I want to talk about LDS fiction, the kind Deseret Book and Covenant and Cedar Fort publish.

This is not a rant. I’m not being sarcastic, nasty, snarky, hateful, bitter, or any other pejorative one might chalk up to my tone. Whatever one might read into it, what I’m feeling right now is a deep sense of disappointment.

I have several LDS novels in my bookshelf by well-known LDS niche authors. There are two I have tried to start, but while the premises are interesting, they aren’t exactly my cuppa. The prose is adequate. They aren’t boring. I put them aside for when I’m in the mindset to read them.

This past week I started a book that’s right up my alley: contemporary romance. I was really looking forward to reading this book. Imagine my dismay when I started reading prose that is amateurish at worst, and at best, suited for 12-year-old girls. It is a series of choppy sentences strung together. There is no discernible rhythm to it. There is no ebb and flow. The dialogue is stilted and too infodumpy about LDS customs and rituals, which made me wonder for whom the book was intended, if not LDS. (We already know this stuff; don’t instruct us in our own culture.) There is no nuance, no allowance for a sophisticated reader, no subtext.

At the convergence of this post on the Association for Mormon Letters blog by Annette Lyon concerning the “clean”ness of books and an inability to find any clean romances in the national marketplace* and my soul-deep disappointment in the book I was struggling with (“soul-deep” is not hyperbole), I realized that LDS fiction needs to stop worrying about a book’s “clean”ness, because that’s the default position, and start concentrating on eradicating (sub)mediocrity.

*I’m not sure why it’s important, noteworthy, or desirable to have LDS fiction without LDS characters or anything relatable to the culture. You can get “clean” non-LDS fiction in the national marketplace. You cannot get LDS fiction in the national marketplace. If you’re gonna be niche, be niche.

Please see The Rules.

Asking Us To Dance (Kathy Mattea)

Go!

Week 2 of the group creative experiment is over. Didn’t have a lot of participation this week, probably because I wasn’t very handy on the Twitter throttle and, well, choosing this song was an experiment unto itself.

You see, this song (to me) is already about as explicit as a story can get. It spins, it’s glittery, it’s Skittle-colored, it tells the story for you. So what I was going for was to see how you would interpret a story already told in speed-shot liquid neon. (And no, I hadn’t seen the video for it until Astrid linked it.)

So here’s the week’s wrapup for Week 2 of the music-prompt group creativity experiment.

Astrid Cruz aka @artistikem “Fairground”: I could feel the man’s thoughts spinning like a carousel in turbocharge, all the colored lights blurring—and then that last line that brings you down with a sweet thump of “Oh yeah. She said that.”

Babette James, a scene from work-in-progress As Clear As Day:  You took the story of the song and appliqued yours over the top of it, leaving little bits of the song peeping out here and there. Very clever! And better! You’re getting your word count in.

So then here’s Lenox Parker aka @LenoxParker formerly known as—shit, she’ll kill me if I say before she’s ready to out herself—with “Like Every Day in Paris, It Was Raining”: OMG you’ve got a theme going with this guy! (This is where I figured it out: “I was totally in love with this man and would have done anything for him at that moment, and in the days, weeks, and months that followed.”)

And so here’s what it did for me: a portion of untitled chapter 11, Magdalene, “Warm*Dark*Sugar*Laugh.”

Excellent! Thank you, all, and the next track will post at 9:00 a.m. Central, and it may really surprise you. Follow on Twitter with #mojogce

Crocheting is not my favorite thing to do, but I do enjoy Tunisian crochet (remedial, in my case). I’m making a queen-sized “comforter” for XX TD for Christmas (provided I get it done in time). Here’s the first skein:

I had a ball of Sugar’n Cream yarn (100% cotton) I bought for XX TD to learn how to crochet. Two problems: A) She’s left-handed and I’m not, and B) I’m a horrible teacher. I seriously needed a break from reading, writing, publishing, DDJ. It had to be something creative, but not involved. Eva Gale’s dishcloth project inspired me, and I thought it was perfect for a mind break while still feeding my creativity.

