Ok, having read Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse and now Breaking Dawn, I think as a writer I’ve figured out why readers are hooked on Stephenie Meyer’s books like addicts on book crack.
While Edward is a vampire, and that just brings in a whole slew of readers right there, he’s also got the whole bad-boy-who’s-still-safe thing going for him. He’s older (though not in physical years, if you aren’t counting not aging the nearly 100 years he’s been changed), he’s smart, he’s got money, he’s got a dangerous edge about him with his supernatural strength. But he’s also not going to initiate anything physical with Bella (in order to protect her). What’s not for a girl to fantasize about?
The thematic that love is sacrifice only adds to the whole deal.
Reader will excuse Bella’s whining, her fit of utter morose depression, her near cultish following of the Cullens, because dammit, it’s for love. And love is worth any price (see references to Romeo and Juliet between the pages of Meyer’s books for further explanation.)
But what really struck me was how completely wrapped up my tween and a fifty-year-old family guy friend could be in the same set of books. Meyer’s (and I am NOT saying this because our names are so similar) excells at bringing people to the base level of their emotions that can cut across gender, age, ethinicity and class. Beyond fear, anger and love (as basic as you get) there is guilt, sorrow, pain, trust, devotion and hope.
As writer’s we really get into what makes readers experience the book like we see it in our heads. As readers, well hell, we just get into the story and appreciate one that makes people start talking.
What are your thoughts on what makes the Twilight series so popular?
I have a love/hate relationship with Valentine’s Day.
How can you not love a holiday that is about love, celebrated by eating chocolate?
But I hate what commercialism has done to it. My kids, in grade school mind you, feel pressured to BUY things for friends, their teachers, even their parents! WTH?
Valentine’s Day is not about how much you can fork out at the cash register. It’s about an expression of our love for one another.
Ever read a romance where it was all about his quest to buy her the perfect ring or flowers and once he gave them to her he walked off, done with his “love” story?
Hell no!
Love is about expressing feelings, talking, sharing and letting the other person know how much you truly care about his or her place in your life.
So go find a way to connect with someone who’s made a difference in your life. Some one that you love. Leave a note on a windsheild. Slip a note under their office door. Write in lipstick on the bathroom mirror! Give them a homemade coupon for something you do well (cooking dinner, backrubs, freshly made margarita, whatever.)
But don’t be paralized because of your pocketbook! Go do something about it and show people you care!
(Then you have permission to go storm the stores tomorrow and get all your chocolate for the next six months half price!)
Um, yeah. Let me disabuse you of that notion right now.
There are literary writers and there are genre writers. Kind of like there are Catholics and Southern Baptists. Both Christians, but totally different.
Literary writers are given reviews, and taken seriously, usually producing work that transcends society in some manner or other and is usually educational or morally edifying in some way. Case it in point – it is designed to be art/literature/educational. Think dinner at a restaurant with linen tablecloths and smallish size food that looks pretty.
Genre writing on the other hand, is more along the burger and fries of books. It’s a staple. More people read it, buy it, hell, consume it, because frankly they are hungry, they don’t have the time to sit down to eat. They just want to get filled up with something they know they’ll like. Genre writing is designed to be entertainment, in the same way a movie, a video game or a television show is entertainment.
This doesn’t mean it was harder to produce the book for the literary writer. It just means that the literary writer chose to take longer slashing their own path through the woods instead of taking an established trail.
News flash for my literary friends: genre writing is formulaic because that’s what readers want! They want to know a murder mystery contains a dead body and we’re going to find the killer. They want to know a thriller is going to be scary and give you goose bumps and they’ll throw the book at the wall if a romance doesn’t have a happen ending, well, let’s be honest, it won’t get published at all without a happy ending.
But within those very loosely constructed borders is a whole world to explore, so the stories are never the same, and they are not imitations of one another, just like America is different from England, even though we both speak English, share some of the same history and occupy the same planet earth.
What’s interesting to me is this: literary writers I’ve talked to yearn to be thought of as artists of the word, but they deep down wish they had fame to go along with it. They think that’s what genre writers have because of the hundreds of thousands, hell millions, of copies of genre books a single popular genre writer can sell.
