Sarah Scheele's Blog, page 21

The Detectives Who Are Out of Business

Oftentimes things don’t make sense because we’re asking the wrong questions from the start. People are not exhibiting curiosity and making inquiries that will guide them to uncovering the explanations. In short, we often double as the world’s worst detectives and if we were ever hired to investigate things we would very, very shortly be fired. Yet people are put on the spot to figure things out all the time in their daily lives. How are they failing?

For a start, they invent fake arguments that aren’t even relevant. They endlessly worry about these two artificially opposed points of view instead of brushing aside that fake argument and probing for the truth. (Such as debates about whether fat and extremely skinny women are equally beautiful. This argument—which I call Fat One vs. Thin One—brushes aside the huge number of women in the middle. They are never shown on TV or in movies or on magazines—how do THEY feel about that?) But we never ask because we are involved in a tedious, irrelevant headlock between two very unusual women who are going at each other like rams. And then we never have to ask . . .

People can get Fat One vs. Thin One about literally anything. Romance vs. no-romance. Clean books vs. not-so-clean. Profanity forbidden vs. profanity exploding all over the place. Short people vs. tall people. George Lucas vs. The Universe, especially the one that embellishes his movies. THE BOOK vs. THE MOVIE (always a quicksand that one, don’t step in it.) One kind of job vs. Another kind of job. And all of this allows people not to ask real questions. To never probe, never investigate, and never start asking the questions we should be asking.
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And there will be more updates. 

That Series Conundrum

One reason I’ve never done a series—one of those real, long, almost hack, everyone-does-them series-with-the-glossy-covers-that-are-vaguely-fantasy-but-could-just-as-easily-be-overhyped-mysteries—is because I was afraid to. What if it didn’t take off? What if I put time into writing 3 more books and the first one flopped? What would I do? (insert hyperventilation.)

After I started to make Palladia a series, though, my fears subsided. Even though it’s still formative at this point—as in really rough-edged. The two books that are out aren’t finished yet—it just keeps growing and growing. I don’t feel as concerned it won’t be a good investment because as it expands in my mind, it will be worth writing, somewhere. Perhaps riding a tide of growing horror that I’m still here. (In which case, these will be scary stories, although gentle Palladia doesn’t seem suited to scaring people.) I mean, I’m Sarah. I couldn’t do a series because that would require understanding people enough to keep them interested for even one book, let alone five or more!

Whether I understand people or not, City of the Invaders is going to get a new cover. The current model is a blended composite and I want a model who’s a real person as on the Consuela cover. Consuela’s transition to the Palladia world isn’t done. I wanted to get the draft out there so people could see it months ago, but the style of the story still hasn’t blended fully with the Palladia style and I’d like to add some scenes with Katia, including her in the plot so the story goes with the first book. Then there will be two more books: currently planning to call them The Princess of Luna and Quest for Cantara. And maybe some add-ons, turning other old stories into Palladia stories . . . writing new ones. All that will take months, but after a while my website could look quite different.
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And there will be more updates. 

Open Sea Ahead

​I’ve been poking around in the shallows of setting up my website for months now, but soon I’ll be trying my hand at some advertising, more serious marketing, promotions, and setting up a store on my website. I know people’s reactions are usually, “Oh no, is Sarah releasing something again?” and I’m like, “Tee hee. You betcha.” It’s fun to see how anxious people are for you to quit when they really don’t have enough control to make you do it.

In additional efforts to make people puke, I will be going global. Even if ebook sales in other stores are tiny compared to Amazon, it’s good for them to be out there and once I’m not exclusive I can sell on my website too and have all kinds of little bundles. I’d also like to investigate creating hardback books. All this means in the future books won’t be free unless I make one permafree, or on a free discount on my website, and people will usually have to actually buy a book of mine if they want it. 

It’s been lively for me recently to see how “I’m continuing writing. I am redoing one book and published another” never fails to scatter people like autumn leaves. Conversations that begin, “Dear Sarah, I am back after an unexplained long hiatus, or Medicare-covered health problems, or a trip to Indonesia. Let me hear that you are fine.” I say, “I’m so glad to see you again. Yes, I’m still writing, as I know you will be pleased to hear. I blog often.” Flatlining ensues. Beep. Beep. Beep. If there’s any response it is a tight, stretched, “Wow, that sounds like . . . like effort on your part. I’m sure (insert random genre) is your favorite.” Repeat, random, random, random genre. They might have well have said horror was my favorite, although that’s very difficult to assign randomly to people. Or my actual favorite, “Will you give me something for free? If it’s even said to be 50% off instead of free I will disappear and never come back, although if I want the book so little it’s completely mysterious why I want it at all.”

This rambled on longer than I meant to—lol—but there will be more updates later. 

Betty Hilligan

I won’t make this a heroine spotlight and I’m not quite sure why not. Betty occupies half of A Year with the Harrisons and her plot is at least equal to the other one. But still, it’s officially a “subplot” and so she isn’t a “heroine” in my mind even though the story is mostly about her and not about the Harrison girls.

