The New Description for THE CITY DARKENS

Well, as I mentioned, I have spent a chunk of time reworking the description of The City Darkens. I got a lot of help from my good friend Kathryn, as well as the awesome folks over at AbsoluteWrite. After pulling out most of my hair as I struggled to string coherent sentences together, here is the new description:

In an island metropolis, where robots serve the wealthy and glittering skyscrapers light up the night, a woman from a country estate, unschooled in the ways of the court, fights to get back her son and resist the tyrannical new order.

After Myadar Solboi's efforts to navigate the perils of the court lead to betrayal, she becomes an urban incarnation of a legendary highwayman, pursuing revenge on those who wronged her as well as on the capital itself. The city's underclass stirs in response, but before she can rouse them to revolution, she falls into a peril she cannot escape.

This twisting tale of the struggle against the birth of a new, violent age is dystopian decopunk inspired by a 1920s aesthetic. A world of fanatical rulers, ambitious priests, seductive courtiers, shining robots, and a nearly forgotten people living under the city in the sewers... all seen through the shocked eyes of a determined heroine.


That last paragraph may seem like it's all tell and no show; I decided to include it to state my novel's genre in the clearest terms I could come up with, after running into several people who had never heard of dieselpunk, much less dystopian decopunk. Which is a genre I have just coined. I expect all future writers of dystopian decopunk to pay me royalties for coining it, by the way.

What with the new description giving away that Myadar goes all Robin Hood (sort of) I think my cover doesn't quite fit as well. I'd asked the artist, Dolly G, to have Myadar holding this red piece of cloth, so that when people read about Myadar's red silk mask, they'd go, "Oh! That's what she's holding on the cover!" Dolly did a wonderful job, and she really listened to me, so I am grateful to have worked with her. It's just that since the whole mask piece of the story isn't a surprise anymore (can you tell I'm conflicted about this?) it seems like the cover ought to highlight the action aspect more. Hence, I covet a cover (that's fun to say out loud) by Benjamin Carré. Here's one of his works, from his website:

This is the cover to Tim Aker's The Horns of Ruin. I haven't read it, though it's on my ever increasing to-read pile.

I've written Carré twice and he hasn't got back to me. There's an immense chance I couldn't even dream of affording him, but I just wish I could know for sure. Sigh.

My Art Deco City CAN Have Robots: Why Dieselpunk is Obscure & May Stay That Way

So after I wrote the last post about working with the kind folks on AbsoluteWrite to improve my blurb, I thought I might take another crack at defining, or at least discussing, dieselpunk. After all, a frightening number of people on AW--these are generally avid readers in addition to being writers, you understand--had no idea what dieselpunk was and several objected to my combining robots with an art deco style city. Some also found it hard to grasp how robots and modern tech could have any place in fantasy (as opposed to sci fi, I presume). It was clearly a counter-intuitive combination of elements for them.

I googled dieselpunk and what popped up in the first results were a lot of good links to sites I've visited over the years as my love affair with the genre and aesthetic has developed. I did notice, however, that one of the definitions the Urban Dictionary gives for dieselpunk says, "Dieselpunk is an art style and subculture that blends the aesthetics / pop culture of the 1920s - 1950s with today." No. At least, not the way I see it. Dieselpunk, like many of the other -punks, is a retro-futuristic genre and aesthetic. It sort of skips today, other than having today's values (or at least, the values of some people today) imbedded in it. So there are women who are mechanics, unlike what you'd come across in most movies or literature from the era. There are people of color in lead roles. Hell, you might even get a main character who is both a woman and nonwhite (I know that's crazy talk, but wouldn't it be nice?). Contemporary (liberal) values are an important aspect, and some would argue this aspect is the "punk" ingredient. However, when it comes to how dieselpunk looks, today doesn't figure in. It's a combination of the culture of some part of the interwar through WWII era (that's another thing about the Urban Dictionary definition--I know others have extended dieselpunk into the 50s, but I really feel it ends in 1945, with the atom bomb... then you get atompunk). Then, you take some of the ideas people had at the time about how the future would look, and you stir those into the mix. Hence my art deco city can have robots.

I think if you look at steampunk, you have additional elements of imagined technology that come from the authors themselves, though these grow out of a love of the same aspects as I've already noted. So in the steampunk movie, Wild Wild West (which, okay, was pretty bad, but go with me here), there can be a huge clockwork spider weapon thing. The operative quality is clockwork. I don't think anyone in the steam era ever envisioned big spider weapons, but the clockwork aspect is part of the aesthetic of steampunk. It's also its own subgenre, but I expect that's even more obscure than dieselpunk. Anyway, the same can be said about dieselpunk; namely that authors can take the imagined technologies of science fiction from the era (be it the 1920s, the 1930s, or the 1940s) and run with it, inventing something that the people of that era would not have thought of. People did think of robots in the 1920s, even if everyone may not have called them robots back then (the term was coined in 1920 though), so even within the confines of the imaginations of people in the 1920s, robots and art deco cities can and do exist.

