Tropey Tropes

In all honesty, I don't think much about tropes. Not consciously, anyway. Clearly, though, they're tucked up in the subconscious, because they emerge in writing anyway. If I think about what ends up in my writing, it's always the same stuff:

• Found family
• Finding or making one's own place in the world
• Enemies to lovers
• Cheating the rules/authority/establishment

The things you won't see from me if I can help it are the same things Jeffe mentioned - damaging, misogynistic, racist, homophobic, transphobic, writer punching down or laterally in any way. Not here for it. Bully trope? Only if they get taken down hard. Even then, the take down needs to happen in the first quarter of the book so the rest of the story can be that bully's redemption tour. Otherwise, I'm out. You wanna kill off family or besties or beloveds in order to motivate a character? I'm going to cringe because it's lazy and it makes a character super suspect in my mind because if someone has to die before the character will move their asses to do what's right, they're either stupid or terrible people. Yes. I'm being judgy. Stuff went down this week and I'm in a MOOD. I'm not saying you can't kill people off in books. I'm in trouble if we can't. But as a driver for a hero or heroine? Yikes. So anyway. Come at me with the torches and pitchforks. Tell me I'm being a small-minded pain in the backside. 

New Fantasy Romance & Old Fiery Fantasy

Jeffe's latest in her Renegades of Magic fantasy romance series is out today!

TWISTED MAGIC: Renegades of Magic Book 3
Their love makes them stronger together... 

Unless the world rips them apart

BUY IT NOW: Amazon | Kobo | Apple | Direct from Jeffe

This Week's Topic: Winter Holiday Promo!

LARCOUT
Fire Born, Blood Blessed: Book 1

SPFBO 2016 Finalist!

Blood-beings can be chattel or char.

Fire seethes through the veins of every Morsam, demanding domination and destruction. Combat is a hobby. Slaughtering the inferior blood-beings is entertainment. Life is a repetitious cycle in the prison fashioned by the gods. But mix-race abomination Vadrigyn os Harlo suspects the key to freedom lies in safeguarding the blood-beings; until her blood-born mother uses foreign magic to turn the Morsam against her. Betrayed, bound, and broken, Vadrigyn struggles against the dying of her essential fire. Yet the ebbing flames unleash the dormant magic of her mixed heritage…

The magic to destroy free will.

Seized by the gods and dumped in the desert nation of Larcout to stop history from repeating, Vadrigyn discovers her mother’s legacy of treason and slaughter still festers. To survive the intrigues of the royal court, the roiling undercurrents of civil war, and the gods themselves, Vadrigyn must unravel the conspiracy behind her mother’s banishment. But manipulating free will unleashes a torrent of consequences.

If she fails the gods, she will return to the Morsam prison, stripped of all magic and all hope.

If she succeeds, she can rule a nation.

Kasthu. Roborgu. Inarchma.

Live. Learn. Burn. 

Buy It Now: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iBooks |Kobo 

Read an Excerpt: Chapter 1

Offering a Hand Up

Mentors come in a lot of shapes and sizes in my life. I can't point to a single person or one single piece of insightful advice. When I look back, I see the long line of people who dropped tidbits of encouragement, advice, and tutoring. I look back across the vast sea of books I'd read that taught me how stories come together. I had RWA teaching me everything I needed to know about writing an about the business. I also had Jeffe trying to mentor me in networking - I was not her brightest pupil. Eventually, it was the people willing to critique my work and talk me through what was right, what was wrong, and how to fix it. I needed someone to take me by the hand and say this is wrong, do you see it? Here's how you fix it. I learned so much that way and I was so grateful for that education.

As for reaching back to help those coming up, I critique for others. Usually it's within my own critique groups, but the real fun is critiquing for contests. I want to help newer, younger writers learn what I learned from critique. 

