Two Books that Freaked Me the F*ck Out

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is, appropriately enough, our favorite horror or scary book.

Now, I don't really a lot of horror or scary books, because I am a fragile flower. I've never really gotten the point of reading something to be frightened or horrified. So, when I thought about what my favorite books in this genre would be, I could think of exactly two. 

But it's cool because they're by friends - which is the only reason I read them.

I really loved them, too, even though they freaked me the fuck out. 

A HUMAN STAIN, by Kelly Robson - who most usually writes SFF, is a wonderful story that starts with low-level dread that gradually builds to a truly freakifying conclusion. Read it if you love gothic slow-burns. Avoid if you have a tooth phobia. You can read it in BEST HORROR OF THE YEAR, Volume 10, which I'm sure is fabulous, since Ellen Datlow edited it. I, of course, *won't* be reading that!

Megan Hart started out writing erotic and nuanced romance, but has moved into more horror lately. LITTLE SECRETS is a haunted house story that also plays on the insecurities of pregnancy and the strain that - and moving into a freaky house! - puts on a marriage. Read it for the subtle build of terror and rich story. And don't worry - the cat's okay. 

A Very Different Ghost Story for Halloween!

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Happy Halloween in just a few days! Next week we’re going to talk about favorite spooky or scary books written by others but I thought it’d be fun to lead into the week talking about a very unusual, award winning ghost story I wrote a few years ago.

(I’m ignoring our actual topic of this week, which is Point of View because I’ve written about it here before on SFF7, I’m not a fan of anything written in first person, Halloween is coming and there – I’m done with the subject.)

Ghost of the Nile is one of my “Gods of Egypt” paranormal series set in ancient Egypt. For quite a while I’d been fascinated with the idea of writing a story set on an estate in the 1550 BCE era. One of the interesting things about Egypt was that for literally hundreds of years the climate and the daily life stayed pretty much the same. Pharaohs came and went but the more ordinary folk had quite an unchanging routine, linked to the Nile’s floods. I felt my ghostly hero could return from the Afterlife and fit right into his old home, although as a guest, not a resident. I thought the challenges for him could be intriguing.

The Egyptians of 3000 years ago believed that unless you were buried in the soil of Egypt and had all the proper rituals recited for you, as well as your name preserved, you couldn’t enter the Afterlife. So my hero Periseneb, who was murdered and didn’t receive the rites at the time of his death, has been condemned to roam the fringes of the Afterlife and wage endless battles against demons and giant snakes.

I’m always fascinated with the goddess Ma’at, who represented truth, balance, justice…and who happened to be the goddess of second chances. I’m a Libra myself – scales, balance…. She was one of the Judges who weighed the heart of a dead person, to see if they deserved the Afterlife. So I decided she’d need a champion to accomplish some task in Egypt, and selects Periseneb, who she believes deserves a second chance at entry to paradise. A favorite old movie of mine is the 1963 version of “Jason and the Argonauts”. I love how the goddess Hera tells Jason she’ll help him three times along the way. I decided Ma’at would help Periseneb, and you’ll see in the book how he has to call for her assistance.

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The next intriguing concept this novel allowed me to play with was the ancient Egyptian idea of the terrifying nature of ghosts, or akhs. They believed that a person's soul was split into various parts, anywhere from three to five. Each part of the soul had different powers and concerns. For my novel I simplified the situation and concentrated on the 'intellect as a living entity' portion of the soul and selected those aspects which worked for the story.

According to Wikipedia, the akh  “could do either harm or good to persons still living, depending on the circumstances, causing e.g., nightmares, feelings of guilt, sickness, etc. It could be invoked by prayers or written letters left in the tomb's offering chapel also in order to help living family members, e.g., by intervening in disputes, by making an appeal to other dead persons or deities with any authority to influence things on earth for the better, but also to inflict punishments.”

The hero of my book, Periseneb, is uncomfortable with being an akh returned to Egypt, and worries a lot about inadvertently loosing the evil powers he now possesses on the innocents around him.

And last but not least, there’s the terrifying goddess or demon Ammit the Destroyer, who was part lion, part hippo and part crocodile, and known as Devourer of the Dead. I’ve wanted to find a way to incorporate her into a novel in a meaningful way because she’s so intriguing.

