David R Slayton

Sep242009

Back to Basics: The Zen Circle of Writing

One of the things I’ve picked up in Yoga is that even advanced practioners need to get back to the basics sometimes. As I work on my next project, while still querying on Eastlight, I’m looking at writing as a craft in a whole new light.

The new project (working title Ghost Town), is in the early stages and this gives me the chance to be better organized from the start. I’m back at the start of the development cycle, and I’m fortunate that I’m bringing more experience to my game.

What does that mean exactly? I’m breaking my work into tighter scenes. I’m rambling less when I write. I’m writing stronger sentences out the gate and hopefully with more clarity. I’ve also learned (and this is a big one for me) that not every idea which springs to mind needs to go into every chapter or book. Sometimes, my first idea for a scene isn’t the best, so I take the time to refocus setting before writing.

I’m at the start of the project, but I’m looking at my writing with a lot more confidence and a lot more skill than what I brought to Eastlight and Neophyte. I’m hoping the eventual payoff will be the need for less rewrite this time. I know rewrites are a natural part of the project lifecycle, but I’d like to shorten the number to get projects out to market faster.

Aug302009

Queries and Confidence: Rules for the Query Process

You may have sensed a little radio silence on the blog lately, and I’ll admit I’ve been busy. My next two projects are coming together, and I’ll soon have to choose which one to devote myself to for the rest of the year. I’ve also taken the time to join the Rocky Mountain Writers Association to expand my contacts and critique circle.

Publishing continues to be a scary game right now, as Jenny Rappaport relays, and more than a few agents are closed to queries, particularly from debut authors. It’s not a good time for trying to break in. The query process can be intimidating, and it requires just the right grip on your work: you have to believe in your book, but also you have to know when editing is required.

Despite all the doom and gloom, I’m optimistic about my writing. I’m hopeful about Eastlight’s chances, and weirdly enough, I get excited when I’m researching my queries.

Rejection is a powerful motivator, if you take it right. You can choose to go hide from the process (and I’ll confess that starting my day by reading up on the state of Publishing is a powerful motivator to fire up the Playstation and avoid reality), or you can rally and use the frustration as fuel to get more queries out there.

All this engagement with the query process has led me to some personal rules:

1. It only takes one yes: don’t give up and query widely.
2. Rejections are normal and the nature of the game.
3. The sooner you query, the sooner you sign (don’t let the process get you down).

The one caveat as always, is the balance: your work has to be ready. You have to have it in the most polished, professional state you can. With few exceptions, regardless of genre, you can only query an agent once for a book.

Aug182009

Masks: a Review of Elizabeth Bear’s Carnival

Writing political fiction is difficult. It’s easy to reduce debate to liberal and conservative, large or small government, progress or status quo. It’s also tempting to beat the reader over the head with your own views and use the bully pulpit of the story to attack the opposition. Humanizing two factions and giving the reader sympathy for both perspectives takes a deft hand. Elizabeth Bear manages this quite well in Carnival, a sci-fi trip to a future when humanity is greatly changed, and spread out over the stars, but where too many of our sad divisions remain. Even in futurist, fictional societies, it’s easy for an author to take sides and Bear wisely creates characters at conflict with their respective societies, making it hard to know whose side they, and she, are on. Every one in this novel is wearing at least one mask. It’s high intrigue with astronomical and very personal stakes for the point of view characters.

Carnival’s plot builds slowly, and I didn’t mind the simmer as Bear’s conflict came to a boil on the jungle world of New Amazonia. Two diplomats from the Old Earth Coalition find themselves on a world where women have inverted the power structure. Women rule and men are a lesser caste. Sinead O’Connor once said that the “opposite of patriarchy is not matriarchy, but fraternity,” and Bear reinforces this idea by clearly demonstrating that the society of New Amazonia has as many flaws as the patriarchy the separatist women left behind.

