked together on The Three Fates, we had to talk about our understanding of the myth of the Fates, and we had to decide that it would be all right if we all used different mythologies from which to springboard our stories. Still, it was a very limited collaboration—and that’s apparent by the wildly different directions our stories all took.  The fact is, if you want a more uniform approach from a collection of feral book-goblins, you’re going to have to hammer out some more details to make that anthology work.

That brings us to the next stage of collaboration, which is also a theme anthology, but it involves a slightly more uniform piece of world building.  This collection is one step closer to that idea of Thieves World which enchanted me so much, and it ensures that one common thread or possibly a common character or set of characters runs through the stories.  I’m currently working on a collaboration like this, and it’s a little more involved than it sounds.  We’ve had to agree upon things like physical details, historical details, world building details, all of which center around a particular object.  There are five people working on the project, and we’ve kept the collaborative elements to a minimum mostly to keep our e-mails down.  If we’re talking about true collaboration, this is maybe getting in up to your ankles, and, yes, the water is still a little chilly. 

The next stage up from this is where I started with the example, and that’s the created world. 

The created world anthology—whether it’s Thieves World or Boxer Falls – is a tremendous undertaking, but it’s bigger for some of the participants than it is for others.

Now originally I was led to believe these collaborations involve a few key dedicated fanatics I mean asylum inmates I mean my kind of crazy people I mean writers who gather together, scatter the blood of an unpublished noobie sacrificed to the glow of an old tower computer, set fire to a bottle of aged scotch, dance the Batusi to old The Clash albums, and pull a character bible out of the least suitable orifice. 

Or that’s what I was told told.

In truth, the crazy people I mean writers assemble a suitable contained setting (including sub-settings within the setting), cast of regular characters, set of shared experiences, and general sets of conflicts and set it down in concrete.  Any of the people writing in this world must respect that Bible.  So, if, say, you’ve set up a bible in an apartment building via Melrose Place, you can’t just destroy the building in your installment unless you have permission from the other writers in the world.  The trick—and it’s definitely a trick—is for each writer to take that bible, to take some of the characters within, and to make that world his or her own. 

It’s an exhilarating feeling.  It’s looking at a microcosm like a petty god, and then playing with the world until it meets your exact specifications.  I adored writing for Boxer Falls, and this week I’m starting an installment in the Riptide Press Bluewater Bay anthology, and I can’t wait.  But that being said, there are myriad more considerations that go into this type of anthology, especially compared to the others mentioned so far.  Even if the initial idea is fomented in alcohol and convention bars, usually there’s more to the giant world-built bible than a convocation of feral writing gnomes, gassing it up on aged Scotch and the Clash.

The original world builders must be able to assemble the world as a team.  Think of an engineering team, trying to put together a building.  They need to consider the materials, the place, the restrictions, the building codes, the expectations of the population--that’s what goes into the character bible.  While it may be fun to play petty god, it’s also a temptation to let your ego get the best of you, and you can’t do that when you’re working with other people.  There can be a project leader, but if the entire world building group doesn’t have a clear, concise vision of the world being built, the resulting mishegas will be both confusing to read and frustrating to write in.  If you’re working from that end of the project, that’s a heavy-duty social skill set you’re imposing on a group of people who are used to working alone in their caves, and that can cause difficulties.  If you want to be one of those petty gods, it’s best to check your ego at the door and party with your fellow goblins in the spirit of inspiration and generosity. 

And if you’re not one of the original world builders, if, say, you’ve simply been invited to the party after all the booze is bought, the decorations put up, and the music chosen—well, same rules apply to you as they do to any other goblin at a party.

Be nice.  Be respectful.  Be inspired.

Your fellow goblins have gone to a boiling cauldron of newts’ eyes and trouble in order to create a world for you to play in.  Don’t break their toys.  Don’t murder their favorite characters without permission.  Don’t make the good guys into villains unless it was already implied by the bible.  Don’t have an earthquake destroy the vet’s office if that’s where everybody was getting laid.  In short, don’t shit on their vision.  Adhere to the bible and take every and all suggestions of ways to stay within those boundaries.  Is it harder than staying in your own world and only answering to your own world building restrictions?  Well, yes.  But it can also be more fun, and way more social than simply tapping away in the cave, surrounded by impatient sub-creatures who need to be fed and fondled.

And once you’ve done that sort of collaboration, perhaps, if all went well, you may be ready for the final stage of writing as a social activity.

You may be ready for the co-write.

Now co-writing sounds really awesome.  People hear of a co-written work and think, “I love those writers!  I’m so happy they’re working together!” and they buy the work on the faith of the writers alone.  Why not, right?  Gestalt principles should apply and if one author is great then two authors should be better, right?

Well, that depends. 

Co-writing can go a number of different ways, and I’ve known author teams who have tried each of these techniques:

·      The authors take turns writing the book, sans outline, on a chapter by chapter basis, sending the story back and forth as each completes his or her turn.

·      The authors take turns writing the book, sans outline, on a paragraph by paragraph basis in the same way as above.

·      Both authors sit down together and hammer out an outline, and then take turns writing to the outline, each one writing to their strengths.  (So, for example, one author takes the love scenes and dialog, and the other takes the action scenes and world building.)

·      The authors get together and hammer out an outline, then each author chooses an MC and they take turns writing when their particular MC’s viewpoint is coming into play. 

·      The authors get together and hammer out an outline and then alternate chapter by chapter or paragraph by paragraph as above.

·      The authors simply sit down to an open Google Doc on the computer and write, watching the cursor move in front of them and jumping in when one author pauses and the other has something to say.  This is facilitated by a dialog box next to the actual document, so one author can be writing suggestions/ outlines/ considerations while the other author is writing.

Now for each of these co-writing techniques, there are plusses and minuses, but what it all comes down to in order to be successful is vision, trust, and ego.

In order to write a book with another human being, you need to trust that writer’s vision, be comfortable enough to write intimately with them, and be able to subsume your own ego to the vision you both established.          

Sounds simple.  Isn’t. 

If, say, you are a pantser—an author who simply sits down and goes—and your co-writer is a plotter, this could be a great pair up if the pantser is willing to follow an outline and the plotter is willing to give the pantser room to fly.  But if the plotter can’t trust the pantser, can’t let go of his or her own ego long enough to see what the other person can do, well, the collaboration loses its magic.  That’s only one person’s vision in the mix, and that might as well be a one person work.  On the other hand, if the pantser ignores the plotter’s need for an over-arcing framework and simply takes the work from one event to the next and doesn’t trust the final vision, then the plotter’s strengths are completely ignored, and, again, the final vision is one person’s, and that might as well not be a collaboration at all. 

What if you write in great chunks of frenetic activity—so, you produce 10,000 words in a day, and then sleep for two days to come back and do it again?  What if you hook up with someone who produces a steady 3K a day—how’s that going to work?  If the person who works in spurts can’t regulate their writing schedule, and the person who puts in a consistent amount of work a day can’t trust the person working in spurts and give them some direction, again, the unified vision is going to be lost. 

