A discussion with Black Rose

As an editor with the Black Rose line, I have the opportunity to peer into the lives of some very sensual creatures. Shifters, Vampires, Demons (Hey, don’t knock it until you’ve tried it), and other paranormal creatures who by their very nature are sexy and inviting. Our readers expect sexual tension and interaction between characters, but there are some things to keep in mind as you weave your tales for the Black Rose Line.

Sex Should Happen Only Between Main Characters

Your supporting characters should support your hero and heroine. If they are running amok, having sex with each other, and overshadowing your main characters your sex scenes are going to lose their impact. Alluding to or having characters discuss their sex lives is fine, but please don’t include descriptive scenes of sex between supporting players.

If you have a hero or heroine who is highly sexual, please limit their sexual activity to their partner (or proposed partner) in the story. While we are all adults and know that sex outside of relationships occur in society, we like to see sexual activity limited to the hero and heroine. If you feel your characters are better suited to an open relationship you may want to check out our Scarlet line and see if your story is a better fit for their guidelines.  

Build Tension Slowly

Paranormal characters often ooze sexuality. Building up the sexual tension between your characters can create the perfect mood for your hero, heroine, and readers. Seeing their desire woven through the story as it grows can lead to the perfect set up for their first encounter. 

On the Page or Behind Closed Doors

Where and how your characters have sex is up to you as the writer. Paranormal readers seem to prefer descriptive scenes on the page to those behind the scenes, but you should write in a style that is comfortable to you and fits your storyline.

Moves the Story Along

Your sex scenes should add to the story and move it forward. It should be a natural progression of your hero and heroine’s relationship and not forced or gratuitous. Don’t add a sex scene simply because you think you should have one, create a scenario that naturally moves in that direction.  Sex should be just one part of the story. If you find your story has a large percentage of sex or sex is a large focus of the story’s development you may be a budding Scarlet writer. 

Too Much Description

While our Black Rose characters have a lot of sex, there are certain words and verbiage that is limited to the Scarlet line. While we want description, we also need it to be a bit milder than what is found in erotic stories. You editor will most likely point out those words that are off limits, but one way to judge their usage is to imagine saying them to your best friend. If you find yourself turning five shades of red, you may want to choose a different word.  

Lill Farrell

Black Rose Editor

The Wild Rose Press

Bringing in the Senses By Beverly Oz

Originally Published in the TWRP Greenhouse

Sensory Detail: Bringing in the Senses By Beverly Oz

Ever run across the sweet, heady smell of honeysuckle while driving in the country? Can you close your eyes and visualize the vibrant reds and pinks of a sunset, or the pale greens of a newly budded tree? Can you imagine the brush of a feather against the backside of your knee? When you think about licking a freshly cut lemon and allowing its tangy juice to linger on your tongue, does your mouth water? Does the sound of honking of horns and screeching of tires make you cringe?

Can you smell it?

Can you taste it?

Can you hear it?

Can you see it?

Now think about what you've just read and how those words affected your senses? Did you smell the honeysuckle? See the reds, oranges, and greens? How about that lemon? Could you almost taste it?
Sensory Response

The human mind reacts to sensory suggestions, even suggestions taken in through written words. After a person experiences a sound, touch, taste, etc., the mere mention of the experienced sense can quickly evoke a sensory response.

For a writer, like myself, this is powerful information. Why? Because I know I can control what my readers see, smell, taste, hear, and feel simply by choosing one word over another. For example, consider the impact of changing just a few words in the following sentence.

Can you feel it?

I rubbed my hand against the furry softness of the cashmere sweater.

I rubbed my hand against the slick, almost wet, skin of the snake.

I opened the door and was nearly knocked down by the oppressive heat and humidity.

I opened the door and was nearly knocked down by the frigid north wind.

When I write, I carefully sprinkle in sensory words to achieve greater reader involvement. I want the readers to experience what my heroines and heroes experience and become immersed in my story. If I can coax the people who buy my books to completely lose themselves in my books' make- believe worlds, maybe they'll come back for more.

****

Reprinted with permission from http://www.rosescoloredglasses.com/.

Tips from the "Queen of Clichés"

If you have ever written any of these three things—oops! Sorry, there are four—please know I will catch you if I can. I may be the Queen of Clichés, but I still wield a pretty mean wet noodle. I have seen them misused so often in the galleys I process that I now check for them regularly.

He sunk into a chair.

Thunder rolled and lightening flashed.

It’s alright as long as you do it with flare.

No. these are not all right, no matter how you do them.

Let’s work in backwards order. “Flair” is the spelling you want in the third sentence above. For a character to do something with flare might indicate you have a firebug on your hands. And while we’re on the subject, how often do you use the word “flare”? Don’t avoid this question! I have seen it more than a dozen times in one book…his nostrils flared, her temper flared, his lust flared, her skirt flared, his passion flared, her nostrils flared, his anger flared, her eyes flared, etc. etc. etc. It’s a wonder it all fits in and doesn’t combust, with so much flaring going on.

“Alright” has not yet received official acceptance as a replacement for “all right.” The two-word version is still preferred. Like it or lump it. That’s all I will say about that.

