Samhain Publishing

I’ve always thought I wrote in an unusual way. You see, unlike some other writers I know, I don’t have a strict plan for every bit of the novel I’m working on. I have a setting, and a vague story arc, but primarily I have characters and they’re what drive my work. I want to explore with them, and if that takes the story off down unexpected lines, so be it – I can always go back and amend the earlier bits of the tale to fit the new ideas. So long as we reach a satisfactory conclusion, I’m happy.

What I also find is that I’ll write something or somebody – or a little random event – into a story with no idea about what I’ll do with them/it or why they’re/it’s significant. I just know they have to be there. Now, I thought that made be a bit odd (no comments, please about how odd people already think I am). I was delighted to find that I’m not alone!

I was at the regular lunch held by the local chapter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association on Monday. They’re a lovely bunch, published and wannabe-published, romance writers, saga writers, crime writers, all of them delightful and full of wisdom. We fell to discussing how we construct stories and what our editors told us. We had people who struggled with just the end of novels, ones who were being told to put more romance into their stories, or who were fighting over proposed titles for their next books. Inevitably there were as many experiences and opinions around the table as there were people.

Imagine my delight to find that at least two other writers found they included things as their stories developed, for no other reason than they ‘knew they had to be there’. One lady said she’d felt compelled to intoroduce a little white dog into the novel she was writing, even though it seemed nothing other than window dressing. Only at the end, when her heroine was in trouble, did the dog’s role become clear. He was there to fetch help – case solved!

I’ve had the same thing happen. A picture on a desk, white lilies on a grave, a bystander in a scene (one with a crush on another character) were all written in before I had any idea what to do with them. But each proved absolutely crucial to the denouement of the stories they were in. I’m a great believer in the workings of the subconscious mind, so maybe some part of my brain had got all the details worked out and all the jigsaw pieces in place while I was still fiddling around trying to work out what the outline represented and what picture was on the box…

A literary agent that I follow, that I adore though I’ve never met her in person, recently posted a blog about what Young Adult books are. Is a book automatically labled YA because its protagonist is young? Nope. Especially not if it’s a book where the main character is an adult reflecting on his childhood. STAND BY ME is definitely not a YA book, even though all of its main characters are children.

What makes a book Young Adult? Certainly adult-like situations happen in YA books. The protagonist (who may be of the older variety, late teens/early 20’s old. Stop laughing. To a tween, twenty is ancient.) MUST solve the problem themselves even if they seek the help of an older person, because if an adult solves the problem, it’s not a YA book.

Does subject of theme make a book YA? For example, can it have romance? Sure hope so, or else some of my books have been grossly mislabeled. It can also include themes of drug use, drinking, pregnancy, sex, and even suicide. There can be vampires, werewolves, zombies, ghosts, and death. The words choice is different, obviously, and certain things may happen ‘off-stage’ or be more ahem vaguely described.

(YA spans from ages 13-18, so there is a wild range of books here, and topics. Some YA will be sweeter than others; the 13 year old book will treat kissing different than one aimed at 18 year olds)

So what is Young Adult? I think the lit agent has the perfect answer: it can be in any POV, take place in any time (made up or real), and can be any genre. Usually it’s about a younger person experiencing something for the first time. Like Romance, most end on a hopeful note, if not completely happily, and all of the plot threads wrap up satifactorily.

What YA is NOT is about adult s**t. No corporate takeovers, no Wall Street deals or multiple affairs to keep their minds off of their crappy jobs. It’s not

Maybe that’s why I read so much of it, and write it. I like taking a break from adult s**t. YA is a crossover genre, they tell me. Lots of adults are reading it. If you’ve got a hankering for YA, tell me why in the comments.

