Fight Scenes for Peace Lovers

I did a book launch signing yesterday for THE ORCHID THRONE, along with Jane Linskold. So lovely to see that my local indie bookstore, Page 1 Books, has such an array of my books!

It was a fun event and I so appreciate all the folks who took the time to come out.

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is Writing Fight Scenes. Now, I - somewhat famously, if I want to give myself that much credit - don't like writing fight scenes. I'm really not much for violence overall. I'm that person who covers her ears and shuts her eyes at the scary part in the movie. The fight scenes - especially those extended mano a mano duels that seem to take up the last twenty minutes of every action movie - bore me to death.

I've even been on panels - like one Jennifer Estep put together for RT one year - on Steam vs. Scream: writing sex scenes or writing fight scenes? Spoiler: I'm the sex scene gal.

I love writing sex scenes. They come easily [heh] for me. I love the way the intimacy and power of sex peels open the characters and can drive transformation. People try to tell me that fight scenes do the same thing and my frank opinion is that they're wrong. Fight scenes can reveal character - and should, if well done - and a fight scene can challenge a character, but overall I think that fight scenes drive plot.

So, this makes sense to me, that character-driven writers like myself tend to prefer sex scenes - or any scene delving into emotional intimacy - where plot-driven writers love fight scenes. Marcella Burnard, our Gal Friday here on the blog, is forever claiming that explosions are perfectly valid plot points. I'm sure she's right - they just aren't for me.

I titled this post "Fight Scenes for Peace Lovers" and that's probably not fair. I know plenty of writers who create horrifying fight scenes while being perfectly calm, lovely and peaceable people in real life.

But what do you do when, like me, you're someone who abhors conflict and finds fight scenes (and I'm including battle scenes in this) tedious at best? When all I really care about is who wins and what kind of damage the participants suffer going forward.

I can personally vouch that treating them like sex scenes, only with fighting instead of loving, DOES NOT WORK.

You know what worked for me? Layering.

I write the bare bones of the fight scene to get it in the story, then I go back and add to it. The major battle scene in book 2 of Forgotten Empires, THE FIERY CROWN (cover reveal coming October 16 on Tor.com!), I revised and layered in more and more detail probably a dozen times. On each pass, I was able to take more time to add to the visceral experience of the battle, to slow things down. This really helped me get past the "Joe and Susan duke it out. Joe gets a gut wound. Susan wins." mentality.

Giving myself permission to revisit the scene multiple times and layer in information really made a difference for this Steam writer. I'm sure our Scream writers here at the SFF Seven will have more advice. I know I'll be reading.

Cats Dogs and Otherworldly Creatures: Pets In Space 4

Our topic this week is whatever is on our minds currently. Confining myself strictly to the author world, what’s on my mind are cats, dogs and otherworldly creatures, otherwise known as Pets In Space® 4! It’s my pending new release, on my birthday next week.

About four years ago, my author friend Pauline B. Jones and I started this fun project and invited some other science fiction romance authors to join in. We put together an annual collection of all new stories featuring action, adventure, romance and a pet of some sort involved in the story. Sort of like “Lassie in space”. (Not the racier kind of ‘pets’ you find in some steamy fiction!).

The idea was to find new readers for scifi romance and to support a worthy cause with a portion of the royalties. Now in our fourth year, we’ve hit the USA Today Best Seller list twice and been able to give our charity quite a nice chunk of donations, thanks to our wonderful readers.

Pets in Space® 4 Anthology Blurb:

For a limited time only! Pets in Space® 4 is proud to present 13 amazing, original new stories! Join the adventures as today’s leading Science Fiction Romance authors take you on a journey to another world. Pets in Space® proudly supports Hero-Dogs.org, a non-profit charity that provides service animals to veterans and first responders in need. Join New York Times, USA TODAY and Award-winning Bestselling authors S.E. Smith, Anna Hackett, Tiffany Roberts, Veronica Scott, Pauline Baird Jones, Laurie A. Green, Donna McDonald, Regine Abel, Alexis Glynn Latner, JC Hay, E.D. Walker, Kyndra Hatch, and Cassandra Chandler for another exciting Pets in Space® anthology. Get the stories before they are gone!