Eva’s all about self-sufficiency and she really strives for it in ways big and small. She is such an inspiration to me. As she puts it, this project is therapy for $2. Awesome. I really liked it for that, but as a step toward self-sufficiency, I found it extremely expensive in terms of materials and time. One $2 dishcloth plus sunk costs of time when I could have been making far more than it would cost me to buy a pack of dishcloths (or Scotch-Brite sponges, which is what we use). But it was fun and it was a break and I got to use a ball of yarn I had no other use for. That was the big bonus.

I don’t watch TV much. It interferes with other things I find more interesting. Still, occasionally I want to vegetate but I can’t do that without something to do while I’m watching TV. I feel really guilty if I’m not able to watch TV and do something productive at the same time. Crochet fills that bill.

The “end of the week” means Wednesday evening, 7 days hence.

Please see The Rules.

Fairground (Simply Red)

Go!

Week 1 of the group creative experiment is over and oh, MY! Y’all are awesome, and thank you for playing! So here’s the week’s wrapup for Week 1 of the music-prompt group creativity experiment.

Peach’s haiku: Heartbeat in a tango gave me shivers.

Baby’s Black Balloon “The Collector”: OMG the detail! dark-haired gypsy queen who never did understand the difference between herself and real royalty and black-velvet spider lashes and Virginia Slim Menthol Lights and the old Lafitte’s instead of Café Lafitte’s. I am in lurve with this piece.

Danielle Yockman, a scene from work-in-progress Seducing the Assassin: So we’re three pieces in and I’m already seeing a trend: detail, visceral, sensual. Feeling the night and sucking in jasmine air.

Astrid Cruz aka @artistikem “Yerba Buena”: The juxtaposition of music that comes from an extraordinarily humid climate and walking into a story that takes place in what seems to be a very arid heat was jolting—in a good way!

Babette James, a scene from work-in-progress As Clear As Day: I’ve been reading snippets of this in Romance Divas chat, so I was unprepared for a long snip and great progress, lady. Looks like you really made some headway. Congratulations.

Galendara, artist, with a variation on Pieta, The Mother and the Wounded Daughter: Genius. Genius.

Jenn Topper, “Jean-Baptiste Foulon is a Brilliant Liar”: A beautiful assistant with her Series 7. The ending? Love! I adore the conversational first person (as opposed to the distanced first person), when the storyteller talks directly to the reader. It may be my favorite point of view. The man’s name even feels significant. I think I’m missing a joke.

Guy LeCharles Gonzales, “Thinking About New Orleans”:  You gave me melancholy. *sniffle*

And so here’s what it did for me: Chapter 15, The Proviso. NSFW (but you probably knew that).

Excellent! Thank you, all, and the next track will post at 9:00 a.m. Central. Follow on Twitter with #mojogce

NOTE: “End of the week” means Wednesday evening, April 7.

Please see The Rules.

Litanie des Saints (Dr. John)

Go!

UPDATE: “End of the week” means Wednesday evening, April 7.

On the Ides of March, Mind on Fire blogger John Remy (@johnremy) orchestrated a project wherein artistic types were given a prompt to create something based on the prompt (in this case a randomly drawn Tarot card). It could be anything.

I couldn’t participate, as it was short notice and I didn’t have time, but I’ve been building the playlists for my books and it got me thinking about how much I depend on music to inspire my writing, keep me enthusiastic, pump me with adrenaline, and pretty much feed my subconscious what it needs to do my job for me.

So now I’m totally ripping him off and putting a different spin on it: music. I’ll post one track every week for the next three or four weeks (as long as people are interested), and see what you come up with. With John’s permission, I’m going to copy and paste his rules:

1) Each week, starting Thursday, April 1 (April Fool’s Day!), I will post a track that played a significant role in my books.

2) Use the track as a spark for some kind of creative activity. It can be a sketch, a paragraph from your novel, a tweet, a photo, an interpretive dance, a poem, a political blog post, a video. The activity can even change from week to week. The only requirements are that:

a) you leave some element of the project undetermined until you hear the track, and

b) the final creation has to be done by the end of the week, and

c) it has to be linkable.

3) I will then post links to everything everyone created by the time I post the next track the next week.

4) The Twitter hashtag will be #mojogce if you care to keep track that way.

I have a cross-section of readers from the Mormon lit crowd, genre romance, and independent authors of all variables. I’m curious what that intersection can produce and anyone can play, even if you don’t think you’re creative (and you would be wrong anyway).

