I cannot tell you…

…how much I’m looking forward to being back in Georgia.

My flight leaves from JFK on Saturday and arrives in Istanbul at about 6 am on Sunday.  The flight to Tbilisi doesn’t leave for another seven hours, so I plan to take the tram downtown and see some of the sights.  I’ll arrive in Tbilisi late that afternoon, spend the night at a hostel…

…and then take off the next morning for Kars, Turkey.  I plan to meet up with a friend there and go tour the ruins of Ani, ancient capital of Armenia.  I have no idea yet how I’m going to get there, but there should be some buses in Tbilisi or Akhaltsikhe, and from Kars you can charter a taxi.

So after all that, I’ll head out to Baghdati to meet my new host family!  For the fall semester, I’ve been assigned to the school in the village of Rokhi:


View Larger Map

It’s about an hour south of Kutaisi, right up against the Lesser Caucasus mountains, and it looks like an awesome place!  A couple of other TLGers have been there before me, and they tell me it’s really great.  It’s definitely going to be a change of pace, going from city to village, but it’s one I’m looking forward to.  There are only 300 students in the school (grades 1-12), so maybe I’ll learn all my students’ names this time.

The family I’ve been assigned to sounds a bit older, with a thirty year old son who works at the school.  It sounds a bit rustic, with Turkish toilets and no internet at home, but I’m looking forward to that, especially the no internet part.  Don’t worry, I plan to get out and blog regularly–I’m sure there are local internet cafes, plus Kutaisi isn’t that far and I know where to get internet there.

Getting out to church is going to be a bit tricky: I’ll probably go into Kutaisi on Saturday, take the noon train into Tbilisi (5 GEL) and spend the night at a hostel (15 GEL), or take the sleeper train (10 GEL) and show up in the morning.  Getting back shouldn’t be too difficult: the Baghdati marshrutka leaves from Didube at 16:00 (or so I hear), and from there it’s only about 6 or 7 kilometers.

I have no idea how long I’ll be in Georgia this time: my contract runs until the end of December but I may extend again, depending on what other options open up.  I’ve really fallen in love with Georgia since coming there, and may just choose to stay on another year.  The Caucasus is a really amazing place, full of hidden treasures and remote places.

Which reminds me: I’m bringing a tent and sleeping bag this time, to do some backpacking in Borjomi and Tusheti.  Packing them was tough: the airline restriction is 20 kg total of weight (44.1 lbs), and after a whole lot of work, I finally got it down to 42.5 lbs.  The disassembled backpack frame is going to have to go as a separate piece of luggage, since it was too big to fit in any bag, but it shouldn’t be too hard to reassemble it out in Georgia.

That’s about it.  I’ll leave you with this awesome Georgian song I found on youtube.  The dance troop is Erisioni, and they put on an amazing show that’s kind of like Riverdance, except for Georgia.  Let me tell you: when it comes to dance (folk or ballroom), I don’t think anyone in the world is as amazing as the Georgians.

Magaria!

Trope Tuesday: The Trickster

After the hero crosses the threshold of adventure and finally sets out on his journey, he passes through a long phase that Campbell called “the road of trials.” This is often where the meat of the story happens, but it doesn’t fit squarely into any one trope because of all the possible directions where the story can go.  For that reason, I think it’s more useful to think in terms of who the hero meets, not what the hero does.

The Trickster is often (though not always) one of the first characters the hero encounters upon entering the lands of adventure.  He is almost always male, though sometimes he can change shapes and even sexes (for example, Loki, who turned into a mare and conceived Odin’s horse).  His role in the story, though, can range from mentor (Merlin, Yoda, Mary Poppins) to bad guy (the Joker, the Homonculi, Grand Admiral Thrawn) to the hero himself (Prometheus, Bugs Bunny, Bilbo Baggins).

Obviously, the Trickster is a very slippery character.  You can tell who he is, though, by whether he meets these two basic criteria:

  • completely unpredictable
  • not beholden to any authority

In this way, the Trickster often stands in stark contrast to the people of the ordinary world that the hero left behind.  Which makes sense–having just crossed the threshold of adventure, the hero needs to leave his old mentality behind and be exposed to new experiences and ideas.  For that reason, the Trickster’s antics often serve to teach the hero an Aesop, helping him to learn and grow.