Maybe she’s too old to be a heroine. “Heroine” sounds like a young adult, but Betty is a mother in her thirties who acts and feels even older than her age. Life has always been a little rough around the edges for her and she definitely has a tired tone to her sometimes. (When she’s not being sarcastic that is, which is one of her best qualities. Betty’s sarcasm is usually intentional, sometimes not.) Perhaps she’s too much of a real person to be a heroine too. Even if they’re faulty, heroines are idealized in so many ways for the reader.

Heroine or not, Betty gets a lot of screen time on the pages of A Year with the Harrisons. And her practical outlook on life contrasts in a really funny (and sometimes a little bittersweet) way with the living-in-a-bubble outlook her mother and sisters have.
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And there will be more updates.

The Old Expression

The phrase “an open book” is so applicable to authors, so obvious, that I’m almost hesitant to use it. It sounds like a terrible pun. But that’s what I try to be on this blog. Even if I state plans I later discard, or shift my books around on the website a lot, I am thinking out loud. I’m a very open person and I think being open is a vital part of anyone interesting, whether online or in daily life. People respond to what they feel is authentic because lies are boring. Stale, correct opinions, “safe” posts on the weather and Bible verse of the day, generic admittance you’ve watched a movie everyone else has seen too—these aren’t genuine. I learn nothing about the person except that they come across as a little smug.

So I blurt out what comes into my head, especially regarding writing, as I think of it. It was true at the time I stated it, but as months go by I might do some thinking and change my mind. People do that all the time—people who have minds to change, that is. If you’re just saying something plastic with no thought in it at all, that wasn’t an action of your mind and so you might not change it. Any more than Fourth of July paper plates change their minds.

One reason I’ve bounced from book to book, genre to genre, blog to blog, post to post, is because I’m always thinking. I’m always changing my mind as new thoughts come into it. Little rockets go off in my mind and I get excited about plans. Later on, I often think, “that was dumb, or why did I do that, that won’t work.” So then I try something else. I guess you’d call me spontaneous and that’s an important thing to understand about my writing too. It’s an idea I got excited about and I’m an open book about sharing it.

Suspicious people will not enjoy my blog, I think. :) 
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And there will be more updates. 

Heroine Spotlight ~ Faye

Although I’m planning to dismiss Bellevere for the time being—I did a mild tweak that pared it down just a hair, removed the contemporary version as not necessary, and I am still redoing the cover—I don’t feel it’s worth the work. I’ve never felt it was worth the work. But I will post on Faye a bit, because I think people were surprised by the way I showed this character. Not as different from Jane Austen’s Fanny Price, because remakes often try to make her less shy and less forgiving. But because I showed her in a particular way.

There is no hidden story beneath what I did in Bellevere House. Faye is not intended to support a subversive, disobedient attitude that pretends friendliness, but is actually hostile. (In contrast to the original Fanny Price. And to the rest of the VJA, in which authority and older people were always obeyed and shown very favorably.) I felt that what makes Fanny Price different from Austen’s other heroines is not her dependent social position—more than any of them have—but her approach to it. She is loyal, passive, and accepting of most things in her life. I wanted to make Fanny like the rest of her heroines and show the social situation wasn’t what caused the blip of Fanny Price—it was the author’s decision to show a specific personality. Fanny could easily have been just like her other heroines.

But a lot of people come to Mansfield Park with issues of authority in mind. They believe Fanny is a person who lives under authority of her aunt and uncle and that Sir Thomas is an authoritarian, landowning man who also treats his children this way. In contrast, Faye is always very detached and clearly views herself as superior to those around her, so much so she is actually tolerant of them. Readers who are interested in Mansfield Park because they think it upholds a staid, authority-driven local structure—being inroaded by the Crawfords' sexual honesty--might imagine I was attacking authority and using Faye to do it. Faye doesn’t care about that at all. She is intelligent, can be cutting or cynical at times, enjoys socializing but keeps aloof in a way—like most of Austen’s heroines. And the story I wrote is nothing but a bubbly surface of fun, a little cynicism, and a party of shallow young people that we’re all too cheerful to hate. A formula that isn’t entirely unfamiliar either when speaking of Jane Austen.

So perhaps Bellevere wasn’t a remake or a retelling. It became its own story, a different book from Mansfield Park. It deserves to be read as that, for what it is, rather than through a lens of seeing nonexistent undercurrents from the original book or the several movie adaptations. But it wasn’t read that way and by now I don’t care if it was. I just want to clarify what I believed was in the story.

And there will be more updates. 

The Book That Isn't There

One issue that any storyteller will encounter in the book market these days is deceptiveness. I’m not speaking of cloudy interactions with other authors, insincere networking, and unclear feedback. I’m speaking of the way stories are actually written. Far too many readers are used to seeing a “real” story laced under the surface of the so-called narrative. They push aside the story on the surface and automatically reinterpret to find the content they believe is hidden.

This can be legitimate if the author actually intended it that way. But not every book is this way and such thinking easily becomes aggressive, pushing what is stated to be there aside in favor of what you’re sure you see. People who become accustomed to this approach will start simply imagining there must be a “real” story beneath anything they come across.

