L. Jagi Lamplighter's Blog, page 58

Caption This!

Juss's pick for this week's Caption This! Best caption wins, posted tomorrow.

Wright’s Writing Corner: Angst, Huh, What Is It Good For?

When one hears people denigrating Twilight and other books meant for teenage girls, one often hears the complaint that such books are angst-ridden. This is often said as if being angst-ridden is a fault in and of itself.

 

Adam and Eve, the original angsty love story

 

When I hear this, it reminds me of my theory that Twilight’s main vice is that it has spread beyond its intended readership. (Mind you, I haven’t read Twilight myself. I don’t like vampires for personal reasons. I am judging from the reactions of those who like it and of those who do not.)

 

Because when it comes to teenage girls:

Angst is not a bug, folks, it’s a feature!

 

Angst, heartbreak, is what we girls daydream about, especially back when we were tweens. When I was 12, I would lay in bed at night thinking of sadder and sadder romantic situations. I loved doing this. (Many of the tragic scenarios involved Captain Kirk or Spock or maybe Prince Caspian suffering a deadly wound or disease or some other heartbreakingly sad situation.) Eventually, I got so good at imagining heartbreaking scenarios I could make myself cry.

 

Why? Why would a girl want to make herself cry? Well, why would a young man want to undergo the grueling discomfort of an adventure? Dare violence, endure explosions?

 

 

For a hero to be great, he has to face a fearsome beast and overcome it. The same thing is true for love. For love to conquer all. It has to overcome the pain within, the darkness and the sorrows in our heart.

Adventure would be dull if the hero just walked up and killed the dragon. Without challenge, there is no story. Romances, too, are dull if there are no huge obstacles to overcome. How can the hero prove his worth, if he does not stay the course despite the terrible odds? The more obstacles overcome by the lovers, the more real their love seems.

 

The emotion which obstacles to love produces in the feminine heart is: angst.

This is what I think most readers are missing when they mock stories meant for teenage girls. The very thing they criticize it for having is the thing that makes it valuable to the young girl. So often, I hear the complain that a story is angst-ridden, as if that alone was evidence of its poor quality. Even many adult women tend to forget they once felt that way—the ones who no longer read tearjerkers.

 

It is not the fact that there is angst, but that it is often not done well, that leads people to denigrate it. Angst in romances is a lot like violence in action stories. A good action story has a brave hero, a great plot…and lots of violence and explosions. A cheep action story tries to replace the hero and plot with more blood and more explosions. Angst works the same way.

 

A really good heartbreaking, angsty story has problems that are outside of the main character’s control and these problems threaten to keep her from a happiness that she cannot live without. The main character expresses her pain and sorrow as she faces these terrible situations. Bad angsty stories just consist of stupid misunderstandings—things that are in the main character’s control but which she does not avoid.

 

Watching characters whine over problems they could avoid tends to annoy people. A good deal of angst’s bad reputation comes from this.

If no one wanted angst in stories, how could have an entire industry—soap operas—existed for well over half a century now running on nothing but angst-laden tales?

 

I mentioned that angst was the emotion in a young girl’s heart when she feels the pain of star-crossed love. It is also the emotion of facing problems that are outside of one’s control. This is a big issue for many teenage girls, to whom it sometimes seems as if everything significant is outside their control.

 

I am reminded of a conversation I had with friends about the movie Suckerpunch. In this movie, a girl in an insane asylum imagines she is an inmate in a brothel, where she dances and imagines she’s off fighting baddies. (If you haven’t seen it, yes, it’s that weird…and more.) 

 

My friend said he could not understand why someone in a bad place would imagine they were in a worse place. But, he noted that some of his female friends, especially those who had suffered some kind of abuse, really emphasized with this and thought it made sense.

 

I tried to explain to him why one does this: imagines one is in a worse place when things were bad. I could not quite do it, but it is something like this:

 

There is somewhere in the back of the feminine psyche—way, way, way back—an unspoken assumption that sorrow can only get so bad. The thought is that if you can just pile on enough heartbreak, you will, some day, hit the breaking point—where either the universe itself shatters and rights everything that is wrong or, like an elf, you die of a broken heart.

 

That idea—that elf maids are hard to kill physically but more vulnerable to perishing from heartbreak—is one that goes very well with angst. Because the idea that no matter how sad you are, you are going to get over it eventually cuts against the premise that love is all and the only thing worth living for.

