Shanna Swendson's Blog, page 234

I Need Minions

I've been hard on myself for having an entire free afternoon to work and getting very little working time, according to my stopwatch, but I realized why that's happening yesterday. When I work too long, I get too into the story and just read instead of making changes, or else I feel too lazy to actually make changes and figure it's fine the way it is. Then I find myself having to go back and fix something earlier. If I take frequent breaks, the work goes better.

The trick is, I probably need to spend my breaks doing something more productive than checking in on message boards. I need to get back into my house cleaning project. My last task turned out to be more complicated than I expected. I was cleaning out the bathroom drawer, but then organizing that required organizing the makeup caddy on the countertop, as well as the basket I use to hold hair stuff (barrettes, hairpins, etc.). I now have the countertop mostly fixed, and having everything together like that is saving me lots of time in getting ready because I don't have to search for things. I just have to re-tackle the drawer now because a lot of stuff got dumped in there while I was straightening the counter. But taking so long to do this means I've lost all momentum. I can see why I have such a problem with housework and organization. It's very easy for me to lose enthusiasm and interest when there's something else that catches my attention, like a book I want to work on. Plus, there's the motivation factor. A book might earn me some money, which I rather desperately need. Cleaning house just has the benefit of making me feel good when it's done, but then it has to be done all over again.

What I need is the army of minions, like on Downton Abbey, where they all scurry into the room after the family has left and tidy it up. I'd need a bigger house for that, though, because in this house we'd keep bumping into each other and having other people around would drive me nuts. I might be able to shut myself in my office and let them deal with the downstairs, and then they might be able to tackle the upstairs at night when I'm in bed, but an open floorplan doesn't lend itself to staff that takes care of the rooms you're not in while trying to remain invisible. Really, what I need are Brownies (like in folklore, not Girl Scouts -- unless they bring Thin Mints while cleaning my house).

Now to see how much I can accomplish this afternoon. There's a homeowners' association meeting tonight, but a lot of drama exploded on the mailing list for that yesterday, which made me think the meeting isn't something I want to deal with (I think I'd rather deal with a session of the US Senate where the drama is about something real and major than any meeting in which relatively petty things are treated with drama worthy of the United Nations). So I ran next door and gave my neighbor my proxy so I can skip the meeting. I'd rather remain blissfully ignorant about the pettiness of my neighbors so I can keep living with them.

Yay, Monday!

It's really strange to be glad it's Monday, but I had a busy, semi-stressful weekend and I'm approaching my favorite part of the book I'm revising, so I'm glad to have a quiet day at home and I'm eager to work.

I should get a lot of work done because it's a fairly cold day today -- not normal winter cold, but not warm -- and if I turn off the central heat and bundle up in the electric blanket, then I won't want to move from my cozy writing spot and my only danger will be daydreaming, which does tend to happen when I'm bundled up all nice and cozy. The trick will be to focus the daydreaming on the book.

I'm going to try to frontload my work for the week so I can take a little time off Friday afternoon. They're releasing the season two Downton Abbey DVD this week, and that means I can marathon the rest of the series instead of waiting for two more installments on PBS. However, if the DVDs for this season are done like last season, the episodes will be edited differently than they were on PBS, which means some events happen in different places, and watching the remaining episodes on DVD will mean rewatching the entire series first. I know, it's a terrible hardship, right?

My choir director must be reading my mind (or my blog) about needing to find more opportunities to force myself to perform so it becomes less scary because he's assigned me to a quartet singing next month. Strangely, that's not as scary as singing solo even though I know my voice will stand out since I'm the soprano and that usually means it's the lead part. Give me a few more years and I might be willing to sing alone in front of people. I also got to try the "survive the worst-case scenario" technique yesterday, as things just sort of fell apart, but it wasn't my fault. I didn't do as well as I'd like, but I didn't do badly, especially under the circumstances, and so many other things that had nothing to do with me went wrong (like the pianist's pages sticking together so she couldn't turn pages and had to stop playing for a while to fix it) that the only thing we could do was laugh about it. As one of the guys said, the only thing that didn't happen during that song was a tornado hitting. And yet I survived and maintained a sense of humor about it. The song is still stuck in my brain, so I need a new earworm, but other than that I don't think I'm going to be scarred for life or set back in my recovery from stage fright.

Fairy Tale Television

I've now reached the real rewriting phase, but it's a cloudy, rainy day, so I'm anticipating great productivity. I really do love this book.

And then there's new Grimm tonight, which has not only become my favorite of the fairy tale shows, but is possibly my favorite of the currently airing series, aside from maybe Downton Abbey (which is more of a miniseries).

In case you haven't noticed, I love fairy tales. I like the sanitized Disney versions with musical numbers and cute talking animals, I like the darker Grimm versions, I read books of Jungian analysis of fairy tales, I like fantasy that plays with fairy tale tropes and I love fantasy that plays with fairy tale themes without directly referring to the tales themselves, essentially creating entirely new stories for the canon.

So having two series on television that make direct reference to fairy tales is a real treat for me. There's Once Upon a Time, in which the evil queen from the Snow White story gets her ultimate revenge by enacting a curse that sends everyone from the fairy tale land into modern America, where they live in a kind of unchanging stasis, unaware of who they really are -- and meanwhile, we learn about their stories in flashbacks. And then there's Grimm, which is a kind of paranormal procedural in which we learn that the Grimms were actually profilers with the talent to see the monsters living as men for what they really are, with the newest Grimm being a young police detective who's suddenly been forced into this strange world where the child molester he has to track down is actually a Big, Bad Wolf, for instance.

These two shows were compared to each other a lot, and the Tor.com blog even has a weekly feature rating them against each other, but I think that aside from the fairy tale theme, they're too different to compare. Once Upon a Time is more of a soap opera about the relationships among the characters and their histories, making much more literal use of the familiar fairy tales while also fleshing out their backstories. Grimm is a paranormal procedural with very slight ties to fairy tales, mostly focusing on the idea that the tales grew out of very real creatures, but functioning far more like a cop show with a twist.

Initially, I was far more into Once Upon a Time because one of my favorite kinds of fantasy is fairy tales that have been fleshed out so that the characters are actually characters instead of archetypes, and there's more to the story than we've heard in the tales. They really got me with the episode that had Snow White and Prince Charming (which we learned was actually her sarcastic nickname for him) meeting when she robbed his carriage (when she was hiding out in the woods after the queen sent the huntsman to kill her, but before she ran into the dwarfs). Meanwhile, Grimm was mostly a police procedural with a supernatural twist (though it manages to be a lot more realistic in many respects than any of the CSI shows -- like they have the armored SWAT guys break into a place and clear it before the detectives go in, instead of the crime lab guys leading the SWAT team).

Over time, though, my loyalties have switched. Once Upon a Time has developed a bad case of Lostitis -- mistaking backstory for character development and leaving the "current" story treading water with no real momentum while we bounce around in the past. The current story is getting boring and frustrating because I get tired of banging my head against the same brick wall week after week. Plus, the evil queen has to be the dumbest villain ever. Her Grand Scheme for Ultimate Revenge is to spend eternity watching her rival live a mildly unsatisfying life. Someone didn't read the Evil Overlord List. (Caution to those unfamiliar with this list: Do not click on the link unless you're prepared to lose at least half an hour and to never look at most movies, books and TV series the same way ever again.) I'm far more interested in how the pieces of the backstory fit together than I am in the current story, mostly because I know they can't afford to go anywhere with the current story or they'd end the series.

Meanwhile, that procedural structure of Grimm is turning out to be a benefit because they're up against a different villain every week, and there's a resolution to each week's story instead of coming to a stalemate with the same villain week after week. There's a mythology gradually building in the background, so it looks like there's more going on than just each week's cases, but the cases are interesting enough that they can afford to build their mythology gradually. They're also doing some fun things to bust a lot of cliches. For instance, our hero is basically a nice guy and very normal. Finding out about this supernatural stuff didn't send him into a tailspin, he's not doing a lot of angsting and moaning about just wanting a normal life, and he hasn't become a superpowered ninja. He's just a good cop who happens to have some additional perceptions, and he's applying his basic personality and his cop background to the Grimm thing, so instead of being a Slayer, he's more of a social worker for the creatures. Not to mention that he's absolutely adorable (and that actor would make a really good Owen -- the characters are even pretty similar). I've been taping this show and watching Supernatural, but I'm on the verge of just giving up Supernatural and watching this live because I don't want to wait even an hour.

I think there's actually a third point to the fairy tale shows triangle, which is similar to both shows, while they're not that much like each other, but I think that's material for its own discussion to have another time.

Fear

I got a good start on the revisions yesterday, though it was on the part that doesn't need so much revising. It starts getting more challenging today. Since most of what I'm revising right now is to make the narrator seem younger, I'm thinking I might start hand-writing "diary entries" for the critical scenes, then pull impressions from those to put into the interior monologue. It will be an experiment. Once I do that for a while, it may start coming more naturally.

