K.M. Carroll's Blog, page 2

The Three-Jayesh Problem

It doesn’t happen to every author, but I have seen it happen more than once. They have that one character that they put into everything. Not just a series character, but this one character who jumps books and genres because the author just can’t leave them alone. Roleplay characters do this a lot. 

Unfortunately, I have one of those characters, and his name is Jayesh Khatri.

I didn’t set out to write a character who would be in everything. No, I started out to write a fanfiction based on a game called Destiny, and I needed a character who was smart enough and dumb enough to hold an argument with a god. Destiny is basically another version of Star Wars, where humanity’s races are every color of the rainbow, even coming in shades like ‘blue’ and ‘robot’. I hadn’t spotted anybody from India yet, so I looked up the Indian equivalent of John Smith. Behold, Jayesh Khatri was born.

That first fanfic was a philosophical exercise that chewed on the finer points of the villain’s argument that he was actually the hero. Jayesh proved to be as naive and as spunky as I had wanted. But it wasn’t until the next story that he began to stick in my brain.

The second story happens months later, and Jayesh is a starving recruit on his first mission. His reputation is in shambles because of claiming that he argued with a god. It was part of his character that his faith got him canceled. This was when this character’s hooks settled in my brain and wouldn’t let go. Jayesh eventually got a whole series of fanfics where he goes out and fights aliens, dragons, and demons because his faith says it’s the right thing to do.

Well, I got tired of Destiny, as you do, but Jayesh still had a few stories left in him. So I reworked his character and imported him to my superhero fantasy books, After Atlantis. He proceeded to take over that series, too. He was more of a healer there instead of a soldier, but his faith still got him into hot water.

I was learning to draw at the time, and I needed a strong visual for this character. Final Fantasy 14 was free and has a robust character creator, so I downloaded that and made a satisfactory Jayesh. But I wanted some better clothes for him, so I started playing the game and got hooked. Your character is the main character of the game, so it’s like this odd shadow-version of him happened there.

So far we have:

Destiny Jayesh

After Atlantis Jayesh

Final Fantasy Jayesh

Destiny Jayesh

My writing group has a tradition of writing Christmas stories each year. One year, for fun, I swapped characters with my friends and we wrote each other’s characters into our different universes. So now there’s different versions of Jayesh in my friends’ universes. In particular, Shari Branning wrote a couple of stories with him, and so did Alexandra Gilchrist. Seeing Jayesh plunged into Shari’s fairytale magic world and Gilchrist’s gritty urban fantasy worlds was incredibly fun. I wrote spinoffs of both.

Jayesh is one of those characters who I didn’t mean to put into everything, but dang it, he is. And I love him in every incarnation.

The DOSA Files: Blog tour stop!

10 Authors, 10 Stories, Endless Ways to Save the Day!

The Award-Winning Supervillain Rehabilitation Project series expands with this new ten-story anthology of exciting superhero (and villain!) tales.

Enter a world of superpowered heroes… and villains. Of epic adventure and hope.

In this collection you’ll find tales of humor, action, and suspense. Meet brave heroes, quippy villains, and desperate vigilantes.

All featured stories are PG or lower, making this a great read for all ages, but especially for fans of superhero fiction, heartfelt moments, and snarky humor.

Featuring New Superhero Stories from Award Winning authors as well as exciting new voices in the genre.

Are you ready to save the day?

Available on Amazon June 27th! Get your copy: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D5JS32QJ 

Add it on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/212327283-dosa-files 

Featuring stories from:
H.L. Burke, Sarah Pennington, Amber Gabriel, Karen Eisenbrey, Rena Gail, Jake Tyson, K.M. Carroll, C.O. Bonham, Michelle L. Houston, and Jenelle Leanne Schmidt.

Since I also have a superhero book series with After Atlantis, I thought it’d be fun to write a story set in Heidi’s world. Her superhero world is more Marvel-like, with the supers (or super-abled, aka sables) being overseen by a branch of the military, DOSA (Department of the Super-Abled). Like all government organizations, there are heroes and villains within it, and the books follow the ups and downs of a core group of superheroes and the villains they rehabilitate. They’re great fun.