That doesn’t mean that the Trickser is harmless.  Quite the contrary–he’s a dirty, lying cheat, capable of taking any disguise and throwing the victims of his pranks into any moral quandary just for laughs.  He’s not necessarily a jerkass–he may even be more of an ally than an enemy–but he definitely is not to be trusted.

Like most things associated with the hero’s journey, the amazing thing is just how prevalent this trope is.  It’s even cropped up in some of my own work.  For example, in Bringing Stella Home, Ilya Ayvazyan is a trickster of the playful hacker variety.  In Star Wanderers, Samson is a blithe spirit who doesn’t necessarily have Jeremiah’s best interests at heart…though his girlfriend (the one at Alpha Oriana) is a lot more sinister.  I’m not sure if anyone fits this trope in Desert Stars, but you could probably make a case for Lena or Amina–or better yet, Ibrahim.

Of all the major character archetypes, though, the Trickster is the one I feel like I know the least about.  If you have anything else to add, I would like to hear it!

Summer recap and new goals

So back in June I made a to do list of things I wanted to accomplish this summer.  I’ve only got a week left before I go overseas again, and I’m happy to say I’m on track to finish most of them.  A couple of them (such as doing a blog tour and submitting aggressively to book bloggers) I decided weren’t worth my time, and dropped them, but these are the major things I’ve accomplished:

  • Release print-on-demand editions of Genesis Earth, Bringing Stella Home, and Desert Stars through CreateSpace.
  • Redo cover art for Bringing Stella Home.
  • Redo blurb/description for all titles.
  • Put proper copyright page in all titles.
  • Publish all titles on Kobo Writing Life.
  • Find a better way to build an ebook and reformat all titles.
  • Finish the second draft of Stars of Blood and Glory.
  • Finish and publish parts I and II of Star Wanderers.

The only major thing I haven’t accomplished is figuring out how to sell ebooks directly from my website.  I figure I can set that up later, though, when I’ve got a large enough readership to justify it.  If it’s all online, I can probably do it from anywhere.

While I was vacationing with my family on Cape Cod, I had a chance to step back and take a long look at what I’m doing with my life, which helped me to set some new goals and get a renewed sense of direction.  I stopped tracking my daily writing word counts in July, which threw off my productivity a lot more than I thought it would.  After setting some long-term goals, though, I think I can find a better way to structure my writing.

In ten years (2022), I want to…

  • have 25+ published novels.
  • earn a solid middle-class income through my writing.
  • be married and have kids.
  • own a house.
  • live in the United States.

My lifetime goal is to publish 100+ novels, which is actually a lot more doable than it sounds.  It means writing a minimum of two novels a year, though, so I’m going to have to follow Heinlein’s rules a lot closer than I have been in the past.  That’s the trouble with keeping a daily word count: it made me look a lot more productive when I was in revisions, so I spent more time doing that than writing new work.

In three years (2015), I want to…

  • have at least 10 published novels.
  • make enough with my writing not to need another job.
  • be married or engaged.
  • have lived for at least three months in 3+ countries (not including USA).

I want to settle back down in the States eventually, but before that I want to get around and see the world a bit.  The absolute coolest thing would be to marry another world traveler and make enough on the writing to have a bunch of adventures together.  I’m not sure if I’ll find her in Georgia, but I’ll be sure to keep my eyes open.

As for short-term goals, I’m still trying to work them out.  Here’s what I have so far:

Quarterly Goals:

  • Start at least 2 new projects.
  • Finish at least 2 first drafts.
  • Publish at least 2 titles (print and ebook counts as two).

I think this is enough to stretch me while still being doable.  By my count, in the first quarter of this year I did 2-2-1, in the second quarter I did 2-2-0, and in the current quarter, I’m at 2-0-5 so far.  Of course, this includes all the Star Wanderers novelettes and novellas, which I hope to expand in the future.

I’m not going to count revisions as progress, except as part of the publishing stage.  Some stuff needs a lot of revision, other stuff, not so much.  What I really want to do is train myself to produce high quality work on the first or second write-through.  Of course, I’ll still use test readers to gauge my work before publishing anything.

Monthly Goals:

  • Finish at least 2 projects (first draft or revision).
  • Write at least 15k words of new material.

I can write a lot more than 15k words in a month, of course, but I figure this is a good starting point.  The key is that this is for new material.  When I looked back at my word counts, I found that months of revision would go by before I actually worked on something new.  I want to change that, but I still need to allow for longer projects that might require several weeks of revision (while emphasizing the need to produce new material, of course).

