Babel Clash

It’s been great having Seanan and Devon on these past two weeks.  All of their posts were filled with lots of great content and ideas (and lots of good tips for aspiring writers).  While it’s sad to see them go, as is customary here, their last day shall be used to plug any past, current, or future projects!  Let the self-promotion commence!

Then, when the dust clears, we’ll be joined by two authors who combine some of my favorite things - steampunk, superheroes, and New York City!

First, let’s welcome George Mann back to the blog!  His latest series for Pyr follows The Ghost and should not be missed.

Joining George is Andrew P. Mayer, who debuts the Society of Steam series with Pyr this year! This series follows the adventures of Sarah Stanton on her path to becoming a hero in a time where women weren’t even allowed to vote.

Again, please join me in thanking Seanan and Devon for their time on the blog and welcoming George and Andrew!

Creepy Care Bears aside, I agree with you, Seanan.  Switching between genres can be a trick.  I’ve never thought about using scents to clue me into the brain space needed for a certain project.  Probably because I don’t have a plethora of lovely perfumes to choose from. Not that I’m jealous.  Nope, not at all.  (Okay, I totally am.) But for me, I think music is the best trigger to indicate which of my worlds is on the writing block for the day.

You also mentioned brain freeze–when you get stuck in one genre and no matter what trick you use, you’re still in that genre. Yep. I totally get that.  I just go with it.  I figure the freeze will thaw once the shiny of whatever idea I’m chasing wears off, or the scene that has me brain-tight is finally down on the page.  My mantra is go with the flow, or the freeze, as the case may be.

But let’s talk more about TV, the great distraction on the wall.  I don’t watch a lot of shows regularly. But when I’m writing the steampunk, I find myself hungry for visual candy.  I’ve always had a fascination with history, and I love filling my brain with images of everything, from hats to the inside framework of old buildings.  And it’s not just the TV that fills that hole for me, though it certainly helps. 

I watch movies, browse old patent applications, look for failed or unmarketed inventions, and thumb through the pages of old catalogs.  I get excited about going to steam locomotive shows so I can look at bolts and welds and valves, find myself mapping ghost towns, visiting museums, and walking graveyards to read the headstones. TV, books, the internet, documentary clips, magazines, newspapers, audio clips, and anything else I can get my grubby hands on, all get stuffed into my brain and into the steampunk world I’m building. I can’t get enough of it.  I am hungry for the look, taste, smell and feel of times gone past.

Urban fantasy doesn’t set off my craving for images quite as much. Maybe that’s because I can drive through Portland Oregon (the town where my urban fantasy books are set) and look for a chocolate shop for a haunt, or a warehouse for a battle, or a neighborhood resistant to magic. There have been the occasions when I’ve hit a scene and suddenly thought, “how would this person decorate?  What kind of architecture reflects his personality or his lifestyle?” and gone to look through magazines, or online sites for interior design ideas. But mostly, the urban fantasy is clear in my mind, without me needing to go on visual research binges.

Some authors put together character boards with photos of their characters: the kind of clothes they wear, the car they drive, the house they live in, and the full background on their life history.  I don’t do that.  My characters come to me pretty much whole cloth, and then I discover cool little details about them as I write them on the page.

How about you, Seanan?  Are you one of those kinds of writers who puts together visual clues before you start writing?  Do you interview and chart and map out the details of your characters before you head into a project? Or do you just jump in and wing it?

You’re not going to scrub that image out of your brain, Devon. Urban Fantasy Bear is my loving gift, from me to you. You’re welcome.

Mood is tricky. Tone, perhaps even moreso. There are days where, for various reasons, I’m writing Toby in the morning (urban fantasy noir), Newsflesh in the afternoon (science fiction zombie thrillers), and InCryptid in the evening (perky monster hunters with talking mice; whatever the appropriate genre is, you know they’ve attacked it with a Bedazzler at some point). This means I’m experiencing the equivalent of genre whiplash every six hours or so, when I have to grab my brain and force it, very quickly, off one track and onto something entirely different.

Devon mentions music as a way to change the mood, and I have to agree with her there. I have playlists of mopey seventies and eighties rock for writing Toby, heavy on the Journey, Pat Benetar, and Meatloaf; I have playlists of dance music and bubblegum pop for writing Verity. The right beat and tempo can definitely do a lot to slam me into the right headspace for telling a different kind of story. Sometimes I have characters latch onto songs that may not make sense on the surface–why does Alice have such a thing for “Never Gonna Give You Up”? Why is Toby so attached to “Carry On My Wayward Son”?–but which make a whole lot of sense once you get to really know them. It’s fun!

