Insight into Young Adult Fantasy - a guest post

On Sunday, Nov. 8, Virtual FantasyCon will tackle young adult fantasy, and in this guest post, Cheryl S. Mackey digs into the genre and outlines the rules of the game for writers and what readers can expect.

Young adult isn't just for the younger crowd. Like The Hunger Games or Harry Potter, it can appeal to a wide range of ages. The reason it is called "YA" is due to the themes and the appropriate content. Great YA books often become classics for all ages. Cheryl clarifies these issues for writers and readers alike. 

Take it away Cheryl S. Mackey.

An Insight into Young Adult Fantasy

Young adult fantasy is a genre readily enjoyed by readers of all ages despite its name. Just look at recent books that have shot to stardom like the Harry Potter series, or The Hunger Games, or The Mortal Instruments. Books for teens have exploded into the limelight, turning adults into rabid fans as well. However, at the heart of the genre the themes relating to the lives of young adults, even in a fantasy setting, is key.

Like any genre there are pros and cons to it and those may differ depending on if you are a reader or an author, or both. A big pro would be the amount of material out there. There are a lot of YA fantasy books. Also, a lot of variety if you add in the sub or side genres and then you have reading gold.  A big con… this also gives authors and readers a lot to wade in and through to either find the right book or have your book found.

Readers can expect a lot of variety and there are two different takes on what angle YA fantasy (or even other genres… mystery, horror, supernatural, you name it) can approach the reader. Both approaches work well on their own merits. Either you can make the characters teens, like Harry Potter, and have their coming of age antics spur character and plot growth, or you can make the book readable by teens (think age appropriate themes, PG13), but have the characters more mature…act, react, and behave in far more adult scenarios (Think The Hunger Games). Of course, there is no 100% black and white on this, but most if not all books I’ve read fall into either of these angles. The commonality between them, especially in a fantasy setting, appears to be the slower march along the plot and a lighter introduction of details. You won’t find ten pages describing a chair in a house in YA anything. Teens, and even adults, just might not have the patience/attention span. Even The Hobbit may be too wordy for some of today’s teens.

Meshing the young adult themes with fantasy themes is richly rewarding for both the author and the reader. Fantasy by definition, has no boundaries. If you can imagine it, you can write or read it. Zombies, aliens, angels, witches, dystopian society, you name it, are all accessible to YA readers in a fantasy setting (for clarity, fantasy can also be linked to science fiction! Think Star Wars). However, when I study the YA fantasy books popular today I’ve noticed another binding element, realism.

Realistic fantasy has nothing to do with the idea that everything in the book must be real. There are loads of people who’d love to pet a unicorn, but not seen that yet. Realism in fantasy has everything to do with taking that fantasy world, whatever it is, and making it plausible, a seamless integration of the reader into the unreal world. This means fleshing out a world/universe to great detail, yet getting it across to the reader in ten pages or less (remember the chair?). Culture, religions, environment, races, music, writing, architecture, science, history, you name it. This is a difficult job for a YA fantasy author. The good ones do it very well and the great ones make rabid fans out of everyone. 

Realism must also apply to characters and sliding into stereotypes and clichés is a pit of no return. Is it out there? Yes. Is it avoidable? Yes. Is it always realistic to avoid it? Nope. It’s up to the YA fantasy author to walk that line and walk it well so that the stereotypes and clichés do not overpower the plot and characters to the point of eye rolling and mic dropping. A great example of a stereotype that worked well is Hermione in Harry Potter as the nerdy-fact-bookish geek. Her role in Harry Potter was obvious. Give Harry (and the other ‘good guys’) the means to an end. Rowling kept Hermione from being eye roll worthy by giving her other roles to fill and other needs as a character. She evolved into a strong, independent, woman that could kick serious butt as well as memorize all the spells Ron needed for class.

Another side of realism is just how real to portray teens when they are the main characters/focus of the story. Drugs. Sex. Alcohol. Abuse. Gangs. Lies. Foul language. Cheating, etc. No one, even teens, denies those exist in our world. Some read fantasy to escape those realities and some read those realities because that is what can and does happen with teens in our world. There is a subtle divide on just how far to portray reality, especially in other genres and it is up to the reader and author to decide where the line is to be drawn. Should realistic portrayals of cultural and societal behaviors exist. Yes. Should it be forced onto a reader or author who doesn’t want it? No. Know that including such realisms is a personal choice as an author, and depending on what type of fantasy you are writing, it might not even be an issue.

In the end, YA fantasy is a thriving, vital part of the bookish world. The genre fills a need of teens (and adults) for age, character, and plot appropriate stories in a fantastical, but believable setting.

About Cheryl S. Mackey

Cheryl lives in Southern California with her husband and two sons. Her books The Unknown Sun and The Immortals parts 1 and 2 are both young adult fantasy and available at Amazon.

She has a MFA in Creative Writing and enjoys games, reading and, of course, writing.  She currently has a flash fiction story published online at The Prompt Magazine.

Her favorite genres to write and read is YA Fantasy closely followed by YA Paranormal and she would love to dabble in Sci Fi, Steam Punk, and Dystopian.

So, what makes Paranormal... paranomal? - a guest post

Monday, Nov. 2 is Paranormal Monday at Virtual FantasyCon. It's the place to meet authors, artists and bloggers who delight in ghosts, vampires and other things that go bump... in broad daylight half the time. Just as with the other days of FantasyCon there are games to be played and prizes to be won. I'm wondering if I could win the cosplay competition for this day by dressing up as an invisible character.

Probably not. But I have an expert on hand with a guest post from prolific science fiction and fantasy author Jonathan Yañez to explain what exactly it is that makes paranormal the genre of the strange and unexplained. 

Take it away Jonathan.

In an age when writer's are asked to place their work in a specific genre, which genre do we choose? Just to name a few genres we have; paranormal, dystopian, steampunk, fantasy, science fiction, supernatural, epic fantasy, etc... There seems to be an army of option all bleeding into one another and making for a confusing decision. I'll spend the next few paragraphs giving you a better idea on what defines the paranormal genre and separates it from all the others.

First the actual definition of paranormal as defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary:

PARANORMAL - very strange and not able to be explained by what scientists know about nature and the world."Still not super clear, right?

As writers I think we have done a better job by narrowing in on a more thorough answer. Novels tagged as paranormal have been written in our modern day world with the introduction of paranormal elements such as; werewolves, vampires, witches, angels, ghosts, and so on. Examples of books that fall in the paranormal range could be Twilight (a paranormal romance) or The Mortal Instruments Series.The aspect that makes this genre so different and unique is the freedom to mix our everyday lives with the fantastical. It twists what we know and turns everything we take as ordinary on its head. It makes us ask questions like, "what if?" and challenges us to reimagine what we thought we knew.

About Jonathan Yañez

Jonathan Yañez is the author of over a dozen fantasy and science fiction novels. His works include, The Elite Series, The Nephilim Chronicles, Thrive, Bad Land, Steam and Shadows and The DeCadia Code. He has been both traditionally and independently published with his works being adapted into; ebook, print, audiobook and even optioned for film.

You can connect with him by clicking the following links to his website, facebook page or twitter account; jonathan-yanez.com, Facebook or Twitter.

http://www.jonathan-yanez.com

https://twitter.com/JonathanAYanez

http://www.facebook.com/JonathanYanezAuthor

Thanks for that clarification Jonathan.

Bookworms, I hope to see you at Virtual FantasyCon next week, exploring and enjoying wild stories among the booths. You can find Paranormal Monday here.

The first excerpt from Path of the Betrayer - Kai Linden

Here's a little treat for readers of The Kyrennei Series.

Path of the Betrayer (Book Five of The Kyrennei Series) is published Kindle users and will shortly be available in Barnes and Noble, Apple and other stores. Here you can read an expert from the middle of the first chapter to whet your appetite. 

I generally recommend that readers start at the beginning of series (The Soul and the Seed) because its world and characters are best experienced over the course of the story. But some readers here may be new to or long absent from the world of The Kyrennei Series, which looks eerily like our own world with a few subtle--yet nonetheless crucial--differences. 

If you're new, you need to know that the Addin is a power cult that can forcibly take your will. The Addin Association is a conglomeration of powerful political and business leaders who run today's society. The narrator is Kai, a twenty-two-year-old Meikan student who has lived all his life in fear of the Addin. He was captured by them when a Wisconsin farm where he was hiding was attacked. He now expects that the Addin will take him and force him to become one of them. There is no hope of psychic resistance. Any human being can be taken and controlled by the Addin no matter how much they resist. 

Kai is in love with Maya, a girl who is a member of the non-human Kyrennei race that the Addin are systematically annihilating because they disrupt Addin power. She was captured as well and Kai has every reason to believe she is already dead or soon will be.

Excerpt 1 - Kai Linden

After the shower, I expected to be taken back to the cell. Instead they put the restraints back on and led me up a flight of stairs and into another hallway that looked less like a prison and more like an office building. After a few turns the guy in front opened a door into a windowless room where three older men sat at a table drinking coffee.

The smell was overwhelming. The food they’d given me hadn’t been much and I was starving.

My heart pounded and I clenched my fists inside the restraints. This would be where they would take me.

I tried to control my breath. I didn’t want them to see how scared I was. The big guy leered at me whenever my muscles resisted him, and I knew he’d take pleasure in any display of my fear.

The men at the table watched me and sipped their coffee. My head was lowered, my hair hanging low so that they couldn’t entirely see my face.

Then one of the men at the table said, “Take that thing off his wrists.”

I remembered him from the attack on the farm. He had a wide smile with perfect teeth that reminded me of someone running for election.

“He might get violent, Mr. Bloom,” the guy behind me said.

“We can handle it. Thank you, Balshaw,” the man named Bloom said.

I thought of trying to grab a weapon. The two guys with me had guns at their belts. But I knew I wasn’t that fast. It probably wasn’t worth the energy. I felt too weak and tired to try—even for the hope that I might die with my soul intact.

The guy behind me unhooked the restraint and I kept looking down, avoiding eye contact with them. Fear was turning to confusion. If they had wanted to take me they could have.

“You’re name’s Kai, isn’t it?” Bloom said. His voice was low, almost friendly. “I know you hate us. Your kind have always been prejudiced that way. But I thought maybe you’d take some coffee at least.”

He poured from a silver pot on the table into a mug and put it in front of a fourth chair, his movements slow and deliberate.

“Come on,” he said. “Sit down and drink some coffee. We’re reasonable people and we’re not going to hurt you.”

I didn’t move from where I stood or lift my head. Did he think I was a complete idiot?

I didn’t know what he could be playing at, but the idea that I would now think he was benevolent was laughable. This man had overseen the destruction of Kaitlin’s farm. They had killed and taken my friends. He had done something with Maya. Of course, I hated him.

There was more silence. They waited. I rubbed my wrists, but then I had no place to put my hands. The track suit had no pockets. Eventually I ended up holding onto my own elbows. I didn’t care anymore if it made me look frightened. They knew I was scared.

I imagined I could feel their power buzz in the room like a live current. They could let me have my hands free, because there was no question of the outcome of any fight.

One of the other men at the table cleared his throat. At last Bloom sighed.

“All right,” he said. “Don’t drink the coffee then. But it’s your loss.”

He took a sip from his own cup and then leaned back, looking at me with his broad smile in place.

“Let’s be blunt here. You know I can get your cooperation if I want it.” He snapped his fingers and his eyes mocked me. “But that isn’t what I want right now. The fact is that there are things I want to know and there are things you want to know. I think we could come to an understanding about that.”

“If you think you can scare me into telling you about the Meikan sign, you might as well go ahead and kill me. You’re wasting your time,” I said.

Bloom and one of the other men at the table snickered under their breath and then downed slurps of coffee to smother their laughter. The third one didn’t change expressions but sat watching me with a scowl of undisguised disdain.

“Oh, sure, I can see why you’d think that,” Bloom said. “But believe me a lot has been tried in that department, for many many years. I don’t think you can tell us about it. The Kyris put some sort of spell on you Meikans so that you can’t speak coherently about it. Certainly if your people could, someone would have. Back in the Middle Ages, you know. All the various methods of torture and all that. But you don’t make any sense when you do try to tell it.”

