Q: How long have you been writing?
A: Literally, since I was about five years old. I was reading at three. My parents still have some of the books I used to make when I was a child; my father worked in a printing company and would bring home whole pads of blank paper and I would just write stories in them.
My early stuff was I guess you'd call it fanfic... me and Snoopy vs. the Red Baron, getting shot down and ending up in Stalag 13. I am not making this up! :-) I was a BIG Richard Dawson fan long before puberty ever set in (I'm guessing it's the accent) and when Family Feud hit the airwaves years later it was all over for me :-D Of course at that time I didn't realize that the Red Baron and Hogan's Heroes covered two DIFFERENT world wars, but who cares? Also I wrote a lot of stories about me and Mary Queen of Scots; I got interested in the Elizabethan era at a very early age. We watched a LOT of PBS in our house, in those pre-cable days... perhaps I should mention I'm talking very early 70's here; I'm 36 this year.
Also, I was the youngest of seven kids and my closest sister is eight years older than me, so by the time I got up and around and aware of stuff she was already in her teens. It was like being raised with six babysitters... so books were very good friends to have around, whether I was reading them or writing them. That's one of the things I like most about Jean Valjean... we have the same attitude towards books...
Q: How did you first discover Les Miserables?
A: Same way practically everyone else did in the US: the damn 10th anniversary concert :-D I saw it in March of 96 on PBS (see above) and a few months later when I was at the Writers of the Future symposium/awards thingy in Houston, I had my homemade Kinko's Iron-on PauC t-shirt on and was reading the LM paperback through for the fourth or fifth time, highlighting it on the flight home.
Although there was something else that happened right after that which, is going to freak some people out: my grandmother told me an interesting story which pretty much cemented the whole thing. After she told me this I had to write the book no matter what.
Right after I got back from the WOTF week, at which I got a box full of copies of the book my winning story is in (a story which I'm going to be posting on my website really soon, as it's in the same universe with my OTHER massive novel project, Timeless) and I was visiting my grandmother to give her a copy of the book... and she asked me what I was going to write next. I told her I wanted to do a sequel to Les Miserables. And she said, "Oh, that's the book that saved your great great grandfather's life." She wasn't really talking well at that point because of the stroke, but she was still sharp, and she told me a story that she had been told... I'll see if I can keep this down to novella size ;-)
One of my ancestors was a man named Lewis Benware. His ancestors had come from France, they were Huguenots, and they settled in French Canada first and drifted south into the US--the original family name was Benoit, a name I used for the "student" in the epilog of Resurrections (small family injoke). He enlisted in a New York regiment in the Civil War and ended up being captured and sent to the infamous Confederate prison camp, Andersonville. He was one of the first prisoners sent there. He ended up becoming something of a camp doctor and was one of the few to survive the experience; he even witnessed the hanging of the camp commander after the war. He returned home and ten years later wrote of his experiences in the camp, and it's a hard document to read not just because of the content and because of the archaic writing and almost total lack of punctiation, but also because it's obvious the man is having post traumatic stress while he's writing because of the way the words flow and the handwriting gets shakier and shakier in spots while describing certain events... although after that horrifying experience, it's no surprise.
Now, I have a photocopy of the diary that Lewis Benware wrote in 1876 recounting his Andersonville experiences (my aunt has the original), but my grandmother told me something that didn't get written into the journal, a story that had been handed down from her grandmother, the woman Lewis married after his release from Andersonville, that while he was a prisoner he had come across a copy of Les Miserables that one of the Confederate guards had left behind. It's not clear if it was one volume of several or the whole thing; I'm inclined to believe it was one of the smaller volumes. As any Les Miserables afficionado knows, it was a VERY popular book in the south, being published just after the war broke out (the southern soldiers often referred to themselves as "Lee's Miserables") and many of them carried copies on their persons throughout the engagement. But for whatever reason Lewis stumbled onto a copy that had either been left behind or that had fallen from a pocket or whatever. Now, Lewis knew that if he was caught with this book, he would be shot on sight. However, conditions were extremely deplorable, horrifying, in fact. Food was rationed at starvation levels, and the camp was rampant with disease. Dysintery was a universal complaint. Lewis looked at this book and realized that for the first time he had something substantial to eat--the wood pulp of the paper. He would have to hide it and at the same time hoard it, but it would keep him alive when all around him people were dying. And he had a distraction, something to read, something to keep his mind going. So, he would read the book, and after he read a page, he tore it out and ate it. He was not discovered. Frankly I'm surprised the arsenic in the ink didn't kill him, but he was one of the few longtime prisoners that made it out.