I got more than my usual quota of hugs last night from the preschoolers. They were unusually clingy, and even the usual non-clingy ones were being very clingy, but it wasn't in a sad, weepy way. It was more of a need for contact, it seemed. I couldn't sit down without instantly having at least two trying to crawl into my lap, and when I was standing I usually had one clinging to one side and one holding my other hand, unless we were dancing, which we did a fair amount of, in which case I usually had one hanging on each hand. We're learning a new song by osmosis, so we just play the CD and dance around, and it seeps into their brains. And usually my brain, but I then had regular choir practice and we're doing a lot of old spirituals, and those really embed themselves in the brain. We get a lot of variety, doing spirituals this month and doing Verdi for Easter. I had nightmares last night about the song we're doing Sunday. Not that it's awful, but it's very syncopated, so it's hard to count, and that makes doing the solo a little more complicated and nervewracking. Oddly, I wasn't having nightmares about singing the solo. The song just followed me through my dreams in a nightmarish way.

I've been reading some psychology books about anxiety and fear in an effort to deal with the singing stage fright. I know that psychological self-help isn't necessarily a great idea, but as I can't afford real therapy at the moment and I'm working on a relatively minor and very specific issue, I figure that if I do it wrong it's not like I'm going to end up in a tower with a high-powered weapon, so I'm pretty safe. I've tried digging into my history to figure out why I have this strange thing about people hearing me sing, and I can't think of any particular event that scarred me for life. I've always felt self-conscious about singing in front of people. It's a vulnerability thing. Maybe it's because it was something important to me that I thought (or hoped) I did well, and therefore it mattered too much to risk letting other people judge it. Then not singing in front of people ever made it scarier to do so. I think a lot of my issue is physiological. I seem to have an overly sensitive sympathetic nervous system. Very tiny things can send me into major fight-or-flight mode. Just thinking about an embarrassing situation can make me turn bright red, my hands shake and my pulse race. It takes nothing at all to work myself up into a state, and that's kind of what happens with the stage fright. My body just goes nuts, shaking, sweating, fast pulse, shallow breathing, etc., which makes it difficult to control my voice, which means I don't perform as well as I'd like, which makes me even more nervous about the next time.

As for what to do about it, most books I've read seem to come down to exposure. By doing the scary thing repeatedly, you eventually teach the unconscious part of the brain that controls those responses that this situation is not actually life-or-death, so it can chill. You get used to doing the thing you're afraid of, and it becomes more predictable. The trick is that it takes a lot of cooperation from others to get the kind of exposure that leads to reducing stage fright. It helped when I was taking that voice class, but even there we only sang in front of the class five times a semester. To some extent, the preschoolers help, because I'm getting used to singing in front of them every week, and while they sometimes make fun of the fact that they think I sing opera, they also tell me they like how I sing. I just need to find more venues that are bigger and more adult than the preschool class but not quite as big and scary as the 800-seat sanctuary in a church service where I can get used to performing and create a comfort zone, and I need to do it more often than a couple of times a year. But I can't get assigned that many solos without being a total diva. I need to find a fear of singing support group, where we meet once a week or so and everyone sings a little something in front of the others. Maybe I'll talk to our choir director about that since I know there are others with the same problem, and he's a voice teacher and performer, so maybe he'll have some ideas.

Interesting factoid from the latest book I read on the subject of fear: The Blitz during WWII was meant by the Germans to be a psychological attack. The idea was to be so relentless in the bombing that the civilian populace would beg their leaders to surrender to make it stop. But there was a fundamental flaw in the plan. What the Germans saw as relentless the British saw as predictable, and that made the attacks less frightening. They bombed just about every night at the same time, and instead of the civilians going crazy with knowing that another attack would come, they got used to it, so they got to a point where it became a part of life and the attitude was, "Oh, the Jerries are half an hour early tonight. More tea?" To achieve psychological terror, the bombings should have been a lot more random and sporadic and less relentless.

New Beginnings and Old Crushes

If yesterday was the ten-year anniversary of my layoff, then I guess today is my ten-year anniversary of not having a boss. I didn't really know that it was the start of anything at the time, though. I got laid off on a Thursday, and I'd already planned for that weekend to be a big reading binge, since I'd just gotten into the Harry Potter series and had finally got the fourth book (the most recent at the time) from the library. I just started a day early on the reading instead of letting myself worry about what I'd do for the future. I figured that could wait for Monday. I do recall that my reading was frequently interrupted, as all the former clients were calling to express their outrage and to offer me freelance work, and by the end of the day I had a meeting scheduled for Monday, and that was what made me decide to try not looking for a job at all. I'd also just come up with the idea that became Enchanted, Inc. and although I didn't start writing it for more than a year, it was in the back of my head that I wanted to be able to write that book.

I dug up my old Air Supply tape, and I learned that listening to the romantic angst music from my youth doesn't work for dredging up those feelings, since now that music just gives me the rosy glow of nostalgia. And, you know, some of it was really good. It's got a melody, good lyrics, and some of it you can even dance to. I was doing a foxtrot around my kitchen while cooking yesterday. I do prefer the songs where "the other guy" who's not the usual lead singer takes the lead because I like his softer, huskier voice better than the brasher voice of the usual lead singer. It may even be worth getting some of this on CD.