And “sink, sank, have or has sunk” has been burned into my brain since sixth grade: Today I sink, yesterday I sank, and before that I had sunk” whether into a chair, a slough of despond, or beneath the waves of the ocean. It’s like “swim, swam, have or has swum” and “sing, sang, have or has sung”—Yesterday I sang and swam and sank into bed happy.

As for thunder and—What is it that flashes and then you hear the rumble? Oh, yes. Lightning. No “e” in the whole word. None. Non-e. Of course there is a word “lightening,” but it’s related to the idea of making things lighter or more clear: “Here, let me lighten your load,” or “Let me enlighten you.”

While I’ve got you by the ear, so to speak, let me mention just one more thing, on the editing/reading side of my life: How weary I am of reading the same phrases time after time in almost every book when we get to the more passionate scenes. Is there truly no other way to describe them? Does everyone have exactly the same moves? Maybe I missed the memo that said, “This is it. Use these descriptive words whenever your characters are getting it on.” Fingers and tongues “tangle” and “trace” and “tease…” I usually quit reading by then, from sheer boredom, and pick up again after they have gone “over the edge.” In processing galleys I also check for “peak” (frequently found in said love scenes) vs. “peek” and find them often overused and/or misused and occasionally substituted for “pique.” My high school English teacher used to groan over the song lyrics of her youth rhyming “spoon” and “moon” and “June” and “croon.” Now I know why. Suffice it to say there must be descriptive words in the dictionary that would give your writing more individuality and flair rather than sounding like you copied the scene out of the last romance you read and merely substituted your characters’ names.

My apologies if the above sounds harsh. But remember—I don’t deal with nearly as many books per week as those readers who go through at least five books a week, some as many as twenty-five or more per week, so they say. Do you think they will not notice these things? Do you think they won’t take note of your name and figure they’ll look for an author with more variety in her vocabulary? Keep a dictionary and a thesaurus handy and try using one new word per book. Too much to ask?

Nancy Swanson- Editor

The Wild Rose Press

The Other Gettysburg Address

This year is the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, and the other day, I read an interesting article in The Wall Street Journal about the Other Gettysburg Address. It was news to me that President Lincoln was not the featured speaker at the Consecration of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg in November 1863. That honor actually belonged to Edward Everett, a man who had been president of Harvard University, a member of the US House of Representatives, a US senator, governor of Massachusetts, US secretary of state, and minister to Great Britain. Everett was considered one of the great orators of the day and was a natural choice for the occasion. He had prepared his remarks with care, and at the ceremony, he spoke for two hours about the meaning of the battle and its place in history. He began with these words:

Standing beneath this serene sky, overlooking these broad fields now reposing from the labors of the waning year, the mighty Alleghenies dimly towering before us, the graves of our brethren beneath our feet, it is with hesitation that I raise my poor voice to break the eloquent silence of God and Nature...

Two hours later, he ended with this:

But they, I am sure, will join us in saying, as we bid farewell to the dust of these martyr-heroes, that wheresoever throughout the civilized world the accounts of this great warfare are read, and down to the latest period of recorded time, in the glorious annals of our common country, there will be no brighter page than that which relates the Battles of Gettysburg.

Soaring rhetoric, right? But there's a reason no one remembers that carefully crafted and well-delivered speech. Because Everett's elaborate words were immediately overshadowed by the simple eloquence of the speech that followed. In fewer than 280 words, President Lincoln perfectly encapsulated what Everett expended more than 13,000 words trying to say. Or as Mr. Everett himself later put it in a letter to Abraham Lincoln:

I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.

But how does this relate to fiction writing? (Aside from the immutable law that you should never use 13,508 words when 271 will do?) Well, maybe the key is in Everett's assessment of his own writing: the central idea is what matters. If you don't start with a good structure and build from that, no matter how many words you add, the writing will not resonate. In other words, if the emotion in your story does not flow from the characterization and the conflict, it won't matter how many adverbs or exclamation points you add, the story will never be memorable.

So if you find yourself writing about how incredibly happy or filled with ecstatic joy your characters are, take a step back and ask whether you're using elaborate language to try to generate emotion where none exists. And if so, take a tip from Mr. Everett and consider whether that elaborate language makes your writing richer, or whether it just makes it forgettable.

Conflict -- An Editor's Dream

One of the things that I see a lot of is conflict without substance. It's become my new little catch-phrase, actually. And I think the concept of conflict is maybe a little vague. Or more precisely "Strong conflict"

Strong conflict is something that takes more than a conversation to work out. It's not just having two divergent character types banging heads and being beligerent or alpha. A strong conflict involves the following set up:

External conflict influences the hero and heroine internally, by targetting their internal beliefs (that are founded on their backstory experiences) and impacts their goals to the point that it makes them resist leaping into a solution.

A person cannot resolve their internal beliefs by having one conversation and everything's good. It takes working through those beliefs, and the events the hero/heroine encounter must contribute to that resolution. The events are either related to the external conflict, or related to the emotional relationship.

