Stuart Jaffe's Blog, page 9

Guest Post: D. B. Jackson

D.B. Jackson and I have been friends since before D.B.’s birth.  His “father” and I have known each other even longer.  And while his “father” has been writing and publishing for a few decades, this is D. B.’s first published novel.  I’m very excited for him.  Oh, and you should know that the book is out NOW, so go and get it!

*****

Inspiration, as Stuart can tell you, often comes from unexpected places.  My newest book, THIEFTAKER, the first book in a historical urban fantasy series called The Thieftaker Chronicles, is a case in point.[image error]

THIEFTAKER is set in Colonial Boston in 1765, as colonists in the New World are beginning to grow restive under British colonial rule.  On the night of the Stamp Act riots, as a mob of protesters rampage through the streets, destroying property and threatening the lives of representatives of the Crown, a young woman is murdered.  Our hero, Ethan Kaille, a thieftaker and conjurer of some notoriety, is hired to investigate the murder and soon finds himself caught up in an intrigue of politics and magic.

That’s the basic set-up for this first book in the series.  Future volumes will also tie fictional murder mysteries to actual historical events.  But while the series concept is fairly simple, the creative process that led me to THIEFTAKER was more complicated.

Several years back, my wife and I packed up our family and moved to Australia for a year.  My wife was on Sabbatical (she is a biologist, just like Stuart’s wife — this is just one of several ways in which Stuart and I lead parallel lives), and there was a biologist in Wollongong with whom she wanted to work.  As we prepared to leave for our year Down Under, we read Robert Hughes’ marvelous history of Australia THE FATAL SHORE.  (This really is relevant — stick with me.)

Australia, of course, began as a penal colony, and so the early chapters of the book spent a lot of time discussing British law enforcement.  And one particular footnote (yes, I am a geek; I read footnotes — a vestigial habit from when I was a history graduate student getting my Ph.D.) caught my eye.

The footnote went on at some length about the career of one Jonathan Wild, London’s most famous thieftaker.  Wild was little more than a criminal himself.  He had several ruffians in his employ who were responsible for much of the thieving that occurred in early 18th century London.  They would bring the stolen goods to Wild who would sell the most valuable items and return the rest to their rightful owners — for a fee, of course — as if he had recovered them from the thieves.  Not only did he build an empire for himself out of the profits he made, but he became a hero of sorts among London’s elite, who fancied him a bulwark against rampant criminal behavior.

Upon reading this, my immediate thought was “I want to write a book about thieftakers!”  My idea was to create a dynamic in which my hero, an honest thieftaker, would be constantly harassed and thwarted by his nemesis, a Wild-like character who would be corrupt, powerful, canny, and in every way a formidable rival.  In the past I have had ideas for books come to me first in the form of a character, but every time that character has been my protagonist. This was the first time that an idea for a book began with my hero’s main antagonist.

My “Jonathan Wild” character began as a man named Sefton Pryce, but as I worked my way through my first draft of the novel, I found that his rivalry with Ethan felt a little flat.  So after thinking about the character a bit, I decided to make her into a woman named Sephira Pryce.  As soon as I did, her relationship with Ethan was transformed.  Their dynamic became electric, filled with hostility and resentment, but also with a crackling sexual tension that brings new energy to every Thieftaker book and story.  Sephira is beautiful, cruel, brilliant, violent, and sexy as hell.  She runs in pre-Revolutionary Boston the same sort of criminal empire Jonathan Wild maintained in London, but in other ways she is very much her own person.

All this by way of saying that the original moment of inspiration is in no way a creative straight-jacket.  When I read the Hughes footnote back in 2005, I had no idea where that spark would take me.  I knew only that it would take me somewhere, and that I needed to pursue the idea as far as I could.  As I allowed the idea to percolate, more and more ideas came to me, and eventually I wound up with Ethan and Sephira, with a historical setting in Colonial Boston of all places, and a series of books and stories that I hope will guide my career for years to come.  I guess my point is this:  Inspiration may happen in a single instant, but its ultimate meaning derives from a process that can take weeks, months, even years.  Inspiration is only the beginning.  It is the subsequent pursuit of creativity that defines the artist.  A hundred authors could have read that footnote and been as excited by the idea of writing about thieftakers as I was.  But, naturally, every one of them would have written a different book, every one of them would have taken that original moment of inspiration in a different direction.  That is part of what makes creativity so incredibly exciting.  It is different for each of us, and one never knows where a single spark might lead.