Actually, romantic angst is so far in my past that it's hard to remember. For the past fifteen or so years, most of my romantic angst has been of the "how can I make sure he knows I'm not romantically interested in a way that will allow us to remain friends?" variety. Or, with some of the "you spoke to me, so obviously you love me" convention stalkers, the romantic angst has been of the "how do I make it clear that I'm not into him in a way that won't make everyone else think I'm a raging bitch?" I don't think I've met anyone I was really into romantically and wanted to like me that way since the 90s.

I did have a lot of the unrequited love angst as a teen, in spite of most of my crushes coming because I thought the guy might be into me. My usual pattern was that I'd notice behavior in the guy that made it seem like he was taking an interest, and then I'd get excited about the idea that someone might like me and work myself into a big old crush. And then usually it would turn out that he didn't like me that way and I'd discover it when I learned he had a girlfriend. Usually, all the invitations to come over to his house and hang out turned out to be strictly because he wanted my help with his homework rather than him using the homework as a convenient excuse to invite me over and hang out, as I'd hoped. It's possible that I might have been right once or twice, but if so, then for some reason it totally freaked him out to get the slightest hint of an idea that I might like him back so he fled screaming (figuratively) rather than it being a nice "I like you, you like me!" start to a relationship. It's kind of hard to get myself back into that frame of mind, since I have the benefit of hindsight and perspective. I've seen how all those guys turned out, and all I can think was that I really dodged a lot of bullets. I find myself just laughing at that pining. But I do think I can recall the feelings well enough to write them. Oddly enough, it's not music or any of the other usual emotional triggers that brings it all back. It's the memory of being on a school bus, and then two particular scenes that happened on school buses come back in a vivid flash.

While I was digging around for old tapes, I ran across a CD I haven't seen in years and have been trying to find for ages, so that was good. It somehow ended up in a box that had nothing to do with music. Tapes were only in there because they'd fallen in from somewhere else.

Today I'm going to get down to work on the revisions, though it will be a short work day due to three choir rehearsals -- preschoolers, chorale and choir. I have a solo in the chorale piece for Sunday. It's an old-timey gospel number that's essentially a solo with choral backup, and the director has divided the bits of the solo among us. I'm really only "solo" for a few words and then sing the verses together with an alto, since they have an alternate higher melody written in and that's the part I'll sing, so it will be kind of harmony (even though I don't think they're meant to be sung together). We'll see how it works. It's all pretty low in my range because it's written as an alto solo, but for once I'll get to bust out my torchy jazz voice in church. I can sing really low if I'm allowed to get torchy with it. It's just a challenge when I'm supposed to be sounding classical.

Layoff Day!

Today marks a momentous anniversary. Ten years ago today I got laid off from my last "real" job at a PR agency. I had a lot of money in savings and I had some freelance opportunities, so I took the plunge and instead of trying to find another job, I decided to try to make it on my own and really focus on my writing. And I haven't had a "real job" since then. I've worked for myself for longer than I worked at any other job. It hasn't always been easy. I've mostly been able to make it because I had all that money in savings. In my best years, I've come close to earning what I did in my PR job. In my worst years, I've been below the poverty level and living off my savings (and think of that before you illegally download a book -- most authors are in the same boat I'm in). But I've been far, far happier even without money than I ever was in a regular job with a steady paycheck. I guess I don't play well with others because going to an office and dealing with people all day is so draining to me that I don't get much writing done and I can't sustain much of a social life. Staying at home and focusing on writing all day means I can have a life outside work without going insane.

I celebrated by going to the dentist. Whee! Actually, I happened to have a cleaning scheduled for today. Then I stopped by the church to pick up the music for Sunday, since I got an e-mail this morning letting me know I have a solo in the piece and I thought practicing it before choir practice might be a good idea, and then I got groceries.

This afternoon, I have a good adolescent wallow scheduled. I re-read I Capture the Castle yesterday because there are a lot of parallels between that narrator and my heroine, even though the stories are entirely different, and I think that book does such a beautiful job of capturing that coming-of-age emotion. It's probably a good thing that I didn't discover it when I was a teenager or I'd have become obsessed and filled scores of notebooks with pretentious journal entries about my life, trying to imitate what was in the book. I also re-watched the movie last night, and while I normally like the movie and book equally, it really doesn't work to watch the movie too soon after reading the book. If it's been a year since I read the book and it's not too fresh, the movie seems like the perfect adaptation. If the book is too fresh in my mind, the movie bothers me because while it gets a lot right, it gets the wrong things wrong, and the book is so vivid that I'm not sure if what I'm remembering seeing in my head is from the book or the movie, so I'm disappointed when a scene I know I've seen isn't actually in the film.

