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.

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A lot of authors use real people as the basis of the looks of their characters. Some authors even reference those people in the text (I did it with Giselle and Bryce). Some readers like it, some don’t. Some readers like faces on their covers, some don’t. Some readers (*ahem* Th. *ahem*) don’t like any description at all. It gets to be a balancing act for an author not to intrude on a reader who likes to imagine the character, yet provide enough for the reader who wants to know which famous person the character most looks like.

Anyway, I’ve been debating writing this post for about a year now, but I’m going to go ahead and bite the bullet. Wanna know who I had in mind while writing The Proviso and Stay and Magdalene (albeit Magdalene’s only about half written)? Here you go, in order of actual appearance across the books:

 

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Readin’:

Torn by God by Zoe Murdock

The Seabird of Sanematsu by Kei Swanson

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

The Actor and the Housewife by Shannon Hale

The Ugly Princess by Elizabeth K. Burton (OOP & no linky)

Writin’:

Work out my sticking points on Magdalene. Thing is, I know what it is; I just can’t visualize how it all goes down.

Edits on Stay when I get it back from above-mentioned editor.

‘Rithmetic:

Create a couple of new products for My Other Business That Is Not Publishing.

There are other things I need to get done, but that’s all pretty boring stuff like, “put up a shelf” sort of stuff.

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In case no one missed me, I’ll tell you what I’m doing:

1. Damned Day Job. You know, I’m awfully glad to have one right now, so I’ll refrain from bitching. See aforementioned financing art to understand why I feel obliged to tell you that.

2. Had a very short deadline drop in my lap for a project I feel privileged to be part of, so there is much e-mailing and such going on around my office in order to get this yumminess out into the marketplace.

3. Stay is finished sorta. A secondary character (a throwaway, but how come all my redshirts end up demanding their own stories?) garnered some attention from alpha readers who said, “Hey, what happened to him?” The original story with Vanessa and Eric is finished and in the hands of beta readers. Yet again I’ve decided to do something bizarre, which is to say, put two mirror-image stories back-to-back in the same spine.

4. Magdalene is 3/4 finished. I believe Cassie St. James is the woman I’ve most enjoyed writing. Ever.

This balancing the art with the marketing is getting on my nerves, quite frankly. I’m a writer and I love my imaginary friends; I settle in with them and I’m mentally…gone…for days.

Plus, I’m still convinced that an author’s brand is the writing, the stories themselves. How can you have a brand that’s the writing if you only have 1 product?

I like blogging, don’t get me wrong—when I have something to say. I also didn’t like feeling like a slave to my stats, who’s visiting, where they’re coming from, what they’re reading…

Some days, I just don’t have anything to say and you know, I think more people should just not say anything when they have nothing to say. Not every second of every day must be filled with words just because we fear silence.

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On Twitter the other day, I clicked on a URL that normally wouldn’t interest me, but for some reason caught my eye. It was about the new Kraft corporate logo:

Read the whole article, because it’s instructive, and I’ve been thinking about that off and on ever since. I don’t know why. Then I saw Sunday’s Wal-Mart insert and saw its new(ish) logo:

Do you see a difference?

Most of you will, I’m sure, since they’re back to back, but I, in all my ADDness, will glance and not see anything of import to differentiate the two. Thus, I will gloss over both. I’ve seen many other, similar logos, but I couldn’t tell you what companies they belonged to. I guess that’s my point.

I follow several different blogs that talk about social networking, branding, marketing, etc. because I know zero, zilch, nada about all this bullshit and I’d really rather not learn. However, it seems to me, in all my naïveté, that you would want your brand/logo to stand out, no?

All the writerly/agently/editorially blogs talk about branding one’s writing. Do we have logos or don’t we? How does one “brand” something that is, inherently, about…you? You have one product, or two, maybe sixteen, but really the product is you. If you have a following, your following buys you. If people don’t like your product, people don’t buy you. You are identifiable by your name.

