Words and Pictures to Inspire

I've just slithered in from the RT Convention in Las Vegas. I don't know if this counts as inspiring, but here's a video of my acceptance speech for Best Fantasy Romance of 2015.

Three Inspiring Thoughts on Writing

Before I share my three favorite quotes about writing, I have to twirl a bit over my big news this week. THE TALON OF THE HAWK was nominated for Best Fantasy Romance of 2015 in the RT Book Reviews Reviewers Choice Awards! I'm so honored to be in the company of such amazing writers, many of whom are my very favorites from way back. Such a thrill!

My three favorite quotes about writing.

There is in each of us an upwelling spring of life, energy, love, whatever you like to call it. If a course is not cut for it, it turns the ground around it into a swamp. ~Mark Rutherford

I found this quote in the book WALKING ON ALLIGATORS, a book of meditations for writers, by Susan Shaunghnessy, which I bought back in 1993 when I first set my cap to being a writer instead of (or, in addition to, as it turned out) being a scientist. I've come back to this quote over and over, to explain to myself why I get depressed if my breaks from writing are too long. Ye olde swamp. Yes, exactly.

Tons of great quotes in that book - I highly recommend!

Take the donuts!

Okay, if you haven't read Amanda Palmer's THE ART OF ASKING, you won't get this. Also, this is an amazing book for any kind of creative. Maybe for anyone at all! Seriously, this book lit up my life and answered questions I didn't even know I had. Anyway, she explains this so much better than I could, that I'm copying from the book. Some of this might not make sense because she references previous thought threads, but that's all the more reason to read the book!

Thoreau wrote in painstaking detail about how he chose to remove himself from society to live by his own means in a little ten-by-fifteen-foot hand-hewn cabin on the side of a pond. What he left out of Walden, though, was the fact that the land he built on was borrowed from his wealthy neighbor, that his pal Ralph Waldo Emerson had him over for dinner all the time, and that every Sunday, Thoreau’s mother and sister brought him a basket of freshly baked goods for him, including donuts.

The idea of Thoreau gazing thoughtfully over the expanse of transcendental Walden Pond, a bluebird alighting onto his threadbare shoe, all the while eating donuts that his mom brought him just doesn’t jibe with most people’s picture of him as a self-reliant, noble, marrow-sucking back-to-the-woods folk hero. In the book An Underground Education, Richard Zacks declares: Let it be known that Nature Boy went home on weekends to raid the family cookie jar.

Thoreau also lived at Walden for a total of two or three years, but he condensed the book down to a single year, the four seasons, to make the book flow better, to work as a piece of art, and to best reflect his emotional experience.

Taking the donuts is hard for a lot of people.

It’s not the act of taking that’s so difficult, it’s more the fear of what other people are going to think when they see us slaving away at our manuscript about the pure transcendence of nature and the importance of self-reliance and simplicity. While munching on someone else’s donut.

Maybe it comes back to that same old issue: we just can’t see what we do as important enough to merit the help, the love. Try to picture getting angry at Einstein devouring a donut brought to him by his assistant while he sat slaving on the theory of relativity. Try to picture getting angry at Florence Nightingale for snacking on a donut while taking a break from tirelessly helping the sick. It’s difficult.

So, a plea.

To the artists, creators, scientists, nonprofit-runners, librarians, strange-thinkers, start-uppers, and inventors, to all people everywhere who are afraid to accept the help, in whatever form it’s appearing:

Please, take the donuts.

To the guy in my opening band who was too ashamed to go out into the crowd and accept money for his band:

Take the donuts.

To the girl who spent her twenties as a street performer and stripper living on less than $700 a month, who went on to marry a best-selling author whom she loves, unquestioningly, but even that massive love can’t break her unwillingness to accept his financial help, please…

Everybody.

Please.

Just take the fucking donuts.

And my most recent favorite, that I have tacked up next to my desk:

What would you write if you weren't afraid?

This one isn't cited to anyone that I can find. It's interesting because when I mention it to some people, they come right back with "I'm not afraid of anything!" Which is great. More power to them. Other people though, particularly well-established, multi-published authors, nod and say, "Oh, yes." It's not fear precisely, but that works well as a good umbrella term. It's caution. It's those voices of the marketplace whispering that something like it has been done. Or has never been done. It's the comments of critique partners warning that readers won't like something. It's the ever-present doubt in one's own instincts.

Whenever I hesitate on going somewhere in a story, I look a that quote.

And I write as if I'm not afraid.

