Babel Clash

When Babel Clash came to me a few weeks ago reminding me that I had been the first guest blogger on Babel Clash and asking me to be the last, it was a bittersweet reminder of the changes the industry has seen in just a few years.  Electronic rights which were often overlooked in contracts, became a potentially profitable venture, evolving into a way for many big-name and small-name writers with a bent for self-promotion to skip the publishing house which had traditionally been the measuring stick for quality.  Independent book sellers faltered at the onslaught of sparkly brick-and-mortar stores with coffee, music, and gathering places.  Electronic retailers eventually chipped away at the big-box book sellers, until now they are struggling to recapture a public enchanted with electronic books and devices that can store more information than you can fill a room with.  Now many are questioning if the demise of the paper book is on the horizon asking if the scent of old books will be forgotten or the smile we wore when we lovingly pulled a book from a shelf of possibilities to share with a growing child, gone?

I doubt it.  Despite the benefits of electronic books, we are a tactile species, and books are a way to give an idea a form and shape.  Having them (an idea masquerading as a book) look different and possess a unique space on our shelves is entrenched in our psyche.  But having said that, the sparkle of gadgetry is a chance for the industry to capture a new reading demographic as well as granting an already overburdened reader release from too many books and not enough shelf space.  That’s not even considering the boon of electronic books that can enlarge print or turn text to speech.  In my thoughts, there is no “right” book, no wrong gadget, there are just choices.

Things, though, are going to change.  And yet, I’m hopeful even as I write Babel Clash’s last guest blog, because one thing remains constant.  Those who love to write, will continue to write, and those who love to read, will continue to read.  The rest is just details.

We are joined by Kelley Armstrong, author of the Otherworld series, in what may or may not turn out to be the final Star Wars Sunday post on Babel Clash.  I’m not 100% clear on the status of the blog, but like I said on twitter, I’m going to keep the lights on for as long as I’m able.

So, without further ado, here’s Kelley Armstrong’s SW Blog!

Not Just For Kids

Kelley Armstrong

Like most children of my generation, I remember the first time I saw Star Wars. I was nine and my parents had warned that it wasn’t really a film for kids, which is why we were going to the drive-in—so the kids could sleep while they enjoyed a movie without hiring a baby-sitter.

Of course I watched it, peering over the back seat of the station wagon, where my sisters and brother and I were stretched out with blankets and pillows. I expected to see some dull “grown-up” movie. When it opened with robots and princesses and spaceships, I was sure my parents had made a mistake. This was a kid’s movie. It had to be. Grown-ups watched boring shows about boring people sitting around talking about boring things. Star Wars was good. It was exciting. So it must be meant for kids.

As I watched, I realized Star Wars wasn’t really meant for children. I also realized that my parents were enjoying it. They were watching a movie with aliens and spaceship fights and they were having fun.

That was the night that first learned fantasy could be meant for grown-ups, too. Even at the age of nine, that came as a huge relief to me, because I’d already been dreading the transition out of “fun” books and movies into the dull, serious adult variety. Now, I realized, I didn’t have to.

Since then, I’ve seen Star Wars at least a dozen times. These days, I often watch it for what it can teach me about the art of story-telling. When I’m teaching three-act structure and the monomyth of the hero’s journey, Star Wars is the example I use. So it clearly affected my view of craft. But if you ask me about the impact Star Wars had on me as a writer, what I remember most is being nine, watching it from the back seat of a station wagon and discovering that fantasy wasn’t just for kids.

The End is Nigh

Kelley Armstrong

Spell Bound is the twelfth novel in my Otherworld series. It’s also the second to last. With number thirteen, I will draw the curtains on a world that I’ve been playing in for nearly half my life.

When I began writing Bitten in my early twenties, I knew exactly where the story would end—on about page 400 of that novel. It was written as a stand-alone. It took me about six years to reach that last page—and two of those were spent mere chapters from the end, because as long as I didn’t finish the book, I didn’t need to send it out and suffer certain rejection. But eventually the book was done and eventually it sold. Then came the question: what about turning it into a series?

I loved the characters of Bitten and relished the excuse to play with them for a little longer, but I knew I couldn’t base a long-running series on them. As a writer, I need variety and challenge. So I agreed that Bitten could be book 1 in a series, if I could introduce new supernatural types in book 2 and spin off to their stories after that. And so the Otherworld was launched.

Last year, with Waking the Witch, I began the final act. While Savannah solved the mystery and dispatched the killer, in Spell Bound she now discovers that those events were only a small offshoot of a plot that will threaten the entire Otherworld.

I’ve had this conclusion in mind since I first began plotting that second Otherworld book, Stolen, and introduced Savannah Levine, the preteen girl who would grow up and narrate the story of the Otherworld’s darkest hour. And it was mid-series, with Broken, that I began laying the groundwork for that final plot, weaving in minor threads that, as readers will discover, were building the fabric for this last adventure.