Sequels come in many varieties. There are the ones that carry the central characters forward, ones that carry the secondary characters forward, ones that carry the setting forward and ones that carry the plot forward for example. My favorite is the one that carries the central characters forward. I like to see the characters evolve through life and move through new adventures. Series like that which come to mind are JD Robb’s In Death series, Simon R. Green’s Nightside and Secret Histories series and Laura Ann Gilman’s Retriever series.

Reading a book again is like visiting old friends but re-reading a series of books where the same characters keep moving forward in life can be even better. As an editor, it’s interesting to have an author bring a series to you. Which type of series will it be? What will happen to characters you meet along the way and what happens to the original characters? One thing that can cause a lot of comment is when characters change dramatically within the books.

One series that I read had a book released lately and I debated heavily before purchasing it. I had skipped the last two books. Why? The main heroine has changed drastically from the initial books. While this could be good, I have never felt there was any life-changing event that justified it in this particular series. She just suddenly became this new person. I haven’t quite enjoyed the series the same way since book 5.

So series are an interesting thing. Some people love them. Others hate them. When do you as an author or a reader know when to quit? It’s a hard struggle for an author when readers are clamoring for more, but the author is ready to move on.

What are your feelings towards series? Are there ones you love? Ones you hate? Why?

When I was a kid, I used pretend I was Indy’s girl and I would go on globe-trotting adventures with him and get into all sorts of mishaps. At the elementary school playground, all the structures were wooden and there was this wooden bridge which made for excellent adventures. My best friend and I used to act out the scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom where Indy cuts the bridge in half and Willie screams her head off. And then they all slam against the rock wall and Indy is at the bottom and he’s trying to climb back up to the top with the stones. Except in my story, I would be the damsel he’d have to rescue from the evil Mola Ram—who really wasn’t evil, you see, because he drank the black blood of Kali to make him that way.

As I got older, the “pretending” became moving pictures in my head. Pictures I had to write down. And because I was completely bored in Freshman English with a teacher that droned on, I started writing. Once upon a time…there was a princess who had an evil uncle, the Duke of Westchester, who locked her in a tower. Until a knight in shining armor came to rescue her… And that knight just happened to look like a young Harrison Ford circa 1986. What can I say? I had a thing for the man.

I wrote my own space adventure where Good had to defeat Evil. I remember sitting at my desk in my room with my lamp on, burning brightly, while I furiously scrawled the story on wide-ruled notebook paper. Front and back. Just over two hundred hand-written pages. Two hundred! I can barely sign my name now without getting a cramp.

After that, I toyed with the idea of becoming an actress but I was too crowd-shy for that.

Some people are lucky enough to pretend for a living—they’re the ones that became actors and actresses living out adventures on a movie set. Others of us, we pretend in our heads and write down all our adventures. Others who didn’t turn to acting or writing and continued to pretend…we’ll, I’m pretty sure they ended up in the loony bin somewhere.

But are writers really so different? Trying to get published is a long, tedious, painful, awful process. But we do it anyway. Every time we get a rejection, we go back for more like a glutton for punishment. You know why? Because we ARE nuts. We believe in ourselves. Our writing partners believe in us. We keep writing and trying. We push ourselves to the edge, write the stories WE want to write, make worlds WE want to live in. We write and write and try and try until ONE day, one special day, we get that call or email from the agent or editor who said yes.

I got the 15th “no” the other day. Am I giving up? Hell, no. Will I continue the rocky roller coaster ride? Hell, yes. Why? Because writing is fun. Writing lets me become all the things I wanted to be when I grew up. Writing lets me continue to pretend.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some make-believe to tend to.

Let’s talk about endings. Endings…some dribble off to nothingness, some are saccharin sweet and make me stop reading, others are ambiguous and confusing and I’m left wondering. When that happens I have to weave a fanciful ending in my head and have the ending I need.

I’m like most readers. I like an ending that is satisfying like a nice cup of coffee after a good meal. I want to know what the characters are doing in the future. But endings should be well thought out and complete, not rushed. I’m still mad at the ending for the last Harry Potter – can anyone say written in a hurry? I, as a reader, felt cheated.