"Anachronisms" in Fantasy - Keeping It Real

My mom sent me these gorgeous flowers last week to celebrate that THE TALON OF THE HAWK, book 3 in The Twelve Kingdoms series, received  Top Pick from RT Book Reviews. That makes two Top Picks and a Top Pick GOLD for this trilogy, which is just...I can't even express how validating this is. They said:

“The saga of The Twelve Kingdoms returns in grand style! It takes a great deal of trust for Ursula to accept that Harlan is interested in her as a woman; his position as a mercenary means he’s skilled at playing courtly games. She’s always possessed a physical strength, so it’s beautiful to watch her accept her own personal power, as a woman and as a daughter of Salena, even when her stubbornness gives you fits. Harlan is her perfect match because his talent at observation allows him to see beyond the tough warrior image she employs to avoid showing her feelings. This is a complex world full of danger, subterfuge and secrets with empowering female characters who are not afraid to fight for their future.”– RT Book Reviews, 4.5 Stars Top Pick

It's so wonderful when someone GETS exactly what you're trying to do with a book. Especially when not everyone does. I'm writing in this odd cross-section of fantasy and romance. It makes me happy and it's exactly where I want to be, but I sometimes run afoul of the genre expectations of both sides of the fence.

But mainly from the fantasy folks.

Because, let me tell you: the sci fi/fantasy (SFF) folks have RULES. It surprises me less coming from the sci fi contingent. A lot of those readers and writers are also scientists and engineers. I've spent much of my life working with both and I know the mindsets. Very much about linearity and sticking precisely - even pedantically - to the rules.

I'm just so not a rules kind of gal.

Really, it's not that I can't. It's that I don't want to. An attitude the pedants don't care for at all. So, you know, I get what I gets.

Which is criticism for using anachronistic language in my fantasy romances. I've seen less enthused reviews for this series calling out phrases like "national security" and "fan club" as anachronistic. Um, okay. Because, this is MY fantasy world, right? I'm careful not to use tech-related metaphors in my non-tech world. No electric shocks or going off like bombs. But how can those phrases be anachronistic when they're drawn from basic words that WOULD have meaning in that world?

It is apropos, however, of this week's topic Realism in SFF: trying to maintain the suspension of disbelief. The argument, I suppose, would be that these phrases are ones that readers attach with modern, popular culture and they thus feel jerked out of the alternate world, losing that lovely suspension of disbelief. It could also be argued that this is a voice thing. I *like* tossing in more current language, to mix things up. But then, I also believe in adopting the slang and alternative usages in our ever-evolving language, where I know many people believe in clinging to some kind of "pure" concept of what is and is not correct.

(Frankly I fall in with those who feel the concept of correct or pure English is a fallacy. Languages by their nature evolve with use, changing to fit the needs of the speakers and listeners. English, in particular, partly because it's the language of technology which is changing at a rapid rate.)

The suspension of disbelief is important, but what is "real"? The word "club" goes back to the 1600s. "Fan" goes back to the 1800s and is a shortening of "fanatic," which goes back to the 1500s. Put together, the phrase dates back to 1930. "National" and "security" are likewise words from the 1500s, put together sometime in the early 1900s. I could see that, okay, those are usages that came into play after the Industrial Revolution.

But, at what point do I draw historical line? After all, in Chaucer's day, "nice" meant "stupid" - not at all how we use it today. When Norman Mailer coined the term "factoid," he very deliberately meant it to convey a fabricated statement. Now our government websites use it to mean a small fact. An irony lost on many.

I think one could go crazy, trying to parse all of this. And is it worth it? Suspending disbelief for the reader: Yes. Totally worth it. Appeasing those who hold to what seems to me to be an arbitrary set of rules? Eh. Yes, Tolkein wrote great fantasy. I read them all, even THE SILMARILLION. But I don't think that this is some sort of academic standard to which we all must adhere. Language changes. Genre changes. If we don't play with the rules, how can we be creative?

What do you all think - am I crazy here?

Which Marketing Is Worth Paying For?

by @JeffeKennedy

This week's topic we'll be gnoshing at the Bordello is our favorite free and paid marketing venues.




It's always the question, which thing to invest in. The topic comes up repeatedly on my author loops. It's not that we don't want to pay to advertise, but there are a LOT of "opportunities" for authors to shell out money in order to bring their books to readers' attention.


Okay, it's downright predatory out there.

Between the perception created in part by the astonishing success of authors like Veronica Roth, JK Rowling, EL James and Stefanie Meyer that authors are rolling in money and the most understandable eagerness (which can shade toward desperation) of writers who *aren't* rolling in money to get that way, a huge marketplace awaits the unwary writer. All of them claim to deliver book sales. None (in my experience) can definitively prove it.

