Month: June 2016

Today is the release day of DUSKFALL–debut novel of the awesome Christopher Husberg. This is one of my favorite epic fantasy novels ever. I love the genre, but I put down far more of the books than I finish, because of the epic fantasy tendency toward slow pacing and bloated description. DUSKFALL is a novel that moves, the characters are compelling, and  the world is awesome and well-drawn.  Seriously, you should read it right now.  But in case you need more convincing, here are my three favorite things about it.

Not counting the gorgeous cover, of course:

#1: DUSKFALL has women in it.

Okay, this seems like it should be a given, right?  But SO many of the epic fantasies I pick up have a) no women who are not love interests, b) no women who are side characters, or (sometimes and!) c) only women who are spoken of by other characters/treated by the narrative in condescending, objectifying, or gender typical ways.  This might be better than our Tolkein roots in which there are almost literally no women, but not by, you know, a lot.

The women in DUSKFALL, on the other hand, are full characters with their own motivations and goals.  I love each of them for different reasons.  Their actions serve their own character arcs.  These characters are not always “likeable.”  I never felt like they were token.  They felt like people who happen to be female as opposed to women who are written as if femininity is the foremost (or only!) aspect of their character.  They were all different from one another!  There are romance arcs, but they’re secondary to the central character arcs of each of the women.  Winter, especially, had one of the most horrifying and compelling arcs I’ve read in a long time.  AND, while the book doesn’t go out of its way to call attention to the fact, as main characters the women outnumber the men.  All without changing the tone of the dark epic fantasy book which will surely still appeal to male readers, probably even as a primary audience, given the state of the genre.

It’s shameful that this makes the list of my very favorite things about this book, but this was the best handling of female characters in an epic fantasy that I have perhaps ever read.  It made my inner feminist do a happy dance.  For real.

#2: I want to avoid spoilers, but there’s an addiction story that was the best handled portrayal of addiction that I have ever seen in fiction.  I generally avoid drug narratives in books and films, because glorification of drug use often makes me feel physically ill.  This one, however, was so artfully done, I felt incredible empathy for the character, though the behavior of this character was truly classic (and rightly terrifying) addiction behavior.  There was a scene near the end of this arc that was at once awful and incredibly powerful.  This is fiction at its best–dealing with darkness in realistic ways without stumbling over messages or glorifying illness.  I wish I could say more but…spoilers.

#3: It does things that I thought couldn’t be done, and does them well.  DUSKFALL, to my great surprise, had not one but three elements that are hard to pull off in new and interesting ways: amnesia, vampires, and elves.  I didn’t know it was possible to sell a book with elves in it anymore, but these elves work wonderfully.  (And kind of Vvardenfell-esk, which puts them close to my heart.)  The amnesia is plausible, well-structured, and generally well-written.  And the vampire was just plain awesome.

I limited myself to three things, but if I was going to pick a fourth, it would be how much more story there obviously is to be told.  It sold in a five book deal…and I wish I had the sequel already.  And the one after that.  And the one after that.  And the one after that.

But hey, if you haven’t read this one yet, you still get to read it for the first time.  Lucky you.  Get to it.

It’s been a while since I did one of these, but this post is part of an ongoing series of how I get writing done at home with a child.  Insert standard disclaimer about how this probably only works if you are me and have my child, but before I had kids I was told I couldn’t write with little children and would never get anything done.  This is my way of sending a more hopeful message out: if you’re me, it’s possible, so maybe it will also be possible for you.

When my daughter turned two, getting work done at home became immeasurably easier.  Because I started letting her watch TV.

Yes, I became THAT mom who uses the television as a babysitter.

But here’s the thing.  She’d given up napping, and was sleeping WAY better at night for it, so it was clearly what she needed.  But she wasn’t actually ready to interface with people all day without getting seriously grumpy.  So we instituted a one-movie-per-day policy.  She got 90-120 minutes of screen time which doubled as downtime, and I got the same to write in peace and without interruption.

And it worked beautifully.  My own guilt kept me from letting her have any more screen time than that, but in that many minutes a day, I could keep up a work pace that I was comfortable with.  Plus, my child fell in love with Miyazaki movies, which was an added bonus.

After she turned four, things changed a bit.  I wasn’t quite prepared for this, but while for my three-year-old I was the favorite person and preferred playmate, my four-year-old would much rather play with her friends.  For hours.

Suddenly I found myself with tons of time on my hands where all I had to do was be on hand to help solve problems and provide snacks–and we weren’t even watching movies anymore more than once a week.