The story:

Betrayed, murdered, and buried without proper ceremony, Egyptian warrior Periseneb is doomed to roam the gray deserts of the dead as a ghost for all eternity.

But then the goddess of truth offers him a bargain: return to the world of the living as her champion for 30 days. If he completes his mission, he’ll be guaranteed entry into Paradise. Periseneb agrees to the bargain but, when he returns to the living world, two hundred years have passed and nothing is quite as he expected.

Neithamun is a woman fighting to hang onto her family’s estate against an unscrupulous nobleman who desires the land as well as the lady. All seems lost until a mysterious yet appealing ex-soldier, Periseneb, appears out of nowhere to help her fight off the noble’s repeated attacks.

Meanwhile, Periseneb’s thirty days are rushing by, and he’s powerless against the growing attraction between himself and Neithamun. But their love can never be. For his Fate is to return to the Afterlife, and Death cannot wed with Life…

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POV Invitation

The beasts have breached the sanctity of the bed! It's adorable, but it's also slightly short on sleep. Still. They have a hard time working out that bed means sleep. This picture to the contrary notwithstanding. They seem to only want to sleep in the bed when the humans aren't in it. If the humans are in the bed, then it's a playground. Oh. And the elder girls are horrified by this development.

All righty. Why were we here? Oh yes! POV. You've had definitions. You've seen arguments regarding which POV goes with which genre. Some of us have expressed our preferences regarding which POVs we prefer either to read or to write.

Here's my slightly out on the fringe rant about Point of View.

It's an invitation. Point of view is my engraved invitation to you to enter into an emotional journey. How I word that invitation dictates how you'll experience the emotional arc of the story and the characters. First person asks you to step into the roll of main character. Third person puts you at a slight remove from that, but it allows you to slip on the masks of multiple characters rather than just the protagonist's. It's my job to decide how deeply I want to immerse you into the feelz of a book. If I'm writing Women's Fiction, deep emotion is the expectation and first person is going to make it easy for me to pull you in. Not to say that Women's Fiction can't be third person. It  can and often is. It's just that deep POV in third person is harder work.

Summary on that: POV is a tool that dictates how readers will experience emotion in a story. Know your story, your genre expectations, the limits of your toolset and then go forth and break all the damn rules about POV and story just to see if you can make it work.

Why do I say that? I have distinct opinions about what POVs I prefer. Distinct. Opinions. And every single time I voice them, someone comes along and writes a POV I profess to hate. They do it so skillfully that I end up loving it. So maybe I am finally learning to say, 'hey, with enough vision, skill and drive, you can make anything work.'

Another note on POV - I draft in first person and then (if the story calls for it) rewrite to third person. It's a tip an editor gave me back at the dawn of time. It was one of those things I shrugged figured I'd try once and discard, but it stuck. It forces me to really immerse into a character and connect with what's going on in a story. Does it make rewrites a pain in the kazoo? Absolutely. And yet if I try to skip it and write straight to third person, my beta readers throw things at me because half of the emotion is missing. So there you are. I write weird, I guess.

I'm sorry I don't have great golden wisdom to impart about point of view and how to pick which one is best. Emotion governs the decision for me - not mine. The reader's. Once I know what and how much I want readers to feel, I can make a POV choice. And like Jeffe said. No one wants to notice POV. They just want that invitation slipped into their hands so they can edge into the story and lose themselves  in it.

In keeping with the incredible shit storm that has been today, I'll tell you that I wrote this post yesterday and scheduled it for super early this morning. No problems right? Imagine my surprise when I check in on the blog tonight and my post is nowhere. Uhm. Blogger? Oh look. My SFF Seven THEMED post went live on some other random blog site. Nice. I'm comfortable certain those people think I am out of my damned mind. They may well be right. 

Point of View and Trust

Point-of-View is one of those funny things writers get very worked up about.  And I’ve noticed, reading through some older books I have, making concrete POV choices is a relatively recent development.  I mean, yes, certainly, the distinction between first-person and third-person (and the rare second-person) was always clear.  But third-person was often more of a muddled third-person-omniscient instead of the discrete multi-person third-person-limited, where individual scenes have a clear POV character.  Even the idea of a “POV Violation” as a writing mistake seems to be a relatively new thing.

Because, let me tell you, a lot of classics are just loaded with POV Violations.

However, the standard today, when writing third-person multiple-POV is for clear, discrete definition of whose head your in for any given scene or chapter. George R. R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice books do this explicitly, telling you who the POV character is instead of a chapter title.  I hear a lot of “rules” of how to do a POV character, who can be one in your book and when you can let them be one.  I’m of the opinion that who can be one and when is whoever you need it to be for the scene, whenever you need that scene to be.   Frankly, one of my favorite bits in The Holver Alley Crew is when Mila steals the dress from the rich woman, because it's from the woman's POV.  She's just a one-off character, that scene alone, and some people will tell you it's against the "rules", but I say BAH.

My big thing with POV is trust.  Unless the Unreliable Narrator is a technique you’re utilizing, then you have to present your POV character in an honest way.  You have to have trust in that character and their engagement in the plot.

Now, that doesn’t mean the POV is limited to the “good guys”.  I love my antagonist POVs, as long as they are antagonists that I can trust are being honest with how they engage in the plot.  If I have a character who is against the hero privately, but acts as his friend, and I don’t want the reader to know that… then that character can’t be a POV character.  But if I want that betrayal clear, then that’s exactly who I want as POV.

This was especially hard for me in A Murder of Mages, which is probably my most constrained work, POV-wise, in that I only have Satrine and Minox as POV characters.   This is because, at its core, it’s a murder mystery, and if you go into the head of murderer, then the mystery is given up.  By limiting the POV to my two Inspectors, then the reader has the same set of data that they do.
In The Way of the Shield, it’s more complicated than that, but similar rules of not using a character for POV apply.  There are people whose motivation and trustworthiness I want the reader to keep in question, even in a subconscious way.  Ideally, when their truths come to light, it will hit the reader like a hammer, because they might not have even suspected it.  That's where a lot of the fun is.

Right now, I'm working on The Fenmere Job, and I've imposed one rule regarding POV on myself for it, because I think it's the best choice for the story.  But I might decide over the course of things to break that.  If that's what's best.   We'll see. 

The perils of point of view

When I was chiefly a reader and not interested in selling my scribbles, I’d buy a book because it looked fun or was recommended to me, and other than broad categories like romance or fantasy or whatever a book store considered “general fiction,” I didn’t pay attention to its market. I also didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to whether a book was written in first-person, second-person, or third-person point of view. (Aside: If you have no idea what I’m talking about when I reference “point of view” in terms of writing craft, Jeffe Kennedy did a fab run-down earlier this week.) Now that I am trying to sell my stories to other folks, I pay a lot more attention to point of view, and I’ve discovered a few patterns. Here are some quick answers to "which point of view do I use for my story?" quandaries.

Lots of characters with thoughts? You want to use third person.

In books where readers get the interior thoughts of more than two characters, writers tend to use the third-person point of view. Think of, for instance George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series: so, so many characters, and a large number of them are point-of-view characters (i.e., we experience the story through their “eyes” and thoughts). If that epic were in first person, I would be perpetually confused.

Note that I’m careful here to recommend third-person specifically for stories that feature the interior thoughts of more than two characters. I did not say fantasy as a whole. Some fantasy writers manage to tell stories using first-person and make it not at all confusing. However, the successful fantasies that do this typically focus narrowly on one character, sometimes two. Amanda Bouchet’s recent Kingmaker series, for instance, is written in first person, but since we are only given and are only interested in the main character Cat’s point of view, the first-person POV works well.

Main character in the young-adult(ish) range? First person.

YA novels, regardless of their genre, tend to be written in first person. If you read a few, you can see why this POV choice aids the purpose of a YA book. Because a good YA book is about one character’s attempt to grapple with relevance in a world that keeps telling them “you don’t matter yet,” the narrative must of course be all in that character’s head. It must of course be suffused with all the agony and frustration and hope and striving that is typical of not-quite-adult-ness. First-person point of view allows angst-wallowing in a way that no other POV choice can.

Hint: the POV recommendation is applicable to character age and also reader age. If your target audience --  your market – is young adult, first-person POV is a good choice.

Similarly, if your characters are recent teens and now just barely adults – a niche that was until recently called “new adult” – I’d stick with first-person POV. First-person books featuring 22-year-olds in their first post-college job yet still making iffy decisions tend to sell a lot better than third-person omniscient books covering similar topics. Somehow, if the character does a boneheaded thing blithely , optimistically, and with no thought of possible consequences, it feels like a grand adventure rather than a poor life choice. Plus, if such an episode were written in third person, there’s always a danger it might sound judgy.

Are sensory details super important to the story? First person.

I’m going to disagree with my awesome co-SFFSevener, K.A. Krantz, and say that if you’re writing erotica or erotic romance, first-person POV is the way to go. Most erotic stories are written in the first person, so it’s a reader expectation. Also, in erotica, if you’re doing it right, the sensory details are front and center. In a story that is about the character completing his or her arc by having sexual adventures, nothing matters more than how that character feels. I mean both internal thought feeling and also satin-sheets, chocolate-sauce, feather-tipped leather feeling. Do I need to go on?

Often paranormal and urban fantasy stories are written in first person, and again, I think that sensory (or in this case, extrasensory) details are central to those sorts of stories.

Trying to sound literary or experimenting with an unreliable narrator? Either first or second might be fun.

Most of the time, second-person POV is only useful for experimental literary fiction or choose-your-own-adventure stories. Note that the latter are not exclusively for kids. A site called Silkwords used to publish choose-your-own-adventure erotica and erotic romance stories, and they were definitely not for kids.

Do I have to pick just one?

Er… technically no? One of my favorite young adult books, The Farm by Emily McKay, uses first person for the main character and her sister and third person for Carter, whose loyalty and good intentions we are supposed to doubt at the beginning. Although using both point-of-view choices works brilliantly for this story, I’m not sure it’s a good idea for a writer with less experience and storytelling command to try. So, although no, technically you don’t have to pick just one POV, please do realize that picking two complicates your work. A lot.

What about you, Viv?

Oh right. My opinion. Seriously, this is necessary? The truth is, I’m an easy read and have favorites using all kinds of narrative choices. However, though I won’t throw a book against a wall just because it’s, say, in first-person present, most of my DNFs (books I did not finish reading) tend to be told in first-person from the point of view of a character I can’t root for. Sometimes that character is too whiny, too certain he’s funny when he’s not really, too oblivious, or too self-absorbed. Sometimes I just can’t bear to be in the head of that person for 300 pages.

Bottom line, though, think about this before you start writing, make a deliberate choice taking all market and reader and genre expectation variables into consideration, and then tell me your story. If you tell it well enough, I won’t even stop to worry about your POV choice.

1st, 2nd, 3rd POV: Which Is Preferred By Me

When reading, which Point of View do I prefer? It depends on what I'm reading. Jeffe defines POV in her Sunday post, so I won't repeat it.

95% of novels I prefer told from a 3rd person deep POV because I like character-driven stories. 3rd omniscient steps up for epic adventures, but too often I feel that deliberate wall between me and the narrator. Choose Your Own Adventure novels totally need to be written in 2nd. I haven't tried RPG Lit yet, but I suspect those also lend themselves to 2nd.

1st Person--if done well--can be delightful, particularly in horror and thrillers, but it takes me longer to sink into the story. The two genres I can't--just can't--abide in 1st are Romance and Erotica. Makes me feel like I'm reading a phone sex script or having a TMI conversation with a creepy couple. That's not to knock the authors who write Romance & Erotica in 1st; there are a lot of readers who like R&E in 1st. I'm just not one of them.

If you're writing in 1st, I penned a cautionary post a few years ago about When the Kaiyaiing Beast Takes Over Your Writing.

Now, if you thought I was going to chat about multiple POVs (multiple characters) telling the story, well, I've got a post for that too: So Close To Perfection...If I Was A Hydra.  TL;DR:  I will wall bang a book at page 2 if there's head-hopping (changing which character is telling what part of the story without clear transition such as a scene or chapter break).

perspective...perspective....

Jeffe has made my life easier If you look at yesterday's post you will see all the definitions you could possibly need for first, second and third person. That's important because (I'm supposed to discuss which perspective I like best.

the answer is simple too: It depends on the piece I'm writing.  I'll go 50/50 split on first and third person for short stories. MOSTLY I prefer third person for novels. Here's why: Short stories need to be intimate and they need to get there fast. I feel, rightly or wrongly, that first person is a great way to pull a reader into a story and keep them there. I think of it as a sort of literary shorthand. When you're reading a first person  account there's a sort of forced intimacy.  It doesn't work for all stories, but it works for a lot of them.