Let's look at a somewhat stereotypical example:

Hero is a wealthy businessman whose wife died and left him with a young child. Heroine is the woman he loved as a teen, who was from a poor family and "the wrong side of the tracks". They were involved as teens, but he left her suddenly. Ten years later, after his wife's death, they are reunited through professional endeavors.

Non-existant conflict:
They meet, there's a conversation along the lines of:

Hero: Susie, my parents forced me to. I never wanted to leave, and while I cared for my wife, I was in a loveless marriage. Please be mine again.
Heroine: Oh George, I've loved you too! Yes, that's all I've ever wanted.


Weak Conflict:
They meet, there's a bit of animosity between them. A bit of snide remarks on her part, his banging his head mentally, accusing himself of being a fool, since it's a Champagne title, they hit the sheets, sparks fly, and no one discusses what happened in the past. Eventually after a few chapters of a happy resolution being present in the writing (but not through character's actions or writings) they consent to forgive, forget, and move forward. Afterall, they've been working on this joint professional venture famously, they share core beliefs, and what happened in the past was out of youthful ignorance and the domination of powerful parents.

In this example, the author has made an attempt at keeping them apart. But the grounding isn't present. Both characters love each other from first meeting, always have, and their conflict is on the surface level. Actions portray it, but it isn't internally grounded. One conversation can resolve it between them. And while the conversation may not be as weak as the example in no conflict, it's still a situation that can be resolved by a conversation.


Strong Conflict:
They meet, there's a whole lot of animosity between them because the reason he is on the job conflicts with the reason she is on the job. Both have strong beliefs in their position and their work. They are at polar opposites, so it appears, within their moral compass. Adding into this the heroine feels intense betrayal, that she wasn't good enough for him because of financial positioning or her lineage. The hero, is anguished over what he did, but his reasons for leaving her had nothing to do with his parental domination, (although on the surface that's how it appeared), were in attempts to forge a path for them to be together.

When he came back to get her, she was gone no forwarding address and her parents wouldn't speak to him. Lo and behold, HER parents are the reason they were forced apart.

Yes, they can discuss this. Yes, he can swear to the truth of it. But although that conversation resolves why their teenage love came to an end, it does not address the larger issue of now that they are adults they are at odds with their core beliefs in relation to this professional set up. But before they can resolve it conversationally, they have to have their misconceptions proved wrong. Not just stated as wrong proved wrong.

The external plot -- the professional endeavor -- triggers them to act in ways that force them to grow and evaluate their individual standings. One of them must grow and change internally after doing something (the wrong something) that puts a divide between them, that seems insurmountable.

So if you have an environmental engineer opposing an oil mogul, the oil mogul must go ahead with the plan that damages the environment, despite feelings for the environmental engineers stance on the situation. External factors trigger something that points the oil mogul to the environmental engineer's motivation, and the oil mogul must scramble to right the situation. If the oil mogul doesn't right the situation, the love is forever lost.

These actions are what leave the reader on the edge of their seat, turning pages, wondering "How in the world is this mess ever going to get resolved?"

Conflict is a complicated entity. But if an author keeps in mind STRONG conflict, grounded in personal beliefs that are triggered by internal circumstances, and far deeper than one conversation can resolve, the odds of mastering conflict is significantly increased.

Good luck and keep on writing!

Dear Editor: When Should I Give Up?

You've just opened your tenth rejection letter for your from-the-heart-and-soul novel. You've even written a short story that you sent out, but haven't heard back about yet.

Some of the rejections say, "Thanks but no thanks." Others have a note or two about craft improvements you can make. But learning what passive voice is and not writing that way--or fixing it where it lies, like stagnant water, in your 100K book--is anther story. You even got a critique group and four people told you six different ways how not to do what they say you're doing wrong and you have no idea what they're talking about.

Should you give up? Decide that your writing is crap, will always be crap, and no one will like it, you can't change how you write, and that's it? Time to go back to the day job and just exist?

NO!

Don't do that to your dreams.

Never give up. You can learn new tricks. Study books on grammar and style. Study books on craft. Buy used copies of your favorite novels and highlight the heck out of that author's crafty bits. Analyze. Imitate until the methods sink in.

And above all, keep writing. Practice, practice, practice.

Have you ever looked at a portrait drawn by an amateur or self-taught artist, and thought, "Wow, that's really good. I can ignore the fact that the facial proportions don't look right because I can't even do that good. Stick figures, baby." Compare that drawing with a professional portraitist's art, someone who has studied line, color, shading, proportion, and has specific tools for different jobs. Worlds of difference in quality, eh?

Writing is a passion and an art. Craft tools and proper structure will allow your passion to shine, just as that professional artist's work is worlds above the amateur's. Perhaps that amateur portraitist draws as a hobby and is content with art for fun and stress relief. That's wonderful.

Is your writing a hobby? Then where did those rejection letters come from?

That's what I thought. Now put on your big girl panties and study.
_____
Kelly Schaub is an editor in the Faery Rose Line. She is also author Kelly McCrady. Check out her new book, "Martial Hearts," on sale at The Wild Rose Press tomorrow, October 15!