Anyway, I think that I've beaten that into the ground now. Can you tell I was a little ruffled by the reactions of those who balked at my robots? Let's move on.

Dieselpunk is obscure, and really, that's a shame. A lot of people are missing out. And I'm not just saying this because if dieselpunk suddenly became the new steampunk my book would be a best-seller. No, in fact, I think that those who are really missing out are all the WWII-heads. My book is based in a 1920s aesthetic, so I have nothing to gain by pointing this out, unless I can hope for some glory by association. There are a lot of people out there who love WWII stories. They are fascinated with the real history. They'll also go see fictional stories set in the period. Just look at the line up on The History Channel sometime. Okay, so it's dominated by Pawn Stars (how did that happen, again?) but if you look at the two or three shows that aren't Pawn Stars, I guarantee you that half or more will be about WWII. Most of the people watching those shows and subscribing to World War II History Magazine would love WWII era dieselpunk, ya know?

So why hasn't dieselpunk caught on?

Well, giving it a little more thought, I wonder if the punk element, if you agree that it does encompass the postmodern and post-colonial aspects of today's values, may be the sticking point. For some people, anyway. I assume (and you know how that goes) that the demographic targeted by WWII magazines and shows and such is generally going to look a lot like my father-in-law, who is, himself, a fan of those things. And my father-in-law is a white male baby-boomer who feels really threatened by empowered women, LGBTQA people and people of color. So as much as dieselpunk stories draw on aspects of the WWII era that people like my FiL really like, the punk aspects, namely female mechanics and such, are going to turn them off. "What is this politically correct garbage?" they'll cry. "In the WWII era the men were men, the women were loyal housewives--except when they were factory workers but they only did that to support the men and then they went back into the kitchen when the men came home and--oh yeah! The men were all white. Let's not get our undies in a bunch about the Tuskegee Airmen again, okay? It was one group. Okay, okay, there were Navaho code-talkers, too, are we going to have to throw them a parade? Let's just forget about them because the men who were men were all white men and we don't want to even think about the Japanese Americans who fought in the American military despite the hundreds of thousands Roosevelt interned--after all, Roosevelt was a bit of a commie anyway, and aren't we all lucky Truman came along and nuked the Japs? That sure showed those Russians! Anyway it was just a matter of time before the Japs at home turned on us all, you know..."

I could go on.

As a history nerd (and teacher), this sort of thing is, to deliberately understate it, icky. But it's there. The people who love the period are usually not going to love the postmodern spin on the period.

Okay, so that raises another question for me. Why aren't people who are hip to stuff like post-colonialism getting excited about dieselpunk?

Wait. Wait. I think I have an idea.

It's because it's diesel.

If you're into diesel, you're celebrating an era of anti-environmentalism. I mean, you're basically waving a flag that says, "Yay Fossil Fuels!" So people who like gender equality and see all people as being valuable and celebrate difference and all that good stuff aren't generally going to get excited about diesel. Diesel is dirty, bad for the environment...

Wow, I think I just realized why dieselpunk isn't going to be the next steampunk in terms of popularity. Of course, dystopias are popular at the moment, so I suppose as a possible dystopian landscape, the combination of diesel with the punk value system could be appealing.

What do you think? Is dieselpunk doomed to remain an obscure genre and aesthetic?

Blurb Writing Hell

Yep, that's where I am. I got some feedback on the blurb I wrote for The City Darkens (along the lines of it sucking) so now I'm trying without a ton of success to rewrite it. I'm really lucky, though, because a bunch of people are helping me (for free!) on AbsoluteWrite. I am genuinely grateful for this. I've realized, though, just how very, very bad I am at writing blurbs. (I've also realized how truly obscure dieselpunk is to the vast majority of people out there, even other writers on AW, but that's not the point of this blog post.)

I never really thought I was great at writing blurbs, you know, but now I have a sense for how truly terrible I am at it. For one thing, I usually only read the first two sentences of a blurb on a novel I'm thinking of reading. I do this not because I'm impatient (well... maybe that too) but because I hate when blurbs have spoilers in them. And they almost always do. And basically a lot of the advice I've been getting from the folks at AW is leading me to do some of that with my TCD blurb. This so goes against my tastes. But let's face it, writing, "This is a really great novel. Trust me. You'll like it. You don't want me to give anything away why, right? Just trust me." Isn't going to work. So I'm biting the bullet and writing a new blurb that says a lot more about the story than the original blurb did.