I pulled in air through my mouth. “Then why don’t you get it over with. Anything else… you can make me do what you want. I know that.“

“So, you want to join, the way that other kid did?” Bloom said. “We’ve got a veritable flood of converts, it looks like.”

I didn’t answer. Was he toying with me? A cat playing with a mouse?

“How about this,” Bloom said, his voice musing, curious. “I know there must be things you want to know about your friends and such. You ask a question and then you answer a question. You can even go first. One question for free but after that you have to give an answer in order to get another answer.”

“If you want information, why don’t you just take me?” I struggled to keep my voice under control. I was gripping my elbows now to keep from shaking.

What a bastard! He was having fun.

“Is that your one free question?” Bloom asked. His eyes were the color of gravel.

I didn’t think they’d answer anyway, but I couldn’t help it. There was a question that burned inside me, every second. If there was any chance that they would answer, I had to try.

“No,” I said, my voice steadier. “Where’s Maya? Maya Gardner, the girl you—”

Bloom smiled and the others at the table smiled too, even the meaner-looking guy a bit. “You mean the Kyri girl you seemed so fond of? She’s here. In this building,” Bloom said without hesitation.

“Is she all right? What did you do to her?” I was desperate. I had lifted my head, my hands releasing their grip on my elbows.

I didn’t care that they probably wouldn’t tell the truth. My heart was in my throat. I knew I couldn’t do anything to help Maya, but the thought that she might be nearby, that she might still be alive…

“One question,” Bloom said. “That was the deal. You want to ask another, you have to answer one of mine. And you could always sit down and have coffee while we do it.”

I clenched my fists again. My back felt like it would burst with tension. It made no sense. But if they would answer…

“What’s the question?” I asked.

“Were there other Kyris at that farm? Most of your friends there ended up dead, I’m sorry to say,” he said, clicking his tongue with obviously fake regret.

“You took Jamaal!” my words came out with hot fury. I couldn’t hold it back. “You have to know that already. You could test their blood even if they were dead anyway. Why ask me?”

“Because I want to ask you,” Bloom said, his voice still smooth, curious. “Why is my business. If you want to ask your question, you answer mine.”

It wasn’t like I was giving away any sensitive information then. I was being interrogated by the Addin and yet they weren’t getting anything out of me that they didn’t already know. I wouldn’t have thought I’d ever answer their questions voluntarily but… under the circumstances. Well, what did it matter?

“No, there weren’t,” I said. “Satisfied?”

Their smiles didn’t waver.

“Now, come and sit down and take a drink of the coffee and I’ll answer the other question,” he said.

I took a slow step toward the table. The smell of the coffee was intense and I felt cold where I stood. What did it matter really? Maybe if I tried to act like I wasn’t afraid…

Read more of this story in Path of the Betrayer. You can get the Kindle book on Amazon and get the book at a discount until Friday, Oct. 30, 2015. Happy reading!

If you're new to the series, keep in mind that you can get one book free by signing up for my hearth-side email circle here. Take a look at the pages for the series, primarily The Soul and the Seed. If you've already read one but not the others and have yet to get a free copy, sign up and then send me an email to let me know which book you'd like and what format. 

The Inner-Life of Science Fiction - A guest post on fantasy science fiction

It's time to get ready for FantasyCon, the huge virtual fantasy convention, where you can hobnob with authors, artists and bloggers, play games, dress up and win prizes (mostly money and books). The way the convention works is this. There is a sub-genre topic for each day from Nov. 1 to Nov. 8 and the event will focus on that genre for the day. There will be a scavenger hunt that takes you on a tour of some of the hottest new stuff in the genre and lets you solve mysterious clues for prizes. Then there are the booths, where you can visit authors and artists, find out about their work and often play more games. 

The important thing to remember here is the daily subgenre themes. I'm blogging a guest post that will whet your appetite for each day and introduce you to an exciting new author in each subgenre.

And the first day (Monday, Nov. 1) day features...

Science fiction.

No, that's not a typo. Science fiction can also be part of the fantasy genre, if it's science fiction that includes fantasy. Think Star Wars and Dune. 

This time the guest post is by Alesha Escobar, author of... Take it away, Alesha!

There’s a certain sense of mastery we feel when we’re able to exert our power over nature through technology. The universe is not man-made, but technology certainly is. What drew me to science fiction, whether it was a film or book, was the idea that future technological advancements presented were just believable enough to be possible, though they had no place in our world today.

What also grabbed my attention was the range of stories--from flying among the stars to discovering intelligent alien life. The possibilities seem endless regarding the types of characters and situations we could explore in a science fiction story.

However, until recently, it didn’t occur to me that most of all, science fiction is really about ourselves. Yes, we are drawn to the scenery and technology, but even more fascinating is how we interact with the scenery and what we do with the technology.

In my recent contribution to the Masters of Time anthology, I set my story in a future where time travel was possible. And while the question of time travel (as well as its consequences) were interesting, what became central to the story was how my protagonist used this as a catalyst to assert his independence and vindicate his humanity.

A story can have the sleekest starships and the most exotic alien life, but if there aren’t characters there to wrestle with deeper questions and issues, then it all becomes window dressing. This is why I enjoy great science fiction stories. They will make you both think and feel, especially as you turn your gaze toward the possibilities that await us in this vast universe.

About Alesha Escobar

Alesha Escobar writes fantasy to support her chocolate habit. When she's not chasing around her children, she enjoys reading, cooking, movies and crafts. The first book of the Gray Tower Trilogy, The Tower's Alchemist, is currently free in the Kindle store. Alesha also has a short story, The Black Dagger Gods, published in the New Myths anthology by HDWP Books. Her most recent work, Logan 6, can be found in the Masters of Time anthology by Creative Alchemy, Inc.

Blog: http://www.aleshaescobar.com

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/AuthorAleshaEscobar

Twitter: http://twitter.com/The_GrayTower

The Magic Within - A guest post on fairy tales

On Thursday, Nov. 5 the virtual fantasy convention FantasyCon will focus on fairy-tale-inspired fantasy. It's a delightful--though not always light--sub-genre and made all the more whimsical by author Rick Haynes, who was chosen to define it with a blog post. I'm hosting the FantasyCon sub-genre posts here to give readers a little taste of the magic in each type of fantasy. After reading  Rick Haynes's post, you'll be itching to find something with a touch of old, primal magic.

Take it away Rick Haynes

Fairy-tales ... from me?

After all, I mainly write medieval fantasy. And where would I start?

At the beginning, I suppose. But of course, didn’t we love to hear fairy-tales from our parents?

When I was small, my dad told me a different story every night, and every single one came from his own imagination. Looking back I realise how many were inspired by fairy-tales.

With the vivid imagination of a small boy, I had dreams of standing in front of the fire-breathing dragon and slaying it with one slash of my huge sword. Dad even made me a wooden one. And what about Jack and the Beanstalk? I loved it, but my mum was none too pleased when I cut down her giant sunflower.

Of course fairy-tales were told many, many, years before I emerged into the world.

Take the classic story of Little Red Riding Hood as an example. This tale was originally dated back to the 17th century. But latest research has suggested that it could be over 2600 years old, because a similar tale has been found in China. The only differences being that the main protagonist was a small boy and the wolf was replaced with a tiger.

Now that is amazing, for stories from that time, and for centuries afterwards, were never written down. Whilst subtle alterations have occurred and the tales have evolved over time, the basic story has endured.Not long after my father read me that story I met a large Alsatian in our street. I took one look before running all the way home, screaming wolf at the top of my voice. When my mother introduced me to the neighbour’s new dog and he licked me to death, I realised the difference between fiction and truth. I think I slept better that night.

And I still smile at the memory.

One of the most prolific writers of his era was Hans Christian Andersen, yet he is more famous for his wonderful fairy-tales; my favourite being - The Ugly Duckling. What a great tale, and with a nice moral. You can be ugly but you can change, and become beautiful. I’ve always believed that the story should not be taken too literally, as I am sure that he perceived that beauty could be found on the inside as well as the outside.

So, what do we expect from our fairy-tales?

Like any other story we demand a beginning, middle, and an ending, preferably a happy one: anything to keep us interested all the way through. But we don’t always get what we want, do we? And even then it’s not enough, is it?

We want, no, demand more, don’t we? 

We want a princess or three, evil villains, brave princes and dragons with long tales and sharp teeth. And we wish for, elves, imps, dwarves, orcs, and fairies; not forgetting bucketfuls of fairy-dust. For you can’t have a fairytale without fairy-dust, can you?

With all the characters leaping from the pages our fantasies soar like an eagle, and all boundaries disappear in a trice.I wonder what would happen if we could bottle up the power of a child’s imagination. The mind boggles with the possibilities.

We love fairy-stories, and even though the tales get bigger in the telling, we pass them on to our children, and our grandchildren. We never worry about the effect on our young because we know that the tales never hurt us. 

And as we see the magic in their eyes, we remember. Because fairy-tales will never die as long as we continue to allow the magic of the words to flow from generation to generation.And as a teller of tales, I should know ... shouldn’t I?

About Rick Haynes

I was born way back before time meant anything. One zillion reincarnations later, I think I know who I am, but I am prepared for a second opinion. I have always enjoyed medieval fantasy tales.

Once I started, I could never put them down, often reading them into the early hours. I found myself living the characters that jumped out from the pages, and I always hoped that one day I could create my own world, full of vile creatures and true heroes. And after the passing of too many seasons I finally began to remove the ideas from my head and commence writing.Several fantasy short stories arrived, and I found that the ideas came along quicker than I could type. My Drabbles also received a dose of fantasy magic, yet in the background, the dream of a novel grew.It has taken many a month to produce a story that had lain dormant for so many years. Evil Never Dies - professionally edited - is my first novel and is a classic tale of good and evil set against a backdrop of green lands, snowy mountains and dusty plains. I show the horrors of war, as well as the loyalty, love and fears of all those involved. I believe that all men are flawed, and I leave it to my readers, to decide whether I have succeeded in showing their strengths and weaknesses, their compassion and cruelty. For war brings out the best and the worst in even the gentlest of men. 

I have let my mind wander freely over the words, and I hope that you will enjoy your trip into the world of my imagination.

http://profnexus.wix.com/rickhaynes

Answer to the Wizards of FantasyCon - Author interview

I was recently interviewed by the wizards of FantasyCon, the virtual fantasy convention taking place between Nov. 1 and Nov 8. This is a huge event of authors, artists, bloggers and fantasy readers who want to get together, have fun, be awesome geeks, play games, win prizes and yak about great books. The can join eight different sub-genre events here. 

The interview posts can easily get buried on Facebook, so here is a transcript of what I had to answer. As it turned out it wasn't really as intimidating as it sounds. If you're on Facebook, please share this interview by clicking here.

A FantasyCon Mini-Interview with Arie Farnam, Author and Blogger.

Q - What are you favorite fantasy stories?

AF - I was teethed on Tolkien. I don’t remember the first reading of The Lord of the Rings. It was just one of those things that was always there. I read everything, including The Silmarillion as a teenager. (I wrote bad epic poetry in imitation when I was thirteen.) I also loved David Eddings’ Belgariad.

As an adult I like The Wheel of Time series, Harry Potter, and The Magicians. I also like stories that bring bits of fantasy into other genres like Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series and probably anything that crosses fantasy with a contemporary thriller without resorting to vampires.

Q - What inspire you most about fantasy as a genre?

AF - I love “what if” logic games. (And I’m the kind of reader who will throw a book at the wall if the author doesn’t play fair.) I also love the interplay of magic, spirit and reality in more contemporary fantasy. Fantasy is truly inspiring to me when it makes you look at reality differently. I’m also a sucker for Elves and Dragons. I have seen them written poorly, but I will do most anything for a top-notch story involving Elves and/or Dragons. I like literary and historical fiction too, but fantasy adds fun and tension that really inspire me.

Q - Have you written any stories? If so, please share them with us.

A - I am finishing up the sixth book in The Kyrennei Series. It’s closest to urban fantasy or sci fi/fantasy. Take a contemporary thriller and cross it with epic fantasy. Add a telepathic power cult who secretly rule today’s world and their ancient enemies—a non-human race that’s supposed to be extinct. Mix in a group of underground Pagan freedom fighters, ancient myths, secret languages and a distinctly international cast. That’s it in a nutshell.