Proud supporters of Hero-Dogs.org, Pets in Space® authors have donated over $7,100 in the past three years to help place specially trained dogs with veterans and first responders. 10% of all pre-orders and the first month’s royalties of Pets in Space® 4 will again go to Hero-Dogs.org. Open your hearts and grab your limited release copy of Pets in Space® 4 today so together we can continue to assist this worthy charity!

I always set my Pets In Space® stories on an interstellar cruise liner and have had all kinds of pets from a cat to an eagle to an alien blend of a tribble and a red-tailed panda. This year my pet is an alien ‘dog’, named Charrli. Here’s a bit more about my full length novel in the anthology:

STAR CRUISE: IDOL’S CURSE (The Sectors SF Romance Series)

An unusual bequest….

Juli Shaeffer, the Nebula Zephyr’s cruise director, receives a mysterious bequest from the estate of a longtime passenger – a lump of rock taken from a reef on the planet Tahumaroa. Legend states anyone who steals from the ocean gods will be cursed. The passenger’s will requests the rock be returned to the beach so his heirs won’t be affected by the bad luck he believed he’d incurred. Juli doesn’t believe in superstitions and she agrees to carry out this small favor on the ship’s next stop at the planet in question.

Until the rock disappears from her office…

When the rock disappears and reappears in various locations around the ship, and seems connected to a steadily escalating series of mishaps, Juli turns to Third Officer Steve Aureli as the only one she feels she can trust. Along with Steve and his elderly Aunt Dian – a passenger aboard the Nebula Zephyr for this cruise - she investigates the strange series of malfunctions plaguing the interstellar luxury liner. Steve and Juli enlist his Aunt Dian’s dog, Charrli, a retired Sectors Z Corps canine, to help them track the missing rock as it moves about the ship.

Juli and Steve must find the rock, hang onto it and transport it to the planet’s surface, before the alien idol’s curse turns deadly. The attraction between the two of them grows as the threat to Juli becomes more and more focused. Can she carry out her task while he keeps her safe from the alien curse? Will the capricious alien idol bring them good fortune…or disaster?

An excerpt when Juli meets Charrli:

“We can give you a ride,” Steve offered. “The side of this road isn’t a good place for you to be stranded, especially with a storm coming.”

A gust of cold wind buffeted her to emphasize his remark and she shivered. What happened to the hot sun of just a few hours ago? Peering at his sporty groundcar, she hesitated. “I don’t want to be a bother or ruin your date.”

He laughed. “No bother and it’s not a date. Remember I told you my aunt Dian was going to be a passenger on the next leg of the cruise? I picked her up this afternoon and I also have the use of the captain’s personal shuttle, so I can take you all the way to the Zephyr with us. Plenty of room in this rented car of mine.”

“Say no more, I’ll be thrilled to accept your help then. Let me grab my purse.” Heart unaccountably lighter because he wasn’t on a date, Juli fished her possessions out of the car, and went to climb in the backseat of his racy red vehicle, as he held the door for her. Hope never dies, I guess. Oh, Juli, get over this mad crush. Angry at herself for her racing pulse and the effect this man invariably had on her, she stumbled and Steve steadied her with one big hand. Her body tingled a little at the physical contact.

“I’m Steve’s Aunt Dian,” said the lady in the front seat, swiveling to study Juli. She extended her gloved hand.

Juli tried not to stare. Dian was elderly but wearing full, expertly applied makeup and her syntho hair was coiffed into a confection of pink and blond a trideo star might admire, accented with a glittery star-shaped barrette. Her pink and cream woven suit was by a high end fashion designer, or else a very good knockoff and she presented an altogether glamorous and retro picture. This is practical, stoic Steve’s aunt?  Juli detected no family resemblance although of course that didn’t mean much. “I’m so happy to meet you and glad you’ll be sailing with us.”

