Editor Unleashed!

My editor is being interviewed at Beth Kery's Blog today. Swing by, learn a bit about her editorial guru-ness and comment to win some Samhain books!

Point of Entry

You know how when space shuttles are trying to land and the weather conditions are poor, they can't just wait for the weather to clear and land whenever they feel like it? They have to find a window, an appropriate point of atmospheric entry that will get them to their landing site.

Sometimes, that's what it feels like starting a story. I'm in orbit. I want to be on the landing strip. I know I'll get down there somehow, but I have to find the right point of entry. The book will crash and burn if I don't open it in the right scene. There are always a couple different scenes - landing in Florida or California? - but using a different window means the entire flight path will be different. How do I find the one I'm looking for? The one that will lead me to the best darn book I can make it?

That's where I am right now. I'm orbiting my next book, trying to figure out the right moment to fire the afterburners. Wish me luck.

New Fangled Technology

Ooooh, aaaaaah. Check it out y'all. It's a new-fangled-book-making-while-you-wait machine. Originally in Britain, but coming to Third Place Books in Seattle this November.



What say you? Too awesome for words? Too expensive to be useful?

Things I Learned from 30 Days of Night:

Research is important.

Suppose you're making a movie about a real city in a real state. Let's say you're making a movie called 30 Days of Night and you're setting it in Barrow, Alaska. Let's ignore, for a moment, the fact that the "days of night" in Barrow number more than thirty each year, because thirty is such a nice fun number. Round. Not like, oh, sixty-three. We will suspend our disbelief about the exitence of vampires, cuz it's a vampire movie and that's what you do when you watch a vampire movie. Oddly, I have no trouble suspending that disbelief. It's these other things that bug me... so I give you Things I Learned From 30 Days of Night: **Spoilers Galore!**

• Thing One: Planes cannot fly in the dark. For all those days of darkness, the people of Barrow will be secluded from the world. Isolated. Helpless. Totally cut off and without resources until the sun should rise again. Ripe pickings for those thirsty vamps. Wanna test this theory? Try Expedia. See if you can fly to Barrow on winter solstice, December 22nd. You know what? You can! So that whole isolated for a month in the dark thing? Um... bullshit. You wanna remake From Dusk Til Dawn in Alaska? Neat. Go for it. But I recommend you pick a fictional city. By having it be a real place, with real flights (several every day!) you lost me. The movie makers went to a lot of trouble to cut those folks off - destroying all the cell phones (then promptly showing cell phones in use in the very next scene!), disabling the internet, and cutting the power - but does anyone actually think that darkness means there will be no more flights? Really? Dude, what century are we in?
• Thing Two: Too many writers is a baaaaad thing. In Hollywood, a screenplay will often find its way through several screenwriters before making it to the big screen. The guy with the idea. The guy paid to fix the idea guy's idea. And the guy brought in by the producers to make the film "commercial" so it will make as much money as humanly possible. I'm guessing that with 30 Days the original idea guy was the only one who had ever given any thought to the realities of living in Barrow, Alaska. There were just enough things done right that it almost seemed like someone somewhere knew what the hell they were talking about. But those right things were grossly outweight by all the jawdroppingly dumb things. Like no one's breath being visible in the -10 degree air. Like Barrow being isolated in "80 miles of roadless wilderness". Um... y'all? That's one helluva lot more than 80 miles. I think you missed a zero. The only thing within even 80 nautical miles of Barrow is Wainwright - and that ain't exactly civilization. Or - and this one is a personal favorite - the oil pipeline running right through Barrow. Yep. Only off by a couple hundred miles of "roadless wilderness". I could totally walk that - like the cute dark-haired chick does after her friend gets munched by vamps.
• Thing Three: Vampires are sloppy eaters. There are a limited number of people in Barrow, i.e. a limited amount of blood. So the frenzied ripping and splashing is just downright wasteful! Make that blood last, boys and girls! Be grateful for the stupid humans who stumble into your feeding frenzy. There are vampires starving in Africa!
• Thing Four: Dental hygiene = morality. Two cute little eye-teeth fangs = Good Vampire. A mouthful of jaggedy fanged teeth with a nasty underbite = Bad Vampire. A mouthful of blackened nubs like you've been chugging battery acid = Bad Human. Straight, over-whitened pearlies = Good Human.
• Thing Five: Stupidity in the cold is still stupidity. The vampires appear to be impervious to the cold. This adds a special layer of juicy idiocy to Our Hero's moving speech in which he proclaims that they live in Barrow for a reason. Cuz no one else can. They know the town. They know the cold. They are gonna prevail, bitches! Unfortunately, their little undead buddies are impervious to the freaking cold, you freaking moron. So the fact that you are not? Not an advantage. Oh! And then there's this one part (God, I love this movie. It is sooooo bad.) when the Rebel Badass guy is running into certain death with his big ass combine-looking piece of construction machinery - only what's this? He seems to be a-slicin' and a-dicin' those nasty vamps! He's winning! Eating their fricking lunch, baby! Then he intentionally runs his combine-thingy into a building so he can blow it up, but does not in fact succeed in blowing up the vamps. Just himself. Yep. Stupidity. Not any less stupid just cuz it's cold.