If one of the parties refuses to bend to the other, refuses to follow an outline or refuses to cast the outline to the winds, refuses to stick to the character or refuses to let the character grow, in short, refuses to sustain the initial vision that intrigued both parties, this attempt at coming out of your writing caves to be together is going to end badly—very very badly—and I have seen some truly disastrous goblin melees when trust, ego, and vision implode. 

But I’ve also experienced some amazing things when they’ve worked.  The Country Mouse/City Mouse  books with Aleksandr Voinov stand proud in my memory.  I think part of our magic was that we’d heard good things about the other, but we hadn’t read the other’s work.  We had no ego walking into our collaboration, and only happy introductions as we worked through our vision.  We used the last writing technique on the list, and I’ll never forget watching that pink cursor move, guided by a person 3,000 miles away that I had never met in person but whom I adore to this day.  That was exhilarating.  That was a rush—and an experience I’m so glad I had, and that hopefully people have loved to read.

But I’ve also picked up the pieces of my fellow writers when their attempts at collaboration haven’t gone as well, and the injury not just to egos but to hearts as well has been truly painful, and truly hard to heal.  Writing in such an intimate circumstance makes writers as vulnerable professionally as taking a lover makes them personally, and that is nothing to take lightly.  I have, in fact, turned down offers of collaboration because I loved the other writer far too much as a friend and didn’t want to disturb that delicate alchemy of personality and presence by involving trust, ego, and vision into the mix.    

I’ve seen the results when it goes wrong.

But I’ve also seen the results when it goes right—and lordie, does it go so right. 

So, fellow goblins, how are you going to spend your day?  Hunched over your computer hissing Tis mine! Tis mine and it’s good! Or involved in goblin parlance in which you dance around writing desks in manic glee and create worlds for other goblins to inhabit?

Trust me—as a goblin myself, I can tell you that both forms of livelihood make us the feral, fey creatures of imagination that we love to be.  There is no right way to be a goblin, and any way you can fathom to create a world to rule over like a petty god is going to be the right way.  Just take care of your vulnerable goblin hearts and try not to tear other’s hearts out with your sharp goblin claws—that’s all the rest of us fey creatures can ask.

 

What’s in a Name?

 

Shall I shock you all?  I think I shall.

My real name is not Amy Lane.  (Are we shocked?) 

Amy Lane was born at 10:30 p.m. in a Daley City BART station during the late eighties, when a girl from the small town of Loomis with a size nine waist, big brown eyes, and a braid of curly hair that went down to her ass got propositioned on a nightly basis.

She was sort of terrified.  She didn’t want to piss people off—but she really didn’t want them to know who she was, either.  She was, at the time, listening to Aimee Mann and her then-boyfriend’s middle name was Lane.

“What’s your name, pretty girl?”

“Amy Lane.”

She then went home and wrote an actual pen-to-paper letter to her then-boyfriend (now Mate) and told him, “Hey (haha) when I’m a big famous writer, I’ll publish as Amy Lane!”

So flash forward seventeen years, when she was self-publishing her first book, and she was deciding whether or not to publish under her real name, or (hee!) under that long ago dreamed up pen name. 

Why the hell not?  Let’s do the pen name, shall we?

Now flash forward six years after that, and she’s suddenly in a bind.  She’s allowed the students to read her books, and in spite of being signed on to a publisher, the district believes she’s pimping porn to high school students.  A high priced lawyer has just been paid more than three times what part-time Amy makes in a year to look through her blogs and determine if she’s confessed to doing anything heinous enough to get fired for.  Amy Lane (as we shall now call her) spends three tortuous days combing through those blogs in the presence of her lawyer and opposing council, sweating about any careless word.  Has she signed her own guilt-warrant by a raucous (and hilarious) rant against the Vainglorious Prickweenie who intimidated her for two years trying to get her to quit?  Has she ranted enough about being powerless in the face of student/parent politics to actually get fired?  Has her “pimping of porn” (as her district would have her believe) spilled out into the realm of immorality?

Turns out, none of the above.

Can you believe that?  Amy Lane (at least the Amy Lane before this happened) has no filter—she spits out what she thinks and the consequences be damned!  She once ground a staff meeting to a halt telling a representative from the Governor’s board of education that not making an allowance for Special Ed students who worked their hearts out was “fucking wrong!”  That Amy Lane, in four years of blogging, never made a mistake?

Nope. 

Why? 

Because she was blogging as that Amy Lane.

Not her real name.

Her pen name.  The one she’d chosen seventeen years earlier because (haha!) she was a scrawny nineteen year old getting hit on at crack central. 

In fact, after Amy walked away from that painful teaching job (assisted by a small settlement) and started writing for a profession, the only punishment she received for the whole affair happened because she left a note on the board for her students the morning she was called out of her room, telling them that she was in the dog house, and that they were to respect the incoming sub.  Seems that telling the truth—even so mild a truth as “I’m in the dog house,”-- doesn’t set you free in the land of bureaucracy, it gets you a ninety day suspension from a credential you’d planned to let lapse anyway. 

In the words of Mrs. Incredible from the Pixar movie, “Your identity is your biggest asset. Keep it safe.”

I know I’m not the only person who’s had their professional/personal life saved by a pen name.

The fact is, the pen name is sort of an awesome creation of the human imagination—and it has several uses.

·      It legally separates us from our day job or daytime identity.  If my nightmare in litigation taught me anything, it’s that the wisest thing I ever did was compartmentalize my writer persona from my teaching persona.  Everything that sprang from that—developing alternative names for the people I worked with, for my spouse and children, even for the place I lived and my students when I spoke of them—helped to protect me.  I could not be accused of wrongdoing if I made a good-faith effort to protect the people I knew in my everyday life from any repercussions of what I did on my online life.  I didn’t get my credential revoked, I didn’t get fired, and I didn’t lose eighteen years of my life without recompense—all because I chose a pen name and used it to keep the defining details of my personal life exactly that: personal.  This can be a powerful incentive to taking the pen name plunge—and even though I went this route on a whim, I cannot deny that it saved my large and hefty keester in a big-assed way.

·      It allows us to be someone else.  The fact is, I’m sort of a shy person as my other name.  I’m better at eating my feelings than voicing them.  But as the teacher (I had a nickname there too) or as the writer “Amy Lane”—I can say the blunt things and do the brave things and be the better, more colorful version of myself.  Being Amy Lane makes me live up to the things that Amy Lane would do—whether it’s taking a risk in fiction that may make people hate me (done that!) or keep my Obamacare bumper sticker on my car until other people’s middle fingers drop off, I am that person because I bear that name.  Amy Lane is a risk taker, and she’s brave.  The other me is really happy to let that name bear the heavy lifting. 