In my latest attempt, I went and looked at the blurb for Kushiel's Dart, since it was one of the books that I thought of when I was coming up with my ideas for TCD (Cynthia Voigt's Jackaroo was another, as were a couple of Marion Zimmer Bradley novels). I followed the Kushiel blurb line by line, trying to come up with what the equivalent would be for TCD. That was interesting, and some of the AW peeps say they like this latest version the best. Now, of course, I'm going to rework it, both to incorporate the newest feedback but also to change it enough that it's not so close to the Kushiel blurb.

This process is frustrating and tiring and may be interfering with my regular writing energies. In any case, I haven't worked on the WiP in a couple of days. I haven't wanted to, which is disappointing because for a while there I was chugging right along. Today, though, I did think of something that was missing in the story, so with luck, I'll find the energy for it again tomorrow. 

When you read blurbs, do you like there to be a lot of information about the story, or do you avoid finding out a lot, like I do?

What qualities do the best blurbs have?

a realization

Bear with me, you probably realized this ages ago. But for me, it's a recent thing. I've figured out what I think the coolest thing about epublishing is.

• the immediate gratification? No.
• the royalties? No.
• the control over just about all aspects of the book? Sort of.

To properly explain the coolest thing about epublishing, I have to backtrack. Let's go back to January, when I entered the ABNA contest with my novel, The River and the Roses. I also started perusing the ABNA forum, which is full of wonderful, supportive writers, by the way. I highly recommend it. One thread prompted everyone to submit their first paragraph to be evaluated. So I did. Originally, my first paragraph was nearly half a page long, and contained a detailed description of my character. Zzzzzz. But I'd never thought about it before: how you open your novel can make a huge difference in your reader's interest.

For years I wrote for myself, creative writing teachers, and writing groups, but didn't have any interest in pursuing publishing (I was intimidated). When I was in my teens and early twenties, I read a lot of books on writing. Then I eventually consciously stopped doing that, because it was fueling my internal editor, and my internal editor, when fueled, is a nasty mofo. My point is that while I knew some things about writing, I really never paid any attention to writing to sell.

So going on that forum opened my eyes: the first paragraph of my novel would put people to sleep. Okay. So I gave that some thought. At what point in The River and the Roses did things really start to pick up? Well, that question was easy to answer. My main character, Veronica (the same Veronica as in "Veronica in Paris" fyi), has been repressing her psychic ability for most of her life, but when a murder happens near her apartment, a nightmare-vision of it overcomes her defenses. This is the inciting incident for the novel. I figured, perfect. I'll start the novel with the dream, and then flashback over the day leading up to the night of the murder (important stuff happens that I couldn't cut out). I sent this new version to a couple of my beta-readers, and they both liked it a lot. So I thought, alright. I'm good. I'm ready for this novel to go to the contest. And I posted the new opening paragraph. That's when some comments I got started to make me uneasy.

"Never open with a dream."

Agents hate it. You'll sink your manuscript the moment the agent realizes you're starting with a dream.

At first I figured, well, maybe that's true most of the time, but Veronica is a psychic. She's very much inspired from tv's Medium. How can it be wrong to open with a dream in her case?

But the more I read, the more this got hammered home. I read agent blogs. I read other forums. I read articles. Everyone said the number one bad way to open a novel was with a dream. So I scratched the opening and started over. I tried starting the novel a few minutes after the dream, when Veronica finds the body and the police arrive. She's in shock, there are flashing lights, they're taking her in for questioning. Exciting, right? Good opening, right? No, apparently not.

Disoriented characters are a no-no, too.

Plus, this flashing forward and then flashing back to the day that preceded it wasn't going over well with critiquers either.

So I went back and cut the flashforward scene entirely. Now I was left with a similar opening paragraph to the original, although I'd chopped the description down a lot. But still, it was pretty low energy. So I tried cutting the very beginning out and starting a bit later, when Veronica is at least doing something, planning a party and shopping, and after a couple of short paragraphs she has her first weird psychic thing. Nothing major, like the dream, but still.

So, I got it, right? It's a decent opening, right? No.

"You have to start with action! You have to grab your reader by the short hairs and yank them into your book!"

Sigh. I wrestled with ideas. I'd come up with something, and then throw it out. It got so I hated that opening chapter. And then I came up with a new thought, which tied in to a subplot I had already decided to introduce throughout the rest of the novel. I wrote it up: Veronica is walking her dog on the morning of the day of the murder, and she sees a ghost. She's embarrassed because she reacts to it and no one else can see it. Good, right? You guessed it. No. Too dream-like.

Luckily for me, at this point, one critiquer said she did like it, and she pointed out some ways to ground it more so it wouldn't feel so dreamy. So I took her advice, and I'm pleased with the result. I'm not changing the opening again, people. I'm done.

So this is a super long-winded way of getting at the coolest thing about epublishing, but I still have more I have to tell you before I can get to it. Still there? I'm amazed.