I needed direct 'this is wrong, see? Do this. Or this.' I have come to understand, however, that I'm in the minority and most people do not want me approaching their fiction in that fashion. So I've had to adapt. I've learned to say things like, what's the goal of the scene? What does this character want right here and why? I guess I've had to learn to lead people to see their own issues themselves rather than have me come right out and say hey this doesn't work here's why and here's how to fix it. It's a running joke with my critique groups that you'll always here me say 'I feel like you have an opportunity here to do xy or z' which is my way of saying hey you missed a potentially potent story thread. I hope it helps.

As for me, I still need a mentor. I need someone who can mentor me in cloning myself so that one of me can do the day job and care for the elderly parents and the other one of me can write and take care of cats and the rest of the household. I'm not sure that kind of mad science is in anyone else's best interests, though. 

New Fantasy Romance Release: The Storm Princess & The Raven King by Jeffe Kennedy

📚💖As temperatures rise, so does the steam in Jeffe's 4th book in the Heirs of Magic Fantasy Romance Series. Out Now! 💖📚

The Storm Princess & The Raven King

A Broken Heart

Princess Salena Nakoa KauPo thought she was over her broken heart. She’d put her first love and childhood sweetheart, Rhyian, firmly in the past where he belonged. His bitter betrayal of her was locked away deep inside, along with her foolishly innocent hopes and dreams. Now Lena has been thrust together with him, the prince of shadows, the one man she could never resist, on a mission to save the world from a terrible cataclysm. Worse, Rhyian refuses to believe her when she says there’s no hope for them.

An Irresistible Longing

Rhyian is rather accustomed to being a failure. Goddesses know, he’s not magical enough for his sorcerous mother and not alpha enough for his father, the King of Annfwn. It hasn’t helped that he’s spent the last seven years trying to drown his sorrows—and to forget the one woman he ever loved, whose heart he carelessly shattered in a moment of weakness. Rhy knows he has to change to win back Lena’s trust, but how?

A Love That Can’t Die

As Lena and Rhy struggle to overcome the wounds of the past, they and their friends approach the final confrontation with the strange intelligence intent on rending apart the very fabric of their world. And it looks like it will come down to the pair of them to strike the final blow.

But only if they can build a new trust on the bitter past.

BUY IT NOW: Amazon | Apple | Nook | Kobo

Start the Series Here 

The Secret to Author Platforms

 So you want to sell all the books. Me, too, my friend. Me, too. Heaven knows I've chased my fair share of strategies and secret sauces that led me to one conclusion:  You can spend your life chasing attention. 

You can spend all your time and all of your money on classes that promise to teach you The Secret to selling millions of books. Facebook ads! No! Amazon ads! Tik Tok! Newsletters! (Of surprise to no one - blogs never seem to be on the list of 'The Secret to Selling -- Anything.') But the truth is much harder than any of the 'experts' who can teach you to market your books for six easy payments of special for you today want you to believe. The truth is that platforms can be carefully created and nurtured, but they are also very much a function of how well your stories fulfill reader expectations and of luck. One you can control. The other you can't (but you can help it along slightly.)

Reader expectations are knowable and writers can opt to ignore them or make sure their stories hit them. If you're writing a sex scene in a romance novel, you'll write one kind of scene. If you're writing a sex scene in a horror novel, the sex scene will have a very different feel because it serves a very different function - and you're doing it that way because you know that a horror novel needs to read and sound and feel different than a romance novel.

As for helping luck along, I'd like to tell you to just see Jeffe's post because, yeah. What she said. The very best advertising for your current book is your next book. And the best advertising for your next book is your current book.

On My Mind: Treating the Writer Gently

 Yesterday, Jeffe shared a blog post from the SFWA blog with me.  Treading on Embers talks about the challenges of existing - much less writing and performing as a public-facing author - while managing chronic disability. In this case, it's invisible disability: chronic migraine disorder. It speaks to any chronic pain disability, though, and brings me to What's On My Mind this week.

How do you treat your writer gently?

