Jane Austen Week: Day 3 - Q&A with Teri Wilson

Welcome to Day 3 of Jane Austen Week! To recap briefly, on Day 1 I shared the recipe for chamomile and lavender scones, as well as the link to the All Things Jane Giveaway. On Day 2, I got  chat Jane Austen and time travel with author Kathleen A. Flynn.

Today, I'm thrilled to be hosting Teri Wilson, author of Unleashing Mr. Darcy!

Teri came onto my radar via an elderly neighbor from our Vancouver, Washington neighborhood. I'd been gardening and doing yard work with my mom in the front yard and had Shiloh and puppy Sylvie tethered near the front door. The neighborhood's bank of mailboxes was just to the left of our house, and I met most of my neighbors over there. That day a sweet, elderly lady from two doors down introduced herself and, after a fashion, remarked on Shiloh and Sylvie.

"They look just like the dogs from that movie, that Hallmark movie," she said. "The Mr. Darcy movie."

As you can imagine, my ears perked up. Cavaliers? Mr. Darcy?

I did some creative Googling later and discovered that Unleashing Mr. Darcy was indeed a Hallmark Original Movie - which would be re-airing in a couple weeks - and was based on a book by Teri Wilson.

Who has two cavaliers.

A Table by the Window - the gorgeous new cover!

So a funny thing happened...

The original Reservations for Two cover used an image that the designers at WaterBrook love for a long time - it was in the running for book one, and when we went in a different for A Table by the Window, the team looped back to the first image for the second book.

So time passed, I wrote Reservations, heavily editing Reservations, we're chugging away, the book is about to go to print...

...and then it comes down the information pipeline that the photographer (who is French) never signed the release for that image, and then stopped returning calls. Because...*insert French shrug here*.

But I'm at peace with this. Why? Because a week before my baby went to print, the designer went and made this STUNNINGLY GORGEOUS new cover that I love even more than the first. Are ya ready?

In the words of Liz Lemon, I want to go to there. I want to step inside and read a book, paint a canvas, camp out forever in that cover (I'm sure there's room service). I want to take Danny and have a twirl on that cover, and then eat a croissant. With jam.

Read more about the book and pre-ordering options (truly, if you love an author, pre-order her books), as well as the Reservations for Two Pinterest board here!

What do you think? Where would you like to go this chilly Valentine's Day weekend? Leave a comment below!

A Little Romance: The Mechanics of a Love Story

I've been asked to appear as an expert, of sorts, for middle school writers.  The subject? Romance.

Yeah, I know.  I struggle with smooshy, mushy romance.  But they asked for romance, so romance they shall have.  I spent some time thinking on the subject of Romance Theory (which seemed to dovetail with the blog on The Vow, come to think of it).

Good romance is the most character-driven of all genres, so if you're going to do romance (or a believable romance subplot/thread), you've got to know your characters and be able to communicate their essence on the page.

I mean, *really* know your characters.  Because the reader has to believe both characters as people, be invested in both of them, and believe that those people could/would be into each other. Obviously, there will be obstacles - that's what drives the turning of pages.  The reader has to:

a.) want the two characters to get together

and

b.) not be certain it's actually going to happen.

If one of those is missing, you've got a problem. If the reader doesn't want them to get together, she (we'll just assume the gender here) will hate you in the end when they do.  And if you make it too easy, there's not enough plot.  The love story can't be a foregone conclusion.  There have to be roadblocks, there have to be difficulties. For your characters - your hero and heroine - to be motivated enough to persist through those roadblocks, they have to be more than likable. They have to be desirable.

(Sorry. The italics just kind of happened there.)  If you skip out on desirability, your reader will sit/read/watch and yell at the character (the one who's romancing the undesirable) to RUN, RUN FAST, RUN FAR, IT'S NOT WORTH IT!

Think of The Bachelor, for this one.  Sure, the girl the guy likes most may be pretty, but if she's also evil, no one will want them to actually fall in love.

Conversely, it can also be a problem (for some plotlines) if your characters are too desirable.  The Vow is a good example -  they were both too pretty and desirable for us to believe they weren't even remotely attracted to each other. If one or both of your characters are very pretty (either inside or out), there had better be some good obstacles!

As far as I can tell, there are three core types of romance -

1.) The "will she/won't she" romance - will the heroine fall in love with him? Will she??  Stories that fall into this category include Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Anne of Green Gables,

2.) The "will he/won't he" romance - will he fall in love with her? Austen examples include Persuasion  and Sense and Sensibility. YA examples include Anna and the French Kiss and The Princess Diaries.

3.) The "can they be together" romance (a variation on this is how long will they be together - especially applicable in Nicholas Sparks books).  The Princess Bride is a good example.