But then there’s something like this:

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Okay, I’m as much a sucker for matching anything and thematic continuity as the next fashion-obsessed girl, and don’t mistake me—these are gorgeous covers and put ’em together like this, they look plenty different. But put me in a bookstore without a list and I won’t remember which one I have and which one I don’t. What’s scary is that I could chalk that up to my gnat-like attention span or my ADD, except I’m not the only one with the complaint. By far.

It’s not just corporate brands or book covers. It’s cars, too.

When I was in high school, a girl in my class had a ’72 Torino. A guy had a ’69 Nova. Another had a KITT car. I drove a ’72 or ’73 Beetle (one of those freaks of nature with the auto-clutch). Occasionally. I used to be able to tell what car was what, and possibly the year.

But now?

They all look alike. It was annoying when I didn’t have a vested interest in cars, but I went looking for a luxury car for Bishop Steel Baron (Magdalene, book 3) and I found…nothing that would differentiate a luxury car from a cheap Saturn, it was downright maddening. Are you kidding me? All this time I’ve been attributing that to the laws of aerodynamics and that’s probably the most likely explanation for it, but across the brand/corporate spectrum, from Saturn to Volvo, from economy to luxury, from SUV to SUV, the vast majority look alike.

I put him in a Bugatti, in case you’re wondering.

Don’t get me started on tract housing, and that includes McMansions.

I know it’s human nature to be drawn to the familiar, but humans also like variety. I’m feeling a bit of brand oppression. The smoothing out of fonts, the smiley faces and flowers, the streamlining, the…aerodynamics.

Am I missing something? I thought branding was about differentiation. If people can’t tell you from someone else, how do they know to throw their money at you?

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Since Mitch lives in the heart of the steel belt and she lives in Manhattan, she has quite a bit of trouble figuring out which ward he oversees, where to go, and what time to be there. Thus, she turns to Mitch’s best friend, who left the church halfway through his mission and is a professed and semi-practicing pagan. He gives her the procedural rundown and says,

“The more you understand about our culture, the better you’ll understand Mitch.”

“Our culture?”

“Well, yeah. Mine, too. You don’t stop being a Jew just because you convert to Christianity.”

“That’s genetic.”

“With us, it might as well be.”

I live in a place that’s rich with Mormon history, so, like any native, I take it for granted. I don’t feel any sense of heritage when I go to Utah (which state I avoid like the plague). It’s in Nauvoo, Illinois, where I feel this connection to my heritage; every time I go, I find my cynicism and willingness to snipe seeping out of my soul, leaving a refreshing softness and wistful smiles. And, well, I got married in Nauvoo. That might have something to do with it.

So I took some pictures when we were there in August for my cousin’s wedding. Enjoy.

*There’s a saying about a portion of folks who identify as ex-Mormon or recovering Mormon (yes, there is a 12-step group for it): You can leave the church, but you can’t leave it alone.

 

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Then there’s this picture of Dame Helen Mirren (shamelessly stolen from Karen Scott’s blog) who, at 62, is totally rockin’. I wouldn’t have posted it because Karen already did, but it’s stuck with me for 3 days. To me, it’s an illustration that Mother Nature doesn’t necessarily punish us XX types for having the audacity to turn 40. Or 50. Or 60.
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And the last 2 ladies in today’s lineup are Alfre Woodard (56) and Diane Keaton (62). I don’t guess I have any commen-
tary because, well, look at ’em.
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Obviously, I don’t know which ladies have had what work done, if any, but still.

Over at Teach Me Tonight, Laura Vivanco discusses the topic of older women in romance vis a vis Charlotte Lamb’s novels. She also points out RfP’s post at Access Romance and about young heroines who don’t really seem young and Robin Uncapher’s post about the time warp in romance.

Well, I’ll tell you. I didn’t really feel like writing an ingenue because at my age, it’s just silly and I was never an ingenue when I was that age. I wanted to write people who had some experience with life. Now, Susan Elizabeth Phillips writes older romance, but always within the context of having the older couple as a secondary love plot.