Sound silly?  Sound childish?  Well, so is Batman—but being who we choose to be is a powerful idea, and the first place it starts is with our name.  Writing is a brave thing—we risk a lot of our egos when we present our work for critique.  Sometimes the only thing that lets us take those hits is knowing that you could probably sit down and have a cup of coffee with the person who just verbally assaulted your book—but only because that person doesn’t see your pen-name as a human being but as a shield for any negative criticism being leveled at you.  The internet is a tricksy, volatile place—and writing exposes your innermost heart to that place.  Having a superhero identity helps make that a little bit easier to bear.

·      It allows us to market as someone else.  So you write M/M romance—excellent!  What if you wish to write ménage?  Straight up het?  Inspirational?  Pagan how-to?  Marketing a different genre can be really difficult while using the same name. 

Of course, there are drawbacks—if you have an established following, you may feel as though you are starting from scratch.  And what if you’re squirrel-brained, like me, and want to write ALL THE GENRES?  Well, there are a couple of things you can do. One is to work with your publisher and cover artist, so you can include your alternate pen names on your cover to attract attention from loyal fans.  And if you do choose to include alternate pen names, be sure to take some time to decide which genres will lose your readers, and which genres are “umbrella” genres, where all readers gravitate.  If you traditionally write M/M Sci-fi, you probably won’t lose too many readers if you write a steampunk novel under the same pen name.  However, if you suddenly decide to write a contemporary M/F story, well, you may want to change your pen name for that.  If you traditionally write vanilla M/M sex, however, and you decide to throw in some BDSM, you may want to keep your original pen name—enough people write both that you don’t want to build up your readership from scratch.  It doesn’t matter how many times you repeat yourself on Twitter and FaceBook and Tumblr and your blog, people will miss the memo.  The more you can do to keep your readers in the habit of buying your name, the better.  And remember that superhero thing? It’s really hard to be Batman, Bruce Wayne, and Super-Pizza Delivery Man, all in the same life, so if you do go the alternate pen name route, be sure to choose sparingly.

Creating an identity is not something you should do lightly—even if you think you’re just publishing for kicks, or (as was my case in 2005) because you’re going to show your family and friends that you wrote a book!  A solid pen name is going to be your marketing tool, your public persona, and, for those who incorporate and get a credit card in that name and copyright and all of the stuff I personally avoid in a big way because my hamster cage is too crowded already, your business franchise.  When a marketing department talks about “name recognition”, that’s it, baby—my name is my badge, it’s my slogan, my banner, my creed.  When I updated my logo, the one thing that didn’t change was that my pen name, my personal Bat Signal, would be included. 

I didn’t choose my pen name lightly.  Even when I thought about using my original promise of being a writer for my pen name, I took a moment to think of other names I could use.  That being said, if I were choosing the name today (instead of ten years ago) I would have taken a few more things into consideration.

·      First off, if Google were as widespread then as it is now, I would have Googled the hell out of my pen name to make sure I wasn’t trying to share a pen name with a porn franchise (my apologies to Jade Lee, who actually had this happen), a rising starlet (Hello, Amy Adams when she was playing Lois Lane!) or someone who writes something wildly different from what I write (Hello, Amy Lane, author of The Baking Pocket Bible).  Think of a nightmare alter-ego, and I’m sure there’s someone out there who has one, and it could have been avoided with one little trip to Google. 

·       Also, I would try to avoid using my initials, mostly because it’s confusing when there are so many of us who already do.   C.K., A.J., A.L. C.L., C.S., K.C., and M.N., are all difficult to differentiate  when seen on a book cover.  You want to stand out—pick a name that will do this.  (For those of you that already have chosen initials for various reasons, this is NOT a bad thing-- you have name recognition now.  But for someone coming into the community doesn't want to stand in your shadow.)

·      Given that in today’s climate there is only the trace of a controversy over women writing M/M, I wouldn’t deliberately use a gender-neutral pen name or a masculine pen name as a woman, because that makes it hard to market personally.  Also, what can be an ordinary thing when seen in the light of day can cause devastating backlash.  (Of course, if you write straight-up science fiction, ignore this section.  The blatant, painful misogyny still present in the sci-fi community is enough to make a woman choose Hardison Dickall as a pen name, just to keep some of those trolls off her back.)

·      I would make doubly sure I could look at, write, and say this name ad infinitum.  My name is on way more book covers than just the first book I ever wrote.  I answer to Amy in public now, and, in truth, when introducing myself in a public venue, I tend to give out Amy as my first name, because after ten years, in some situations that’s who I am.  I’m lucky—Amy Lane looks pretty good on a book cover, but if I’d gone with my more adolescent self and chosen Linathien Thai or Teron Angel, I’d be really frickin’ miserable right now. 

·      And that leads me to something that seems logical—but I know I didn’t think about it when I came up with my name, I lucked into it, because my name is short:  Make sure it’s something you can work easily into a logo or a brand.  Look at a book by John Grisham, Nora Roberts, or Nicholas Sparks.  Their name is their brand.  They don’t need a logo or a tagline—their name says it all.  Start out with a tagline and a specific brand, but be aware—and prepared—for a moment when all of that transitions into your name.

Let’s face it—in a decision based on luck, when I came up with a logo at all, it included my name.  Now, my logo is almost entirely my name.

When I sat in a windowless office, picking through four-and-a half years of my past to see if I’d ever lost it enough to truly lose everything, my name was my shield.

When I stood in a scary place in a scary part of town in the dark, young and anxious, my name was my escape.

And now that I’m grown and brandishing my burning literary sword at all things that incur my wrath—or my interest, or my compassion—my name is my armor, my weaponry, and my brand. 

What’s in a name? 

Everything.

What’s in creating a name?

Hopefully a whole lot of thought.

What’s My Subtext?

 

By

 

Amy Lane

 

 

So I went to see the newest Transformers movie, and as expected, it was a ginormous hot mess of violence and Mark Wahlberg and big metal monkeys with really sexy voices.  (I did miss Starscream’s original voice, though.  Steve Blum was so deliciously eeeebil…)

As I was watching this hot mess, which was all special effects and no script, one of the things that came to me was how much the movie relied on certain expectations that we, as Americans have, of our own country and the people who live here.  By capitalizing on our expectations, the movie was able to do a lot of storytelling with very little dialog or even screen time.  These are things we might not even process (although with the crowd I write for, I suspect you processed the messages and disdained them as soon as they rolled across the screen) but they are, nonetheless, in this multi-bazillion dollar story, seen by millions of people, not all of whom are schooled at mining the subtext from the bright shiny explosions. 

If I was an alien from outer space, I could draw some pretty interesting conclusions from the assumptions this movie makes—are you ready?

·      The people who should be in charge of our government are misled by evil.

·      The people who are making scientific discoveries are misled by ego.

·      The real people in charge of our government have allowed their egos to make them evil.

·      90% of the people in charge will sell out the human race for a quick dip into the money pool.

·      90% of the people not in charge will help the people in charge sell out the human race because they’re too stupid to know better.

·      Poverty is something that happens to people who don’t try hard enough.