This movie? Beyond awesome. I can't stop laughing. It's the gift that keeps on giving. If only it were trying to be funny.

So do your research, boys and girls. Cuz if you don't, someone may just be blogging about how ridicu-awesome your mistakes are.

On a realistic Alaska note: Snow in the mountains behind my house today and a moose eating the neighbor's flowers before they're all killed by the frost. Winter's coming. And you thought it was Autumn. Ha ha.

Good News!

Didja like Serengeti Heat? Didja wanna read more lion-y goodness? Are ya waiting with bated breath? Well, unbate that breath, baby!

Serengeti Storm is coming this January!!!

Shana's been a very naughty kitty and it's time for big bad Caleb to take her down a notch or two. Return to Three Rocks Pride for a romance that'll burn hot right through a winter storm!

I'm psyched. Can ya tell? Little bit? Scream with me, y'all. You know you want to. Woohooooooooo!

Surrender Dorothy!

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls! I give you the launch of the group blog for the 2009 Golden Heart Finalists: The Ruby-Slippered Sisterhood! (Try saying that five times fast.)

The 2010 RWA® Golden Heart Contest opens for entries TODAY, so if you'd like the skinny, the lowdown, and a few insider tips from the 2009 graduating class, be sure to drop by the RSS blog during our launch month. Beaucoup prizes will be given away, from mugs to manuscript critiques. Come on by! Comment early, comment often!

Click your heels together three times and repeat, "There's no place like the best-seller lists."

Revisionist History

How historical do you like your historical fiction? I just saw Inglourious Basterds and I was completely unprepared for the new ending to World War II. To be perfectly honest, I found it pretty damn annoying.

Hollywood is basing their films ever more loosely on those "true" stories. No, Inglourious Basterds didn't claim to be historically accurate, but there are far too many people who will watch that movie and assume that's what really happened. If "historical" movie makers are going to veer quite so drastically away from reality, I'd like a disclaimer... or some paranormal element in the plot to indicate that this is an alternate history. The relationship between history and fiction is a messy one, especially in the eye of the general viewing public.

Historical romance is not immune to the bending-history epidemic. I don't have a problem with the wild proliferation of rich, studly dukes in the regency era... as long as you aren't giving those dukes real historical identities. Then things start to get a little fishy. A fictitious king? You can do whatever you want to him. George IV? He actually lived. Is it so much to ask for a little historical accuracy?

History itself is a jumble of perspectives. No two memories of an event are going to be identical, so it stands to reason that our cultural memory would be fuzzy around the edges. But some things are facts. If we know when someone died and how... if we know how they were viewed in their own lifetime... why do we have to mess with that? Why do we have to sensationalize and speculate? I'm all for creativity, as long as people aren't trying to pass it off as truth. "A true story!" has become a selling point that is trotted out more and more frequently, with less and less accuracy. We will never be able to reverse that trend until we start calling people on the lie.

What do you think? Am I not giving the masses enough credit for knowing the difference between Truth and Based on a True Story? Or are we losing our sense of history to fiction even as we lose our sense of news to entertainment?

Lordy, Lordy, Look at All Them Books!

Books, books, and more books! The Writeminded Ebook Extravaganza is going on now HERE: http://www.writemindedblog.com/!!! Many a book to be won, ladies and gents. Grab your free stuff while the grabbing is good!