 

One cannot help being curious, then as to where this breaking point is? How much sorrow can I suffer before I cannot go on? How much can Juliet endure before she gives up? How much can Prince Charming overcome?

 

The greater the amount of heartbreak overcome, the greater the victory of love.

 

Because if love is worth having, then it will triumph, victorious, and the lovers will come together, despite all.

 

And that, by the way, is the unspoken assumption of all romances: that the couple is destined to be together. They belong together, and if they do not, their lives with be warped and ruined. There is something in their togetherness that is so important that they—and the entire universe—cannot function, cannot become whole, without it.*

If you buy into this premise…the romance genre makes sense, and stories of heartbreak and angst, when well done, will delight your heart.

If you don’t, they will makes no sense at all.

 

*A reader asked: what about love triangles. In a true romance, the assumption is always there that the true lovers will find their way through the triangle and triumph together. The girl may not know at first which love is the one meant to triumph, the story is then about her coming to recognize it. But the assumption that there is one right boy and he is The One is there. If it is not there, the story is not properly a romance. It becomes instead a harem comedy or some other type of literature.

 

Comments

Caption Winner!

Lots of good comments this week, but the winner is:

 

"Stick this on the dog. He's the one who lays his head in your lap."

Caption This!

Best comment wins!

 

Promotion for a friend

Reposting this for Danielle Ackley-McPhail.  She wrote:

Hi, All.

I received a wonderful review yesterday for my solo science fiction

collection, A Legacy of Stars (DTF Publications/Dark Quest Books). It made my

day, but it came with something of a mystery, which I’ll quote here:

“One of the cleverest first contact stories to come along in a long time.”

Analog June 2013 issue

Where is the mystery, do you ask? See…there are two first contact stories

in the collection. Now I could just ask the reviewer which one he thought

was the cleverest, but where is the fun in that? I say this calls for a

contest.

For the next week I will be taking a poll on what you thought was the

cleverest first contact story in the book. How it works: If you really like me

and want to give some support to a small press author buy the ebook version

of the book for $2.99 and give it a read.

Kindle:

http://www.amazon.com/A-Legacy-of-Stars-ebook/dp/B00AD4BHI2/?tag=blissinsan-20

NOOK:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-legacy-of-stars-danielle-ackley-mcphail/1113801125?ean=2940015734997

Or, email me at _greenfirephoenix@aol.com_ and I will send you a PDF file of the two stories in question. Whichever route you take, read the stories: Building Blocks and To Look Upon The Face of God and click the below rafflecopter by April 12 (EST) with your pick for which is the cleverest. On April 13th the reviewer, Don Sakers, will answer the question on my Facebook page. Two people will win a free, autographed copy of the print version of A Legacy of Stars.

 

http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/3536890/

To help share this promo visit:

http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/share-code/MzUzNjg5YWM2OGQxYmQ4N2NmYjhiNWE2MDk1NmViOjA=/

To read the full review: http://www.analogsf.com/2013_06/reflib.shtml

 

Wright’s Writing Corner: Adventures In Publishing

I wrote this two weeks ago but new computer woes kept me from finishing it. Even though the day I sent the manuscript off is now two weeks behind us, I decided to leave it as it was:

I had been planning to write a post inspired by the comments from last week’s article on the Virtue of Angst (or perhaps I should call it: Angst, Uh, What Is It Good For?). But something significant happened today. I figured it was worthy of a post.

Today, I sent my latest novel off the publisher!

The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin went off to Dark Quest Books this morning just before noon.

Whohoo!

So I thought I might talk a bit about why Rachel Griffin went off to Dark Quest and not to a Big House publisher.

The first question might be: Was this book rejected by the Big New York Publishing Houses?

The answer is: No. I never submitted it.

I decided I wanted to publish it as an ebook, for a series of reasons. I will list some of them below. Then, Dark Quest Books, a small publishing house, expressed interest. I spoke with them and discovered that their royalty rates were not much less than if I did it myself—about the same as if I had an agent. But they would do the work of posting the ebook in various places. They would also provide a print copy. This sounded pretty good.

If I think of it as going from Tor to Dark Quest, it seems like a step backwards, but if I think of it as going from ebook to ebook with help, it seems like a step forward!

So…why did I chose ebook?

1) Financial.

With the Big Houses, an author gets 6% of the cover price. This includes ebooks, where we get 6%. Independent ebooks pay 60% to 70%, depending on venue, cover price, and other issues. That’s a big difference per book.