And apparently what he read made some kind of profound change on him; after the war he went on a kind of pilgrimage, going around the country to find several of the widows of men who'd died at Andersonville and return personal effects (if they hadn't been confiscated) and tell the widows their husbands' last words, give them some last piece of news from their lost loved ones. He did this for a few years. One of the widows he met he eventually married himself, and that woman became the grandmother who told my grandmother the story about the book.
So, literally, Les Miserables saved my ancestor's life, and without it, I wouldn't be here. A very Hugotian chain of coincidence, I'd say. Life's weird.
Oh, yeah, I kept meaning to put this story on my website, but my aunt's writing a book about Lewis Benware, and she got real huffy when I said I wanted to mention this episode, as if someone's going to steal the idea and write it up themselves... so I figure if I say it here she won't find it and complain to my mom about me :-D Shhh, don't tell anyone... you all look trustworthy...
Q: What made you decide to write Pont-au-Change?
A: Well, right before I went to the WOTF thing I had made plans for PauC to be, of all things, a zine, where I set up the whole "Valjean and Javert team up and do stuff" universe and people were going to contribute adventures--because I was too interested in writing about my own characters professionally, mainly in the Timeless universe, I wasn't thinking of them as anything more than fanfic fodder--and then at the library I ran into a copy of Cosette, The Book That Reads Like A Doorstop. I was floored by the idea, for one thing--and I also got on my "I can do better than that" horse.
I should also add that I went to high school with a guy named Eric Shanower, a fabulous illustrator; he used to do art for my stuff in the school newspaper, and frankly his art was much better than my prose, but he's very deeply into the Wizard of Oz and has published several graphic novel original Oz stories that are very highly acclaimed (heck, Harlan Ellison introduced the first one!) and he has his own publishing company now that publishes other Baum stories that have fallen out of copyright (thus making them more accessible to other "Ozmopolitans" who can't afford to shell out big money for rare books) as well as publishing his own original stuff. No one's going around saying he's desecrating Oz... and no one's calling it fanfic, either. Once I realized it could be done, just as there are new Sherlock Holmes books coming out every day it seems, why not do it? And thus the site came into being.
Q: When you first began writing Pont-au-Change, what kind of reactions did you get?
A: When I first started posting it, I really didn't do any advertizing or anything. I just put up the site, put in a few keywords in the heading and put up a listing in Yahoo. I figured the search engines would take it from there, and I was pretty much right about that. As for reactions, I get people stumbling onto it all the time, and they all say pretty much the same thing, I get a good positive response. As I've said on the website, the only negative comments I've gotten so far are from people who haven't read it and who object to me writing after Hugo. To which I say, "bite me." ;-)
The only sucky thing I've run into is the fact that I seem to have done the worst possible thing a writer can do: give a book a title that the average Joe cannot pronounce. When I turned in Pont-au-Change I forgot to put the "Bridge of Change" subtitle on it... so now when people ask me what it's called, I generally go, "Well, the first one's called Resurrections, and the second one's Sanctuary..."
Q: So, according to your website, you've just finished volume three. How many volumes to go?
A: Three more. I'm halfway done! Which is why I'm referring to my six month break as "the halftime show" ;-) Although if I'd stayed on my "book a year" schedule I should be halfway through Honor right about now, but oh well.
Q: You state very firmly on your website that Pont-au-Change is *not* a fan story. Have you ever written something about Les Mis that *was* fanfiction?