It starts out with The Soul and the Seed. A student named Aranka Miko is kidnapped, then rescued and pulled into the clandestine struggle because of a fluke in her genes. She has to choose between being a victim in hiding or fighting back in a way that will surely get her killed. At the core it’s a story about finding authentic hope and inner freedom when you’re massively outgunned.

Beyond that series, I’m currently working on some adventure books for kids from Pagan and earth-centered families. And I’ve just started a near-future dystopian novel.

I love to connect with friends, readers, authors and artists on Facebook. Please share this interview with your friends who like to read.

A publisher's view of fantasy - Guest Interview

I will be a panelist and have a booth at the mammoth virtual fantasy convention FantasyCon coming up (November 1 - 8). This is a new kind of book-lover's event. The kind of nerdy conventions that hard-core fans used to spend thousands to attend can now be had by anyone with an internet connection. There will be fantasy games with real prizes (money, books and swag). There will also be at least 200 real authors to meet and a ton of free and discounted books to explore. It will truly be a fantasy paradise. 

Each day of FantasyCon is devoted to a sub-genre of fantasy. And some who aren't fanatical about fantasy might not even know what some of them are. To gear up for the event then, I am going to host a series of guest posts from FantasyCon authors clarifying the different sub-genres over the next few days. First, however, I am going to post an interview with another kind of FantasyCon participant--a publisher.

Please welcome Carly McCracken of Crimson Cloak Publishing. And thank you for joining us today, Carly.

1. From a publisher’s point of view, how would FantasyCon help you and the authors in your company?

FantasyCon helps by making more people than we would normally have access to, aware of us, our books, our authors, our brand, and our mission.

2. Can you see online events as part of an author’s role in the writing world?

Absolutely!  Authors need to continually put themselves in the public's (and potential customers’) eye.  This is just one more way to achieve that!  Plus it has its advantages.  For instance, an author doesn't have to actually LEAVE his home, his family, his life to participate, and he/she can potentially reach a MUCH bigger audience.

3. What do you look for in a good fantasy and sci-fi manuscript?

It MUST have good story flow.  You know, the kind that keeps you interested through almost every step of the entire book.  It should have a well-rounded story, built with interesting and memorable characters.  It doesn't have to be action-packed to accomplish this either!  A good plot, characters that seem to come to life, and good dialog around a campfire can accomplish this as well as a good action scene.  It SHOULD have some action somewhere, though.  :)

4. This genre is filled with an abundance of sub-genres. In your opinion, what is the future of fantasy and sci-fi? How does this genre stand up against the many other genres in the industry?

Wow, that's a tough question.  My personal favorite is Sci-Fi/Fantasy.  I think this genre has the biggest possibilities, but even a good children's book is enjoyable if written well.  The future is hard to predict at any time, but I don't think many parts of Fantasy Genre will suffer.  They have been around a long time, and I think they will continue to interest people.  I think there are a lot more people interested in Fantasy than any others.  The only one that probably compares would be self-help books.  Those get a lot of sales too.  For good reason.  

5. What draws you to fantasy and sci-fi, both as a reader and a publisher?

I love a good story.  I love aliens, and space, and time, and magic.  I love interesting characters.  I love ghosts, and anything paranormal.  It's all so fascinating, and different from the mundane stuff we deal with every day.  I think that is what draws me (and most others) in.  The escape from reality.  We can imagine we are the character, or there with the character, and we can experience things we wouldn't be able to otherwise.

6. Can you offer some advice to fantasy or sci-fi writers in the community about manuscript to publishing?

Not much more than I have already said.  You need to keep your story moving.  If it flat-lines, you need to look at why, and either remove what is causing it, or try re-writing it.  Also, be open to re-writes.  A lot of authors get married to their work.  While this is a WONDERFUL quality that will help you sell books (enthusiasm for one's own work will draw people), you don't want to be SO married that you aren't willing to listen to your editor.  Editors DO know what they are doing, otherwise they probably wouldn't have their job.  So please be open-minded, and be willing to work with your editor on re-writing parts of your story that might need this.  You do NOT want the reader to lose interest in your book.  Usually once lost, they will put the book down, and never pick it up again.  Another thing you don't want to do is over-complicate your story.  If you do this, you will make your book hard/frustrating to read, and that will lose you potential sales, or a good review.  One bad review can do 10x more damage to your sales/reputation than the good that 10 good reviews do.

A very short story - Strike

I've been challenged to enter a "drabble" contest as part of a huge online fantasy and sci fi event that will take place from Nov. 1 to Nov. 8.

What is a drabble? 

You might ask. So would I except they explained it. A drabble is a very short story of 100 to 200 words. I've never written any of these or any other sort of flash fiction before. The concept doesn't entirely appeal to me because my primary interest is with in-depth character and emotional impact, but I thought I'd try it for kicks.

How much depth could I pack into a 200 words? It's a challenge. I was curious to find out if I could maintain a plot arch, character changes from passive to active and other basic tenants of fiction in such a short space. So, here is my attempt.

Strike

The book is warm, sheltered from the driving sleet inside my windbreaker. I bound down the steps from the professor's townhouse. My heart flutters.

He's accepted me as one of his elite students!

Dark. Huge. “SLAM!“ 

Nothing.

Creative Commons image by Robin Hutton

I'm looking down at my sprawled form next to a truck. Bystandars crowd around. Someone hauls the drunk driver from the cab. 

Fear is distant. More like curiosity. Is this the end?

"Dramatic, eh?"  

A man in a black coat sits on the roof beside me. Something is odd. His face is flat. Feline. Yes, he has no human ears. Instead... cat ears and fur.

“Who...?“

“You accepted.” It’s the professor.  

Something flaps in front of me. Wings?  Yes, a person with wings.

“She’s new?”

“Very new,” the professor says.

“No!” I strike at the professor. “I’m not one of your pets!”

“Too late.”

I crouch at the edge of the roof. Now I’m afraid. But surely I can... I leap.

“Nooooo!” he screams. 

Falling.

Nothing again. 

Then I wake up in the ambulance.

The EMT gasps, “You are one lucky lady.”

“Thanks.” I feel for the book. It’s gone. I’m glad, but there’s a touch of sorrow. What did I miss?

There you have it. Wish me luck. 

By the way, FantasyCon is going to be a huge event. I'll post about it in depth next week. But it is going to be like a huge fantasy and sci fi convention except it is all online. Imagine... a bunch of geeks and fantasy freaks getting together to talk magical races, biotechnology and medieval weaponry, play hilarious games and win prizes without actually leaving their basement lairs. This is how we do things these days. 

A thriller I think Kyrennei Series readers will love - Cold River Rising

College students from an Oregon Indian reservation are kidnapped by a Shining Path splinter group in Peru. The Peruvian army is worse than unhelpful and the Indian tribe, as a sovereign nation within the United States, declares war on Peru. Other tribes join the non-traditional war along with a white police chief.

Here's a story of courage, today's wounds, history's tears, a deep friendship and the kind of heroism that the modern world thinks is gone or never was. There's a young woman with both strength and a lot of doubts. There's a lonely police chief who has to choose between laws and justice. There are real warriors and women who challenge propriety and dance rage and joy against anything that stifles. 

I love it when I find a really fabulous book by an independent author. I know there are piles of books that aren't that great, full of mistakes and floppy plot. But I've hit a nugget once again in my rather random perusal of books. All through Cold River Rising, I kept saying out loud "Home run!" because there were scenes, emotions and issues that resonated and the author handled tough stuff well. 

I have never said this before, so it isn't just that this is a book I personally like.  I love all kinds of books (historical fiction, epic fantasy, futuristic dystopia and memoirs) and many of the things I love to read are very different from what I write. But this time I can safely say that I think readers who love The Kyrennei Series would get a kick out of this book. That isn't just because I like it. It's because of these things:

• Cold River Rising deals with emotion in a real and visceral way, much like The Kyrennei Series
• It deals with violence in much the same way, brutally and without any hint of weapons porn or glorification.
• It pulls at issues of social justice without ever dipping toward preaching or dogmatism at any point.
• It is primarily about a whopping good story while also including brain fodder that keeps you thinking and caring when you aren't reading.
• There is an element of people making justice when the authorities refuse to or are actually the perpetrators of injustice. We write in the hallowed tradition of Robin Hood.
• Oh, and it's partly set in Oregon--the Cold River Indian Reservation to be exact--and it gives an Oregonian the same rush of reality, knowing the landscape that The Soul and the Seed does.

This book has a truckload of great reviews (4.5 stars out of 5 on Amazon). It also has a few negative reviews and I almost didn't read it because I always read negative reviews first. That usually pays off but this time it was a bit misleading. Some of the reviews say there are a lot of errors in this book. Maybe there were back in 2011 when it was first published and maybe it has been edited since, but I didn't notice any mistakes as I read briskly through it. I could have missed a few minor things, but the point is that there aren't distracting mistakes for anyone who is more interested in story than ego. 

There were a few negative reviews about graphic violence. And in some ways that's fair enough. There is graphic violence, but it is real and honest, not glorified and meant to titillate. It is there because it's the truth about the world and it's true to the story.  That makes the violence worth reading. However, there are people who for reasons of youth or past-trauma might find it too much. 

Then there is the fact that the book is about Indians. Mostly Native American reviewers seem to love this, even though the book was written by a white guy. He did reasonably well, according to the reviews, and I expect it took a mountain of research. But a few of the negative reviews mentioned an Indian leader giving an endangered eagle feather to the friendly white police chief, which is apparently wildly unrealistic culturally and highly illegal. The book I read didn't include anything like that. I suspect that this is a symptom of modern publishing in which a mistake can be caught and rectified after publication. So, it may be that the author did put in such a scene initially and then changed it based on legitimate complaints. I personally don't see anything dishonorable in this approach. It is very difficult to write about a culture other than your own (even difficult to please everyone when writing about your own culture). It requires massive research and making a change based on good feedback seems like a wise choice.

All in all, I have to say, author Enes Smith, that's a home run. It was a very fun read, not too heavy for me but then I can't stand things that are too light. I have to feel the thrum of passion, the echoes of social justice issues and some intense emotion for a book to hold my interest at all these days. Too much life going on otherwise. 

Lightning strikes and the dubious use of inspirational self-help for creative workers

The game has changed for writers. Or so they say.

It used to be that the gatekeepers (publishers and agents) kept out the masses and only a select few (primarily those with the right connections and prior celebrity) could publish--let alone make a living as a writer.

Today everyone can publish.

The technological revolution for creative workers is intense. Writers, musicians, visual artists and even artisans making traditional crafts have suddenly found the world wide open. There is, in theory, a giant market out there, just a few clicks away. If only we could find our niche. 

Lightning strike - Creative Commons image by John Fowler (cropped)

And as with all opportunities, the pitfalls have multiplied too. When the virtual doors were flung open and those hoping for a chance at creative work swarmed out into the sunlight, others fixing to make a profit off of their hope started popping up like mushrooms after long rain. Today there are hundreds of self-help books, courses, programs and websites devoted to "helping" writers who want to earn enough to make a living from their work. And it's similar for musicians and all other creative people. Are these helpers and "allies" really on our side, or are they primarily hoping to make a profit?

The vast majority of this self-help material centers on the idea that all creative workers really need is "motivation" and "discipline."

"If you keep track of your word count every day, you'll get that novel written in a few weeks," they say. "If you are generous and prolific on social media or a blog, you will no longer be lost in obscurity. If you aren't successful, it is simply because you need to become a better writer. Study and work hard. You too will climb the mountain, if you put one foot in front of the other long enough." 

On the one hand I appreciate that many of these inspirational books and blog posts are helpful to people who are struggling to find time for their creative work or to those who have the requisite wealth or media industry connections to make a career of writing, if only they could get motivated and organized.

But those aren't the circles I move in. Mostly I know writers who do find time for their work no matter how hard it is, who stay up half the night and give up their family time to do the work and improve their writing. Many of them are excellent writers but still have little chance to get paid for their work, even in today's supposedly more open world.

The problem is finding the people who want what you have--readers, listeners, viewers, your tribe. And that is as big of a problem today as it ever was.