I also use scents to switch myself from one universe to another. I’m a big fan of those weird little perfume companies that have sprung up all over the internet in the last few years, especially Conjure Oils and the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab. My perfume collection is somewhat daunting to the uninitiated (and to me, when it comes time to dust my shelves). So no matter what sort of story I’m trying to tell, I probably have some sort of perfume to dab on my wrists and really immerse myself in my subject matter. And we’re not just talking “roses and strawberries,” here. I have multiple dirt-based perfumes (my favorite is Graveyard Dirt, which smells like dirt and loam and the risen dead), a perfume called Embalming Fluid, and even a perfume called Bad Luck Woman that’s best described as smelling like freaky chainsaw swamp sex. Any story I want to tell, I probably have a scent to go with it.

(It would be amiss of me not to mention that there’s even a perfume line from Conjure Oils that’s directly based on my Toby Daye books. So now I can not only smell like the story, I can smell like the specific characters from the story. My cats are frequently very confused.)

If music and perfumery doesn’t do the trick, I break out the big guns of redirection: television shows. I watch a lot of TV, and different shows put me in the mood for different stories–not always in a predictable way, either. Phineas and Ferb makes me want to counterbalance its relentless positivity by starting the zombie apocalypse or wiping out mankind (again). Fringe makes me want to work on Toby, where nothing is explained by science, and magic can solve most of the problems it creates. About the only series with a really understandable TV show/urge to write connection is InCryptid; nothing makes me want to work on those books like a new season of So You Think You Can Dance.

Sometimes I just can’t make the switch. I admit it. Sometimes I get jammed on one track, and I just have to go around the track over and over and over again until I get it out of my system. Learning to recognize those times was really the hard part, since otherwise, I wind up with Toby fighting zombies, or the Masons casting spells. And that’s not fun for anybody.

So how do you deal with those moments, Devon? Do they hit you, too, or am I alone in my genre brain freeze?

Seanan pointed out that even before you open a book, the cover art and design is giving you clues about what kind of story it contains. She also says you can tell a lot about a genre by how your character walks into a bar.  (Care Bears with boobs and knives?  Really, Seanan? How am I going to scrub *that* image out of my brain?)  But even with cool covers and pissed off Care Bears, it can be tricky to figure out what makes a book fall into a specific genre.

I’m writing two very different series right now.  One is urban fantasy and one is steampunk set in the American west.  Both of these genres are the kind that people ask me to define.  I try.  Really, I do.  But there is so much crossover in urban fantasy (we know it must have a fantasy or “paranormal” element, but is it mostly a mystery? Romance? Noir? Comedy? Fantasy? Science fiction? Horror? Crime story?) that it is difficult to give a single description that fits all urban fantasy.  Plus writers are creative little critters and they like to mess with stuff.  So it’s pretty safe to say that urban fantasy pulls from the tropes of at least a dozen genres.    

Then we have steampunk.  I can’t keep track of how many people have asked me what steampunk really is.  Heck, I’ve asked what it is too–and I write the stuff!  I’ve heard some good definitions, but steampunk is another one of those genres that has massive cross-over appeal.  Is steampunk adventure fiction? Alternate history? Romance? Fantasy? Science fiction? Horror? Humor? Scientific romance? Yes, yes! And more.

Since I’m writing urban fantasy and steampunk at the same time, I often get interrupted to take care of something else in the other series.  That means I need some tricks to flip my brain toggle between genres.

Luckily, both series have a different emotional center for me.  Even as a reader, I’m looking for different things from urban fantasy books than I am from steampunk books.  It is not just the setting, characters, story lines and tropes that are different, it is also the “feel” of the books that make them two very different beasties in my mind.  The urban fantasy I’m writing is fast-paced, funny, dark, sarcastic, intense, sweet, dangerous, filled with a sense of awe and set in an alternate magical present.  The steampunk I write is a study in contrasts: dark/ poetic, gritty/melancholy, adventuresome/ down-to-earth, mechanical/magical, reserved/wild, and full of the what-if wonders set in an alternate historical past. 