Most of us in the writing trenches understand that 80 to 90 percent of the time, discipline is the answer to just about all of our writing woes. But there are days or weeks or months or (gods forbid) years where discipline is crumpled up like a used tissue and cast aside by Life Events (TM). It could be chronic illness that a writer has to contend with and which no amount of discipline will overcome. It could be a crushing and terrible diagnosis and subsequent treatment. It could be the deep pain of sitting in the hospital room with your slowly dying child. Or it could be a tornado of activity, instability, uncertainty, and circumstance changes crushing you into burnout.

Of course taking a break and allowing yourself to rest and heal is the first, obvious answer. But that's physical and mental recovery. There's also a subtler recovery required - more than emotional. I'm thinking about creative recovery.

Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way lays out a 12 week path to creative recovery. The program is laid out as a 12-step program because it was the way Julia Cameron charted her course for creative recovery after managing alcoholism. It is useful and it can be powerful. The current issue with the program for me is that it demands going out in public once a week. For me, that's a dicey commitment both with a pandemic that hasn't resolved in our favor and a chronic pain issue. It isn't that I don't *want* to go on Artist's Dates - it's that working a day job means there are no spoons left at 5pm to do anything but take a pain pill and collapse. That doesn't negate the rest of the program, granted. 

I'm just interested in how other people recognize their need for creative recovery and then what they do (or don't) in order to treat that writerly part of themselves with compassion and care - tempering discipline with a bit of nurturing. 

If you've considered how to treat your writer gently, what are you favorite ways of doing that? How do you approach creative recovery if it's ever been necessary for you?

Instagram Time Sinks

 Pretty Instagram photos haven't been on my list of things to do. Should probably be. Aren't. In part because cats and a moveable composition aren't compatible. I do realize I could maybe go somewhere in this house and close a door with the ever so helpful felines on the other side of it. I just haven't. Instead, I play with virtual photos - these were ads that ran on Facebook and got posted (but not boosted) on Instagram. They did fine. 

The issue for me is that I can spend a bunch of time on photos, or I can steal that time back for working on a book. Given that I've had to take on a day job (living in a house big enough to accommodate four adults - one with mobility issues is more expensive than  two people living in a 34' boat - who knew) the hours available for writing have shrunk considerably. 

I'm going to opt for words over photos most of the time. So while these are a little flat and shiny rather than textured and lush like Jeffe's lovely photos, the ads are the closest I get to Instagram-worthy shots. If I want yet another job, I'll figure out some means of creating clever TikToks cause nothing says time sink like an amateur doing video editing.

Exercise Envy

 

Sitting. Not ideal. You've seen the data earlier this week. But you know, when all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail. All I have are sitting desks. So far. I lust after a treadmill desk like Jeffe has. With four adults and too many cats in the house, that ain't happenin' any time soon. Space concerns and all.

Still. In the middle of the raging hellhole that was 2020 (and that 2021 is still flirting with, the hussy) doing something - anything - to look after our health made my family feel a little more in control. Working out at home became THE thing.

Yes. Yoga. Weightlifting - we have free weights and a bench and training in the Weider method. We take 2-3 mile walks (with masks - this is Florida and well - the FL man memes, they do not lie). The dh and I bike. 

These are lovely. They boost mental and physical health. But they're time delimited. There are only so many hours in a day and only an hour a day I can devote to motion for motion's sake. Yet our brains evolved in very different circumstances - when motion WAS the day. Our brains were designed to operate at peak efficiency while we walk. Stroll, really. Take a look at the book The Brain Rules. 

Read this and see if you don't join me in lusting after a treadmill desk like Jeffe's. 

The spoiler is this: Our brains were designed for us to walk up to twelve miles per day. It keeps our brains oxygenated, boosts connections, etc, etc, it's really good for you, so there. 

All I know is that if I stop moving, I start hurting. Maybe I'll start saving for that treadmill desk.