While anyone can theoretically publish today, traditional publishing wasn't traditionally about only printing and distributing books. It was about getting the information out to readers. There was a time when publishers ran ads, hosted events and worked out deals with bookstores for special book displays. And not exclusively for celebrity authors. Back in the day, it might have been difficult to get a publishing deal, but those who did had at least some help from publishers in reaching readers. A completely unknown writer could, if he or she was very very good at spinning a tale, go from nothing to a successful author. J. K. Rowling did it after being rejected 20 times after all.

(People are still telling me that is why I should drink the Kool-Aid, even though that was a different era. Rowling is fantastic and deserves all she got, by the way. But she isn't my favorite British author. My favorite British author is Ann Pettitt. Never heard of her? There's a reason for that. Being fantastic doesn't mean you get in the door.)

In 2015 whether you go with a big publisher or not, unless your name is already fairly well-known, your work might as well be sitting on your coffee table in terms of the chance that readers will see it. 

The rough news

The message I have for fellow writers and other creative workers is not as sunny as the inspirational self-help books and websites out there urging us to bootstrap our way to success. I might be more popular if that was my message, but that kind of message would also be quickly forgotten. I have been a writer for more than twenty years. For most of that time I have made my living from writing in one form or another. I have seen other eras come and go, even in such a relatively short time.

My conclusion is that there is both gold and dust at the heart of our favorite inspirational phrases. Gold because those who are drawn to creative work must find ways to maintain focus. Dust because the hard truth is that this era is not that much different from any other. Most of us will never be able to make a living doing creative work in the current economy and the system for choosing who has that great privilege is still not based primarily on merit and market viability.

A story of another era

When was eighteen I had a dream to become an international newspaper correspondent. At the time, in the 1990s this was a similar dream to being an author who actually makes the bulk of their living from book sales today. It was a reasonably popular ambition but statistics said that one in ten thousand young people who wanted that job would ever get it and the professionals knew that 95 percent of those successful ones were promoted through relatives or friends in the business.

It was ridiculous odds for a broke kid with no connections to speak of. But there was that whisper, "It's extremely unlikely but it's possible." I pursued it. I got scholarships, so I could get the right education and work for free for years without having to pay off loans. I beat the pavement and the mud of reporting locations for years. I did the work and wrote the word count and perfected my craft and learned the business side of writing and journalism.

Then one day while I was washing the dishes in a tiny apartment in a squalid neighborhood in Eastern Europe, the phone rang and a successful reporter was on the other end. He had a job he couldn't do and he needed to give it to someone. He picked me, and that was my big break.

I got into the elite club. That job was quickly followed by more. I built on my success and hopped from success to success for a couple of years. It only lasted a short time because the whole profession of stringer journalism collapsed a few years later, but I'd made it.

And I have never forgotten the lesson. My experiences before and after that break showed me that all of my motivation and hard work counted for a very small portion of the success. What really mattered was that phone call. And it might well never have come. I knew others just as motivated, just as good or better, who it never came for and I knew those who had it made easily through lucky birth who were not nearly so good.

I know. This is the opposite of what inspirational people are supposed to tell you. I'm supposed to say that my luck was just a bit of it. That really it was mostly sweat and sleepless nights. But it doesn't correlate. Those who got a break were not primarily those who worked hard. They were those with connections and luck. Some had lots of connections and thus didn't need to work very hard. Some had to work extremely hard and also had a bit of luck or a minor connection. Many who deserved it, both in terms of hard work and talent, never got in.

The self-publishing window

And now I find myself in the slush pile again and I have researched the business enough to know that the game is the same. The authors of inspirational self-help for writers would like us to buy their books and believe that an unknown author without capital for major advertising can bootstrap their way into making an income with genre fiction. But when you look at the details, how the systems of publicity and book selling actually work, it doesn't add up. And worse yet, if you know excellent writers who take all the right steps and still remain lost, the picture is all too clear. 

There will be one or two exceptions, but those will be lucky breaks helped along by an enthusiastic Amazon or BookBub editor whose hobby happens to correspond to the book's themes (or a similar fluke). There will be those who were celebrities in another field or simply had the money for a lot of ads to start with or had a cousin who works at one of the major distribution channels. And these will all be held up as proof that anyone can do it, if we only buy this inspirational book and try harder. 

And many of the writers who were fortunate and smart enough to get into the self-publishing business between 2009 and 2012 continue to misunderstand this. They bootstrapped their way into publishing! Why can't others do the same?

The problem is that the window between 2009 and 2012 WAS a lucky break, like the time I got that phone call. It was a fluke created by the jockeying and competition between Amazon and the big publishers.

Part of the fallout was that a few authors who were positioned just right at the time, took a risky leap and landed well in self-publishing. But what they did is no more replicable by writers in 2015 than my "strategy" of washing dishes to await a phone call from a colleague that would send me to the elite club of international journalism was something I could advise rookie reporters to do. 

In 2009 to 2012 I was drowning in huge medical problems and very needy babies. I wasn't one of those well positioned this time. Even though I heard about the opportunity I couldn't take advantage of it. .And by the time I got my head above water that window was closed. 

Gold and dust

Back in 2001, when I got my big break in journalism, I might have been sick or had commitments in a day job. Plenty of things could have held me back. I was lucky that, when that break came, I could drop everything and seize it. And in that respect the inspirational slogans of the self-help books are dust.

But the gold in there is that luck or no luck I would have lost that opportunity if I had not been driven to do the creative work even without being paid for it. If I hadn't been already motivated, if I hadn't been doing the work for free for several years, if I hadn't practiced the craft of writing high-powered newspaper and magazine articles, if I didn't know how to do hard reporting, I would have missed that opportunity no matter how lucky I was. 

So, here is my not-so-inspirational message for fellow travelers in creative work, particularly those not born to an easy leg up: I hear you. I know the struggle.

Whenever I have had a job that required writing all day, I was in bliss. Yes, it can be hard. But even the pain of creative work is somehow sweet. Some of us have a burning fire at the core that will not die. I have never been very good at anything else. This writing thing is the one place where I excel and yet I am intelligent enough to calculate the odds. Most writers will never be able to write full time, no matter how good our craft is and no matter how much readers love to read our stories. 

The inspirational books say you should log a word count. They spend a long time talking about how to start and the discipline needed to keep writing. I'm mystified by these lengthy discussions. Certainly it's hard to find time with kids and day jobs and everything else tugging at you. But I have no trouble keeping up a word count. I've been doing it since about age seven. 

The inspirational blogs urge us to strive to improve our craft and promise that those who can work magic with the written word will someday reap the rewards--somewhat like preachers promising eternal life in heaven to those who refuse all sin. I love to read craft books. It's fun. I love to tinker and improve my writing. If I didn't have kids and the necessity of making a living, I could crank out a novel about every two months in good condition. Why do we need to be urged to do this?

Some of the more practical inspirational books tell us to spread the word and be proactive in our attempts to reach an audience. I don't exactly love the marketing and business end of the job as much, but I know how to do the research and develop strategy. And most of the work is still writing in some form. Thus, I'm doing that too in those few hours I have free.

Real hope, no fluff

Writers write because we can't help ourselves and generally we don't need any motivational encouragement to do so. It's possible that some fluke or chance or lucky break will come and I might just be ready for it because of all this work. But it's much more likely that it will never come, that most of us who do all the necessary steps and have what it takes to make a living writing will never get that chance. When I went into journalism as a young kid, I knew that. I knew the that the chances I would make it were ridiculously small and I did it anyway.

I didn't go into journalism with some motivational book or speaker telling me, "Just keep at it. Practice makes perfect. You can achieve it, if you climb the mountain."

Nope. My mentor told me, "You have chosen a damn hard business, but I see that isn't going to stop you, so here are a couple of tips that might slightly help your chances."

And that was both a comfort and a help. It was a comfort because someone actually cared and was giving me real encouragement rather than a fluffy dream. And it was helpful because I went into it with my eyes open. I went because my inner drive wouldn't take "no" for an answer and I gathered every skill I could to slightly increase my odds.

And that is what writers need today, I believe. We don't need a pep talk on good habits and reaching goals. We need to know the real odds and the true mechanisms by which most paid writers become paid (even if those mechanisms are depressingly rigged). Writers need to know the mechanics and how to do the business right, and also that even if you do everything right and your books are excellent, you will most likely never be able to make a living at it. We need to know that lightning does sometimes strike and if you are ready when it does, you might just be able to ride it.

Now, I'm just hoping lightning might strike twice in the same lifetime.

I love your comments on these posts. I can be mouthy on this blog. Chime in. Tell a story. I love to hear from you.

When you become your greatest fear: A Kyrennei Series character interview

Readers of The Kyrennei Series love to ask questions about the premise, especially about how the Addin really works on the inside. There will be more on that coming in Book 5 of the series this fall, but for now here is a character interview that will answer some of the questions you have wondered about and add a little more spice to the summer.

If you haven't yet started on the series, this interview doesn't contain any major spoilers, although you'll have to roll with a few unfamiliar terms. Reading this first may also have unexpected consequences in your experience of the story when you do read it.  That could be a good thing, although I'm not sure what the results would be. 

With no further ado and by popular demand, the character who has been drafted by readers to be interviewed on these pages is...

Atreyu O’Keefe

Q: We'll leave aside how and why you're here talking to me for the moment because that is confidential. We'll start with the basics. Where are you from? Where were you born? And all that.

Illustrative photo - Creative Commons image by Palmira Van

I’m from La Grande, Oregon. I was born there. My mom was too. My dad was from Portland. They built our house out on Hunter Road.

Q: You were friends with Aranka Miko as a kid, weren’t you? What was that like?

We were friends for a few years, since we were seven or eight until we were twelve. It was great at the time. There weren’t any other girls my age who lived close enough to visit. We were active, outside most of the time. We played dress-up like a lot of girls, but we’d dress up in wild outfits and then we’d go ride our bikes down the gravel roads and get the gauze of our princess dresses tangled in our chains. 

Q: Was there anything out of the ordinary about her then? Would you have believed that she would play such a crucial role in the world?

No, no, of course not.

I mean she wasn't average or anything. She was kind of wild adventurous for a kid. She talked me into hiking to the top of Mount Emily to camp out by ourselves. My parents freaked out. She was never going to fit in with the mainstream, but neither would I, except for... well, all that. But still I never would have thought anyone from our little backwoods corner was going to do something like that.  

Q: Did your parents approve of your friendship with Aranka?

My parents were always a bit nervous. But when my mom mentioned that I wasn’t best friends with any Meikan kids, I remember my dad said, “Lin, let her be. She’ll have to accept hard reality soon enough. Let her be a child for a while.” 

My dad liked Aranka’s dad too. That was probably part of it. So, they didn’t have anything against us playing, but they believed she was uninvolved and that I would have to grow out of that friendship someday.

Q: What was it like growing up Meikan in La Grande? 

It was okay mostly. I have to say. Even though some things were hard. We had our community. People stuck up for each other. A bunch of guys helped my dad build our house. If someone was sick, you always had people to help out. It was like having a big family. 

We were under pressure from the Addin but only as much as we could bear. It was more that you knew what your limits were. Uninvolveds talk about how “any kid can be president” and all that. We knew that wasn’t true. We knew we couldn’t even be mayor. 

But we also knew that we could live a reasonably good life if we just kept our heads down. At least that’s what I thought as a kid.

Q: But then you were taken.

Yeah.

Q: Why? If you obeyed the treaty, why were you taken? 

Accidents happen. I was always told it was because they didn’t know I was Meikan. That might have been true.

Q: And afterward they couldn’t undo it?

No! No, there is no way they can undo that. And they wouldn't even if they could.

Q: Can you tell us what happened exactly? How you were taken?

A family moved in nearby who had two girls a bit older than me. I guess they were fourteen and fifteen. My mom always made one little effort to welcome new neighbors, even though she was nervous about uninvolveds. She brought them cookies and some spring greens from our garden.

Aranka wasn’t home that day. I think they went on a canoe trip. So, I went with Mom to see who the newcomers were. The girls weren’t very nice at first. Their names were Britney and Chelsea. I tried to act like I was their age to try to get them to accept me a little, but I don’t think they believed me. I didn’t think about the fact that someone like that might be Addin. I was twelve. It just didn’t occur to me. 