I’ll be drawing from these playlists: The Proviso, Stay, and Magdalene.

Have fun!

I have a lot of fun with my imaginary friends, thinking of them as if they’re real, telling my tax deductions about mommy’s imaginary friends and laughing about what they do with Dude, talking about them to other writers who like to talk about what their imaginary friends do, too.

We talk about them as if we have no control over them, as if they’re driving the train. In a review of Stay, reviewer Julie Weight said,

When you read Jovan’s books, you just know these characters are like real people to her. She knows them like she knows her own family. Actually, she knows them better than her own family, since she knows their motives and what they’re thinking. If you get her talking about them, you’ll forget that they are just the imaginary people who live in her head. She makes them real, however and wherever she presents them. And because of that, she also agonizes over their lives – to the point where sometimes it seems like she forgets that she’s the one in charge of their lives! All of this familiarity and love for these people comes out in the writing and the story. Because she believes in them, you will start to believe in them. She writes the characters and the stories so well that you, the reader, will become wrapped up in their lives and care deeply about what is going to happen to them.

Emphasis mine.

Here’s the thing: All that’s true. It’s really the subconscious doing the heavy lifting—we all know this. We let it do its thing and we talk to our imaginary friends and let them dictate their lives to us because we are their scribes, but…

Then they stop talking.

What do you do then?

I didn’t realize that this can get into scary territory until I was talking to another n00bish writer who speaks in the “Character X told me to do this” vernacular. It’s cute. I like knowing I’m not the only crazy person on the planet.

Then I realized… He wasn’t taking any responsibility for the words on the page, and it drew me up sharp. He didn’t know what to do when his characters/subconscious stopped. He didn’t have any confidence in the work of the conscious mind. Worse, he wasn’t sure it was even necessary to employ the conscious mind (i.e., himself) because he had himself convinced he couldn’t write without channeling the imaginary friends and taking their dictation.

My subconscious comes up with some amazing shit. Seriously amazing. Stuff my conscious mind would have had to work for decades to come up with. People are amazed when I say I don’t outline, but I don’t. At least, not in any recognizable fashion and certainly not the way I was taught in fifth grade. (I always had to write the paper first and backward engineer the outline; it was a pain.) Things tie together in ways I don’t know how it happens, and I seem to write by serendipity. It seems automatic.

But then the free-flow stops.

At some point, the writer has to take responsibility for who these people are, what they do, what they say, how the story winds out. It’s all fun and games while the subconscious is doing its thing and the writer can pretend these people are real and are simply giving dictation.

But the subconscious is notoriously unreliable and sporadic. What do you do when it takes a break and you can’t?

You start putting words down on paper.

Conscious words, words you choose and arrange, laboriously.

You take responsibility for those words.

And for all the ones you wrote when you were taking dictation, because it doesn’t matter that nobody knows how the subconscious works, what you wrote is still from you.

All you.

There are no imaginary friends.

I’m totally not paying attention to the world around me lately. Didn’t have a clue about Read an eBook Week (missed it last year), and apparently jumped the gun with my giveaway.

BUT I still have something to give you. Peculiar Pages, an imprint of B10 Mediaworx, is giving away The Fob Bible (PDF only for now, but crap, it’s 76MB of heavily illustrated awesomeness!) this week.

What is The Fob Bible*, you ask?

Reviewer Jeffrey Needle describes it thusly:

“Part Bible, part midrash, part send-up[...]

“But make no mistake, by and large, this book is a delight from beginning to end. There are smiles and smirks, but there are also deeply insightful ponderings on things previously considered too holy to study too closely.

“There’s something for everyone here: poetry, prose, play-writing, and even some e-mails (it’s not clear from my reading of the Bible that the patriarchs and prophets had access to the Internet, though this would explain quite a bit…). There’s pity and pathos, humor and hubris[...]”

Trust me, you want this. Ain’t a speck of preachin’ going on, neither.

*Fob stands for “Friends of Ben.” Yeah, they knew what’d it look like when they did it. They’re perverted that way.

I want to thank everyone so much for helping me in my experiment, retweeting, Facebook posting, emailing, message board posting, and downloading. Nothing makes an author happier than when people are sharing in her vision. The links to the free download are broken now, replaced with links to the purchase point. The samples on the sidebar are back, so you can still try before you buy.