One of the first things I noticed was the complexity of Bear’s universe. It took me a while to sort through the factions, characters, and loyalties. The technological vocabulary of the Coalition diplomats slowed me down. This was part of the fun, being a tourist in an alien society, but it made Carnival a book you can’t just casually read. This one takes some focus, but it is well worth the time. The book is thoughtful, and it turned my mind towards a number of topics I don’t regularly consider. Bear invests the conflict with a good amount of gender study, and I was impressed by the time she took to work out how a matriarchal warrior society would handle issues of reproduction, the rights of males, and status. I had questions as I read, and her characters addressed most of them over the course of the novel.

Once the plot heats up, the philosophical consideration gets pushed aside and things move very quickly. In this sense, it was like reading two books, one with a more considered tempo and a second with a strong action beat. I personally preferred the first part, though I can’t deny that the latter section was more of a page turner. The only real difficulty in reading was the exposure to two cultures, not simply one. The reader is transported with the diplomats into the world of New Amazonia, but it took the course of the novel for me to understand where the diplomats were coming from and for the opposing viewpoints to become clear.

Bear’s use of technology, both Amazon and Coalition, was well-conceived. These are interesting and more colorful than the average space opera. The relationship of the technology to the character fit their background and loyalty. She imbues her characters with appropriate prejudices, based upon their side in the conflict, and these come through, enriching the characters and the story world.

In many ways, Carnival isn’t an easy journey. You’re being exposed to a confusing foreign culture, and you don’t speak the language, but if you’re up for a little adventure outside the normal light reading, it’s well worth the trip.

Jul242009

Practice Makes Perfect

If there’s one thing to be said about writing, it’s that you get better with practice. A lot of writers have a number of books under the bed, in the closest, somewhere, which will never see the light of day. I’ve collected one of these skeleton books so far, and I don’t regret writing it. My first book taught me more about writing than anything I’d done before, just as Eastlight taught me even more. I truly believe that Eastlight isn’t due for that pile. Why do I believe in my book so much? I’ve followed all the steps, read all the blogs, paid the dues, and done everything I can to make it the strongest book possible. I’ve gotten critique from honest parties and rewritten it over and over, hammering it into the book it is now. And if I can’t find representation, or it doesn’t sell, then I’ll just finish the next book and keep the process going until one catches an agent’s eye. With practice, I improve, and each book I write teaches me more about my craft.

I’m definitely seeing an upwards progression in quality as I read through the Dresden files series. I enjoyed the first two books, but the third really hooked me, and the fourth, Summer Knight, really seemed to bring all the elements to just the right boil. Characters reach a maturity in the fourth volume, the world gets fleshed out, and Jim Butcher does a superb job of overlaying the supernatural onto the material. He’s got me anxious for the rest of the series, and I’d start the fifth tonight if I had it in hand. There’s not a lot to say here that I didn’t put forward in my review of the first three, but I’ll say that I highly recommend the series, particularly if you’re wanting to see urban fantasy done right. Butcher clips off some of the elements I found a bit silly in the first two volumes, like potions made from mundane items such as coffee, and plunges full hilt into his take on the faerie mythos. The stakes get upped for Harry Dresden and his world. Butcher adds a ticking clock to the mix, nicely increasing the tension and forging a real page turner. Old allies return and Harry solves his mystery with a deft combination of magic and mental gymnastics.

Jul172009

Late to the Party: Some Comments on Trying to Publish and Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys

You might notice that the list of links on the blog is growing. This will keep happening as I keep finding new sites that help with my understanding of the publishing process and business. If you’re an aspiring writer, I recommend any of them, as they’ll help you get the lay of the land. They most certainly should be read and carefully studied before you start the query process. I especially recommend Kristin Nelson, Nathan Bradsford, and Janet Reid for this.