Those are the core types.  Many stories are a combination of the two. Stranger than Fiction is a "will she/won't she" with a twist of "can they be together" - Maggie Gyllenhaal's character has to decide if Harold Crick, the tax man's flours are charming enough, but even after they all for each other, there's this niggling reality that Harold Crick is going to die.

You've Got Mail is a "will she/won't she/can they be together" mashup - they fall in love online first, but have to reconcile their real lives and true selves with their online personas before they can be together.

Something to consider with love-triangle plotlines - it's still a will she/won't she with a twist of  which one should he/she choose (most successful triangles involve a woman choosing between two men).  It can be kind of  a cop out. The question is "A or B?" rather than "Do I love A with my whole heart? Or should I ditch A and B because this situation is disturbing?"  My take is the same in fiction as it is in real life -  if you really can't choose, the answer should be neither - because you don't love one enough to give up the other.

(This is why I'm neither Team Edward or Team Jacob, but rather Team Go Find a Strong, Reliable, and Loving Human Man With Less Baggage. And don't tell me humans are boring within the framework of Sci-Fi/Fantasy. Because: Aragorn. End of conversation.)

My personal preference is for a combo of the core types - it gives the characters two kinds of drama.  While you're figuring this out, though, you've got to make sure you're maintaining both believability and likability.  It also works best for stories where the romance is a subplot. Your main plot throws your characters just as many curveballs as their love lives.

So - there's my short masterclass on plotting romance. What do you think?

Brief Update: Found this rather awesome article about female stereotypes in chick flicks - you know, the women you see onscreen but NEVER meet in real life. Worth the read.

Rescue, Kiss, Repeat

I don't know about you, but I'm loving ABC's new show, Once Upon a Time. It's one of those rare TV shows that keeps getting better and better with each episode.

In the first few episodes, we see Prince Charming (whose real name is James, we learn), wake Snow White. Later, we learn how Snow and Charming met. It was the kind of meet cute that involves a lot of flirtatious squabbling, adventure, a grudging admiration and a certain amount of chemistry. She saves him. He saves her.

Rescue, kiss, repeat.

I love that.  I love it because it's a truer model for a real-life happy ending in marriage. It's not just the prince rescuing the princess in the classic model, or the princess rescuing the prince in the feminist model. Long-term love involves both.  Marriage is committing to rescue each other, over and over again. It's having each other's backs, it's being strong for each other.

Fairy tales will always have a special place in my heart, but I'm troubled by the lack of stories that involve courage on behalf of both men and women. East of the Sun, West of the Moon is one of the rare examples of a couple who must rescue each other. The prince, as the bear, rescues the girl from poverty.  The girl rescues the prince from the troll princess.

There is still a happily ever after for them, but both the man and the woman have had to work for it.

And that's how marriage is, isn't it? Courage is required for both the husband and wife to fight for and rescue each other, facing down despair, discouragement, illness, and injury in battle.

You never know how many battles you'll face in marriage, or when the next one will find you. The happily-in-betweens? Absolutely worth the work.

Christians, Spec-Fic, and the Amish Issue

A good friend of mine sent me this link the other day, about why there isn't more Christian Speculative Fiction on the market, and why the Amish seem to be taking over the world.

Well, Christian bookstores, at least.

I thought it would be fun to blog about.

So let's take a look.

1.) Christian Bookstores don't carry much spec-fic/sci-fi/fantasy.

Sure, we know that the bookstores skew towards a female, and often older, demographic (hence the Precious Moments population). We know that spec-fic readers tend to be male. The two don't meet well. But even if you could get the spec-fic reading men into the bookstores, past the Testamints, and into the bookshelves, you still have a person standing in your way.

The person who buys the store's stock.

We're in a recession. We have been for a while. Though there are sure-bet spec-fic authors like Frank Peretti and Ted Dekker, stores are going to be less likely to pick up books by lesser known authors in a genre that doesn't sell much.

And it's not just Christian bookstores. Mainstreams booksellers such as Barnes & Noble and Wal-Mart are going to buy what they think will sell well in their stores.

2.) "Everyone" is asking for more Spec-fic, though.

Keep in mind that, yes, spec-fic readers are very vocal, but one more thing - they know how to use their computers (this is not necessarily true of Amish Fiction readers. Just sayin'). Mike Duran's inside source (and if my hunch regarding the identity of that source is right, is a solid person to listen to) made the point that if Spec-fic really truly sold like gangbusters, publishers and book store buyers would sit up and pay attention. Really. But they're not. So my guess is that "everyone" isn't as many people as you'd think.

3.) Frank Peretti and Ted Dekker are the big fish in the spec-fic world.

True. BUT there are tons of other writers out there. Bill Myers is one of them; he'll also be keynoting this summer at the Oregon Christian Writers Conference in Canby. Jill Williamson's By Darkness Hid was not only Marcher Lord Press's biggest seller, but won the 2010 Christy Award in their Visionary category. Randy Ingermanson has several books out, Eric Wilson did a Vampire trilogy with Thomas Nelson Publishers, Stephen Lawhead released several fantasy books. The books are out there. You might have to order them, but they are in existence.