Final download tally in 26-1/2 hours: The Proviso, 420 and Stay 364.

* * * * *

I’m going to try something here. Y’all know I’m a writer and I have books for sale. More than 1500 copies of the sample for The Proviso have been downloaded, and 450 for Stay. That’s awesome! Thank you!

The thing is, I’m excited about the world I created and I want you to be as excited as I am. But I’m a new-to-almost-everybody writer and I write long, angsty, family saga books that can be polarizing, so one might be hesitant to try it. I get that.

So just for the next little while (a couple of days or so 24 hours), I’m going to offer the ebook versions of The Proviso (book 1) and Stay (book 2) for free. In their entirety. (The files are huge.)

Enjoy!

Book 1: The Proviso

Book 2: Stay

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UPDATE: I’m going to disable the sample links on the sidebar while the books are available free. I don’t want somebody to pick up the sample, thinking it’s the whole thing and then be upset.

UPDATE 2: This is good until Friday, February 26, 2010, at 3:08 p.m. CST. When I said “today only,” I meant for 24 hours. What, you can’t read my mind???

UPDATE 3: So, exactly 24 hours after I posted the links, what did I get? Numbers. I don’t really know what they mean, but I’ll share them. In 24 hours:

The Proviso: 385

Stay: 333

I’m not sure why there is such a discrepancy between the two, but I’m going to guess it had something to do with file size and download time. I’m breaking these links by midnight, so hurry! The samples are back up on the sidebar, plus they are littered elsewhere throughout the web.

Anyway, thank you all for participating in my experiment and I hope that you enjoy my imaginary friends as much as I do. And if you do, could you tell somebody else who might?

. Thank you!

I’m in the middle of writing Magdalene, book 3 in my series.

If you’re passingly familiar with Christian myth, it should be quite clear where I’m going with this.

But let me tell you a little about my main characters.

Mitch Hollander, PhD, metallurgical engineering; founder and CEO of Hollander Steelworks, headquartered in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He is also a widowed Mormon bishop who served half an 18-month mission in Paris, France. He likes fast cars and ZZ Top.

Cassie St. James, MBA; Vice President-Restructuring Division, Blackwood Securities. In a previous life, she was a high-dollar hooker. She is divorced, lives in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, has four adult children (all of whom live with her), engages in strategic revenge, and possesses a latent penchant for silliness.

So I was on the search for a special little gift that Mitch could give Cassie that meant something but was not expensive. After all, what do you give a woman who can buy anything she wants?

Naturally, I turned to books because I have a vested interest in people buying books (product placement!). I decided that Mitch might have a special book that he may have acquired on his mission and is probably in French. Naturally, I googled, and then headed over to Wikipedia where I stumbled upon a list of French novels. I doggedly worked my way through them one by one, read the synopses, then picked one based on a vague similarity of the plot to Cassie’s past.

I wrote it into my book as if I’d read the thing (but hadn’t), then decided I probably should read it. And it freaked me out. Big time.

The book? Angélique, the Marquise of Angels by Anne & Serge Golon, first published in 1958.

Unbeknownst to me, this was a huge hit in Europe and apparently a big hit here. I’d never heard of it, never stumbled across it in the intellectual drunkenness of my youth (that actually amazes me).

The book is heroine-centric, so it’s all about Angélique. The parallel I found between Angélique and Cassie was that they both had arranged marriages. The similarity stopped there.

Angélique didn’t know her contracted husband, feared him at first, then grew to love him.

Cassie knew the man she was to marry, adored him from afar and was eager to marry him, and then quickly realized that her marriage was a sham.

Cassie is familiar with the story via film, so she has no problem making this parallel and had, in fact, written a paper on it during her undergrad years.

What doesn’t show up in the plot summary is a description of the hero’s “unusual way of life.” Joffray (the hero) is described as “scientist, musician, philosopher.” I didn’t think much of it. Mitch is a scientist with his own lab, true, but he’s also a CEO and I’ve always thought of him in those terms.  He’s not a musician. He’s not a philosopher. At heart, he’s a blue-collar steel worker who loves steel enough to reinvent himself and the industry; steel is his life’s work.

Turns out that Joffray’s science is metallurgy. That was freaky.