Genre writers on the other hand, and more specifically romance writers, wish their work would get the respect of a literary writer, so when the go to a spouse’s company dinner party some smart aleck doesn’t say “Oh, your wife writes sex books. Bet she just cranks those out on the weekends in between quickies.” They wish that the serious reviewers would even try cracking one of their books and give a review. And they wish they could be nominated for awards given out for books (because after all, they’ve spent years tapping away at their keyboard and going through the harrowing world of publishing the same as the literary author has.)
So one wants fame, the other respect. Funny since they both write books. Didn’t you know that really, you should have taken up acting? More people likely know about Zac Efron from Disney’s High School Musical than will ever read a single book.
But I digress. (as per usual) Writing is hard work no matter what. If you want to be your own original and educate the world, then be literary and soar. If you want regular deadlines and want to make this your job, then write genre. It’s all a matter of market and numbers. You can’t go around wishing one were the other. It isn’t. It won’t be.
So literary authors, rather than disparage your genre brethren, think on this–as long as people are still picking up genre books, be grateful. As long as they are reading rather than watching re-runs of Scrubs or Grey’s Anatomy, you have a prayer they may some day desire to be educated by their reading selection.
Genre authors, keep plugging away and know one thing—people will always pay for entertainment, even in a depressed economy. And books are the cheapest source of entertainment on the planet (ok, unless you are born a guy). And in a hundred, possibly two-hundred years, your books may even be well-respected literature if William Shakespeare, Emily Bronte and Jane Austen are any indication.
OMG. Just when you thought it was safe to go back to a blog…it all gets worse. It appears now that historical romance novelist Cassie Edwards has not only taken passages from many a research book verbatim into her own novels, but has also taken passages as well from the 1930 Pulitzer Prize winning novel Laughing Boy by Oliver La Farge. (see Smart Bitches Trashy Books website for full listing paragraph by paragraph.)
If there remained any doubt in this author’s mind that Edwards was confused by the proper citation of sources for historical research, this just blew it out of the water.
La Farge’s book is fiction. You’ve now just stepped over the line of believable and are blatantly plagiarizing someone else’s fiction for profit. (Not that you should have done it with the non-fiction, either.)
Wow.
All I can think of is where is her publicist????
Seriously, if this were one of my clients, I have had a heart attack by now.
Note to authors, there are three basic things you should do when the media calls or you have been ratted out for something you didn’t want anyone to know about:
1. No comment is as good as admitting you did it. Seriously. This is what everyone thinks. Better to make a comment that says you aren’t certain what’s been said and you’ll have a better comment later than to make no comment at all.
2. If you already know what’s been said, and you are in any way guilty. Admit it. Then follow it up with what you are planning to do to resolve it. Denial will only make the people who broke the story go looking for additional dirt to prove their point.
3. Hiding out and taking down your website only makes things worse. If you have a problem be the first to comment on it. With things the way they are now, you aren’t going to escape the comments and it isn’t going to just die down. Get your own message out there, be consistent in your message and make sure you take responsibility for what you did.
It seems like you can’t turn a corner without running into a comment about mega-selling romance author Cassie Edwards. Right now it’s all over the blogosphere and nearly every major newspaper since the Associated Press got a hold of Nora Roberts for a comment.
I regularly read the blog Smart Bitches Trashy Books that broke the story of her peculiar similarities to other published works–i.e. plagiarism–because they give me a laugh, have a lot of snark and really tell things like it is rather than sugar-coat it in terms of book reviews.
I’ve said my bit over there on how I feel about the entire situation several days ago, but I guess I need to say it here too.
We shouldn’t put the blame on her publisher. Like Nora Roberts I agree that an author has the responsibility to turn in work that they have verified and presented as their own, and if they borrow from other sources, then they need to cite it in their author’s notes or at least acknowledge it in some fashion. Refusing to buy the other books produced by that publisher is only going to bring a direct hit to the books you love. They don’t sell romance, they’ll start cutting the number they produce. So boycotting Signet or NAL or Penguin Putnam (the parent company) isn’t going to do you much good.
But people are angry with the publisher for saying Edwards did nothing wrong. The confusion is this: Copyright infringement is not the same as plagiarism. One is actionable in a court of law, the other is ethically abhorrent, but not going to get you anything should you pursue it.
And really I think that’s the real reason why the publisher isn’t more concerned about it. What Edwards has “borrowed” and turned into speech for her characters is from books that are published from so long ago that likely the copyright has expired. That means no one is really going to bring it up in court, which is what really concerns any corporation.