A: I would consider the Final Duet to be fanfiction, or at least fan-oriented. It's also musical oriented, but the two don't necessarily go hand in hand. I do have a little separate fanfic one-shot story, where the ghost of Javert finds himself paired up with the ghost of Sydney Carton, haunting Paris during the Nazi occupation... I don't know what to do with it though. It's called "Things To Do In Paris When You're Dead". Haven't much thought about it for awhile now... but then again, I have a slight problem with fanfic in general at this stage... which leads to...
Q: What's your take on fan fiction in general?
A: You're familiar with Sturgeon's Law? Science Fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon once said, "Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud." Personally, when it comes to fanfic, I think Sturgeon was an optimist.
I'd have to say ninety nine percent is just plain unreadable, on two levels. The stuff that's decently written, technically, generally has a bad story idea behind it; the stuff that has a good idea behind it is poorly executed. I could cite examples from some of the LM fanfic I've read but I'd just get myself into trouble :-) (like that hasn't happened before) Suffice it to say that there have been a few LM stories that I've seen the premise for, which I thought rocked, but when I read the actual stories I was so disappointed I felt like throwing my monitor across the room.
(note to self: when reading a book, if the bullshit-o-meter peaks, I throw the book across the room and leave it there till I feel like taking it down to the used bookstore and trading it in for something readable. Reading online has certain drawbacks, the cost of new monitors notwithstanding.)
That's not to say that no one writes good fanfic, there is some out there, but finding it is nearly impossible amid all the slush around it, and I don't have the time or the inclination to wade through the sewer just to get to the one good story on the other side. In the good old bad old pre-internet days, zines were your best bet because more often than not you knew the authors by name if not by sight and people had to really work to get their stories printed out and distributed and stories were promoted by word of mouth. Nowadays anyone with a keyboard can anonymously throw up whatever they write onto the net and it sticks there... ick. (Which is why I refuse to use a pen name. I figure if I'm not proud enough of what I wrote to put my own name on it, I probably shouldn't be publishing it)
The problem with writing fanfic for me now is that it runs on quid pro quo; "I read your story, now read mine and tell me what you think." Lord, I can't tell you how many times I've gotten in trouble for telling people what I think of their stories. I basically got thrown out of mainstream Elfquest fandom because of a letter I wrote that ended up in the editorial of the comic book, and the zine editor got ticked off because the person I was writing about was his wife, who of course could write no wrong herself... let's just say I have bad luck with fan groups! (let's just say "Arlene does not work well with others" ;-) ) But I've served my fanfic reading sentence, I've done my fanfic writing apprenticeship. I voted myself off of Fanfic Island. Because if I have to read just one more Mary Sue--or Eponine Sue, in this case--or one more slash story, well, I'll just have to take some hostages or something.
I mean, it's not like I came across it on the web one day and got outraged, I used to write slash myself, I went to slash cons for years, I've been hip deep in fandom since college and I just finally came to a realization about it: characters on a page are much like real people in that they have parameters, they act "in character" or they are just not the same character, they are shadows of themselves, they don't "ring true". I came to the conclusion that forcing a straight character into a gay situation is as uncomfortable and objectionable, IMHO, as forcing a gay character to go straight--even when the "force" applied is simply that of the writer bending a character to his/her will and writing them as other than themselves. Speaking as the godmother of a gay person (who writes fanfic herself, btw--I used to publish her stories in my zine), whose mother has tried everything from guilt to shame to denial to conniving in order to "straighten" her out ("When are you going to give me a grandchild?" "When I can legally marry, Mom...") I can honestly say that there is no greater harm people can do to each other than to try to force them to be something they're not.
And I got into an argument with a very militant woman (the kind who believes that any combination of straight, white, and male is inherently evil--despite the fact that she's at least one of those herself, and I'm at least two of them) who writes tons of slash. She told me that it's her revenge for female pornography, that men are made uncomfortable by the very idea of slash and that makes her feel like she's "raping them back" (??!?!?!?) I realize that that's not the attitude of the majority of slash readers/writers but she's probably one of the most prolific and well known slash writers in the US right now and her attitude scares the bejeezus out of me. And frankly I've read too many forced rape stories passing as "seduction," too many "you know you want it, you'll like it by the time I'm done with you" stories (frankly, most slash reads like a reverse-sex issue of Letters to Hustler) that I have to wonder just how many slash writers DO get off on the idea that it somehow empowers them over men, the "I don't have to feel helpless if in my mind I have gained control of the very people I'm afraid of" approach. But maybe that's just me psychoanalyzing things again.
