Archive
Monthly Archives: June 2015
- by Tara Maya
July Theme: Villians & Anti-Heroes
The Theme for July will be Villains & Anti-Heroes.
I’ll recommend some books on Writing Craft to help you create chilling villains and monsters. I’m also going to recommend two non-fiction books, which admittedly might be more difficult and dense than some writers are willing to delve into, but my point is to remind you that if you really want to write about scary people, the best place to find them is in the actual historical record of the human race.
- by Tara Maya
The Escapist Nature of Fantasy Romance (Guest Post by Heidi Wessman Kneale)
When I’ve had too much of reality, I open a book. I love the delightfully escapist nature of Fantasy and Romance. This escapist quality was what saved my life.
For me growing up, books weren’t just an enjoyable pastime. They were my vehicle for escape. My childhood bully lived next door to us. I didn’t dare step outside in case he was there to torment me. He was my age, went to the same school, the same church, the same grocery store. It’s like the greasy tentacles of his presence invaded nearly every aspect of my life.
The only place I truly felt safe was in my own home. However, it didn’t feel like a refuge. It was a prison.
How did I escape? Books.
Fantasy was my first love. I devoured the Chronicles of Narnia when I was six and raided the book shelves for more. I loved it when my mom took me to the library–one of the few places my bully didn’t follow me.
I couldn’t stand contemporary fiction because it felt like all the characters were trapped in their lives like I was. I didn’t want to read about more misery. Bridge to Terabithia positively made me cry.
Fantasy was different. It thrilled me because it was otherworldly. Sure the characters had their problems and their griefs and even their bullies. But their problems were solvable because they had magic, or they had godlike lions or they had Grand Destinies. Unlike me, they had an Out. They could defeat the bad guy and move on with their lives in triumph. In Fantasy, there was always an Out.
Reading about this Out was very important to me as a child. For many years I honestly believed I would never get my own Out. When one spends most of their young life with daily scorn and ridicule, one doubts that they will ever receive respect, even as an adult. Even as young as age 10, I dreaded that I would end up in a life of poverty, having no career prospects as an adult. Nobody wanted me now, I’d reasoned. Nobody would hire me when I grew up. How would I support myself if I couldn’t get a job?
With such a grim future ahead of me, can you blame me for turning to Fantasy?
As I grew older, along with non-existent job prospects, I realised that love prospects were also not going to happen. No boy liked me. In fact, several of them went out of their way to ensure I knew just how unlikeable I was.
So I lost my teenage self in Romance. Again, contemporaries were not for me. Historicals were where it was at, and what few Fantasy Romances existed, I sought them out. Had Twilight been published twenty years earlier, I so would have been a Twihard.
This was the 1980’s, the heyday of those gloriously fuschia bodice-rippers. Their heroines had a much harder life than I, yet I revelled in these stories because of one very important detail: every single one of these heroines got her Happily Ever After (HEA). It didn’t matter how impoverished, shipwrecked, kidnapped, abandoned, or even raped the heroine was. She stuck through it all because she was guaranteed that Happily Ever After light at the end of her long dark tunnel. HEA is what I love most about Romance.
I read for the hope she had.
When I read these books, I forgot about my miserable little self and got nicely lost in someone else’s world. This is what sustained me through my dark years until several very important things happened in my life. My bully moved away, I grew up and went to university where I met lots of other people who loved escapist fiction as much as I did.
So, am I living an HEA now? Of course not; this is reality. I still have to get up at stupid o’clock on a chilly morning, I still have to deal with irritating people, I still fall down and scrape my knees. But now I have friends who will help me up and patch me up and send me on my way with love. I may not have an HEA, but I do have an Out. Even so, when I’ve had too much of reality, I can always open a Fantasy Romance book.
Bio:
Heidi Wessman Kneale is an Australian author of moderate repute. By day, she wrangles computers as a way of supporting her educational and musical habits. By night she stares at the stars in the sky.
- by Tara Maya
How to Use Reiteration in Romance
Staurt Horwitz in his book Book Architecture makes the case for using Reiterations to create structure for a novel without tying yourself to a linear outline. Especially if you’re writing a literary book, a book with multiple viewpoint characters or multiple timelines, this method is gold.
Horwitz is weak on one point where Coyne is strong, however: Genre specific advice.
