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Watch my right hand…

Watch this right hand. It’s doing interesting and strange things…

We all KNOW this stunt.

We all fall for it (or most of us). Every. Darn. Time.

We know (or we should) what is being done. It doesn’t stop it working far too well. Whether it works for contracts or politics, it’s a human instinct. You know – or you should – when someone ‘leaks’ to a friendly media outlet (with its own credibility and possibly legal problems) they’re waving the hand that you’re supposed to see around. It happens in Australia, it certainly seems to happen in the US.

The keep doing it because it still works pretty well.

That’s the real world’s problem. Ours is slightly different. You see… we’re the ones waving the distracting hand (or rather prose) around. But we face a more complex task. You see it’s very rare that we don’t want the reader to – at the right time and right scene – see the other hand. Worse (for us) we want them to realize that they were actually seeing the other hand all the time.

It’s the centerpiece of the modern Murder Mystery, important in a lot of SF and Fantasy and very common in Romance. (I can’t say I noticed it in modern Literary Fiction much). It struggles in modern PC literature of any sort, because the characters are count the tokens and their roles are defined by their position in the hierarchy of victimhood. For example, you can’t have the lesbian token even appearing to be the villain, let alone actually being the villain, without attracting hissy fits.

One of the more common tropes – particularly in Romance, but I’ve seen it – and used it, in sf/fantasy – is the ‘villainous’ hero – the hero who looks like the villain.

Yeah. You’ve read it too. Done badly it is TBR awful.

Done well… it can be exceptional.

So: first off what IS ‘done badly’? Yes, I know. We all know it… and throw it, when we see it. But what makes that difference between bad and good? Quite simply: readers don’t like changing their allegiance to a character (and yes, we all identify with and root for certain characters) because the author says ‘ha ha, fooled you. Cousin Fred is the good guy after all.” If you as the reader suddenly find that Cousin Fred was doing his level best to save the heroine, but the writer was deliberately letting us see his worst characteristics, and his deeds in the most suspicious light (that ‘noisy’ right hand)… and you’ve spent the entire book eagerly waiting for Cousin Fred to get his comeuppance – to instead have him gain the heroine’s love and hand in marriage – you’re not going to be a happy reader.

BUT if from the get-go the deeds of Cousin Fred are colored with just that hint of the left hand… and the writer has slowly built sympathy and even possibly liking for Cousin Fred… a little whimsy desire to see him… at the very least, escape justice… that’s different. It usually works with his inevitable counterpart – the ‘heroic’ villain gradually having his sympathy and the reader’s trust eroded – so when he turns into the bad guy, they are relieved.

It’s NOT an easy trick to pull off well. The common murder mystery trope, where the villain appears innocent and another character appears guilty is an easier one, because you just have to set things up so that the guilty party would be the suspect, were it not for the loud right hand (and the visible but distracted from left, which makes them guilty). It can be simply about the mystery and both the patsy and the villain be rather unlikable (Midsomer Murders does this a lot. Heyer did to a lesser extent in her murder mysteries. When she did it in the romance arena she was a lot better at making us like the apparent villain – even when it was de facto a murder mystery (THE QUIET GENTLEMAN – where Theodore attempts to make it look as if the impetuous young Martin (the heir apparent, who has been ‘done out’ of his inheritance by unlooked-for survival of Gervase, is the guilty party, trying to kill Gervase. Now the hero of the story is Gervase, so the reader thinking Theodore dull and Martin painfully intemperate and impetuous is fine.

The classic example of the ‘villainous’ hero is in her ‘REGENCY BUCK’ –not one of my favorites, but really fine example of doing this cleverly and well. The author pulls off something probably way beyond my ability – She starts off with a moderately unlikeable heroine (which is done with a balance of PITA impetuous behavior, and a somewhat more impetuous and foolishly spoilt younger brother – the heroine is ‘redeemed’ by her high spirited self-reliance, and her care for her brother – and by the fact that the left hand shows (despite the right hand flashy displays of temper and outright foolishness) that she knows her errors. Won’t readily or happily acknowledge it, but knows it. The heroine takes a vast dislike to the ‘villainous’ hero on first meeting, and the author is careful to cast her experiences with him (in the attempts to murder her younger brother) as… ambivalent. In her eyes, he could be guilty. BUT the author lets us see things that the sister is unaware of: the ‘villainous’ hero destroying the debt-vowels that could take money from the younger brother and heir. The real villain – Bernard – allows him to wear the blame for this non-existent loss (but the reader knows it is non-existent) Bernard is thus gradually shown to be cozening rogue, but what the author has done is not so much to change the ‘villainous’ hero as to change the heroine gradually, and therefore her perception of the hero. We see relatively little from his point of view, and that carefully ambivalent – because that would reveal too early. But it’s a really brilliantly orchestrated piece.