Next instant, a barking ball of golden brown fur sailed over the seat, landing in Juli’s lap with a thud. With a startled scream she tried to fend off the pet, which fortunately seemed intent on getting into her purse, rather than actually attacking her personally.

“Charrli, don’t be rude,” said Dian, snapping her fingers in annoyance. “No one asked you to do a search and destroy mission on Juli’s belongings. Get back here where you belong.”

Hand on the controls, Steve studied Juli. “Do you have a snack in your purse?” he asked. “Charrli’s a real chow hound.”

“What an inelegant way to describe my champion purebred miniature Deskaza dog.” Despite her offended protest, his elderly relative didn’t sound too offended.

All Buy Links: https://www.petsinspaceantho.com/books/pets-in-space-4/

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07WCQF358/

Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07WCQF358/

Amazon CA: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B07WCQF358/

Amazon AU: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B07WCQF358/

Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/pets-in-space-4

Apple Books: https://books.apple.com/us/book/pets-in-space-4/id1476281234

Slipping Sideways into Death

Black bellied whistling ducks line the opposite shore of the pond behind the house. They're chatty birds who like to fuss and argue amongst themselves. They often lose track of the pair of alligators eyeing them from the deeper water. One of the ducks is supposed to always be on watch, but when hierarchy fights erupt, the look-out bird gets involved. Once in a great while, a gator gets duck for breakfast.

It's lightning fast and terrible to witness. Dreadful to hear. The caught bird is killed instantly, but there's a lot of snapping and crunching involved while the remainder of the flock screams.

On this side of the pond, the alligators take a different form. They wear white coats and read numbers from gleaming computer screens. Stage three this. Acute that. Denial feels like a flimsy shield, but who among us dares to point that out? So we keep busy on our side of the pond, where we watch the ducks and they watch us. We acknowledge that one of our party keeps drifting closer to death's pointy-toothed grin. But we keep busy. Maybe if we keep moving we can confuse the specter creeping up on us and death, when he comes calling, will miss his grab and leave empty-handed and resentful yet again.

Or maybe, this harvest season, he won't.

Juggling Cats and Chainsaws

Folks, it has been a TIME for me the past few months.  In good ways, with the Good Kind of Busy, but still: A TIME.  And a big part of that is the cat-and-chainsaw juggling that is finishing the draft of PEOPLE OF THE CITY, where I have several plot threads from four different series converging and paying off, and that has been a huge thing, let me tell you.

I'm honestly so glad I'm using Scrivener for this.

One of the things that I LOVE about Scrivener is how painless it is to move scenes around. When you're juggling a bunch of converging plot lines it can be VERY helpful to try different orders of scenes for maximum impact.  Like, you plot it out in outline, figuring out all the What that needs to happen.  But then once it's written, and you've got a sense of the scenes, how they each rise and fall, the lengths of each one, the rhythm of the chapters, it's fun to play with how that works.  Do you group three disaster scenes together, so things fall-fall-fall in each bit through the chapter?  Or push the disaster of one plot line to the next chapter while bringing in the hope from another: fall-rise-fall. Which one is the best end-of-chapter kick?

Plus I can see the word count of each scene, each chapter, and get a sense of how shuffling the scenes around affects the pacing, keywords to show me which characters and threads I'm moving, how each plot thread is moving forward.

I can't imagine writing a novel like the one PEOPLE OF THE CITY is shaping into without these tools.  SO VERY HAPPY.

In other news: SHIELD OF THE PEOPLE comes out this month.  AND I'll be at New York Comic Con this weekend and World Fantasy Con next month.  So things are not slowing down.  Say hello if you can.  Wish me luck.

