I'm Nuts Enough, I Do Not Need an Unreliable Narrator's Help

Yesterday was my father's birthday. January 31st. He wanted to have dinner at a tiki bar. So we found something that was on the water. As luck would have it, we were in perfect position for the sunset over Tampa Bay.

I imagine the person pointing is telling stories - fish stories, maybe. Or tales about what lies in the direction they're pointing. Which leads us to unreliable narrators. I had been going to say I don't know much about unreliable narrators, but in fact, I now more than I want. It's just not from fiction.

I think the important thing to keep in mind about unreliable narrators is that they are giving you the truth as they see it. It's a truth they utterly believe, that they are invested in. Chances are, that even if you catch them out in what you'd swear was a dead on lie, they'll deny it to their graves. I admit this is not my favorite story trope. Maybe in part because I am not entirely certain I could pull it off as a writer. Or maybe because I knew one. For real. And I tried to be her friend. It went well. For a little while.

Let's call her Joan. There's no way to put too fine a point on it. She lied. All the time. Funny thing, there was zero malice behind it. It was 100% telling you what you wanted to hear - things like, 'I'm coming to your house to pick up the Very Important Thing you wanted me to pick up!' Then I'd get a text - 'hey traffic is terrible.' Then another text. 'Accident on freeway.' That's about the point I worked out she wasn't on the road at all. Hadn't, in fact, even left her house. Called out on it, the next lie was that she was desperately ill and had to undergo radical treatment that oddly, never had any physical impact. The final straw came when she lied to someone else to the point of attempting to impersonate someone in authority in email.

We'd gone from saying what she believed her friends wanted to hear to actual criminal activity in that last case. And yet. When confronted, she denied that any of it was a lie. Honestly, looking back, I think she believed that no one would or could like her for her. They'd only like her for what they believed she could do for them. So she'd constructed fiction after fiction and then convinced herself they were fact. But that's me. Attempting to rationalize something that may not be at all rational.

So maybe you'll understand when I say I've sort of had my fill of unreliable narrators in real life.  I don't deal with Joan anymore, but there are a few other people with tenuous grips on consensual reality that I can't avoid. And can't safely describe here. It means that since I have to live unreliable narration, I really do not want it anywhere near my entertainment.

Real life doesn't have to make sense. It's a relief to me when my fiction does make at least a little bit of sense. Am I weird here? If you like an unreliable narrator in a book, do you have people in your life who actually DO that? I'm wondering if my distaste is colored by my exposure or if everyone has had similar experiences in life and me not liking an unreliable narrator in fiction is just me.

Grand Announcements for Maradaine

I've been hinting for quite some time about big news, and finally I'm ready to tell you about it. 
First, the slightly sad news: the third Maradaine Constabulary novel, A Parliament of Bodies, will not be released until Spring 2019.  I know many of you have been anxious for the next installment with Satrine and Minox, and it is going to come out, just a few months later.  This is entirely due to production schedule and release strategy-- because we've got something else planned for release in the fall of 2018.  And so much more.

What is going on?  Well, I've signed a contract for FOUR new books!


First off, coming out on October 3rd, 2018, we have THE WAY OF THE SHIELD, the first novel of the fourth Maradaine-set series, called The Maradaine Elite.  What is THE WAY OF THE SHIELD, and The Maradaine Elite?  Glad you asked!

The first novel in the Maradaine Elite series blends fast-paced high fantasy and political intrigue.

Dayne Heldrin always dreamed of being a member of the Tarian Order. In centuries past, the Elite Orders of Druthal were warriors that stood for order, justice, and the common people. But now, with constables, King’s Marshals, and a standing army, there is little need for such organizations, and the Tarian Order is one of the last remnants of this ancient legacy. Nevertheless, Dayne trained his body and mind, learned the arts of defense and fighting, to become a candidate for the Tarian Order.

When a failed rescue puts Dayne at fault for injuring the child of a powerful family, his future with the Tarians is in jeopardy. The Parliament controls the purse strings for the Order, and Dayne has angered the wrong members of Parliament. He returns to the capital city of Maradaine in shame, ready to be cast out of the Order when the period of his candidacy ends.

Dayne finds Maradaine in turmoil, as revolutions and dark conspiracies brew around him, threatening members of Parliament and common people alike. Dayne is drawn into the uproar, desperate not to have one more death or injury on his conscience, but the Order wants him to stay out of the situation. The city threatens to tear itself apart, and Dayne must decide between his own future and his vow to always stand between the helpless and harm.

And, yes, you already can pre-order it.  THE WAY OF THE SHIELD is up on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Goodreads, and all other places you can think of to go for books.

Launching this fourth series puts the final piece in place, introducing you to Dayne and his world.  And it was important we did that before releasing A PARLIAMENT OF BODIES, as you can see...