And I also have a very big problem with the romanticization of rape, period. Rape has nothing to do with sex, it's all about power, it's all about control, and if you've ever been there you'd know just how decidedly NONsexy it is. Although I have to point out that you don't have to commit a physical rape to achieve the same effect, psychologically: probably the best episode of ST:TNG was "In The Vineyard," the one where Picard goes back to Earth and sees his brother and describes what the Borg did to him, how he lost his sense of self, how the last shred of control was stripped from him and how helpless it made him feel.... I had that episode very much in mind while working on Adrift.
Anyway, that's why I don't do slash anymore. I'm not going to tell other people to stop doing it, I know a lot of PauC readers read (and write) slash, and what they do on their own time is their own busines, but that's why I got out of it. And now there's Harry Potter slash... and Pokemon slash... I mean come on, consenting adult is one thing, but how in hell do you possibly justify THAT?
Uh oh, I seem to be stuck in rant mode.... so I'll just stop here and go on with the next question...
Q: Who's your favorite character in Les Mis?
A: Favorite is a relative term. Certainly I find Javert the most interesting character, pretty much for the same reason I find Professor Snape to be the most interesting character in the Harry Potter books. The man has depth, he has issues, he's not two-dimensional, though it's easy to pigeonhole him into the villain slot; it's fascinating exploring what makes him the way he is.
Jean Valjean was interesting almost right up to the end of Les Miserables. But once it became clear that no matter what the situation, no matter what the cost, he will always do the "right" thing, he became kind of boring. I mean, suspense would be finding a situation where Valjean would compromise, would act out of self-preservation, would throw down the mantle of the martyr and walk away... but if he did that, he wouldn't be Jean Valjean, so you can't have that. Which is why in PauC, Javert has become kind of Valjean's proxy: we know what Valjean will do in a given situation, but what will Javert do? Can Javert follow in Valjean's footsteps? Basically the whole of Pont-au-Change is taking Javert step-by-step through Valjean's metamorphosis process and seeing what happens to him.
When I say that I'm not exaggerating, either: Resurrections carried Javert from his old self through a revelation, his "white moment," and his decision to take a new path, much in the same way Valjean did when he was given the candlesticks. Sanctuary had Javert settled into a comfortable routine, he's making a difference in other people's lives--in the only way he knows how, by being justice without a badge--and that peace gets shattered by circumstances beyond his control, and he is forced to leave his comfortable existence and go back on the run. This is basically what happened to Valjean in Montreuil-sur-Mer, until Fantine's death, and Valjean's rearrest and subsequent escape. Adrift saw Javert captured while on his way back to France, put on a boat, and then picked up by another boat and restored to freedom. Much in the same way that Valjean was captured by Javert, put back in prison, escaped from a ship (the Orion) and, thus freed by being assumed dead, he could go on with his destiny. Following this along, you can pretty much guess in a general sense what's going to happen in books 4-6... although Javert's reactions are not the same as Valjean's was, Javert is progressing through the same gauntlet. This time it's Javert in the crucible, and what comes out at the end... well, we'll have to wait and see, won't we? :-)
I also like Montparnasse; he's another dark, complicated character. I don't play him as hard and gritty as the fanfic writers do; I don't see him as a rapist. I think he genuinely had feelings for Eponine, and he got ditched for Marius. I think the only reason he doesn't gut Marius from stem to stern is the fact that he's convinced Marius never touched Eponine, nor did he treat her contemptuously for her low station. Had Marius never seen Cosette, maybe... who knows? But Marius, unlike others of his class in similar situations, did not take advantage, although it would have been so easy for him to have done so. This impresses Montparnasse; for Marius, Honor isn't just a word the upper classes bandy about. It remains to be seen if, under similar conditions, Montparnasse would do the same.
