Val Tobin's Blog, page 27
April 16, 2016
Nightmare: #atozchallenge
Warning: this is a rant. Some readers may be offended.
I’m talking living nightmares here, not bad dreams. I watch, nightly, scenes of ravaged cities that, a few years ago were bustling, modern metropolises teeming with people going about their business and tourists photographing historic buildings. I watch, too, over-loaded boats ferrying people, men, women and frightened children, across the Mediterranean or Aegean seas. And my television also shows me lines of similar people trekking across country or, more often these days, camping in unbelievably squalid conditions beside hastily erected fences. Many of these dispossessed people are the former citizens of those wrecked and ruined cities.
I cannot begin to imagine what it must have been like to see one’s home become a war zone. By ‘home’ I do not just mean the house one occupies with one’s family, I mean the familiar neighbourhood where you conduct your business at…
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April 15, 2016
M is for Memory #atozchallenge
Memories fascinate me–not so much the memories themselves as much as their presence or absence.
Why do we remember? Why do we forget? This article on About.com has some answers, but much of what there is to know about memory remains elusive.
In my Valiant Chronicles, I played around with memory and how it influences people.
Assume for a moment that reincarnation is true. Most people don’t remember their previous lives, but their previous lives affect their existing one. Maybe that would explain instant attraction or repulsion to another person. Perhaps it influences life choices.
Carolyn and Michael are haunted by glimpses of their previous lives through dreams. Their current life repeats a pattern established in previous lives. This life, for them, is another opportunity to break the pattern and change the future.
When I wrote the story, I was what-iffing about reincarnation and how it might work.
If past lives exist and birth into a new life erases the memory of what went before, how does one break the pattern? If a lesson must be learned before you can move on, how can you learn from your mistakes if you can’t remember them?
And what if the memories that do exist have been implanted?
In the sixties and early seventies, the CIA was involved with mind control experiments in their MKUltra project. In A Ring of Truth, I explore what the impact would be on people who have their memories tampered with.
The questions I asked myself were: Are you your memories? What if they’re not your real memories? Who are you, then? How does it change you when you discover the truth? If your past contains horrors you thought you’d lived through, what does it do to you to find out they never happened?
Multiple characters in The Valiant Chronicles confront these revelations.
Dani in Injury faces something similar when she learns the truth about her childhood. Not only is her belief in what happened in her childhood based on lies her own mother told her, she has some repressed memories. When all this comes out, it changes who she is.
Memories affect our lives, but we also have a choice in how we react to what happens to us. One person will become bitter, while another will become more resilient. Exploring what shapes people has always fascinated me, and I enjoy exploring it in my writing.
KU Scammers Attack Amazon’s Free Ebook Charts
This makes me furious.
Last month, Amazon was caught up in a crisis at least partly of its own making when bungled attempts to deal with a growing Kindle Unlimited scammer problem resulted in the sanctioning of innocent authors.
Amazon has since apologized, and has also pledged to beef up its response to the KU scamming mess – but questions very much remain about whether Amazon is taking the problem seriously enough. A quick check shows that some of the main scammers are still operating, under the very same author names and book titles that were reported to Amazon in late February and early March. Which is very disappointing.
A couple of weeks ago, I was chatting with Phoenix Sullivan about the problem and she told me about something else she was witnessing – scammers taking over the free charts in the Kindle Store. I could see what she was describing and invited…
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For Writers, Some Notes On The Martial Arts
Great explanation of various martial arts.
Most people don’t write martial arts into books. The details of how and why things work in martial systems is difficult to distill into simple words. I wrote a post sometime back about how to translate the physical aspects into something that was a bit more entertaining than “A hammer-fist to the back of the head followed by a palm strike to the nose and claw to the face.” Whether or not it helped anyone out, I don’t know, but it was a good exercise for me.
The basic gist of that post was you need to have an understanding of how and why things work and the ability to turn it into fiction without sounding like a pompous ass or ITG. Today I’d like to take a slight turn and look at the macro world of the martial arts instead of the individual movements of the martial arts.