The ONLY way to succeed at writering

I removed myself from a ton of Facebook groups recently. No, you didn’t read that wrong. (If you are one of those group’s owners and noticed, thank you and please know it’s me, not you. You’re doing everything right.) As far as I can tell, such self-imposed isolation from all industry kerfluffle is tantamount to career suicide, because all of those groups contain the Ultimate, Immutable, and Only Keys to Success in Writering.

(Writering is totally a verb, and it’s not the same thing as writing. Hang with me here.)

The industry is shouting at us that if we want to succeed at writering, we need to follow this model, promo at this interval, place ads at this place, hire these professionals to package our book, and network at these-and-only-these conventions and shindigs. There can be only one (way)! So does leaving those groups mean I 

• don’t want to work hard? (nah)
• think maybe my books aren’t good? (probably I don’t do this, at least not every day)
• have some other, magical, better method of reaching $100k in 13Days? (God no)

In truth, it means only one thing: there is more than one way to succeed as a writer. In fact, there are infinite ways, for infinite individuals. So when somebody says that you have to write 1,000 words a day or wrangle 1,500 pre-orders or nudge 200 people into posting reviews or any other numbers, you have my permission, as a writer-er, to give them the middle finger.

Writerize (aw hell, make up all the words) the way it works FOR YOU. Don’t chase somebody else’s method, especially if you aren’t hitting it and as a result you’re feeling like a failure. Stop. It. 

The wisest person I know asked me earlier today to focus on two questions and keep asking them until I can answer myself:

1. What if success is simply answering the question “Are you enjoying your craft” in the affirmative?
2. What is the minimum that would make your fear-self able to release the fear and live in the joy?

See, I don’t think Facebook groups or self-help books or marketing videos are going to help me answer these questions. Your mileage may vary.

Penning Promos: Making It Easy for Fans to Retweet & Share

On my mind this week is Penning Promos: Making It Easy for Fans to Retweet & Share. As we march into the autumn release season, social media promotions for new and backlist books are on the rise. We're shaking off the summer sales slump and embracing the cooler curl-up-by-the-fire weather to catch the attention of readers (yes, yes, I know it's still Hellmouth hot outside in most places, but it is October). We all want to support the authors we love, and frankly, authors love the support.

As authors, what can we do to encourage sharing? Post promotions (not ads) that pique interest but don't fully satisfy it.

5 Tips for Sharable Promotions

1. Keep the Promo Short
This is where you use your 1 sentence hook + 2 hashtags + 1 universal link to buy + graphic/image.

Thank you! 😍😍(There is a third and final book in the series, too, but it’s only in ebook.) https://t.co/EBTHr3LHWv

— Vivien Jackson (@Vivien_Jackson) September 13, 2019

See how Vivien was able to retweet with comment and still have BN's original tweet look great? See how BN's original tweet told us very succicently about the book? Yesssss.  That's our goal.

2. Use Hashtags Judiciously 
Limit your Hashtags to 3. One of those should always be your genre. Remember, hashtags are a way of including your post in targeted search results. Too obscure a hashtag and no one is going to be searching on that term. Too broad a hashtag and you're lost in the deluge.

The #BookQW word is MISTAKE. Here's a snippet from HAUNTING MISS FENWICK, #99Cent pre-order if you love to #ReadaRegency! https://t.co/NTY3iIAXuP pic.twitter.com/tut4vFsA4F

— Alina K. Field (@AlinaKField) September 25, 2019

3. Include a Graphic Sized for the Platform
We all know desktops,  tablets, and phones render images differently. The same goes for social media platforms. Using the right-sized image is how you prevent your fabulous book cover being cropped to a blurry boob-shot in someone's feed.
➡  Not sure what sizes to use? Try this 2019 social Media Image Cheat Sheet from MainStreetHost Marketing Agency.
➡ Looking for free image creation sites? Try Canva or Book Brush

4. Leverage Image Real Estate
Book cover + short quote + eye-catching background.  Don't overcrowd the graphic. Less is definitely more. It's a companion to your text promo. See how the image enhances the post?