Read it – as a study not as a pleasure (you’re better off with the repartee-dialogue in several of her others). But once you realize you’re being shown the left hand, just distracted from realizing it by the pyrotechnics on the right… you’ll understand how to do it yourself.

I wish I could do it half as well. I wish politicians did it worse.

Sharkskin and Rhinohide

A while back, we (by which I mean somebody who actually does stuff ‘round here, like Amanda or Sarah) asked for suggestions for topics, and I’m swiping one from the compiled list.  One or more of you, our valued readers, asked how a newbie writer could become part of an established community when uncertain of the quality of their output, how to get feedback, and how to start feeling real. Well, be warned: perspective incoming.

The writing side of publishing may well be the least organized industry in existence. Do you write? Words, strung together into phrases, used to cast spells to vaporize the unworthy convey meaning from one thought-having thing to another? Congratulations: you’re one of us (one of us, one of us, one of us). Like most quasi-social organisms, we tend to agglomerate into loose communities.

Unlike more regimented industries (i.e. those with established lines of training and accreditation) and owing to our own, often peculiar natures, writers (as well as other artists) tend toward the odd, and often the Odd. Which is reflected in our communities.

All humans do this, but in writing, the strange little in-rules that govern human social group interactions are what organize (Hah. Hah.) how our industry works. For a given value of works. So what you’re asking is really, “how do I become good enough friends that a group of writers won’t ignore me?”

I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, but we’re more or less cantankerous, and really only seek out social contact so we can abuse each other in print. *reads the preceding, looks at his half-full mug* Ok, that coffee was too dark. Gimme a minute.

–One dollop of cream later—

Much better. My apologies. What you’re looking for is how to become accepted by writers, when what you need to be doing is looking at befriending lonely, often curmudgeonly, and always strange individuals who happen to interact on a somewhat regular basis.

The secret, speaking from experience, is this isn’t actually very hard to do.

The biggest part is just showing up. Odds are good you already know a writer. Or several. If you’re here, you rub elbows with several, of varying degrees of success and notoriety (not the same thing), and frankly, the MGC is a good place to start. The method is the same as any community: find where your interests and the community intersect, and participate. A few years back, I decided (based on some interactions at a convention) that I wanted to expose myself (shaddap) to more of what a handful of writers did that wasn’t just their fiction. I started frequenting blogs, and (here’s the trick) commenting on a regular basis. This was more than a little emotionally risky. I don’t often have much of great wisdom or insight to offer. I’m not nearly as well read as a lot of our readers, let alone my fellow Mad Genii (can’t put that back in the bottle). I can, however, turn an amusing phrase now and again, and that kind of repeated presence establishes you as a regular. It led directly to me posting here at the MGC. In short, pay your dues. Become part of the community by becoming part of the community.

Now, as to quality of writing, I don’t have anything new. You may well not have anything “good” when you first become accepted by the rest of us crazies. On the other hand, you could be the next sliced bread of the publishing world. For most writers, success seems to come much later than quality of prose. We’re an industry founded upon preference (specifically, the taste of others), and as the ancients had it, in matters of taste there can be no dispute, though you wouldn’t know that from the state of, well, anything. At least on the internet.

Is your writing any good? Well, beyond a certain basic level of craft – past the rules of good grammar, can you put together a story in ways that don’t have readers putting your words through virtual walls – whether your writing is any “good” depends less and less on what you can control that the question becomes meaningless. Becoming a better businessman helps, I’m told. Though again, success seems to depend a great deal on luck. And from my industry contacts, luck looks – over time – more and more like hard work and persistence. So, keep at it. Keep writing, keep showing up, keep learning, keep pushing your personal limits. That’s how you get better at anything, and writing – being a skill – is no exception.