It will be hard to leave the Otherworld. But I know that I’m drawing a curtain, not slamming a door. There is always room for a curtain call or two, somewhere in the future, when this world calls me back for another visit.

Thanks for having me on Babel Clash! It’s not often that I get a chance to show up for the apocalypse… In the spirit of the Victorians, however, I refuse to let a little bad news get me down. Instead, let us sally forth!

George and I have both had novels set in New York City, so I thought I’d start out by examining the reasoning that led to me setting my first book in 1800s New York rather than the typical urban caverns of Victorian London.

First and foremost, I was actually born on the island of Manhattan; although I haven’t actually lived in New York since this most recent turn of the century, I still hold a very soft spot for the concrete canyons and mean streets of the five boroughs.

New York City, Times Square: Longacre Square in the Blizzard of 1888

But beyond my accident of birth, I was also attracted to the city’s amazing history, and the fact that the time period I was setting the book in (1880 to be exact) was a pivotal moment. After the devastating years following the Civil War, New York was once again growing at an incredibly rapid rate. It was just before amazing new inventions such as the telephone, electric light, and the elevator would allow for the construction of skyscrapers that would transform it into what we consider to be a modern metropolis.

New York of that period was also plagued by shocking displays of poverty and decay that would remain at odds with the city’s reputation for wealth and industry over the next hundred years. This was a Big Apple tilting from the old world into the new: a fertile ground for steampunk storytelling.

But London has similar charms. Even though it wasn’t the land of my birth, my mother had been born and raised in London. And where New York is locked into “the new”, the English capital holds many of the ancient mysteries and true grandeur that only a city 2,000 years old can hold. And during the late 1800s London was at one of its heights, blending together the ancient and the modern, as mysticism and antiquity rubbed elbows with science and technology.

London in the late 1800's: Fleet Street, by James Valentine c1890

So what was it that finally made me choose to go with the younger metropolis? The obvious answer is that I knew more about the city I grew up in. But I’m not afraid of research, I’m sure that given enough time I would have managed to create a British world every bit as dynamic and exciting as the American one that I’ve (hopefully) created for The Society of Steam. The clincher, in my case, is my book wasn’t just going to be steampunk tale, it was also going to be a story about superheroes.

There is no such thing as putting the creepy Care Bears aside. They’re like Santa. They see you when you’re sleeping, and they know when you’re awake. They know if you’ve been bad or good. And they have knives.

No, I was not kind to my younger siblings. Why do you ask?

I am at once the most research-oriented writer you will ever meet, and the least research-oriented writer you will ever meet. It’s not just tied to genre; it’s a whole setting and science thing. And yes, I acknowledge that it’s a little weird.

See, for me, worlds require construction. Worlds require research. Worlds occasionally require spending six months auditing virology lectures at the local university, taking copious notes that don’t make any sense to anyone who isn’t a medical professional and cause people who are medical professionals to look queasy and find another seat on the train. Worlds need documentation and thought and consideration.

People are the part that just happen.

I like to say that my brain understands how afraid of commitment I am, so it lures me in with delicious research-flavored candy, promising me a joyous romp in the bibliophile forest. Then, once I’m in too deep to find my way out again, it starts presenting me with plots and people and by the way, were you aware that this series is seventeen books long and requires an index? Have fun.

Writing a book is a lot like planning a D&D campaign. First you read the manual. Then you spend six months carefully drawing dungeons and populating them with all manner of monsters and treasures and traps, all of which you document with scrupulous attention to detail in your reams and reams of notes. Then, once you’re absolutely sure that this is the best dungeon ever constructed by any DM, ever, you summon your players…or, in the writer’s case, your characters. And you put them down at the mouth of your dungeon, and you wait to see what they’re going to do next.

And then they set the thermite charges, blow the whole thing to shit in thirty seconds, and head for the nearest pub to get roaringly drunk, because no plot, ever, has survived contact with the player characters. Half the time, I have no idea who my characters are when they first make their appearance. Toby was a changeling with a smart mouth and an occasionally dumb reaction to danger, the kind of girl who would go into the big creepy house at the top of the hill just because she wanted to see what the big deal was. George liked the truth, rode a motorcycle, and wore sunglasses after dark, despite living in a zombie universe, where you’d expect vision to matter a little bit more. It was through running them through my dungeon that I learned the reasons why they were the way they were, and was able to adjust the world to suit them.

Now, I am crazy-meticulous once I know what’s going on, and my second drafts require more notes and flow charts than a calculus exam. But the writing? It’s like Stan Uris once said on the topic of conceiving a child: “I never think about it during.” And I don’t. Thinking comes after. Writing comes first. Writing, and creepy Care Bears. Don’t the worlds you’re working in ever surprise you? Do your characters do things you didn’t see coming? Talk to me, here, Devon, or it’s the Care Bears for you!

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?

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.