The city of Maradaine is vexed by the Gearbox Murders: a series of gruesome deaths orchestrated by a twisted mechanical genius. With no motive and no pattern, Inspectors Satrine Rainey and Minox Welling— the retired spy and untrained mage— are at a loss to find a meaningful lead in the case. Until the killer makes his most audacious exhibit yet: over a dozen victims in a clockwork deathtrap on the floor of the Druth Parliament. 

 

The crime scene is a madhouse, and political forces conspire to grind their investigation to a halt.  The King’s Marshals claim jurisdiction of the case, corruption in the Constabulary thwart their efforts, and a special Inquest threatens to end Minox’s career completely.  Their only ally is Dayne Heldrin, a provisional member of the Tarian Order, elite warriors trained in the arts of protection.  But Dayne’s connection to the Gearbox Murders casts suspicion on his motives, as he might be obsessed with a phantom figure he believes is responsible.  

 

While Satrine and Minox struggle to stop the Gearbox from claiming even more victims, the grinding gears of injustice might keep them from ever solving these murders, and threaten to dismantle their partnership forever.

Next up, scheduled for late in 2019, we'll get the second Maradaine Elite novel, THE SHIELD OF THE PEOPLE, where Dayne and his compatriots get embroiled in a plot of dissident groups threatening to disrupt Parliamentary elections and throw Maradaine into chaos. 
"But, Marshall!" I hear you say.  "That's a lot of focus on the new character, and while we get Satrine and Minox, what about the Thorn?  What about the Rynax brothers?  Have you forgotten about them?"  And the answer is, of course I haven't.

That's why the next book will be the third Streets of Maradaine novel, THE FENMERE JOB.  Asti & Verci's fiery quest for vengeance, and their efforts to bring peace and justice to the streets in North Seleth, will put them and their crew in the line of fire of The Thorn. 

Finally, we'll have THE PEOPLE OF THE CITY, the third Maradaine Elite novel, Dayne digs deeper into the underworld conspiracies that swirl throughout Maradaine, an investigation that will bring him together with the Thorn, Inspectors Rainey and Welling, and the Rynax Brothers— a thrilling fantasy adventure to conclude the first phase of the epic Maradaine sequence.

So here's how it'll all look, and the shape of my life for the next two years:

And then?  Well, then it'll be on to Phase II.  But that can wait for now.

Release Day: The Burned Spy by @KAKrantz

Tooting my own horn today as I release the first book in my new Immortal Spy Urban Fantasy Series.

THE BURNED SPY
Gods. Always ready to screw you.

When Bix the Gatekeeper is summoned from exile a hundred and seventy years early by the goddess of the Norse Under World, the former Dark Ops agent knows there’s a catch. On the surface, the terms of the deal are simple. Someone attacked the pantheon’s ambassador to the Mid Worlds and left the ambassador in a coma. In exchange for early parole, Bix must identify the perpetrator and drag their soul to Hel.

It’d be a sweet contract, if not for the details. The ambassador is Bix’s ex-girlfriend, the lead suspect is the key witness from Bix’s trial, and the organization leading the official investigation is the same intelligence guild that disavowed Bix when a covert op went pear-shaped. Undeterred, Bix returns to her old stomping grounds where clues in the smoldering woods of Centralia, Pennsylvania, lead to the waterfront of Washington, DC, and Worlds beyond.

Once valued for her skills creating passageways as small as a capillary or as large as a continent, Bix’s success now depends on the relationships she was forced to abandon. As she squares off against friends who betrayed her and enemies keen to destroy her, Bix follows a trail of secrets, torture, and treason that leads to the very superpowers who banished her. With her freedom on the line and revenge within reach, this highly-trained operative will take on Fates, dragons, angels, and gods to get exactly what she wants.

Hel hath no fury like a burned spy.

Buy It Now in eBook & Paperback: Amazon | iBooks | Kobo | B&N

What's not to Love?

The Unreliable Narrator. That wonderful voice that  tells us what is going on, tells us what has happened and leads us down a rocky path to dubious revelation.

I love that voice. It's a keystone of horror stories and novels.

Poe used that sort of narration in The Tell-Tale Heart to great advantage. Madness tinges the words and leaves the reader wondering what is real and what is not. It's delightful!

I've done several stories with that sort of narration and they are among some of my favorites.  In the right hands it's a wonderful reading experience. In the wrong hands, well, what's true about writers everywhere is true here. If the writing is bad, the story will not work well.

it's certainly something to consider if you intend to write for the Twisted Book Of Shadows, edited by yours truly and Christopher Golden, The guidelines are coming in a couple of days.