Being locked in a castle dungeon would probably do wonders for my productivity. For now, I have to settle for being locked in my office or on the "library" loft outside my office.

Anyway, I think I've found the parallels from my own teen experiences to some of the things my heroine experiences, and now I'm going to dig out my college acting textbook to re-read the chapters on applying your experiences to a character because it works just as well in writing. It's funny that the college textbook I've most often referred to after college and the course that I probably use the most was the "acting for non drama majors" (aka Jock Drama) course I took pass/fail my senior year because I had almost all the credits I needed to graduate but needed one more class to maintain "full time" status and keep my scholarships, but I was interning and needed a light course load. I was one of three people in the class who wasn't a varsity athlete. But that made it very low-pressure for performing because no matter what I did, I'd be miles ahead of most of my classmates. Strangely, every character I played in the scenes we had to act out was the flighty, scatterbrained, slightly slutty type. That meant I really had to stretch out of my comfort zone. Fortunately, it was spring semester, so I didn't have to worry about traumatizing the football team (I did that enough in the fall when they were trying to date my roommate).

Maybe tomorrow will be the "celebration" day, since it will mark the tenth anniversary of the start of my self-employment. I may go to the library and get something decadent at the coffee shop next door.

Recapturing My Youth

I finished the latest draft of The Book That Will Not Die on Saturday -- well, except for one line that I subsequently realized needs to be fixed. Meanwhile I had a chat with my agent on Friday about revisions I need to make on another project. That's going to require a complete mental gear shift as I'm changing styles of writing, kind of story, time period, point of view, narrator and age range.

The difficult one is age range. This is theoretically a young adult book, but the heroine is still coming across as too "old." When my agent was suggesting the things that might make her seem more like a teen, they were all things I thought I put in the book, so I probably need to take them a bit further. I wasn't ever really a "teenager" in the way we tend to think of them. I think I was born thirty and was always old for my age until I reached that point and am now young for my age, having passed that point.

But then if I'm honest with myself, I did go through all those feelings, even if I didn't share or express them or act on them. You can behave maturely even if you're churning up inside, and what I remember is more the behavior than the feelings.

So, the project for the day is a mini "retreat" to change mental gears. I'm reading some YA books that come close to the kind of heroine I'm writing -- reserved behavior, but deep feelings -- and I may even do some journaling to try to get my mind back to my youth and remember my first crush or the boy I liked in high school that I thought also liked me but who always went cold just when I thought we were getting close. Now I wish I'd kept a diary where I recorded all those deep thoughts. Instead, I sat on the back porch and poured out my feelings to my dog because he was warm and cuddly and obviously loved me back in the way a diary couldn't have. It's nice to get a "but I love you" response when you're crying about some boy not loving you.

Now I need to get out the Air Supply, the soundtrack to my adolescent romantic angst (I switched to Survivor in late high school and college, even though most of their music came during my high school years). Unfortunately, I only had Air Supply on LP and no longer have a turntable. I may have a cassette I made so that I could indulge in the romantic angst in the car, but I'm not sure it still works. I'm sure YouTube will come through in a pinch.

Warning to my friends: I may be very difficult to deal with for a while until I get into the mindset well enough to write it and then get into the groove enough to separate myself from it.

A Not-So-Brief Intro to Downton Abbey

I'm still liking my crazy book. In fact, I was up until almost one in the morning because I couldn't put it down while editing. I'd get to the end of a chapter and say just one more chapter, until my eyes would barely stay open anymore and I knew I wasn't truly editing. That's got to be a good sign, right, if as many times as I've read this (this has to be about the tenth time), I can't put it down?

I'm going to have to really work today if I want TV time tonight, since an era ends with the series finale of Chuck. It's been a shadow of its former self lately, but I still want to see how it ends. However, my current TV obsession is Downton Abbey. I have to admit that it's essentially a soap opera, but it has British accents and history and it's on PBS, so it counts as Quality Television.

We're in the second season now, but for those who haven't yet discovered it, the series follows a British noble family and their servants, starting in 1912. The earl is one of those British noblemen who bolstered his dwindling estate by marrying an American heiress. That worked out well for him, as they ended up falling in love and being very happy while the estate thrived, except for one teensy detail: they had three daughters, and the lovely home and all the lovely money (including the money the wife brought to the marriage) has to go with the title to a male. It's not too bad because the earl has a slightly distant cousin who has a son (making him an even more distant cousin -- they aren't hillbillies or the royal family) who is engaged to the oldest daughter, Lady Mary, which means all the lovely money and the lovely house will stay in the family. And then the cousin and the cousin's son go down on the Titanic. Oops. Then things get interesting.