Mine aren’t 50-ish, but they are 40-ish and as the series progresses, they age. In book #2 (Stay), the hero and heroine (Eric and Vanessa) are youngish by my standards (late 20s and early 30s, but this is a challenge I set for myself). By book #3 (Magdalene), the oldest of the original characters are on the wrong side of 45 and still going strong. Mitch and Cassie, the hero and heroine of Magdalene, are on the wrong side of 45, with grown/almost grown children and possibly a grandchild or two.

So along with my other crimes against romance, you can add major characters in their 40s. Gee, how many other ways can I bend this genre?

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Re: Ann Herendeen and Phyllida

This is what’s apparently called “good” gossip. I shall take the liberty of bragging.

Eric Selinger, a professor at DePaul University, who also contributes to some romance blogs, including Teach Me Tonight, has invited her to be a panelist on a conference next spring at Princeton University, along with Pamela Regis, author of A Natural History of the Romance Novel, Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, a History, and Joey Hill. Selinger is also teaching Phyllida in two graduate seminars, this summer and in the fall.

Also, Ms. Regis will be referencing her in a chapter she’s writing on Women’s Genre Fiction for The Cambridge History of the American Novel.

The woman’s a groundbreaking juggernaut, I tell you. I’m like Smart Bitches with Ferrets.

Re: The Proviso’s followups

I think I mentioned before that this is the first of a series. Well, it’s not. It’s more like a family-and-friends saga.

Right now I’m working on book #2, which is titled Stay. It’s the story of Knox’s wards, Vanessa and Eric. You won’t get too far into The Proviso without reading a little about Vanessa, and Eric is mentioned not long thereafter, though Eric has more face time in The Proviso.

I’m also deep into book #3, Magdalene, which is the story of Mitch, who has no face time in The Proviso, but is somewhat significant to one of the characters and is mentioned a lot. He’s a widowed Mormon bishop busy tending his ward and running a business and keeping his 17-year-old son on track, and then he meets Cassandra, whose prior profession is, well, the world’s oldest. Teh sparks. Let me show u dem.

Re: “Self-Publishing”

I am henceforth and forthwith going to refer to it as “independent publishing.” I set up my own publishing company. I bought my own ISBNs. I got my Library of Congress Cataloging Number. I got my cataloging info to put on my copyright page (oh, Librarians, I did this for you, my loves). I paid an editor! to edit my book. And hey, all you Mr. PageMaker Publishing Persons out there, I’m using Word to typeset. Bite me (but only in the nicest way!). And no, I will not be using Garamond or Palatino, thankyouverymuch.

April Hamilton does a very nice job as ambassador for independent publishers and she has a point when she says that independent artists and musicians and filmmakers don’t seem to feel the same industry shame at “self”ing anything. In fact, “indie” as applied to the aforementioned is a tag of distinction and diversity.

Re: eBooks

Y’all know this is my pet theme. I would feed it if it had fur. There’s just way too much information going on in eBookWorld right now to disseminate by myself or what I think is important about it. But a few things have caught my eye recently:

1. During Tor’s book giveaway, I noticed they have one book in the .epub. It’s a graphic novel and so bravo!

In case you don’t know, which you probably don’t and that’s okay because this is the only time in my life I’ve been an early adopter of anything, ebooks come in all sorts of formats. This is no VHS/beta situation. This is a VHS/beta/and 16 other ways of buying and viewing movies with attached machines that may be obsolete tomorrow situation.

The .epub format is hoped to be the .mp3 of electronic books; that is, it’s open source and elegant, so it has the greatest flexibility of all the other formats to explode eBookWorld. The hope is that there will come along a slew of ebook reading devices whose native format is .epub and/or that the device can decode the .epub format and turn it into its native language–across the board. I don’t have an iPod; I have a Rio Karma. But it still reads .mp3 files.

2. I’ve been sitting here wondering when the iBooks store is going to open. Huh. Guess Jobs really does think people don’t read anymore… Bastard.