I'd pick a favorite female character but frankly they're all kinda bland, as written by Hugo. Maybe Fantine... she's just not strong enough, though. Sister Simplice is pretty cool. Lying to Javert is brilliant. What I'd really like to have seen is her grab a yardstick and start whacking him with it like the nun in the Blues Brothers movie. Now there's a nun for ya!
Q: Okay, who's your favorite character in Pont-au-Change? (Of your own invention, that is.)
A: Oh lord, actually, my favorite characters have only been mentioned in passing so far, Mrs. Nichols and Jerry Crocker. I invented them in high school as part of my Sherlock Holmes musicals (although he was Jerry Crowe then). If you're familiar with the Modesty Blaise books/comic strip, they've got a very Modesty Blaise/Willie Garvin relationship, or as much as they can have in the 19th century... and the fact that they're not super-spies or working secretly for the British government...
As for the musicals, I wish I still had the librettos, I wrote words and music for two musicals, but my ex husband burned them along with some of my other earlier work, like the really really rough draft for Timeless. I don't miss that much since I had others but I sure do miss the musicals; I only had the one copy of each... I'd tell you the titles but since I'm reusing the characters for PauC and I'd be giving away a major plot point if I did, I won't :-)
Of the characters that have been introduced so far, I'd have to say I really like Rene. He wasn't really a character when I started, he was just "the doctor" in Resurrections, he didn't even have a name. He wasn't even going to continue as a character; I think in my notes for Sanctuary, Valjean and Javert just somehow manage to get a gardening job in England and then go with their employer to Canada. But when Rene fleshed himself out, so did Pierre Abelard, and so did a lot of other considerations. That's pretty much how I write, I just have "book one is getting Valjean and Javert to become partners" "book two gets them in trouble in Canada" etc. Book three's notes were basically "meet Poe, get captured, escape, end up on transport to Australia."
I suppose I should mention that with a very few exceptions, all the characters on the Ouroborous are based on my friends on the EBay Comics Chat Board. That's where Corporal Jones came from, too... a friend of mine wanted to be written in, so I was giving him a bit part in Sanctuary, then I realized he could be a cool continuing character and kept him, even incorporating him into another character who was going to play through the rest of the series (which is where Dawkins came from). Then, of course, everyone else wanted in on the act. They're all named with variations of their own names and their EBay ID's; they all know who they are, even if the readers don't know. I think that's what took me so darn long to finish Adrift, that I was getting too much into the mechanics of the ancillary characters. Adrift as a unit is going to need a bit of an overhaul before it sees print; now that I have it all written out I think I can make it more coherent, streamline it, tighten it up. Good thing I've got six months to do it in! But it'll definitely be better when it comes out this summer.
Oh, and I *really* like Velasquez. He's very Javertian, in a way. He's an artist, he has his job, he has his mission, and he knows his place in the world. To use Wolverine's old quote, "I'm the best there is at what I do." I'm going to have loads of fun with him before the book is done. I love great bad guys, the kind you want to root for till you realize who's on the other side... but that's just me. :-)
Q: How would you describe your experiences with writing the book, so far?
A: Resurrections was a lot of fun. Sanctuary was a lot of research! And Adrift was just a nightmare; I've almost sworn off mysteries. Too hard to keep track of what clue went where! Thank God for rewrites! Anyway, with Honor, things are going to take a different tack; for example, it's not starting out with Hugo in Guernsey. If there is a sequence with Hugo (and I'm not sure there will be) it will be at the end of Honor. The book I'm really looking forward to is book five. Well, I guess I may as well say it here as anywhere: Book Five is called Inferno, and Book Six is Requiem (yes, I have all the names of the books already; I've had them pretty much since I started writing it. There's a reason and a progression behind it, but I'm not ready to give that out yet.)
That's not to say I'm not looking forward to Honor. It'll give me a chance to introduce a few people I've been dying to play around with and some locations that will require more research (my favorite!). But Inferno's going to be my favorite, I think.
Q: As a professional writer, what advice would you give to those who are just starting out?
A: Oh, now here's an opening if ever I saw one! :-) That could be interpreted two ways: starting out writing, or starting out trying to get published. I think I'll cover the first one; once you train yourself to write well, then you should start worrying about getting published...