Weekly/Daily Goals:

  • Keep all project deadlines.
  • Start each day with writing.

I’ve found that if I don’t start off each day with writing, I keep putting it off until I’ve spent more time and energy angsting about it than actually doing it.  For a short period of time this summer, I put my butt in the chair and my hands on the keyboard first thing after waking up (even before getting dressed).  It was amazing how much of a difference that made.

Beyond that, I’m not really sure what other goals to set.  I want to plan things out on a project to project basis, but beyond that I haven’t yet figured out what kind of a daily structure I need to build.

It’s probably a good idea to keep things flexible at this point, though, since I have no idea what my schedule is going to be like once I’m in Georgia.  I do know a little bit about my next placement–more on that later–but for the first half of September, I’m going to be all over the place.  Ani, Tusheti, Kars, Akhaltsikhe, Tbilisi, Baghdati, and Istanbul–it’s going to be crazy!

For this next week, my goal is to finish the revisions for Star Wanderers: Sacrifice (Part III) and send that out to my beta readers.  I’ve been struggling with it all month, but I think I’ve got a pretty good idea of where I need to go with it.  I’m going to finish chapter 3 tomorrow, then rewrite chapters 4 and 5 from scratch.

After that…another Caucasian adventure! 🙂

Trope Tuesday: A Man is Not a Virgin

I’m back from vacation, but I’m going to take a break from the Hero’s Journey trope posts to talk about something that I really feel passionate about.  I hope you’ll forgive me if this turns into a rant, but I think this is an important issue that has some very dangerous implications that need to be explored.

In modern fiction, there’s a very prominent trope that a man is not a virgin.  The basic idea is this: if the protagonist is an adult male and he hasn’t yet had sex with a woman, there’s something fundamentally wrong with him.  Of course, because of his adventurous lifestyle, he can’t be tied down in a committed relationship–that would spoil the story.  But he can’t be holding himself back, either, lest his manhood come into question.  And most of the time, he doesn’t really want to, anyway.

This trope has a whole host of unfortunate implications, though, all of which serve to reinforce constrictive gender roles, disempower both men and women, drive a gulf of misunderstanding between the sexes, and emasculate true manhood and its role in our society.

To demonstrate this, let’s take this trope to the logical conclusions that our society seems to have come to.

If a man is not a virgin, then sex is a rite of passage, and it isn’t rape if it’s female on male.

In fiction, the sex as rite of passage trope is often seen in stories about angsty teenagers trying desperately to get laid. These are not typically stories about love–they are stories about peer pressure, objectification, and power.  By equating sex as a rite of passage in this way, it actually divorces sex from any concept of love or commitment, and turns any form of physical intimacy into a caricature of itself.

It doesn’t stop there, though.  If sex is a rite of passage, then it’s only reasonable that the young novice should have an older mentor to help him through the initiation process.  Thus we get the professional sex-ed trope, where the boy’s mentors or guardians help guide him through his first sexual encounter.  The implications for pedophilia and underage sex are more than a little disturbing.

We can see this trope in action in the way we treat female sex offenders.  If a 30-something male teacher has sex with one of his female students, he gets a lengthy prison sentence and spends the rest of his life stigmatized as a predator.  If a 30-something female teacher has sex with one of her male students, she gets a slap on the wrist and TV spot.  She’s not a sexual predator–she’s just having a personal crisis.

Needless to say, this double standard is extremely destructive for the victims of such abuse.

If a man is not a virgin, then men cannot help themselves.  Therefore, all men are perverts.

If a true man is not a virgin, then a true man doesn’t say no to sex.  Even if he can say no, he won’t because that’s just not what men do.  Therefore, being a man is functionally synonymous with being a pervert.

The danger here is that it reduces men to their basic animal urges.  If being a man means finding a warm, inviting place for your penis each night, then you might as well go out to the pasture and eat grass.  Whatever happened to self control and delayed gratification?  Do you think anything meaningful would ever have come out of our civilization if we couldn’t keep our pants on?

And yet, both men and women seem perfectly willing to believe that it’s not only unmanly for a man to control his animal urges, it’s impossible.  On the Kindle Boards forum about a month ago, there was a thread on erotica and marriage and one of the members posted this:

I used to work as a forums admin on a large women’s forum (over 100,000 members) and the relationships forum had a lot of heated discussions on this topic. I won’t of course refer to any specific threads, but the discussions went a lot like this:

One woman concerned that her husband was spending too much time watching porn
A massive amount of women telling her that it’s ok, that ‘all men watch porn’
A small amount of women saying either they don’t agree with it or that their men don’t view it
A percentage of women saying their men are addicted to porn and would rather watch it than go to bed with a willing wife
A percentage of women saying it’s not the porn itself that concerns them, but the type of porn their husbands watch
Another group of women saying they either watch it themselves, or watch it with their husbands
Yet another small group of women who either were or are prostitutes/strippers/involved in amateur porn (who are either for or against based on their experiences)
A very vocal percentage of women saying that if your man says he doesn’t watch it, he’s a liar
A heated discussion ensuing….

How does it possibly empower men to tell them that they cannot control their own sexual impulses?  It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, which harms not only men but women as well.  If all men are perverts, then women can’t afford to wait for a decent man and should settle instead for a deadbeat porn addict.

But that’s not even the worst of it:

…and if all men are perverts and all women are prudes, then men and women are two entirely different species that are completely incapable of understanding one another.

This one really gets to me.  I hear it everywhere, even from people who don’t consciously buy into the logic behind it.  I used to buy into it myself.  It’s the idea that women are so complicated that they are impossible to understand, whereas men are as simple as an on/off switch.

In my experience, men and woman are both human.  Both of them are equally complex and equally emotional.  Yes, they are different, but in such a way that it’s equally difficult (or equally easy) for the one to understand the other.  Generally, women tend to externalize their complexity, whereas men tend to internalize it.  At least,  that’s what I’ve found.

Our society takes this to the next level, however, and teaches men that they should just swallow their emotions.  If they don’t, they risk being seen as weak or effeminate (never mind that equating weakness with femininity is a whole other can of worms in itself).  And after a lifetime of living this way, it can be hard not to believe that that’s just the way men are.

But this is perhaps the most insidious danger of all.  It’s the falsehood that real men don’t cry, or show emotion, or have any capacity for compassion or tenderness.  It’s the fallacy of equating strength with violence.  It’s the destructive belief that men will never rise above the lowest common denominator of their hormones, and should never even try.  And because men are so obviously different from women in this regard, any attempt to understand them would be futile.

But how can you have a committed relationship with someone you can’t understand?  How can you possibly hope to make the necessary sacrifices for each other to make the thing work out?  And if you can’t reach the understanding necessary for a committed, loving relationship, how can you ever hope to raise a family together?

So yeah, sorry for the rant, but this trope REALLY gets under my skin.  It doesn’t help that one of my favorite authors, David Gemmell, is a big fan of it.  I tried to get into his Rigante series, but this trope was so strong that I couldn’t finish the first book.

I should also clarify that the thing that irks me isn’t just the trope, but how much our society has bought into it.  By themselves, tropes are neither good nor bad, but when something like this becomes so prevalent that it defines the entire operating system on which our society is based, that’s when someone needs to speak out.

And for the record, I am a 28 year old single male who is not ashamed to say that he is still saving himself for marriage.  Am I gay?  No.  Has it been difficult?  Yes.  Am I anything less than a man because of it?  Hell, no.  In fact, I would argue that the wait has made me more of a man than I otherwise would have been, and I’m sure that my future wife will agree.

Real men aren’t defined by their hormones or their sexual history.  They’re defined by the way they treat the people around them, especially the ones who are most important in their lives.

Got a moment? Help me make my book free on Amazon.

So Star Wanderers: Outworlder (Part I) is available for free now on Kobo and Smashwords (it’s also free on a couple of other sites, but hasn’t yet updated to the new version–see Monday’s post for the explanation).  I would like to make it free on Amazon, too, but I need your help!  Here’s what I need you to do:

Step 1: Copy this URL

http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook/Star-Wanderers-Outworlder-Part-I/book-OkUwT3TLcE2GfBP8sCDHHA/page1.html

It’s the page for the book on Kobo.  Amazon doesn’t usually price match to Smashwords, but if you want to be extra awesome you can do that too.

Step 2: Go to Amazon and click on “tell us about a lower price”

Open a tab in your browser and navigate to the Amazon page for Star Wanderers: Outworlder (Part I). Above the customer reviews section and below the “Customers Who Bought This Also Bought” is a section labeled  “Product details”:

Click on “tell us about a lower price,” and a small window should pop up.