When I ran into them later, I kept trying to say hi to them, even though they didn’t say hi back. Once the younger one, Britney, commented on my clothes, laughing and saying she had the same skirt a few years ago, so I must have gotten it at the second-hand store. We weren’t dirt poor or anything and I’m pretty sure that we bought that skirt new, but we did sometimes buy clothes second-hand. My mom thought buying second-hand was socially and environmentally responsible. Or something like that.

Anyway, I figured those girls weren’t going to have anything to do with me. Then one day a week or two before summer break they came up to me in the public library while I was checking out books and waiting for my dad to give me a ride home. All of the sudden, they were acting really nice. There were two other girls with them. One of them was Rose Sinclare who was an eighth grader and already a social queen. She smiled at me and said I was cute. I couldn’t help feeling good when someone so popular said something nice to me. 

They said they wanted to show me something and we went back to the teen section. That’s a room at the back of the library that’s all glassed in and has lots of posters up. There are some couches for kids to hang out on. Those girls had smart phones and this was before it was standard for everyone to have smart phones. They started showing me pictures... 

Q: That's it? That's all that happened? They just accepted you and you went willingly because you didn't know they were Addin? 

No... It wasn't just that. When it happened I felt kind of dizzy. Like if you spun around in circles dancing really fast. I held onto the couch really hard and I must have looked a little weird. Then the girls were all laughing and patting me on the back. 

“See. No big deal,” Rose told them and then asked me, “How do you feel, Atreyu?” 

I didn’t know why I should feel anything, but I did feel a little different. I really wanted to be Rose’s friend and I wanted her to like me and like what I did and what I wore. I think that was the first thing. The rest of it sank in more gradually over the next few weeks. At first, they didn’t tell me anything about special Addin stuff. 

Q: But that still doesn't sound like a big deal. Was there ever a moment when you were shocked to realize you'd been taken?

I started to wonder and the idea didn't bother me. Then I wondered why I'd been afraid of the Addin.

It wasn't a single moment. It took a little while to really understand it. That's probably because I was so young. I wasn't shocked. I thought it was funny. I was a bit nervous about how my parents would react. Very briefly, but I knew they couldn't do anything to me. That made me kind of giddy, knowing that my parents were weak and brainwashed and I didn't have to do what they said every again. 

Q: How did your parents react?

My dad showed up at the library to pick me up and Rose and the others said goodbye just like they were my friends. Rose said something like, “Have fun and don’t get into too much trouble at home.” 

My dad got on my case when I got in the truck, saying I was being sullen and turning into a teenager. Then he started giving me a lecture about how you always have to use the sign, even if you’re pissed off or whatever.

I’d just picked up the sign a few weeks earlier and I still wasn't entirely sure what had happened. But I couldn’t remember it. I couldn’t even remember what it was. I still don’t. I know it was something I could do for those few weeks, but it was just gone.

I did get sullen then and I wouldn’t answer my dad. It took a few days before I told my parents straight out that I didn’t remember it. First I told them maybe I wasn’t really old enough. They talked to some of the Meikan elders. At first they hoped maybe it was a fluke, like I’d regressed or something.

They took me to see Annie Reese. I only knew where we were going when we pulled into her driveway and my dad got out of the pickup and ran in to talk to her. When they came back out Annie was really upset. And by that time Rose and the others had made the situation clear to me, so in the end I told them.

I got out of the truck and said, "Yeah, you idiots. I finally woke up and realized how stupid you are. Now you have to leave me alone. It's the law." 

My mom started sobbing and some guy across the street was staring at us. I felt embarrassed to be around them at all, so I walked away and went to one of my new friends' houses in town. I had to go home eventually, but it was different then. They couldn't boss me around.

Q: Do you really think the Addin didn’t know you were Meikan?

Britney and Chelsea acted all shocked that I had been Meikan. I’m not sure. I think maybe some of them knew. It’s hard to say. Why else would they have been interested in such a young kid? It’s possible Rose knew and the others didn’t. The way she acted was different. She could have been told by adults to practice on me.

Q: So then the Meikans shunned you?

Annie Reese let everyone know about it and immediately no Meikans would even look at me. At first, I didn’t really care that I was shunned. I had new friends. And it was good that the uncool people who I knew around town didn’t try to bug me or say hello to me. If they had, it would have been really awkward with my knew friends.

I saw that most of the Meikans shunned my family too. At home my family acted stiff around me. I could see that my dad was really angry when he looked at me, but he didn't raise a hand against me. My mom cried a lot. I thought she was just silly and hysterical. I had no idea how much it hurt her that I was taken. Then my dad and my brother moved away. My mom was pretty much alone because a lot of Meikans were too afraid to have anything to do with her, even though she still had the sign. They were afraid of me. I could see it in their faces and their hatred too.

Q It’s odd. It doesn’t sound that terrible to be taken. It almost sounds like your family and other Meikans overreacted.

It wasn’t a terrible thing for me. I've said that plenty of times. And I did think they overreacted. That’s how it was for me. I’m sure they saw it differently. They saw me change. I went from being a kid who was interested in the community, a kid who had dreams and goals for my own life and a kid who was really into saving forests and protesting clear-cutting to a kid who was  passionate about the popular crowd and having all name-brand clothes and perfect make-up.

There's a cost. You lose yourself, but you don't grasp that, so it doesn't actually hurt while it's happening to you.

 I didn’t care about our community anymore. I really thought they were delusional and I thought the Addin was much more practical and reasonable. The Addin knew how to run things. They had a hierarchy that made sense, based on how talented you were as well as good looks. 

When you’re in the Addin you want the Addin to be in control. It’s the most obvious thing in the world. You know that people are better off with the Addin in charge, even the people who don’t know about it. And all you want for yourself is to be accepted in the Addin. 

I could sit down and have dinner with my parents and not have any real problem unless they brought it up. I knew they had weird ideas that would screw things up, if they ever got their way.  But once I was brought into the Addin I had older mentors who explained to me why I had to let my parents be the way they were. They weren’t important and as long as they didn’t stir up any trouble it was best just to leave them alone.

Q: But you didn’t just let Meikans be. You gave the Addin names of Meikans in La Grande.

A few months after I was taken I was asked to come and talk to some people, including the mayor. That was a pretty big deal for me. One of the Addin teachers let me out of class to go, so my parents didn’t have any idea about it. 

The mayor's people told me again how I had to accept that my family and other people I knew wouldn’t understand. They seemed disappointed that I had been shunned by Meikans so soon. That is another reason I suspect that my being taken wasn’t entirely an accident. But it could have been. It doesn’t really matter. The Addin never really took the treaty seriously. What they took seriously was the need to keep Meikans docile and quiet.

Anyway they started asking me who was Meikan. They already knew about some people, but not about most of them. I didn’t know everyone’s last name at that age, but I could name off which kids were Meikan from all over town and they could then figure out who the families were. At the time I didn’t think about why. They wanted to know and I was so happy to be important enough to help them that I was all glowing and elated inside. Maybe I was just an immature kid or maybe its a specific Addin thing. I don’t know, but it never occurred to me at the time that I was betraying anyone or what the consequences might be. 

Q: But Aranka wasn’t Meikan. Why did you stop being friends with her as well?

She wasn’t cool. She was nowhere near the popular crowd. After I was taken, all I cared about was being accepted by the popular Addin kids and doing what they wanted. Mostly I just couldn’t be bothered with Aranka. She was insignificant. 

When she kept following me around and talking to me, Britney told me that I had to get rid of her for good. She let me know that having a nobody like that act like your friend was really bad juju. It would hurt my chances in the social scene. So, I told her to get lost. I told Aranka I was just pretending to be her friend. 

Q Why was Aranka not cool?

I don’t know… No specific reason really. She dressed very practically and she didn’t seem to care about what was in style. But it wasn’t even mostly about appearance. The social crowd can always find something about you to pick on, but they mainly do it because of who you are inside anyway. 

She wasn’t as quiet as a low-status person should be. She’d go ahead and talk, even when you were supposed to listen to the cooler people and work your way up to being worthy enough to talk. When the top girls decided someone needed to be punished, she didn’t seem to notice. She’d still laugh at that person’s jokes and talk to them. 

I guess most of all, she just didn’t play the game. She knew it was there, but maybe she didn’t know it was mandatory to play it. Or maybe she couldn’t play it the same way. Kyrennei are still Kyrennei even before they’re changed. Maybe there is something about them that is never going to fit in.

Q: Do you feel hope for the world, given how powerful the Addin is?

I do now. I can't really say more about it, because like you said it's confidential. But there is hope. For me, it's about compassion. That and I still believe people have good souls.

The dystopia of today's popularity cult: The Kyrennei premise part 1

There's the high school cafeteria with its ironclad rules about who sits where--tables for the gamers, the emos, the jocks or the geeks among the boys and for the girls the clusters around this or that social magnet. Just about everyone has been there. If you're lucky you might fit in with one group or another or at least squeeze through relatively unnoticed. A few actually thrive in this acrid environment. And some are torn to bits.

Creative Commons image by Autoskabar of Flickr

On one particular gray Tuesday, there's a girl sitting on the steps leading to an upper level. She's alone - as always. She has a pad of paper and colored pencils and she's practicing drawing lines of perspective, capturing the crazy, obtuse angles of the modern cafeteria.

Does she bother the groups at the tables?

She sits there every day in the same spot. She is weird. At first she tried to talk to people, but she looks a bit different and she won't play along. She won't dress the way you are supposed to. She won't wear makeup or not in the right ways. She never pays attention to what was in style. She doesn't make small talk. She talks about why things are the way they are in the Arctic and what happened in a book more than about the other girls.

Yes, she bothers people. 

A couple of the guys catch a nerdy kid with glasses at the top of the stairs. He should have been paying attention. Never should have walked by them. He knew he should take the other stairs to avoid them, but he was in a hurry. He bothers them too. He doesn't give them their due.

So, they grab him and hurl him down the stairs. He crashes into the girl's back, scattering her colored pencils, shattering them into pieces, pulverizing the delicate cores within. They'll be useless now.

She saved for those pencils. There's no way she can afford a new set. But that isn't even the important part. They were her lifeline, the way she survived the hell of this place, the disdain and the shame. Now her lifeline is broken.

She believes the boy jumped on her from the stairs to taunt her, and in a split second brain chemistry flips and years of isolation coalesce into rage. 

She grabs the boy's hair at the tender nape of his neck in her left fist and pounds him with her right fist. Again and again. She sees white, not red. She hears only her own ragged breath. She doesn't scream but her face holds such intensity that they leave her alone for a while after that.

She knows that she has failed again. She played right into their hands. The crying, beaten boy wasn't the attacker. They should have been allies.

We left such things behind in high school. Didn't we? 

I hoped so. Once. But then I discovered Mommy cliques. When you're a mother with small children, you need other mothers. You need companionship with those who understand and the occasional conversation of multi-syllabic words. And you need playdates so your toddlers don't drive you crazy. But if you thought high school had cliques... watch out! 

Mommy cliques are a tad more sophisticated, but the rules are still pretty much the same. The ammunition is still fashion, makeup and small talk, but you have to add in home decor, flashy birthday parties, magazine-quality Pinterest photos of crafts and cooking, kids fashions, kids behavior, parenting styles, how early you potty-trained and how well you can talk about it all without seeming to brag too blatantly. 

The stakes are the same - inclusion or exclusion, street cred or isolation.

Does this mean that men get it easier? Maybe. But both men and women have to run the race for "success" in academia and then in career. Men have to dress the part too. If you don't, it's your loss. You can't blame anyone but yourself. Sure, the fashions are arbitrary, but only geeks can differ and they can only differ in certain ways. 

Creative Commons image by Martinak15 of Flickr

A random perusal of my Facebook feed shows that it isn't just mommies who didn't leave the social rat race behind in high school. Everything is measured in "likes" these days. I've been studying a lot about effective online business, but I still can't figure out how "likes" help exactly - except that they give that street cred. It's essentially the same thing as having the popular kids give you a considering look and an oh-so-minuscule nod to show that you are allowed to sit in their vicinity.

Except "likes" have the illusion of democracy. They make it appear that the more you have the more people must really support you.