Now, on being real. Insert a math joke here. And another, because I’m pushing limits. This is where the title comes in. You have to consider yourself a real writer. Nobody is going to do it for you. At least until you have fans. Decide what Real Writerness is going to look like, and work toward that. Is it an author page on Amazon? Or a Real™ book that you wrote in your hot, little hands? What about a publishing contract with a Real Publisher™? Or a regular income from a handful of successful series?

I know authors with multiple novels by multiple publishers who aren’t considered real writers by some readers. Usually for obscure emotions linked to emotional issues. I freely admit that – at this point in my life – I’m more than a bit of a dilettante. It’s not that not a writer, but I don’t keep to a schedule, I don’t meet deadlines, and the whole endeavor looks more like a hobby than a business. In my own defense, I have toddlers, and looks can be deceiving.

And that’s the thing about being a writer: it’s complicated. On one level, you determine whether you’re a writer. Do you write? That counts. Do your peers accept you? That counts, too. Do you have readers? That also counts.

The best approach seems to be more or less what I’ve already described: join a community of writers, practice the present imperfect of the craft, and develop a hide thick enough to shrug off the proverbial slings, arrows, and fiery darts of the naysayers. External and internal.

It’s An Heroic Quest

Okay, to review and so no one is confused since I’ve had some truly strange comments in the past, including people who thought I was trying to dictate to you which points to hit: this review of genres and subgenres is not to teach you how to write them, so much as to help you classify what you’ve written, so you can publish it in the genre/subgenre that gets you most readers who won’t leave you nasty reviews saying “do you even read this sub-genre?”.

Now, here we are on slippery ground as with say “fantasy that’s not technically set in a bit city but is set in the present day.  Is that urban fantasy or not?”  Since Amazon doesn’t have a category for “modern day not urban fantasy” it’s tricky, because putting it in urban fantasy means a good part of the crowd who downloads it will be upset at you, because there’s no dangerous romance element etc.  (And heaven help you if the paranormal romance crowd downloads it.  They like their sex explicit.)

Everyone who reads fantasy knows what I mean when I say “heroic or quest” fantasy, but you know, Amazon doesn’t have a category for “like Tolkien.”  Someone at Amazon doesn’t have a huge grasp on things, so they decided to just have historical fantasy, which frankly doesn’t even fit alternate history fantasy like Witchfinder, because their history is not parallel to ours.  In fact, I’m fairly sure I put it under general fantasy which is stupid, because the “feel” is historical, so I need to go look and change it, but I don’t have access to the publishing computer today.

What you do for this is compensate by going into the key words and putting in things like Wizards, elves, dwarves.

Don’t btw take my word for the words to use, because I don’t have access to the publishing computer right now.   No, wait, I found it.  The closest they have is Sword and Sorcery, which if I remember was the 70s term for this.  https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201216150

Note there’s really no sub-category or keywords for even things like Game of Thrones.

So, it’s hard to figure out how to make it so your book discoverable, but I’ll be honest, in these circumstances one often puts the name of the most distinguished/best known practitioner in the field as a key word.  So you could put it in Sword and Sorcery and put in the key words as Tolkien.  Or G R R Martin, if that’s what you actually sound like.

Anyway, quest fantasy: your group of heroes is looking for the McGuffin.

It has always amused me that quest fantasy is intrinsically similar to a subset of science fiction novels we don’t see much of today, but which were a favorite of mine growing up: colonization science fiction novels.

It has a lot of the same touchstones: it’s a group novel, with a set of personalities.  There is often at least one romance (and for the love of heaven don’t list your novel as romance under fantasy, just because there’s a love interest and some romantic subplot.  Remember romance means a genre, not romantic love.) Sometimes more than one.  There is usually a traitor and a couple of red shirts.  And there is a hidden prince, or in science fiction “the guy who survives against all odds.”

Now it’s been years since I read colonization novels, but I felt at the time that I could tell who would die and live within the first few chapters, and I often feel the same way with fantasy novels of this type.  I don’t have the time to cover every cliche of the field, though if you’re an RPG player you probably know most of them.

The world these are set in is usually “vaguely tolkienesque.”  Yeah, each one has variations, and some people are very creative, but there’s still some of the traditional races and struggles we met in Tolkien or in Norse Myth/Celtic Myth in general.

To compensate for what I don’t have time to cover, I highly recommend you buy and read Diana Wynne Jones “the tough guide to fantasy land”.  It not only will give you the “if you have this, you should class it as” but also some of the things to avoid, such as bicycle horses or stew.