But how about if one combined Coyne’s and Horwitz’s methods?
I’m going to take my list of Obligatory Scenes for Romance, inspired by Coyne, and mash it up with Horwitz’s Reiteration method. Let’s see what happens!
First, here’s a re-cap of Obligatory Scenes for Romance.
- The Cute Meet: Meeting the each other is an unusual, even life-changing event, or occurs during some life-changing event. (If they knew each other long ago, this is replaced by an Unexpected Reunion. Sometimes, the Cute Meet is included too, as a prologue or a flashback.)
- The External Problem: Something outside the heroine and hero keeps them apart.
- The Internal Problem: Some internal wound keeps the heroine and hero apart.
- The Draw: Despite the problems, something forces the heroine and hero to spend time together.
- The First Kiss: The heroine and hero express their attraction for the first time.
- The First Fight: The heroine and hero quarrel, but overcome their difficulty.
- The Commitment: The heroine and hero admit to loving one another or in some way commit to one another.
- The Betrayal: Despite their commitment, either the external force or internal force keeping the lover apart threatens to separate them forever. There seems to be no way to overcome this.
- Love Conquers All: The heroine and hero overcome the betrayal, proving the strength of their commitment (even, in a tragedy like Romeo and Juliet, or a romance without a HEA like The Titanic or The Notebook) despite death). In other almost-romances, or romances involving very young teens, an ambiguous “happily ever after for now” is acceptable.
- The Happily Ever After (HEA): In a true sits-on-the-romance-shelf genre Romance, as opposed to a strongly romantic story that might end tragically, the hero and heroine remain in love, remain together, and remain alive: they live happily ever after. Their HEA may be confirmed in an epilogue, or whenever the couple shows up in later books (about other couples) of the same series.
First of all, notice Points 9 and 10. The larger Theme, and the outcome that proves that Theme, for all Genre Romance (as opposed to Women’s Fiction or literary novels with a love story) must be “Love Conquers All” and a Happily Ever After (HEA). This is part of the Genre. If you don’t like it, don’t write Genre Romance. That’s pretty simple.
That doesn’t let you off the hook from developing your own Theme, however. This will be a variation of Love Conquers All, a specific example of what kind of problem Love Conquers. For instance, in 50 Shades of Grey it would be: Love is stronger than sexual sadism. The theme of Pride and Prejudice would be: Love is stronger than social prejudice. Another book might have the theme: Love is stronger than greed. One of my favorites is the HEA version of Romeo and Juliet: Love is stronger than enmity.
So far, that’s just Romance 101.
Here’s where it gets interesting. In my list of Obligatory Scenes, there were three that bugged me, the scenes I labeled 2-4 on the list: the External Problem, the Internal Problem, and the Draw. They weren’t quite right—because they weren’t Obligatory Scenes, as such, but rather ongoing elements necessary to drive the Romance. These elements might go into every scene, in fact!
I was trying to use a linear sequence, but what I needed was a set of parallel sequences—a grid. First let’s leave only the real scenes in our list:
- The Cute Meet: Meeting the each other is an unusual, even life-changing event, or occurs during some life-changing event. (If they knew each other long ago, this is replaced by an Unexpected Reunion. Sometimes, the Cute Meet is included too, as a prologue or a flashback.)
- The First Kiss: The heroine and hero express their attraction for the first time.
- The First Fight: The heroine and hero quarrel, but overcome their difficulty.
- The Commitment: The heroine and hero admit to loving one another or in some way commit to one another.
- The Betrayal: Despite their commitment, either the external force or internal force keeping the lover apart threatens to separate them forever. There seems to be no way to overcome this.
- The Happily Ever After (HEA): In a true sits-on-the-romance-shelf genre Romance, as opposed to a strongly romantic story that might end tragically, the hero and heroine remain in love, remain together, and remain alive: they live happily ever after. Their HEA may be confirmed in an epilogue, or whenever the couple shows up in later books (about other couples) of the same series.
What happened to 2-4 and 9? They are still there, but along a different axis. Let’s look again at that list once we’ve turned it into a Reiteration Grid:
The Grid allows us to see that Reiterations can (potentially) iterate in every scene. (They don’t have to but they could.) This is critical, because touching on these narrative events is key to making a romance romantic. Each Obligatory Scene, as well as the other scenes in the book, will combine more than one Reiteration Arc.
