For those who’re reading the sample: I’ve added a new page for discussing Blood Red Moon. I’m really kinda nervous about this book, it having been through so many incarnations, so would love to know what you like… and what you don’t like.

FREE SAMPLE

I’ve decided to be optimistic about the future of Sergei and Crew and have started a new Series Title: Nights of the Blood Red Moon. But first things first. The newest cover!

This is one of the more difficult editing jobs I’ve ever done. Blood Red Moon (name still subject to change) was written on demand, to fit an ambiguously defined style. It was rewritten to fit even more ambiguous input, again from my agent, with all the good will in the world bless his heart, and somewhere along the way it lost its vitality.

Slowly but surely, it’s regaining it.

Several years ago now, when DAW was still sitting on my six books, my agent suggested I write a vampire book, the theory being (and I quote) he could sell anything with a vampire in it. I specifically asked if he meant one of the fast-paced urban fantasies still, then, on the rise, books which simply weren’t my cuppa tea. He said, no, absolutely not, and pointed me at a book which was vastly popular and an absolute tome. I honestly could not read more than a page or two and skimming it, it didn’t get any better. Slow and characterless (for me) didn’t begin to cover the problems I had with it.

(Please please please note, I say “for me”. I freely acknowledge I’m not a mainstream style reader!)

But they all had female protagonists, which is something else I’m not particularly into, so…I queried again, and, no, I didn’t have to write a female protagonist. Just relax, enjoy myself and write a book with a vampire.

Ooookay…To begin, I’d never read Dracula, so I went back to the beginning of the vamp in modern literature. As I read, I became aware of the changes of attitude and technology and the problems such a relocation would face in the modern day world…and the seeds of my story were planted. The Count’s gypsy servants appealed to my inner socio-Anthropologist, and a little research into modern Roma gave me other cool factors. A bit of study into the real history gave me my antagonist, a little communing with my inner vampire gave me some cool notions on ways around my too-educated intellectual problems with shape-shifting and I had my vampire biology in hand.

So…I was off and running. I wrote a book I really liked. My agent hated it. Well…I shouldn’t say that. He loved Sergei, just not much else. He didn’t like the sociological aspects, and he didn’t like Peter. He gave me some other input…which boiled down to what he wanted was a fast-paced, pro-active, but not too pro-active, female protagonist and not a lot of inner contemplation, urban fantasy. He wanted conflict (there was plenty of conflict, but what he wanted was the physical kind all the way through rather than my psychological-style conflict) and he wanted the antagonist onscreen for the entire book…or rather, he wanted me to cut all the real conflict that is the point of the whole story. Basically, he wanted me to start over.

In retrospect, I understand why. NY was getting increasingly conservative and this is a very different kind of vampire book. He was trying, very hard, to help me, and this is the same guy who put me in contact with Pat Lobrutto, who gave me, on ‘NetWalkers, the best editorial input outside Carolyn and Lynn that I’ve ever gotten.

I honestly tried to listen, tried to think how to adapt what I’d done to fit his needs. But I’d just spent the better part of a year on this book, I’d become very fond of the characters and was spiritually content with the underlying social consciousness of it, and the events had become inherent to the characters. To do what he wanted, I’d have to come up with a whole new scenario and cast of characters, but he wanted Sergei and Radu.

I was, in a word, disheartened. But I tried. I took out scenes, pulled strings of time, truncated causality…and made the relationship between my human protagonist, Peter, and his fiancee, Mina, a whole lot more interesting. In many ways, I liked the changes, but in others, I felt I really lost something…because I was editing without hope.

Wow…where did that come from? But it’s true. I’ve never thought about it that way, but that’s what it was, and that’s what I’m sensing as I do this final edit. The big difference in that last edit and this one is hope. It’s the knowledge that this story has a home and that, at last, I’m writing it for myself.

That’s a hell of a good feeling.

(On that note, I’m leaving what else I planned to say and getting back to work!)

Dinner with Sharon the other night got into some interesting territory. Everyone, it seems, has an internal age, a gut level sense of how old they are. We got to talking about it and it turns out I’m weird (no surprise there) as my internal age is actually pretty old…late twenties or even thirty.

I attribute it to the fact that I was a little old lady, goody-two-shoes in high-school, and went through most of my twenties trying to become something I wasn’t really meant to be…i.e. a physicist/astronomer. Lots of school. Lots of work to allow me to go to school. And through it all, a focus on my parents, both of whom I loved dearly, and a marriage I just knew was going to dissolve at any second, once my mother discovered what I already knew to be true.

That happened finals week of my last year of college. I was twenty-eight at the time. (I had to take time off to work and collect enough money to go back to school.) Right after that, I discovered that due to bad counseling, I was three GURs short of my degree and out of money.So…no degree. No grad school, and a mom trying to hold it together.

The next couple of years I associate with keeping my head above water and a lot of personal floundering. Twenty-nine or thirty was when I finally let all that go, took the risk to go work in Poughkeepsie with WaRP graphics, which challenged me in a whole lot of ways, but which ultimately led to my working with Carolyn which is when I finally quit fighting my basic artistic nature and started applying learning to writing. At the time I was also in the best physical condition of my life, which probably has something to do with it.

Anyway…that’s my story. What’s yours?

I went up on youtube looking for a good example of Deymio’s dancing horses and found this magnificent freestyle routine by Blue Hors Matine. I’d heard of this mare and she really was special. She’s only nine in this video! I’ve never seen such cadence. And durned if she doesn’t feel the beat! Unfortunately she had to be put down after (as I recall) breaking a leg. One of the great losses of the horse world.