What She Said

So for my post, can I just link to Jeffe's post and nod vigorously? No? Rats. Okay. Let's come at this another way, then.

Sometimes, mes amis, the world of publishing leaves you very few options. When what you write isn't necessarily the flavor du jour, most trad publishing houses won't look at you cross eyed. If they do, but your sales don't hit a particular benchmark, you may rapidly find yourself unpublished by traditional houses. If that happens, and if you have the self-confidence and spite to pick up your stories, you can go home and learn to become your own publisher.

Or say you've been writing one genre and you want to dip your toes into another - one you aren't necessarily certain you want to immerse yourself into. You write that book and rather than subbing it to agents and editors, you put it up yourself as an experiment. To test the genre waters, so to speak.

Or, maybe, after an eternity of waiting, you recover the rights to a group of stories that were orphaned when your cherished editor left the business (get used to that one, cupcake, it happens on a daily) you finally have the opportunity to finish out the series and relaunch the whole thing at what you consider a much friendlier price point - or with the cover of your dreams. Whatever your entre into DIYing it is.

Just know this. Everything about self-publishing is learnable. Scads of people have been through this wilderness and will gladly point the way. Some people will charge admittance. Many more won't. Author loops are crazy generous with how-to information, software suggestions, cover designer, editor, and copy editor referrals, too. Most of them will discuss the nuanced differences between launching wide versus targeted, too. Here. Let me pass you an aspirin. Author loops are a fire hose. You might need the pain killer.

All of this said, there's no right or wrong answer to the question of going indie or trad or both. There's only what's right for you and your work. If you're a security seeker, go trad. If you're a risk taker and a control freak, go indie. If you see the merits of both, then do all the things. There's really no math to do that will make clear which path is 'best'. It's all judgement call and what sounds like the most fun. Sure. You need a career strategy at some point. Tons of people will coach you through that, too, but as far as I can tell, you end up with a mirror of THEIR strategy rather than one of your own. So you may as well be guided by your own sense of what sounds easy versus hard. If having to format your own book sounds like the third circle of hell because you're a technophobe, you can hire someone to do that work, or you can choose to stick with the trad houses. They'll handle all that fiddly stuff, at the price, however, of having complete control over how your book is presented to the world.

So. Yeah. What Jeffe said. It's all about tradeoffs. You get to choose which ones you'll accept.

Release Day: Prisoner of the Crown by @JeffeKennedy

It's a party here at the SFF Seven Authors' Blog as we celebrate the release of Jeffe's new book kickstarting her Chronicles of Dasnaria High Fantasy series!

**It is NOT a Romance.**

I don't tell you that to discourage you, dear reader. Far from it. I tell you so you are prepared for the type of heart-pounding adventure on which the Chronicles of Darnaria will take you. Afterall, Jeffe is an award-winning Fantasy Romance author; hell, she's won the top prize in Romancelandia for her work, a RITA Award. It's fair to assume her fans, many of whom are our blog readers, would think this new series is all HEA and smexytimes.

That is not this book.

When it comes to rich worldbuilding, nail-biting plot twists, and a heroine discovering her own value and power, well now, this IS that kind of book.

__________

PRISONER OF THE CROWN

She was raised to be beautiful, nothing more. And then the rules changed…

In icy Dasnaria, rival realm to the Twelve Kingdoms, a woman’s role is to give pleasure, produce heirs, and question nothing. But a plot to overthrow the emperor depends on the fate of his eldest daughter. And the treachery at its heart will change more than one carefully limited life…

THE GILDED CAGE

Princess Jenna has been raised in supreme luxury—and ignorance. Within the sweet-scented, golden confines of the palace seraglio, she’s never seen the sun, or a man, or even learned her numbers. But she’s been schooled enough in the paths to a woman’s power. When her betrothal is announced, she’s ready to begin the machinations that her mother promises will take Jenna from ornament to queen.