My story is called A Supervillain Named Heartache. It’s about a guy who thought he was a hero until he realized that his sister was a big-time criminal who had been using him. His powers go haywire and he kills a lot of people, including her, and now he’s in prison. But he’s eligible for rehab, so he agrees to enter the Supervillain Rehabilitation Program. Most of the story is about him and the team of supers who take him in and work with him. And he’s not really a bad guy, he always thought he was a hero, he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Unfortunately, the Mexican drug cartel that his sister was working with track him down, and now he has a chance to redeem himself … or accidentally kill his new team by letting his powers get away from him once more.

I wrote this story because I was interested in seeing what would happen if a character with healing powers accidentally used them to harm others. And if a character like that could be reformed/redeemed. It’s actually a lot of ground to cover in a short story, and I think the idea could fill a whole book someday.

Check out the other stops on our blog tour!

And let me let you in on a secret: scattered throughout the various blog posts are six clues. Find them all and solve the puzzles to get a secret passcode. That passcode will give you entry to this form: https://forms.gle/55fAGSXAyyjDEFCw9 

One lucky puzzle solver will win a mini-paperback library of titles from our authors (US shipping only).

One lucky puzzle solver will win a mini-ebook library of titles from our authors. (Winners chosen July 1st, 2024)

June 20 th :

https://www.hlburkeauthor.com

https://jenelleschmidt.com

June 21 st :

HTTP://Cobonham.com  

June 22 nd :

https://authorambergabriel.com/blog

June 23 rd :

https://corinnejet.wordpress.com/2024/06/23/hl-burke-exclusive-interview/

June 24 th :

http://creatingforcreator.wordpress.com 

https://kmcarrollblog.wordpress.com

June 25 th :

https://www.rachaelritchey.com

June 26 th :

https://kareneisenbreywriter.com/blog/

June 27 th :

https://Whichwaywriting.com

Don’t forget: once you’ve solved all the clues and discovered the passcode you can enter to win one of two epic prizes here: https://forms.gle/55fAGSXAyyjDEFCw9 

The clue:

Oycosug’rce addogiinbg dgjryenamt, Osipmebcnivawl Qagggecnct, abtutt stswso glgeststsegrss irnecmmaaiin. Jhmesrse niss ilkehthtsesr nnnunmnbnenr sfgicvwe: IL. Opvlsesaasje ihiusrsrby. Ntphmiincggs shgaavxe xddexvsoalgvjead oipnptao aasbbssoslsustse vcvhsasoss. Occbobmbmsiststeeee hmsecmsbjesr Hgilaianht kiss bsftfufcnk nimn htehse feslgesvnastsokr, aavndd LI htkhlisnsk yhae nmbisgchct gbce pcsrcysisnag.

The actual bestseller lists, August 2024

I was laughing to some friends that if people could see the real bestseller lists, they’d be shocked at what people actually read. So I decided to get on Amazon and take snapshots of the major genre categories for fun and profit. These are only current as of August 2024, but it looks like Sarah J Maas will be with us for many years to come, so they may not change all that much. Also, these are only the Paid lists. The Free lists only have stuff on them as long as people’s promos last.

First off, the big one: Contemporary Romance:

Going out on a limb here and saying it’s not ALL erotica, but you can see a couple of potentials on there at 1, 4, 5, 9, and 10. Hee.

Next up, mystery and thriller:

I have no idea what these books are but they look like fun summer reading.

Next, fantasy:

Looks like Sarah J Maas’s dirty books are holding strong. I have no idea what the other books are, but somebody’s reading them by the truckload.

Next, sci-fi:

Scifi seems to be the usual suspects.

Last of all, Young Adult:

Young Adult also seems to be the usual suspects.

And there you are, the bestsellers as of this moment in the major genres. If you go looking into the subgenres it gets a lot more interesting … and swamped with erotica. But Amazon tries to hide that from public sight as much as possible.

For instance, here is Scifi First Contact:

I guess there’s no question what humanity would do if we ever met aliens.

When you read your own books aloud to your kids

So last month I finished the 10th book of my After Atlantis series. It was a ton of work, and it was such a relief to publish it and be done.

Then my older kids said, “You know, Mom, you need to read this aloud to the little kids. They haven’t heard the whole series before.”

It dawned on me that I started publishing this series in 2020, when my 9 year old was 4. My middle kids definitely wouldn’t remember these books, especially the early ones. I asked them if they wanted me to read them the books, and they agreed. So I began the journey from Guardian’s Awakening, when Tane goes from being the beta muscle of a superhero team to being the Guardian of the Mercurion, allllllll the way through the Vid:ilantes series with James courting HeroTube hits and stumbling across the Lost Atlantean Isles, to the big crossover book, all the way down to Tyrona, when the exiled Emperor of Atlantis makes his big play.