·      Only red-blooded Americans can fight off the bad guys with guns.

·      All teenaged girls are silly, self-absorbed, and hate their fathers for not giving them everything they want.

·      All fathers are blind to what their teenaged girls really want and are obstructionists to true love because they just don’t understand.

·      You have to be an alien to be human, because the human beings just don’t do a stellar job of it.

Are you frightened yet?  Because I’m saying right now that the subtext is scaring the hell out of me.

Subtext is the message that is told by the characters’ behavior and how that behavior is rewarded in a story.  Does that sound simplistic?  It is.  In fact it’s so simple a child can get it.

Now, when I went to see this movie, my husband’s friend had brought his six year old.  As we were leaving the theater, the little man was so excited.  “Did you see that?  Optimus Prime just split his face in two.  Because he was the bad guy.  Because he was gonna kill the world, and all the bad robots want to kill the world, and Optimus won’t let them.”

So, basic violence is totally justifiable in the name of good guys and bad guys. 

And there you have it, folks.  Our country in a nutshell, in a two and a half hour CGI explosion with minimal dialog and only one shot of Mark Wahlberg shirtless.  (I am still bitter about that, by the way.)

Now, some of you may be thinking, “Uhm, yeah, but Amy!  It was a schlock movie—we don’t go to those for deep thought and subtext!”

Well, yeah.  But think about it.  More people will see that movie in one weekend than saw The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel in its entire run.  When a popular movie gives damaging subtext (Women are objects? Men are bad parents?) everybody sees it and thinks it’s okay.

And the same can be said for popular fiction in general, and romance in particular.

It’s something that both readers and writers need to be aware of.

Yes, I know.  The worst snobs are literary snobs—and they laugh at romance and call it a guilty pleasure and housewife porn and readers feel like overemotional sheep for reading it.  Hell, even when the literati try to give it props, they say something backhanded and condescending and completely infuriating, so it’s obvious that the people “in charge” of reading subtext and telling us what our fiction means aren’t going to see it, so why should we worry about the meta message of our highly disdained literary art form and what it says to the world?

Because it matters.

A very successful author of Young Adult vampire novels was once asked if it bothered her that her books were telling young girls that it was okay to be stalked and a woman’s power was in her absence.  Her response was that it was only fiction.  Who cared?

Think about that.  How many people read that book—which was also made into a hugely successful movie franchise.  How many young women spent their formative years believing that it was okay if an older man suddenly decided what was best for them, and that “I’m drawn irresistibly to you” was a good excuse for a girl to forfeit all of her power to somebody else.

That is the thought terrifies me about damaging subtext.

I know that much of my audience has already won the subtext wars.  In fact, it seems to me that most M/M readers read the genre for the positive subtext alone.  But that doesn’t mean we can let their guard down when it comes to our own writing.

My primary editor is Canadian, and there is nothing more eye-opening than when our subtexts clash.

I cannot count the number of times when one of my characters has done something—say, investigate a crime, make a devil’s bargain or commit murder perhaps?  And her response in the margins is “Why don’t they call the police?”

And my response—always surprised, because quite frankly it didn’t occur to me—is “People do that?”

And suddenly I read between my own lines and realize, “Hey.  I don’t like authority.  In fact, I distrust it with a deep-seated hatred, fear, and loathing.  I need to be aware of that.”  And sure enough, in my next work, I do make an effort to have an authority figure who isn’t a self-serving dick.  (This doesn’t always work out well.  I’m sure I need therapy, but I don’t trust the health care system either.)

When I was growing up, I was always aware of money, and how much it cost to do things my friends seemed to take for granted—braces, having a car, new clothes.  As a result, much of my subtext deals with people fighting for some economic stability, and for the education for upward mobility.

When I taught high school in a socio-economically diverse neighborhood, I got to know students, sometimes visited their homes, attended their baby showers, their graduation parties, and once or twice, even their funerals.  When I write a character of color, I am keenly aware of the disadvantages this character would face in a society that doesn’t admit there are still racial dividing lines.  I watched politicians and administrators tap-dance around the education gap, refusing to answer the best and brightest of their student body when posed with the question, and you’d better believe that comes out in my subtext.

 As the first member of two out of three family branches to get a Bachelor’s degree, I’m keenly aware that as much as a humanities education can give a person, it can strike a dividing line between him or her and her family.  Yes—that subtext comes through as well.

In short, if the essence of subtext comes down to what a character learns, how a character’s behavior is rewarded, and the gap between what the author knows and what the character knows, then my consistent meta-message is going to be the things that myself have learned or believe in.

Every time I write a book—even a happy, flirty little novella who’s sole purpose is to relieve me from some of the strain of writing painful, serious angst—a part of myself is going to be laid bare, and I’m going to say “Look, this is me, and these are the things that I believe in!”

So I can argue all I want about how good romance is just as important as literary fiction, and I’ve spent a good amount of my non-fiction writing time making a case for just that, but even if I’m never taken seriously, I need to remember it for myself. 

Yes, I write romance, and the world doesn’t always take that seriously—but I also write subtext, and those lessons make an impression.  In fact, very often, the subtext makes more of an impression than the actual story.  I would guess that many of those girls who read the YA vampire story are going to be very disappointed when their first boyfriend is either A. A simple, fallible human being but not all full of “the answers” and big decisions either, or B. A controlling stalker and therefore a nightmare for her future, her self-esteem, and her capacity to have a healthy relationship forever after.  I’m pretty damned sure that the five-year-old who watched Transformers is going to remember that all government members and scientists are bad guys for a really long time. 

And that’s the supertext that storytellers need to remember.  As writers, it’s as important to tell a valuable story underneath the story as it is to tell an engaging tale of hope, adventure, and love.

Shakespeare Pursued by Bear


By Amy Lane

 

The following conversation takes place in ye plain and ink stained bedchamber of His Royal Playwright, Wm. Shakespeare, between the Bard Himself and his faithful servant, Hod, shortly before he finished writing Macbeth.  

 

Bard:  Oh God.  Oh no.  I can’t do it, Hod, I can’t.  You know what they’re saying out there, don’t you?

Hod:  Right then—yer whorin’ yerself out there, milord.  Tha’s what they’re sayin’.  Don’ you pay’em no mind though.

Bard:  But it’s true, don’t you see?  Macbeth—one of the best kings Scotland ever had, do you know that?  Ruled for seventeen years in peace when that old fool Duncan was one bloody war after another.  But I’m writing this play for James, so he’s got to be the villain. What are people going to think of him now?  You tell me that!

Hod: That ‘e was a bloody rotter, milord.  But ‘e ‘ad some damned fine lines.

Bard, to himself:  But I had to do it.  I had to.  The king comes to you, says, “Write to prompt!” and he owns the bloody theater, right?  What’re you going to do?

Hod: Write the bleedin’ play, milord.  

Bard:  But the critics!  They’re unmerciful!  Oh my God—do you know what I heard on the street the other day?