I know I'm supposed to say things like "write every day" and "keep a journal" and "join a writer's workshop" and stuff like that, but you know what? I don't write every day; I stuff ideas into my head and let it percolate and when it's sorted itself out subconsciously I get the urge to sit down and put it down on paper and I write it and it comes out fairly well thought out. I go through fewer drafts that way :-) I've tried keeping a journal and I just can't do it; people would give me diaries to write in when I was younger and I couldn't bring myself to write stuff in them. It works for some people, I know; I'm just not one of them. That's why I can't do a blog either...
And writer's workshops drive me nuts. The last one I was in was in college, unless you count the Writers of the Future thing. I mean there was a week-long writer's workshop there, and although I actually managed to write something for it (believe it or not, another Timeless story--if it wasn't for PauC I'd be neck deep in time travelling love story right now!) I didn't enjoy the experience. I like the people, I just didn't like having to write about something that wasn't begging me to be written.
Here's another good quote, from a guy named James Blish: "Forget 'write what you know,' write what you feel." After all, if you write what you know, you're going to bore yourself to death. If you write what you don't know, you experience it along with your readers; you find the answers simultaneously with them. That's when I know I've written a good story, when I look at it while I'm writing and think, "that wasn't the way it was supposed to happen, but looking at it, that's the way it must have happened!" That's pretty much what happened to me at the end of Sanctuary; Benedict was supposed to kill Pierre Abelard, and then he was going to continue on as a major villain throughout the rest of the series. But when it came time to write the actual scene, I realized what had to happen instead, and I think the series is better for it. Although I'm a little bummed out; I liked the bi-colored eyes bit and was going to use it later when he showed up again, but now I've wasted a good foreshadowing clue, darnit....
Here's something I can't say strongly enough: as a writer, words are your tools, grammar is your blueprint. Learn how to use them! Get a good dictionary, a thesaurus, and a copy of Strunk & White's Elements of Style.
Learn how NOT to put apostrophies in plurals! If you need a graphic reminder, go here. Print out the cartoon and hang it over your desk! (I love Bob the Angry Flower.)
And another thing: learn what other people have done, and what's been overdone, and try to avoid it.
Learn what a Mary Sue is and never do it again.
When you write characters, or when you create characters, remember that no one is intrinsically good any more than one is intrinsically evil. Case in point: Hitler was a pretty decent landscape painter. Albert Einstein treated his wife horribly. You just never know about people. "He's doing this bad thing because he's the bad guy" is NOT a viable motive. People have depth, they have tone, they have reasons for being the way they are, good, bad, or otherwise. The more you know your characters, the more you know what drives them, what makes them happy, what makes them sad, what makes them angry, the better you'll be able to write them. The best understood characters, frankly, write themselves, and will let you know if you're writing them wrong. It's like programming code: once you get the parameters down, all you have to do is hit the "run" key and it'll run itself. If a parameter is faulty, you have to keep fiddling with it. Your task should be to make as little work for yourself as possible; the less fiddling you have to do, the closer you are to your goal.