*****

D.B. Jackson is also David B. Coe, the award-winning author of a dozen fantasy novels. His first book as D.B. Jackson, Thieftaker, volume I of the Thieftaker Chronicles, is available now. D.B. lives on the Cumberland Plateau with his wife and two teenaged daughters. They’re all smarter and prettier than he is, but they keep him around because he makes a mean vegetarian fajita. When he’s not writing he likes to hike, play guitar, and stalk the perfect image with his camera.

http://www.dbjackson-author.com

http://www.dbjackson-author.com/blog

http://www.facebook.com/dbjacksonAuthor

http://twitter.com/dbjacksonauthor

http://www.goodreads.com/dbjackson

http://amazon.com/author/dbjackson

Guest Post: Bob Mayer

A quick note of thanks to Bob Mayer for gracing this little blog with his presence. If you haven’t discovered Bob’s work yet, here’s a chance to get started. And if you find you like his stuff, well there’s tons of it to enjoy. Bob’s been a published writer for many, many years, so he’s got a long list of title to choose from. And now, I’ll let Bob take it from here –

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What Influenced me to write I, Judas: The Fifth Gospel?

Sometimes we can work backward to figure things out.  The first review on this book posted on Nook [image error]was:

Anonymous    Posted June 12, 2012

Zero stars

I am catholic and this book is horrible. Judas was a traitor not a prophet get your facts straight you filthy sadist

So.  What to make of that?

My wife and I watch MSNBC and Fox News.  We watch The Daily Show and Colbert.  We read numerous books, newspapers and magazines.  We’re always open to seeing differing points of views on various subjects.  There have been several intriguing books published about the Bible and God.  And some movies made.  One was The Rapture starring Mimi Rogers, and it was a very brutal movie because it played out the event occurring just as Revelations says it will.

What I wanted to do was pit the Brotherhood of fundamentalists and the Triumvirate of the Illuminati.  Faith versus science.  I wanted to show how the two are not mutually exclusive.

One of the tenets of almost all my books, which my business partner Jen Talty has labeled Factual Fiction, is to take facts and then explain them differently.  My Area 51 series is 95% fact.  I just add in a fictional element explaining the cause of the facts differently.  My novel, Duty, Honor, Country: A Novel of West Point & The Civil War is historically accurate, yet the log line for it is:  Sometimes the people who aren’t recorded by history are the ones who make history.

For example, in Judas, I have him explaining to the people sent to kill him the history of the Bible.  So many people use the Bible as the foundation of their faith but they have never studied how it was written and evolved.  Revelations, upon which the Rapture is based, most likely is not written about the Second Coming, but about an event that happened:  the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD.  Yet it’s interpreted completely differently.

Also, I’ve always had a hard time reconciling the hatred in the comment above from the first review and people who profess to have faith.  The two don’t jive.

I once asked:  Why do churches lock their doors at night while we have so many homeless?  I got many vicious responses and I certainly understand the problems that would ensue, but if one really digs down to the core message of most religions, it would seem that faith has its limits.  There are Ten Commandments, yet somehow, through convoluted reasoning, churches have come up with ways to be able to violate many of them.

In Judas, one interesting scene is two very rich men, one from each side of the Brotherhood and Illuminati discussing the camel and the eye of the needle and entering heaven.  They finally begin to understand what it really means.

I went to Catholic School from grade one through high school.  I also served as an altar boy.  One of the most striking things I experienced was when we had a visiting priest, an African missionary.  When we were in the sacristy after he said mass one day, we were talking.  And he said that if those people in the pews really believed the words they were mouthing, they would act much differently than they do.  The simple way he said it, even at that age, I could feel his sincerity.  I felt it when he said mass.

I think there’s a lot of good to come out of both faith and science.  But it all has to be tempered with one key thing:  no one has all the answers.  To blindly believe a dogma or ideology is a very dangerous thing.

Guest Post: Janine K. Spendlove

I met Janine this year at Ravencon and then again at ConCarolinas. She is instantly likable and so enthusiastic about the start of her writing career that I couldn’t help but be drawn into her enthusiasm. She’s also a Marine (as is her husband), a mom, and a delight to be around. With her first book out for awhile now and her second on the way, I thought it would be great to have her here to share with us. Take it away, Janine!

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I was absolutely thrilled when Stuart asked me to write a blog post on what influences or inspires my writing! I could go on for thousands of words on the subject – lucky for you he limited me to 500-1000 words. I’ve often been asked what inspire me to write my first novel, War of the Seasons, book one: The Human, and that, my friends is a story much longer than my allotted words – but if you’re curious you can read about it here: http://www.ailionora.com/2012/03/26/why-i-wrote-war-of-the-seasons-happy-birthday-will-tk8432/

Music plays a very large part in my writing. I create specific playlists to help me get in the “mood” [image error]or channel a theme. In fact, in my most recent novel, War of the Seasons, book two: The Half-blood, I ended up naming all my chapters after song titles. It wasn’t until my second draft that I realize just how much I’d been listening to Adele while writing The Half-blood. A good ¼ of the chapter titles were song titles from her albums! I changed most of them since I didn’t want to use more than one song title from an artist, but I think I still may have ended up two from Adele.

