Guest at Paranormal Romantics

Posted on January 11, 2010 by Victoria Janssen

I’m a guest over at Paranormal Romantics today, talking about “Choosing Your Paranormal Creature.”

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Charles Sorley, "All the Hills and Vales Along"

Posted on January 10, 2010 by Victoria Janssen

All the Hills and Vales Along

All the hills and vales along
Earth is bursting into song,
And the singers are the chaps
Who are going to die perhaps.
O sing, marching men,
Till the valleys ring again.
Give your gladness to earth’s keeping,
So be glad, when you are sleeping.

Cast away regret and rue,
Think what you are marching to.
Little live, great pass.
Jesus Christ and Barabbas
Were found the same day.
This died, that went his way.
So sing with joyful breath,
For why, you are going to death.
Teeming earth will surely store
All the gladness that you pour.

Earth that never doubts nor fears,
Earth that knows of death, not tears,
Earth that bore with joyful ease
Hemlock for Socrates,
Earth that blossomed and was glad
‘Neath the cross that Christ had,
Shall rejoice and blossom too
When the bullet reaches you.
Wherefore, men marching
On the road to death, sing!
Pour your gladness on earth’s head,
So be merry, so be dead.

From the hills and valleys earth
Shouts back the sound of mirth,
Tramp of feet and lilt of song
Ringing all the road along.
All the music of their going,
Ringing swinging glad song-throwing,
Earth will echo still, when foot
Lies numb and voice mute.
On, marching men, on
To the gates of death with song.
Sow your gladness for earth’s reaping,
So you may be glad, though sleeping.
Strew your gladness on earth’s bed,
So be merry, so be dead.

–Charles Sorley

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Moonlight Mistress Excerpt – Explosions

Posted on January 9, 2010 by Victoria Janssen

Moonlight Mistress is from Harlequin Spice. In this scene, three soldiers are causing a distraction at one site while a more secret operation happens at another. Note there’s been a change to this excerpt to protect a plot detail.

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It would have been better to have grenades thrown from all directions, but it hadn’t been practical with only the three of them. Meyer had insisted that one of them be armed with a more accurate and long-range weapon, much as the infantry were protected by artillery. Of them all, he was the best shot with a rifle, though he wasn’t as good as Southey or anywhere near as good as Mason, back at the regiment. Hailey reminded himself that accuracy like Mason’s or even Southey’s wasn’t required here. All Meyer had to do was plug someone until he couldn’t attack any more. Even the worst shot in the regiment could usually manage that.

Meyer interrupted his thoughts. “Be careful. Both of you.”

Daglish said, “I for one don’t intend to be killed. Hailey, you ready?”

“Yes,” he said.

After that it was the usual sort of running and dodging and flinging oneself into cover, except the sniper gear was uncomfortable and one had to do everything more carefully because of the grenades; and normally, Hailey wouldn’t be given grenades, even jam tins, because his job was to carry messages. In front of Meyer, he’d pretended he didn’t mind, but in truth the grenades made his nervous enough that his palms were sweating inside his gloves.

Daglish had taken platoons out on raids, so he knew what he was about. When they reached the stand of trees that was their midpoint, he settled in among the leaf litter and silently began to lay out his grenades in an arc around his feet. Hailey did the same, then slipped the lit pipe from its loop on his webbing. He could still see a red-orange glow within the pipe’s bowl. He stirred up the embers just a bit with a stick and murmured, “Ready.”

Daglish rose slowly, stretching his arm and rotating it to make sure his sleeves–uniform beneath, sniper tunic above–wouldn’t catch and land a grenade on top of them. He scooped up a tin in each gloved hand and held them out to Hailey, who held the pipe bowl to the fuses until they caught. Together, they counted, then Daglish threw, strong clean arcs that nearly made Hailey whistle in admiration.

Daglish had easily cleared the tall fence. Hailey counted another second, then two explosions ripped the air, one after the other. Sound rushed in, and he realized he hadn’t been breathing, but he was already lighting the next grenade, holding the fuse steady in the bowl of the pipe until sparks crackled, slowly eating their way up the fuse, towards the tight-packed gun cotton. The explosion would fling free the nails and other bits of metal rubbish they’d packed into the tin. The sharp odor of gunpowder singed his nostrils, or was it smoke from the laboratory compound? He held the grenade up to Daglish without looking at him, shook burning ash off his leather glove, then began to light the next fuse.

Daglish had thrown perhaps half the grenades before Hailey heard the gate rattle open and rifle shots popping. “Run?” he asked. He risked a glance; three guards had ventured out, staying close to the fence.

“Two more,” Daglish said, heaving the grenade he held. It landed on a roof, and the resulting explosion resulted in a tower of flame as dry wood caught fire. He hissed with satisfaction as the flame leapt to another roof, which caught fire with a roar.

#

c. Victoria Janssen 2009

Order from Amazon.com.