For novels I always feel it's more fun if the readers learn at the same speed as the characters. Sometimes that's a challenge. In my novel DEEPER I decided for the first time to go First Person on a novel length work. It was my shortest novel ever at that time, at 85,000 words and change. It was also an incredible challenge because I had to make the character learn everything organically. There were no assumptions made. He didn't learn anything offscreen as it were. he learned it in front of the reader's eyes and I had to do it without cheating, which meant that if something happened when the main character wasn't there, he learned it from someone else. he learned it second hand. That can put a big dent on proper suspense, frankly.

One one occasion, the novel SMILE NO MORE, I did three separate parts of each chapter. first were the scenes from Cecil Phelp's perspective. Cecil was a sixteen year old boy who ran away from home, joined the circus, learned a few life lessons and then was murdered. Second was the perspective of Rufo the Clown, who was actually Cecil Phelp's stage name before he crawled back from Hell and went out on a quest for revenge  and to find his family members. Then, finally, the rest of each chapter was third person, limited omniscience (meaning one lead perspective at a time, but still told in third person). The reason for that was simple: I needed to garner sympathy for the devil as it were. Rufo the Clown is both the hero and villain of the piece, depending on perspective. From his point of view, he is/was perfectly reasonable in committing the absolute atrocities he commits. From the perspective of, oh, basically anyone who is sane, he is a monster.

I must have done something right because several reviewers made comments about how much they liked Rufo and Cecil both, right up until the times when Rufo got a little, well, psychotically violent. After that, they felt bad and even a little dirty for still liking the character. That was the main idea.

Like every part of the rules of grammar, perspective is a tool. It should be used as needed to get the point across, just as brushes and paints, quills and inks should be used to make a picture. Words are merely another medium for driving the point home.

That's my two cents on the subject.

Keep smiling,

Jim

What's Your Favorite - First, Second, or Third Person?

Minerva Spencer's kitchen in Taos - isn't it gorgeous? I'm up here visiting for the weekend and she wants me to tell you it's normally much tidier than this but we've been having an eating, drinking, talking writer's bacchanalia. 

Our topic this week at the SFF Seven, to continue the contentious cycle of last week's one vs. two spaces throw-down, is: First Person POV vs. Third – or Second – Which Do You Like to Read?

I've blogged about this topic a fair amount and discussed it on my podcast. And I've been asked there to explain the difference between 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person, so I think I'll kick this topic off in part by defining some terms.

POV = Point of View

Point of view, commonly referred to as POV (Pee-Oh-Vee), is how the story is told, from what perspective. You can think of it like a camera recording the scene - it can be close up on faces or panning over the landscape. We refer to close up as "deep POV" and the most distant focus as omniscient, where the story is told by someone who knows everything that's happening and that everyone is thinking. Who is telling the story gives you the POV.

One way to look at the type of POV is like you may have learned in grammar or if you learned a foreign language. You learn to conjugate verbs according to 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person, singular and plural. For example:

	Singular	Plural
1st	I am	We are
2nd	You are	You are
3rd	He/She* is	They are

*"They" is also appropriate for a gender-neutral 3rd person singular, though the verb conjugates as the plural.

Most writing is going to have instances of both singular and plural POVs, but whether the author chooses 1st, 2nd or 3rd person to tell the story - or a combination of those - affects a great deal about it.

First Person

First person POV, the "I" perspective has the camera very close, essentially inside the character's head, viewing the world through their eyes, knowing only what that person knows. It's the deepest POV.

Example: I was at the store the other day and saw the strangest thing.

Second Person

Second person POV is kind of funky but also hip, especially in more literary efforts. It speaks to "you," drawing into into the story as the character and telling you how you're behaving and feeling. This is also a deep POV, though I find it also has a distancing quality, like a game or a dream. It's almost always done in present tense (that I've seen). 

Example: You're at the store and you see the strangest thing.

Third Person

Third person is the most traditional storytelling style. It can range from deep - though never quite as deep as first person - to omniscient. This is telling a story that happens to someone else. 

Example: She went to the store last week and saw the strangest thing. 

With all that established, what do I prefer, as a reader? I actually don't really care what POV a story is written in. I read for character and story and don't pay much attention to POV. That said, I don't love second person and it often reads as pretentious to me. And it's a flag that the story is meant to be more literary and I rarely enjoy something deliberately designed to feel erudite. Just me.