Whether you like Adele’s music or not doesn’t matter, the fact is her two albums 19 and 21 perfectly set the mood I was trying to achieve in The Half-blood. This proves to be very essential when you’re a part time writer like me. After a long day at your day job it’s hard to sit in front of a computer again and tell your mind to be creative. It sometimes needs a jump-start and it definitely needs training. It got to the point where as soon as Adele, The Cranberries, or The Steelwells would come on my brain “turned on” and the words flowed.

I guess I was a bit Pavlovian in my approach, but it worked. My first novel took me one year to write the first draft. The second took just over three months and is a far better novel in terms of both writing and story. Sure, some of that was feeling more comfortable/experienced in what I was doing, but a big part of it was training my mind to write even when it didn’t want to.

Sometimes though, inspiration strikes you when you least expect it. It can be anything really, but probably the most visceral case for me was a combination of location and music working together. In 2010 I was in New Orleanson a business trip. I’d just finished the first draft of The Human (then called The Ailesit), and wanted/needed a break before I jumped into the revision of the story.

As I walked through the French Quarter, taking in the sights, the song “Girl” by The Beatles, as covered by Jim Sturgess, came on my iPhone, and I was struck by a visual of Sgt Milton Sorenson, pining for his lost love there in theCrescentCity.

I went back to my room and wrote.

I needed to know this story.

I needed to understand why Story’s parents split and how she ended up staying with her father.

So I ran up to my room and instead of taking in the sights I wrote. And wrote. And wrote until I was done. I discovered many things about Milt and Story’s mother by doing this, and it helped me understand and develop my characters better for the final draft of The Human. More than that, I ended up with a longer “short story” (Songs of the Seasons: Girl) for my readers, who were waiting patiently (okay, some not so patiently) for The Half-blood to come out.

Ultimately, I never know what’s going to inspire me. Sometimes I sit down with a goal to write, an outline to follow, and I go for it. Other times I get assaulted by a plot bunny and if I don’t get it out onto “paper” it consumes my mind until I do. The unwavering theme though it all is that music has always played a key part in my writing, and I expect it always will.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

[image error]Janine K. Spendlove is a KC-130 pilot in the United States Marine Corps. Her bestselling first novel, War of the Seasons, Book One: The Human, was published in June 2011, and she’s also had several short stories published in various anthologies. A graduate from Brigham Young University in 1999 with a BA in History Teaching, she is an avid runner, enjoys knitting, playing Beatles tunes on her guitar, and spending time with her family. She currently resides with her husband and daughter in Washington,DC. She is currently at work on her next novel. Find out more at: WarOfTheSeasons.com

Southern Bound RELEASED!

Southern Bound is out!

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It was supposed to be a new beginning – good job, good pay, and a lovely home in North Carolina.

But when Max Porter discovers his office is haunted by the ghost of a 1940s detective, he is thrust neck-deep into a world of old mysteries and dangerous enemies.

One in which ghosts, witches, curses, and spells exist.  One in which a simple research job can turn deadly.

ConCarolinas and My Thanks

Here’s a little admission.  Oftentimes, while traveling to a convention, I will get filled with dread for the upcoming weekend.  It’s long, tiresome, and I have to be “on” all weekend long.  While I don’t have a big enough ego to think all those people came to see me, I know that my name does make it on to the lists of a growing number (okay, the bottom of the list, but still on the list).  Point is, I feel a responsibility to give those fans (and all those attending) my best, and so as I approach a convention, I start thinking, this won’t be any fun, it’s just a bunch of work.

Here’s another little admission.  By the time I step foot in that hotel, I always do an emotional one-eighty.  It’s such a joy to meet old friends I haven’t seen in a long time, see readers who enjoyed my books, discuss writing and publishing, and make new friends who will take my life in new directions. There’s always so many interesting and bizarre things to see.  Music and comedy, artists and writers, fans and friends, spouses and family – all blending together into a big, raucous weekend.

Here’s my last admission.  When I’m leaving a convention, I’m exhausted and exhilarated.  I’m glad it’s over and sad that there isn’t one more day.

Because here’s the thing: as a writer, I find inspiration all around me.  Everything I do and see and experience influences my work.  And that includes people.