I’ve read my other books multiple times over the years, because I love the moments in them (the big crossover book, Mercurion, is definitely a favorite). But this is the first time I’d read Tyrona since I published it. I was kind of scared. All I could remember was how hard I worked on it, all the feedback, the parts I ripped out and rewrote. I didn’t know if the *story* held up.

Anyway, today we finished reading Tyrona aloud. Oh man. Oh man oh man was it good. It starts off with a bang and is just action, action, action all the way through. It pays off every major plot point from the other books: James’s ill-fated viral video, the Quetzelcoatl Jayesh tamed, the rising unrest on HeroTube, the Lighthouse finally deploying from its pocket dimension, the source of the Emperor’s power, the Aspected and the Ascendants, it’s all in there. Each new payoff made me so happy. It’s like … the way the final book of a series should be, you know? Every character from the main cast gets a moment in the spotlight. Everybody gets to be badass. Everybody pays a price of some kind to build to the Emperor’s ultimate defeat. The way the Emperor is defeated is so incredibly Michael Bay that I read it going *did I really write this? This is the most epic thing I’ve ever read*.

I sighed in satisfaction as I closed that last book and put it on the shelf. Ten books, each more or less a standalone, but with a heckin’ metaplot and a heckin’ payoff. It’s actually a wrench to leave those characters behind, because in my mind, James and Jayesh and Tane and Cirrus are all still there, still having adventures. One day I’m going to have to go back.

Publishing by poll: SciFi is the winner

Over on TwiX, I ran a poll about what book I should write next. I just finished After Atlantis, after all, and I needed some direction. Here’s the poll:

As you can see, scifi won by a surprising margin. I was sure that the other ones would be more popular. Maybe that’s just the demographic of people who follow me on there, I don’t know. Anyway.

I did just so happen to have an almost-finished scifi I wrote a few years ago. I dug it out again, dusted it off, and gave it a proper ending. My beta readers and editor all enjoyed it, so without further ado, I present to you In a Mirror, Darkly.

When an interstellar object known as the Mirror lands on Mars, a team is sent to investigate. The lead scientist, Kai Stellan, at first thinks the Mirror is an inert object, despite being made of theoretical materials–until it seems to sample his bioenergy. Two of the marines accompanying him have the same experience. 

While being taken back to base under quarantine, they are attacked by an unknown alien ship: the Coldwight, who have pursued the Mirror across the galaxy. But the Mirror didn’t just draw energy off the human team–it made them immortal. Despite being shot down, they manage to hijack the alien ship. Knowing that Command has questionable intent for their future, they flee Mars, only to wind up as prisoners on the alien mothership.

Now they must escape the Coldwight, steal a ship, and get back to Earth, all while avoiding recapture by their own side–assuming they don’t start a war between Earth and the Coldwight along the way. Available now!

Final book of After Atlantis series: Tyrona

With the release of book 10, my After Atlantis/Vid:ilantes series is officially complete.

The Emperor of Atlantis has begun his invasion of Earth. When the erstwhile supervillain Dr. Regulus loses his entire robot assembly factory to a sudden attack of Atlantean Exiles, the Atlantean Isles prepare for war. The leaders of the Lost Isles, James Chase, Tane Casak, and Jayesh Khatri prepare their islands for the battle they’ve known was coming for so long.

As the Exiles emerge from portals and swarm the islands with a fearsome mechanized army, HeroTube fights back alongside the Atlantean Defense Force. James Chase fights to rescue his sister from the Exiles, who have captured her and are using her earth powers against them. Tane Casak deploys the Mercurion against the giant mecha of the Exiles, and victory seems assured … until the Emperor brings the death island Tyrona out of its prison dimension. Now the heroes of the Lost Isles and HeroTube alike must fight for their lives against the Emperor of Atlantis and his superweapons.

Because after three hundred years, Atlantis alone will not satisfy the Emperor’s lust for conquest.

Buy on Amazon or other stores!

Here is all ten books in all their colorful glory! They are what I call superhero fantasy, which is basically just urban fantasy with a brighter coat of paint. There is a culture of superheroes and villains who play to HeroTube to earn those sweet ad revenue clicks. However, all the superpowers everyone has comes from the sinking of Atlantis, and the series is drawn more and more back toward that earlier world. Modern day Atlantis is an island chain in the Caribbean and is mostly just a tourist attraction, but the ancient magitech is mined and sold to arms dealers around the world. All this is fine until mysterious supersoldiers in magic-resistant armor appear and cause havoc, preparing for the return of the exiled nation of Atlantis from their prison dimension.