In the case of romance books, I like to be hit over the head with a happy ending. I like knowing the characters will be together longer than the next month. Epilogues are an effective way of giving the reader a glimpse into that future.

Some of my favorite endings are:

A Room with A View by E. M. Forster – boy meets girl in Florence, they have troubles when returning to stuffy England, but boy eventually gets girl and they live happily ever after in Florence.

It by Stephen King – childhood friends vs. evil clown-demon-spider thing. The movie was actually pretty good too, which is rare in my opinion on books moving to the big screen.

Regina in the Sun by R. G. Alexander – okay I know this is one of my authors, but I love the ending. It ties everything woven throughout the story together.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie – can’t say anything, it would give it all away. But if you like mysteries, this is a good one.

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card – a very thought provoking ending. I have been afraid to read others in the series because I don’t think anything can trump this one.

So as an editor, I’d love to hear your feelings about endings. Do you like epilogues or do you like to leave the future to your imagination? What are some stories with memorable endings (non-romance endings are fine)?

I made some New Year’s resolutaions that involved doing more to further my writing career. Which means going out an finding professionals to tell me what my work is missing, why agents are continuously rejecting my stories. I get plenty of requests for manuscripts, so I must write a pretty good query letter, but the story itself falls down somewhere and ultimately I get the dreaded ‘not for us’ letter.

I went to a Mentoring Conference recently. I paid for a NY editor to look over 30 pages and my synopsis. I know everyone hates writing synopsis, but I’m not bad at it. Actually she said it was excellent. Except that it was too long. So I need to snip and tuck a little. I was ready for a fine NY tongue-lashing, for her to tell me all the ways my story was wrong, wrong, wrong. I had prepared for it, trained for it. But it wasn’t that bad. I agreed with everything she said, and she was really super-nice. The biggest change is that it wasn’t ‘YA’ enough. The editor thought it read like a tween novel, which is what I usually write, so not really that shocking. I need to, um, add some more Victorian teenaged sexual tension. Okay, I guess I can do that.

But something still doesn’t seem right. It’s definitely an improvement, but I just can’t put my finger on why my writing doesn’t seem as good as some of the books I’ve read. So I’m signing up for the NJSCBWI annual conference, taking a day and a half of classes on various subjects in the area of children’s writing. I’m going to give a first page to a reader and have agents and editors tear it apart. The first 15 pages of the WIP is going back to a group critique, for other writers to take me out for another round. I’m going to wrestle this puppy and until it’s ridiculously wonderful or I have no hair left. I’m going to cut and trim and make my characters go through horrible things.

It’s the book or me this time!

Writing is not for the faint of heart. In fact it’s pretty much a bloodsport. If you don’t have your thick skin on, don’t get in the ring, because in order to be good, you have to be willing to put take some hits, put it all on the line and have someone tell you it isn’t perfect. Because in the end, it’s not about you. It’s about the story, and about what readers want.

If you can’t do that, stay home.