Two days until the submission window opens for The Twisted Book of Shadows. Submission info will go live on Wednesday night on the Facebook page. PLEASE share to any and all writers and writers' groups with an interest in horror, but ESPECIALLY to marginalized voices. We want the best horror stories we can find, and that means from everyone. Wherever you fall on any spectrum of race, sexuality, sex, gender, age, or ability, if you have a horror story to tell, we hope you'll submit to The Twisted Book of Shadows.


More information soon!

The Unreliable Narrator - Love or Hate?

Another photo from Meow Wolf. Nnedi Okorafor and I fell in love with this crazy kitchen and had to photograph each other in it. One of the most fun aspects of this "immersive experience" is not only being able to touch and enter the exhibit, but in a way to become part of it as well. I felt like part of this kitchen and wanted to seem like it, too.

Art of all mediums is interesting in the way it interfaces with reality. It's impossible to recreate reality in art - and maybe not even desirable to do so - but art necessarily reflects and at best deepens our understanding of the real world. Our topic this week is the unreliable narrator - whether we love them, hate them, write them or avoid them.

An unreliable narrator is a point-of-view (POV) character - or characters who delude themselves in some way and thus misdirect the reader. They almost always occur in first-person or deep third-person POVs, though I've read one book where the omniscient narrator turned out at the very end to be deeply unreliable, making the reader realize the entire story was slanted - which was a terrific twist. Recent examples of unreliable narrators are the heroine of The Girl on the Train, who is drunk and emotionally traumatized, with memory gaps, or Gone Girl, where both POV characters are hiding who they really are and keeping secrets from the reader.

Me, I love an unreliable narrator. In fact, I'd make the case that all of my POV characters are unreliable, because I think human beings cannot escape being subjective about their experience in the world. There's no such thing as objective reality. A character will always interpret the world according to their own emotional landscape - which includes denial of some truths about themselves.

Reading a story with an unreliable narrator requires the reader pay close attention, because you can't just believe what the characters tell you. You have to be alert to subtle cues. I love reading an unreliable narrator in the same way I enjoy solving puzzles. I like writing them, too, though I've been sometimes accused of inconsistent characterization by those who don't understand that my characters are sometimes lying to themselves.

Now, a close friend of mine - and one of my critique partners - hates unreliable narrators. She wants to know what's real and what isn't, with very little tolerance for the gray areas.

What all do you think - love or hate an unreliable narrator? Any great examples?

What Really Matters When Balancing Your Life?

This week’s topic is how we maintain work/life balance…or whether or not you have a standing desk, a treadmill desk, believe in “butt in chair” or some other mantra. Hmmm, plenty of room there to write a post!

On the micro level, I sit at my writing desk, which is actually my great grandmother’s desk, a fact which pleases me for the continuity. I don’t think she wrote anything other than her own diary (which I’ve never seen – who knows if it even exists but didn’t every woman of her time keep some sort of journal?). My grandmother used the desk for her correspondence and I believe may have written some poetry. Then the desk came to me and I bang out science fiction romance and ancient Egyptian paranormal romance and probably both ladies would clutch their pearls at some of my scenes, but I believe they’d be supportive.

I sit in a cheap Amazon ergonomic chair at the moment, and before that had a cheap Walmart ergonomic chair that was actually better than the extremely elaborate and price-y ergo chair NASA/JPL provided me at the old day job. I used my Walmart chair until it literally fell apart after about eight years. (To be fair to the JPL chair, it had too many levers and controls that I could never figure out. It was probably extremely ergonomic if I’d ever mastered the amenities.)

I (mostly) write for a timed thirty two minute stint and then I get up and walk around, do housework or other activity on my feet for at least ten minutes before resuming my place at the desk. Why that exact time frame, you ask? Well, I used to do forty two minutes but that was too long to sit in this one spot, and thirty minutes feels too short. Go figure! Ten minutes of activity isn’t long enough to kill my creativity if I’m doing well. If I’m in the flow of writing, I never even hear the timer and I just keep writing until I realize my whole body has gotten cramped and stiff.  Forget time limits!

I have a trackball mouse, wrist braces if needed for a bad week, a lower back support and an ergonomic foot rest.

I try to walk a certain number of steps every day and to avoid sugar. Don’t ask me how I do on those goals.

And a cat to supervise my writing. Did I mention Jake?

I TRY to write at least a little bit every day, but most days I can do 2-3K words. Yes, I spend too much time on social media.

On the macro level, two events defined my approach to work/life balance, which that life is too short to waste on things I don’t enjoy or which are stressful, and that life can end at literally any moment so be sure you’re getting the things done you really care about. My family is the most important thing to me and if they need me, I’m there. And of course one has to take the trash out, go to the dentist, have a mammogram, go to the day job to support themselves and their family (before I became a fulltime author)…but life is TOO SHORT to waste forcing myself to finish reading books I’m not into, watching movies or TV shows I’m not into, cleaning the oven, taking on thankless jobs because someone expects me to do so…etc etc etc.