Let’s take the Cute Meet. Looking at the Grid, we can see a there are several elements that might go into that scene. First there’s an iteration of Draw—the reason they are meeting and will continue to meet. Instantly, they are attracted to one another, though at this point it might be purely physical attraction. There may be an iteration of the External problem already evident. And even at this point, we should see the first iteration of the Heroine’s secret and the Hero’s secret, though the hint might be so well disguised we don’t recognize it as the first iteration of that Reiteration Arc until we’ve seen further iterations.
Least it seem the Grid is too, dare I say it, formulaic, let me emphasize that each individual story will have a different palette of Reiterations flowing into scenes. The Heroine and Hero might meet for the first time before they know that something is going to continue to work together, so there may be no Draw iteration in Cute Meet. Or they may meet, be attracted and go right to the First Kiss scene before an External antagonist pulls them away and stirs up the doubts that become an Internal Problem for one or both of them.
It’s not always necessary for the Heroine and Hero to both have a secret/internal issue. Sometimes it’s just one or the other. In Twilight, Bella is a normal girl; Edward has a secret. But in the subplot romance of Bella and Jacob, both Bella and Jacob have an internal issue. Jacob has a secret identity. Bella’s issue is that she’s still in love with Edward. In the Bella/Edward romance, they are able to overcome their external and internal problems, whereas Bella/Jacob are not. (Obviously the Bella/Jacob love story could not stand alone and still have the required HEA, but as a subplot, it works. Romances can have bittersweet, unhappy for now, or even unhappily ever after subplots for the third wheel. Usually, though a HEA is implied even for the loser of a love triangle, unless the rival was a Baddie.)
This Grid is solely for Obligatory Scenes. It could easily be expanded along the y-axis to include all the beats of a standard Narrative Arc. Several of the Obligatory Scenes are also usually broken up into successive scenes in a standard length novel.
The First Kiss can be extended into a sequence in either direction: The First Look, the First Touch, the First Time to First Base, the First Time Making Love, the Second Time Making Love…and so on. In Romantic Erotica, the first sex scene might occur about two seconds after the Cute Meet. A Sweet Romance might replace the First Kiss scene with a gentle holding-hands gesture, and the couple might not kiss until the final scene when the preacher says: “You may kiss the bride!”
A Romance trilogy that follows the same couple may extend the later beats, such as Kiss, Fight, Commitment and Betrayal, several times, with a new arc in each book. The true HEA is withheld until the last book in the series.
- by Tara Maya
Recommended for Writers: Kate Walker’s 12-Point Guide to Writing Romance
Kate Walker’s 12-Point Guide to Writing Romance orients aspiring Romance writers toward Mills & Boon’s guidelines for their numerous “lines” of subgenera. This might make it a strange book for me to recommend, since I encourage up-and-coming writers–especially for Romance–to consider going Indie.
Nonetheless, studying Publisher Guidelines for Romance Subgenera is a wise move, especially if you’re just starting out. One of the problems Indie writers run into is a failure to refine their focus to win a particular readership. They make basic mistakes that would have their manuscripts tossed into a Reject pile by any acquiring editor… but in this case, the Readers throw the books into the Reject pile.
To avoid that, the wise writer will not scorn the high standards of the “Gatekeepers,” but learn their secrets. After mastering a genre and associated subgenres, of course, the writer can knowingly (not ignorantly) choose to bend or merge them from a position of strength.
Buy Kate Walker’s 12-Point Guide to Writing Romance by Kate Walker.
- by Tara Maya
Tara Maya’s Review: The Reluctant Concubine
Caveat—Reader Beware!
My reviews are written from a writer’s perspective, with an eye to dissecting good novels to find out what makes them work. Although I try to avoid explicitly discussing book endings, I am not as careful about avoiding all spoilers as some reviewers. If find if I employ too much caution about giving away plot twists, I am not able to provide a concrete analysis of the book’s structure. And frankly, I hate vague reviews.
So… there may be spoilers. If that bothers you, read the book first. Then come back and read my analysis and let me know if you agree…or what I missed!