Why do I write in two different genres?  It was an accident.  But, wait!  I can explain.

Seanan did a great job starting us off on the topic of why we write in multiple genres.  I agree that the concept of genre is rigidly defined and controlled, and there’s a good reason for that.  The good reason?  Readers.

We readers are looking for specific experiences when we pick up a book.  If we like horror, we want to be cowering under the covers.  Mystery?  Give us clues until our brains hurt.  Romance?  Love, baby, in all its frustrating, funny, heartbreaking goodness.  
   
As readers, we gravitate toward wanting to explore certain experiences when we crack open those covers.  And to make those experiences easy to find, books–heck, even  movies and songs–are sorted into genres.

But here’s a little secret: a lot of the things those genres contain can be found in other genres.  No really, it’s true.  Because no matter how we sort and separate, books are about human experiences, human emotions, human everythignness.  Cue my best Charlton Heston voice:  Books are made of people!

So when I started writing books, I didn’t give a lot of thought about which genre it would be categorized into.  Well, I knew there was magic in it, so it would fall somewhere under the fantasy umbrella, but really, I was focused on this woman who had been betrayed by her powerful father, and then blamed for his murder.  I was focused on loss, and love, and hatred.  I was focused on self-doubt and survival and humor while all the world, and magic was falling down around her.  It turned out to be an urban fantasy. 

Then I had this other story.  This one had magic in it too, so naturally, I thought it might be a fantasy of some sort.  But it also had these wondrous steam-powered machines, and was set in the 1800s with mad-scientist devisers.  To me, it was a story about a man grieving a past he could never recover, and fighting for a future he never dreamed of.  It was about a woman who wouldn’t follow the rules, and it was about the price of undying love.  That one turned out to be a steampunk novel.

Which is what I mean by I write in two different genres by accident.  For me–and I daresay, for most readers–genre is a nice way to clue us in to what we’re going to experience. Wise writers understand what those expectations are and willingly provide it.

But really, at the end of the day, we’re all looking for ripping good stories about people.  About us.  About human experiences, whether those experiences are set in a close facsimile to the real world with folks who remind us too much of our family and friends, or if they take place in extraordinary locals where the main characters aren’t even human–and still remind us of our family and friends.
   
So maybe I should restate my original answer.  I write in different genres by accident because hey, I’m only human.

Devon and I are here to spend the next few weeks talking about genre, and the fact that we’re willing to work in multiple genres at the same time, which is, I suppose, naughty and not the sort of thing that good girls do.  Before we can really do that, though, we’re going to need to decide what a genre is.  (Sidenote: The trouble with the word “genre” is that it doesn’t lend itself particularly well to crappy puns, which are usually the way I sort of ease myself into a topic.  Yeah, this makes me a lot of fun on first dates.  Anyway…)

According to Wikipedia, which is, as we all know, the font of all knowledge, a genre is “the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or culture based on some set of stylistic criteria.”  It goes on to state that “genres are formed by conventions that change over time as new genres are invented and the use of old ones are discontinued. Often, works fit into multiple genres by way of borrowing and recombining these conventions.”  So genres change with time, and sometimes get kicked to the curb as they cease to become relevant.  Groovy.

The whole concept of the genre was codified by two of my favorite dead Greek dudes, Aristotle and Plato.  Before they, and others like them, decided that you should be able to tell whether something would make a good date movie based on subject matter alone, the whole idea of the genre was sort of alien territory.  Skipping forward a couple of hundred years…

We live in a world where genres are rigidly defined and controlled.  Sure, you can mix them, but there’s always going to be one genre that gets called out as the “real” genre for the work.  Got magic?  You’re writing fantasy.  Got ghosts?  You’re writing horror.  And so on.  The genres give us basic rules and conventions, which is awesome.  They also give us expectations and automatic judgments.  “The butler did it.”  “You’ll die if you have sex.”  “And they all lived happily ever after.”

Naturally, the reality isn’t quite that simple.

Living in two different genres gives me two very different sets of expectations to contend with.  By day, I am the perky Disney Halloweentown Princess known as Seanan McGuire, author of urban fantasy, superhero wackiness, and the occasional adventure of the Fighting Pumpkins cheer leading squad.  By night, I am the slightly manic cornfield hazard known as Mira Grant, author of scientific science fiction, zombie mayhem, and lots of things involving pandemic disease.  I’m actually one of the luckier cross-genre authors, in that my two names allow me to maintain a degree of separation–something that can make all the difference when it comes to setting reader expectations.

Why do I write multiple genres?  Because I live in multiple genres.  My life is, by turns, a romance, a comedy, a situation comedy (different rules), an animal adventure, and a musical.  Mostly it’s a musical-slash-something else.  The idea of saying “I will only write one type of life, and one type of story, forever,” sort of makes my skin crawl.  And if you don’t think that you live in multiple genres, well…

This is gonna be fun.