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April 14, 2016
L is for Love #AtoZChallenge
Shortly after I selected love as today’s topic, I read this in Genuine Lies by Nora Roberts, the novel I’m reading at the moment (well, one of the novels I’m reading at the moment): “‘Delrickio is evil.’ Kenneth brought his gaze back to hers. ‘It’s in his blood, in his heart. Murder, the destruction of hope, of will, are only a business to him. He fell in love with Eve. Even an evil man can fall in love. . . ‘” (259).
I found that timely. Part of this discussion was to be about the capacity for love in villains or anti-heroes.
All of the novels I write contain love relationships in some form or another, whatever the genre. Whatever type of love characters experience, love always factors into a story somewhere.
It’s difficult to picture evil characters falling in love, but depending on the nature of the evil, they can and do. Sometimes that’s their saving grace. Sometimes that’s another character’s destruction.
When I first got the idea for The Experiencers, I contemplated the possibility that a man who murders for a living could fall in love. Could someone like that have a wife? Would he love his children?
According to the book Writer’s Guide to Character Traits by Linda N. Edelstein, Ph.D., “A Professional Murderer is generally married and has a family who is completely unaware of his professional activities” (152).
My main character, Michael Valiant, has a wife and, while he doesn’t want to have children, he loves his wife. One of the villains in the story, Jim Cornell, also has a family. Michael’s partner, Torque, does not. Each of these three men display a different capacity for love.
Michael keeps his activities a secret from his wife, but loves her in a real way. As we find out in A Ring of Truth, his love has been tested in the past. This ability to love provides him with the moral fibre he needs to make the decisions he does when he uncovers the Agency’s agenda.
One of the controversies in The Experiencers is the swiftness with which a relationship develops between Michael and Carolyn. There’s a reasonable, logical explanation. You may or may not pick up on what it is in the first book, but it’s there. It’s not “love at first sight” nor is it Stockholm Syndrome.
Cornell views his family more as status, as part of his estate, as his legacy. His wife remains home and should be grateful to him for what he can provide. From his boys, he wants respect. But his love doesn’t include fidelity, which becomes evident in A Ring of Truth.
Torque doesn’t have a family, and has sex with a variety of women for his own pleasure. He doesn’t want anyone to get close. This reflects on his partnership with Michael.
Getting back to love at first sight, I’m a believer, so my romance novels reflect it. I define love at first sight as an undeniable physical attraction that draws two people together into a relationship built not only on physical chemistry but an emotional connection as well. The relationship may begin with the physical, but it has the potential to evolve into unconditional love.
That doesn’t mean there won’t be problems in the relationship, but the arc leads from mutual attraction to mutual love.
I found developing Arnie’s character particularly enjoyable. Arnie was the satyr I mentioned in a previous post. I won’t say anything more about what happens to him, but it was fun getting him where he had to go.
In my opinion, though, evil characters don’t have the capacity for true, unconditional love. They can’t, especially if they’re sociopathic. But unless the character is Sauron, they will be able to achieve some level of love, though it won’t be expressed in a healthy, mature way.
Works Cited:
Edelstein, Linda N., Ph.D. Writer’s Guide to Character Traits. Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 2006. Print.
Roberts, Nora. Genuine Lies. New York: Bantam Books, 1991. Print.
April 13, 2016
K is for Killing #AtoZChallenge
Yes, D was for Death, but that was the death of characters in books you’re reading. It was more from the reader’s perspective.
K is for killing characters in novels you’re writing (not about killing your darlings, which is something else entirely).
Sometimes, a character has to die, and it’s a shame. I hate doing it, but it becomes inevitable when you’re writing certain types of fiction: horror, thriller, or murder mystery, for example.
The Experiencers has quite a substantial body count. The story involves assassins, so deaths are to be expected. When the deaths occur, though, they flow organically from the story, and each one has a point.
However, after the novel was published, I had one reader contact me to say that one of the characters who was still alive should die in the sequel. At this time, A Ring of Truth was written but not released, so he didn’t know yet how the story would end.
His reason for this was that the character slept around, and he said story rules dictate that sluts/satyrs should die. According to this reader, the character should repent but die a horrible death.