As a whole, the process of publishing can really get you down. Writing and publishing are two very different things. When I was writing my first book, I heard a lot of comments that made me scratch my head. Most were usually along the lines of: “Won’t that be nice? To write a book and make a ton of money?” I knew these weren’t comments on my talent, but rather a supposition that writing a book leads to fame and fortune. Let’s be clear: I’m getting more savvy about the state of publishing every day, and it’s an uphill battle to make it out of the trenches, publish a book, and see it succeed. Even if you reach this point, continued success is not guaranteed. You have to continually evolve, continually market yourself and your work, and continually improve. Frankly, the whole process of breaking into commercial fiction can get me down. Quitting isn’t an option, but taking a breather isn’t a bad idea either. For me, a breather is a book or movie that reminds me why I love writing, and the English language, so much.

Nearly eleven years ago, my friend Alan gave me a copy of Wonder Boys. It’s even autographed. And for eleven years it sat on my shelf, unread. I wish I’d cracked it open years ago. Wonder Boys is that rare book about books, like A.S. Byatt’s Possession, that brings out my love of the written word. Chabon nails his characters so well, so cleverly, and sums up the crazy things writers do to find material to work with. He also captures a lot of the pretension and manic energy that surround them, and I have to say, I can spot myself or some people from my college program in his pages. Here I am, reading a book that most of you probably discovered a decade ago. But I think we’ve established I tend to move at my own pace when it comes to reading, though I’m quickly trying to better synch myself with the state of the market and adjust my reading list accordingly.

When reading a book as good as Wonder Boys, you have two directions you can take your feelings: jealousy that you may never write anything nearly that good, or you can be inspired to write more, write better, and fall back in love with your craft. I’m sure there are some people out there who would have a third reaction, which would be “I can do better than that,” but I’m not among them. I choose to be inspired, to let books this good drive me to write better and push myself out of my comfort zone. I could give you a solid critique of Wonder Boys, break it down for you, but I wouldn’t want to spoil your fun. It’s worth reading if only for Chabon’s fantastic phrasing, which turns over and over to make me laugh or catch my eye on some delicious detail in his wording. If you trust me on these matters, just read the book.

Jul112009

The Delicate Art of the Serial II: The Dresden Files

The Modern Language Association (MLA) is the style manual I cut my college teeth on. It’s the preferred manual for English papers and so I first learned to underline book titles rather than italicize them. I’ll confess a dirty secret: I started italicizing a while back, unless I was writing a paper, since it just looks cleaner to me, and when dealing with electronic formats, avoids confusing the title with a URL. Here’s another one Daily Writing Tips reports that the MLA has finally caught up and decided that italics with titles are the way to go. This should give a few million English majors an easier time as well as help resolve conflict with the Chicago Manual of Style, which other majors such as my History degree, use. I highly recommend subscribing to Daily Writing Tips. They’re doing a lot of great work and keeping me up to date.

The second book series I’m examining is the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher. I’m going to start with two disclaimers: I completely missed the television series, so I won’t be discussing it to any degree. Second, I read the first book a while ago and the second more recently. I’m revisiting them for critique, but I’m already a fan and likely a bit biased towards them. I know there are several more, and I am behind, but they’re in the stack and I hope to get to them very soon.

In Butcher’s first book, Storm Front, he set up a stand alone adventure with a few threads he could build on for subsequent plots. This looks typical for the business (and is the model I’ve used for Eastlight). You don’t want to torture your readers with unresolved issues if you don’t get a longer publishing deal. Harry Dresden as a character is established and his basic traits are put up there for us to see: technology doesn’t work well around this urban wizard, and money is usually an issue for his business. Butcher will revisit these traits at the start of the next two books as an anchor for us to remember but also maintain conflict. The second book, Fool Moon, immediately reminds us of Dresden’s money problems while the third, Grave Peril, instantly brings up the technology problem in a life and death situation.