More excerpts.

More Snippet Saturday:

McKenna Jeffries
Vivian Arend
Ashley Ladd
Kelly Maher
Shelley Munro
Taige Crenshaw
Mari Carr
Eliza Gayle

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Why No, My Face Is NOT Red

Posted on January 8, 2010 by Victoria Janssen

Back in December, I was involved in a discussion about (I paraphrase) how to get used to using “naughty” words in your writing, when they weren’t in your everyday vocabulary.

“Naughty” words should be treated just like any other words, as tools to get meaning across, to communicate meaning as accurately as possible.

For instance, do those particular words suit the story you’re writing? If your character wouldn’t say or think the word, then you shouldn’t use it.

I think a key to using transgressive words beneficially is to make those words, whatever they are, work for you. If you have to work to use them, reach down deeper into your unconscious, then they become a feature, not a bug.

It’s excellent writing exercise. Think of a sexual word you have never used, or perhaps a sexual act you’ve never written about, and then use it in a scene.

You might uncover more than you bargained for by transgressing your own internal boundaries.

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Goals and Deadlines

Posted on January 7, 2010 by Victoria Janssen

This post was originally written for Leah Braemel’s Blog.

A writer’s work is never done, and neither is her goal-setting. I have one goal staring me in the face right now: the deadline to turn in the manuscript of The Duke and the Pirate Queen. It’s due February 1, which means I’ll be spending January writing the last scenes as well as cleaning, tweaking, revising, and polishing.

A deadline isn’t really a goal. The goal, for me, has nothing to do with getting the manuscript to my editor on time. My goal, always, is to write a better book than I’ve ever written before.

The goal doesn’t stop there. To really make it work, I have to break down “write a better book” into specifics. I choose my specifics based on weaknesses I’ve recognized in my own writing, and I’ve been trying to address different weaknesses with each successive novel.

Here’s what I’m trying to address currently. I worry that I spend too much wordcount inside the heads of the characters as they think about their relationships. I would much prefer to show their relationships through actions, so when and where it seems possible, I cut off the internal monologues and replace them with actions to demonstrate emotion. In the final read, if I feel an internal monologue is going on for too long, I plan to cut it, identify the point of the monologue, and demonstrate it through character action.

A second weakness I’ve been working on is meandering. When I’m drafting a novel, I’m usually moving pretty quickly (see deadline!) and spending more wordcount on scenes that are flowing easily than might be required. As I’ve been writing The Duke and the Pirate Queen, I’ve realized that some of the erotic scenes might be too long; the same thing is sometimes true of scenes with a lot of dialogue. My sense of these things is not always true to reality while I’m in the process of writing; sometimes a scene seems really long because I worked on it for several successive days, but the wordcount is actually low. I won’t be able to properly judge the appropriate length and pacing of those scenes until I’ve completed an entire draft. One of my goals is to scrutinize the erotic and/or dialogue-heavy scenes carefully, decide if any of them drag, and if so, if they can be tightened or shortened, or even intensified. I might also give those scenes to a trusted reader, because after a certain point, I lose all objectivity and can no longer tell if the scene is working or not.

My next major goal for the year is to complete a short story. I’ve already promised this story to an editor, so it’s part deadline, part goal. My goal is to approach a new-to-me historical period, the Crimean War, and a new-to-me sub-genre, time travel, and to concentrate on the romance instead of the erotic elements.

Once that story’s complete, it’s back to fulfilling my contract with Spice. I have a few ideas for my fourth novel for them, and I’m still planning what my specific craft goals for that book will be; they will depend somewhat on whether my editor accepts my first proposal, or if I have to come up with a different idea.

How about you?

Related Post: Dissecting Critique, Dissecting Manuscripts.

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Worthy Transgressions

Posted on January 6, 2010 by Victoria Janssen

People have been talking for a while about how there’s more erotica being published in both print and electronic formats, and how more people are reading erotica and talking about it, and how erotica is getting more and more explicit and transgressive.

transgression: (noun) an act of transgressing; violation of a law, command, etc.; sin. Or, in the case of published erotica, exploring the limits of societal boundaries regarding sexual acts.

Is there any way to gauge appropriate levels of transgression? (I am aware of the innate humor of that question!) If we progress in huge leaps, will we leave our readers behind? He did what with what in a what? Why? If we progress in tiny, shuffling steps, will the readers grow bored with reading the same acts over and over again? Oh, good grief, not another ménage à neuf.

If writers are exploring the boundaries, how far is too far? And is that really the relevant question? I think the real question might be, how far it worth it to go outside the boundaries?

I think, in story terms, it’s the boundaries that are of the first importance. You can’t transgress unless there’s a boundary in place. If those boundaries aren’t set up in the novel or story, then transgressing is meaningless, and fails the “why do we care?” test of fiction.