The final book, Tyrona, deals with the return of Atlantis and the huge battle against the Evil Emperor. All the heroes team up and get their moments of awesome.

Concept art for the final battle, when the evil island of Tyrona unfolds all its mechanical arms and shadow tentacles for a final beatdown.

So now I’m trying to decide what to write next. I’d kind of like to do some more fairytales, or maybe something else with werewolves. My kids want some kids books, so I’m thinking about that, too.

The petulant reader’s guide to YA buzzwords

I am a petulant reader of young adult fiction. Ten or fifteen years ago, YA was super hot (we’re talking the 20-teens). There were actually decent books being written in it, and it sold like mad. That’s when we got stuff like Cinder, the Raven Boys, Hunger Games, Mazerunner, and a bunch of other stuff that got turned into movies.

But nowadays the genre has become hugely Flanderized.

Flanderization is the process through which a complex fictional character’s essential traits are oversimplified to the point where they constitute their entire personality, or at least exaggerated while other traits remain, over the course of a serial work.

Wikipedia

YA is romance now. Bodice-ripper romance. It was always mostly written and read by middle aged women, but now that’s even MORE so. Keep your kids away from this genre, ladies and gentlemen.

To simplify the advertising language used around young adult books, I have broken it down for you, so you have a clear idea of what any modern YA book actually contains:

This is a light read: This book is shallow as a puddle.

Fast-paced: You are literally reading the author’s outline.

Swoony romance: Hackneyed shallow relationships that focus only on the physical. There is kissing with groaning. I don’t know about you, but groaning happens … NOT WHEN KISSING.

Quirky heroine: Stupid, self-centered, and annoying.

She’s Not Like Other Girls: she’s actually exactly like other girls, because she’s angsty, depressed, listens to music on headphones, has a secret power, and is an artist.

Inclusive: People in wheelchairs, disabled people, and lots of maudlin treatment of these things because WE MUST BE INCLUSIVE OR SOMETHING.

Gritty: BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD AND DEATH

Heartbreaking: The love interest dies, the little sibling dies, the mother dies, the dog dies.

Sensitive: I GOT SENSITIVITY READERS TO TELL ME IT WAS OKAY GUYS!!!!!11

Dark: The main character pointlessly dies because NIHILISM.

Complex characters: There are politics in this somewhere between the kissing.

Rich: There are lectures about the evils of society or something.

Hotly anticipated: Three people on Goodreads added it to their Want To Read list.

Cinematic: This might work as a movie but as a book it kind of sucks.

Lyrical Prose: Since most modern authors have never read a poem in their lives, I can only assume it refers to lyrics such as:

SOMEBODY ONCE TOLD ME THE WORLD IS GONNA ROLL ME
I AIN’T THE SHARPEST TOOL IN THE SHED
SHE WAS LOOKIN’ KINDA DUMB WITH HER FINGER AND HER THUMB IN THE SHAPE OF AN L ON HER FOREHEAD

All Star by Smashmouth

In conclusion, young adult fiction is not for young adults. Actual young adults should steer far, far away from this genre and go read either middle grade or adult fiction, particularly older books where they still had action adventure. Go read John Grisham, David Baldassi, or James Scott Bell, or if you want some supernatural thrillers, Lee Child.

First book review of 2024: The Curious Quest by E. Phillips Oppenheim

A friend of mine tracked this book down because she sort of enjoyed the movie, the Amazing Adventure, by Cary Grant. We’re talking an old book this time, folks! It’s so old it’s on Project Gutenburg!

The story follows a bored young millionaire, Ernest Bliss, in the roaring 20s in London. He goes to the doctor to find out what’s the matter with him, because he’s bored of life and his digestion and sleep aren’t good. The doctor tells him contemptuously that easy living is killing him, and that the only cure would be to go out and get a job and live on what he makes. The doctor sneers that this young man’s character is so weak, he’d never last a week. Then he refuses to shake Bliss’s hand.