As characterization goes, Harry is fairly vague in the first book. We get to know him, but a lot of his history (and the potential conflicts it brings) are left out. As a good serial character, he shouldn’t grow or change too fast, and Butcher keeps to the core of who Harry is. He’s brash, has a strong streak of chivalry that is often a weakness, and his aforementioned liabilities surrounding money and technology are a concrete portion of his character. What does get expanded nicely are Harry’s contacts with the spirit world. As the series progresses, we see more of his allies and enemies past the mundane. We’re introduced to some of his old associations, and Harry’s world widens for us. Handling things this way, Butcher wisely doesn’t throw the whole world at us in the first few books: he lets it widen as he goes. By handling it this way, he avoids the typical fantasy trap of over-describing and laying out all the groundwork in advance of the story. Instead, he lets the world serve the story and grow organically. It also means that the reader doesn’t have to remember a million little details about how Harry’s world works. We can just get on with the story and let the world catch up.

Butcher gave the first two books a fairly strong self-contained nature. Characters from them return, but again, he doesn’t wallow in backstory, so the plot gets moving right away. The third book seems to lay the groundwork for a longer series, setting up some pretty important events (which I won’t spoil). The Dresden Files works effectively as a series for a number of reasons, but I think the strongest are that Butcher doesn’t bog us down with unnecessary detail. He repeats critical information but not too often, and he links the books together with details that while important, aren’t essential so you don’t feel as though you’re missing something if you read say, the second book before the first. One warning though: you may get a little hooked. I finished the third book and immediately cracked open the fourth. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Jul102009

The Delicate Art of the Serial I: Balancing Conflict and Resolution in a Series

Instead of a personal note on mood or what’s on my ipod, from now on I’ll be dropping a note on style or grammar into the blog. As my intended readers for this blog are largely fellow aspiring authors, I want to share my findings as I scour the Internet for tips:

Thanks to Daily Writing Tips, I know that the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) has finally dissolved my tradition of using two spaces after a period. It has been a factor in writing as we transition from print to electronic media. Since I was trained to type in the business manner, I’ve had a hard time letting go of that second space: but I learned in my History and CIS degrees to treat the CMS as definitive so one space it will be from now on.

I don’t think it will shock you much to learn that I was something of a nerd in high school. A bit anti-social, extremely awkward and shy, I spent a lot of time in the company of paperbacks, many of them in a connecting series. This was a great escape, running off into vast landscapes of books where characters grew in slow arcs, defeated foes who’d come back to haunt them, and eventually marry the man or woman they’d been fighting alongside for hundreds of pages. As I intend Eastlight to be a series, I want to spend some time analyzing successful series and what makes them tick. This will be the first of three blog posts looking at series as I read and analyze them.

In high school, I first read long serials, before moving on to comics. I wish somebody had explained that Dickens wrote in serials and should be read as such. We had to read vast chunks of Great Expectations all in one go, and I utterly hated it. I’ve since learned to appreciate Dickens by reading him the way his original readers did: bit by bit, week by week. In this manner I can sip at his prose, slowly taking it in, without feeling buried by his language. Instead of stressing to complete a big block of reading in time to write a terrible paper about it, I have time to enjoy Dickens and look forward to the next chapter.

Back in my awkward teen years, the series that kept my attention the most were Star Trek novels. They were a great way to spend infinite time with characters I loved. I went on to read a lot of comic books. One author who crosses between the two mediums with deft, prolific, effectiveness is Peter David. I think the man must sleep very little. His X-Factor comics have a consistent high quality in a bloated landscape, and his Star Trek: New Frontier books demonstrate a well plotted, character-focused serial.

I took about a twenty year break from Star Trek novels so I’m still surveying the landscape, but as far as I can tell, David was the first to try something of this type: he took a number of B characters in the Next Generation Universe, stirred up his own funky aliens, and dropped them into a ship in an uncharted region of space. Remember when I said he’s deft? David’s strength in writing characters he didn’t create is that he picks vaguely-defined figures and brings them to vivid life.