What gave me this attitude? I’ve talked about both things before but briefly, one evening after work my husband went out for a bike ride with his best friend and ten minutes later the neighbors were at my door to tell me there’d been a terrible accident. An athlete and former Marine, he died in the prime of life, in his mid thirties. Our children were 3 and 5. And he was literally hit by a truck, so I don't take that phrase lightly. It happens.

Second, one morning while attending a business conference I came within about 60 seconds of dying (according to the doctors), after choking on food and passing out. Only the fact that I was able to pantomime the Heimlich Maneuver to the co-worker who was at the table with me in the seconds before I lost consciousness saved my life. And the fact he was a big strong guy, who persisted in doing the maneuver fourteen times before the obstruction came loose and my brain got oxygen again. Approximately 5000 people a year die in similar incidents. I would have been done, gone, no more time to write another word or more importantly, to hug my kids.

So when it comes to your allotted time on this Earth there are no guarantees, no promises, perhaps no chance for a few last acts or even words….

I may sound cynical here but I’ve had the experiences to support what I’m saying. It may be an uncomfortable thought and everyone expects to peacefully pass away in their sleep at 105, so they feel there’s plenty of time….

Don’t waste your life on things that don’t matter to you, okay?

NOTE: Photos are Author's own or purchased from DepositPhotos

Balance: The Involuntary Standing Desk

I have a standing desk. My standing desk has a chair. As you can see by the photo at right, whether I sit or stand is not at all up to me. This means that any notion of balancing anything is dictated by my furry masters. 

That probably sounds wrong.

Balance is such a personal thing. Most people with day jobs have to worry about work/life balance. Writers have a set of unique balance requirements in that we have to look after our brains as much (or more in some cases) as we look after our bodies. We're asking a whole bunch of our minds while we live inside our stories and attempt to imbue our characters with emotions we usually evoke in ourselves to some extent as we put them on paper.

Reading books written for laymen by brain scientists has been a thing recently and one of the fun concepts is that emotion in the body defines reality for the brain which subsequently releases chemicals in response to that emotion. Do you get angry remembering how that twit in the blue car cut you off in traffic? If I've understood the biology correctly, the brain scientists are saying that you brain and body can't tell that your anger is about the past. You're angry now. Therefore there's a threat now. Have some adrenaline and a few stress hormones to go with it. Now your body is reacting physically to a threat that's not even present. We all do this. I get that. But writers and actors do it as a living. And writers and actors need to know there's a need to purge the accumulated emotional and chemical baggage. 

Exercise, meditation, changing up and tuning our energy systems - whatever that means to you - they're all tools in the box. Getting out and away - seeing or doing something new, those can also be useful balancers. Sure. I get up at 5AM every day to meditate and do an hour of yoga. It's the single biggest predictor of whether I'll make my word count goal for the day or not. In no way do I recommend it to anyone else. You have to do you. 

I used to think I had to get up at 4AM on a consistent basis in order to make life work. I hated everyone and everything, including myself. All those years I thought I had mental illness and I had to take all those psychoactive medications to function. Turns out it was a major body clock issue. When I finally refused to get up at 4AM anymore, I was cured. So if I have any advice at all to offer here it would be this: Don't fuck with your body clock. Yes. You can train yourself to get up earlier, but if you notice you're getting and staying depressed? Back off. There's only so much play in your body's preferred sleep/wake cycle and a definite mounting cost the farther you deviate from it.

I strongly suspect that balance, like every aspect of health, is something you pursue but never quite catch. It's a work in progress and all any of us can do is keep trying.

Which, according to Hatshepsut, I will do standing.

Balancing Health While Writing

If you've been following me for any length of time, you know that January is a hard time on me, health-wise.  January in Austin is when the cedar pollen starts up, and that always does a number on me.  One year it hit me so hard, I had vertigo for a week. 

Of course, this sort of thing affects creativity, affects the work.  I try not to let it too much, and it does become a matter of powering through and just getting it done.  Which I've been making a point of doing, even if right now I'm highly medicated and a little out of it.  The point is I need to focus on the work, I need to get it done, because... well, not doing it is worse for me, emotionally.  A few days without writing or other creative work, and I get very testy.  That was the worst part of that vertigo bout-- I literally couldn't work. Eyes couldn't focus.  I couldn't do much of anything but lie in bed and watch West Wing.  It was terrible.

So thus I stay highly medicated right now to avoid that.  And keep working.  Which I've been doing: manuscript delivered to my editor this week.  Now onto the next things.

There's always the next things.