Hod:  “Duck! Pisspot coming!”?

Bard: Oh we wish people would warn us, don’t we?  But no.  Someone said, “Remember Romeo and Juliet?  I wish he’d write more plays like that!”  But I can’t write another R&J—I wrote that play. And you know what?  It sucked.  It sucked.  Cause those two dumbshit kids, they should have been happy… they were going to be happy… shakes self  Why couldn’t they just have been happy?

Hod: Cuz you got stuck behind a mule at the marketplace, milord. 

Bard:  Oh fucking lord yes.  If that damned beast couldn’t move fast for me when I had the runs, one sure as hell wouldn’t go fast enough to save those two poor doomed kids, would he?

Hod (mournfully): Acres of soiled velvet, milord.  Your best new suit.

Bard:  Thank you, Hod.  I remember that.

Hod (trying to be helpful): ‘ow ‘bout Falstaff, milord! Why can’t you write wot ‘bout ‘im?

Bard:  Oh no.  Not this…

Hod:  We liked Falstaff, milord!  Wot’s wrong wi’ ‘at?

Bard: I did, now didn’t I?  I wrote Merry Wives of Windsor, just so that fat bastard could have his say.  Cause it wasn’t enough that I wrote the action adventure piece of the century, was it?  Everyone’s all Falstaff, Falstaff--we love this guy!  But Henry couldn’t keep that fool around, could he?

Hod: Warn’t right wot ‘e did, milord.  Tha’ Henry, couldn’t stomach’im after that.

Bard:  But I brought Falstaff back.  I brought him back--

Hod: Th’ fans loved it, y’ken they loved it, right milord?

Bard: The critics, though—you remember that, Hod?  The critics, were all, “A wandering excuse for Sir John to chew scenery and deliver pomposity!”  They didn’t get it--

Hod: Was a fan piece, milord, tha’s all.  Ye ought ta write fer them folks as love ye, ye ken?

Bard:  Yes, yes… but you never know, do you?  You think you know what they want.  I wrote histories, thought they liked histories, but Henry V, oh there was a flop.

Hod:  Too close to home, milord.  We’re English, we remember!

Bard: Good point, Hod.  You’re very wise.  

Hod:  Maybe s’more Romans, milord.  We like them Romans!

Bard (wincing): Yes, but Troilus and Cressida didn’t have much to say—Sorry you’ve got to sail off and all that, but hey, we each have a country to run!  

Hod:  But Julius Caesar milord--

Bard:  Well yes, but I’ve already done that!  What am I going to do next?  Anthony and Cleopatra Get Old?  And THEN they die?  Wait… that’s not a bad idea, really…

Hod:  But why death, milord?  Why so much damned death?  Hamlet, milord—why’d the girl ‘ave to go--

Bard (hurt): Because sometimes life is just like that, Hod!  Wasn’t right for my Hamnet to die, was it?  Poor little blighter… was just a baby…

Hod: But… but ‘e wasn’t the prince, milord.  Why’d you ‘aveta kill tha’ prince?  

Bard:  Because pain is pain, isn’t it Hod?  When you’re feeling pain, that’s what’s going to come out of the pen, isn’t it?  You set out to write Ethyl and the Pirates and you end up with Romeo and Juliet, because your heart is broken, and all you want to do is show the world that being young and in love sucks moldy mule mush, you know?

Hod (pats shoulder):  ‘ere ‘ere, milord.  Aye, we know.  We know.

Bard:  And it’s like all people see is the flash, right?  Titus Andronicus cuts his hand off, everybody’s all “Oooh! Aahh!  That’s stagecraft!”  I get brilliantly meta with the play within a play, and people think I’m all full of myself.  What do they expect?  I don’t have a day job—the theater is what I know.  

Hod:  ‘at ‘n’ politics, sir.  You do know yer politics, sir.

Bard:  Well, it’s cause I’ve had to whore myself to the higher ups, now isn’t it?  Who knows better than an artist how to bend over and take it hard in order to get what you want?  Sighs  Wasn’t always like that, right?  There were moments when… oh, there was nothing like being in love with the world, was there?  In love with language.  Of writing poems that were strictly for love of writing and had nothing to do with making a living.  

Hod: Them sonnets were pretty things, milord.

Bard:  I miss those people in my head.  Almost worse than missing the lovers who inspired them.

Hod:  But they don’t pay the bills, sir.

Bard:  No.  No.  At the moment, sucking King James’s hard-on with Macbeth, THAT’S what’s going to pay the bills.  

Hod:  Speaking of sucking dick, milord…

Shakespeare (surprised):  Yes, Hod?

Hod:  Was there summat ye wanted me to do?

Shakespeare (blushing):  Why, uhm, yes, Hod.  If you don’t mind.  

Hod:  Ye’d best drop yer stockings and yer doublet then, right milord?  And yer vest and yer…

Shakespeare:  You do make a persuasive case here.

Hod:  Well, you can’t write what you don’t know, innt that right milord?

Shakespeare:  Hmm… yes… oh, drop your own trews while you’re at it, and, oh God, codpiece off, oh please… you’re right… but wait?  What does, uhm… uhm…

Hod: Gettng rimmed, rogered, and rubbed?

Shakespeare (blushing and naked):  Right.  Getting rimmed, roggered, and rubbed—what does that have to do with writing?

Hod:  Cause there’s some fuckery ye do to get wha’ you wan’, like yer Macbeth, right?  And there’s some fuckery ye do cause it feels good, like yer sonnets.  And there’s some fuckery ye do cause ye need to do, like wi’ Hamlet, right?

Shakespeare: Right… uhm, yes… to the… oh God, Hod, harder…

Hod:  But it’s all fuckery, right?  An’ it all feels good in the end… like this end right here… (grunts)

 

Shakespeare:  That’s right, Hod!  Write me harder!  Harder!  Write my fucking brains out!  It’s all in the name of art Hod!  Bugger me harder, ye rogering sod! Yes!

 

-- Exeunt Shakespeare, pursued by bear.

 

*Note-- this is cross-posted in the RRW forum under Amy's Lane, and this month, it's also posted at the UK Meet, which can be found right HERE.  

One of the things I really love about writing is when you find your characters in a place that they created all by themselves.




In Winter Courtship of Fur Bearing Critters, we learn from Craw that Jeremy was an ex convict and an ex conman, whom Craw had met panhandling on the streets of Boulder.  When it was time to write Jeremy's story, I had to elaborate.

I'd already established Jeremy and Aiden as communicating mostly by bickering, so I needed to explain how that relationship had happened as well.  What followed was How to Raise an Honest Rabbit, and you all loved it, and I was pleased.

You were not so happy in Knitter in his Natural Habitat
when Jeremy got beat the fuck up.  I didn't know how to go to everybody and explain why that happened--but it wasn't something I'd just done because I wanted to see Jeremy and everybody else hurt.