I inadvertently ran a small experiment on "likes" recently. I was trying to choose between two possibilities for the new logo of my dystopian fantasy series and I posted it to various groups asking for gut reactions. In every group there would be one enthusiast who would pipe up quickly and give their answer, either  "right" or "left." The first time this happened I was thrilled. The first person chose "right" and that was the option I secretly favored. There followed a stream of agreement, "right," "right," "yes, right's the best," a dozen or more responses. I was vindicated! 

But then I looked at another group. There the first person to answer had said "left" and the whole string of replies had agreed that the left-hand choice was the better one. Out of six different groups, the responses were about even, but they always followed the leader, like little ducks... or lemmings. 

What I learned from this is that "likes" are far from democratic. What is popular is popular because of how people follow the leaders, not because of popular appeal or true support. I call it "the cult of popularity," but I might as well call it a "cult of power."

Political organization, social structures and economic entities all use it and the underlying psychology isn't that different from high school cliques.

I just read an article about a blind citizen detained by US border patrol between Montreal and New York because the way his pupils were dilated looked suspicious. He and his friends laughed and the border patrol was incensed. "You think US Customs and Immigration is a joke?" they bellowed. Then he was subjected to hours of intimidation and interrogation. The guy's eyes "bothered" those with power. His failure to "play the game" of mild intimidation bothered them even more. 

Does nothing ever change? Are humans just wired to ostracize - to pick sides, pick out and pick on? When will those who are bullied stand up together instead of fighting one another? Will bystanders ever wake up and say enough is enough? 

For as long as there have been poets and bards and storytellers by the fire, some of us have tackled these questions with stories. That's why I wrote The Kyrennei Series. It started there in the lunchroom in high school. I watched the florescent lights and escaped from purgatory by making up characters, names, places and fantasies.  

The story is dark because it comes from that darkness. But it's also essentially the anatomy of hope. First, how can you survive? How do you struggle and hang on to those who stand by you? Then how do you choose your own path no matter how hard you're pushed down? How do you use the power you have - great or small - to make something meaningful? 

I'm going to write a few posts about the premise of the Kyrennei series. This is the first. The Soul and the Seed is a story that faces the human desires to to build cults of popularity and reject difference head on. 

I love your comments on these posts! Do you thrive in the social rat race? What do you think would happen if the cult of popularity literally ruled the world? 

Must all modern female heroines be unbelievably strong, fearless and invincible?

Maya Gardener is a college student with practical dreams. She's a dutiful daughter, attending church even when she goes away to Michigan Tech. But she doesn't feel like she belongs--not at church, not with the sororities on campus, not with her parents nor anywhere else. She assumes that's because she is both adopted and biracial in a country where the rift between black and white is widening.

And yet that's the least of her troubles. Shadowy authorities are trying to track her down, authorizing "lethal force" to capture her. A guy she thought she liked turned into a maniac, shot up the university and kidnapped her. Maya has good reason to be frightened. Most of us would be.  

"But she isn't like Katniss of the Hunger Games!" a friend who is also a prolific author protested.

"That's true,"  I answered. "She isn't Katniss... or Tris of Divergent for that matter. Her name doesn't even end in 'iss' as seems required of best-selling modern heroines.  But more importantly, she is more like a real woman." 

"But who wants to read about regular old people who aren't superhuman?" my colleague argued. "I want to escape into a fantasy world when I read, not experience a life that is even more miserable as my own." 

"It's easier to fully enter the world of the story, if the characters are like real people." I tried to explain but I wasn't entirely invested in the argument. "Katniss and Tris will always win. You know that from the outset. They don't give me a sense of hope, because I always knew they were in a class apart, superheroes, who I can never measure up to." 

My correspondent wasn't convinced and neither was I. We simply disagree. And readers are bound to disagree as much as writers on this issue. 

Aranka Miko, the heroine of the initial trilogy of The Kyrennei Series, has been compared to Katniss and Tris on occasion. She is feisty. She gets hit with bad stuff and she bounces back. The minute she has a spare breath, she is ready to help rescue others in a similar predicament, regardless of the danger to herself. She stands up to torture and refuses to surrender valuable information to the bitter end.

And there is a kind of hope in that. We need strong heroes and heroines.

As readers, we recognize the strength and courage it takes for the character to survive and even fight back in the face of enormous evil. But how difficult is the path of such a heroine really when she begins with tenacity and ferocity as her strengths? And what can she really do for the world, when you get right down to it? She brought a flicker of hope, but unless the author (ahem) engineers a series of extremely unrealistic events (as some authors have... no naming names here), Aranka won't be able to bring down the powers of tyranny alone. 

To do that, it will take something more than tenacity and ferocity. It will take the kind of strength our own world is in such dire need of.

That kind of strength comes from a real battle within. Deep and authentic hope comes from the understanding that even those of us who do not start out as superheroes, who are small, terrified, wounded and broken can choose our own path in the face of the most horrendous odds. The battle is within us as much as on the outside. 

And that is why Maya Gardner is the heroine of Code of the Outcast (Book 4) of The Kyrennei Series. She is like most of us. She isn't particularly strong or fast or good with a bow. She avoids fighting and conflicts. She freezes up in a crisis. But within her she carries a hidden potential, a spark of something waiting to bloom. If only she can reach out and choose her own path when most of her choices have been taken away. 

Then we would have hope in the darkness of our own world as well. When the choices are hard and uncertain, choosing your own path is an act of great courage.

I love your comments on these posts! What is your favorite type of hero or heroine? Share this article using the icon below and find out what your friends think.

Code of the Outcast (Book 4 of the Kyrennei Series) is out!

Code of the Outcast, the long-awaited next installment in the series, is now live on Amazon. This book departs a bit from the first three, focusing on new characters, but it is more of the desperate adventure in the world ruled by the Addin. The series is best if read in order. If you're new to it and looking for a gripping read, try The Soul and the Seed.

Please don't be shy and drop a review of Code of the Outcast on Amazon. Reviews matter. They don't need to be long or convoluted, but they're a big part of what keeps your favorite authors writing. 

Here's the story

When a masked gunman barges into a university acoustic-dynamics class and abducts Maya Gardener, she knows she has to fight for her life. But her supposed rescuers may want her dead, and the kidnapper insists that the world as Maya knows it is a lie.

It’s present-day America and society is as dysfunctional as always. Democracy and even the “freedom to shop” is a sham. A powerful elite wields clandestine control over human will to maintain hegemony in every aspect of modern life. 

It’s been that way for a thousand years, but today there are finally a handful of people who might possess the power to resist and to shield others… if they only knew how. Maya isn’t a fighter by nature, but the random chance of genetics chose her and now she’ll have to learn to help herself and others. 

She was always an outsider—trapped in the borderlands between races, cultures and families. Now she’s hunted through the biting cold of a Wisconsin winter, and the only thing that holds her body and soul together is her love for Kai Linden, the fierce-eyed musician and comp-sci major who claims there is one place she truly belongs.  Read more.

What's in a word? "Outcast"

"You must think the whole world is against you. Why else would you write about an outcast?" 

That was one interesting reaction to the upcoming publication of the fourth book in The Kyrennei Series, entitled Code of the Outcast.  (I'm beginning to like criticism. It provides good blog fodder.)

Obviously the word "outcast" stirs up some intense emotions. I'm well aware of it. For some, that word has more gut-punch power than the worst curse words. It isn't a word we say or hear very often, but it's between the lines a lot. 

I wrote about the issue of a community shunning a person, making him an outcast, because I believe that it's the duty of writers and artists to open up the dark corners of society and the mind.

Whatever is too painful to touch directly, we must touch and try to heal with stories. For centuries that has been our role. Where the healing of doctors cannot go, where the words of public figures dare not go, artists and writers should go. 

And no, the world isn't "against me." The world is very troubled and mostly doesn't know I exist. And that is quite difficult enough for anyone to cope with. 

Code of the Outcast is the fourth book in a series. Even though this book starts with new characters, you will probably still enjoy it more if you start from The Soul and the Seed (Book 1). For those who know the series, this book is a bit of an answer to a lot of reader questions, wondering about what happens to those who don't have the protection of the legendary fighters of J. Company.

The answer isn't always pretty. And yet there is something of great value here. 

Code of the Outcast begins with a person facing the realization that he and only he can make a difference, save a life... change the world. Yet in order to do it he must commit violence and take the consequences. 

We float through so much of our life in numbness because most of the time there is very little we can do to change the terrible things that happen in the world. We hear about them at a distance and we can only write letters to politicians and protest. We can't really change it. 

But there are moments when you can.

Such a moment will usually not come when you expect it or come at a convenient time. But there are moments when one person can make a great difference. Code of the Outcast is essentially the story of one of those moments and the two people it uprooted and turned into outcasts.

You don't get to change the world without sacrifice and in this case the sacrifice is just that - to be shunned and lose home and family forever. Could you make such a choice, if it would save the life of a person you cared about? 

Is this a worthy topic for a novel? Comment using the icon on the lower left. And please share this post with your friends using the icon on the lower right. :)

Time to order Book 4 of The Kyrennei Series

Code of the Outcast is now available for preorder as a Kindle ebook. Until July 1 it will be on sale for 99 cents. Then the price will gradually go up until it's $3.99 like the other books on publication day (JUly 7). It's both cheaper and a boost to the series if you preorder now and have the book delivered to your Kindle on July 7. 

If you haven't read The Soul and the Seed (Book 1 of The Kyrennei Series), it's recommended that you start there.

The paperback book and other ebook formats will be up soon. 

If you need a read-for-review or pre-release copy either in the Kindle format or another ebook format,  send me an email. 

Free books!

If you think you might like my books or have read one of them but not the rest, here's your chance to get a free book. Join my hearth-side email circle, where readers get an occasional email with links to my blog posts plus a sort of virtual cup of tea. And you get a free ebook. Here's how:

1. Subscribe to my hearth-side email circle here. 
2. Then look at The Soul and the Seed (or check the Books by the Fire tab to find the next book in the series if you've already read that one.) 
3.  Next go to my contact page and send me a message. Include your email address, your preferred ebook format (Mobi, Epub or PDF) and which book you would like. Presto! You'll have it in your inbox soon.

Violence in fiction and the concept of deep hope

Violence in real life is brutal, traumatizing and usually over before you have a chance to think or react. 

I've been mercifully fortunate to undergo only a few incidents of real violence or narrowly averted violence in my life.  I was once grabbed by a man in a dark, deserted street, but I managed to trick him into believing that I had friends in the doorway of a nearby building, so that he let go of me for a second. And I had fast feet.

As a journalist during the conflicts in the Balkans, I often saw the aftermath of violence, but only rarely was I in the middle of it. One terrifying night in the summer of 2001, I ran for my life through dark deserted streets to escape from a mob firing automatic weapons. When I was finally able to get indoors, a man who was out of his head with terror leaped on me and tried to sexually assault me. I fought him off and then had to lay on the floor of a room while bullets whizzed by the open windows and pinged off of the gutters just a few feet away.

Those experiences have given me an idea of what real violence is like, and the discrepancy between that reality and the way violence is usually portrayed in books and movies is often disturbing. Before I had those experiences I found gratuitous violence in fiction to be merely boring. Violence that is divorced from emotion and real human reactions of shock and trauma felt meaningless. After my experiences in conflict areas, it feels both meaningless and disrespectful, dismissive of the experiences of those who have undergone far worse than I have.

Arie's rules of fictional violence

I am reasonably tough and I wasn't traumatized by my experiences. I'm not all that disturbed by reading violence. But I usually avoid books that seem to be primarily about violence.

And yet my books have fictional violence in them. My contemporary fantasy The Kyrennei Series has even been called a thriller by reviewers, due to the violent content. 

Let me lay it out clearly then. I don't write violence the way 80 to 90 percent of action and thriller books are written. Here are my rules of violence in fiction:

• The violence in a good thriller isn’t where the greatest suspense is. The suspense is in our emotions about the characters.
• And yet the violence must be integral to the plot. It should not be an aside just stuck in there to titillate. 
• Violent scenes should be brutal, even traumatic, and avoided when possible by both the characters and writers alike.
• Violent scenes should not be entirely pleasant even for the reader. Making it purely entertaining is a betrayal. 