Last weekend, I was a guest writer at ConCarolinas in Charlotte, North Carolina.  It’s always been a fun con to go to and this weekend was no different.  I had a blast, almost sold out of books, and reconnected with some wonderful people.  I earned a few new fans and discovered some new writers to become fans of.  I also had a few truly amazing, touching, inspiring moments in which readers told me that my books meant something more than just a story to them.  I had touched them, helped them, or inspired them.  There isn’t a writer alive who doesn’t want to hear something like that.

And so, as I begin another week, sit down at the keyboard to type out another chapter, and wonder if anybody out there is listening, I remember this weekend and all the convention weekends like it.  I remember that you all are out there, reading and enjoying.  You may not realize it, but you inspire me to keep going.

Thanks.

Death Note and Stealing

Influences come in many sizes.  Sometimes an entire work can reshape the way I think.  Other times, a passing remark or a small moment in one scene of a movie can alter the plot of whatever I’m working on.  It all depends on how the world strikes me at a certain point in time.

My current work which has no title (the rough draft is almost done) was inspired by the story Death Note.  This is a Japanese tale that has been presented as a manga, an anime series, an anime film, and a live action film.  There might be other forms it has taken, but those are all I know of.

The story deals with a special notebook dropped into our world by a bored demon.  There are a few rules to this notebook but the basic idea is that if you write a name down, that person will die.  The book is found by a highly-intelligent, highly-ambitious, high school senior with little conscience.  You can see where this might go.

The demon comes with the book, so it’s always near our protagonist, following him around and making comments.  I loved that.  And it inspired the entire tale I’m working on.

I took that simple image – protag walking down street with a demon casually floating behind him – and built a story around it.  My story has nothing more to do with Death Note.  There is no book, there is no demon, there is nothing similar.  Just this image.

That’s about as much as I’m willing to say – I don’t like to discuss my current works because whenever I do, they fall apart.  I feel safe mentioning this much because I’m at the climax of the story and I haven’t really given anything away.

Besides, the point here isn’t what I’m working on at the moment, but rather how just a little thing like a striking image can spawn an entire novel.  Often new artists worry that if they use an influence too directly they’ll be somehow stealing.  While I don’t believe this is the case, I don’t want you to think that I believe in carte blanc regarding this.  There is a world of difference between being influenced and being a thief.

This has been on my mind lately because of the current questions regarding 50 Shades of Gray, the highly successful erotic novel that was born from Twilight fan fiction.  Fan fiction by definition is work inspired by another, but it goes way beyond that by using the same characters, locations, and stories.  As long as the fans writing these things aren’t selling them, I have no problem with it.  It is, as the name would imply, done out of fannish love, and if anybody were to make Malja fan fiction, I would be flattered.  But what of 50 Shades?  Is it right for that author to make millions without Twilight getting its share of the credit (and cash)?  What if the original story was a small selling, mid-list book instead of the behemoth Twilight?

That’s what bothers me here. Like it or hate it, Stephanie Meyer worked hard on Twilight, and it’s not right for someone to make money off of Twilight-porn.

If 50 Shades had been inspired by Twilight but also created its own world with other influences, that would be different.  My series The Malja Chronicles is often billed as Xena meets Mad Max.  Obviously, those two stories influenced the series.  But I was also influenced by Lone Wolf and Cub, a myriad of samurai movies, blues music, and many other stories (a bunch of which I’ve posted about in the past).  In other words, I didn’t steal one storyline, changed the names and called it something new.  Instead, I took the core concepts from a ton of different sources, mixed them together with my own personal experiences and creativity, and came up with something new.

To me, that is how it should be done.  What do you all think of the 50 Shades situation?

The Way of the Brother Gods RELEASED!

That’s right, folks!  The Way of the Brother Gods (Book 3 of The Malja Chronicles) is now out for you to enjoy.

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Above all else, Malja has sought one thing – a way home. With the help of her companions, Tommy and Fawbry, she may finally have her chance.

But after years of using magic, Tommy is spiraling into madness, and it could destroy the whole world. Caught between those she loves and that which she desires most, Malja will have to risk everything -

friendships, lives, even her chances to get home – in order to save it all.

SF Becomes Reality: Survivor

I’ve mentioned this before, but I have always loved the television show Survivor.  I started watching it way back in the first season, turning it on by accident and getting sucked in right away.  It was the first reality game show and it’s still the best. As people flocked to the movie theaters to see The Hunger Games, I was glued to the television to see who won the title of Sole Survivor.