The short length of the books means I can breeze through one in an evening, though I quickly find that I need a few on hand as I’ll reach for the next as soon as I put one down. In this manner, he’s constructed his series to work just like episodes of a television show, and it works really well. Part of why the series succeeds is that threads aren’t left to dangle: he tracks unresolved elements over the course of many books and gets the conflict resolved. He’s shown a similar talent with X-Factor, where I’ve been happily surprised to see him pick up threads other writers dropped fifteen years ago and wrap them up. His way of writing comics, in self-contained chapters which culminate and collect well into larger books, serves him well in his novels. He likes to leave you with a cliffhanger or an ominous portent. Both serials benefit from a large cast, which aside from cannon fodder, also provides him with many smaller arcs to stretch the narrative over a larger canvas.

One weakness in the serial is that the suspense can be tiring if threads don’t get wrapped up. You want to see things resolved at some point. If an author stretches things out for too long you get anxious. There’s a delicate balance to this that many authors struggle with. In comics, where short attention span reigns, writers only have so long to wrap it up (or we get those annoying dropped threads when the writer changes guard). In the novel these open ended moments can bring you back for more, but only if the payoff is worth the wait. An easy out for a conflict that has stretched over three books leaves a bitter taste. David doesn’t suffer from this problem.

David’s second strength is that he doesn’t lose track of his characters. He keeps them in mind when he returns for the next episode. We get surprised by new facets of a personality, but he doesn’t radically alter a character’s nature. They grow, and our understanding of them grows too. Using this technique, he lets characters resolve their individual conflicts. In the New Frontier series, he seems to have started things with each individual coming on board with a different secret or desire. Each episode clears up one or two of these, so the reader is satisfied while they wait for some of the larger mysteries to simmer. I think David intimately knows his characters, and while they surprise us, I get the feeling he knows exactly what they’re hiding before he began writing the first episode. I’ve long been a fan, but I’m really beginning to admire Peter David’s craftsmanship as well.

Jun182009

An Interview with Gail Martin, author of the Chronicles of the Necromancer series

For this post, I’m doing something exciting: an interview with Gail Martin. Gail is promoting her series, Chronicles of the Necromancer, and she kindly agreed to let me interview her for the blog. Read on below for more about Gail’s series and find the sneak peek she’s offering for the fourth volumne: Dark Lady’s Chosen.

In the Summoner, you introduced us to a hero, Martris Drake, who as a necromancer, would normally be evil. While Tris uses his spirit magic for good, you have hinted at a dark side to Tris’s powers. Will we see more of this explored in further volumes?

I really wanted to question the assumption that a necromancer is necessarily evil. I don’t think that being dead makes someone a bad person, and just because a spirit is brought back from the dead, why should it change the moral compass the person had throughout life? I realized this when my grandmother died when I was just a girl. At first, the whole ghost thing spooked me, and then I realized that if my grandmother were to come back (to my knowledge, she hasn’t), it would still be my grandmother and she wouldn’t hurt me.

So the ghosts and the power itself are morally neutral. But spirit magic is very powerful and rare, and it carries a real temptation to use it for selfish ends or to say that the ends justify the means. Tris sees what this seduction costs the Obsidian King and the mage Lemuel, whose body was possessed by the Obsidian King’s spirit. As he ventures further into the moral quandaries of being a king and the battlefield issues where right and wrong become murky, it will be harder and harder for Tris to avoid making compromises. So yes, you’ll see more of this struggle, especially in Dark Lady’s Chosen.

You’re blending a lot of genres together: fantasy with light horror and most recently quite a bit of romance. What brought you to writing fantasy? What inspired you to write in this genre?

I really just started by writing the stories I wanted to read. I’ve loved fantasy and the paranormal since I was a kid, as well as vampires, ghosts, magic and haunted houses. So it’s inevitable, I guess, for all those elements to end up in my novels. As for the romance—the books are first and foremost action/adventure, but I’ve always enjoyed deeper characterizations and a hint of romance, so there it is. It’s not the most important element or the focus of the book, but when you’re dealing with a cast of characters that are young men and women in their 20s and early 30s it seems like it would be remiss to leave it out. I want to make the characters very real as well as their setting and adventures. My favorite books are the ones where I feel like I’ve really gotten to know the characters as people.