I started thinking about masochist heroines not because of any fiction I’d read recently but because of some nonfiction—a book by a woman who’d been one of the multiple wives of a Mormon fundamentalist. She’d spent most of her life in grinding poverty bearing thirteen children and dodging her husband’s murderous relatives. I’m afraid my first reaction to the book was “Why on earth didn’t she leave?” Some of the author’s reasons are understandable—she was the descendant of several generations of polygamists, which made her think that kind of life was normal, and she didn’t really have a way to get herself and her children out of the family compound. But some of them are just incomprehensible. Namely, she swears she loved him.
Now, I write romances—love is my stock in trade. But I have a hard time understanding how you can love a man who marries six other women, is seldom around (because he’s off earning money to support these women and his thirty-plus children), and has little time for affection when he is. Unless, of course, you’re a masochist.
Masochist heroines were a lot more popular in the eighties than they are now (and I should say at this point that I’m not talking about heroines in BDSM—I’m talking psychological masochism here). For example, take Linda Howard’s Sarah’s Child. This is a lot of people’s favorite book, but it’s always struck me as faintly creepy. The heroine, one of those ubiquitous eighties executive assistants, marries her tycoon boss (another eighties favorite). Said boss lost his previous wife and child in an auto accident and is adamant about not having any more children. The heroine gets pregnant—by him, of course. He basically kicks her out of his life. She goes off to bear the child by herself, uncomplaining (well, after all, he did say he didn’t want children). He comes around. HEA. And yuck.
Then you’ve got Elizabeth Lowell’s eighties heroes, who are so alpha they’re almost psycho. They’re tough, loaded, and convinced that most women are worthless sluts, based on past experience. The heroines inexplicably fall for them, and the heroes stomp on their hearts. Then the heroines take the men back when the heroes figure out they were maybe wrong about this particular woman (although not about women in general). It’s hard to imagine a real HEA with this type of jerk.
I should admit up front that neither Howard nor Lowell writes heroes and heroines like that now. In fact, if Sarah were a current Howard kick-ass heroine she’d probably tuck the baby into her backpack and head for the hills, after telling the dumbass hero to take a hike of his own. And then she’d find some nice backwoods type who’d be perfectly willing to let her be herself, etc.
But I keep coming back to that polygamous wife. It’s all too easy in romance writing to let love overtake good sense. After all, the insensitive alpha hero who refuses to consider the heroine as anything other than this week’s assignment and then learns, almost too late, to appreciate her is a standard romance trope. The key here is figuring out the heroine’s reaction. When the hero behaves like a jerk, does she call him on it, or does she just endure? I haven’t done too many jerky heroes, although Pete in Wedding Bell Blues has his jerky moments. I have a hard time with heroes who don’t behave like heroes, but maybe that’s just me. Writers like my fellow Naughty Niners do a good job with them. The trick is, I think, to give the heroine an honest reaction, to let her be both hurt and pissed off. What you don’t want to do is just give her a trembling lower lip. But in the long run I have to admit—that’s probably better than giving her six “sister-wives” and thirteen children.

Short and Sweet

Do you find yourself skipping over portions of books? Do you tend to buy shorter 200-300 page books rather than the larger tomes? Why?

I asked myself that question a while ago when I finished a book by a well-known author. The book was over 500 pages and action packed from beginning to end. The main character(s) were constantly on the move and under time crunch to “save” something (the world/another person, it doesn’t matter). Yet I found myself skipping large portions of the book.

Why? Information dump.

I love history. I love conspiracy theories. I love tangled webs. But put them all together and add a fiction plot and more often than not I am disappointed in the book. Make the book a romance on top of that and things can get really tricky.

I feel for authors who are excited about the information, the legend, the myth, and in some cases, the history surrounding an event. It’s a tightrope walk to figure out what is important and what isn’t. I often think the author is more in love with the facts and information than with the characters of the book. The author is so eager to share his/her fascination with the details that they forget they are writing something that is for the beach or the sofa rather than the classroom. The number one thing I dislike more than anything when reading a book for pleasure is to be lectured to. Having an author lecture his/her point of view and using the characters in the story for the vehicle causes me to put that book aside. Fiction reading should be stimulating, satisfying and enjoyable.

While the information may be fascinating, I only need to read the part that connects the dots for the story – the characters and the plot they are involved in. If the plot is so complicated that it requires minute attention to detail and learning obscure fact, chances are the book should have been a series. A series would allow the information to be given to the reader in short doses not all at once.

So to keep this blog short and sweet…what books have you read that are wall-to-wall information dump? Did you like it? Are there situations where that type of book works?

I realized, when looking back at all the past ‘Ask the Editor’ posts we’ve done, that we’ve never actually had an open ask the editor thread. So, instead of listening to me ramble on about the topic du jour, I thought I’d open today’s post to you.