Step 3: Fill out the details and click “submit feedback”

The window should be pretty self explanatory.  It basically asks you where the book is selling for less, and how much it is selling for.  Select the option for the online store, paste the Kobo URL into the appropriate field, and fill out the price/shipping details:

It shouldn’t take more than a couple of moments.  After that, you’re done!

If you could do that for me, I would really appreciate it.  Amazon’s bots are sporadic and unpredictable, but if a whole bunch of different people (from different ISPs using different Amazon accounts) tell them that a book is free, they’re more likely to price match.

If you’re an Amazon customer and use the UK, French, German, Spanish, or Italian stores, it would be even more awesome if you could help me out!  I’ve never been able to get any of my titles to price match on those stores, though I’ve certainly wanted to.  Here are the links for Star Wanderers: Outworlder (Part I):

So why would I want to give this book away for free?  Well, Star Wanderers: Fidelity (Part II) is already out, and the next two installments should be out in a few months as well.  Plus, I figure that people who read this and enjoy it will be interested in checking out my other titles as well.  I’ve already made Sholpan and “From the Ice Incarnate” permanently free, and it’s helped a lot to drive attention to my other works.

So thanks for your help!  I really appreciate it.  I don’t have anything to give you for taking the trouble, but if all works out, you might be able to download a free ebook soon. 😉 Enjoy!

Star Wanderers: four novelettes or a novel in four parts?

So my plans to publish Star Wanderers have run into a little snag…Part II was rejected for distribution to iTunes, Sony, and other retailers, with an order to unpublish both parts and republish them as one work.  The order probably came because of this clause in the Smashwords Terms of Service:

9d. You further warrant the book represents a complete work:
• this is not a work-in-progress;
• the uploaded file is not a partial sample or sample chapter, or is not a collection of sample chapters, or not simply a catalog advertising other books
• the uploaded book represents a complete story with a beginning, middle and end; not a short serial

Now, I do not believe that I have knowingly violated any part of the agreement.  Each installment of Star Wanderers is a complete 15,000 to 17,000 word novelette with its own arc, including a beginning, middle, and end.  I have finished all four installments and only need to revise them before publishing, hopefully in a couple of months.  None of them contain sample chapters from any other work.

However, up until now I have seen this story mainly as a novel published in four parts, kind of like how Tolkien originally intended Lord of the Rings to be one giant book, published in three parts.  In my mind, “a novel in four parts” and “a series of four novelettes” are not mutual exclusive.  Apparently, Smashwords doesn’t think so.

All this makes me wonder, though: should I just drop my plans to publish this as a whole novel and instead keep it as four separate novelettes?  I intend to write a parallel series of the same events from Noemi’s point of view, and may expand that to include other viewpoint characters.  Maybe I should wait to novelize this series until I can include other scenes and chapters, turning it into a substantially different work.

This kind of puts me in an awkward position, though.  I’d originally planned to drop the price of Part II to $.99 after Part III comes out, and Part III to $.99 after releasing Part IV.  The idea was to keep the total price of all four parts below $4.95, the price point I’ve chosen for all my other novels.  But if Star Wanderers in its current form remains a series of four novelettes, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to drop the price of any one of them below $2.99 (except for the first one, which I still intend to make permanently free).

If I have to make a choice between unpublishing parts I and II of Star Wanderers and publishing it as one novel, or simply repackaging the parts that are out as separate and distinct works, I’d much rather do that.  It seems a truer reflection of the overall story structure, and gives me a lot more flexibility to add more in the future.

This is a pretty big shift, though, and I worry it may offend readers who expected me to drop the price according to the previous plan.  I really don’t have any excuse for that: it’s entirely my fault for misreading the Smashwords TOS, and I apologize.

For newsletter subscribers, though, I still plan to make each subsequent release available for free for the first two weeks following publication.  That’s a promise I made to my readers, and I’m not going to go back on it, no matter what I end up doing.  And if I do repackage Star Wanderers as a series of novelettes instead of a novel in four parts, I’m not going to make any substantial changes to the actual story of Part I or Part II–just the titles, and possibly the author’s note at the end.

All of this is still in the air, though, so if you have any ideas or suggestions to offer, I would very much like to hear them.  I still have a lot to learn as a writer, and the publishing landscape is changing so quickly that I really have no idea what I’ll be doing even a year from now.