And while the characters from one series simply would not fit into the world of the other series (kind of like Seanan’s stuck-in-a-jar/shot-in-the-chest analogy) there was the one time I pulled up out of a deep immersion in the steampunk to write the urban fantasy, and for a page or two, my urban fantasy smartypants character was talking like he lived in the 1800s.  My brain had gotten stuck in steampunk mode.  It was hilarious to listen to my street-wise big-mouth talk like a cowboy, but it didn’t fit him.  At all.

So I used a quick trick to shift my brain, and my emotional center: music.  For the most part, I listen to alternative rock when writing urban fantasy. It works for the mood of the book and really keeps me going. But when I started writing steampunk, I just couldn’t concentrate with all that rock and roll blaring in my ears.  Luckily, I love old jigs, reels, drinking songs and folk music. And the “era-gone-by” feel of that old music fit nicely with the feel I needed to enter steampunk-mood.

Seanan, do you use any tricks to get “in-the-mood” for your books?  Ever start writing in one world and realize you were writing with the other world’s “tone”? Or is it easy for you to flip your brain toggle?

Devon’s argument seems to be basically “Soylent Green is made of stories!  It’s stooooooories!”  Oddly enough, I don’t really find that I have much of a problem with that.  Anything that uses cannibalism to make a point is a-okay by me.  She also brought up genre cues, the little things people use to tell whether something is horror or fantasy or romance before they even open the cover.

Let’s talk tropes.

Three protagonists walk into a bar.  One is a cranky-looking dishwater blonde in a leather jacket, with pointy ears and sensible shoes.  She travels with her own personal Cloud o’ Doom ™, like Grumpy Bear with breasts and knives.  One is a brunette in black, CJ Cregg by way of Spider Jerusalem, wearing sunglasses in the middle of the day and opening carrying her firearms.  The last has short blonde hair, three-inch high heels, and a regulation tango dress made almost entirely of fringe.  Oh, and talking mice.  Now what are their genres?

The first is easy: urban fantasy (she’s not showing enough skin for paranormal romance).  The second could go in a lot of directions, most of them involving the words “thriller”; it’s the sunglasses.  Knowing that I’m a science fiction writer in my spare time, you can say “science fiction thriller” with relative confidence.  The third would probably be filed in a Meg Cabot-type contemporary romance, except for the talking mice, so putting her on the lighter side of urban fantasy, with the potential to wander into paranormal romance to borrow a cup of sugar, is a relatively safe bet.

We use little cues to tell us what a story will contain.  Buckets of blood on the cover?  Probably going to be horror, or at the very least, some pretty darn gruesome science fiction.  Most fantasy won’t actually have blood on the cover, even if the book itself is drenched in the stuff.  Chick in black leather on the cover?  Probably urban fantasy.  Oh, wait, she’s wearing heels and has visible tattoos?  Probably paranormal romance.  It can be hard to tell sometimes.  Those two genres are kissing cousins, and they have a tendency to sneak off and make out in closets when they think nobody’s looking.

The trouble with tropes is this: there’s a reason the word “trope” shares three letters with the word “trap.”  If you use too many of the trappings of a genre, you’re going to get included with that genre, whether you intended to be or not, and once you’re there, you’re going to be measured against all the tropes you didn’t use, as well as all the tropes you did.  Your urban fantasy heroine wears combat boots and kicks teeth in?  Awesome, but why isn’t she having sex?  Your mad scientists cackle and release world-destroying plagues?  Neat, but why aren’t they raising the dead?  And so on.  Genres are like tar pits.  They’ll suck you in.

Sometimes, the hardest thing about writing in more than one genre at the same time is remembering which tools I can’t bring with me from one story to the next, and which complications I can’t avoid.  Rose Marshall, being dead, is capable of getting out of most of the issues which plague Verity Price simply by going insubstantial and letting people shoot at her ghostly form until they either run out of bullets or get bored and wander away.  Verity, on the other hand, is not at risk of being shoved into a jam jar and left on a pantry shelf for seventy years.  So there’s a series of trade-offs to be made.  Can’t cover your urban fantasy backstory with science, can’t cover your science fiction backstory with “the pixies did it, bite me.”

Some things are universal across the genres.  The gun on the mantle in act one goes off in act three; the protagonist who wears a white shirt and goes out for Italian food is about to need some bleach; pixies don’t like flyswatters.  But other things are trapped by tropes, and they don’t get to cross over.  No matter how much you may occasionally want them to.