#Interview + #Excerpt: @jeffekennedy – author of THE ORCHID THRONE – on dreams, dresses, and drafting https://t.co/BbBUwJBs75 pic.twitter.com/3jaDvuBd9K

— 🌟 Dani 🌟 (@dani_reviews) September 26, 2019

5. Be Mindful of Platform Cropping Text and Image
Sure you can write a tome on Facebook (63k characters), but more than three lines of text and the dreaded "See More" pops up. Guess what? Most people don't click that. Plus, if fans share it with a comment (like "zomg, so awesome, buy it now!"), your original text gets shrunk and shortened (depending on platform).

What's the "right" length? Here are three sites with recommendations. YMMV.
➡ The Social Report,   Hootsuite,  Influencer Marketing Hub

In summary, do yourself and your fans a favor, make easy to share social media promotions with properly sized graphics. Hook + hashtag + buy link + image.

Accuracy in Fiction - Where to Draw the Line

One of the most fun things about having a book release these days is the #bookstagram world. So many book lovers make gorgeous collages with my book cover - like this one from Reading Between the Wines Book Club - and then tag me on Instagram. With THE ORCHID THRONE, I'm getting all kinds of beautiful orchids and it rocks so hard!

The hubs and I have been watching Reign on Netflix - from the beginning as we'd never seen it - and we're a few episodes into Season One. I realize I'm late to the game on this, as the show ran from 2013 to 2017. But I've seen so many people - like my editor Jennie Conway at St Martins - who just LOVE this show, that I wanted to check it out. 

And I get the appeal. 

This is the story of Mary, Queen of Scots, starting with her arrival as a fifteen year old to the French Court, where she's to marry Prince Francis. The history is familiar to most of us, kind of like watching an extended show about the Titanic - we know where this is going. And, of course, they take liberties with the narrative. Mary has her four ladies-in-waiting, making for a group of lovely, randy, and ambitious young women in the French Court. But where in history the four young women were all also named "Mary," modern viewers are spared the headache and they all have different names. They all have various love affairs, too, including with the French King Henry. 

It's basically a soap opera, a teen love and angst fest only historical. Which means gorgeous clothes! And swords! And cool political machinations. (I love Queen Catherine of Medici.)

There are also a LOT of historical inaccuracies, as one must expect. Characters have been created out of whole cloth. (Amusingly enough, some commenters list them as "goofs," and I want to ask them if they know that the show is fiction.) For the most part, I'm fine with the fictionalizing.

The ones that get under my particular skin are the ways Mary's ladies in waiting are snarky to her. The dynamic is solidly high school and the hubs and I are forever pausing and saying "No way she'd say that to her queen." But it lends to the dynamic and the drama, which makes it fun to watch.

The thing is, in telling historical and historical-feeling fantasy, we have to make choices. We want to create an accurate-feeling world, but also be true to the demands of Story. In my Twelve Kingdoms and Uncharted Realms books, I deliberately blur the lines with my High Queen Ursula. With her sisters, then her lover, and then a few friends, she begins to unbend. But she's always and ultimately High Queen - and that affects everything in her life.  

In THE ORCHID THRONE, I went to great effort to separate Queen Euthalia from even her closest ladies. That's part of who she is. She's been raised to be a queen and that weight of responsibility - and the formality her position brings - never leaves her. Though part of her character arc is peeling away her mask and exposing the vulnerable person beneath. 

In writing about the lives of rulers - whether created characters or fictionalizing historical ones - we want to create credible pressures, while still satisfying that story itch. Grace Draven and I were chatting about this and she mentioned something interesting. She said, "I did have some readers who thought Ildiko was being unnecessarily cruel to Brishen [in EIDOLON] by suggesting he put her aside in favor of a Kai consort. I was like 'Folks, that's how this kind of thing works. Look into history. It happened. Harold and Edith Swan Neck are a great example of a monarch having to set aside a beloved consort in favor of a political marriage to save a kingdom.'" 

