Advice for Urban Fantasy Heroes

Today, I'm highlighting some troublesome mistakes I see urban fantasy heroes and heroines making on a regular basis, and tossing out some alternatives to these frustrating situations. Let's face it, characters have to be flawed and they do have to make mistakes sometimes. But as a UF reader and writer, there are certain scenarios that drive me crazy, and usually come off as convenient solutions to plot problems.

So here is my advice to our heroes, addressing the Top 3 Mistakes that should probably be avoided whenever possible:

1. Do Your Research. 
If our heroine is hob-knobbing with vamps, weres, fay, and all manner of supernatural folk, she should learn all there is to know about them. Instead, I see too many protags hanging out with very dangerous creatures, only to discover that they have unwittingly made a crucial faux pas and must now pay the price.

Yes, we want to cause trouble for our heroes, but that doesn't mean they have to stumble around blindly before accidentally falling into a big stinking mess. It would be far more interesting to present a situation where the heroine must make the choice to break a rule which she knows will have consequences, but she does it anyway for a good reason.

*Characters who have just been introduced to a new 'world' in an original novel get a pass on this one, but they should have things figured out by book two.

2. Don't give out key information.
Our hero is in contact with someone whose suspicious activities have put them in the middle of the mystery. A bad move is to have them tell said party what's being done to solve the case and where they can find the hero in order to get together and answer some questions, regardless of whether they've known each other for a while.

If we need the bad guys to find out certain information about the hero's activities or whereabouts, there has to be a better way. Set up a spy in the hero's camp, or have them be a tech-savvy kind of villain who has pre-set surveillance and taps into street cameras. Anything but a blabber-mouthed protag please.

3. Hold your lovin' until the appropriate time.
All hell is breaking loose, people are dying  and danger lurks around every corner. If the heroine can't figure out what's going on soon and stop it, the whole world as we know it could end. So how about a night of nooky with the guy she just met instead of searching for clues? Bad idea.

I'm not saying romance is never appropriate, even in bad situations, but I can't stand to have a lead who is more interested in her budding relationship than the crisis at hand. Worse if it turns out that the supporting cast is doing all the legwork in the meantime, or the villain has gotten away with something terrible while the heroes were, um, distracted. All I'm saying is think hard about the fallout before taking time out to do the nasty.

None of these flubs necessarily put our heroes in the category of TSTL, but why not avoid that slippery slope altogether. What are your pet peeves when it comes to characters making the wrong choices in any genre?

Cheers!
Ella

For a Rollicking Good Time...Agatha H!

It's been a bit stressful around here.  I sprained my ankle a few days before undergoing oral surgery.  It's ok!  It all worked out. Pain meds covered both incidents nicely (over-the-counter? Even better!) So, needed to recover. Needed to sit around with my foot up and just relax. For that I needed a story or several.

Enter the Kindle.

I use its text-to-speech function: the computer voice isn't that bad. Sounds like someone with a strange accent, but after a few pages I had the "accent" figured out.

I went through my Steampunk list of books. I've got a good collection.  A couple of them I got on Audible. Bacigalupi's Windup Girl, for one.  Link and Grant's Steampunk! anthology, for another.  I've finished the Anthology.  The Goodreads group read, Steampunk Tales is done, too.  Windup Girl is a little to involved for post-anesthesia listening.  So, what's left?

The Steampunk Detective by Darrell Pitt worked nicely.  As did Ekaterina Sedia's Alchemy of Stone.  Sill stressed out by physical and now family stuff, I needed still more distraction. Enter Agatha! Agatha H and the Airship City.

At first I was getting lost. Too many characters, no airship city, Agatha being a bit too ditzy for me. At first.  She was interesting enough for me to stick with her, though.  Which turned out to be the best thing.

OK, still too many characters.  They were a bit hard to keep up with.  It's a sprawling novel for taking place in so small a space. That was when I realized where I'd got the book.  It's a novel written around the characters created by the Foglios, Phil and Kaja, the creators of the exceptionally successful Girl Genius web comic.

Yup, I finally caught up with the rest of the internet!  Not with the comic, though.  The graphic style puts me off.  I'm old school and prefer the old rough, pulp look to the new, slick, computer-drawn one.  Fortunately, the novel takes me into the world of Agatha and her cronies. Fortunately also, there is another novel just released from Night Shade books!

So, another novel works its way through my Kindle.  I fell asleep before the end and woke up in the middle of an exciting bit.  Wait! Wait! What happened?  Yeah, rollicking adventure.  I'd fallen in love with the characters and their weird world. Even enough to pick up the Omnibus and enjoy the comic.  Meanwhile, gotta get back to Agatha. I left her alone in her lab with some guy. The cat didn't like him, so I gotta wonder...Should I trust the cat?