Here's something else to remember: it has been said that there are only three stories in the world: Boy Meets Girl, Man Learns Lesson, and Rags To Riches. Any story can be defined by any of these three descriptions; some stories combine two or all three ideas. Someone else said that it can be refined even further: all stories are basically "one day, a stranger rides into town." The stranger can be a person that changes everybody's lives, or maybe a thing that affects how people behave towards one another, or the stranger could be an incident. Personally I think the whole thing can be distilled into one word: UNTIL. That one word drives all fiction. How? Well, how's this:
Jean Valjean is a poor peasant UNTIL he can find no work, and his family is faced with starvation UNTIL he decides to steal some bread and is imprisoned UNTIL he decides to escape, but he's caught and he served 19 years UNTIL he's paroled and he's turned away from every door UNTIL this poor old woman tells him to go to a certain house where he's fed and treated well UNTIL he decides to steal the silverware, and he's getting away with it UNTIL he's caught and they bring him back and the bishop tells them to let him go and Valjean goes off with a new purpose in life and he builds a factory and everything's great UNTIL the new police inspector comes to town and thinks he recognizes him and Valjean manages to fool him UNTIL Fantine is arrested and Javert denounces him UNTIL Javert is told he's mistaken, and it looks like he's going to give up his post UNTIL Valjean goes to Arras and goes to court and gets Champmathieu freed and goes to prison instead UNTIL he escapes again and goes to get Cosette and they set up in Paris UNTIL Javert is on his track again and they go to the convent UNTIL Cosette grows up and Valjean takes her out of the convent because he doesn't want her to be a nun without knowing what the outside world is like and they're happy UNTIL she meets Marius and she manages to keep it a secret UNTIL Valjean reads the blotter and he goes to get Marius and he's caught behind the barricade UNTIL he gets into the sewer and drags out Marius and it looks like they've escaped again UNTIL Javert shows up again but Marius is taken home and Valjean looks doomed UNTIL inexplicably Javert disappears, so Valjean resumes his life with Cosette UNTIL the wedding and it looks like there'll be a happy ending UNTIL Valjean denounces himself to Marius and goes away and Marius is content to keep Valjean distant UNTIL Thenardier shows up and proves Valjean saved Marius and he and Cosette go to Valjean's side and stay with him UNTIL he dies.
That's what I mean by "stories are driven by 'until.'" Try it with any other book, you'll see what I mean. Any story with no UNTIL is only a vignette, a slice-of-life. A story isn't a story until something or someone changes. Everything is happy in Happy Valley UNTIL the mill closes. Then what? How does it affect the people working there? The rest of the town businesses that depend on the mill workers spending their paychecks there? The owner? The mill in the next town over? There's your story. Writing about the happy mill is boring. Maybe by the end of the story the mill is happy again, but something's gotta happen between those two points, or there's just no story--and if it's happy in the same way it was happy before, with no change or growth in the characters (or, more importantly, no change or growth in the perceptions of your audience!) then there was no point to telling it in the first place.
A lot of the examples I use are science fiction based, but frankly all genre fiction is pretty much the same, just with different emphasis. How many science fiction stories are just westerns with lasers instead of rifles? And romance stories take place in any setting, any time, and mode, particularly historical fiction. Les Miserables could rightly be described as a romance, a mystery, a historical epic, and a social commentary. It has elements of all these genres in it.
If I had to recommend any one book on writing for the beginning writer, I would say that the Beginning Writer's Workshop book by Barry Longyear is my favorite. I got the most out of it than I did with any other book, and I wasn't even taking the workshop... I met him at a science fiction convention ten or twelve years back and I love his books (one of them became the movie "Enemy Mine") and he uses his own stories as an example of how to write, what goes right with a story, and what goes wrong with it. His section on "fatal flaws" (stories that just don't work no matter what you do with them) was particularly instructive. Yes, it's science fiction oriented, but the techniques for good writing cross all genres. Try here to get yourself a copy.
(BTW, Longyear's republishing his earlier books, the Circus World series as well as Infinity Hold--a great book about a prison planet with no guards, where the convicts rule and convict justice has to be defined--with Iuniverse.com, the same publisher that's doing PauC...and hey, B&N.com ranks it only 13 points ahead of Resurrections! Neat! Oh, sorry, I get distracted on bookselling sites...)
Okay, that's enough... any more writing advice and I'll have to insist on payment for services :-)
Q: What's the best way to get hold of a copy of your book?
A: Right now, the best way to get both books, Resurrections and Sanctuary, is through the publisher. Barnes & Noble is only carrying Resurrections; apparently there wasn't enough "interest" in Sanctuary for them to carry it or list it on their website at this point. I don't know what Amazon.com's doing... they add a $2 fee to IUniverse titles so I don't pay attention to them. Frankly, I'm still ticked at the publisher for tacking on a $30 price tag for Sanctuary... I mean, for a paperback? I know it's big but JEEZ! Fortunately Adrift won't be so big. I mean it! And maybe by then I can get a decent cover illustration... but that's another thing... so I'll stop right here.
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