Is there a burning question you have for the new Executive Editor? Something you’ve been dying to know about Samhain Publishing? Ask it in the comments. I’ll be popping in all day to answer.

I’ll start with a question I’ve heard too many times:
Q. Is it true that only current Samhain authors can submit shorter works – like 12 – 20K-word short stories?

A. Nope. not at all. We will look at any length between 12,000 words and 120,000 from any author – published with Samhain or aspiring to be published with Samhain.

Now it’s your turn… what’s your question?

Normally when I blog over here I talk about writing or books or something related to those subjects, but all I can think about in December is Christmas and my birthday (which is next week, but I honestly don’t want to think about it because the number is freaking me out). (That sentence was way too long. Don’t tell Deborah Nemeth…)

This is my favorite time of the year – from now until New Year’s I’m in a happy, mellow mood. Not even Christmas shopping can freak me out this year, in part because we’re doing so much less of it.

So instead of talking about books or writing, I thought I’d share a couple of my favorite recent Christmas memories and ask for yours as well. Post them in the comments – anything funny, embarrassing, heartwarming, whatever. I don’t think you can post pictures in the comments but if you want to share them, leave a link to your webpage or Twitpic page. (I love looking at other peoples’ pictures, and I assume they love looking at mine, but…no, sometimes they don’t.)

Ok, I’ll go first:

Christmas 1999

Our house has a large building in the backyard – 900 s.f., electricity, air conditioning, a loft. The Hub put a bid on the house without setting foot inside, based solely on the Barn’s potential as manspace. (It didn’t earn the initial capital till after the addition of a fridge, a poker table, a crapload of power tools, and so on).

When we moved in, we found the folks who’d lived here for 50+ years (they wouldn’t sell us their vintage 70s VW bus, BTW) had left a bunch of stuff in the loft, including a sad, ancient aluminum Christmas tree that Charlie Brown couldn’t love.

Come December, I was so excited. I went off to do shopping, and the Hub and the Brother-In-Law went off to buy Christmas trees.

I came home to find Hub and Bro-In-Law sawing off the bottom of a beautiful tree, doing all the stuff guys do to get a Christmas tree ready for installation. (I think they make that crap up, BTW).

I squeed over my first Christmas tree in my first home. But the Hub & Bro-in-law said no, that’s the Brother-in-Law and Sister-in-Law’s tree.

Hub says, “Trees were so expensive this year. We just bought a house, baby. We need to save our money.” And he stepped aside to show me…the aluminum tree. I stared in dismay, tears pooling in my eyes while the Hub chuckled and said, “Oh come on, baby. It’s not that bad. I can fix it up, and everyone will think it’s funny.”

In my defense, he’s got one hell of a poker face. That’s why he had me going for thirty minutes – it wasn’t because I was gullible…

When I started to cry, he folded and showed me the real tree in the back yard – it was beautiful. Ten years later, Hub and the Bro-In-Law still go get the Christmas trees together every year. He can’t wind me up quite so much after all this time, but that’s okay. He’s got Diva to pick on now, and she falls for anything he says.

Christmas 2004

Diva was 3 and just about old enough to get really excited about Christmas. She kept asking when it would start snowing. I explained (over and over) that we don’t get snow very often in Houston. We get it about every ten years, and when we do, it comes in January or February. I told her she’d be seven or eight before it snowed again here.

It started snowing on Christmas Eve – unheard of around here and absolutely magical. Driving home from Hub’s grandmother’s house, it started coming down heavily (or heavily for here). It wasn’t fun to drive in, but it was gorgeous. When we got home we played in the backyard. We got more than an inch, which is a lot for us, and Diva made snow angels on the trampoline.

I’ve looked everywhere and I can’t find the pictures from that magical snowfall. So here’s a picture of Diva in the snow in Colorado in December of 2006.

Now – what are some of your favorite Christmas memories so far?