Unwritten Creativity

The first thought that crosses my mind when I see a blank page is Natasha Bedingfield’s song “Unwritten” and the lyrics at the beginning.

I am unwritten, can't read my mind, I'm undefined

I'm just beginning, the pen's in my hand, ending unplanned

Staring at the blank page before you

Open up the dirty window

Let the sun illuminate the words that you could not find

The song can be about how life isn't planned and you fill in the blanks of the future. Yet I relate to the lyrics as a writer and how my writing starts out as that blank page. I have no ending in mind and I'm waiting for the words to put down. 

Reaching for something in the distance

 So close you can almost taste it

 Release your inhibitions

 Feel the rain on your skin

 No one else can feel it for you

 Only you can let it in

 No one else, no one else

 Can speak the words on your lips

 Drench yourself in words unspoken

 Live your life with arms wide open

 Today is where your book begins

 The rest is still unwritten

Each word seems further away whenever I start to write, but only I can write my own story and characters by entangling myself in it order to complete the novel.

At the same time I believe the lyrics extend to any type of creative thoughts; whether they are words, pictures, or drawings. 

Look below at the blank pages and post on how you would fill the them.

Female Fantasy – Authors (get your mind outta the gutter!) by Maureen O. Betita

We're happy to welcome fantasy author Maureen O. Betita to The Speculative Salon!

I’m Maureen O. Betita, author, blogger and general philosopher regarding arcane subjects. Thank you for allowing me a stage to pontificate upon! Now…

I took part in a fascinating discussion on another blog I belong to a few weeks ago, regarding fantasy. Most of the participants of this blog are romance writers and seldom tread beyond their genre. Until one of them did, at the urgings of their significant other, and read a multi-volume massive fantasy tome.

And, for the most part, enjoyed it. She posted a review, stated what she liked and what she didn’t. Then asked about fantasy written by women authors.Hoping to find books which involved more than men doing manly things while on an epic quest.

At first, I, an avid reader of fantasy during my growing-up period, had to really think. I’d read the stuff, I knew it was out there, but I drew a blank at naming authors. Slowly, through e-mails with my sister, I began to remember authors. From Anne McCaffrey, to Marion Zimmer Bradley and Diana Paxson, to Mercedes Lackey, to CJ Cherryh…

Another casual reader of the blog began to chime in and before we realized it, we had quite a list of women authors.

Now, the original blog hadn’t asked for Urban Fantasy, but we found ourselves wandering down that path, because the blogger wanted to know about first person POV. I realized that at some point, I’d left behind reading modern fantasy (I’d say for me this was in the late 1990’s and onward) and one of the reasons? Because other than Charles deLint, I felt most authors didn’t touch on the female experience.

(Allow me to say that there is Nina Kiriki Hoffman, who I always loved. And Pat Murphy. But their stuff didn’t easily slip into the fantasy category.)

It wasn’t the romance I grew to miss, but the… I don’t know…it’s difficult to peg. The personal and in depth writing I craved wasn’t satisfied by the fantasy I saw on the shelf. Oddly enough, some of it came from women authors starting to appear on science fiction shelves, while they were disappearing from the fantasy. Then UF took off and most migrated there.

Now it appears they are migrating to YA. Granted, all of these categories of books and sub-genres have become so muddy and lines blur at the borders anymore. Something I totally embrace. As a reader though, I shy away from trends and am slow to migrate with my few reading hours.

My author-self embraces a saying on a t-shirt I often see Adam Savage wearing on Mythbusters. “I Reject Your Reality and Substitute My Own.”

A great motto for striking out. Not a great motto for becoming a best seller. But still! I do embrace it. After the blog about female fantasy authors, I began to reflect on who I once read and what I read now and how they influenced what I write. Most of my former favs were striking out into territory that was relatively unknown. And they bucked some huge trends.

Anne McCaffrey wrote dragons that didn’t hoard treasure or roast knights.

Marion Zimmer Bradley and Diana Paxson gave us historical fantasy from a woman’s perspective.

Mercedes Lackey presented women warriors, before Xena and Gabrielle.

CJ Cherryh? From Faery to cat like aliens.

I’m fond of saying that I credit my writing chops to Fritz Leiber, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Michael Moorcock…but I recently realized…also a great deal is owed to the ladies I list above.

*****

I created the Kraken’s Caribbean. A world where the refuse from the modern world washes up onto a Caribbean shore full of pirates ala the Golden Age of Piracy. And these lost items work. Hence, pirates with iPods, taverns with working blenders on the bar, and people from other places and times. Toss in a match making kraken overseeing it all and you’ll find my books. The Kraken’s Mirror, The Chameleon Goggles andThe Pirate Circus.