His pride stung, Bliss proclaims that he’ll start this very day to earn his living, leaving home with only five pounds in his pocket. He then sets the following conditions. He won’t touch his own money to benefit himself for 12 months. If he uses his money to benefit someone else, he will immediately cut ties with that person so their success doesn’t indirectly benefit him. If he gives up any time during the 12 months, he has to pay the doctor 25k. If he makes it through all 12 months, the doctor has to shake his hand and apologize. The doctor scoffs and says it’s the easiest bet he’s ever won.

So Bliss leaves his assets in the hands of his lawyer, and his plush apartments in the hands of his manservant, and sets out into London to earn his keep for 12 months. From here, the book turns episodic, with each of the jobs he gains and loses forming each episode. He gets jobs selling stoves, he works as a chauffeur and a cab driver, he works odd jobs loading and unloading carts. Along the way, he finds himself working for illegal gambling dens, blackmailers, and other amoral people, and finds his own character tested. (The best one is when a guy hires him to pose as himself to perform bank fraud on himself!)

These jobs are not isolated incidents, however. He makes friends that remember him, friends far different from the idle rich he used to run around with. He sees his old idle rich companions in a whole new light as they unwittingly cost him jobs and trample over him.

And he gets a girl. Their romance is quiet and understated in that wonderful way of old books, and he’s utterly devoted to her, and she to him. But he won’t marry her until his 12 months are up, because he wants to give her the best life he can. Meanwhile, she tries to find work as a typist, and in at least one situation, Bliss has to rescue her from an employer whose only interest in her is physical, if you know what I mean. He goes off on long jobs and sometimes doesn’t see her for weeks, then when he gets back, she’s unemployed and being ‘slowly broken on the wheel of poverty’. She had a man who wanted to marry her, but she left him because she was in love with Bliss. The harder things get for her over the course of the year, the more she wants to just go back to that other man, because then at least she’ll have food and security. Bliss begs her not to do it and just last it out a little longer … and of course he can’t tell her why.

This relationship is what ends up driving the tension of the book. Will she trust him? Will they make it? Will they hang in there?

Well, this being an old book, the answer to all those questions is yes. The ending of this book is wonderful, to the point where my kids cheered as I read it to them.

My other friend and I declared this a lovely Christmas book, because the 12 months begin and end on December 12th. Christmas doesn’t feature in it, but the ending is so happy and heartwarming that it fits the holiday very well. I highly recommend the read for the sheer uplifting entertainment value.

Resolutions and goals 2024!

Welp, it’s that time of year again–time to make tons of new goals that we utterly forget about once we get to February!

Art recap 2023! Mostly it’s comic panels because I drew a ton of comic pages this year.

My goals for 2023 were as follows:

I’d like to play more games with my kids and husband, maybe stream some. I need to get my oldest kid driving (screams in terror), and get this house finally fixed up. I also want to plant a big garden and do some canning this year.

Well, didn’t get my oldest kid driving. We did some work on the house but it needs more. I did plant a big garden, which was more or less murdered by the heat dome we had over the summer (52 days over 100 degrees with an average of 106! And our AC unit died!). Once the heat cooled off in the fall, my garden came alive again and produced tomatoes and peppers for me like crazy until the frost killed it. I have buckets of ripening tomatoes in my kitchen and I’m trying to figure out what to do with them. The problems you love to have, right?

I also played videogames with my kids all summer. Mostly, I wanted to play some older games that passed me by while I was stuck with tiny babies. So I played A Hat In Time, which is a wonderful game as long as your teenagers play the boss fights for you. I played Undertale, which is a great game as long as your teenagers play the boss fights for you. Then I played Final Fantasy 14: Heavensward for my teens, which we did every night like a movie. They were traumatized by the death of a side character and have told me they never, ever want to see that cutscene again. But I got them to start playing the game with me, so we’re almost through the base game at the moment. I really want to take them all the way to Shadowbringers and watch the trauma fill their eyes as they open the window and see the sky ablaze.

Ryan and I had played Destiny 2 faithfully for the past few years, but the last expansion was so bad that we gave it up. He’s dabbling in Warframe and I think I’m almost ready to give that a try. Gotta get my scifi fix somewhere, even if I don’t really care for the Warframe aesthetic and how long you have to grind to unlock literally anything.

Anyway, that’s it for 2023, and I think it wound up being quite nice, the year’s challenges notwithstanding. For next year:

Another garden, bigger, badder, and better mulched than last year!

Actually can stuff from my garden!

Play more games with my kids and husband!

Publish the two books I have in the hopper!