I have to ask about your inspiration for your character naming conventions. Can I ask where you get your names from? They have a great old Europe or Romany sound but also a consistent texture.

Good question! I will admit to having a stack of baby name books by my computer, and I use the online sources as well. Since the setting is quasi-northwestern European, many of the names are variants of Anglo-Saxon, Welsh, Celtic and Gaelic names, with some Bulgarian, Slovenian, Romanian influences as well. It depends on the character I’m naming.

I’m really excited for the fourth book in the series, Dark Lady’s Chosen. You’ve certainly left us with a couple of cliffhangers and done a great job in splitting focus onto various characters. How long do you expect the series to go, and will we see more of the other characters in main storylines?

Thank you! I’m hoping the series will go on in various forms for a long time. By ‘various forms’ I mean duologies and maybe trilogies that are contemporary to the first 4 books and that also go backwards or forwards in the chronology, as well as some completely unrelated storylines. I think I’ve identified at least 20 story arcs so far I’d like to work on in the Winter Kingdoms, so we’ll see!

Yes, as the books unfold I do plan to show readers more of the Winter Kingdoms and more of characters who may have just had a minor role in other books. There will be new characters as well. It’s a big world—there are lots of interesting people and plenty of stories to tell!

I think your use of a rather singular religion in the series is very interesting. You’ve got different factions fighting over it anyway, which I think reflects human nature. The Goddess has already made a few cameos. Can you tell us a little bit more about how religion affects your story world? Will we see more of Her and the Sisterhood in the following volumes?

Fantasy often either ignores religion, gives it a superficial nod and then moves on, or makes it the uber-bad guy. I wanted to have it be a part of my world and my characters’ lives in realistic ways, because it does shape the history and the culture of the world, even for agnostics and atheists. As you read the books, I think you’ll see that the Aspect of the Lady a particular individual or kingdom is drawn to colors the world view and even self image of that person/kingdom, and the choice of Aspect often tells you more about the individual/kingdom than it does about the nature of the Goddess herself!

In the real world, whether or not someone is observant or not, religion or the lack thereof is an element of culture, just like geography, social structure, economics, plague, invasion, famine, historical rivalries, politics and personality. I love playing with the texture of the 8 different major practices, and as you’ll see in Dark Haven and Dark Lady’s Chosen, there are older, partially forgotten gods and goddesses who aren’t really gone as well as a wide variety of observances for holidays and life events such as weddings, funerals, births and coming-of-age. And of course, the vayash moru and vyrkin have their own observances and perspectives shaped from their unique situations and for the vayash moru, their long lives. So yes, you’ll see more of both the Goddess and the Sisterhood as the books move forward.

Finally, any tips for the unpublished fantasy authors out there? What do you think aspiring authors can do to succeed?

To succeed, you have to keep trying. Write what you enjoy reading. Don’t write to impress other people or because someone tells you a certain type of book sells well. Write what you enjoy. Then find a couple of trusted friends who like to read the same types of books you do and try your stuff out on them. Pick people who are kind but honest: you don’t want people who enjoy shredding other people’s work for their own amusement. Then write. The more you write, the better you get. It’s ok to start with fan fiction. Many famous writers did. Eventually you’ll find a story of your own and then you’ll find the fire inside to tell it. Learn everything you can about the business of writing by reading books about publishing and going to conventions or conferences where you can talk to real writers. Some of the best books on the subject are published by Writers’ Digest Books. I think I’ve read all of them. They are very helpful.

For more about Gail’s dynamic series, visit her site: www.chroniclesofthenecromancer.com. She’s got some great content, including podcasts and a calendar of upcoming appearances. You can also read the first chapter of Dark Lady’s Chosen here.