Well, it may not qualify as copyright infringement, but that doesn’t mean it’s not plagiarism. You take another author’s words in the same form and use them as your own without acknowledgement, to me, that’s plagiarism. Funny enough it was for my journalism professor too. And for the multiple newspaper editors I worked for.
To say “I didn’t know” is a cop out. You’re the author. You should know. It’s your book isn’t it?
I admit, I don’t blog often. OK, I only blog where I’m scheduled to with my fellow writers from the American Title Contest on our blog Title Wave. But so many people have either emailed or called in the last month or so to find out what happened to my book, The Spellbound Bride, that I thought it was about time I write it up on the blog.
Here’s the deal: The Spellbound Bride was supposed to come out in late May. My publisher gave me a lot of excuses about printing problems and such, but ultimately a month after the book was slated for release the publisher folded and filed for bankruptcy.
I was one of the fortunate ones. I asked for, and received, the rights back to my book weeks before they filed. Some of my fellow authors weren’t so lucky and now can’t even order or sell their own books!
Right now I’m working on finding a new home for The Spellbound Bride. I mean, afterall, it already received a four-star review from Romantic Times Magazine and some great reviews online. You would think someone would pick it up, right? Well, welcome to publishing…
There are only so many places a writer can submit his or her work without an agent. So I’ve been working on getting a new agent. I split with my agent of 8 years back in 2005 and haven’t really been all that worked up about getting a new one until now.
The problem is that this all takes time. I’ve already heard back from a number of agents who’ve said “your writing is great, but just not my taste” to the point where a writer begins to wonder if her book is anyone’s taste. But I know from those of you who were kind enough to read advanced copies for review, and from booksellers who looked at the book, that there are people out there who want to read The Spellbound Bride. And for you, I’ll keep looking for a home for this book.
If you’ve seen the play Wicked or read any of the alternatives stories to The Wizard of Oz, then you know that Dorothy didn’t borrow those ruby slippers—she stole them.
The same thing is happening just as innocently (or not) at a site called esnips.com which has allowed the posting of entire copyrighted books for free download.
Here’s the problem with it:
1) The author NEVER gets paid for this. Author doesn’t get paid, author can’t write more books for audience, even if said audience loves his or her work. How would you like someone else taking home your paycheck no matter how many hours you put in at work?
2) You make think that you’re only “one” person downloading a book, music or copying a movie, but you’re not. Millions of people do it and when they do, they bankrupt the industry that is providing them entertainment. (Which refers back to point number one, you want new material, you have to make sure the writer can make a living producing new material. Which, by the way is minimal for most authors anyway—something like 40 cents per paperback book when it’s bought at full price.)
3) Posting copyrighted material is a crime. It is punishable by law…and frankly I wouldn’t want to tangle with some of the attorneys for authors that esnips currently has circulating in their cyber-space (ie Nora Roberts…among others).
So don’t be lured by those ruby slippers, people. I have a feeling the big bad witch of publishing is about to go postal on said site, and like the whole Napster thing, you don’t want to be caught with your computer harboring dirty laundry.
I’m a busy person. Most of us are. We have lives (ok most of us have lives). A lot of my friends seem very mystified by the whole process of writing a book in the first place. Making tea, they get. Including chocolate dougnuts with tea they get even better. But not writing.
The funny thing is that for most writers, we’ll do anything but write. (Witness the rage in blogging, which doesn’t actually count toward the word count of your book going up.) We’ll do housework, we’ll do bills, we’ll even do taxes rather than plunk our butts in a chair and actually write.
Why?
The reasons are as different and individual as the writer. For me, it’s a matter of not wanting to get interrupted. Well, partially. Once I ‘m in the story, I don’t want someone yanking me back out. It’s like going to a movie and then having your kids tell you 2/3 of the way into the movie they’ve gotta go pee. You know you’re going to miss something big by leaving.
The same thing happens when I write. My brian is just getting rolling, the movie of my book is playing in my head and I’m writing it down as fast as I can to keep up. Then, BAM! Everything grinds to a hault because she hit me, he won’t stop bugging me, the cat ate my bird and dinner’s burning on the stove. Getting back into the frenzied heart-pumping action of a fight scene or the sensual buzz of a love scene is a lot harder when you’ve got to get into it again.