It’s funny, I always have two books that I write over the course of the year and publish the following year. This year, it’s:

The final book of After Atlantis, tentatively titled Tyrona. It’s the big battle the series has been leading up to. It starts with Exile soldiers sneaking through portals and it ends with giant robots and death rays. I’ve been chewing over it for months because I have to get it just right, and my beta readers are holding my feet to the fire over it. It’s the last book, and it has to be the biggest, best one of all.

Heart and Crown. So uh, this book was kind of … well, I wrote it as a challenge from a fellow author. We both wanted to try to write books to get into a particular small press, kind of a publishing competition. So I went and read a bunch of the publisher’s books as I was writing Heart and Crown, and I realized that this publisher will only publish books with on-screen s3xytimes. Every one of their books has it, even books with teenagers (minors!). So I wound up writing this entire fantasy action romance that this publisher will not take because I don’t write bedscenes.

It’s about the son of the captain of the guard who is low-key in love with a princess because they grew up together and went to the same school. She’s going to be married to a wicked prince to end a war … except the prince ends up getting assassinated and it looks like the princess did it. So the hero has to save the princess except there’s some plot twists, and also there are aliens and demons and magic. (Heart and Crown refers to the way the magic system works.) It’s a fantasy story set on an alien planet that humans have colonized, so it has that Pern scifi fantasy flavor. My beta readers say it’s the best book I’ve ever written, so I’m hopeful that other people will like it, too.

Anyway, that’s my 2024 goals, and they seem pretty achievable. I like keeping my goals simple because I tend to forget them pretty fast, so it’s better if it’s stuff I was going to do anyway.

Writing for the non-visual reader

There’s this lovely little thing called aphantasia that is getting more attention online. They say it’s quite rare, but as three people in my writing group have it, I seem to think about it more often than other people.

From Clevelandclinic.org:

Aphantasia is a characteristic some people have related to how their mind and imagination work. Having it means you don’t have visual imagination, keeping you from picturing things in your mind. People often don’t realize they have it, and it’s not a disability or medical condition.
…

The available research indicates that aphantasia is uncommon overall. Experts estimate between 2% and 4% of people have it. However, research on this condition — including how many people have it — is limited.

It’s also difficult to determine who has it because many people with aphantasia don’t realize they think in a way that’s different from most people. People with aphantasia may not realize that most people can “see” images they generate in their minds. Some with aphantasia say they thought using the word “see” in that context was a metaphor. Because of this, aphantasia may be more common than research currently shows.

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/25222-aphantasia

My personal theory is that the inability to picture things in your mind comes from a profound deficiency in omega oils, which your brain requires to run properly. However, I don’t have any studies to back this up, only observations that my aphantasia friends improved when they took some.

Anyway, modern authors are told by modern writing books and bloggers to get more and more visual in their descriptions. Make it like a movie or a videogame, we are told. Readers are used to visual media, so make books as much like movies as possible.

However, this leaves people without visual minds in the cold. When you describe your heroine as having brown hair, brown eyes, of medium height, and 35 years old, that basically conveys nothing. It’s a string of facts. The nonvisual reader will make a note “average” and go on with the story, hoping you can clue them in.

When consulting with my aphantastic friends, they pointed out a few very interesting things, and I wanted to share them with my fellow authors.

What they can picture are characters and emotions. Give them a feeling or a personality to connect with, not a look. For instance, this was judged to be an excellent nonvisual description:

That unsureness, though he did not know it, was one of the things that years of being a disappointment to his father had done to him. He had always been miserably aware of being a disappointment to his father. His mother, whom he could scarcely remember, had been beautiful; but Justin, always unfortunate, had continued to be both very like her and very ugly, with a head too large for his thin shoulders, and ears that stuck out defiantly on either side of it. He had spent a good deal of his childhood being ill, and as a result, when the time came for him to go into the Legions, as the men of his family had always done, he had failed to come up to the needful standard of fitness for the Centuriate. He had not minded for himself, because he had always wanted to be a surgeon; but he had minded deeply for his father’s sake, knowing himself more than ever a disappointment; and became even more unsure of himself in consequence.

The Silver Branch, Rosemary Sutcliff

This passage only gives us a few cursory physical details: thin shoulders, a head too big, too big of ears, overall ugly appearance. But those pale in comparison to the emotional impact of being a disappointment to one’s father, and as a result, losing all self-confidence. The nonvisual reader can picture this clearly, because human emotions are universal. They may not be able to see the outside of the character, but they can feel his soul.