But the man named as Jenna’s husband is no innocent to be cozened or prince to charm. He’s a monster in human form, and the horrors of life under his thumb are clear within moments of her wedding vows. If Jenna is to live, she must somehow break free—and for one born to a soft prison, the way to cold, hard freedom will be a dangerous path indeed…

Read an excerpt here.

BUY IT NOW:   Amazon  |  B&N  |  iBooks |  Kobo

Binge Reading, a Bookworm's Approach to Series

Do you remember as a kid finding a book in the library? It looked great, so you checked it out. Then you started reading. It's a hit out of the park. You LOVE this book. You're right in there with the characters, laughing, crying, fighting -- and then the book ends on a cliffhanger. Then and only then do you realize you have a book that's the first in a series.

Heart fluttering, you rush back to the library. There! On the shelf! More titles by the same author. You search frantically. You come up with books three and four and seven.

Right then. Right there. Your innocent little bookworm heart breaks just a little. And you learn. NEVER start a book without 1. first knowing whether it's part of a series and 2. that you can acquire the rest of the series.

Maybe your life was settled and you grew up in some rarified place where books were as important to your family as they are to you. If you did, you could generally be sure that if you developed an addiction to a series that was still being written (as opposed to one already completed) you'd be able to get a hold of the latest in the series when it finally came out. Those of us without such assurance, at the mercy of library systems without our loyalties to long-running series, learned never to start a series until it was finished and all the books in the series were available.

This is the long way of saying I strongly favor writing stand alone books, which is amusing, because everything I have is part of a series or leaves the door open to being a series. Funny how the world turns, isn't it?

As it happens, at the time that Enemy Within sold, series were THE thing. I'd written the book as a stand alone. Straight up, I admit that I did. And then my editor asked if I could make it a series. I was still so afraid someone would take back that publishing contract, I said that of course I could. So I did. Same thing happened with Nightmare Ink, though I wised up before I wrote that one and I planned it out as a series because I could see the handwriting on the wall. Sure enough. That same editor asked for a series treatment. At least this time around, I was ready for it. And now that I'm writing my series, I love them. I don't want to abandon them any more than I wanted to read the first book in a series I'd never find book number two for when I was a kid.

This isn't to say I don't love reading series. I do. And now that I'm an adult with my own book budget AND Amazon Prime, I can do my very favorite thing in the world: Find a series I love and buy the whole damned thing in one go. Because you binge watch GoT if you want. I'll binge read Jeffe's Twelve Kingdoms, thanks.

I desperately wanted a bookwormish sort of photo to give you. I don't have one. But I do have a little green garden frog who was hanging out in the zinnias yesterday. I have yet to ask what his reading preferences are.

Embracing the Brand

Whelp. After reading Jeffe's excellent post about author brand, it belatedly dawns on me I have one. One I hadn't, to this point, known about, much less embraced.

Crazy Cat Lady.

Seriously. Follow me on Instagram. @marcellaburnard  Have a look at my gallery. Go back through my blog posts. How many cat photos versus photos of literally anything else? Also, who just landed a part time job as a veterinary assistant for a cat-only clinic based solely on a long history of rescue work and learning to give subcutaneous fluids to her own cats? Yeeeeeah.

Not to mention that if you read the reviews of the last book I put out (Damned If He Does) - the very first cat I've written into a story gets mentioned in reviews more than the main characters. I'm seeing a trend here.

But I'm not certain how to capitalize on that, you know? I mean, okay. 10% of everything I make goes to animal rescue (Best Friends and Big Cat Rescue, specifically).  But that's not exactly - I don't know - flashy? Visible? Easily identified?

I could wear sweaters knitted from the fur I've combed from my cats to all my events, but I have concerns about just how many readers would be seriously allergic to me . . .

Wonder if Hatshesput would consent to wear a 'service animal' vest and come to events with me. Without murdering me in my sleep for the affront of making her wear clothes.