The only thing I know for sure is that I’ll still be writing.

Quick summer update

So I just finished a quick 2.0 draft of Star Wanderers, and there still seems to be something missing.  Not sure what it is, but I probably need to take a break from it for a while and focus on something else.

Working on it has really drained me, which is one of the reasons why I missed the Trope Tuesday post this week–sorry!  I’ll try to get something up this coming Tuesday, though I can’t make any promises since I’ll be at Cape Cod on vacation with the family.

I’m not sure whether to take a break for a while or to throw myself into another project, but I’m going to take it easy this next week and focus on  having a good time with my family.  That’s the main reason why I came back to the States, after all.  But one thing I do want to do is read more, so I’ll definitely be spending some time with my kindle while on the beach.  Expect to see a few reviews here shortly.

I can’t really say which project I’m going to pick up next, but I’m going to take a break from Star Wanderers for a while.  Don’t worry–Part III will be out no later than October, possibly sooner depending on any number of things.  Taking a break from this story will help me come back to it with a fresh perspective.  And who knows?  I might write something really awesome in the meantime.

That’s just about it for now.  If updates are sporadic for the next week, it’s because I’m on the beach somewhere, reading a good book. 🙂

Star Wanderers: Part II is now published!

The next installment of Star Wanderers is now up on Amazon, Smashwords, and Xinxii!  In a couple of weeks, it should be up on Kobo, iTunes, and Barnes & Noble as well.

This continues the story of Jeremiah and Noemi, a boy and a girl from completely different worlds who end up married by accident after a deadly famine drives her away from her home.  Neither of them speak the same language, but they eventually come to an understanding of each other and figure out how to make things work.

In Part II, though, all that is put to the test.

It’s available right now for $2.99, but if you sign up for my email newsletter in the sidebar, I’ll send out a Smashwords coupon code at the end of the week that you can use to download it for free.  Part I is already free on Smashwords, and should be free soon on the other sites as well.

Part III needs a lot of work, but I should be sending the rough version out to my first readers pretty soon.  Once I’ve gotten their feedback, it shouldn’t take more than a few weeks to get it finalized and ready for publishing.  After that, it’s just a matter of finding proofreaders and formatting it, which doesn’t take long at all.

That’s about all for now.  I hope you enjoy it–and if you do, please share!

Alright, hit me up…

I’m just about ready to release Star Wanderers: Part II–the story’s been revised and proofread, the cover art is finished, the formatting is ready to go–all that’s left is figuring out the book blurb.  Which is where I could use your help!

Here’s what I’ve got so far.  What do you think?

IS FIDELITY WORTH THE PRICE OF FREEDOM? CAN LOVE TAKE ROOT BEYOND THE STARS?

Oriana Station: a bustling frontier settlement between the Outworlds and the Coreward Stars. A popular port-of-call for free traders and independent starfarers alike—and the latest target in the aggressively expansionist plans of the Gaian Empire.

Life was simple for Jeremiah and Noemi before they arrived. Though neither of them speak the same language, they’ve reached an understanding of each other that goes beyond words. But when the colonial authorities make them into second-class citizens of a fractured empire, even that might not be enough.

Their newfound friends in the immigrant community can only do so much. With Noemi and her people depending on him, Jeremiah must find a way back to the Outworlds—before they lose everything that they came for.

I’m going with the family on vacation at the end of the week, but if all goes well, I should have it released before then. Newsletter subscribers will be able to download it for free on Smashwords for the first two weeks, and I’ll make Part I available for free while pricing Part II at $2.99.  When Part III comes out, I’ll drop the price to $.99.

In other news, I typeset and formatted Bringing Stella Home for CreateSpace this morning, and ordered the proof just a few hours ago.  With luck, it should come in the mail by the end of the week.  This is the third book I’m releasing in print, and the last one for the rest of this year.  I’ll be sure to post pics and links for where to get it once it’s ready.

In still other news, the Mars landing was totally worth staying up for last night.  A truly awesome moment for the whole human race.  And yes, I’ve been using this excuse all day.

Hey, at least I got the blurb done! :p

When men cry, or in defense of damaged characters

I recently read an amazing blog post by Shannon Hale titled “Why boys don’t read girls (sometimes).” In it, she makes a number of excellent points about how our society stigmatizes boys who read “girlie books,” and why that’s harmful.