Lady Mary: Whew, I really dodged a bullet there.
Lady Edith, the middle sister: Wow, you really are a cold-hearted bitch. I see you've already gone into half-mourning. You may notice that I'm still wearing all black.

Normally, Mary would be the kind of character I hate, the beautiful snobby one. But I love her. Some of it may be residual awesome because Lady Mary is also Susan, Death's granddaughter, the nanny feared by the monsters under the bed, and I could totally see Mary riding Binky, Death's pale horse, and wielding a mean fireplace poker. But we do start seeing cracks in her icy facade that reveal a lot of vulnerability, and the surest way to make me crazy about a character is to first make me not like the character and then force me to change my opinion. Then I'll defend the character to the death.

After the Titanic, the new heir is Matthew, who is (gasp, shudder) a lawyer. This isn't a lawyer joke. They're just scandalized that he has a job. It's probably because his father set such a poor example for him by being a doctor. You know you're in bizarroland when the lawyer son of a doctor isn't considered a good catch until he becomes a potential future earl. Maybe this is why I like the series -- it counts as fantasy, as this place is even stranger than Narnia. The earl decides to make the best of the situation and invites Matthew to come live at Downton so he can get to know the estate he'll inherit and start studying Earling 101. Matthew's not entirely keen on all this and insists on continuing to practice law, saying he can earl on weekends. That baffles the family, mostly because they're not familiar with the concept of some days being different from others. (See, it's a total fantasy world. I bet they even have weekends in Narnia.) They also think it might be good if they can marry him to one of the daughters, which he's not keen on until he gets a look at Mary, and then he figures he might be able to take one for the team.

But the best thing about Matthew is his mom, a former nurse who is better known to Doctor Who fans as Harriet Jones, Prime Minister. She's totally on board with this nobility thing, even though she's awfully middle class about it.

Isobel: Isobel Crawley, future earl's mother
Everyone at Downton Abbey: We know who you are.
(that will only be funny to Doctor Who fans)

Isobel's nemesis is the earl's mother, Lady Violet, played by Maggie Smith, who is brilliant at every little moment, from her witty lines to her facial expressions to sitting in a swivel chair. Seriously, one of the best moments in the entire series consists almost entirely of Lady Violet and her first encounter with a swivel chair when she visit's Matthew's law office. Isobel likes to shake things up and Lady Violet wants everyone to stay the same. If she had her way, they might still be wearing animal skins and living in caves. It worked for their ancestors, so why should they presume to change things?

There's all sorts of other stuff going on, including the new valet that everyone hates until they all love him, except for the evil footman and the evil lady's maid, and then there's the sibling rivalry, the politically minded youngest daughter and the radical Irish chauffeur, the maid who wants to be a secretary and sneaks around studying typing, and the kitchen maid who doesn't realize she's totally barking up the wrong tree. Oh, and there's the dead Turkish diplomat in Lady Mary's bed, which becomes an ongoing problem (the fact of him -- he's not still there stinking up the house).

After a rocky start, Mary and Matthew actually become friends because they may be the only two people in this group who can carry on an actual conversation and say what they think to each other instead of maintaining the social facade. And then they fall in love and he proposes, but you know it can't be that easy. There's that issue of the dead Turkish diplomat that she feels she ought to tell him about but that she's afraid to tell him about, and then her mother has a surprise pregnancy, so he might not inherit, after all, and he thinks she's delaying because while she might marry the future earl, she won't marry a (gasp, shudder) lawyer. And then World War I starts.

That may have been a bad move. Well, yeah, the war was a very bad idea, but it also means that with Matthew off at war that makes it a challenge to come up with reasons for him to be around so we can have scenes of him and Mary gazing at each other. You see, he's moved on and gotten engaged to someone else, just as she's realized that she really does love him. So she keeps a picture of him under her pillow and prays for his safety every night, and gave him a cherished childhood toy to take to the front as a good-luck charm, but it's just because he's her beloved cousin (not too close a cousin, mind you, as they're not hillbillies or the royal family). And he takes her good-luck charm with him when he goes into battle and always seems to go to Downton, up in Yorkshire, first on leave rather than to London where his fiancee is -- but it's because of his family, of course, including his beloved cousin.

And they have lots of conversations along the lines of:
Mary: I'm just happy for you that you're happy being engaged to someone else.
Matthew: I'm happy that you're happy for me, since I just want you to be happy.
Mary: Well, I can be happy if you're happy.
Matthew: Then that makes me happy.
Lavinia (Matthew's fiancee): Oh, for heaven's sake, will you two just kiss already? I mean, I'm engaged to him, and I spend all my free time while he's at war or at Downton on leave writing romantic fanfic about you two.