While this “rule” does, perhaps, apply in cheesy slasher horror flicks, my Valiant Chronicles are not cheesy (I hope) and are not horror (despite some horrifying scenes). If that character were to die, it would be because that’s where his story fate led him. It wouldn’t happen as a punishment for loose morals.
Based on that logic, most of my characters should die a horrible death. While not all of them sleep around as much as this character, they’re not Puritans. For example, Dani, in Injury, is emotionally damaged and has low self-esteem. She suffers from abandonment issues and her hook-ups, in the beginning, are a search for a father figure.
People are flawed. Characters are flawed. They should grow, evolve, mature. If they don’t, there should be a logical reason why they’ve stagnated despite all they’ve gone through. Perhaps that stagnation is the point of the story. But should their flaws lead them to death despite their growth (or instead of it)? I don’t think so.
Making extramarital sex punishable by death in a story smacks of didacticism, and I prefer not to go there. It’s difficult, though, because as a human with values and a moral code, I struggle to remain objective when characters behave in ways I wouldn’t. Ideally, the characters have beliefs and a moral code they adhere to, and they should, at times, clash with those of the writer. How else can you get well-rounded characters?
Some characters, of course, reflect the writer. Gillian in Gillian’s Island has neuroses with which I’m intimate. All my characters, to some degree, contain a piece of me (some, I’m sure, unconsciously). But when I create characters, they are separate from who I am. When they make a decision, it’s not always what I’d have done under similar circumstances.
What was interesting about this reader’s comment was that he didn’t say the same about a main character in The Experiencers, Michael Valiant, whose job description included killing people. Michael had his justifications for it, just as the other character had his for sleeping around (including with married women). But apparently murder doesn’t need to be punishable by death in this reader’s eyes.
Most of the time, readers complain of a writer killing off a favourite character. Rare is the reader who complains when a character lives. In this instance, it ignited a fascinating examination for me on character killing that otherwise wouldn’t have happened. It didn’t change my stance on the matter, and it didn’t change the fate of the character, but I enjoyed the resulting discussion.
April 12, 2016
*Injury*by Val Tobin*5-Stars
A nice review of my novel Injury. Thank you, Peg Glover.
Injury is a well-written and suspenseful romantic tale.
Daniella Grayson was a successful actress. She was rich, famous, and had a following of fans, yet she was troubled and unhappy. Having grown up in a dysfunctional home with an abusive mother and an absent father, Daniella sought comfort where she could. Unfortunately, Daniella chose the party life, with alcoholic drinking and unhealthy relationships. True love was nothing, but a fairy tale to Daniella, until Robert Copeland (Cope), became more to her than just a chauffeur. Not everyone, though, was happy with Daniella’s new love life, especially an obsessive, dangerous, and cruel ex-lover.
The two main characters, Daniella, and Cope were easy to become involved with because their characters were well-developed and their dialogue natural. Cope was my favorite character. I loved his caring and understanding nature. Daniella won me over. She worked hard to heal her inner demons and stop…
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Never a Hero To Me
Tracy’s story is an important read for anyone coping with abuse or helping survivors.
THIS WEEK’S OTHER FEATURED POSTS, “STEALING CHERRIES,” BY MARINA RUBIN AND “PASSAGE OAK,” BY K.M. DEL MARA, CAN BE FOUND BY SCROLLING DOWN BELOW THIS POST.
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THE BOOK: Never 
a Hero to Me.
PUBLISHED IN: 2011.
THE AUTHOR: Tracy Black.
THE EDITOR: Kerri Sharpe at Simon & Schuster.
THE PUBLISHER: Simon & Schuster.
SUMMARY: Tracy Black was only five years old when her mother was hospitalised for the first of many occasions, leaving Tracy in the care of her father. His behaviour, seemingly overnight, changed from indifferent to violently abusive and, for the next seven years, Tracy was sexually and physically abused by her father, his friends and her own brother. All of the men were in the British Armed Forces. Tracy’s father compounded the abuse by sending her to baby-sit for his paedophile friends – whilst their own children slept in other rooms, these men…
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J is for Joy #atozchallenge
When I was studying literature at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, I took the fantasy lit course because The Lord of the Rings was on the reading list, and I love LOTR. I’d read it dozens of times by then, and instead of taking the opportunity to remove the book from the to-be-read list, I read it again.