They will start to read The Book That Isn’t There.

This has often happened with my books because the whole point of them is to make things clear, to make the story simple so we all know what we’re talking about. But if you’re used to reading this way, you’ll automatically dismiss what I’m saying and start getting into a very murky kind of creativity. I couldn’t possibly have simply written a story to read. I MUST be hiding something. If I say Bella in Victoria: A Tale of Spain is sad and lonely because her parents don’t like her personality, I must have really said they have been trying to force her into an arranged marriage but won’t admit it and the other sisters don’t know this.

But that isn’t what I said. It simply isn’t. People who don’t read my books as straightforwardly as a child would are reading The Book That Isn’t There. What you see really is what you get. I am up to literally nothing. If you think my book is boring, that’s because you really think it is boring. It’s not that there’s a hidden plot underneath that would make it more interesting to you and you don’t know WHY I’m not developing that plot. It’s not because I don’t know how to write my book and if you asked me little personal questions about it perhaps you could get me to admit the story underneath. It’s because you don’t know how to read my book and are trying to make it another book.

A Book That Isn’t There.
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And there will be more updates. 

Consumer Alert

I had a weird moment about selling my own stuff when I thought of something really simple: “How do I shop? Me. Myself. Personally?” I’ve always approached potential book readers as people who weren’t like me. They were “possible readers,” an abstract, uncomfortable group of people who couldn’t be farther from me because I wanted to induce them to consider my books and they wanted to do literally everything else. But you know, I buy things too. I shop. I watch movies and sometimes I even read. (Although I am a writer and easily get word-nausea.)

Wow! How do I buy things? Potential readers think just the way I do, once I stopped the “buy my books” view of them. I’ve always had a conservative budget, so I’m not going to be cranking out money for new items all the time. I buy them in resale, used, discounted, and rarely—all things that wouldn’t give the original creators of that product a dime. I have to do that. But I also watch TV and visit libraries and I know about long-term exposure. Long, long, long term exposure.

I am a reluctant purchaser, so If something can reach me, it really was a very effective method. And nothing ever fails to work on me like patient, long-term free exposure. (That’s one reason short freebie bursts like on Kindle don’t always work.) We’re talking months. Years, even. Just steadily, steadily making it available. I’ve become interested in movies I’d ignored at first because they began to run regularly as marathons on TV—over and over, over and over. Eventually, I just got interested and felt enough trust to start making the movie more permanent—aka. BUY IT. I’ve bought DVDs often after checking them out from the library, even multiple times.

I’m also a loyal consumer and when I buy something I tend to be very involved with it from then on.
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And there will be more updates. 

The Segovian Sisters

Besides Victoria, who is second oldest in the Duke of Segovia’s family, there are five other sisters. I had a moment of fried-brain when redoing the book (honestly it is very hot here in Texas right now!) and put on the back cover and descriptions everywhere that Victoria has six sisters! See, this is what happens when you can barely grasp your own material. Which, since it’s a simple little escapist fairy tale, doesn’t bode well for me.

Bella is the oldest—sometimes I call them Bella Segovia and Victoria Segovia because I didn’t really give them last names—and Victoria doesn’t understand her very well. She admires Bella as charismatic and feels she is oppressed by life in the castle. But actually, we don’t really know much of what Bella’s like. Probably because she’s really, really in the background.

Then there is Julia—who’s next after Victoria—and she ran off to get married. Now she lives with a rich, irritating man in France and the others aren’t allowed to see her. Neva is spoiled, daring, and always sneaking out of the castle. She comes to a bad end—and Lucinda is the next sister. She’s very boring and barely seen at all except she gets married too.

Araina is the youngest and in the second half she gets a lot of room. She took over the “Lulu” role from Alyce. Lulu was Alyce’s cousin and friend and a very bubbly person. “Lulu” also appeared in Millhaven Castle and is a character I worked with over and over, so it was hard to fill her shoes, but Araina was invisible in the first half so it was good to flesh her out.
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And there will be more updates.
 

Let's Talk The Test of Devotion

This book was my first (and for the moment my only) western. I’d never written a western before or even thought about doing anything in the genre. And I haven’t written one since. In fact, after a bad review because the original book was—admittedly—put out too fast at a hectic time in my life, I was certain I’d just drop it altogether. Although the plot was based in part on an old classic novel and had a lot of drive, I just didn’t feel like marketing the book or justifying why people should read it after an initial poor reception.

But it had a lot of downloads, by my standards, when it first came out. And after I gave it a new cover and a big edit, it just hung around for a while on my website. Some of you have probably read it during the months it was available free. One thing I noticed when redoing it was that I’d marketed it as western romance, but it turned into more of an actual western—which kind of bothered me. I’d assumed it would be western romance because I couldn’t possibly aspire to a real, gritty western. That would be laughable. Everything I’ve written has always been fluff.

But probably because of its original source in an old book written by a guy (who wrote action) it just did become a western, and that might explain—my junky editing aside—why it failed at first. It wasn’t for the right audience. Now I’m not sure who it’s for, but it lingers like smoke after a fire.
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And there will be more updates.