Available at Amazon and most other outlets

www.maureenobetita.com

 

*****

The adventure aspects of what I write probably rose from the Pelucidar novels of ERB, but the magic, the romance and the in depth exploration of my characters rose from the women who came before.

What women writers do you read who fit the blurry boundaries of fantasy and speculative fiction? I’d love to hear of the modern from the not-so modern!

Lace vs. Subplots by Irene Radford

We are extremely pleased and honored to welcome author Irene Radford to the Salon. Her new novel in the Pixie Chronicles series, Chicory Up, is available now. Follow the links at the end of the post to get your copy today. Take it away, Irene!

In grade school, I fell in love with lace; the wearing of frothy trims made from thread and air, the elegance it added to formal gowns and wedding veils, and yes, the making of lace. The complex puzzle of weaving threads finer than a hair into patterns that defined the air between them challenged my mind as well as my manual dexterity. Concentrating on the click of bobbins, the cross, twist, cross, of the thread, counting stitches, the placement of pins to hold the cobweb in place became a meditation for me.

Jump forward a couple of decades and I find myself with the complex puzzle of weaving together subplots, and story arcs, and characters into similar patterns. In lace you can only do two things, right over left, or left over right. Rarely do you hold more than two pairs of bobbins in your hand at any one time. Twist, cross, twist, put down one pair, pick up the next in line.

In putting together a novel I find my characters like to jump over spaces and tangle with characters that aren’t in the geometric progression. The subplots like to dart off in odd directions. They make life more interesting that way.

Bobbin lace patterns are a series of dots printed onto thick card stock and often covered in clear plastic film. When I first started making lace my teacher made me use an arcane tool called a pricker—a needle held in a handle by a vise, very like a screw driver that you can change the heads on, but smaller and more delicate. I looked at the splatter of dots on the card and tried to make sense of this new language. Carefully I punched a hole in the pattern at each dot, trying to follow along in the order I would need to when I wove the threads and stuck a pin in each of those holes. Slowly I learned this new language and soon could look at the sequence of dots and know what to do with thread and pins. Gradually I also learned to trust myself and the thread enough to remove a pin from the back and place it in the next spot in the front. This released the lace to float free in part, while the working portion remained attached to the temporary loom of pins.

When I start a new book, I take a pile of note cards and write place markers on each, much like my pins, filling in details of character development, plot progression, the stages of the character’s journey and what plot elements I need to show this. Unlike lace, I rearrange the note cards a dozen or more times before I even begin to put words on paper.

Novels create their own logic as they go along. Lace has its own logic built into the pattern. I suppose if I tried freeform lace as some of my compatriots (fellow addicts) do, then I might be able to stretch this analogy a little further. I can make the same lace pattern over and over. Indeed I do when doing a long strip of edging or trim, repeat after repeat for several yards.

In books no two are alike. But looking for the patterns within patterns, finding the right path for characters to follow is similar to working a complex lace style. Figuring it out, finding the arcane logic within the dots, without trashing the entire project is just like writing a book.

Sometimes I succeed on the first try. Most times I don’t. But that’s what second drafts of a book are for. I can also back out lace to fix a mistake almost as rapidly and cleanly as I can put in new pins. That takes practice, for both arts.

Here is the blurb for Chicory Up:


Skene Falls, Oregon, is not only home to Desdemona and Benedict Carrick and their parents, but is also the dwelling place of the Pixies. When Thistle Down was exiled from Pixie and stranded in a human body, it marked the beginning of a campaign that would prove dangerous to all.

Get your copy at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Connecting with the Source

I taking off for a much need R & R to feed my inner spirit.  The hammock is empty but not for long for I'll be in it swaying to the tune of not a care in the world. 

Till later,
Elizabeth

Excerpts: Love, Hate, or No Interest?

Last week, Tor.com released an excerpt from A Memory of Light by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. I didn’t spend too much time reading it because I didn’t want to spoil myself. Normally I’m first in line for any spoiler, but I couldn’t bring myself to do this time.

It is because the character from the excerpt was not one of the main characters? Probably. I’m positive if Mat popped up in it, there would be no one to stop me from reading it. He is the only character I care about in the entire book.

And for some reason, I don’t read excerpts from any books unless it is from series I read before. Authors posting excerpt from the first book of a series doesn’t excite me. I read the summary, if it peaks my interest, then I will read it. Otherwise I move on to the next book.

It’s strange how I read them if I’ve already read a previous book in the series. If not a series, I won’t bother with the excerpt even if it is an author I love to read. I’m very much an all or nothing type of girl. Plus I’m not patience. I dread reading an excerpt and the book’s release date is months away.

How do you feel about excerpts? Is that the way you will read a book? Do they help you choice which book to buy on a tight budget? Or don’t care about them one bit?