While I was laboring over my novel's opening, I was also still reading novels before bed. I read one called Unholy Ghosts, by Stacia Kane. Good paranormal suspense book: I recommend it. As I started this novel, it struck me that Kane opened it exactly right. High action, introduces the character and what she does, etc. In fact, it was so perfect, I felt like it must have gone through the vetting process at absolutewrite. As a quick explanation, absolutewrite is a big writer's forum. It's got some amazing people on it. There are experts who will explain things to you never thought you could find out about (in my case, arson investigation, the territorial disputes between PDs and FDs, Koreans and shamanism, and more). There are people who will give you step by step instructions to accomplish some formatting feat in your Word document. And there are the Share Your Work boards. Maybe it's because I opened myself up to it by saying, "Critique me with your gloves off," but I have gotten beat up one side and down the other of those forums. The worst being "Query Letter Hell." But my first chapter of River didn't fair well, either. And to be honest, most of the feedback I got wasn't very helpful, because people would say I was doing this or that wrong, and never suggest how I could do it right. Anyway. So I'm reading Unholy Ghosts, and I'm thinking, man, Kane is nailing it. She's got it down. Her book would totally pass muster on absolutewrite. Yeah, because she's a mod there. No joke. And there's nothing wrong with that. Is there?

"We are the same"

I started to think about this experience I'd been having, with the opening. And I'd also been reading a lot of articles and forum posts about other right and wrong ways to do things (you can even see the results of some of that in my blog post from earlier this month about naming your character and ending your novel). In fact, I became obsessed with the idea that I could write a perfect novel that followed all the rules (a bit like Kane's). I started gathering all of the rules I could find in a notebook. I outlined a novel to follow every one of them.

And then one day, as I was walking my dog and chatting with my husband, I started feeling uneasy about it. Not so much because I learned long ago that I can't force myself to write something, even if I like the idea (Stephen King talks about how he wishes he could write like Amy Tan, but he can't--I can totally relate--I want to be Jacqueline Carey so much; it's like she took all of the things I love and put them in Kushiel's Dart... but I can't write like her). But because I started to think, wow, eventually all the commercial novels out there will be fundamentally the same. Not the stories, but how they are told. A horror novel and a mystery novel and a western and a romance--they'll all start the same way, follow the same path, and end the same way. Not blatantly, you understand. But the skeleton will be the same--start with some nondreamy exciting incident, go through the correct number of plot steps, include all the important aspects of a plot, and end by tying all of those together. And the only novels that won't do that will be from established authors who can get away with ignoring the rules.

I already can tell you the ending of most movies or what a character will do next in tv shows without having seen them before. Knowing the structure and rules of novel writing means I can do the same thing when I'm reading, and the best I can hope for is that while I'll know a twist is coming, I won't quite have figured out what it's going to be.

How sad is it to know a twist is coming?

Which brings me, at last, to the coolest thing about epublishing.

There are no more rules.

Don't get me wrong. I think River's Veronica-sees-a-ghost opening is good, and I'm keeping it. I'm glad I had to work on it so much, because I do think it's better for it. But the cool thing is, if I want to open my next novel with a dream, because that's the best way to open it, I can. No agent will look at it and say, "Damnit, another dream opening!" and throw it in the garbage. Epublishing means the only people I'm beholden to are my readers. I'm guessing that breaking all the rules may create a big mess, but just think of the creative possibilities of that mess! Just imagine the weird directions novels can now go in! Or, how about this... I have a critiquing partner on a forum who wrote an epic fantasy that's the first book in a trilogy and it's something like 200K words. He's been told on forums like querytracker that he's got to cut that thing down because no agent will consider publishing a first novel that long, epic fantasy or not. But he feels that it's already as trim as its going to get. So if he epublishes it, does he have to amputate some part of it that he feels is vital to the story? No! How cool is that?

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Is this really a good thing? Don't authors need the gatekeepers in traditional publishing to force them to tighten their prose, make better plotting decisions, etc.?"

I put it to you that the answer is no. The only people authors need to please are readers. If my friend publishes his epic and he gets readers, that's all that matters. Now what may happen is that when an author puts a novel up, very few people will buy it, because it has massive flaws and gets bad reviews. Then it's time to go back to the drawing board. And who wants to have to keep pulling their novel off the retail pages to fix it? No, I think good authors will work their hardest to create the best novel they can to begin with anyway. Most of us are not hacks trying to throw a few cliches together and thinking it will sell. Most of us love what we do. We love our characters. It matters to us that a story hang together well. It feels good when you come up with a solution to that plot point nightmare you've been struggling with for weeks. So while there will be people who epublish before their novel is ready, they'll learn. And once they do, they'll become better writers for it. And best of all, the novels they will produce will be original and wonderful and not fettered down by rules!

Pretty cool, huh?

You've made it through this whole post. That means you have an unusually robust attention span. So tell me, what do you think about all of this?