I love me some good romantic pining, especially when it involves a man in uniform and a woman in lovely period costumes. I'm totally unspoiled, even though the second season has already shown entirely in England, but by the rules of war movies, Matthew might be in danger, what with that last heir thing and an engagement, but by soap opera rules, since he's in a romantic triangle, that might give him a chance of survival. I'm thinking there may be some shell shock, and we'll know which woman is right for him based on which one can deal with it. The fun thing is that his fiancee is actually likable and Mary is very nice to her, so there's no bitching. But there is still that dead Turk ...

Pondering Book Viability

I discovered last night when my decongestant wore off a few minutes into choir rehearsal that it's very difficult to sing soprano when your sinuses are totally blocked. I could manage up to an F (and probably could have done a G if one had been in the music) because I can do that without going into my head voice, but when an A above the staff came up, that just wasn't happening. When it's more of a throat or chest problem, I can sing the high notes and not the low ones, but when it's in the head, high is the problem. I sort of made it through the rehearsal of the piece we're singing Sunday, and then I bailed because the more I tried to sing, the worse I felt. I'm doing a lot better today, even without drugs, but I'm really tired of the sniffling and sneezing. I'm still not sure if this is a major allergy attack or a mild cold, but I suspect this will be a weekend of hibernation to let myself rest and recover.

In spite of the stuffy head yesterday, I got some serious work done in reviewing/editing The Book That Will Not Die. The more I read this book, the more I love it. I'm just still not sure how viable it is. I love reading it, but I don't really get the "this is it!" tingle that I got from Enchanted, Inc. I don't know if it's because this book evolved gradually over time instead of coming to me as a flash or if it's because I'm less naive and more cynical about the publishing industry (so that I know my "this is it" doesn't coincide with the industry's) or if it's a bad sign that I don't have that much confidence in this book in spite of loving it. It's not exactly "high concept" in that it's very difficult to describe quickly and convey what's cool about it. It's sort of a "Tam Lin" story, only contemporary and about sisters, and there's a whole plot about what's going on with the fairies that's the reason one was taken, and trying to get her back gets the other sister into even bigger problems.

I've also noticed that while this book isn't really a mystery (the main character knows what happened and just has to figure out what to do about it), it has a lot of mystery-like elements, so maybe I've been moving in that direction without knowing it, or maybe writing this book got me headed in that direction. We have the heroine who's something of an amateur sleuth in that she's not officially a cop or detective (even if she happens to know more than the cops about this sort of thing), and then there's the real police detective who's also on the case (without knowing what's really going on) and who's suspicious about the amateur. There's even a bit of police procedure. I don't think this could be published as a mystery, though (if it can be published anywhere). I don't normally do the beta reader thing, but I may get a sanity check from some friends with this book before I send it to my agent, just to see if I'm the only one who loves it. And before people start volunteering, that will be limited to people I know personally whose reading taste and experience I'm familiar with.

Meanwhile, I've been continuing my mystery market research reading. I appreciate all the suggestions, and many of them are going into my "to be read" notebook for potential pleasure reading, but for the purposes of the current exercise, I'm looking at relatively recent (still being published, preferably started in the past few years) series that are published as mysteries and shelved as mystery in bookstores and that contain paranormal elements. I'm trying to read as many first books in as many series as I can, and then I'm getting subsequent books for series I like or that I think get close to what I'd want to do. Because genre lines tend to blur, it's entirely possible that whatever I do could still end up being published as fantasy (if it's published at all), but right now it looks like the fantasy/mysteries published as fantasy are darker and grittier, more noir than cozy, and since "cozy" is more my style, my hope is that the mystery publishers could be more receptive than the fantasy publishers have been.

One area where I may tend to stray from the mystery norm is with the world building. In most of these books I've been reading, the heroine and maybe one or two (usually older) relatives have the same or similar paranormal talents, and the rest of the world is very normal. I haven't yet seen a situation where the world itself has a little more magic in it -- aside from the Charlaine Harris books that were initially shelved as mystery (though that may have changed after the urban fantasy wave hit and after the series became a bestseller). I guess I'm more drawn to writing the "normal" person in a crazy world than the "crazy" person in the normal world, or else I like the idea of being in on the secret in spite of being normal, because all my ideas lean more toward the curious outsider discovering the location's secrets than to the gifted person whose gifts get her in trouble. However, having a location with secrets does give a reason why the per capita murder rate in a seemingly sleepy small town is higher than that of most major cities.

I've also started reading some "how to write a mystery" books I found in the library, and that's had me rethinking my series idea. Now I have two potential avenues I might take with my amateur sleuth. With one, I think I would like it better as a reader, but it will be harder to do and require more research. The other would be easier to write and might even be more marketable, but I kind of think it would be less interesting in the long run and I wouldn't like the character as much. But I still have a lot of work to do before I get to the point where that's an issue.