Recently, I bought four books by a friend. The purchase came to $25. He got about $18 of that. If you went out and bought a hardcover by John or I, it would cost about $25. We would get about $1.50.

Ebooks cost between .99 to $4.99. At $4.99, I would make $2.50.

I have to sell a lot less books to make the same money.

 

2) Ebook Potential.

I spoke with friends who are selling ebooks, including Jonathan Moeller, who is doing very well with his ebook sales. I determined from speaking to them that this series was a good candidate to do well as an ebook. I don’t expect it to sell much at first, but the series is addictive, like potato chips. That kind of model…where if you can sell the first one, people who like it at all will probably want more…seems a good candidate for ebook…where one of the sales techniques is to give away the first book for free if you have later books. (Dark Quest may chose not to do this, but it’s an option.)

 

3) Square Peg in a Round Bookstore.

Right now, traditional publishing has rather narrow ideas of what a book in a certain category should be like. A YA should be a certain length. It should have characters of a certain age. Etc. My book does not fit this model. My main character starts out twelve (she’ll get older), younger than a YA character should be. The book is a bit short of 110,000 words. Too long for a YA.

If I publish it as an ebook, it can find its audience without anyone worrying abou these artificial constraints.

 

4) Editing Freedom.

This project had a lot of things I worried about, both from the point of view of whether my publisher would dislike certain things as the series went on, but more from the point of view that I did not want to embarrass them. This story started as a fan-fic style roleplaying game. I think I have a pretty good grasp on the law and how much I have to change so as not to be stepping on anyone’s toes. But satisfying the law and satisfying the reader are two different things.

So far, readers have really liked the Roanoke Academy background, and when they have recognized who a character originally was—I left a few details in as homages to the original authors—they were amused. But who knows what the general public will think. I was worried about having to go over with my editor exactly what I had borrowed and changed. Now, I won’t have to worry about that.

Though there are a lot of books out there that seem mighty close to other books…so maybe they would not have cared. Still, it is delightful to have editorial freedom and not worry that someone will object to anything I might be writing.

 

5) No end date.

My physical books got into the books store, when they did at all, for a short time. Then they disappear again. My publisher has complete control over how many to print and whether to bother printing them again.

An ebook just goes out there…and stays. When a later volume comes out, the first volume will still be as available as ever for someone to download and read.

This means that the book does not need to do well right away, like a print book does. It can sit there and gently build up steam over time. True, it may never do so. But, considering that I think the later books in this series will be better than the first one—not because there is anything wrong with the first one, but just that the story becomes more interesting as it builds—at least this model will give it the opportunity to find its way, should that be what Providence has in mind for it.

6) And, finally, Prayer.

I prayed about it a great deal. And then quietly did what came to me. What I think is interesting is that my Big House sale was a fight every step of the way. Nothing happened easily. Each step had to be prayed through and fought through to get to the next step.

This project, on the other hand, has come about very graciously–each piece unfolding just as it was needed. The result has been a great deal of fun. I got to pick my own cover artist. I talked to quite a few artists and finally found one I’m quite hopeful about. I even get to include some drawings done by John!

And the best thing of all is how many friends are included in the project. When I was little, I belonged to a group called the Ward Pound Ridge Wood Elves. In our early days, we threw parties and kidnapped people (to make them attend the party.) Then, with time, we would meet and read Tolkien aloud. Finally, with time, we morphed into a literary group, with poets, writers, actors, and musicians each performing their original material.

I was quite young and used to wish so much that we could all do some project together, that we would all grow up to be successful in our fields. That sense—of wishing I could see a group of friends succeed together—has stayed with me.

So, I am so delighted that so many steps of this project—from the conception to the publishing—has involved the participation of friends.

 

Good luck, Rachel Griffin. May you prosper and soar!

 

 

Comments

 

 

And the winner is….

This week we have  a tie between:

All this time, Pikachu was supposed to be a CAT?!

and

Pika-Meow!!

 

Comments

Caption This!

A day late. Now that I have gotten back into my website, I will post, tomorrow hopefully, my post on sending off my lastest book to the publisher.

Until then…

 

Same drill: Best comment gets posted tomorrow.

 

 

Comments

 

Happy Easter!

Woohoo!

Made it back to my website! (I had password troubles for a bit.)

Good to be back. Missed you all.

 

 

Caption This!

Hard to remember it is Monday when the kids are home. I have a Wed. post for last week…but we got two new computers and everything is in disarray. It will go up eventually….I hope.

 

 

You know the drill…best caption will be posted on Wed. Morning.