This is an interesting challenge for modern writers, because it runs counter to most things we’re taught. Keep description brief, we are told. Remove exposition in the name of show, don’t tell. Never explain, only show visuals, show visuals, show visuals. This leaves a portion of readers in the dark. They can’t see those visuals, and as a result, there’s nothing left to connect to. Characters are given so much visual description that their inner description is forgotten.

I opened a random Kindle book I’d recently sampled and found this description:

Gus got onto his knees and looked up at me. The same old Gus. Pale face, and nervous eyes that never looked in any one place for long. His black hair hung down from under a dirty orange cap. He was maybe five years older than me, but he looked…old. I clenched my fists. “Why are you here, Gus?” He got up, brushing newspaper and wet leaves off his cargo pants. Working himself up to say whatever it was he had come here to say. He was shorter than me by a lot, so he had to look up.

Empowered Agent, Dale Ivan Smith

This description is so cursory that a nonvisual reader will see it as a list. Pale, nervous, black hair, orange cap. Maybe not bad for a very minor character, but it’s implied that this character will be important. We could have used another paragraph of the viewpoint character expositing about him, maybe show the POV character’s emotions about him. We got a little from earlier in the scene, but it was mostly “I’m angry this guy is contacting me because I’ll be breaking parole”.

Meanwhile, older authors like Charles Dickens had this down to a science. Without combing back through Bleak House, I could describe verbatim “the woman who always talked about the orphans in Africa, and was always focused on helping the orphans in Africa. Meanwhile her own eight kids dressed in rags, ran about in a shrieking pack with no discipline, her house was filthy, and her husband came home from work and just sat in the corner with his head against the wall until there was a discolored spot there.”

My nonvisual friends winced at this description because they know this woman. They don’t have to know a single thing about her hair or her clothing, because her character shows through in her actions and motivations, and how she treats the people around her.

This kind of description is a lost art among modern writers. I suppose you might still find it in “literary” fiction, but genre fiction could benefit from it, too. One of them said, “I have trouble with physical descriptions. Because I can’t actually see, I do better if the physical description is short and the character description is long. Your description of the terrible mom in Bleak House actually did more for me than any physical description would, because I knew her.”

One of my nonvisual author friends said:

Physical description tied to character works. I think that’s why Dante (the main character of Baptism by Fire by Alexandra Gilchrist) is so vividly real to readers (at least me [image error]). The key points of his appearance are tied down in some way to his behavior. The way he dresses, the more proper way he speaks, the disdain he gets for his incongruous youth.

Gilchrist

From the book in question:

“Agent Patrick McCoy, I’d like you to meet Agent Dante Brand, top agent of our PNI Division.” The director gestured to the young man sitting on the corner of his desk. Brand couldn’t be more than twenty, with an easy smile, flaming red hair that was fashionably spiked, and strange golden eyes that glittered as if they harbored a secret joke. He wore an incredibly expensive suit unlike anything Rick had seen before. A deep blue tailored cashmere suit jacket, detailed with hand embroidery on the sleeve cuffs and lapels, covering a burgundy silk shirt. The kid literally wore white kid gloves embroidered with an orange and yellow design Rick couldn’t make out. 

Top agent, my eye. Probably the son of some senator or something handed a made up rank to make daddy happy. Rick crossed the room, forced a smile, and extended his hand to the other agent. “Please, call me Rick.” 

“I’m Dante, if you please.” The other agent took his hand. The gloves were soft, but the kid’s handshake was firm, and his voice quietly confident. He had a faint accent – French, maybe – but only as much as you’d expect from someone who had been in the country a while. So a diplomat’s kid maybe? Rick cringed inwardly. He was going to be assigned to babysit some pampered rich brat as penance for punching the guy who got his kicks murdering his last partner.

Baptism by Fire, Alexandra Gilchrist

There is a video that my writing group constantly references, especially as regards Young Adult fiction. The heroine is described as “not beautiful and not ugly, but just sort of plain”, but what does that even mean? If you have a nonvisual mind, I’d say you wind up with exactly the cartoon character in this video:

Apologies to all your YA writers out there who have written this exact thing.

“I don’t want to be a cookie maker! I want to fight wars with the high elves!”

Anyway, this is a topic that will require further unpacking and thought, so I’ll revisit it in the future. I hope it’s given you some food for thought, both as a reader and a writer! If you have aphantasia, what kinds of books do you enjoy?