Coupled with this was a realization I had.  I’d always thought I couldn’t write at night because I am braindead at night.  But I went through a couple months where for physical reasons I was braindead ALL the time.  And I discovered something invaluable: the quality of my ability to think doesn’t actually affect my writing ability at all.  This may be because I’ve been writing for sixteen years now and it’s all become muscle memory.  Or maybe I always could have done this, and I was just telling myself I couldn’t.  (As a sidenote, it’s amazing what I can do when I stop telling myself that I can’t and just do it already.)  But I would get into the evening hours and my thought process would go something like this: I am tired.  I cannot brain.  Tired brain cannot write.  Wait.  When will my brain not be tired?  Crap.  This is all I’ve got.  Tomorrow, it will also be all I’ve got.  Next week?  Same.  Guess I better write anyway.

So I started getting work done during the day while my child was happily occupied AND at night when she went to bed.

Thus followed the most productive writing months of my entire life.  I got so much done.  It was liberating and exhilarating.

But…then.

Then.

This happened:

We’re in for a whole new adventure, guys.  Stay tuned for the Mommy Writer, part 2.

While I was really looking forward to publishing BOYLESS, I dreaded the process of approving a cover.  The beauty of this cover (and all my covers) is due to the wonderful work of my cover designer Melody Fender.  But usually when we begin work I send Melody not only the book, but also a lightbox full of stock photos I’ve collected as a jumping off point, and a description of any ideas I have.  Often (very often) we go in a totally different direction, but at least it gives us someplace to start.  As Melody puts it, “it lets me see what’s in your head.”

But for BOYLESS, all that was in my head was a list of what I didn’t want.

The main character of BOYLESS is overweight.  She does not, as some early readers suggested, merely imagine that she is overweight.  She is actually what the BMI would classify as obese.  (I’m not going to even get started about what I think about the BMI and this classification, and instead let the fact stand.)

In my head, Bryn and Logan look something like this:

Isn’t she cute?  Overweight and awesome.  This is the Bryn that I wrote about.

But that photo above?  It represents one of only four or five photos I could find of cute couples where the girl is overweight.  Most of the photos that claimed to have overweight girls in them either had girls who were a) not actually overweight, just not Vogue models or b) were insulting, “humorous”, or otherwise offensive.  What remained were a very few images like this one, which is a snapshot.

NOT a cover quality image.

This made me intensely angry.  Because I wanted to put a picture of my main character on the cover, like my other contemporary novels.  But mostly because it’s ridiculous given the sheer volume of photos of happy couples on stock photo websites that there isn’t a wider range of body types.  Every once in a while I would make another pass, sure that the photos I was looking for must be out there somewhere.

But they weren’t.

I thought seriously about trying to create a photo of my own.  But when I thought about the added complexity and expense…I just didn’t have the resources to hire a photographer, pay (let alone find) models, pray that the pictures came out right the first time, etc.

No.  I’m an indie author, and I am limited to what stock art provides.  But I didn’t know what we were going to do, so when I sent the info to Melody, instead of a list of ideas, it read like a big long list of what I didn’t want.

Here are a few of the things I told her:

I wanted the cover to match my other contemporary novels, which meant no drastic changes in style, like going illustrated a la the cover of Dumplin’.  We needed to find a photo that would work.  Also, BOYLESS is a romance, so I wanted a couple on the cover.

However, I absolutely did NOT want to put a skinny girl on the cover, because that is so insulting to my character.

Other things I didn’t want to see:

-refrigerators

-food

-clothes that indicate size that are not on a person at the time

-images prominently featuring my character’s butt

(This list brought to you by actual covers by New York publishers.  Ugh.)

I also passed along this article which summarizes a lot of why those particular trends in covers are problematic.

In the end, this was my take home:

“I don’t know that an appropriate image exists.  It’s really annoying because by avoiding putting Bryn’s body on the cover it’s adding to the idea that no one wants to see an overweight body, but there are no appropriate photos of bodies available to PUT on the cover.  Stupid fat shame culture.  Stupid airbrushed people.”

I closed the email saying this might be an insurmountable problem.

And you know, with my resources, it really was.  Maybe I should have tried harder.  Maybe I should have done it differently.  But in the end, my cover designer created this cover, and it’s gorgeous.

I am so, so happy with Melody’s work.  The cover fits the book, nails the genre, and is a great advertisement for the story.  (And the boat scene remains my very favorite in the entire novel.)

A part of me, though, will always be angry on Bryn’s behalf, and, really, on behalf of all women, that we didn’t have the option of using a cover quality, market appropriate shot of an overweight girl as part of an attractive couple.  Because, guys, this is a thing that exists in real life.  Guess what?  Fat girls are loveable.  And have men who love them.  And therefore real life romance stories that don’t involve makeovers or weight loss.   That’s why I wrote this book–because I think our media should reflect that reality, and the fact that it doesn’t just makes me sad.