I encountered this, too, with THE MARK OF THE TALA, where some readers felt my heroine Andi was forced into having sex with her new husband, where I felt she made the choice consciously. Yes, she wed her enemy, but she did it with the full intention of being his wife, because that was part of her responsibility as a princess and then a queen. (Besides, she was totally into him ;-) ) 

In the end, I think we all make choices to balance story drama with enough real-life truth to make the characters feel true. 

Who Can Know - Representation in Fiction

In acting school many eons ago, an instructor asked the class whether we thought actors had to be Russian in order to play Chekov. We scoffed en masse and said no! Or course not. We'd studied history and first person accounts of the end days of Tsarist Russia. With a little imagination, we could grasp the sensibilities of the time and place. No problem.

We were naïve.

We had our noses rubbed in our naiveté when a group from one of the big national theaters in Russia came to Seattle on tour. They did a show (in English) we'd all done several times ourselves. So we recognized the scenes, the situations, and the text. Yet, these people who'd lived in Russia all their lives and who'd absorbed the history of their nation and their people as lived experience, brought a deep well of nuance and resonating emotion to the play we'd never achieved as Americans and Canadians trying to reach for every sliver of meaning underlying Chekov's script. Granted. These people were professionals who had hundreds, if not thousands of shows under their belts. We were students. We were still humbled by our presumption that it'd be easy for us to get at all the richness of a script written about a culture and experience not our own.

Representation in fiction is, to me, entirely the same. No author can assume they can either know or imagine someone else's experience. The only thing any of us has to build from is what we know. Most of us have experienced alienation and deliberate attempts to cut us. Junior high, anyone? We can extrapolate from that and create characters who can speak that experience. But in no way can I conflate angsty preteen loneliness into any of the horror of having been a slave in the American South. Or a mother of color in the modern US having to bury a child who'd been shot by police. Or a mother separated from her child at a border. If I tried, I'd be that naïve college kid again, believing that another human being's deep pain was somehow fathomable.

Pretty damned arrogant.

As it is, I write from an extremely privileged position. Writing science fiction, I get to pretend that all cultures, all colors, all genders, no genders, nonbinary, and all orientations just are. I get to pretend that no one polices anyone else's existence other than being at war over resources/territory. There are still cultural clashes, yes. In fact that's part of the theme of Enemy Games. Jayleia comes from one culture and species base. Damen comes from entirely another. His species didn't evolve from apes. They evolved from a feline-like species. Their culture is based on that fact. He's openly bisexual, but no one bothers him or ostracizes him for it. The story touches more on the cultural differences between Jay and him and the main theme of learning to define family as something other than bloodlines.

In Enemy Storm, the heroine is deaf. It does play into the story and there are instances of prejudice and deliberate attempts to alienate her because of it. It's not the point of the story so I don't hit it hard (because not my wheelhouse), but it does show up. Not because I feel like I have anything unique or helpful to say about it, but because of who my characters are. That's where I think maybe one key lies - who are these people? What do they want? What do they need in the course of the story to step into becoming better versions of themselves? Edie has prejudices of her own to work through, so it was useful for her to face someone else's about her if she was going to decide she didn't want to be someone who judged other people based on nothing but where they had come from.

Will I make mistakes? Likely. I hope not, naturally. I do the best I can, and I check in with the communities I represent just to make sure I'm not being a dick. But what I Do Not Want is to pretend the future is all one color. All one orientation. Or culture. Or belief system. If the Chronicles of the Empire as a whole has an over arching theme, it is that diversity is strength and beauty. So I'll keep writing people and writing them as self-actualized beings as much as possible. Even when they aren't, strictly speaking, *people*. And I'll keep writing multiple skin colors, races, specific adaptations, sexual orientations, and identities.