Title: Reluctant Concubine (Hardstorm Saga Book 1)
Author: Dana Marton
Genre: Fantasy Romance
Read: First Time
Style: First Person Past
Type: Kindle ebook
* * * * *
Plot Summary:
Tera’s own father sells her into slavery to the ruthless Kadar people. The Kadar keep women in harems for the pleasure of a few feudal lords, and pride themselves on their martial prowess. Tera is purchased by the cruel first wife of a harem because Tera is supposed to be a magical healer. Unfortunately, she hasn’t come into her powers yet. When she is called on to heal the head wife’s daughter, Tera has to hide her deficiency.
Though Tera brings the daughter back from the brink of death, things only grow worse when the head wife and her daughter plot to keep Lord Gilrem, the brother of the High Lord their drugged prisoner. Lord Gilrem is a not a kind man either. When he’d first arrived at the House, his men nearly raped Tera and he did nothing to aide her. Nonetheless, her innate sense of right and wrong compels her to help him escape. The ungrateful oaf immediately reneges on his promise to help her escape as well, and leaves her to bear the punishment for helping him on her own.
It is not due to Lord Gildrem but to Tera’s reputation as a Healer that the High Lord himself arrives (in Chapter 7) and takes her as his own property. The High Lord Batumar has a fearsome scar and an even more fearsome reputation: every concubine he’s ever had has been killed. Yet the first night he has Tera, and she resists him, he tells her: “You will come to no harm from me tonight.”
On the road to his palace, Tera tames a tiger and assists (unsuccessfully) in the interrogation of a traitor. There’s an enemy warlord who threatens all the peoples, both Tera’s and the Kadar, with a conquest even more brutal than that of the Kadar.
Once at the palace, Tera is the only occupant of the harem. All the others who once lived there are dead—how? Why? She dares not ask.
At the palace, however, Tera’s healing magic finally awakens. She is able to ease some of Batumar’s old war injuries. While there, she also investigates the mystery surrounding her mother’s death, for her mother died in this very capital. As her healing powers expand, she makes herself useful to the servants of the palace, healing their ailments and illnesses. She makes an enemy, however. The Shaman Shartor distrusts her and tries to foment others to distrust her as a sorceress.
A strange aspect of the novel picks up (around Chapter 13) with the introduction of a magical “mist.” When this mystic fog rolls through the city, everyone else hides, but when Tera goes out into the mist, she encounters some old men who identify themselves as sacred Guardians. They knew her mother. They warn her that the Emperor Drakhar is the real danger.
Despite wandering off into the mist, she returns to the palace harem and to Batumar, where the romance and sexual tension continues to build. Eventually she understands the secret behind the empty harem and the tragedy in Batumar’s past. She also comes to realize he is not the man she feared and despised.
When he is imprisoned by the enemy, she risks her life to try to rescue him.
Characters:
Heroine /MC: Tera daughter of Chalee
Hero: Batumar
Villainess: Kumra, cruel head wife
Villain: Shartor, shaman who accuses her of being a sorceress
Setting/Worldbuilding:
The setting of the novel serves to drive the relationships. As the heroine lives mostly confined to the interiors, the outside politics feels removed. This is compounded by the first person PoV, which keeps the reader’s focus confined to Tera’s personal observations. We don’t have multiple angles to see the story unfold, so the battles, for instance, remain distant. It works in this novel, but it’s one of the reasons I wonder where the rest of the series will go.
Complexity/Organization:
I would say that the main focus of this novel was the romance, but structurally, it’s more complex than that. The heroine doesn’t even meet the hero until Chapter 7. In Chapter 13, a subplot which ties the heroine to a more typical Fantasy “Prophecy of the Chosen One” type plot begins, and the final four chapters of the story involve the heroine in a rescue-adventure to save her beloved from the forces of the series villains. In all these respects, the reader is gently prepared for the larger scope of the series.
Personal Remarks:
This is the first book in a romantic fantasy epic. The romantic tension in this book was amazing, but I’m not sure how it can be continued in the rest of the saga, since the hero and the heroine have already declared and consummated their love. Either something has to come between them—and it would have to be pretty severe to match the emotional intensity of the original romance—or they will ally together in future books against a common foe and the series will be more fantasy than romance. I enjoy fantasy of course, but the strength of this first book was the fraught emotion, sexual peril, and angst, not so much the worldbuilding; is this going to change? A third possibility is that another couple or another relationship will come to the fore. In common with other authors who combine Romantic Fantasy and Epic Fantasy, Dana Marton has an interesting challenge to maintain the tension across several books.
Quotes:
Then Tahar reappeared in the doorway, with Onra behind him, and I forgot to worry about my mother. Onra stood naked, her pale flesh glowing in the trembling light cast by the torches. She stayed where she stood, while Tahar, an arrogant smile on his face, seated himself amid loud cheers.
“Does this mean he keeps her?” I whispered.
“He would have sent her straight to the Pleasure Hall, then,” one of the girls answered.
My heart ached for Onra as she walked slowly across the endless room. A woman servant threw flower petals on her and thanked her for bringing good luck to the House. The warriors banged their fists on the tables, whistled, and made other rude noises.
She slowed when she walked by our window, blood smeared on her white thighs. Her head held high, she shed no tears. When she reached the outside door, her mother wrapped in her a blanket and led her into the cold night.
A young warrior stood from the end of the table.
“Tonight, she will be had by many,” the redhead next to me whispered. “Straight from the Lord’s bed, her virgin’s blood still flowing. It’s good luck for the men.”
Life without freedom runs on its own time.
I looked at the High Lord who would either take my body tonight or my freedom forever, or likely both, without a thought to my wishes.
I might have met him only that night, but I knew him all the same. He was a man who lived by his strength and probably despised compassion. He led his nation to war season after season. His people cared little about the ideals that were important to mine. I had known his Palace Guard, and I had known his brother, and what I knew about them told me a lot about the High Lord. I had despised him before I ever set eyes on him, and now that he owned me, I despised him more.
Strong anger in a man with a weak spirit was a dangerous thing.
Kindle Locations: 4364
My reading time: 5 hrs
- by Tara Maya
Novel Excerpt: Good as Gold by Heidi Wessman Kneale
As Good As Gold by Heidi Wessman Kneale
Sweet Fantasy Romance out now from The Wild Rose Press
About the Book:
Daywen Athalia wants love–true and lasting. Fearing a future of bitter loneliness, she seeks help from a gypsy woman. The price: a hundred pieces of gold. Daywen’s never had two shillings to rub together in her life. Where’s she going to find a hundred gold pieces?
Bel MacEuros made a career of theft from fey creatures. When the cursed gold he rightfully stole from a gnome is taken from him by Daywen, the consequences could bless or break his life.
It is not the gnome’s curse or a gypsy’s blessing but another magic, far deeper and more powerful, that will change their lives forever.
Excerpt:
“And that is how I know your name is Daywen Athalia.”
A heat so strong Bel could feel it suffused her cheeks. “What?” she squeaked.
“And now you’ve put me in a quandary: what do I do with you?”
Daywen looked to the opening of the alleyway. If it wasn’t for the grip on her arm, Bel was sure she would have bolted. He didn’t want that. He really didn’t want that, but wasn’t sure why.
“You have put me in an awkward spot between several of my relations,” he explained. “When my mother learned you had stolen a hundred gold from me, she guessed rightly that you were seeking the faerie. Had she not told me, I would demand my hundred back from you, if not in coin, at least in trade–”
As he spoke these words, Daywen stiffened and she drew herself upright. “I am not that sort of woman!” She pulled against his grip like a panicked horse.
Bel pushed her up against the wall once more, this time her hands pressed between his chest and hers. “And if it had occurred to me–which I will not confess if it did or not–and I chose to sample your favors, that would not bode well between me and another relation of mine: my cousin. After all, isn’t he your sweetheart?”
Confusion wrinkled her brow. “Who’s your cousin?”
He didn’t expect that. Surely the lass knew who she loved. “Uhh, Lachlan…?”
“Oh,” she muttered, then realization dawned in her widening eyes. “Oh! Oh no…” She sank under his grip.
“So no, I won’t be taking a hunner’worth from you that way. I can’t even steal a kiss from you.” The words slipped out before he could stop them. She was pretty and wasn’t going anywhere for the moment. Is that why he wanted to kiss her? That itch in the back of his head nagged him. All he had to do was bend down and taste her lips…
Buy As Good As Gold by Heidi Kneale
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Bio:
Heidi Wessman Kneale is an Australian author of moderate repute. By day, she wrangles computers as a way of supporting her educational and musical habits. By night she stares at the stars in the sky.