Anyway, it’s a quest and along the way your characters are tested, and some die or are judged unworthy, etc.

I’d distinguish heroic fantasy, which might have SOME elements of the Tolkien world, or might not.  It might be an historical “feel” world with magic, but its creatures can come from completely different mythologies.  It’s where I’d class G RR because it often involves clashes of civilizations in the face of an impending supernatural doom, etc.

Both of subgenres are very much “not of our world” and both hard to place in Amazon categories.  (I have to ask Amanda S. Green how she classified Dagger of Elana.)

One recourse is to look at books that are like yours, see how they’re classified, then figure out how to achieve it.  And no, I’m not that bright, either.  It just now occurred to me I should do this with DWJ’s Chrestomancy and classify Witchfinder accordingly.  Well, it’s a project for this weekend, hopefully.

Again, neither of these subgenres are my own preferred poison, either written or to read, but mention had to be made of them because they’re such a big part of the field.

Completely open if someone chooses to explain how they back engineered the sub-classification.

A well turned ankle

On page three hundred and twenty two, your book contains the vile prurient words ‘In the privacy of her bedroom, with the curtains drawn and shutters closed Purity Smith stole a glance at her well-turned ankle.’ For this disgusting, lascivious piece of prose you are henceforth cast out of literary society and your works all to be destroyed. Such obscenity can never be tolerated.

By Order: The Special Prosecutor The State Council of Public Morality. 

Yes. Well the sight of a lady’s ankle was once considered rather risqué. And for some reason a pretty one was described as ‘well-turned’ – Which puts a whole new twist on turning your ankle —  And history’s worm turns too.

Of course, in reality, people went one with much the same conduct as today. It was just done in ‘secret’ and of course that was much better.

Well, according to some people anyway.

It was a bit like the log-rolling that went on in the SFWA Nebula nominations. Susie, Fred, Joe and Mary would nominate Pat. And then Fred, Mary, Joe, and Pat would nominate Susie. And in another category, oddly, Susie, Fred, Joe and Pat would nominate Mary… and so on. It was a bad joke, a mockery of the legitimacy of the Award. You could see all the nominators back in those days, and it was painfully obvious. A fair number of people – me among them – complained. The then president, John Scalzi, promised to do something about it. And he was as good as his word: he made the names of the nominators secret.

Strangely, the same clique of log-rollers went right on getting nominated. I’m sure it was pure chance that saw those same names on the Hugo noms too. Looking at the ‘me too’ coming out of Hollywood – which will, inevitably affect the writing world – I see the same sort of thing happening. Of course it won’t actually stop the casting couch, or actors and actresses giving sexual favors for roles. That would be hard and take real change. It’ll just hide it, make as if it isn’t happening.

I see a new ‘puritanism’ coming charging down the track at them, and probably us.

Shrug. You know mostly we just ride with the tide of the world. Contrary to the myth, authors rarely make popular opinion. At best we shape it a little. Populism works because… well, because it is popular. The Zeitgeist moves and so must we – or not (that is one’s own choice after all. It can destroy your sales, or, contrariwise, if you’re one of a few standing against the tide, give you enough readers to be able to).

I’ve managed to always write more or less within my principles and I’m not exactly a graphic pron writer, but I’m quite happy for it to float the boats of others. Puritanism will put some challenges up there, especially for the authors who rely heavily on sex or the shock value of sex. Fortunately, this too will change as it always does. My grand-kids will probably be able to enjoy the backswing.

On a separate tack – interesting post here from David Gaughran. It seems that scammers have been screwing with Amazon and that Amazon has come down hard… on innocent people doing promotions – which is rough if that is part of your business model, as it should be. It makes for uncertain ground. I’m honestly not sure what the final outcome is going to be, but it is certainly something that should make every author work on having their own mailing list, and look toward the possibility of selling their own work directly from that before you put it up on Amazon, and well before you go KU. I got an advert from Jetpack about taking payments for physical goods etc. for my WordPress Website, but selling e-books still seems too hard. Still, in small volumes I imagine manually sending an .epub file to individual customers would be a pain in the nether region, but possible. Anyone having better systems to suggest – I’m sure I wouldn’t be the only one pleased to hear about it.

Anyway, forgive this being bit short today, but I managed to hurt myself today (just a stupid muscle injury that will get better quite soon) and am taking it to bed.