And, lemme tell you, we're not talking cheap. Book Bub charges up to $1600 to feature your book for one day. Fresh Fiction offers a one-year advertising  package for just shy of $1100. You can pay up to nearly $4000 for a full-page, full-color ad at RT Book Reviews - and barely skate away for less than $1,000 for a 1/6th page ad. Now, I'm not saying these don't return on the investment. Some people swear by them. I can vouch that having Rogue's Pawn featured on Book Bub put the book up at #2 under Fantasy Romance on Amazon. Which was amazing and wonderful - arguably tremendously effective. And my publisher paid for it - even better.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't have that much cash to invest. Not like that, anyway. So I tend toward free marketing venues. Do I get what I pay for in those cases? Maybe. The ones I pay for I choose pretty carefully.

Free
Social media. It costs time, yes, but - if you don't succumb to Facebook's endless prompting to pay to boost posts - it's otherwise free. If you do it right, it's also fun and builds a community of friends and like minds. My personal favorites:

• Twitter
• Tumblr
• Blogging
• Goodreads
• Facebook

Paid
My favorites aren't necessarily the smartest investments, but in examining what I actually shell out money for? Giveaways. I give away my books, my friends' books and various prezzies. I tend to favor baked goods. Some examples:

• Guesting on blogs and hosting a giveaway as part of that
• Contributing to a group gift
• Participating in another author's party and adding my own giveaway
• Offering a gift related to the book on my own website
• Swag at conferences

In the end, I shell out the most to attend conferences. Going to those, interacting with readers and other writers, both feeds me and gives me a real-world sense of who is actually reading my books. Nothing is more wonderful than having someone dash up to me at a cocktail party and introduce themselves as the person who wrote that amazing, glowing review. It's a small sample, but I love having that moment.

Crossing Genres for Fun and Profit

Each month the RT editors select one book that is not only compelling, but pushes the boundaries of genre fiction. This book stands out from all the others reviewed that month, in the magazine issue and on the website. June 2014's RT Seal of Excellence — the editors' pick for best book of the month — is awarded to Jeffe Kennedy's fantasy romance, The Mark of the Tala.

This week's theme in the Literary Bordello? Cross pollination: mixing and matching your genres.

Boy, am I the girl for you!

For a very long time as a fiction writer, I didn't know that I wrote cross-genre. I started out as a nonfiction writer, more or less, and for years I wrote in whatever style or format struck my fancy. In many ways, the world of "literary writing" is much more tolerant of this. You get to play around and find out what format works best. When an essay didn't work - at the suggestion of several people - I reframed it as a set of poems. Which then won a poetry fellowship. I sold a magical realism short story to a literary magazine that published only creative nonfiction. Which was funny, because the woman in the "essay" has a cancer that turns her into a grizzly bear at the end... VERY creative. :-) In that writing world, format takes second place to art.

In the world of commercial fiction, however, genre is Queen. Book sales are driven much more by type of story than author. Where lit fiction and nonfiction might all occupy the same shelf in the store, my erotic romances and fantasy titles would really never be shelved together - unless some special category like "local author" trumped it.

But this is something I did not get for a very long time.

Admittedly, part of this also comes from me being a very cross-genre reader. I've always read pretty much everything - from Oliver Sacks' essays on neurology to Anne McCaffrey's dragon-fired fantasy to Anne Patchett's books - both her literary fiction and her excellent memoir work - to Nora Roberts' contemporary romances to a book of very smutty rape-porn I found in my grandmother's attic. I never really read by genre. Thus, when I began deliberately writing fiction, I wrote the kind of story I liked to read - not realizing that what I liked to read was a major stew of stuff.

So, I wrote this story about a woman scientist in the modern world who walks out on her annoying boyfriend (contemporary romance), has a strange experience at Devils Tower (magical realism), ends up in Faerie (fantasy), is chained to a bed and forced into a semi-sexual bargain (BDSM/erotic), becomes a sorceress and fights to gain her own agency (sword & sorcery/epic fantasy), and has a convoluted romance (romantic fantasy/fantasy romance). After a few years of hearing that this book (which became Rogue's Pawn) could not be marketed, I finally sold it to a digital-first publisher known for taking chances on cross-genre books (Carina Press).

After that, I thought I got better. I made an effort to write in-genre.

I'm not very good at it.

I think I may be too cross-pollinated. Too eclectic in my tastes and styles to color within the lines. I'm more or less resigned to it.

Plus this happened.

Just last week!

My newest book, The Mark of the Tala, received the June Seal of Excellence from RT Book Reviews. As you can see from the caption above, they give it to a book that "is not only compelling, but pushes the boundaries of genre fiction."

Isn't that the way of the world? One moment a misfit, the next a visionary! (Okay, "visionary" might be stretching things - but still!) In the end, I stuck with what mattered to me. Maybe those early lessons writing non-commercially made a lasting impression. For me, genre has always come in second to story, much as I learned to subsume the format as the art demanded. It takes persistence and more than a little courage, to withstand the marketing types who insist on clear genre boundaries.

Would I do it this way again? Absolutely.