Jun112009

Off the Beaten Path: David’s Review of Eat, Pray, Love

Finishing my “practical” Master’s in Computer Information Systems sort of knocked me offline for the month of May. I was staring at a computer for most of it, but I’m afraid my writing and blogging got mightily ignored. Whenever this happens, whether from a dry creative period or life just keeping me away, I find I’ve lost focus. It’s not very different from working out: you ignore your muscles and they atrophy. Going back to the gym means finding your place and building them back up again. Completing the degree meant that my brain was very, very tired. It was quite strange, but I realized that I had little ability for meaningful output directly after. Instead I switched to input and started tackling the stack of books piled up beside my desk.

I just finished Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir piece Eat, Pray, Love, stepping far outside my genre. It was a great read and I got a lot out of tagging along for her global adventure of rediscovering her self. I don’t think I was one hundred pages in before I’d made a mental list of six people, not all of them women, to recommend it to. Gilbert’s journey to explore pleasure and devotion gets kicked off with a brutal divorce, something too many of the people on my list can relate to. I have to admit a lot of the appeal to me was getting into her head, feeling how she experienced her journey. By the end I felt like I’d connected with her as a voice, made another friend “through the pages” as an old saying goes. The book is intensely personal.

In many ways, Gilbert’s journey is mythic and that connects it well to fantasy. After all, our characters in fantasy are usually on a journey. Their experiences and encounters change them, evolve them, and shake them up. The whole concept of the mythic journey is just that: a call to leave an ordinary life. Gilbert is lucky enough to have experienced this in reality, but she touches on why I read fantasy and why I fell enough in love with it to write it: by escaping for a bit, we get the chance to change our perspective. Maybe we learn something, maybe not, but just the experience affects us. Gilbert set out with a mission and a plan, the benefits of which unknowing characters rarely have. Escape can be avoidance, but it does not have to be. Escape, when you’re trapped, is exactly what you need. By traveling with characters on their journeys, we ride along, and hopefully empathize with their plight. When they experience something, maybe we experience too. I’d highly recommend Eat, Pray, Love for anyone in your life who needs a change.

Jun62009

Everything Old is New Again

The summer movie season came faster than I expected. It will be dating myself to say that when I was in high school, Terminator 2 was the big action flick. This summer feels like a nostalgia wave: Star Trek, Transformers, and a new Terminator are all hitting the screen.

I find it interesting that we cling to serials and timeless characters, though I’ll have to do a lot more in depth analysis to grasp what I think makes a character last like that. In fantasy, the trilogy seems to be the norm, but the series is another standard. I think some series go on a bit too long, sometimes when the author has simply run out of things for the characters to do. (I’m thinking here of R.A. Salvatore’s action-packed Drizzt series, which I loved for the first eight books or so). Or an author leaves too many threads dangling, and I finish the books feeling like some important plot points were left unresolved.

But we seem drawn to everlasting characters, ones we eventually call classic. I can easily tick off a list of attempts to bring older characters forward: the upcoming Sherlock Holmes film immediately springs to mind. Some of these characters are actually immortal, drawn back from death after their creators have tried to let them go time and time again.

So how do we get from blank stock character to one we want to spend a number of books with? It’s a question I’ll be putting a lot of thought into as I think about Eastlight’s future. I’d certainly like to see it go to series and last at least as long as a trilogy. I’ve started with the idea that characters need to evolve over time, but not too quickly, so they have somewhere to go. While my two main characters certainly grow in the course of the first novel, I’ve left them a lot of room to mature and sprawl out in time. Certainly a character should be unique, original enough the reader wants to spend many books with them, but not too unique. I think of the typical romantic heroine, who shouldn’t be so offbeat or alien that your reader cannot identify with her getting the hero. Genres such as fantasy and science fiction give us the chance to work with characters radically different in culture, history, and even biology. All of these things can help to give a character flavor and a distinct background, but even strongly defining traits shouldn’t override our ability to relate to a character.

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