In fact, it was something I had inadvertently set in motion from that first thumbnail description of Jeremy put forth in Winter Courtship.  If Jeremy was an ex con and ex conman, and he was going to have a happy ending with young Aiden, there was going to have to be a reason for him to go straight.  If there was a reason to go straight, there was going to be some sort of reckoning.

And if there was going to be reckoning, there was going to be fallout, and that was going to be a whole other book.

And that's Blackbird.

The first chapter of Blackbird might seem a little drifty.  I did that on purpose-- Jeremy is a little drifty.  He's in a hospital, he's coming and going from reality, and for a couple of sequences, he doesn't realize that the words that he hears in his head when he talks aren't what he sounds like at all.  So we see Jeremy at rock bottom.  Positive he deserved what happened to him at the end of Knitter, terrified that his boy won't love him anymore, positive that he never deserved to be loved in the first place.

When we see him at the end we see him in his glory, and although it's not a roller coaster ride to get there, I hope it is at least a pleasant journey.  I know that the ending made me cry-- and I was not expecting it to.  It's happy, right?  But, well, I think when you all get to see Jeremy change the soundtrack of his own life, you'll see why.

Oh yeah-- and we finally find out what happens to the floor safe.

(Oh-- btw-- ALL of the first Granby stories are now available in print in The Granby Knitting Menagerie-- for those of you who treasure your paper :-)

Description:


Sequel to Knitter in His Natural Habitat
A Granby Knitting Novel 

After three years of waiting for “rabbit” Jeremy to commit to a life in Granby—and a life together—Aiden Rhodes was appalled when Jeremy sustained a nearly fatal beating to keep a friend out of harm's way. How could Aiden’s bunny put himself in danger like that?

Aiden needs to get over himself, because Jeremy has a long road to recovery, and he's going to need Aiden's promise of love every step of the way. Jeremy has new scars on his face and body to deal with, and his heart can’t afford any more wounds.

When their friend’s baby needs some special care, the two men find common ground to firm up their shaky union. With Aiden’s support and his boss’s inspiration, Jeremy comes up with a plan to make sure Ariadne's little blackbird comes into this world with everything she needs. While Jeremy grows into his new role as protector, Aiden needs to ease back on his protectiveness over his once-timid lover. Aiden may be a wolf in student's clothing and Jeremy may be a rabbit of a man, but that doesn’t mean they can’t walk the wilds of Granby together.

Here's where you can buy it:

Blackbird at Dreamspinner
Blackbird at ARe
Blackbird at Amazon

Here's some reviews by folks who liked it:
Love Bytes Reviews
The Tipsy Bibliophile
The Novel Approach  -- Now, you may want to notice that Rhys Ford (the inimitable and awesome!) and Lisa from TNA Reviews both conspired to help promote my book.  I almost burst into tears this morning when Rhys put this on my FB timeline, but I had no idea they were going to do a giveaway.  I'm thrilled and humbled, and I urge you to stop by this particular site and leave a comment on the giveaway post, because guys-- that was really awesome of them!

And here's an excerpt:

Shattered Bones and Broken Strength

JEREMY STILLSON spent more time in the hospital after he stopped living a life of crime than he had before he’d quit. Given that his second hospital stay ever lasted over two months, he could safely say he was over the experience by the time he left for home.


If Craw hadn’t thrown a fit and begged and pleaded so that Jeremy could share a room with Ariadne, he never would have made it.


HIS FIRST week was hazy, just a confused mess of pain and voices and Aiden--Aiden—holding his hand a lot, his voice choked and messy. Jeremy had a lot of surgeries in those first days, which was a blessing, because he didn’t really have to make any decisions. Aiden and Craw made all of those decisions for him.

Sometime toward the end of the first week, he woke up abruptly, breaking out of a bleary dream of being locked in a box of pain.

“Boy! Boy! Aiden!” he called, because his one constant in the past three years had been his boy. At first his boy had been sarcastic and frustrated because Jeremy couldn’t seem to learn the ways of living an honest life, but that had changed, hadn’t it? Aiden had gone from frustrated to friendly, and then, in these past months, from friendly to more than friendly.

Why wasn’t Aiden next to him?

“Boy?” he asked the cold and alien darkness. Some of his teeth were missing, his mouth hurt like the blazes, and it was hard to talk. “If you’re gone for water, I could use some.” Because his mouth was dry and his entire body… it felt achy and creaky and everything, everything hurt, but that dry mouth, that was the thing that was making him craziest.

“Jeremy—”

“Boy?” It was a woman’s voice, and Jeremy couldn’t figure out why a woman would be in his bedroom, his sweet little bedroom in his and Aiden’s tiny apartment. Jeremy loved that little apartment; it was safe, like a den or a warren, and you could fight the urge to run when you were safe.

“Honey, it’s me, Ariadne. We’re in the hospital, remember?”

Oh. Ariadne. Craw’s assistant and best friend. Spider-thin woman who liked to dye her hair bright red and who could knit lovely things like lace while yelling at “her boys” not to track sheep shit all over the store.

What was she doing here?

Oh yeah.

“Hey, Ariadne,” he said, feeling loopy. “How’s the baby coming?”

“Hanging in there,” she said weakly. She had pregnancy diabetes as well as high blood pressure. She was one of the most active people he knew, and she’d been on bed rest since Thanksgiving, which was….

When was Thanksgiving?

“Ariadne?”

“Yeah, hon?”

“What day is it?”

“December 20. You’ve been here around five days.”

Jeremy whimpered. “I don’t like hospitals,” he said nakedly, and he heard a noise. He tried to move his head, but his face was swathed in bandages and his body just hurt so bad. In a moment there was a rustling, and the sound of something being dragged, and then something else.

In another moment there was a softness near his cheek and the smell of the special soap Ariadne liked to buy from a crafter in Grand.

And then there was a pressure on his blessedly undamaged hand.

“I’m right here,” she said, and he moved his eyes just enough to see her wan and pale face in the light creeping in from the hallway.

“I don’t mean to be a bother,” he said, keeping his voice low in the hospital echo. The words were almost a cruel repeat of his first months spent at Craw’s farm and yarn mill, when he’d had one foot out the door and all of his earthly possessions packed and ready to bolt. The words “I don’t mean to be a bother,” had been code then, for “Don’t get attached to me, I’m not staying.”

“Well, it’s nice to have company,” Ariadne said quietly. “Keeps me from worrying so much about my little one here.”

Jeremy felt weak tears sliding down the sides of his face. “You shouldn’t have to worry,” he said sincerely. “You of all people should have a healthy, happy baby. You’re gonna stick around for it. That’s important.”

“I’ll be here for you too, okay, Jeremy?”

Jeremy nodded and tried not to be afraid. Bad things came out of the dark—fists and gunshots and the butt ends of pistols. Sharp needles and scalpels and that horrible, nauseating, free-floating feeling of anesthetic.

“I appreciate it,” he said, feeling dumb and helpless. “Just until my boy gets here.”