While The Hunger Games is a reality game show of Survivor on steroids, it is by no means the first of this type of story.  Plenty have pointed out the disturbing parallels between The Hunger Games and the Japanese story of children battling to the death, Battle Royale. I’ve not read the Japanese book, yet, but the film is worth your time (warning: it’s very bloody).  Long before, though, we had Stephen King’s tale, The Running Man (made into a movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, but not a very good one).  Go further back and you get the schlock flick, Deathrace 2000.  In fact, you’ll find plenty of examples throughout prose and television of this same basic idea — battling to the death as televised entertainment.

It’s a weird aspect of science fiction that sometimes — not often, but sometimes — the crazy worlds we create become reality.  Cell phones were predicted in Star Trek’s communicators.  Geo-sync orbiting satellites were famously described by Arthur C. Clarke long before they were a reality.  And then we have Survivor.

Now, thankfully we haven’t degenerated to the point that the contestants are trying to physically harm or kill each other, but they are trying figuratively to cut each other’s throats in order to win one million dollars.  As a writer, I love Survivor because you get to see human behavior under extreme stress and paranoia.  Writing action-adventure fantasy, these are things I encounter all the time.  Heroes and heroines, by definition, live under extreme stress.  And unlike other “reality” shows, Survivor is not set up to mimic reality.  Nobody thinks this is real life.  But it is real people stuck in a real game.

Furthering the fascination is the fact that once they reach the jury level (where contestants voted out don’t go home but become part of the jury that will vote for who wins), the jurors are sequestered to a mini-resort known as the Ponderosa.  Online, you can see short videos following contestants from the moment they’re voted off to their first jury sitting.  You see them emerge from the game and discover their humanity again.  Two people who hated each other, lied to each other, and back-stabbed each other in the game, often find that, out of the game, they get along wonderfully and become lifelong friends.

It’s a happier ending than any of the fictions usually provide, and perhaps that says something better about us as humans.

Expectations and Cabin In The Woods

This is not going to be a review of the movie, though I will quickly say that the movie is awesome, wonderful fun for anybody who likes Joss Whedon’s work as well as horror films.

What this post concerns is expectations.

See, over at The Eclectic Review podcast I give a lot of movie reviews.  Now, one surefire way to kill a film is to make me think I’m going to be seeing one type of movie and give me another one instead.  Yet, even as I type this, I can think of quite a few films that successfully pull off this switcheroo.  The key to success is in laying the proper groundwork so that when the true nature of the film is revealed, the audience is not taken by complete surprise.  I should be able to look back and think, “Oh, of course.  That was going on the whole time.”

In Cabin in the Woods, you might think as you’re sitting in the theater that you are in for a horror film.  But really, the movie is a horror film trapped inside a science-fiction/fantasy story.  Whedon handles this by not hiding it at all.  The opening scenes of the movie let the audience in on the concept at large (even though the details are kept secret for some fun later).  It works because I’m not really led down the wrong path, even if the view is a bit obscured.

This, of course, holds true in writing as well.  It’s actually more important because the length of a novel lends itself to being easily invested in one set of thoughts for a long time.  There are many ways to deal with this, but I always prefer the straight-forward method.

In The Way of the Black Beast, I approached it much as Joss Whedon does in Cabin in the Woods.  The opening chapter is designed to set up the proper expectations – that this is indeed a fantasy novel with magic and a sword-wielding heroine, but that there are also blues musicians and a formerly civilized, technologically advanced society.  This is crucial because much later in the book, Malja and her group are in a jeep driving around.  The only way for the reader to buy into that kind of thing is to have the proper expectations laid out early on.

Of course, not all books (or films) have to approach it right from the start.  Alfred Hitchcock notoriously led his audience to believe that Janet Leigh was the protagonist of Psycho, investing a lot of screen time into her character and story.  But he used this to great effect by killing her halfway through the movie.  It jolted and shocked the audience.  At this point, when others start searching for her and Norman Bates must cover up what he’s done, the movie shifts its focus.  This kind of playing with expectations works for two main reasons: 1) though the character viewpoint is shifted, the genre does not, and 2) Alfred Hitchcock is extremely talented.  Not everyone could pull off the same trick using the same script and actors.

In the end, for me, expectations play a vital role in guiding an audience toward the goals the artist desires to reach.  If done right, I reduce my workload later on, and the reader actually fills in all kinds of details based on those expectations.  I can play with those details to reinforce the ideas or jolt the reader with the opposite of the expected.  As long as it’s earned and doesn’t violate the overall story as it was set up, it should work.  But if you pick up a book expecting fantasy and instead got a historical romance, that would be where the problem lies.

The Way of the Brother Gods Cover Reveal

Book 3 of The Malja Chronicles is coming out in just a few short weeks (if I can move fast enough).  So, here’s the cover art, once again done brilliantly by Lynn Perkins.

 

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