Turns out that Joffray is hung out to dry, religiously speaking, for reasons that have nothing to do with religion and everything to do with power, politics, and money. That was even freakier.

As I got deeper and deeper into the book, I felt like I’d entered the Twilight Zone.

Then I got to the end. Angélique plunges out into the cold night, penniless and powerless, to exact revenge. That is so Cassie. I nearly expired from the freakiness the universe had perpetrated upon my person.

I couldn’t have picked a better novel if I’d written it myself.
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PS: Yes, I know Mary Magdalene wasn’t a prostitute.

PPS: In the mid-1980s, missions were, in fact, only 18 months long for men.

Go read this and all the comments, then come back. Now we’ll recap.

Footprint: A narrow storefront on the county square of a small midwestern city, with three floors. (I didn’t bother with the third floor sketch. Use your imagination.)

Complaint: It’s not a “real” bookstore.

Disclaimers: 1) I’m not an industrial designer so don’t ding me on scale, lack of bathrooms, and walking space, etc etc etc. 2) This is an IDEA. Don’t take me to task as if I’m on the cusp of taking over the world and implementing all these in a grand sweep tonight while you sleep.

Goal: To make the bookstore a destination, not a stop on your to-do list.

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I. Print on Demand

This is the key to blending the Espresso and “real” books:

A. Do you know what it is? It’s a catalog holder, like the ones at auto parts stores, where you stand at the counter and find which part you need for your car. Only these won’t have catalogs. They’ll have cover flats, separated by genre, subdivided by subgenre.

B. You will sit at the counter and flip through them. You will have a little wifi gizmo tied to the store’s computers. You will enter your account number and you will order what you want by pointing the gizmo at the bar code. Your order will go downstairs to the Espresso machines.

C. If you want an electronic version, it can be wifi’d do your device and/or you can have a CD/DVD burned, and/or you can have a download link emailed to you.

D. If you have already ordered what you want from a home computer or smartphone or other device, it will be waiting for you at the customer service counter (“Espresso Order Counter”).

E. The store will have a website that functions like any other ebook third-party retailer.

II. eReading

You may purchase the most current electronic reading devices and be advised by someone who actually knows what they are, how they work, and can teach you. There will be workshops.

III. “Real” books

A. The store will have at least one copy of whatever the buyer knows his customers like. He won’t have to order more because he’ll “Espresso it.” That way, customers can browse actual books.

B. The third floor will be dedicated to art books, children’s books, collector’s editions, with plenty of comfortable chairs. Yes. You will have to climb stairs. Get over it.

IV. Sustenance

In the basement there will be a coffee/tea bar with pastries and chocolate, possibly a small deli. There will be ample room to hang out.

V. Extras

A. You can watch the Espresso machines through the glass window.

B. There will be book club nights.

C. The Espresso books will always be brought upstairs so you don’t have to go downstairs if you don’t want to.

There you go. Blast away.

Macmillan to Amazon: Do it my way.

Amazon to Macmillan: Fuck you.

Macmillan has in its power to say, “No, fuck YOU!” to Amazon and make it stick, and newsflash: It ain’t with the indie bookstores. This is what you do, Macmillan:

Get yourself a team of programmers. Give them 36 hours. Have them put your entire catalog into an online store, both print and electronic. Exploit the Tor online store to its limits.

Print: Sell for just above wholesale and offer free shipping.

Electronic: Strip your DRM from your existing ebooks and feverishly convert your back catalog. Sell them at the wholesale mass market paperback price.

Marketing: Take out ads in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal announcing your bookstore and flip Amazon off publicly, and at the same time exploit the fact that Amazon has just seared your name into the minds of the reading public.

Your weapon: Your entire catalog.

Goal: Cut the Gordian knot that is the distribution system that has just bitchslapped you and turn a healthier profit.

You could conceivably break Amazon’s back if you succeed (and you WOULD), and other publishers decide to come with you.

I would give just about anything to see something so daring happen in publishing.

Here’s the catch: You’d have to start thinking of readers as your customers.

You know, the people who actually spend the money.

UPDATE: Oh. My. Goodness. Amazon caves. WTF? Yeah, that boy ain’t right.

But does it have wings?

Not only is it not a unicorn, it’s not even a Pegasus.

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