I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time now. So much of my blog is dedicated to my cover projects and other visual stuff, and the categories is a clunky way, IMO for organizing them. So I’ve added a page that will have thumbnails linked to their slideshows. So far, I’ve just got the covers up, but I’ll do it with the details and with the pond projects as well. Hope ya’ll like it!

Thanks to my buddy Maelen for putting me onto this. A “commercial” aired only once, in acknowledgment, not meant to make money. I think, even if  you’re not as huge a fan of the Budweiser Clydes as I am, you’ll get a bit teary. It’s really quite special.

but not what you’re likely thinking, given the date. 9/11 has a much different connotation around Tau Ceti, Inc.

Nine years ago today (9/12/01) Carolyn’s darling father, Basil Cherry, passed away. Basil was a wonderful man, strongly religious, yet with an inquiring, lively mind. I remember many fun (and challenging) discussions with him as he endeavored to reconcile those beliefs with the fascinating discoveries being made in science. He loved gardening, playing tennis, and singing in the choir. I’m blessed to have known him.

A year later, on 9/13, my mom, Jane Maxine Fancher, passed away. Like Basil, she was religious, but in the best sense of the word. She never used her beliefs to judge people, but rather expanded her definition of proper behavior to include everyone who didn’t hurt anyone else. Like Basil, she sang…like an angel…in the choir and everywhere else, loved gardening, and for all I know, played tennis when she was younger. She certainly maintained an active and vital lifestyle up until the day she passed away.

In our garden, we have two very special roses: Tropicana, which was Mom’s favorite, and Chicago Peace, which was Basil’s. They’re strong, vigorous growers/bloomers and constant reminders of two of our world’s most special people.

Mom, Basil…here’s to you!

What makes a good/believable character?

I’m putting part 1 because the subject has so very many facets that it might well turn into several posts, but I got to thinking about it when I went up to Amazon to get the isbn numbers of RoL and got seduced into reading the book’s reviews and realized that I now have a viable forum from which to respond to those reviews.

Normally, I try to stay away from reviews cuz nothin’ good ever comes of reading them. It’s just not worth the frustration and self-doubt. You either want to scream a) “OMG…what part of this book did you actually read?” b) “OMG…did I really write that?” or c) “OMG…could they possibly be right?”

One negative review for RoL triggered an initial “a” reaction, but as I was raking this morning (have to do something with the excess neurons) I began to think about what he’d said, not questioning what I’d written, but thinking of that author/reader synergy that makes a book work or not. Fiction isn’t a one way transaction. It isn’t one person telling the same story to every reader. It’s one person telling a slightly different story to every reader, because what the reader brings to the equation is as important as what the author wrote.

This particular reviewer had a problem with the characters in Ring of Lightning. They were, to paraphrase, over the top.  The reviewer’s support for this opinion? The Rhomandi brothers quarrel like teenagers and with all their money, they should have learned to avoid AuntyA.

Hmmm…

Yes, Khyel and Deymio argue like teenagers: their understanding of each other is frozen at that point in time.  One of the major points of the whole series is how this screwed up, adversarial relationship came about and how they overcome that conditioning. It’s very common, among large families, for patterns to get set in the teenage years, patterns that affect the sibling interactions for the rest of their lives. Sibs age and leave, one after another. While the sibs might interact as adults, it’s rarely to the same extent as they did as teenagers…unless they share a domicile as adults, which adds a whole new layer of complexity.

This reviewer is not alone in the opinion that this interaction “wrong.” I’ve heard it a few times over the years. Invariably (if I get the chance to ask the question) the person who expresses this opinion is an only child, or at most, one of two children in the family, and those usually widely separated in age. Discussions over the years have shown a curious pattern. Most only children have this idealized notion of what it would be like to have siblings. And that notion doesn’t begin to resemble the Rhomandi brothers’ relationship.

I come from a large family. I love my sibs dearly. But there are arguments. Thank god there are arguments. If there weren’t we’d be a seriously boring Stepford Wives family. Like the Rhomandis, there’s a fair spread in our ages. The parents my oldest brother knew were not the parents I knew, as next to the youngest. Life had changed, taking familial relationships with it.

As for the suggestion that the Rhomandi bros should take the money and run…I have to ask myself, what kind of CEO would the reviewer have made? The kind who finds an excuse to fire a longtime employee just before retirement? or the kind who takes a cut in his own pay to avoid layoffs? Granted the former is far more prevalent in our society these days, but the Rhomandi brothers are not like that. The power and money to which they were born is the foundation of the entire economic structure of the web. If they were to pick up and leave, leaving Anheliia in charge, that entire structure would collapse. Deymorin does use their Outside holdings to escape Anheliia while still keeping his side of the economic bargain that he inherited from his ancestors. Mikhyel is likewise bound by duty and honor and a real love for the city of Rhomatum. He is the legal buffer between Anheliia and the people of Rhomatum.

And herein lies the catalyst for the heat of their arguments: the fact that they are caught between the ability, monetarily speaking, to escape the nightmare of Anheliia, and their duty to every other Rhomatumin citizen. The brothers endure Anheliia because they must, because they are who they are. They inherited more than money; they inherited responsibility.

So…I guess this reviewer completely missed the driving force of the entire character side of the book. But the question is…why? Should I have explained more? Reiterrated yet one more time those above mentioned factors? Should I have spelled it out in words of one syllable?

I don’t think so. There comes a time when as a writer you just have to admit you’re going to lose some readers. The one thing you can’t overcome, as a writer, is a reader utterly and completely predisposed to reject your basic premise.