Oh no. He’d just called Aiden “his boy” when Ariadne and Craw weren’t entirely comfortable with the two of them yet. “Don’t tell Craw,” he mumbled. “But I really love that boy.”

“Craw’s fine with it,” Ariadne soothed, rubbing the back of his hand. “Craw and Aiden saved your life.”

“Yeah,” Jeremy said, remembering that terrifying moment when he’d heard the gunshot and thought it was the one that killed him. And then Aiden sobbing over him, yelling at him for going to defend their friend alone. “He cried for me. My boy shouldn’t ever cry for me.”

“We all cried, Jer,” Ariadne murmured into the darkness. “You’re going to have to take better care of yourself now that you’re meaning to stay.”

“Yeah, okay.” Jeremy was tired now, and the fact that he could smell his friend, feel her touch on his hand, that meant the world. “You… you’re not leaving anywhere tonight, are you?”

“No, baby. Right here.”

“Well, as long as you’re comfortable,” Jeremy said, and then he fell asleep.


SOMETHING HAPPENED. Something bad. Another surgery, maybe? Pain, confusion, more anesthesia—God, that shit made his stomach feel just raunchy. But it was over, and he was back in the bed, and he knew Ariadne was with him in the same room. He thought numbly that someone must have brought her bed over to his, because when he tried to turn and then stopped because it felt like a steel spike was lodged through his stomach, she was close enough to touch his shoulder as she soothed him.

“Aiden, hon, he’s awake. He was asking for you.”

“Jer?”

“Boy.” The sound was a drawn-out syllable of relief. “Boy, you’re here.”

Jeremy felt a hot presence next to his shoulder, rough with razor stubble and tearful breath.

“Jeremy,” Aiden breathed.

Jeremy smiled a little. “Got used to you,” he mumbled. “You and me, we lived together. I loved that. It’s hard when you’re gone.”

“We still live together,” Aiden said, and the words relaxed Jeremy’s shoulders, helped the pain flow over him and drip away, just like the bag of fluid attached to his arm.

“We do? I don’t live here?”

“No, Jer. I moved into your apartment, remember? Except we’re gonna move.”

“Why do you have to move?” No! Oh no. Aiden couldn’t move out—not when Jeremy was thinking about starting a bank account and taking everything out of the safe. Including the mittens.

“Not me, Jeremy, us. You and me are going to move out. Ben is letting us buy his house now that he’s in with Craw.”

“Craw’s mad,” Jeremy said disconsolately.



The week after Thanksgiving, Aiden had told their boss at the fiber mill that they were together. Jeremy had been in the barn, feeding the animals and making sure everybody’s heater worked, and Aiden had come up behind him, wrapping those great brawny arms around Jeremy’s waist and kissing softly at the nape of his neck.

“Bad?” Jeremy asked. He’d heard the voices from outside the barn and the slam of the door as Craw stomped inside the house. Aiden had promised him--promised—his voice soft and insistent, that Jeremy would not be put on the spot because their three-year friendship had finally matured.

“He’s a stubborn bastard,” Aiden said into his ear. “Nothing new. He still thinks I’m his little brother.”

Jeremy’s shoulders drooped. “You were my little brother,” he said softly, stroking the rabbit in front of him. “Maybe I should just—”

Aiden’s arms tightened. “If you say it, Jer, you’ll break my heart.”

Jeremy closed his eyes then. “Anything,” he muttered. “Anything but that, boy. You understand? Not breaking your heart—that’s like my number-one priority.”

Aiden’s warmth at his back comforted him like a bale of straw, throwing his own body heat back at him with interest. Behind his closed eyes, Craw’s anger, the displeasure of the first man who had ever known him and shown kindness, dissipated, and there was only Aiden.

Aiden hadn’t been kind, not at first, but when the boy had grown, he’d become even better than kind. He’d become a gruff bastion of safety. Nothing would ever hurt Jeremy while Aiden stood guard. Jeremy trusted that.

But that didn’t change what happened next.


“SH,” AIDEN whispered now.

Jeremy must have lost time.

“Craw’s not mad?” Jeremy muttered. He heard Craw being mad. He was outside the hospital room somewhere.

“Oh, he’s mad, all right.” Ariadne’s dry voice soothed like a balm. “But not at you. Honey, Craw couldn’t stay mad at you. Certainly not after what you did.”

“What’d I do again?” That was what he thought, anyway. All his words were what he thought. But what they sounded like was worse, like he was talking through marbles.

“You… dammit, Jer, you—”

“Don’t be mad!” Jeremy couldn’t stand it if Aiden, his safety, his wolf, suddenly turned all his fierceness on Jeremy.

And then, to his horror, something worse happened.

He heard the noise first, the rasping of voice in Aiden’s throat, the choked sound of breath that wasn’t cut free soon enough. He moved his head slowly to his left and Aiden’s face had blotched deep purple, and his chin was folded like fabric.

“Boy,” he said helplessly, and Aiden shook his head and buried his face next to Jeremy’s on the pillow.

His shoulders shook like mountains as the earth crumbled beneath them. Jeremy reached up with the arm he knew had not been broken, and scrunched his hand in that dark-gold hair.

“I’m sorry,” Aiden sobbed. “I’m sorry, Jeremy, but I’m so damned mad.”

Jeremy moaned in his throat. “But I didn’t talk,” he protested, feeling weak. “I didn’t let them get Stanley!” The little yarn seller Gianni had fallen in love with. Jeremy owed Gianni—dammit, Johnny—and Stanley was his lover. Jeremy had done Gi—Johnny a solid, that was all.

“I didn’t talk,” he mumbled again, hoping to reassure, hoping to make Aiden feel better. “You can’t be mad if I didn’t talk.”

“Oh Jeremy,” Aiden groaned, looking up from the pillow, so close Jeremy could count the sleepless crimson branches in his eyes. “Why didn’t you run? Three years, you had one foot out the door. The mob comes, all set to kill you, and you couldn’t rabbit away?”

Jeremy ran his tongue around his mouth, trying to find where his teeth were and where they weren’t, so he could talk better. “You deserve better than a man who’d run,” he said, hoping that wasn’t too garbled.

Aiden’s face crumpled again, folded, and he shook his head. “I deserve you,” he mumbled. “I’ve wanted you for so long—and now, I’m so worried.”

“Don’t be worried,” Jeremy told him, thinking his voice sounded more like his voice now that he’d gotten his teeth figured out. “I’m not the guy who’d run.”


There was more to it than that, he thought as his eyes closed. His face hurt—he thought he might have bandages on it, because in front of his eyes were layers of things that infringed upon his vision. His pretty, pretty face, the thing his daddy had always said was his moneymaker, and now it was damaged, probably beyond repair.

“You’d better not run,” Aiden choked next to him. “You’d better not run. We’re subletting that house, Jeremy. We’re putting your name on a paper. We’re opening a bank account, and you’re meeting my parents.”

Jeremy woke up enough for that. “Not when I’m not pretty,” he complained.