That said...

I have to be honest here. My husband has read a lot of spec-fic of the Michael Crighton, James Rollins, Matthew Reilly, Clive Cussler type. (By the way, how much should Clive Cussler be on Dancing With the Stars? Tons, that's how much. He can drive to the lot in his pink car. Sorry. Tangent.) He's also read some of the Christian releases.

And honestly? He usually likes the general market ones better.

There have been some exceptions, but he prefers the plotting in the general market releases. And rather than ignore the elephant in the room, I'm going to go out on a limb here, and accept that I may receive angry letters - there is some really, really good Christian Fiction out there, of many genres. But some of it is not so great. Just because a book is written from a Christian world-view doesn't mean that it's a worthy piece of art or entertainment. I'm sorry. it doesn't.

So. There you have it. I'm not pointing fingers or naming names, I'm just putting it out there.

4.) Historical Romance and Amish are what's selling.

The economy is bad. CBA readers, by and large, are looking for love stories, and they want them in long skirts. Gloves optional. Why Amish? Because it's safe. Because it's cozy. Because their world is simplified. Because our world isn't. Our world is scary and war-ridden and filled with gray areas that are difficult to wade through.

Also,the rest of us look impossibly hip next to the Amish. There are loads of reasons. I did find out recently that the Amish boom is plateauing, at least. Most publishing houses have filled their Amish Writer Quotas, and in an industry where platform is the new black, that means that either you're already in, or you get to do something else. A new sub-genre will get its turn in the spotlight shortly. In the past we've seen Chick-Lit, suspense, and Prairie Fiction do really well. We'll see what comes next.

5.) The popularity of Amish Fiction represents a Christian world-view shift.

This is an interesting idea. In this blog, Mike Duran posits (sorry, watching lots of Fringe these days) that Christians are veering away from material that contains elements of the supernatural, that they avoid the mysterious. Duran argues that the Bible, what with the fish taxi and the speaking snake (oh, and the speaking mule), and the angels and the prince of the air and the curses and the locusts and the food appearing on the ground and the visions and the prophecies food multiplying and the dead being raised (reanimation? Sorry, like I said, watching Fringe) and the RESURRECTION, scripture alone includes a lot of weird. We won't even talk about end-times prophecy.

My theory on the subject is that Christians, by and large, like their spiritually-oriented paranormal material to be served straight-up. By that, I mean they want it to stay within the covers of their Bible. Because outside of that, you've got a lot of tricky theological decisions about what kinds of weird are okay, and which are twisting spiritual truths incorrectly and not okay, or downright occultic.

It's true, though, that many believers like to skip over the weirder passages of Scripture. Other believers prefer to believe a lot of the stranger bits are literary devices. We live is a post-modern world that clings to science and reason and avoids or negates the inexplicable. To think that post-modernism hasn't crept into the church is unrealistic.

Now, to say that non-paranormal stories are bland and avoid mystery is unfair. To quote Proverbs 30:18-19, "There are three things that are too amazing for me, four that I do not understand: the way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a snake on a rock, the way of a ship on the high seas, and the way of a man with a maiden." Life is mysterious. Romance is mysterious.

There's a lot of thoughts there, not necessarily a lot of conclusions.

What do you think?

I love you, sensibly

I'm starting to think that I kind of suck at writing romance. This is a problem, because most editors in my genre want a romance storyline.

And I'm fine with that. I understand. Romance sells. I'll get them together in the end. It's just the drama I have trouble with.

Good romance, written, is all about drama. The thing is, though, is that the mark of a good realistic romance is the lack of drama. I mean, when you ask couples how they met, there's not a lot of "well, my dad was a mafia boss - you know how that goes" or "I almost moved to Saint Tropez, but then Fred ran on onto the tarmac and stood in front of the plane to stop me. That's how I knew." And rarer still, "There was this snafu with my inheritance, I had to marry someone within two days, thanks goodness I met Bob! The only problem was, he had an insane wife in the attic at the time..."

Here's what I've experienced with the two books I've worked on in the past, one completed, one nearly complete. I'm great when the two characters are not supposed to be together. Really great. Nice drama, superb tension (tension being the lifeblood of story).

But by the time I've cleared the obstacles (about two-thirds through the book) for these two to really, truly fall in love, what then? They fall in love. Big whoop.

I'm going to solve this, truly. And I have no concerns (no concerns, especially if my agent or editor is reading this) about my ability to craft a lovely little romance. But it's tricky, you know? This is a book about the Amish. Now, if I could only have some Canadian mobsters with a vampire or two while someone (the guy) gets hit by a car on the way to the Empire State Building, things would be a lot easier.