Perhaps the most moving part of the post was at the end, where she described an experience at one of her book signings where she saw a boy hanging back and asked him if he would like her to sign one of his books.  The boy’s mother jumped in and said “yeah, Isaac, would you like her to put your name in a girl book?” The boy’s sisters all laughed at him, shaming him for reading anything that ran against their strictly defined gender roles.

In direct contrast to Shannon Hale, Dave Farland released a “daily kick” newsletter a couple of days ago where he advises writers to never let their characters cry.  In it,  he states:

Whatever problem [the character has]—whether terminal disease or sociopathic neighbor or anything else—the problem must be faced with courage. This means that your character can’t cry about it, no matter what the source of pain…Any time that a character breaks down, we as an audience may cast judgment upon that character.

Now, I have nothing but respect for Dave Farland.  I’ve been following his “daily kick” emails for years, attended dozens of his convention panels, and even interviewed him once for an online magazine.  He’s been a very influential writer to me personally, and his advice has had a huge impact on my writing.

But on this issue, I think he’s dead wrong.

Even if you don’t have any problem with the idea that men should never cry–a disturbing belief that harms men by forcing them to hide their true feelings, and harms women by teaching men that compassion and empathy are signs of weakness–even if you’re comfortable living in a culture that accepts this belief, there are still instances where having a man cry in your story can be both moving and poignant.

Cross his woman, and he’ll blow your brains out–quoting scripture while he does it.

The best example of this that I can think of comes from David Gemmell’s The Jerusalem Man.  No one–and I mean no one–writes manlier heroes than David Gemmell.  And among his characters, Jon Shannow ranks as one of the manliest.

In The Jerusalem Man, Jon Shannow is a lone gunman roving the post-apocalyptic wastelands of Earth on a spiritual quest for the city of Jerusalem.  Near the beginning of the book, he comes across a frontier woman under attack from bandits.  He stops to defend her homestead, and she shows her gratitude by inviting him into her bed.

Jon Shannow is a middle aged man, but because of the post-apocalyptic setting, this is his first sexual experience, and it moves him to tears.  For me, that was one of the most poignant moments of the book.  It didn’t take away anything from his masculinity throughout the rest of the story–indeed, it added significantly to it when the woman got kidnapped and he determined to rescue her.

I’m sure there are other examples that you can think of.  Certainly in real life, this notion that men should never show their feelings is both harmful and outdated.  To say that in fiction, no characters should ever cry–female characters as well as male characters–that’s just so wrong it’s infuriating.  If crying is so taboo that it’s even forbidden in the pages of a book, then something is wrong with the culture, not the story.

In 2008, I attended a fascinating panel at LTUE in which Tracy Hickman and a number of romance and fantasy writers discussed how to write romance in science fiction and fantasy.  Tracy explained that in all the novels he writes with Margaret Weis, she does the fight scenes and he does the romantic ones.

He then went on to talk about how there’s a whole side of life that our culture has shut men off from–a feminine side which is present in all of us, men as well as women.  The way he explained it, romance is not just the “kissy bits,” but a vital and enriching way to see the world–a paradigm that infuses everything with feeling and passion.

It makes me think of The Princess Bride, where even the action scenes with Inigo Montoya have a certain romantic flair to them.  In the old days, the term “romance” described not only love stories, but action & adventure stories as well.  In modern times, we seem to have forgotten all the old qualities like honor, love, sacrifice, loyalty, heroism, and compassion–even though they still make for the best stories.

Of course, our characters need to have courage.  But courage is not the absence of fear–it’s pressing on in spite of it.  And crying is not always a sign of weakness–it can actually be a sign of great emotional strength.  And if it’s true that the best literature helps us to see our world in a new light, giving us a greater understanding and appreciation for the human condition, how is it “courage” for anyone to hide their true feelings?

So do the characters in my stories cry?  Hell, yeah!  I don’t have them hide their feelings just because some readers might look askance.  Some of them cry more than others, and many of them don’t hardly cry at all, but those who do cry do so because the story demands it.

Even though I write science fiction, I do my best to infuse my stories with romance–not just the “kissy bits,” but that depth of feeling and passion for life that made me fall in love with books and reading in the first place.  Star Wanderers is a great example of that, and so is Desert Stars.

And yes, in case you’re wondering, I’ve read a lot of “girlie books.” They’re some of my all-time favorites.