Aiden’s voice grew flinty, like it used to do when Jeremy tried to shirk his chores. “Fuck pretty,” he snarled. “Fuck pretty, fuck it to hell. You’re mine, and I love you, and we don’t care about pretty. You understand?”

“Yeah, fine,” Jeremy sulked. “You be pretty for both of us. I’m already too old for you. Now I’m not pretty anymore. That’s fine.”

At that point something in his body gave a big fat throb, and his head clanged timpani with it, and he moaned from pain, because just that suddenly, it was drowning out all the other voices.

“Here, Jeremy,” Ariadne said, fumbling with the little red button near his hand. “Don’t mind him. He’s worried, and he feels bad ’bout not being there.”

“Don’t let him do that,” Jeremy mumbled. “My bad. So many things in life I had to make right. Don’t you see that, boy?”



But the morphine was potent and quick, and Jeremy’s mind and body were soon sliding around consciousness in the liquidy viscousness of pain and drugs and the firm belief that he’d had this coming all along.


JEREMY DIDN’T even know his real last name. He thought it might have been the one his father had died with, but even that was sort of a crapshoot. Oscar had been telling lies a lot longer than Jeremy had—even his “original” name might have been a lie.

As far as he knew, Jeremy had come into the world conning people. He was reasonably sure his parents had grifted their way out of the hospital bill when he was born. His mother was a hazy memory of bangly earrings and the smell of scotch, and his father had been more impressed with Jeremy’s benefits as a partner in crime than as a son.

Jeremy had hurt a lot of people before he’d just up and decided to be honest. He’d cheated women and children, hardworking men, college students alone in the world. And as hard as he’d worked at Craw’s fiber mill, as much effort as he’d put into being an honest man, he’d always felt like it wasn’t enough.

Nothing would ever be enough to make up for the man he’d been before Craw had found him, an ex-convict panhandling on the streets of Colorado.

Nothing would ever be enough to earn the love of the beautiful boy he’d been smitten with from the very beginning, when it probably wasn’t right that Jeremy had even noticed his beauty at all.

So when Aiden had invaded his space, invaded his home, made Jeremy notice the three years of friendship and attraction between them, Jeremy had accepted it, because he had no choice. Aiden was his boy—as long as Jeremy could stand not to run, he was helpless to do anything but to fall into his orbit.

It had been a tenuous gravitational shift, at first. Jeremy had always circled around Aiden; from the first moment he’d seen the boy working in Craw’s mill, Jeremy had wanted to be nearer to him. But Jeremy was older, and dumber, and he was sure his soul had shriveled, a withered flower with roots in an oil spill, twisted almost since birth.

He was a bad man. Bad men did not deserve to orbit near the bright and shining sun that was his boy. It wasn’t until Aiden proved he had interesting shadows, dark spots in the sun, was a wolf and not a lapdog, that Jeremy even dared to dream.

They’d had a month, almost two, during which Aiden spent most nights in Jeremy’s little apartment. The past few weeks, he’d been there full-time, all of his clothes in boxes, new towels from his mother in the bathroom, his favorite cereal in the cupboards. Just a breath, just a taste of having Aiden there in his home, as his home, and then….

Well, Jeremy had debts to pay. When one of them called him up in a panic, Jeremy had to pony up.



JEREMY WOKE up the next day actually feeling like a person. How did that happen? One minute you were free floating, a specter in a hospital bed, hearing people talk about you, drifting to escape the pain, and the next time you opened your eyes, it was you, in your body, anchored to the sheets by stuff that your body did.

“Aiden?” he murmured. Aitbhen. That was what it sounded like. “Jebuth thfuckin’ krith—when bo I ge’ my fhfuckin’ teef?”

Craw had a deep, growly bear voice, and his unmistakable laughter echoed over Jeremy’s head. “Today, actually,” he said. “You get fitted for them, anyway. You didn’t have any dental records, Jeremy. We had to wait until the swelling in your jaw went down to make a model.”

Jeremy remembered that. In fact, he realized that some of the difficulty he’d had talking actually had to do with his jaw still being wired shut.

“Whab bay ith ib?” Oh man, the more conscious he was, the worse he sounded. He felt like he could finally hear what he was actually saying instead of what he thought he was saying.

“You’ve been here for a week,” Craw said. “We’re going to take some plasters for your teeth and unwire your jaw. They’ll be changing the bandages on your face today and seeing if you need cosmetic surgery.”

“Aiden?” He had to work hard, but it sounded right.

“I made him go home today, Jer. He was dead on his feet.”

Jeremy closed his eyes in relief. “Good. He won’ thee me.”

Craw made a hurt sound. “Don’t worry about Aiden seeing you, okay? He’s always seen you.”

“When I wath preddy.”

Craw growled. “All the crap I gave that boy about you two being together and you’re telling me you’re going to take it back because of a little blood?”

Jeremy had been beaten, talking the whole time, so that guy beating him wouldn’t find Stanley. Suddenly meeting Craw’s eyes was not quite as hard as he’d thought it would be, that not-so-long-ago day when he’d listened to Craw and Aiden argue.

“We bode know ith more.”

And Craw, who didn’t know how to bullshit, shifted his green-brown eyes away. “Have faith,” he said gruffly. “Ben found me, Stanley found Johnny, Aiden found you. Have faith.”

If Jeremy could have talked more, he would have spun sunshine and rabbit crap about how sure, a man had to have faith, and maybe, under a sunny sky, he’d have enough faith for them all. He would have said that faith is a wonderful thing, but it was better to have faith when you had a plan of escape, and that once you had a way out, you could have all the faith you wanted.

But it was all a big, fat, painful, throbbing lie. Aiden would never forgive him for not calling for help, and Jeremy had no hope that he ever could. Jeremy could lie like a champion with his words, but his eyes—well, as a con man he’d had to squint a lot, because his eyes had been touch and go. He’d had to believehis bullshit to lie with his eyes.

And now he couldn’t use his words, and his eyes were all he had. He looked at Craw mutely, no con between them, just the painful, painful truth.

Craw nodded, and for a moment his lower lip trembled. “I’ll have faith,” he whispered. “That boy has always known his own mind and been strong about getting his way. He wanted you, I guess, and I admit, when I saw that it was real and not just you two bickering like you were married, I had second thoughts. But….” Oh no. Craw’s voice was wobbling. “Jeremy, we’ve been worried. They say you’ll probably be okay, but the lot of us, we’ve been worried. You’re our family, boy.” He swallowed. “I’ll have faith for the two of you.”

Jeremy closed his eyes then, tight, because they were burning. “’Kay,” he mumbled through a mouth full of missing teeth. “I’ll bind tum ob my own.”

“Good man,” Craw told him. Then the doctor came in, and unpleasant things happened with his mouth and dental tools, and in his head he was in Craw’s field with a piece of clover in his mouth, sitting on a rock in the sunshine, warm under the golden sky, teased by the breeze, watching Aiden herd the sheep.