That said, there are times when you can’t avoid violence in fiction. And it is better to have it out there than in real life. The story must be told. And The Kyrennei Series is a hard and desperate story. It’s fiction—even fantasy—on the literal plane. And yet there is a deeper level of reality where this story is true. And that truth has to be told. Even when it’s hard.

The road to deep hope leads through darkness

A reader recently told me that my books are like The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It’s a great book, and at first I was simply pleased to be favorably compared to an awesome author. But then I realized that The Road is categorized as literary fiction, not popular dystopia. I've been categorizing my books with things like The Hunger Games, not with literary dystopia. 

So, how in the world is The Soul and the Seed like The Road?  

They are in wildly different settings after all. The Road is in a grim, future in a destroyed world where people resort to cannibalism to survive. The Soul and the Seed is set solidly in the present. The dystopia is inherent in today’s socially harsh and physically unsustainable society… with one fatal twist that isn’t even apparent on the surface. 

The similarity is more in the way that violence, despair and emotion are dealt with. Much of the violence in popular urban fantasy and dystopia is “justified” and almost enjoyable to read.

And the violence in my books isn’t fun. It’s all too real. 

Why read it then?

To the readers of books like The Road or The Soul and the Seed, it’s partly the authentic spirit of the people that keeps you glued to the page. It's also the burning questions we carry inside whether we read this sort of thing or not. 

How do we live with despair? How do you go on through anything, no matter how terrible and gut-wrenching? Is hope just wishful thinking?

Authentic answers to these questions have always come hard. But they can be answered in bits and pieces--in the gentleness of a person forced to fight, in the need that binds the strong and the weak together, in the fact that you still seek life and comfort amid horrific circumstances, in the play of children in wartime, in the courage those who know they cannot win..

If you don’t have the darkness--real darkness--true and desperate, how can you have an story about hope?

I wanted to write about these things, but I also wanted to do it in a gripping story without the tiniest whiff of moralistic preaching. I am as much a seeker as the reader. The story is there to sweep you away to another reality while simultaneously making you question your own world, to terrify you and help you feel deeply.

And it may just help you find hope. Or not. Depending. But it will grip you and make you fall in love with the characters, regardless.

An example from The Soul and the Seed

Let me put it technically. The Soul and the Seed has three or four incidents of violence in it, depending on if you count hearing violence at a distance or not. That’s not a peaceful book. But it isn’t that much violence when compared to a book like The Hunger Games, which is (after the first third) essentially a sequence of violent incidents.

And yet readers who have read both The Hunger Games and The Soul and the Seed will often say the latter is scarier and more intense. People who can read about teenagers slaughtering each other in The Hunger Games, sometimes find The Kyrennei Series to be “too much.”

And that's how it goes. a writer can't please everyone. If I want the reader to feel hope deeply, I have to make the reader feel pain deeply as well.

The only problem is with telling readers that. I want to give fair warning about the violence in the series. And yet violence isn’t at the core of the story. There are other readers who find modern fiction too violent who will actually like The Soul and the Seed better than The Hunger Games. Which is more "intense" or "violent" Is to some degree subjective and bases on what kind of violence the reader is prepared to handle.

Sometimes a thing is described best by saying what it is not. I liked the idea of The Hunger Games up until the middle of the first book. But then the violence became mechanical. The emotion slid into melodrama, even though it didn't need to. By the third book the violence read like the description of a video game. It wasn’t painful to read. It was a game.

Not everything must be painful, but if you want real hope, it is likely that getting to it will hurt.

And that is what The Kyrennei Series does. It goes for real hope. Hope that doesn’t pull any punches. And it is wrenching to get there.

Books for 99 cents

Code of the Outcast (Book 4 of The Kyrennei Series) will be published on July 7. As of today, it is available for preorder. For just a few days you can get it for 99 cents. Next week the price goes up to $2.99 and then to $3.99 when it's published on July 7.

Book 3 of the series, The Taken and the Free, is on sale this week at 99 cents too, for the last time. Time to get your summer reading. 

Free books!

If you think you might like my books or have read one of them but not the rest, I have a special offer going. Join my hearth-side email circle, where readers get an occasional email with links to my blog posts plus a sort of virtual cup of tea. And you get a free ebook. Here's how:

1. Subscribe to my hearth-side email circle here. 
2. Then look at the books under the Arie's Books tab at the top of the page and pick the book you want. (It's highly recommended that you read the books in order and the first book is The Soul and the Seed. But if you've already read the first book, here's your chance to get the second for free. ) 
3. Next go to my contact page and send me a message. Include your email address, your preferred ebook format (Mobi, Epub or PDF) and which book you would like. Presto! You'll have it in your inbox soon.

Note: If you are already subscribed to the Hearth-side Email Circle, you can also get a free book. Reply to the latest By the Hearth email and let me know which one you want.

On violence in fiction and the path to deep hope

Violence in real life is brutal, traumatizing and usually over before you have a chance to think or react. 

I've been mercifully fortunate to undergo only a few incidents of real violence or narrowly averted violence in my life.  I was once grabbed by a man in a dark, deserted street, but I managed to trick him into believing that I had friends in the doorway of a nearby building, so that he let go of me for a second. And I had fast feet.

As a journalist during the conflicts in the Balkans, I often saw the aftermath of violence, but only rarely was I in the middle of it. One terrifying night in the summer of 2001, I ran for my life through dark deserted streets to escape from a mob firing automatic weapons. When I was finally able to get indoors, a man who was out of his head with terror leaped on me and tried to sexually assault me. I fought him off and then had to lay on the floor of a room while bullets whizzed by the open windows and pinged off of the gutters just a few feet away.

Those experiences have given me an idea of what real violence is like, and the discrepancy between that reality and the way violence is usually portrayed in books and movies is often disturbing. Before I had those experiences I found gratuitous violence in fiction to be merely boring. Violence that is divorced from emotion and real human reactions of shock and trauma felt meaningless. After my experiences in conflict areas, it feels both meaningless and disrespectful, dismissive of the experiences of those who have undergone far worse than I have.

Arie's rules of fictional violence

I am reasonably tough and I wasn't traumatized by my experiences. I'm not all that disturbed by reading violence. But I usually avoid books that seem to be primarily about violence.

And yet my books have fictional violence in them. My contemporary fantasy The Kyrennei Series has even been called a thriller by reviewers, due to the violent content. 

Let me lay it out clearly then. I don't write violence the way 80 to 90 percent of action and thriller books are written. Here are my rules of violence in fiction:

• The violence in a good thriller isn’t where the greatest suspense is. The suspense is in our emotions about the characters.
• And yet the violence must be integral to the plot. It should not be an aside just stuck in there to titillate. 
• Violent scenes should be brutal, even traumatic, and avoided when possible by both the characters and writers alike.
• Violent scenes should not be entirely pleasant even for the reader. Making it purely entertaining is a betrayal. 

That said, there are times when you can’t avoid violence in fiction. And it is better to have it out there than in real life. The story must be told. And The Kyrennei Series is a hard and desperate story. It’s fiction—even fantasy—on the literal plane. And yet there is a deeper level of reality where this story is true. And that truth has to be told. Even when it’s hard.

The road to deep hope leads through darkness

A reader recently told me that my books are like The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It’s a great book, and at first I was simply pleased to be favorably compared to an awesome author. But then I realized that The Road is categorized as literary fiction, not popular dystopia. I've been categorizing my books with things like The Hunger Games, not with literary dystopia. 

So, how in the world is The Soul and the Seed like The Road?  

They are in wildly different settings after all. The Road is in a grim, future in a destroyed world where people resort to cannibalism to survive. The Soul and the Seed is set solidly in the present. The dystopia is inherent in today’s socially harsh and physically unsustainable society… with one fatal twist that isn’t even apparent on the surface. 

The similarity is more in the way that violence, despair and emotion are dealt with. Much of the violence in popular urban fantasy and dystopia is “justified” and almost enjoyable to read.

And the violence in my books isn’t fun. It’s all too real. 

Why read it then?

To the readers of books like The Road or The Soul and the Seed, it’s partly the authentic spirit of the people that keeps you glued to the page. It's also the burning questions we carry inside whether we read this sort of thing or not. 

How do we live with despair? How do you go on through anything, no matter how terrible and gut-wrenching? Is hope just wishful thinking?

Authentic answers to these questions have always come hard. But they can be answered in bits and pieces--in the gentleness of a person forced to fight, in the need that binds the strong and the weak together, in the fact that you still seek life and comfort amid horrific circumstances, in the play of children in wartime, in the courage those who know they cannot win..

If you don’t have the darkness--real darkness--true and desperate, how can you have an story about hope?

I wanted to write about these things, but I also wanted to do it in a gripping story without the tiniest whiff of moralistic preaching. I am as much a seeker as the reader. The story is there to sweep you away to another reality while simultaneously making you question your own world, to terrify you and help you feel deeply.

And it may just help you find hope. Or not. Depending. But it will grip you and make you fall in love with the characters, regardless.

An example from The Soul and the Seed

Let me put it technically. The Soul and the Seed has three or four incidents of violence in it, depending on if you count hearing violence at a distance or not. That’s not a peaceful book. But it isn’t that much violence when compared to a book like The Hunger Games, which is (after the first third) essentially a sequence of violent incidents.

And yet readers who have read both The Hunger Games and The Soul and the Seed will often say the latter is scarier and more intense. People who can read about teenagers slaughtering each other in The Hunger Games, sometimes find The Kyrennei Series to be “too much.”

And that's how it goes. a writer can't please everyone. If I want the reader to feel hope deeply, I have to make the reader feel pain deeply as well.

The only problem is with telling readers that. I want to give fair warning about the violence in the series. And yet violence isn’t at the core of the story. There are other readers who find modern fiction too violent who will actually like The Soul and the Seed better than The Hunger Games. Which is more "intense" or "violent" Is to some degree subjective and bases on what kind of violence the reader is prepared to handle.

Sometimes a thing is described best by saying what it is not. I liked the idea of The Hunger Games up until the middle of the first book. But then the violence became mechanical. The emotion slid into melodrama, even though it didn't need to. By the third book the violence read like the description of a video game. It wasn’t painful to read. It was a game.

Not everything must be painful, but if you want real hope, it is likely that getting to it will hurt.

And that is what The Kyrennei Series does. It goes for real hope. Hope that doesn’t pull any punches. And it is wrenching to get there.

Preorder for just 99 cents

Code of the Outcast (Book 4 of The Kyrennei Series) will be published on July 7. As of today, it is available for preorder. For just a few days you can get it for 99 cents. Next week the price goes up to $2.99 and then to $3.99 when it's published on July 7.

The paperback edition and other digital formats will follow short.y. If you need another digital format now, write to me here and I will make sure you get one. If you would like an advanced review copy, drop me a note.

Free books!

If you think you might like my books or have read one of them but not the rest, I have a special offer going. Join my hearth-side email circle, where readers get an occasional email with links to my blog posts plus a sort of virtual cup of tea. And you get a free ebook. Here's how:

1. Subscribe to my hearth-side email circle here. 
2. Then look at the books under the Arie's Books tab at the top of the page and pick the book you want. (It's highly recommended that you read the books in order and the first book is The Soul and the Seed. But if you've already read the first book, here's your chance to get the second for free. ) 
3. Next go to my contact page and send me a message. Include your email address, your preferred ebook format (Mobi, Epub or PDF) and which book you would like. Presto! You'll have it in your inbox soon.

Note: If you are already subscribed to the Hearth-side Email Circle, you can also get a free book. Reply to the latest By the Hearth email and let me know which one you want.

New characters and epic struggle in Book 4 of The Kyrennei Series - Code of the Outcast

I know many of you have been waiting for a long time for the fourth book in The Kyrennei Series. When The Taken and the Free (Book 3) was published in November, I wasn't ready to make any promises. But now it's imminent. 

Just a detail the cover of Code of the OUtcast - Not for copying (Shutterstock license)

First, I'm ready to announce the title of Book 4. That is Code of the Outcast.

The cover is ready, but I'm working out the details in a new version of the series logo, so I'm not going to post that quite yet. It will be one of the most atmospheric covers yet.

As to what's in the book... 