When you read a book from a literary perspective, the experience is different from when you read it for pleasure. On the one hand, reading it while knowing you have to pick it apart sucks enjoyment from it. On the other hand, it adds fascination and the opportunity to explore ideas and concpets you didn’t consider before.
In this particular read, what struck me was how Tolkien illustrated the dichotomy between joy and sorrow. One of the themes in LOTR is that you can’t have great joy without great sorrow. While that can devolve into a “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” type of discussion, I thought it was an interesting perspective.
What if all you had was joy? Would you stop appreciating it? Would you recognize it? Were we born to learn through suffering?
Part of a pagan wine blessing I think is profound says this:
“To learn you must suffer; to live you must be born; to be born you must die; the beginning, continuation and the end, over and over;”
The learning through suffering part always bothered me. I don’t want to accept that, but that doesn’t make it false.
When I attended Doreen Virtue‘s Angel Therapy Practitioner® course in Hawaii in March of 2008, a comment she made stuck with me. She said (paraphrased): “You can learn from joy as well as you can from sorrow.”
In essence, if I interpreted correctly, she was saying that we don’t need sorrow to learn the life lessons we need to learn.
I explored all this in The Experiencers. My character, Carolyn Fairchild, believes joy can teach you what you need to learn. Yet she has to survive in a world that includes great sorrow. We all do, whether or not we believe sorrow has its place.
What do you think? Must you experience sorrow to learn and grow, or would joy be enough?
April 11, 2016
I is for Ideas #atozchallenge
Where do you get your ideas?
People ask that question of writers so frequently, some writers hate to hear it. Some hate it enough to respond with sarcasm when it comes up.
Perhaps I’m weird, but I love answering that question. Thought processes have always fascinated me, so when an idea for a story pops out of the ether, I enjoy picking apart how I got it.
Every one of my stories started as an idea, and the germ started from a series of thoughts.
For example, Storm Lake, my short horror story, came out of thoughts I had when I saw trees up at our cottage with huge burls. I had no idea what a burl was at the time (about twenty years ago, which tells you how long that idea sat purcolating in my brain). I didn’t learn anything about burls until I sat down to write the story. So, of course, my writer’s brain made shit up about what those enourmous bulges on the trees were.
Me being me, the first thought was that they looked like something was gestating in there. That’s it. Once that seed dropped, it expanded from there, and I thought it would make a great basis for a story.
What happens when I get that little idea seed, you see, is that I then expand on it by asking “what if?” So, what if those trees were gestating something inside them? What’s in there? How did it get in there? What happens when they mature? Probably nothing good, right?
And so Storm Lake was born.
If you’re unfamiliar with the story, this is the one-sentence summary for it: A girl and her little brother struggle to save themselves when trapped in an isolated marina by flesh-eating creatures.
The romantic suspense story Injury also has an interesting origin.
Injury‘s one-sentence summary: A young actress at the height of her career has her personal life turned upside down when a horrifying family secret makes front-page news.
The idea for Injury came to me years ago, but the seed for it came even before that. When my daughter was in elementary school, she had to write a biography of a famous person. She chose Marilyn Monroe.
Part of the assignment was to create a list of interview questions for the person. In the list my daughter compiled was this: If you could ask your father anything right now, what would it be?
That question lingered in my psyche for years. What would Marilyn have said? How did it feel for her to have grown up without a father? Did she wonder if he saw her in her movies and think about her? If you examine her life and relationships, her lack of a father impacted her tremendously.
My writer’s brain took over, and I what iffed the hell out of it.
What if a young woman who thought her father had abandoned her persued a career in movies to try to get his attention via her fame? What if these abandonment issues haunted her throughout her life, molded who she was, formed the person she became? Then what if she found out he’d never abandoned her? How traumatic would that be? How would that change her life and how she viewed herself?
From that, I created Daniella Grayson.
Every story has a story.