Say the story is set in Regency England. It’s a big deal if one character deliberately ignores another on the street. In a contemporary novel set in, say, New York City, that act would be much less meaningful. If, however, one contemporary character was peacefully walking along 6th Avenue and another character ran over and sniffed her buttocks, then there would be conflict. In a science fiction world where all of the dog-descended aliens sniff each others’ buttocks in greeting, not sniffing would be the transgression.

To say it another way, I think the effective degree of transgression in a story is directly related to the boundaries the writer sets within that world. If those boundaries aren’t set, then transgression might momentarily shock, but ultimately not serve the story.

If the world is contemporary and local, it’s a bit easier to relate to the boundaries, as we carry them within us; then the craft issue moves on to the next stage, using the transgression effectively by making it uniquely relevant to the characters and themes of the story.

If the transgression doesn’t serve the story, then I think it’s pointless. At least in the stories I am most interested in reading.

Posted in erotica, genre, reading, writing, writing craft | 4 Comments

The Bust Bodice

Posted on January 5, 2010 by Victoria Janssen

If you’ve read The Moonlight Mistress, you know that Lucilla, rather than a corset or brassiere, wears a bust bodice. Below, a picture of a bust bodice.

Some models reached as low as the waist, and some were worn in addition to corsets. They were popular through the 1920s.

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Multi-Purpose Worldbuilding

Posted on January 4, 2010 by Victoria Janssen

This post was originally written for Star-Crossed Romance.

In The Moonlight Mistress, werewolves are an important element. However, the world they live in is much like our world; the werewolves exist as “secret history.” Though several of the characters know about the existence of werewolves, and one finds out about them in the course of the novel, for the most part they exist out of sight.

The setting of the novel is World War One Europe, so the primary worldbuilding for the novel consists of historical detail. Also, it’s an erotic novel, so sexual relationships are also very important. But I wanted the paranormal elements to be inextricable from the rest. If any one of the three elements was removed — history, erotica, werewolves — the story would collapse.

I’ve always been told that every detail of a story should be relevant in more than one aspect, and that’s even more important in speculative fiction, where so many more details are required. For example, a particular song and its topic tell the reader something about the world as well as something about the character who’s chosen that song to sing. If the character is singing too loudly, he might alert his enemies and thus propel the plot forward. I tried to use duplicate or triplicate relevance whenever the werewolves appeared in the story.

First, the werewolves served a plot purpose. The main romantic couple in the story meet because the hero is trying to gain information about a secret laboratory studying werewolves; later, when he shares this with the heroine, it demonstrates that a level of trust has been established between them. Her reaction shows how she’s come to feel about him. When they take action together (deepening their relationship) to save the werewolves, again the werewolves are propelling the plot. At the same time, the personal relationship between two werewolves comments on the relationship between the main couple; both couples are thrown together because of the war, and both pairs discover they have something powerful in common.

One of the soldier characters is a werewolf. He has werewolf problems which draw in his human friends and have consequences for them. Each time he acts like a werewolf, the plot is moving, his character is being reinforced, and the reader is being reminded that they’re reading a fantasy.

Related posts:

Historical Detail in Fiction.

Types of Paranormal Romance.

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Ivor Gurney, "Strange Hells"

Posted on January 3, 2010 by Victoria Janssen


Strange Hells

There are strange Hells within the minds War made
Not so often, not so humiliating afraid
As one would have expected – the racket and fear guns made.

One Hell the Gloucester soldiers they quite put out;
Their first bombardment, when in combined black shout
Of fury, guns aligned, they ducked low their heads
And sang with diaphragms fixed beyond all dreads,
That tin and stretched-wire tinkle, that blither of tune;
“Apres la guerre fini” till Hell all had come down,
Twelve-inch, six-inch, and eighteen pounders hammering Hell’s thunders.

Where are they now on State-doles, or showing shop patterns
Or walking town to town sore in borrowed tatterns
Or begged. Some civic routine one never learns.
The heart burns – but has to keep out of face how heart burns.

–Ivor Gurney

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Black Wine opening

Posted on January 2, 2010 by Victoria Janssen

I really love the opening to Candas Jane Dorsey’s Black Wine (1997).

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There’s a scarred, twisted old madwoman in a cage in the courtyard. The nurse throws a crust at her as he passes, therefore so does the girl. Others bring a can of water, or a trencher of meat cut up small, to stuff through the bars. The woman shoves the food into her mouth, dribbling and drooling and muttering.

“Why do they keep her?” says the girl. “She is useless. She is crazy. She eats too much.”

“So do you,” says the nurse offhandedly.

“But I work,” says the girl. “I am a slave.”

“She is not a slave.”

“She is in a cage.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

The old woman babbles in a language the waif understands but the others don’t. She calls names, she recites recipes, she counts things. Sometimes she talks of hanging, and carrion crows. The girl thinks she calls like a crow herself, and the voice makes her shiver with an atavistic fear she hardly notices, so like the rest of her life it is.

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Black Wine

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