I received a lot of questions from readers about the world of The Kyrennei Series and what other people beyond J. Company are experiencing, particularly given the societal upsets caused by events in The Taken and the Free. So one of my goals in writing the next few books in the series was to let the reader take a wider journey into this alternate version of our world, to experience what life is like for those who are not directly under the protection of J. Company, which is widely known as the only outfit with the wherewithal to provide protection from the wrath of the Addin.  

In order to explore these questions, Code of the Outcast focuses on new characters - college students Maya Gardner and Kai Linden at Michigan Tech on Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Michigan gets the dubious honor of being the setting of the latest Addin machinations because it's one of those places where pharmaceutical companies like to set up small, high-tech labs that no one really seems to know much about. In addition, my mother grew up there and Wisconsin, where I attended university, is right next door. As you know, I love to pick on my own stomping grounds. In fact, most of Code of the Outcast takes place in Wisconsin after Maya and Kai are forced to flee from Addin agents, including Kai's own family.

But there I'm getting ahead of myself... 

What really happens is that Maya, a biracial woman  studying sound design, is sitting in class one day when a masked gunman barges in and forces her to leave with him.

But is it really a kidnapping? He claims he is trying to rescue her from something far worse. Forced to survive on the run and on foot in through a Midwest winter and to face her long-held fears of being a misfit in the cultures where she should belong, Maya struggles with her tendency to freeze up in a crisis and avoid confrontation at all cost. In this world, there is no avoiding fear.

These are very different characters from those in the first trilogy of the series, but no less real. I fell in love with them early and I'm sure you will too. I love Aranka and J. Company, but we are not always that strong and we also need fictional characters who are sometimes as lost as we are. Only then can they reflect back the hope in our own struggles.

This story tackles the issue of what it is to be an outcast - not only outcast from mainstream society, but even among those who should be friends and allies. Without the protection of an established outlaw group like J. Company, the search for a safe haven is paramount. And once a measure of safety is found, it can hardly be permanent in a world where the Addin controls the powerful social and economic elites. 

Because Code of the Outcast begins a new part of the story with different characters, it may be tempting for readers who haven't read the previous books to jump right in with this one. While the basic premise of the world of The Kyrennei Series does come out in the telling, test readers have shown that you get more out of the story if you read at least The Soul and the Seed first. I don't want to repeatedly belabor things that would slow the story down for those who have read all the books, and there are psychological issues with how the world of the series works that can't be summarized quickly or easily. 

For those who have read the previous books, you will find Code of the Outcast deepens and world and calls to the vulnerable parts of our souls. The road to authentic hope is long and rugged.

You can read the full book description of Code of the Outcast here on its dedicated page. 

And if you are just getting started with The Kyrennei Series and need to get the previous books, now is your chance. The 99 cent sale of The Soul and the Seed (Book 1) on Amazon ends today. And starting today for one week The Fear and the Solace (Book 2) will be on sale for 99 cents. If you or your friends need some summer reading, now is the one time to get it for a reasonable price. The ebooks are normally $3.99.  There are also paperbacks of all the books available on Amazon and at Looking Glass Books in La Grande. 

How can a reader find the ideal book when all the descriptions sound the same?

Am I the only reader who finds that book descriptions have started to sound way too similar? 

On the back of every novel you see it. Action! Drama! Intensity! Guy in pursuit! Girl in despair! Snappy prose! One- or two-word descriptions by celebrities. "Fantastic!" "A masterpiece!" 

How do you tell which book you will really like? 

I don't know about you, but I don't have nearly as much time to read as I would like. I get frustrated when I pick up book after book and read a third of the way in and find that it really isn't my thing. Half the time it's not even poorly written. It just doesn't have the atmosphere I like or I don't care about the stoic characters.  

That's because readers are diverse. Some readers like physical action. Others prefer wrenching emotions. Some can’t stand the internal tension but are fine with violence. Some insist on sex scenes. Others can do without the details. Some books are harshly literary and others are more cozy. And those are issues that mostly cross genres and are true regardless of specific themes. 

So, why is it that it is so hard to tell what the heart and soul of a book will be like from the description?

Here are a few reasons:

1. The description can only be 100 to 150 words or about a dozen sentences. There are only so many combinations of grammatical sentences possible. 
2. There are rules. The writer must present who the main character is and what their problem or goal is immediately. It's not just the industry standard. That part makes good sense for readers too.
3. The blurb has to give an indication of genre and the major themes and that takes up most of the space.
4. And then few blurbs ever say what the book is not. No one is going to advertise a book by saying it isn't intelligent, even if it's definitely NOT literary fiction. And no mystery writer will say their book isn't suspenseful, even if the truth is that it's pretty cozy and the suspense is at a minimum.
5. If there is violence in the book, this will often be made clear but no one will ever tell you that it is gratuitous, video-game-style violence. Every violent thriller or dystopian novel will insist that it is gritty and realistic--employing characters with heart, even when its main character is a stock tough guy who leaps, shoots and dashes through the pages. 

So, there are some legitimate reasons for the look-alike cover blurbs. But what is a reader to do? I love good fantasy and I like contemporary thrillers, but I don't like gratuitous violence and those genres are often filled with it. I enjoy historical fiction but I prefer a story with a casual tone and characters from everyday life rather than momentous language and well-known figures of history. I can read virtually any genre as long as it is neither too dry and literary nor too brainless. I barely know how to describe the humor I like. How can I find books that will actually suit my taste?  

And worse yet, how do I as an author give readers a feel for the heart and soul of my books in the space of a blurb?

My first book (The Soul and the Seed) starts with a teenage girl imprisoned in a laboratory by doctors with nefarious motives. Given that, it's hard to convey that this is not a story about teenage angst. There is violence in the story. I wouldn't leave that out of the description, because some people really don't want to read any violence of any kind and this is pretty heavy-duty intense stuff. Yet the story isn't primarily about violence. Most important of all, it's hard to convey the close, confiding tone of the story--like a friend telling you about their harrowing experiences--let alone the sense of magical realism, the deep connections to characters or how a book that is so dark can be primarily about hope. 

I follow all the blurb-writing rules and I'm not a terrible writer (at least I'm told I can string sentences together with some semblance of art) and what comes out?

Action! Drama! Intensity! Girl in despair! Guy to the rescue! 

Ah, I see the problem that all those other authors have while trying to describe their books when I'm the reader. My book is NOT like all most of those books. They are all vastly different. But in a blurb on the back cover it is very hard to get that across.

I love to hear from you. Feel free to comment using the bubble on the lower left. What are your frustrations as a reader? Do you agree that book blurbs are all the same?  Do you have any tips for how to decode which ones will suit you? Do you ever pick up a book, thinking it is going to be your thing and it isn't? Or do you ever randomly discover a fantastic book behind a description that didn't do it justice? 

Free books!

The publication of my fourth book is coming up. To celebrate, I'm going to give every new subscriber to my hearth-side email circle a free ebook. If you've looked at The Soul and the Seed and been curious or if you've read part of the series and haven't gotten around to reading the rest, now is your chance to do so for free. 

1. Subscribe to my hearth-side email circle here. That's where you get links to my latest blog posts as well as the occasional virtual cup of tea. There's no spam, thanks to the excellent security of Mailchimp. 
2. Then look at the books under the Arie's Books tab at the top of the page and pick the book you want. (It's highly recommended that you read the books in order and the first book is The Soul and the Seed. But if you've already read the first book, here's your chance to get the second for free. ) 
3. Next go to my contact page and send me a message. Include your email address, your preferred ebook format (Kindle, Epub or PDF) and which book you would like. Presto! You'll have it in your inbox soon.

Note: If you are already subscribed to the Hearth-side Email Circle, you can also get a free book. Reply to the latest By the Hearth email and let me know which one you want.

The big lie about writing and getting rich

There's a modern obsession about a mythical connection between writing and making tons of money on the internet. At every turn, I encounter some version of this question recently asked on Quora, "Through what ways can I become wealthy if I am an extremely talented writer?"

Leonid Pasternak - The Passion of creation (public domain image)

It brings me back to a wonderful moment when I got to meet one of my personal heroines as a teenager. I read a book called The Cloud while I was an exchange student in Germany. It still hasn't been translated into English, so this was a challenge, but it was so well-written and the story was so gripping that I was hooked. The author, Gudrung Pausewang, was a very well-known author in Germany at the time and I read several of her other books and loved them all.  English speakers may not know her but Germans certainly did in the 1990s.

A few months after I read that first book, a foreign friend of mine had to visit a sweet German lady who was a friend of his father's to deliver something. He asked if I would like to go along because he'd heard that the old woman was a writer. Ironically, he was from Czechoslovakia (Pausewang's birthplace) and he didn't know her name. 

I went with him that day. And yes, the woman was my newly discovered favorite German author. I was blown away to meet such a staggering figure. 

But I was also a little disappointed. I assumed that being a famous, best selling author during her lifetime meant that she would be wealthy. Instead she lived in a humble cottage amid flowering shrubs with little more than the essentials and her bookcases. She was far from wealthy, although otherwise she lived up to my expectations in wit, wisdom and sheer presence. 

Gudrun Pausewang, author portrait

This was one of the hard lessons of my youth. Fabulously talented writers don't become wealthy by writing. Period.

If they become wealthy, which is rare, they do it by having a relative in the publishing business, by being a celebrity in some other capacity (actor, well-known psychologist, president, etc.), by developing excellent marketing skills, by investing inherited or previously acquired financial assets (in marketing), by utilizing interpersonal manipulation and similar pursuits. 

Writing is an adjunct skill. It is helpful to many other careers or conditions, but it isn't the primary vehicle.

When I was an up-and-coming journalism intern in 1999, one of my mentors gave me some good perspective:  "Writers who are good enough to write for a top newspaper are a dime a dozen. But not many make it. The real deciding factors are connections and bull-headed persistence." 

It's as true today as it was in the 1990s--probably more so.

The vast majority of people who make a living writing actually make a living through using (rather than wasting) some degree of prior celebrity, through skillfully working social or family connections and through intelligently investing money in marketing. Despite the fact that these sorts of careers are out of reach for most people, they still require motivation and hard work even for those born into privilege.

Here's the cold hard facts about publishing today.

• There are many poorly written, moderately successful books. These books are successful based purely on other skills or preconditions. There are a few wildly successful, well-written books. These combine other skills/conditions with excellent writing.
• There are thousands upon thousands of fantastic, rock-your-world books that are languishing in obscurity. They had the benefit of good writing but the writer lacked other conditions or skills necessary to make them successful.
• Obviously, there are also millions upon millions of crappy, boring books also languishing in obscurity (camouflaging the relatively few good ones) written by authors who lacked both the conditions and skills to make money and the ability too write well. That's true but it, unfortunately, doesn't mean that just because your book is great, you will find success.

So, when I'm asked about what a talented writer should do, I have my own set of advice based on today's conditions:

• First, determine if you really can write well. Get some independent, very critical opinions from professionals who don't know you. Insist that you want a real assessment.
• If it turns out that you can write "extremely well" AND you have one of the prized pre-conditions (some celebrity in a field, a lot of inherited money and/or social and family connections in media, publishing and/or entertainment industries), I would suggest you spend the next ten years perfecting your writing skills, writing a minimum of 2,000 focused words per day. And if you stick with it, you have a reasonable chance of at least making some money from "writing," even though you will actually be making money from capitalizing on your pre-existing conditions and there may be a lot of other ways you could do that that would be more lucrative.
• If you don't have the preconditions but you are assured that your writing is spectacular, decide if you love writing beyond anything else. If so, spend the next ten years developing your writing further as described, while working a marketing or media job as hard as you possibly can. With a large dose of luck, you might be moderately successful. though you will have to accept that those born into better preconditions will always outpace you.
• However, if you are assured that your writing is excellent and you have a job or a life you can tolerate, just write. Forget about becoming wealthy and write. Pity the poor fools who think wealth is important when they already have the joy of writing.

I have made a living writing in one way or another most of my adult life. However, most of that time was spent writing what an editor told me to write in the style that a boss wanted. For me "getting rich writing" would mean having the financial independence to write the stories I have always wanted to read without having to worry about the next paycheck.

What does getting rich mean to you? Do you have a passion that you'd love to make your living at? How much marketing and networking can you do before that becomes your primary occupation? What are you willing to do to follow your passion? I love to hear from you. Comment using the comment's button on the lower left and share this post with your friends using the button on the lower right.