Today is July 4th, but in the Babel Clash world, it’s the Monday before the changing of the guard.  For the last two weeks two of horror’s best authors, Jonathan Maberry and David Moody, have been gracing us with posts about zombies, the craft of writing, and giveaways.  Not bad for two weeks!  I wanted to thank them both for spending the last two weeks with us!  Please use today to promote to your heart’s content - past, current, and future projects (Oxford comma!)  Also, for those of you who have entered David’s giveaway, tune in tomorrow to see who won the autographed books!

You should also tune in tomorrow because we have another set of amazing authors slated to begin posting for us.  Starting tomorrow, we’ll be joined by Seanan McGuire and Devon Monk!

Seanan McGuire is the author of the October Daye series.  In the series, we learn that fairy tales are real, and the main character, Toby Daye, is a changeling - half fae, half human.  The latest Toby Daye novel is Late Eclipses, followed by One Salt Sea in September (notice the Shakespearean references?).  Besides writing the Toby Daye series, Seanan McGuire also spends some of her time writing under the name Mira Grant.  The books by Mira Grant form the Newsflesh Trilogy (the second in the series, Deadline, was just released) and they involve a very interesting take on zombies.

Devon Monk also writes an urban fantasy series.  Her series stars Allie Beckstrom.  Beckstrom is a Hound - someone who can track a spell back to its caster.  In Beckstrom’s world, the use of magic incurs a physical (or mental) cost.  It’s interesting to read how Monk touches on the implications of the use of magic in her Beckstrom novels. The latest Allie Beckstrom novel is Magic on the Hunt, with Magic on the Line due out in November.

Devon steps aside from Allie Beckstrom briefly for a new series. The first book in her new steampunk comes out tomorrow, July 5th. That book, Dead Iron, takes place in the American Wild West in a time where bounty hunters, gunslingers, magic, and steam all intermingle. If paranormal and steampunk are your thing, Monk’s new series starring Cedar Hunt is right up your alley.

Readers, please join me in thanking Jonathan and David while also welcoming Seanan and Devon to the blog. It’s going to be another great two weeks!

I can’t believe our time at Babel Clash is already at an end. We’ve had two weeks filled with many things:  laughter, tears, obscenity, fangs and snark. But most of all–love. I’ll always remember it fondly. I know you will too.

Huge thanks to Dane for being such an excellent host and to the readers for putting up with our antics. It’s always a pleasure.

Now for the pimpage portion of this post (warning: exposure to pimpage may cause stress diarrhea, bleeding from the eyes and rashes in sensitive areas).

My latest book, GREEN-EYED DEMON is the third book in my Sabina Kane series. Just in time for Mardi Gras, the book is set in New Orleans and features drag queens, voodoo priestesses, scheming Cajuns and accidental zombies. If you like your urban fantasy dark with complex world building and sharp-edged humor, give it a try.

-end pimpage-

Until next time, Babel Clashians, I bid you adieu.

Nicole asked whether you enjoy nomadic or home-base protagonists in your UF. That got me thinking about common settings. Or more specifically, whether Urban Fantasy must always be urban.

The short answer is no. We can all think of examples of UF novels not set in large cities. The truth is the term “urban fantasy” is largely a construct of clever marketing people. As a marketing term, it’s quite effective. It implies a certain gritty modernity that separates UF from the more traditional fantasy subgenres. It just sounds cool.

But it can also be confusing to some readers when they run across novels that are not set in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, etc.

I attended ConDFW in Dallas over the weekend. I sat on a UF panel with Rachel Caine, Stina Leicht, Candace Havens and Frances May and we discussed how the word urban isn’t quite right for the genre. Most of us agreed that the genre would be more accurately described as “contemporary fantasy.” This term would be more accurate because, as I mentioned in my post last week, the difference between traditional fantasy and urban fantasy is largely one of setting and world building. Traditional fantasy is other worlds. UF is our world … only different. The “contemporary fantasy” gets us a little closer to the heart of the distinction.

However … It’s not quite accurate either. Why? What about all the new historical-set urban fantasies? See what I mean?

On the same panel I mentioned earlier, we also discussed how genres are really not a tool of the writer. Many an author has completed a novel and had no idea where it would be shelved. I can name a dozen off the top of my head that thought they wrote one genre and then got shelved somewhere else. In other words, the vagaries of genre-naming and the defining of genre conventions are mainly the job of publishers, book sellers and, yes, readers.

As humans, we crave neat little categories. They help us make sense of an often chaotic world. And when we read, we want to know whether a novel contains elements we enjoy. Genre definitions are there to help us with that pursuit. But it can be frustrating for authors who are constantly asked to explain the “rules” a genre they didn’t create or define. This is especially true for Urban Fantasy since it’s full of contradictions and exceptions due to the very nature of the multi-genre plotting, world building and character development.