And first I have to finish editing this book.

Avoiding Cliches

Every so often one of those Internet lists of things writers should never do gets forwarded around -- usually lists of cliches for particular genres. They mostly seem to be written as humor aimed at those familiar with the genre tropes, but are often presented, or at least forwarded, with the idea that if you do any of those things in your book, your book will be cliched, derivative and awful and is guaranteed not to sell. The last time I looked at one of those lists for the fantasy genre, I realized that most of my favorite books would never have been written or published if the authors or publishers had taken a list like that seriously. The fantasy writer Diana Wynne Jones wrote a humorous book on the cliches that come up in fantasy fiction (The Tough Guide to Fantasyland) and then wrote a whole series in which she proceeded to cleverly use all those cliches. There's a difference between a trope and a cliche -- my personal definition is that the trope is used as a framework upon which something original can be built, while the cliche stops at the superficial. How do you avoid doing it the wrong way and having a book full of cliches?

1) Know your genre.
The best way to avoid cliches is to know what they are and to see how the tropes have been used. You should have some working familiarity with what's selling in your genre today, but you should also look at the classics of the genre over the years and the roots of the genre. If you write mystery, you should probably have read some Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Raymond Chandler and the like, as well as going back to Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allen Poe. For fantasy, you need to have read Tolkien and Lewis, and it's probably a good idea to have read some folklore and mythology. Doing the background reading will help you recognize the common tropes and cliches that pop up in today's books. It will also help you know when a commonly believed cliche isn't really one.

For instance, one of those "fantasy cliches you should never use" list mentioned the farmboy who turns out to be the rightful king. I've read a ton of fantasy, and I can only think of one book off the top of my head where that happened -- Lloyd Alexander's The High King, in which the assistant pig keeper becomes the king. Maybe this trope was overused in bad fantasy books that haven't stood the test of time enough for me to have seen them, but I don't think it's common enough that it falls into the "must avoid" zone. It was fairly common in fairy tales for the third son of a farmer or woodcutter to win the hand of the princess and end up becoming the king, but he did that through feats of skill or strength, usually magically aided because of some good deed he'd done. It's far more common in fantasy for some unlikely person -- the farmboy, baker's assistant, neglected orphan -- to find out he has some kind of magical powers.

2) Think about the cliche or trope
These things are popular enough to be overused for a reason (and not just writer laziness). Going back to the unlikely person becoming powerful trope, that really makes for a more interesting story than a likely person becoming powerful. There's not much drama or contrast in the son of a king becoming a king or the son of a wizard who grew up surrounded by wizard stuff becoming a wizard. Then there's the wish fulfillment angle of the reader. Most of us aren't children of royalty or wizards, so for us to achieve great power it would have to be an "unlikely person" story. We can put ourselves in the position of a character and vicariously enjoy finding out we're special. Going to another genre, I was once part of a conversation in which a group of romance novelists were griping to an editor about the marriage of convenience cliche and how maybe it was outdated. The editor said to think of what it represented -- legalized sex with a stranger. Once you know and understand how the trope works and why it's popular, you may be able to find ways to provide the same appeal in a different way.

3) Do your research
A lot of the cliches get propagated through writers using other novels as their research material. Your work will come across as more original if you get beyond the commonly accepted facts to what's really true. If you're writing quasi-medieval fantasy, do some good research into the real medieval period. If you're writing mystery, research true crime and police procedure. You may find a telling detail that helps you subvert or elevate the cliche and that will make your work come across as a lot more original.

4) Think it through and flesh it out
You'll have a cliche if you just stop at that usual plot trope. Put more thought into it and readers may not even consciously notice the trope because they'll be too busy reading about your three-dimensional characters. Take the example of the farmboy who's really the rightful king (whether or not that's really a cliche). How did the rightful heir come to be living on a farm? Say the king saw a coup coming and sent his newborn son off with his most trusted soldier and a nursemaid, and they hide out on a remote farm. Did the soldier grow up on a farm, so he knows what he's doing, or has he always been a soldier? What does he think about farming? What's his relationship to the nursemaid? Does the prince know who he is or does he think they're his parents? Does the soldier teach him soldier stuff, or is he so paranoid that he doesn't dare give even that much hint about his identity? What does the farmboy prince think about being on a farm? What are his ambitions? What does he think when he learns who he is? Do his ambitions change? How does his farming background affect the way he goes after his throne? You could probably get a dozen different stories based on this trope depending on the answers you give these questions. The key is to not stop at "farmboy who's really a prince" but to make him a real character with real goals and motivations who is affected by his environment.