3. The dude at PersonaNonData thinks each ebook format should have its own ISBN. Poor Elizabeth Burton over at Zumaya is swimming upstream there, but I’ll tell you what, Ms. Burton, if it becomes an issue, pack all your formats into a .zip file and slap an ISBN on that. Right now, the standards don’t require one per format, but if it does, you can see small publishers taking the hit. Unless, of course, they take my suggestion.

4. And as always, my personal gripe about DRM. Stop it already.

Re: LDS fiction. Again. Go away.

It won’t die. The term “LDS fiction” has been defined by the consumer. It is its own genre. Live with it. You’ve been pwn3d.

Either write/publish in it and slap the label on it or write/publish out of it and get it into the mainstream. As I said in my penultimate post on the LDS Publisher thread, mainstream genre/literary readers are going to be a lot more forgiving of characters being LDS and/or being informed by an LDS worldview (and oh, hey! you get the culture out there into the social consciousness!) than LDS readers are going to be of LDS characters who don’t conform to a rigid morality…

…which is its own little irony right there, forgiveness. Yes, it’s true. We LDS are very forgiving. When you act like we think you should.

Re: Sex

Heh.

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Now, I can write for a Mormon audience. Or I can write for the romance audience. Or I can write for the general fiction audience (whatever that is). Well. I wrote for all three, because that’s what I like.

The Proviso is a romance novel. Actually, it’s three romance novels. It’s erotic (though not technically erotica), political, financial, and religious. I don’t think anything like it has been done, but I haven’t read every book out there, either. So the problem is, where do I market this puppy?

It’s too graphic (in sex and language) for your average Mormon reader. Yeah, you’re not going to find this at Deseret Book.

It’s got too much thinking and religion for your average erotica reader, which is not to say that straight erotica is bad (cause, you know, I’ve got my share); it just doesn’t fit the needs of someone who wants to read erotica.

Its politics are specific and on the fringes of any political spectrum you want to try to define. (Chanson asked me how I’d like to read about unreconstructed Marxists sitting around patting themselves on the back for how brilliant they are, and that was the funniest and most clever zinger I’ve been nailed with in a long time. I love zingers. Just make them brilliant.)

I love romance novels. I cut my teeth on the huge, sweeping, 50-dollar-word purple-prosed romance novels of the late ’70s when I had barely hit puberty. But I want romance in a way I don’t get from either the romance genre (or any of its sub-genres) NOR from Mormon romance (as discussed in a previous post). As far as I’m concerned, Mormons shouldn’t be asexualized just because of this little thing we call the Law of Chastity. In my mind, spirituality and sexuality are two sides of the same coin and neither should be trivialized in the face of the other.

What I had hoped, in writing The Proviso was that I could reach a larger, more secular audience who might not mind reading about Mormons doing wild’n’crazy things if it were smart and well written. When I read characters who are Catholic, I don’t need to be instructed about Hail Marys and rosaries and novenas. I know all that. It’s in the public lexicon. When I read characters who are Jewish, I don’t need to be instructed about Yom Kippur and Sabbat and synagogue. It’s in the public lexicon.

Mormonspeak is not. I want it to be. I want the general public to be able to pick up a book with Mormon characters and automatically understand what “wards” and “stakes” are, what “going to the temple” means (if only in general terms), what Sacrament Meeting is, Relief Society, and the priesthood. Does that mean opening myself (and, by extension, the lot of us) up for ridicule? Yes, but having our traditions, customs, and structures out in the public makes for an easier dialog all around. My Catholic friends can whine at me all they want about being a “lapsed” Catholic and I completely understand what that means; it’s a commonality of language that is so natural to us as a society we don’t even think about it.

By contrast, I’m not out to write the Great Mormon Novel, either. It might happen, but it’ll be entirely unintentional on my part. I write romance. I’m not Tom Wolfe. I’m not Umberto Eco. I’m not Neal Stephenson. But I sure as hell would like to be.

But for right now, I’m writing in a niche market. Possibly a niche market of three, which is me, myself, and I. So my latest work-in-progress is, naturally, a romance, but it’s more specifically Mormon than The Proviso.

What would do you think would happen if a widowed Mormon bishop meets up with an ex-prostitute?

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