That’s all a really long-winded way of saying UF doesn’t enjoy playing by the rules. But if you were the enlightened despot of genre naming for a day, what would you call this genre?

Thanks for coming back for day two of our Kim Harrison weekend! Today, we have a fun little Q&A with Kim that touches on everything from Clint Eastwood to advice for aspiring writers! Enjoy!

photo of Kim Harrison by Kate Thornton

Thanks for reading the interview with Kim and for checking in on Kim Harrison weekend!  Hopefully, you’re as pumped for Pale Demon as I am.  If so…you should pre-order it now on borders.com or head to your local store next week when it releases on 2/22.  Thanks to Kim for playing along with weekend, thanks to you all for reading, and thanks to Jaye and Nicole for taking the weekend off so I could bring you all Kim Harrison weekend!

With the release of Kim Harrison’s latest novel, Pale Demon, fast approaching on 2/22, Babel Clash is privileged to have the following exclusive essay from Kim.

photo of Kim Harrison by Kate Thornton

A witch, a pixy, and a vampire get in a Buick and head west, fighting bad food, bad demons, and bad assassins on the way to San Francisco.  Is it any wonder that I have a definite fondness for Pale Demon, the ninth book in the continuing Hollows series?

Many authors will tell you that the book they are currently writing—or just finished—is their favorite, and to a large extent, this is true for me.  Dead Witch Walking (book one) had the excitement of being the introduction to the world.  Fistful of Charms (book four) was our first time out of Cincinnati, and seeing Jenks humansize was worth the year it took to write it.  The Outlaw Demon Wails (book six) was the original end of the series and had some very satisfying elements as far as me, the writer is concerned.  But Pale Demon has all the earmarks of remaining on my “favorite” shelf for a very long time for a bunch of reasons, the first of which being that I had to travel in order to research it.

Research isn’t my favorite thing, which is a large reason as to why I make up all the magic from my childhood reading of fairytales and fantasy rather than seeing what’s actually out there right now.  However, I do prefer to see a place before I work it into the pages if at all possible.  Much of that stems from my idea that when done right, setting is as much a part of the story as the characters themselves.  Rachel and the gang have been in Cincinnati for almost all of the books, and when the setting changes, characters are forced to think and react differently.  It allows for the characters to rapidly grow in unforeseen ways as they see their place in the world shift.  It also makes for a surprising rough draft, which I love even as I plot almost everything to within an inch of boredom.

Pale Demon is a coast to coast race that took me through St. Louis, the Petrified forest, Las Vegas, and San Francisco.  I’d never been out west before with the chance to get out of the car and touch the earth and see the sun rise, and what I experienced while researching real locations made it into the pages in unexpected ways as Rachel left carnage wherever she went.

Another reason Pale Demon stands to be my favorite in the series is that here Rachel finally knows who she is, accepts it, and embraces it.  She almost dies as a result, but she survives by trusting one-time enemies.  Being able to successfully take a major villain and convincingly allow your main character to trust him or her is exciting stuff!  I’m just glad I had the luxury of time with which to do it in.  I truly enjoy watching the characters evolve, not only because it keeps things interesting for the reader, but it makes me, the writer, have to grow as well as I have to devise new ways for old trouble to crop up with a wiser, stronger main character.

But the primary reason Pale Demon is my favorite book in the series has got to be the chance for me to settle the question of if Rachel and Trent really could find their happy endings with each other.  Readers had been asking me for years if Trent might be Rachel’s ultimate happy ending.  I never saw the potential, but that so many readers did, it deserved investigation.  I figured putting Rachel and Trent in a Buick for almost three thousand miles ought to settle the question.  I’m not saying how that turned out except that it wasn’t what I’d expected.  Seeing Trent in the shower was a definite plus, though.  –laugh– 

There’ve are some clear movements in the attitudes of both characters by the end of Pale Demon.  The book has a finish that I wasn’t expecting, the version you see on the shelf being far different from the ending that I submitted the story with, which both aggravates and delights me at the same time, since I’m still left wondering how this series is going to end.

But on second thought, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Thanks for reading Kim’s post!  Come back tomorrow for part two of our Kim Harrison weekend where Kim answers a few of our questions.  While you wait, feel free to pick up Kim’s upcoming novel - Pale Demon - on borders.com