Do you have something that’s catnip to you as a reader or a writer, or simply as a person?

Keep it minimal in your story. Or if you absolutely have to have it in there — well, you are you, so often your ideas will have something that is catnip to you and that’s what makes them tic — be very suspicious of it.

How suspicious? Well, make sure it’s not the ONLY thing in the book that is interesting to you and driving you to write on.

Let me explain: I’m… old. Possibly older than dinosaurs, or at least that’s how I feel like today.

I’m a lousy mentor, mostly because I’m ADD as heck, so I tend to forget to read things. Also, my life is a complete state of perpetual chaos — yes, some of this is the ADD, but some is just that I’m cursed. Yesterday and today Engineer Cat learned how to break into the parts of the house that are still full of boxes and therefore kept closed to him. Avert your eyes…. — which means sometimes I remember for months, and feel super-guilty but can’t get to it. A word in your shell-like ear: the best way to get mentoring out of me is to keep bugging me, way past all bounds of decency.

However, in moments of relative calm, I’ve mentored people. And over 30 years, that amounts to a lot of people. A lot, a lot.

Which has led me to be aware that passion is a fickle mistress.

No, I don’t mean sex, though you’d be shocked — or maybe not — how often for the young and naive sex is in fact their plot catnip. (I don’t know. While the subject interests me enough in person, I am … not a voyeur? So reading about it is always a little blah.)

I mean whatever passionately interests the writer is a good way for the writer to forget about plot, character development or even story at all.

I will never forget the 180k word novel, in which the person — whom I later found out had a degree in the history of textiles — went astray by pursuing textile production/transport/sale/valuation in this galactic empire.

You start out with the young woman, carrying the precious cloth she inherited from someone and isn’t sure where it came from, as her sole possession and clue to her origins — she is a foundling — boarding a spaceship to the largest world/trading center. And you’re all interested…

And then she meets a cloth trader. And then we follow him on a buying expedition cum lecture on methods of weaving. And then we follow one of the weavers…

It wasn’t so much a novel as “Scenes from how cloth might be made in a future space empire with multiple nodes of trade and–“

And it took me forever to convince the poor person this wasn’t a novel. She kept saying “but it’s over 100k words!”

You could tell, too, that it was passionately interesting to her. Mention things like “You probably don’t need the scene with the android weavers” and she’d start talking about how the cloth would lack those little imperfections that made it blah blah blah….

Seriously. I don’t even know if I ever convinced her, as eventually we lost contact. And she’d come to me because it had been rejected EVERYWHERE and the rejections baffled her utterly. Because to her the book was unputdownable, of course.

Most of the time I run into this with either politics or sex, though honestly, for men it can also be “imaginary machines.” A subvariation of this is when they don’t even describe the spaceship or flying car or whatever, just beat you over the head with brand names. “He didn’t have a Dragon Rider, which was, of course, the best, but he had a great Phoenix Flyer, with the leather seats.” Seriously, if you must get all geeked out over imaginary machines, at least describe them. We don’t need details, but we do need to know if it’s bigger than a lemon and can carry more than an unladen swallow.

If it’s sex I’m put in a heck of a position as a mentor. Because if I say “Okay, thing is you have a lot of sex, but no plot or characters or anything else that interests anyone not along for the sex,” I get called a prude and my advice discounted.

Note that I figured this mistake out by making it. No, not sex. My catnip is such complicated world builds that they literally don’t fit into a book, and confuse everyone. Took me years to figure out that at best I was boring people out of their gourd. At worst, they were confused by a tour of worlds that don’t exist, with no reason to be there.

So, how did I get over it? Very easy. My husband doesn’t have my obsession with politics or “how societies work.” He very much is there for the story. So having him beta read beat most of it out of my back brain. (Though, heaven help me, the weird book might be me regressing.)

Now, I’m not loaning Dan out — though he’s awesome as a beta reader — so what do I suggest?

Find a set of first readers who aren’t obsessed with the same things you are, and then get them to give you honest opinions. If you can’t do that, and look, finding beta readers is hard even for professionals, because of the requirement to get it read on time, then it’s harder. You have to pretend you don’t care for thing, and diagram what you’re doing with characters and plots, BESIDES THAT.

It is however important. The fact that romance has become really erotica is to be laid (snerk) at the feet of “Obsession that writers and editors share.” And while sex will always have readers, the low-quality of plotting and character has got traditional publishing houses in romance in relative trouble. Meaning their circulation is lower every year.

In the same way, the fact that writers and publishers tend to have gone to the same impeccable universities is responsible for the wokening of science fiction. Beyond all other pressures to sing in the Marxist choir, there’s the fact that people freshly indoctrinated with a bunch of imperatives to “change society” think that anti-racism whatever it means this week, or the latest gender cant is the most fascinating thing EVER. And when the writer and the editor both coalesce it’s easy to forget that novels should have characters, plot, and a driving force pushing the plot forward.

Hence how many “heroes” of sci fi or fantasy trad pub epics are just scolds, who magically “stick it to” the racists or the sexists or whatever, but are, objectively evaluated by people who are not obsessed by the topic, in the exact same way, horrible people we wouldn’t want to share a cab with much less an adventure.

Look, yeah, I disagree with a lot of it, and some of it is so outright stupid even the author can’t seem to have it clear in her/his head — in fifty years most coastal areas can’t/won’t be under water. If that were true, we’d already be seeing it, and coastal properties would be devaluing. BUT more importantly, if Kansas — KANSAS, WTF? — is underwater, so is London. More importantly, so is all of England and a large part of Europe — but that alone doesn’t mean I wouldn’t enjoy the book, around it.

I read a lot of communist apologetics during the cold war, as much as the ideas they pushed disgusted me. I read them because the STORY was good. And I cared about what happened to the characters, even if they were soviet shills.

You can have whatever your catnip is, even if it is something that makes me roll my eyes so hard they roll on the floor and the cats play with it.

But if you want to entice readers, you need to make sure you have other things that will bring in the maximum readership possible. And ultimately that’s mostly always characters, plot and a story that moves. Because if you have that, even the bits that upset the reader will be ignored till the story is read.

So, put your catnip in, if you must. But treat it as a dangerous substance. And make sure there is enough around it to make it not the only thing interesting in the work.