The other thing I guess that keeps me away is the fear of failure. Down deep I tell myself that If I finish this book, then I have to send it in. If they don’t take it (which, judging by the thickness I’ve developed in my rejection file is more often than not) then I’ve wasted those months and years of my life I spent writing it. Which isn’t true! Once a story is on the page, it is forever out of my head and available to share. It has power to speak to people and change ideas. If it remains stuck in the recesses of my mind, it ends when I do.
*sigh*
OK, enough pep talk. Now I’ve got to get back to work!
Since this time last year, I was overwhelmed with the process of being an American Title II finalist, it beehoves me to annouce and welcome the American Title III finalists to our little sisterhood of insanity.
This year’s ATIII finalists are:
Kim Howe – ONE SHOT, TWO KILLS
Meretta Pater – RISING SIN
Jenny Gardiner – SLEEPING WITH WARD CLEAVER
Judi Fennell – BEAUTY AND THE BEST
Sally Stotter – DARE YOU
Raz Steel - PASS THE KRYPTONITE
Linda Thomas-Sundstrom – BARBIE AND THE BEAST
Cathy Pegau - HAUNTED
Lindsey Brookes - OPERATION: DATE ESCAPE
Big congratulations ladies! You’ve made the first major hurdle!
Now for the rest of the race…
Best Advice: 1. Don’t neglect your writing. It’ll be tempting to say you can’t think straight or you need a Xanax for your stomach, but keep writing anyway. Even if it’s only a page a day. Don’t stop. It can be a major writing block if you do.
2. Keep yourself organized. This is going to be a long trip, ladies, so keep yourself sane by knowing where you put everything. You’ve already experienced the ASAP deadlines. Those don’t stop!
3. Take a breather. When you can, relax and take time to be just a normal person with NON Writer friends. People who support you but have no idea why or how you are doing this. Competition is grueling work.
4. Enjoy the ride. It’ll be over soon enough, so for now enjoy being a finalist! You made it. You are one of TEN in the NATION! That’s huge! Go use it for what it’s worth with agents and in pitching your other books starting now. Don’t wait until this is all over. You are a star right now!
Voting begins on Oct. 15-29th at www.romantictimes.com. But if you can’t wait and want a preview…go to the Title Wave blog starting this Friday and see the exclusive pre-voting interviews with all the ATIII finalists!
There are things we all love to do. But some of those things can be dangerous for you, even outright deadly.
I found this out first hand during an innocent trip to run the ATVs (that’s four-wheelers for those who aren’t addicted) on the sand dunes with my family the last weekend of summer vacation.
I wasn’t hot-dogging. I wasn’t going fast. In fact all I was doing was following my 14-year-old nephew along a narrow path in the dune grass, when the ATV when up on the high center of the trail, flipped me off the side and then ran up a steep bank, turning over on top of me. Now all of this wouldn’t have been traumatic in the slightest but for two things.
1. when it flipped me off, I landed and my leg went at a ninety degree angle outward with a crunch, pop, pop sound that let me know things weren’t good.
2. when the ATV fell, it fell on top of my “good” leg pinning me to the ground.
When my nephew found me I was screaming. Poor kid. Probably took three to five years off his life. ops:
The good news is I survived. I had surgery to replace the severed ligament, and torn cartilage in my knee and now I’m hobbling around off crutches after two months.
Here’s the thing…we were supposed to go again as a family. In a way I bummed I can’t. Despite the surgery, despite the accident, all of it. I’d still like to go.
That’s what I’d call and obsession or addiction. When you like something so much, you’d do it again even though you know there’s a chance it really suck at some point.
The thing is, it’s like that with writing too. Since being a finalist in the American Title II contest last year I’ve catalogued 29 agent rejections, 9 editorial rejections, and one sale. That’s one year. I’ve got a rejection file 4 inches thick. Considering I’ve been writing fiction almost 20 years now, that’s a lot of hurt for just one sale…but I keep at it.
Why? The truth is, like most writers, it’s a bit of an obsession. We do it because we have to. We have these stories and the only way they can get out is to share them with you. So we write.
I’m going back to the keyboard, but if you happen to be going to the Emerald City Writers Conference in Seattle this weekend, look me up. I’ll be there with all the other obsessed writers!
Ever read a romance where it was all about his quest to buy her the perfect ring or flowers and once he gave them to her he walked off, done with his “love” story?
Let me disabuse you of that notion right now. 
OK, I only blog where I’m scheduled to with my fellow writers from the American Title Contest on our blog 
You’ve made the first major hurdle!
ops: