by Brenda W. Clough

 By this point the works of Jane Austen have had a great deal of screen time. They are also making inroads upon the stage, and I went to the Folger Shakespeare Theater‘s production of Sense and Sensibility this month. This is the well-reviewed production that was on Broadway a few years ago.

Our vision of this novel has been completely renovated by Emma Thompson’s excellent movie version. Her snappy and intelligent script has a visible influence upon this stage version, scripted by Kate Hamill. What the stage gets you, that you cannot get on the screen or on the page, is theatricality. Click on the production link, up in the previous paragraph, and have a look at the video. The stage and the set is a buzz of storytelling motion, furniture flying, windows spinning. And I am particularly enchanted by the cast, which doubles and even trebles key roles. When you see an actress play both participants in a drawing room conversation, that’s something no book or movie can do for you.

This is also a production that deliberately emphasizes the comedy. The novel is a hoot, but you may not realize it until you see it staged. It is wonderfully accessible and a complete delight — catch it if you can!

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Rich and I went kayaking again last weekend. It was cold and rainy, typical early October weather in the Chicago area, but the lagoons are always so beautiful that we couldn’t pass up the chance.

The Skokie Lagoons go for miles. We haven’t learned how to portage yet, so we stuck to areas accessible on one level. We still saw loads of lovely wildlife. Here’s a sample view of the vistas. You can see the trees aren’t turning yet.

In order to avoid two large parties of noisy kayakers we hugged the shoreline for a mile or two.

You can see how this cottonwood is leaning over into the water. Cottonwoods love to have wet feet. (Did you know that rayon is made from cottonwood fiber?) Eventually they suffer ant colony damage, and then they rot, but they do it very gracefully, and in the meantime they host literally millions of lives: birds, raccoons, squirrels, bats, frogs and toads, a dozen kinds of insects… and here, water rats.

Notice the little black gaps where a rat can swim under the tree roots and then climb to shore, up inside the safe, dark corridors of its lair.

Are those birds, or a lot of little Ms?

I never get tired of watching the cormorants swim, dive, pop up with a fish and swallow it, and then take off clumsily into the air. These are double-crested cormorants. Up close we could see their blue, blue eyes.

They hang out in gangs on bare trees and spread their wings to dry out.

On this visit, before we even got into our kayaks, we saw a bald eagle swoop low over the lagoon and stoop feet-first as if to pounce on a fish.

It didn’t quite hit the water. Instead, it made a startled, clumsy, flippy-floppy-flappy retreat.

A second later, a cormorant popped up out of the murky green water.

A second after that, narrowly escaping the eagle as it skimmed, probably embarrassed, over the cormorant’s head, a big silver fish broke the water.

Naturally I didn’t have my camera to catch this little drama. But here’s the bald eagle hanging out in another part of the lagoon.

Only a few minutes later, a handful of crows showed up and yelled rude things at the eagle.

Crows will hang around and harrass anything up to and including a bulldozer, if they think they know something to its dispraise that they can repeat at the top of their lungs. Think fourth-graders on a playground.

These guys hadn’t a hope of budging the eagle, but you can see this one is determined to keep an eye on it.

These fungi were so beautiful I had to get a shot of them.

Notice the green stain where lagoon water has soaked into the grain of the log. The log was wet, of course, because it was raining.

A party of ducks sat on the low end of the log, bathing. I couldn’t figure out how to get my camera to take video.

I did get lucky on this shot. The lagoons are crammed with big wading birds. You can see a great blue, a great egret, or a black-crowned night heron just about anywhere you look.

We came around a corner and spotted this one stabbing at a fish.

Looks like it’s getting salad with that, too.

Across genres, we accept the importance of bonds between brothers; I would argue that in speculative fiction, at least, we give less weight to the loyalty and emotional intimacy between sisters. This may be due to the domestic setting for sisterly concerns. Brothers march off to war together, but sisters hold hands when one is giving birth. If one or both is unmarried, sisters set up housekeeping together, often living their entire lives under the same roof. Yet the relationship between sisters opens many fascinating and challenging story possibilities.

I’ve found that once I step away from the models of male-bonding or male-female romantic love as the only possibilities for central relationships, my stories get a lot more interesting and also emotionally powerful. They don’t necessarily have to be the sole or pivotal bonds in a story. Just as in real life, they form a critical foundation for any social setting.

Thunderlord’s  emotional heart is the relationship between the two Rockraven sisters, Kyria and Alayna. This being Darkover, I also included plenty of action and adventures — banshees and laran and bandits, oh my. Through all this — and a love story or two — the sisters are so integral to the tale that at times I felt as if I were channeling Elizabeth and Jane from Pride and Prejudice (or Marianne and Elinor from Sense and Sensibility). Sisters are not always close, but when they are, the relationships are complex, rich, and enduring. Lovers may come and go, the saying goes, but sisterhood is forever.

I didn’t set out to write “The Bennett Sisters on Darkover.” I began with a few pages of Marion’s notes on a sequel to Stormqueen, almost all of it backstory, and the title of the proposed book. I didn’t want to repeat the general plot of Stormqueen or its tragic ending, and I also wanted to experience whatever adventure the story took me on through the eyes of fresh, new characters.

Although the Rockraven family isn’t anything like the Bennetts, I kept finding similarities: a noble but impoverished family, the pressure for one or both girls to secure the family’s financial future by their marriages, their wistful longing to marry for love, how the sisters are different but devoted to each other, and so forth. There are no balls in the neighborhood, no mother with imaginary illnesses scheming to “make a good marriage” for her daughters, no problem about the inheritance of the estate, and certainly no Mr. Darcy to be unpleasant to everyone. Practical Kyria deals with her family’s poverty by donning her brother’s clothes and trapping animals for food. Romantic Alayna dreams of love stories while understanding that such a happy ending means they must be parted, most likely forever. Distances on Darkover are much greater than in Regency England!

Kyria and Alayna made their entrance in my first draft as fairly conventional characters: the tomboy and the dreamer. I added Kyria – but not Alayna — having inherited the Rockraven storm-sense laran into the mix, along with family legends of scandalous Great-Aunt Aliciane (who was Lord Aldaran’s ill-fated mistress in Stormqueen) and “The Rockraven Curse.” Kyria developed pretty much along the lines I’d initially set for her. When, for instance, she leaps on the back of a banshee, armed only with a knife, that does not present a radical departure from her character, as it would have been for Alayna.

Alayna, initially less interesting to me, nevertheless led me down some unexpected twists and turns. She grew more in the course of her adventures, in part because she had a longer distance to cover in terms of becoming her own person. She didn’t astonish me when she moved from timidity to desperation to heroism. Her compassion and her bravery in standing up for the people in her care did take me by surprise. I had no idea of her inner strength, a strength that comes from depth of heart instead of muscle and will-power.

By far the biggest revelations came from the minor women characters, in particular Ellimira and Dimitra. Ellimira, wife of the heir to the Rockraven estate and therefore chatelaine of the house, began as a fairly standard scolding, demanding older kinswoman. Not quite an evil stepmother (or, in this case, sister-in-law) but one laboring under the responsibilities of making too little stretch too far while somehow tending to her own children and husband. Yet when she bid Kyria and Alayna farewell, she presented me with a moment of insight: she has not seen her own family since her wedding, and if I knew nothing of whom she missed and what she had left behind, it was because she was such a private person, she would never volunteer that information and no one would ever think to ask, they were so busy either scrambling to obey her orders or trying to escape her notice. She never did tell me, but as this was not her story, I left her secrets for the reader to guess. Perhaps she will, in between counting the holes in the linens and nursing the baby who surely must have been born by now, suggest that I write it.

Dimitra made her entrance as the lady-in-waiting who takes Alayna under her wing upon her arrival at Scathfell Castle: competent, motherly, a bit chatty. Very quickly, it became apparent that she had a mind and agenda of her own. What was she up to with Dom Nevin? And why – money? a secret passion? rebellion against Lord Scathfell? When Nevin’s scheme was unveiled, Dimitra became the catalyst for Alayna’s kindness and sense of justice to overcome her timidity, and this later returned in a much more powerful way when Dimitra fell ill. Although a secondary character, Dimitra had a pretty remarkable story arc, moving from motherly guide to traitor to dying woman to loyal accomplice.

I hope you enjoy reading about these wonderful women characters as much as I did writing them. I lack Jane Austen’s wit and keen social insight, but if you hanker to read about women’s relationships and growth (along with adventure, thunderstorms, a banshee attack, and a couple of love-never-did-run-smooth stories), I hope you’ll check out Thunderlord.

Spoiled Harvest
The Cassie Stories, book 3
by Leah Cutter

Cassie cannot turn away her most recent client. She needs the money. Though honestly, trying to find the woman’s damned cat turns her stomach.

But the client also carries a rose with her. It represents…something. Something destructive. Something apocalyptic.

Something Cassie can’t defend herself from. Not even with sarcasm.

Spoiled Harvest—the third novel in this fast-paced urban fantasy series—pits Cassie against an order of monks who follow Zarathustra, more gods, and even more corporate machinations.

Be sure to read the first two kickass Cassie novels: Poisoned Pearls and Tainted Waters.

EPUB MOBI

Buy Spoiled Harvest at the Book View Café bookstore.

8 rms, full bsmt
A Short Story
by Kristine Smith

Before you sell your home, don’t forget to hire a housecleaner to remove all those nasty demonic presences.

Buy 8 rms, full bsmt at BVC Ebookstore

Continuing Education
A Short Story
by Kristine Smith

A woman seeking a new direction in life returns to school, and learns lessons she never imagined.

Buy “Continuing Education” at BVC Ebookstore

X is for (E)xposure.

(Yeah, so sue me. Or give me an idea of another “X” word to write about.)

Before an author publishes a book, they revise it, edit it, copyedit it, proofread it, and format it.  Through each of those iterations, the book becomes better and better. By the time it hits stores, it’s the best version of that book the author could write.

But that’s not enough for the book to sell well. Rather, potential readers need to learn that the book exists. The author needs exposure.

Once upon a time, authors were told that the only exposure they needed was a good website and a blog. Authors were expected to post regularly to their blog, building an avid following of readers. A handful of authors mastered the platform, creating a veritable new form of entertainment and attracting tens of thousands of fans.  Most authors, though, maintained a steady communication without substantially changing their readership statistics.

Various social media began to appear on the scene—MySpace and LiveJournal, which gave way to Facebook and Twitter.  New forms evolved, taking advantage of near-ubiquitous cell phones equipped with cameras—Instagram and Snapchat. Tumblr filled a need for some people, and LinkedIn and a thousand other services for other online denizens.

Authors followed the developments.  Sometimes, they reserved accounts so that other people could not use their names on the various social media sites.  Other times, they developed unique marketing plans that took advantage of the various media.  In each case, a handful of authors mastered the new platform. Most, though, used the various services without gaining a substantial number of new readers.

So, what’s an author to do?

Creating Exposure

First, figure out which media work best for you. Consider whether you prefer words or pictures. Are you better with pithy sayings, or do you best express yourself in flowing paragraphs? Are you primarily a computer user, or is your phone surgically attached to your palm?  Take stock of your preferences, and choose modes of communication that play to your strengths.

Second, determine your social media schedule.  Your schedule is a guideline, a reminder to make posts on a regular basis. It doesn’t bind you to specific topics on specific days, but it helps you to structure your broad range of ideas.  Set your schedule by creating a chart for each form of social media you intend to use:

•    In the far-left column, write down half a dozen broad subject areas that appeal to you.  These can be specific books you want to promote, causes that you believe in, holidays or vacations or other activities you want to share, etc.
•    Across the top, write each day (or time of day) you intend to post.  All forms of social media work best when your contact with followers is regular. Plan on maintaining your frequency for an entire month. Therefore, don’t lie to yourself that you’ll post once an hour, every hour, seven days a week—you won’t be able to keep up that pace. Be realistic.
•    Complete your grid, sketching in a subject-matter idea for each time period.  You don’t need to go into detail; just leave yourself enough information that you can jump into your social media post when you’re ready.  You’ll have one entry in each column (each day or time of day you intend to post). You may have more than one entry in each row (if you have more days than you do topics.)

Third, stick to your schedule. Consider your social media — the exposure that’s going to result in sales of your books — as important as creating the books themselves. If necessary, draft posts ahead of time, maintaining them in a spreadsheet or word processing file so you can cut and paste them into social media.  (Depending on your media of choice, you might be able to raise your profile by sharing other people’s posts (“Share” on Facebook, “Retweet” on Twitter, etc.)  Don’t allow your account to consist solely of sharing; advance your own personal agenda.

Fourth, restrict the time you spend on social media.  As your exposure builds and your social network expands, you’ll be tempted to spend more time interacting with other people. Some of that interaction is good — it helps to build fans.  It gives you a break from the strain of creating your books, and it’s fun. But it’s very easy to forget how much time you’ve been online—time that could be spent writing, or with family or friends.

Evaluating Exposure

At the end of your first month, set aside some time to study your social media. Consider whether you stuck to your schedule. If you didn’t, determine why you didn’t, and whether your modifications were for good reasons or bad ones.

Also, review the effect of your social media campaigns.  Did you increase the number of followers? Did you increase the amount of interaction with existing followers? Did you connect with more prominent members of your online community? Did you see an effect on book sales?

If you saw improvement in all metrics, fantastic! You can continue doing exactly what you were doing.

If you saw improvements in the amount of interaction but not in the number of sales, consider continuing your same plan for another month (or two).  It often takes time for social media contacts to “mature” into purchases.

If you did not see improvements, then consider ways to change your plan.  Are there other topics that interest you that might be of greater interest to your social media community?

Are you posting often enough to build a community?  Are you posting too often, so that your posts are ignored as if they were spam? Are you using the correct form of social media to find readers interested in what you write? Can you try another social media platform, where you might receive greater exposure? Modify your plan, taking into account answers to these questions.

So? Where are you going to start your social media plan for exposure? What social network will you target first? And what are three topics you’re especially interested in discussing?

(This is the thirty-eighth installment of Dice Tales, an ongoing series of posts about RPGs as storytelling.)

***

When I was running my Changeling tabletop game, one of the challenges the PCs faced was defeating Herne the Hunter in a hunt — to get his prey before he did. This challenge made thematic sense . . . but when I looked at the PCs’ character sheets, I found they had virtually no hunting-related skills, and barely enough Ride to stick on the back of a horse. How could they possibly beat Herne at his own game? The only way for them to do it, I realized, was for them to cheat: to use the skills and magical abilities they did have to win the contest their own way.

They almost failed this challenge.

Not because of bad rolls or anything like that, but simply because my players went straight at the challenge as if it were exactly what it looked like — even though it should have been blatantly obvious that they didn’t stand a chance. I was on the verge of declaring they’d fallen badly enough behind that they couldn’t possibly catch up when one of them looked at her sheet and said, “wait a sec . . . can I use this ability?” The light bulb went on, and things got back on track, just in the nick of time.

This happens sometimes. My last post talked about what happens when the game goes around an unanticipated curve, but there’s a related issue when instead the plot fails to go around an anticipated curve. In the Pathfinder game I’m a part of, we had a session where the current PCs were expected to rescue a new PC from her employer, who intended to flog her (probably to death) for causing a big disaster. We-the-players knew we were supposed to do this, but the scene stalled out because none of us could figure out how. To us, it looked like we didn’t have a legal leg to stand on in stopping him, and the situation wasn’t quite the sort of thing where it made IC sense to just haul out our weapons and rescue her by force. The society the game takes place in is considered lawful evil; I assumed that meant an employer had the right to flog his employees. It wasn’t clear to me until later that the way the GM saw it, he could only punish her if he dragged her before a magistrate first. Since he was trying to bypass that step, we could have used that as leverage against him.

Any GM worth their salt should be ready for the possibility that the players will come up with a different solution than the one the GM thought of. But it’s another matter entirely when the players don’t come up with a workable solution at all. Not because they’re lazy, or anything like that — but just because what the GM sees as an open door looks like a featureless brick wall to them.

Dealing with this problem requires you to figure out why the disjunct is happening. Preventing it requires you to align your mode of thought with the GM’s (if you’re a player) or the players’ (if you’re a GM) and checking the two for points of mismatch ahead of time, which is easier said than done. Sometimes you wind up with a disjunct because of lack of information: I don’t know the Pathfinder setting very well, so it was easy for me to plug in the wrong assumptions about what an NPC can or can’t get away with. Sometimes it’s because the thing you thought would be tempting bait doesn’t actually play to the other person’s interest nearly as much as you expected it to — that seems to be what happened with our Obviously Suspicious NPC that wound up attracting no suspicion at all. Sometimes it’s because the narrative chain has a link missing. David Gaider, formerly the lead writer for the Dragon Age video games, posted for educational purposes a hypothetical quest plot for Dragon Age II, inviting his blog readers to figure out its key flaw; the answer was that completing the plot required the player to go talk to a certain NPC, without providing any in-story reason for them to approach that NPC for help, or even to know that he could help. (Since it’s a video game, there would have been a marker on the map showing where the player needed to go for the next step — but any quest that depends on outside hints brute-forcing the plot in the correct direction is not well-designed.)

Rolls can be the answer to many of these problems. If you’re stuck as a player, ask if you can roll to get some kind of clue regarding the thing you’re stuck on: I could have asked for a Diplomacy or Sense Motive or Knowledge (Local) check to find some angle from which to approach the Evil Employer problem. If you’re a GM and your players are stuck, call for a roll yourself; I could have suggested my Changeling players roll Wits or something like that to figure out they were going at the hunt challenge all wrong. (This may feel awkward, because we assume players should overcome social and mental challenges on their own — but remember, that isn’t always fair or helpful.) Other times it requires education; the player actually reads up on the world or the mechanics or whatever/the GM seeds in appropriate reminders of relevant details. And sometimes it’s just the same kind of problem a novelist faces, making sure the sequence of narrative reasoning from A to Z doesn’t skip over L-Q. Novelists have critique readers to help with that kind of thing, pointing out where there are gaps; gamers usually wind up having to patch holes on the fly.

Mind you, sometimes what players will do is leap over your carefully-prepared L-Q of their own accord, because they’ve made some connection you didn’t expect. But that’s a feature, not a bug.

(Photo #1)

Those familiar with my writing know that vivid settings are important to my storytelling—whether exotic foreign locales (including invented planets), the glorious wilderness, the shimmering world under the waves, or the flavor of downtown streets. I confess I gravitate to the outdoors when possible, and find it boring when scenes and sometimes whole stories are devoted to characters talking in generic rooms. When I’m working with student writers, I “open up the toolbox” of techniques to try in the pursuit of fully textured fiction. I’ve found that setting and landscape are often forgotten in the development of character and conflict, but they can be powerful in establishing the emotional tone of a scene. Witness Shakespeare’s plays that famously use weather and landscape as symbolic mirrors of the human comedy or drama.

“This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air
Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
Unto our gentle senses.”    (MacBeth, Act I Scene 6)

A perfect moment to lull us into relaxation before the horrific events to come.

“It was the owl that shriek’d, the fatal bellman,
Which gives the stern’st good-night.”   (Macbeth. ACT II Scene 2)

(Photo #2)

Most modern humans are more insulated from nature and weather than our ancestors were, and I know people who rarely stick their noses outside.  I must confess that when I assign my students outdoor-setting exercises, I’m hoping that they will spend more time outdoors observing and perhaps valuing the natural world. (Okay, off  my soapbox now…)

(Photo #3)

So for those of you who might be game to try a brief writing exercise:

Pick one of the photos in this blog post and pretend it’s the setting for a fictional scene. Write three different brief descriptions of the setting (3-5 sentences), without altering the time of day or weather. If you add people or animals within the setting, they must be the same in each of the three versions. BUT slant the descriptions, picking your adjectives and sentence rhythms so that the three versions evoke three distinctly different moods:

1. Joy: How would a happily-in-love person perceive this setting?
2. Grief: How would a person who just lost a loved one perceive the same setting?
3. Fear: How would a person who feels threatened perceive the same setting?

(Photo #4)

The trick is to avoid mentioning the Joy, Grief, or Fear, or the character’s thoughts who might be experiencing the emotion.  Make the landscape itself emanate that feeling, so the setting is doing two jobs—giving the reader a place to ground the story, while it’s also stirring up an emotional response.

(Photo #5)

Then please post your descriptions (mentioning which photo you chose) in the Comments section below.  I look forward to reading them!

*****

Sara’s newest from Book View Cafe was recently released in print and ebook: The Ariadne Connection.  It’s a near-future thriller set in the Greek islands. “Technology triggers a deadly new plague. Can a healer find the cure?”  The novel has received the Cygnus Award for Speculative Fiction.

Changer of Days: The making of a novel

I am used to this – or I should be, it’s happened to me often enough. A character steps out of the ether, introduces himself or herself if I am lucky, and then proceeds to dictate a story which I have to scramble in order to render into the written word. Often they don’t even do that, but simply start living a life of which I am tacitly appointed chronicler –  and God help me if I don’t come up to scratch.

Changer of Days began as a single scene of some five pages or so – a band of fugitives running from a powerful pursuer finds a vantage point on the top of a hill and from there bleakly observes the dust of the armies which are in pursuit. What I knew about them at this point made for a pitiful little pile of knowledge. One of them, the girl called Anghara, was the reason they were all here – and she had suffered something terrible at the hands of the man who was now pursuing her. Another was a lad named Kieran who was fairly obviously in love with Anghara, with her largely oblivious to this fact. Two more of them were a pair of twins, and somehow related to Anghara – and to Kieran. They were fleeing from danger and about to go into greater danger because Anghara spoke of  going to a place of mystery and a dark reputation, a land by the name of Kheldrin, to seek healing for her wounded spirit.

That was it. That was all I had. I remember, I wrote this partly at my tiny and cluttered desk parked in a corner of the Microbiology laboratory where I was, at this time, still working towards my MSc degree. There it was, and there it stayed, for a while.

I started playing with the story concurrently with performing serried ranks of lab experiments and writing a Masters degree thesis. I wrote up a bit of background for my setting, and the more I dug the more came – it was like digging a hole in a place with a high water table. I found out who Anghara was – an ousted princess and a heir to an ancient throne. I found out who her pursuer was – her half-brother, Sif, who had usurped her crown. I found out that the twins were her cousins. I found out that she, the twins and Kieran were all fostered in the same household. I found out much about a gift called Sight, and how it controlled young Anghara’s life.

When I finally began the novel, it was with a prologue that took place many years before that isolated scene on the hilltop. Anghara was only nine years old, and about to taste the first bitterness of exile  There were several people who read sections of  this MS as it was being written – David, once-boyfriend and now best friend, who would sit across the table at a local Cape Town restaurant with his chin in his hand and listen rapt while I read the thing out to him out loud; Pandora, with whom I would exchange large swatches of paper and would devour her novel-in-progress while she read the latest adventures of Anghara (once a waiter at a coffee shop where we did this, unable to stand it any more after he had circled our table four times and craned his neck this way and that to no avail, came up to us and asked plaintively, “Are you two studying something?…”).

And the thing grew, in fits and starts. I’d write a segment in a passionate fury and complete a great chunk of it – and then it would fester at this point for weeks or sometimes months because other things intervened or I simply could not find my way through a particularly thorny plot thicket. On the way at least one of the characters who had originally been intended as a walk-on, the Tath Prince Favrin Rashin, assumed a life and spirit of his own and became so fully-fledged that much later, on publication, there would be calls for a book devoted to him alone.

But I wish to place it on record that it took me months of writing, hundreds of MS pages, and a great deal of twisting of the plot to finally reach the scene I had written on my desk in the research lab, and by this stage I had long left that lab in pursuit of a livelihood.

Changer of Days was written over a period of two or three years – including a period of nearly four months right at the end where I left my hapless protagonists sitting on their horses in the middle of a winter wood for AGES because, subconsciously perhaps, I could not bear to write the next piece of the story which would have to be followed by “the end”. I finally had to be pushed into finishing the novel, by a reader who begged me to “do something with those poor people, before they die of terminal frostbite!”

So, it was finally done.

I continued, as I had done up to that point, to read a lot of books in the fantasy genre, and now that I had a completed novel of my own (and what a novel! The completed MS weighed in at almost a quarter of a million of words!) I was inevitably comparing the published works I read with the thing that I had written, and was discovering that I had a good story on my hands – a damned good story – a better story, in fact, than much of what had found its way into print up until now.

And thus began my journey of faith, a decade of sturdy belief in the potential of Changer of Days, a refusal to give up in the face of the sort of iniquitous odds that face first-time novelists in today’s cut-throat publishing world.

There were a few milestones on the way – like the time I cornered a London literary agent who represented one of my favourite fantasy authors and essentially bullied her into reading the MS of Changer upon threat of not leaving the agency’s offices until she did – she accepted the MS, a little nonplussed, and then phoned me at my London hotel and talked to me for forty minutes about it. She took it to a publisher, who said, “Strong story, good characters, but a little too long. We might be interested in seeing it again when the author has done her edits.”

That was where things stayed, pretty much, for some time. I sent the MS to a couple of publishers, and it didn’t get very far – but it was still better, I knew that it was still better, than many of  the already published offerings, and I wasn’t giving up.  When my mainstream novel, Letters from the fire, was published by Harper Collins New Zealand in 1999, for the first time in my life I started developing a personal relationship with a publisher and an editor, highly placed staff of an honest-to-goodness publishing house who became friends. When I was asked to write a reader report on a fantasy MS Harper Collins was thinking of publishing under their new Voyager imprint in New Zealand, I took the new manuscript and gave it a good write-up – and then said, “But I’ve got a fantasy novel of my own. Would you like to look at it?”

They said they would.

The manuscript sat with them for some time.

I finally asked if they had reached a decision, and was told that yes, they had. They would go ahead with the project, but split into two volumes to minimize the impact of all those words.

It had taken faith, perseverance, a stubborn and implacable dream – but Changer was going to be released into the world. For many years the name of my heroine had been my identity in the cyberworld of the Internet; I was, to all intents and purposes, my Anghara – and when I heard that it was going to be published, I cried. Tears of joy. Of vindication.

The book garnered a swathe of glowing reviews, and two award nominations. But more rewarding than all this were the reader comments that kept filtering through. The sort of comments that bore out my instinct that I had a good story and one that deserved to have an audience. One of my favourites has to be the judgment of a friend’s teenage daughter who, having just finished Changer of Days and then followed that up by going to the cinema to see Fellowship of the Rings, the first Lord of the Rings movie. Walking out of the cinema, she turned to her mother and said blithely, “You know, Mom, this Tolkien guy writes almost as well as Alma.”

I was a writer. I was a fantasy writer. Changer of Days was a damn fine story, after all.

Interesting things are happening to these books as far as in-or-out-of-print – but apparently you can still find them here or here if you want to try and hunt one down…

Toward the end of my last year in high school, my speech teacher gave us copies of a textbook the district was considering adopting. I only remember one thing about it: in the front was an errata page that said the reference to evolution on page such and such would be removed before final publication.

I thought it was the silliest thing I’d ever seen. First of all, it was a speech textbook, not a biology one, so the comment on evolution was not a substantive part of the book. Secondly, if evolution wasn’t being taught in high school biology classes – and it wasn’t – it should have been.

At seventeen, I assumed the anti-evolution movement that brought on that errata was on its last legs. Surely in the modern world of the double helix and space exploration, evolution opponents would soon go the way of the Flat Earth Society. The few that might hang around would be irrelevant.

That shows just how bad I am at predicting the future. (Truth be told, very few science fiction writers are good at that.)

A few years before my father died – and quite a few years after the speech textbook incident – he and I were discussing the rise of the fundamentalist Christians who go overboard denying evolution.

I said I’d never expected the huge growth in fundamentalism that we were seeing. I’d thought such churches were dying out, and here they were, growing wildly with a theology based on denial of science just as many other Protestant faiths were ordaining women, addressing racism, and generally showing their relevance to the modern world.

My father said he’d also thought those extreme fundamentalist churches would have disappeared; he’d never expected the revival. He wasn’t quite old enough to remember the Scopes monkey trial – he’d have been about seven then – but he knew all about the culture that produced it.

My father grew up in a part of West Texas where the Southern Baptist Church held sway. Like a lot of people from that part of the world, he was technically a Baptist, though since he was also raised in cowboy culture, he didn’t take seriously the rules on drinking and dancing. When he and my mother got married, he became an Episcopalian, which fit his worldview quite a bit better.

In fact, he became an active Episcopalian over the years, helping to start and run our small hometown church, becoming good friends with the bishop to make sure we got the support we needed from the diocese, even teaching Biblical history (which he loved) in Sunday School. He never became a priest or even a deacon, but he had a special dispensation from the bishop to do his own sermons as a lay reader on the Sundays when we were without our own priest.

If he’d even taken seriously any of the fundamentalism he’d heard in his childhood, he’d left it far behind. He certainly didn’t doubt the theory of evolution.

I’m not sure what his religious beliefs were as a younger man, but over my uncle’s dinner table one night not long before his mind started to slip away, someone asked him how he thought of God. “I see it as a kind of force,” he said. He was in his 90s then. I didn’t want to ask too directly about Heaven.

I don’t believe in God myself. The whole idea of a creator makes no sense to me. If I have something akin to a religious belief, it’s in life itself. I believe (and I state this as a belief because I don’t think it’s something that can be proved) that life is such a powerful thing – a force, if you will – that it will out anywhere it possibly can.

My Aikido teacher calls a seed a miracle, because it contains everything needed to make a tree or other plant. I like that image.

I understand why people like church. First of all, there’s the community. People are social animals and a good church can provide a community that is broader than the one you might meet at work or even in your neighborhood.

And ritual is a fine thing, too, especially accompanied by music. I still get goosebumps listening to church choirs.

Of course, I fall in the category of spiritual but not religious. I like practices like meditation, chanting, even ecstatic dance. These things open people up to other ideas about reality.

I’ve never accepted the materialist idea of what you see is what you get. That doesn’t mean I believe in magic or other supernatural things. What I believe is that there are a number of things that we can’t explain yet. I have faith that over future centuries – millennia, maybe – we’ll come up with an explanation.

I believe in the cutting edge of physics, too, and suspect it will be the source of some of those explanations.

While I’m surprised that so many people are still seriously religious. I don’t mind that they are. After all, the presence or absence of God is by its nature unprovable, so all of us are dealing in belief.

I do mind when they condemn atheism, though, and I get angry when they attack other religions, both other branches of their own and those of other traditions. I’ve reached my limit with people who think they’re the saved and everyone else is going to Hell.

One of my strongest beliefs is in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, so I’m OK with people worshipping or not as they see fit. (I draw the line at human sacrifice.) Because I believe in that Amendment so strongly, I don’t think any religious group has the right to tell the rest of us how to live.

And they certainly shouldn’t be telling us not to teach evolution in the schools. There are plenty of court cases that have made that clear, but it still seems to be happening.

For my part, I don’t understand why someone is incapable of believing in God and evolution at the same time. I know many people who do. Seems to me a God capable of setting in place a system that creates life on its own and eventually results in people is a powerful idea of God.

Karen Armstrong says people used to believe in most religious stories metaphorically and that the current push for literal interpretation of the Bible and other religious books is born of a society that wants to be able to prove everything just as good science does. If that’s true, I think it’s a loss to what made religion special and worthwhile.

We held a memorial after my father died, with a retired minister he knew from the local Democratic Party leading the service. We prayed a bit and had some music and people told stories about my father.

It was very moving. Ritual. I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in ritual.

DANNY on sale now at Book View Cafe.

My inestimable agent

My inestimable agent, Trodayne Northern, recently decided that what he really would like to have on the new Prentis Agency website he’s building is a series of love letters from his writers to their beloved genres. Here is my “how do I love thee” letter.

Dear Speculative Fiction…

As a child, I discovered first-hand that reality was a difficult beast to tame. I was shy, too tall, too chubby, and wore braces, glasses, and orthopedic Oxfords. I was the kid that nobody wanted on their baseball team because I couldn’t run and had abysmal eye-hand coordination.

I met you, if you’ll recall, when I was six and my father let me stay up to watch ”The Day the Earth Stood Still”. You terrified me and exhilarated me and gave me a fascination with the unexplained and alien.

Phillip K. Dick spoke of being ”content with the mysterious.” I was more than content; I was in love. I read ghost stories and fairy tales and sagas about the exploration of the unknown. I discovered that something I could do better and faster than any of my peers was read and imagine things.

When I reached my teen years, I admit, you put me off a bit with your warnings about impending doom and post-apocalyptic horrors. You seemed to be about endings and I wanted to read about beginnings. I suppose it’s no surprise, then, that it was stories of first contact that drew me back to you. Andre Norton opened the door and welcomed me in, and Ray Bradbury closed the door firmly but gently behind me. I was in. And when I began to write seriously, I began to write science fiction and fantasy.

People tried to dissuade me. They said you were silly, impractical, unrealistic, even demonic, and that I shouldn’t spend so much time with you. They said you were escapist fiction that would lead me astray. They echoed literary critic Lee Mortimer, telling me that you were a ”genre of escape literature which takes the reader to faraway planets—and usually neglects to bring him back.”

Did I want that to happen to me? they asked. ”We don’t read ’that stuff’,” they assured me. ”Can’t you write real, serious fiction?”

But I was a child of Bradbury, and I knew the real you. I also knew your ”secret”. Ray Bradbury whispered it to me in an essay entitled On the Shoulders of Giants. He said:

”The children sensed, if they could not say, that fantasy, and its robot child science fiction, is not escape at all. But a circling around of reality to enchant it and make it behave. The children guessed, if they did not whisper it, that all science fiction is an attempt to solve problems by pretending to look the other way.”

If I had to give one reason why I love you, it is that. You satisfy my deepest impulse to solve problems, to make our sometimes chaotic reality behave by only pretending to be gazing into the eyes of an alien or fey lover.

Yours completely,
Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

Since my teens (possibly even before that, but the facts get lost in the gauze of time) I have occasionally fallen over. Often publicly. The first time I remember was in gym class, where I turned to a classmate, said, “I feel like I’m gonna–” and did, coming to a minute later to see the faces of all three of the school’s gym teachers very close to mine, and to hear the “what happened?” of 40 15-year-old girls echoing like the cries of maddened seagulls in my ears. Since then, my public swoons have been the stuff of anecdote, like the time I fell at the top of the up escalator at a department store, and awoke to find that I was being prodded with a cane by an elderly woman who thought I was staging a protest (it was the ’70s).

I never really worried about it too much. When I was young, it seemed to be mostly associated with heroically bad cramps (or the occasional stomach bug), which was embarrassing but seemed on the outer edge of what was considered normal for us frail female sorts. I figured: if I felt rotten, best thing to do was to get down low on the ground until I passed out or the feeling went away. And I will say, your fellow citizens are generally very kindly to women who swoon. I have been in the back offices or living-rooms of strangers who decided I could not be left to lie strewn about the hallway or pavement. High embarrassment, lots of thank yous, and I’d go on with my life.

Until finally it was pointed out to me that I should really get this looked into. Here’s what happened.

One morning, when my younger daughter was still in diapers, I was getting her changed and dressed, when I had a stab of sciatica followed almost immediately by lightheadedness. I called my husband in to take over, and went off to the bathroom (the only place where Mama could get a moment to herself) to sit down for a moment until it passed. Somewhere in the sixty seconds after I sat down on the side of the tub I realized that I was really, really dizzy. I remember thinking “I’d better get down on the floor” just before the ringing gray tide swelled up around me (really, that’s the best description I can give). When I awoke I thought, for a moment, that I was in bed. I’d been having a vivid dream. Then I realized that I was on the bathroom floor. Lying in front of the door (which had stopped Danny from being able to come in and see if I required assistance). I picked myself up and realized 1) that I was bloodied (I’d bitten my lip spectacularly) and 2) broken (one of my front teeth had broken off at the gum line).

First things first: I called my dentist and got an appointment for an emergency root canal late that afternoon. Then I called my doctor, a calm sort, and explained what had happened. “Go down to the ER; my partner’s on duty. You need to have your lip sewn up.” So I followed instructions, not reckoning on the fact that few things get ER docs more excited than LOC (loss of consciousness). I kept protesting that I just needed a stitch or two, while they spoke of CAT scans and MRIs… until I said, “Well, my daughter has a diagnosis of vaso-vagal syncope….” At which point they did the ER doc equivalent of pouting, as if I had misrepresented my swoon as something interesting, sewed up my lip, and suggested that I might wanna get this checked out at some point.

Vaso-vagal syncope, as it was explained to me, is a relatively benign tendency to faint. It is often found in robustly healthy people whose systems are so finely tuned that said system mis-reads a cue, thinks that there’s a medical emergency, and cuts down blood flow to everything except the core systems–of which, it appears, the brain is not one. It is the world’s fastest episode of shock. Then, after a minute Silly Body says “Oops! My bad,” blood flow is restored, and the faint passes off, leaving the patient to deal with the embarrassment of swooning.

My doctor and I agreed that finding out what was happening was probably a good thing (and why hadn’t I ever mentioned this before? Because it mostly had seemed tangled up with gynecological issues, and…). So I was sent for a tilt table test. In a tilt table test you are strapped, Bride-of-Frankenstein-style, to a table which is then raised so that you are almost standing–thus the “tilt table” appellation. I imagine there are different protocols, but for me, they put into IVs each arm. For the first phase of the test, they piped something something into my left arm that slowed my heart rate to a crawl. Whatever it was (I remember it as adenine, but it was a long time ago) it metabolized very quickly–after about two minutes the effects were gone. But that was a horrible two minutes. I didn’t faint, but I felt… rotten. No pain, no queasiness, just awful in a way that defies description. And then it was gone.

For the second part of the test they ran a second chemical into my right arm, something that sped my heart rate waaaaay up. And that part of the test was supposed to last for about 25 minutes. “What happens if I don’t faint?” “Then you’ve passed the test, and whatever it is that’s making you faint is sinister and must be further investigated.” “Oh.” Sinister? And here I’d been ignoring it for 30 years? Fortunately, 22 minutes into the test I said “I feel like I might–” and did. At which point they lowered the table and told me I’d flunked the test and indeed, I have vaso-vagal syncope.

And there was much rejoicing. At least by me, who now had a name for what it was, and the assurance of the neurology department at NYU that I didn’t have anything really really scary to deal with.

And the recommendation on how to deal with it? If I were fainting several times a day, they could medicate me. But given that it’s only once, maybe twice a year, they didn’t want to do that. “So what do I do?” I asked.

“If you feel faint, get down on the ground.” Hell, I coulda told me that.

__________

*I suspect the 10 degrees of tilt, or whatever it is, is so that if you faint you don’t overbalance the table and fall forward.

Book View Cafe’s First Bundleset
by Doranna Durgin,
Irene Radford,
Madeleine Robins,
Kristine Smith

Four BVC authors offer bundles of their most popular novels.

Available until October 11, 2016.

These ZIP files include both EPUB and MOBI/Kindle ebooks of each title.

Go to the BVC Ebookstore to see the bundles and to read descriptions and free samples.

Four Fantasy Novels by Doranna Durgin: $9.99

Dun Lady’s Jess
Barrenlands
A Feral Darkness
Seer’s Blood

Five Historical Fantasy Novels by Irene Radford: $12.49
The Merlin’s Descendants Series:

Guardian of the Balance
Guardian of the Trust
Guardian of the Vision
Guardian of the Promise
Guardian of the Freedom

Five Romances by Madeleine Robins: $12.49

Althea
My Dear Jenny
The Heiress Companion
Lady John
The Spanish Marriage

Four SF Novels by Kristine Smith: $9.99
The Jani Kilian Chronicles:

Code of Conduct
Rules of Conflict
Law of Survival
Contact Imminent

Click here for more information

Imposter Syndrome. It’s defined (according to wikipedia, which in this case is on target) as:

Impostor syndrome (also known as impostor phenomenon or fraud syndrome) is a term coined in 1978 by clinical psychologists Dr. Pauline R. Clance and Suzanne A. Imes referring to high-achieving individuals marked by an inability to internalize their accomplishments and a persistent fear of being exposed as a “fraud”.

Now, I’ve felt like an imposter forever. It started in my PhD program and has only increased over time. The imposter in me says–high-achieving? Really? Am not. Not even close. And yet, I have a BA, an MA, and a PhD. I’ve published 15 books. I’ve been married 26 years, had a couple pretty awesome children, and have owned several houses, and published stories and articles, and won awards. By most reasonable definitions, that’s fairly high achievement (I, obviously, am unreasonable).

I have never overcome the syndrome. It seems to run rampant in the writing community. Maybe creative types are extra-susceptible to it. Who knows? But the reason I’m talking about it again, is because of this article that popped up on my radar the other day. It was published on an entrepreneurial website and was titled: Imposter Syndrome Will Kill Your Business. It describes the syndrome and then, for the first time I’ve ever seen written about (and no, I haven’t really done a lot of searching on the subject), it offers solutions.

I found two particularly compelling. The first: write down achievements. You know them. Write them down. Come up with categories–writing, life, business, exercise . . . Whatever categories make best sense to you. And then ruthlessly write down your accomplishments. If it helps, imagine that you’re writing somebody else’s. Don’t skimp. Be thorough. Be tough on yourself and make yourself write them ALL. If your forget some, go back and add them. I suggest putting them somewhere where you can read them regularly. In fact, read them several times a day, every day, and take time to acknowledge that these are big deals. BIG DEALS. You did amazing things.

The second suggestion: keep a file of complimentary . . . well, everything. Emails, written notes, telephone conversations, award nominations . . . All of it. Get in the habit of writing down the compliments that are verbal. Make a point of it. And then read them over, particularly when you’re feeling particularly imposterish. Remind yourself that this isn’t just an ego thing–other people admire and respect you. It’s important.

Go do both of these things now.

Writers often keep a brag shelf of books/stories/articles they’ve published. It helps us remember that we are pretty good at this job. I never look at mine. Never think about just sitting there and paying attention to it. I should. I should spend a few minutes every day just considering the amount of work I’ve done, the hurdles I’ve jumped, and how much I’ve really done.

I’m going to do these things. I’m going to make a priority of them.

What about you?

(Originally Published on Magical Words, 2016)

Whenever I travel, I like to take afternoon tea in a new place if the opportunity presents. Last summer I was in Spokane, Washington, and had the pleasure of visiting The Silver Spoon Tea House, a charming establishment in an historic Queen Anne house whose original owner was a colorful businessman in the city’s earlier days. The house is delightful, with a veranda that must be lovely on warm days. We took our tea indoors, in a pretty little back room.

We were so hungry that we had raided the sandwiches from the tea tray before I remembered to photograph it. Take my word for it – they were delicious, as was everything on the tray, and also the fresh-baked lemon scones that we devoured before the tray made its appearance. Though they were American style scones, not British style, they were light and delicious, and I loved the garnish of a curl of sugared fresh lemon. I also loved the addition of fresh fruit to the tea tray, something you don’t often see with afternoon tea!

Another innovation (new to me, anyway) was the warming stand for our teapot. I am used to tea cozies, but there was no need for one with this lovely stand, which was fueled by (appropriately) a tea light. It kept the tea hot right to the last drop. I may have to try this at home, as I tend to go through my daily pot of tea rather slowly, and end up reheating the last cup or so.

So if you are ever in Spokane, do try this charming tea house. If you don’t have time for afternoon tea (by reservation only), they have a pastry case of delicious goodies, and they also sell sweets, leaf tea, and accessories.

Patrice Greenwood was born and raised in New Mexico, and remembers when the Santa Fe Plaza was home to more dusty dogs than trendy art galleries. She has been writing fiction for longer than she cares to admit, perpetrating over twenty published novels in various genres. She uses a different name for each genre, thus enabling her to pretend she is a Secret Agent.

She loves afternoon tea, old buildings, gourmet tailgating at the opera, ghost stories, costumes, and solving puzzles. Her popular Wisteria Tearoom Mysteries are colored by many of these interests. She is presently collapsed on her chaise longue, sipping Wisteria White tea and planning the next book in the series.

Wisteria Tearoom Mysteries:
A Fatal Twist of Lemon ~ A Sprig of Blossomed Thorn ~ An Aria of Omens ~ A Bodkin for the Bride
A Masquerade of Muertos

What do these two exhortations have in common?

“Smile! And the world will smile right back.”

“If you don’t stop pouting I’ll give you something to pout about.”

Yep, in both cases, whoever is being spoken to is not happy. And the chances were really good, especially in days of yore, this was a female.

On television, all the family shows offered stories where the kids, and even the dad, could have a bad day, before everybody—especially Mom—rallied with sympathy and fresh-baked cookies. Children’s books were filled with moms who existed in smiling service to their families, without any time, much less emotions, of their own.

We never saw a story in which Mom, or silly, devoted maiden aunt Minnie, tore off her pearls, turned off the vacuum cleaner, kicked off her pretty heels that she always wore even to do housework, put her head down on the kitchen table and howled. Unless she was the villain of the piece.

As we got older, the cues got more subtle but no less persistent as societal expectations narrowed in around us, especially those of us who paired off and had kids. We wanted to be good moms, and we had breathed in the lesson that a good mom Didn’t Have Negative Feelings before the child, and when you’re on duty 24/7, well then, you had to tough it out for everyone else’s good.

A good wife, mother, lady, cheered herself up by baking cookies for other people, by always being the rock of her family, by serving others. To serve herself was selfish.

I’m a writer, and this particular blog series was put together by writers, so my focus is writers—particularly older women who, with an apologetic air, admit that they’d really like to write again. Of course it’s too late . . . it’s kinda silly, really, no one expects anything good out of someone old and out of practice . . . Seeing a tangentially related blog series begun by Deborah Ross caused me to reflect on the fact that all of these deflections and apologies I’ve heard are from women of a certain age, women who hasten to point out that they never fought in a war, or survived an attack by terrorists, or lived through a tornado leveling their house around their ears, so they have no room to complain. Even when their hands grip together, their voices wobble, their gaze goes diffuse.

These are the women whose lives never underwent HBO-level drama, but whose lives were shaped by thousands upon thousands of little—and not so little—hints that the only acceptable emotions from a good woman were smiles or sympathy. And yet their own dreams were squashed down for decade after decade because they needed to be practical, they were depended upon.

Even many of those who endured the “I’ll give you something to pout about” threat (which was then carried out) are quick to say, “Oh, that’s the way it was in those days—everybody got slapped/spanked/beaten with a belt. My family life was so much better than most.” Though a soldier never is told that their wound was for their own good—they deserved it—they “asked for it” and the soldier gets it from an enemy, not from those who were supposed to guard your safety.

I’ve met a lot of women in particular who give off a strong PTSD vibe to those who know the signs, but who insist that they are fine, lucky, grateful. And there’s that quick, anxious smile that never quite reaches the watchful eyes, waiting for the world to “smile back.”

Unfortunately, I know way, way too many of these women who dealt with their squashed, “selfish” dreams by drinking them into numbness, or smothering them by prescription drugs, or committing suicide by cigarette.

It’s not an easy thing to find safe space in which to vent those longings to try for those dreams again, and to slowly, painfully, make their way to a place where all emotions—messy, mixed, impossible—are considered reasonable, valid.

First you have to believe that you have not failed the world to have them—and that it’s okay to be annoyed, or even angry, when someone wags an admonishing finger and coos “Smile! Everything will look rosy if you just smile.” Because your subconscious knows that what you are really being told under that teeth-grittingly cheery exhortation is that your messy, human emotions are illicit—and if the world isn’t smiling back, you are at fault.

If you have questions about PTSD, I encourage you to read this post by Rachel Manija Brown, a writer who is also a therapist and crisis response counselor. It’s Part Three—go ahead and read all the posts, and check out the resources.

But above all, this series is to underscore the fact that your—whoever you are, young or old, whatever gender—your feelings are legitimate, and that there are resources out there that can help you find a space that allows the real smile to bloom—even if there is no one there to see it.

 The National Center for PTSD

Anxiety and Depression Society of America

About the campaign:

#HoldOnToTheLight is a blog campaign encompassing blog posts by fantasy and science fiction authors around the world in an effort to raise awareness around treatment for depression, suicide prevention, domestic violence intervention, PTSD initiatives, bullying prevention and other mental health-related issues. We believe fandom should be supportive, welcoming and inclusive, in the long tradition of fandom taking care of its own. We encourage readers and fans to seek the help they or their loved ones need without shame or embarrassment.

Please consider donating to or volunteering for organizations dedicated to treatment and prevention such as: American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, Home for the Warriors (PTSD), National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), Canadian Mental Health Association, MIND (UK), SANE (UK), BeyondBlue (Australia), To Write Love On Her Arms and the National Suicide Prevention Hotline.

To find out more about #HoldOnToTheLight, find a list of participating authors and blog posts, or reach a media contact, click here.

As usual, mine is the first car in the lot. Although this field and several adjacent to it will be filled with hundreds of vehicles when I return to the car sometime this afternoon, for now I’m alone in the predawn silence. I turn off the paved driveway, bump over the field to the first row of parking, and lock up the car. From here it’s about a quarter mile down a hill and through a managed woodland to the fairground. My shift in the kitchen that will provide about 700 free meals today for all the volunteers, vendors and guest speakers starts at 6 a.m. Better get moving.

I’ve come here this morning, as I have done every September since I retired (except for last year, when the Epic Roof Job caused me to miss) to be one of the hundreds of volunteers at the three-day Common Ground Country Fair in Unity, Maine. This is the fortieth year the fair has been put on by the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, or MOFGA, which is the largest organic organization in the country, with upwards of 7000 members. Considering that half of those are family memberships, the number of people involved is probably over 10,000 at this point. Yes, I’m a proud, card-carrying member.

Peace activist Vandana Shiva at the 2011 Fair.

Common Ground attracts over 60,000 fairgoers each year, which is pretty remarkable given that there are no midway rides and no cotton candy. Instead, what patrons get is exactly what’s promised on the Fair posters: a celebration of rural living. Well, make that a celebration of small farms and farmers, of craftspeople, artisans and musicians, of healthy lifestyles and communities, of a mindset that doesn’t treat the Earth like dirt, of the animals who are working partners on our farmsteads, of power to the people and taking care of the bees, of LOTS OF GREAT FOOD and you begin to get the picture. Add to this some 200 lectures, demonstrations, presentations, and workshops each day and you’ll quickly see what distinguishes this from any other agricultural fair. Over the years, I’ve learned about colony collapse disorder in bees, Monsanto’s latest outrages, hoophouses, small-scale cheese-making, artisanal bread, the effort to reestablish strains of wheat that once flourished in Maine’s short summers, home funerals and green burial, cider making, how to build a wood-fired pizza oven, heritage apple varieties, home-scaled wind power, and a host of other interesting and useful knowledge and skills.

The Harry S. Truman Manure Toss

And right after I finish my volunteer shift at 10 o’clock, I’ll explore all of that. Work before pleasure, however. The kitchen is calling.

If you’re reading this on Friday morning, September 23, I may be flipping blueberry pancakes or mixing up an apple coffeecake, peeling and dicing potatoes for the Common Kitchen’s renowned home-fries, or cracking dozens of eggs for scrambling. Most probably, however, I’m stationed at the commercial dishwasher, because once you’ve been trained on the beast, the kitchen coordinator swoops on you the moment you walk through the door. It doesn’t matter a bit to me exactly what I’m doing, though. The company is cheerful, the classic rock ‘n roll playing on the radio has us all singing or humming, and there’s a wonderful shared sense of purpose.

These are my people. This is where I want to be.

When I was sixteen, I developed a passion for a yellow Lincoln Continental convertible with a black leather interior. Not a Corvette, which was the hot car of my youth (why, yes, I did watch Route 66), or one of the adorable tiny English sports cars of the ’60s. A Lincoln Continental, the ultimate land yacht.

In my dreams, I would have this car by my mid-20s, when I’d be living in Kemah, Texas (on Galveston Bay), and working at some job or another (the details of employment were not part of this fantasy, though it must have been well-paid). I would also have a shrimp boat, though I wouldn’t be working shrimper.

Why a shrimp boat, you may ask? Possibly because I really, really liked (and like) to eat shrimp. But also because it wasn’t the sort of boat the wealthy acquired. That is, I wanted a rich person’s car, but a working person’s boat.

It should go without saying that I never achieved this dream. In my mid-20s I was finishing law school and pretty much broke. The car I did have – a Plymouth Valiant – had bit the dust and I was commuting around Austin by bicycle.

Even if I’d had the money, I didn’t want that car or that lifestyle by that time. Kemah was no longer a sleepy bay town but a bustling suburb and I had developed my life-long allergy to commuting. And I had other dreams, few of which involved cars.

These days, I usually get around by a combination of walking and public transportation. I still have a car, but I mostly use it to get out of town. When the wind is out of the west, I can hear the highway at night. I hate the sound. I am beginning to hate cars.

But I am a child of the Twentieth Century and that was the time of the automobile. I learned to drive at fourteen. Over my lifetime I’ve bought five cars and had two given to me by my parents. I’ve driven all the way across the US twice and halfway across it multiple times and traveled by car in all 48 of the contiguous states.

My great-grandmothers didn’t drive, but both my grandmothers – born about the same time as the automobile – did. My father drove his entire life on a license he got at the age of fourteen, before there were driving tests to pass. He was still a good driver in his 90s when I had to take his car away because his memory was going. (He could remember how to drive safely, but not how to get where he was going.)

Here in the United States we have a vast network of highways. But a story from my father’s childhood illustrates how fast that network came together.

When he was about five – which was less than a hundred years ago – he traveled with his parents in a Model A Ford from West Texas to Southern California on an often unpaved road across New Mexico and Arizona. Much of this road was what became the fabled Route 66 and what is now Interstate 40, but back then it was two lanes (or maybe just one) and went through the small western towns (some of which are now large cities).

Somewhere in the middle of Arizona, they met another car and stopped to chat. Turned out the folks in the other car had been in California and were traveling back to Texas. They exchanged news while stopped in the middle of what is now I-40.

Think about that for a minute. In the early1920s, you could stop in the middle of the road and chat on what is now a very busy interstate. By the end of that decade, just a few years later, that time was gone.

In the Twentieth Century, we built highways very quickly to go along with the car culture. These days, we don’t seem to be keeping up with the maintenance or the building: no matter how many roads we have, they’re never enough and they’re all full of potholes.

And we’ve built a lot of monstrosities, like the interstates that cut through Oakland and divide up neighborhoods. I’m sure everyone can name stretches of highway that they hate with unbridled passion. (My personal list, off the top of my head: all the freeways in Oakland, I-35 from San Antonio to Oklahoma City, I-95 from Maine to Florida.)

But there are roads I like. One of my favorite stretches is across Wyoming from Sheridan to Yellowstone Park on Alternate Highway 14, which I think is closed in winter. It’s a sharp climb into the Bighorn Mountains (which have a number of peaks in the 12,000 foot range and a couple over 13,000). There’s an overlook near a national forest campsite where you can see what was once a vast inland sea.

Standing there about twenty years ago, trying to think in geological terms, I found myself instead realizing how fast we humans had changed the landscape of this country in the Twentieth Century to accommodate the automobile.

Much as I hate driving in traffic or searching for the elusive parking place in urban areas, there are lots of places I want to go that are only accessible by car. I’m not planning to give up my trusty Scion xB this week.

But I suspect that by the end of the Twenty-First Century, the car and much of its infrastructure will be obsolete. We have remade our world for a mode of transportation that will disappear almost as fast as it came along.

How long will it take the Earth to recover from that?

It’s the first day of autumn.

I know this because the first wave of migrant crows came by my house in a gang today, hooting like teenagers, chasing around the neighborhood, celebrating the fresh clean cool dry air of autumn.

I got a ziploc full of roasted salted peanuts in the shell and went outside to hoot back. Here they came, three, four, fivesixseveneight, parking in the top of the towering elm tree across the street. I tossed down some peanuts, laughing at them, making kiss-me crow noises (a kind of low whiny-baby grizzle).

They weren’t interested in the peanuts. They wanted to play copycat. We cawed back and forth at each other. They were too excited to do it one at a time, so if two cawed at once, in different pitches, I copied one, then the other.

This lasted until one of them, perched higher than the others, spotted something in the distance and took off bat-outa-hell, yelling. The rest followed.

Believe it or not this made my day. Nothing can go too wrong after the crows stop by to say, “Hi, we’re back, yay autumn!”

As I write this I can hear them out there, a few blocks away, yodeling like kids visiting a favorite playground after long absence.

How do you know when it’s the first day of autumn?

Recently, I received this letter from Wendy, a fan with whom I’d been corresponding. It spoke deeply to me, and rather than answer it alone, I asked some of my writer friends to join in a series of round table blogs on the issues raised. If you’ve been there, too, I hope you’ll follow along and offer your own wisdom.

I’ve been trying to reconnect with writing friends after a hiatus from the creative life. I’ve spent the past year or so taking care of my mom and working to pay the bills. Mom passed away in October.

When your last parent passes away, it changes you in many ways. That foundation you always relied on — even as an adult — is gone for good. Whether you’re ready or not, you are truly on your own in the world and must somehow carry on without their nurturing presence. One of the most difficult aspects of my mother’s final days was the fact that she had so many regrets about life. She once had goals and dreams, but left them behind out of fear and a belief that these dreams were just not possible.

I’m 54 years old. More than half of my life is over. Writing has been a dream/goal of mine since childhood. My mom was the only one who believed in me. I don’t want to leave this world regretting the fact that I never pursued this dream to the fullest. To be honest, my writing “career” never took off. I let fear, doubt and the negativity of others keep me from my dreams. I want so much to be brave, to take risks with my creative life. I truly wish for a group of fellow writers who are willing to give me the encouragement and support I need to write with my heart and soul, to grow as a writer and a human being. And I want to be a support for others as well.

How do I get back into the writing life after leaving it on the back burner for so long?

Cynthia Felice: Filling the Giving Hole

My similar experience was long and arduous; each time I thought I was ready to pick up my writing career I discovered, painfully, I was so not ready. I went through years of bewildering anniversaries and finding ways to establish new normals for everyday life that re-establishing my writing life was always something I’d do tomorrow. It’s different for everyone, so don’t assume setbacks are failures. Your loss and mine were different, and that alone changes working through the loss. But when writing life did start working again, it was because I made myself find a listserv (actually several, but only one clicked for me) of writers who were working at their craft. Just checking in every day and lurking for a while helped me feel connected again to the familiar problems and worries writers have and need to discuss. Eventually I was “talking” again and involved, sharing my concerns and experience with other writers. No one understands writing life the way other writers do. Besides, what else are you going to do with all that tender care you’ve been giving to your loved one for years? I needed a place to put mine; maybe you do, too. Don’t let not giving daily leave a hole in you.

Similarly, I attended the Pikes Peak Writer’s Conference http://www.pikespeakwriters.com/ because it’s well known for great organization and attracting the best speakers (heh, heh, and I’d been one of those speakers years earlier) and because it takes place in my back yard! It was a wonderful long weekend spent rubbing shoulders with like-minded folk and learning what had changed in the industry while I was away. There are other fine conferences and also very good writers workshops, but I have personal experience with this one, so am content to recommend it. Research carefully if you’re tempted to plunk down the fee; not all are equal. You’ll notice that I did not recommend a specific listserv; the one I favored no longer exists, but others are out there, and if the daily passive contact appeals to you, you will find them.

Good luck, Wendy!

Cynthia Felice writes science fiction novels, and occasionally writes short stories and articles. She was a John W. Campbell Award nominee for her novel, Godsfire. Felice is a workshop enthusiast, including being an early Clarion “grad” and a frequent Milford attendee. Her experience includes managing technical editors, writers, and designing configuration control software, as well as writing and editing technical articles, essays, and documents, one of which received the Award for Outstanding Paper from the Society for Technical Communication. Cynthia Felice grew up in Chicago, and now lives with her husband on a ridge east of Colorado Springs overlooking the Front Range.

Deborah’s note: Cynthia critiqued my very, very first attempt at a fantasy novel (1980?) with such kindness and insight that I am still writing!

Meg Mac Donald: Dear Wendy,

Your letter touched my heart in so many ways—and in so many ways, on so many levels, I could relate to what you were saying.  As will always be the case, we each have our own story—that moment, that feeling, that fear, that loss that seemed to take away the dream that we had nurtured from childhood on.  Those hurdles in life that seem insurmountable.  We are of an age, you and I.  No doubt we share many of the same memories about childhood pastimes, favorite books, iconic films, moments where planet Earth stopped turning to look to the moon…  What a glorious, bright future we were promised—especially for girls.  What a “brave new world” where we believed that if we dreamt it, we could achieve it.  No better time to be alive.  No better time to want to write science fiction and fantasy.  No better time.

Maybe every generation has that hope.  There’s something about our generation, though.  Something about promises that weren’t kept.  Something about the future not being what it looked like it should be.  Where did it go?  And we tried to hang onto the dreams and may have even had some luck.  Found those older and wiser to nurture us and lead the charge.  For all those that managed to keep going or never faced serious setbacks, there are probably far more whose lives became overwhelming.   In the midst of trying to plant that creative garden and keep it blooming, we grew up and life happened and the frailty of our own lives was realized in the frailty of our aging parents—or the deaths of friends and kin, or the trauma of war, or financial hardship, or personal trauma wearing a hundred different, dark cloaks.

I stopped writing at one point.  I loved writing.  I loved editing.  I loved books and reading and reading to my children.  I had a huge library in an old farm house.  I had aspirations to be a novelist.  You set things aside when you have to.  You set them aside because life requires you to prioritize and since I wasn’t making any sort of real living with writing and I was so overwhelmed… I let it go.  In the past, I always knew I could start again.  It will always be there, after all.  But I stopped believing I was ever going to get anywhere.  I just didn’t have the energy with three young children, two of which we had adopted from foster care and whose mental illnesses were far beyond anything we were prepared for.  There simply was no time for me, taking care of them, their older sister, my husband, a farm…  I remember very clearly the day I put one of of the novels I’d been working on for years into a backpack, zipped it up, and placed it on the floor of my office.  I closed the door.  I rarely went into the room after that.  It became a place to put things to keep them safe.  I did not write for almost ten years.

In the midst of this, my father, the person that always believed in me and in whose eyes I saw my potential, died.  What you said, about feeling alone in the world?  Though I still had my mom (and we are now closer than we ever were), I remember that feeling.  Like being adrift, without my daddy.  Without the shining beacon of his exquisite blue eyes.  The same year, my husband was diagnosed with a chronic illness that we have done battle with—but can never win—for the last ten years.  And the situation with the kids grew worse.  I now know more about childhood mental illness and psychiatric hospitals than I ever knew.  I know more about kidney disease and dialysis and emergency rooms and doctors and hospitals in general than I ever wanted to know.  I have struggled with how the trauma of living with mentally ill siblings impacts a neurotypical child. I have waited for surgeons to tell me that my husband was not going to die, when he should have several times over. I have fallen on my knees, prayed, cried, wondered how will I ever go on and can I ever reconnect with the thing that gave me such joy.  And then I get up.

I had sacrificed my joy because, in a way, I had sacrificed myself to take care of everything and everyone else.  It seemed necessary.  It was (and sadly, is) an overwhelming situation.   My husband is still ill and we have waited ten years for a kidney transplant.  The troubled small children are now extremely troubled teens.  My in-laws both passed away.  One of my best friends died.  We lost our farm.  My mother, now almost 85, has dementia.  I spend a lot of time on my knees.  Sometimes I cry such buckets of tears that I feel like they would fill an ocean.  But I am coping better since I started writing again about five years ago.  It was as if… as if I woke up.  I was marching along, struggling, carrying the weight of the world when it wasn’t mine to carry at all.  And I had a gift all that time that could have helped me make sense of it.  Because that’s what our writing, our creativity, our dreams are—they are gifts.  And gifts are meant to be cherished.  To be nurtured.  To be shared.  For all the right reasons, I very nearly put out the candle that had been given to me to light the way.

I started small.  I wrote a novella.  It was the best thing I had ever written.  I wrote some short stories.  They are some of my best work, ever.  I started making notes about long lost stories.  I started looking for things and uncovered gems that still sparkled in the darkness.  I wrote things that amused me at first because I was really quite terrified and I didn’t ever, ever want to stop writing again.  I wrote Doctor Who fiction and started editing that book—the one I’d zipped up in the backpack years before.  The one I had been so proud of.  The one that I am currently tearing to shreds, rewriting, and loving every moment of.  I tried to reconnect with people that I knew from Before, but either couldn’t find them or their lives had gone in other directions.  Writing is a solitary process, but having people around you that like to write and who understand and can encourage you is essential.  Having them even like what you write is a bonus.  But it isn’t necessary as long as you can nurture one another.  I made new connections.  I started helping “younger” writers again, something I had always loved (back in the day, I edited a semi-pro SF/F magazine and enjoyed those years).

My journey back hasn’t been meteoric.  With my complicated life, I can’t devote the amount of time I would like to writing.  I go in fits and spurts, staying up late, finding time between Looking back, it was probably the worst choice I could have made because it only added to an already impossibly sad situation.  But I made a promise to myself—and to the One who gave me the gift to begin with.  I will not set it aside again.  I will not put out that light.

Wendy, rekindle the light.  Just a tiny candle in the darkness.  Know that your dreams are a gift and that gift is valuable and precious and worth fighting for.  You gave of yourself and you cared for your mum.  Now, take care of Wendy.  Allow yourself to be happy again.  Allow yourself to experience the joy.  Sometimes we need to give ourselves permission to go on.  Do that.  Go.  Live.  Connect.  Write.  Take one little step forward and don’t be afraid of the shadows.  Where there’s a shadow, there’s a light.  Where there is light, there is hope—and dreams, you know, never die.

Ad Astra, my friend.  And Deep Peace.

After a number of years away from writing, Meg Mac Donald set pen to page again in 2011.  Delightful chaos ensued.  She shares her home in Michigan with her husband, children, a Norwegian Elkhound and a clowder of cats (yes, it actually is bigger on the inside).  She would like to own horses again, sell a novel (how about a series?  Any takers?) and has, sadly, never been to the Moon.  Meg’s sold stories to two previous Darkover anthologies (when she was very young but no less silly).  You can follow her on Twitter @kyrrimar, but she doesn’t really go anywhere.  Her author page on Facebook is rubbish.

Dragons in the Earth
Horses of the Moon, Book 1
by Judith Tarr

Dragons sleep in the earth here.

Claire is barely scraping a living on her friend’s ranch near Tucson, Arizona. She looks after the long-abandoned horse facility, makes occasional attempts to resuscitate her academic career, and pays the bills, more or less, with her skills as an animal communicator. Those skills don’t always let her say the tactful thing to the human with the checkbook. Sometimes she has to tell the truth.

After a particularly unfortunate session, Claire gets one last chance to keep her home and her livelihood. A small herd of horses needs a place to live and a person to care for them.

But these are no ordinary horses. They represent an old, old breed, the rarest in the world, and they protect an ancient and terrible secret. And something is hunting them.

The ranch is a perfect sanctuary. The powers that live on and under and above it can protect the horses–if Claire can control them. But first she has to control her own abilities, and learn to believe in herself.

EPUB MOBI

Buy Dragons in the Earth at BVC Ebookstore

W is for Workspace.

Every author has a preferred workspace. Lucky authors get to work under those conditions on a regular basis. Everyone else figure out ways to make do.

A workspace has many elements.  First, authors have to have some way of setting down their words. Some people work with pen and paper. Others work on computers (including phones, tablets, and anything else that takes typed or tapped input.)  Others record their work, using programs to transcribe the spoken word into a file that can be edited later.

Brainstorming is often done with a variety of office supplies, spreading out inspirational notes on walls or tables.

Any method of capturing words should include a method of backing up data.  Handwritten words can be photocopied and stored offsite or promptly typed into a computer file. Computer files can be backed up to thumb drives, external hard drives, and off-site locations such as cloud storage. Audio tapes can be duplicated and transcribed.  Ideally, each file will be saved in multiple ways in multiple places.

Of course, authors rely on furniture to support them while they’re writing. That furniture must accommodate whatever writing method is used.  Some authors stand at tall desks or walk on treadmills while they work.  Others prefer a more traditional chair (often, one that is ergonomically designed) while sitting at a standard desk.  Some people work in an armchair; recliners can be especially comfortable for people with certain back problems or reduced mobility. Authors who dictate sometimes walk as they work, taking inspiration in a changing landscape.

A workspace includes other elements as well.  Writers often need telephones (to speak with other writers, business partners, and takeout Chinese restaurants for those nights when inspiration is flowing and there really isn’t time to cook. Occasionally, writers need to print documents (including, for some, entire manuscripts), and they may need to scan documents as well.  Sometimes, materials must be sent by mail or other delivery service, and a well-designed workspace includes office supplies to complete those transactions.

Some writers are fortunate enough to have a dedicated home office. Others make do with allocated space elsewhere in a home—a table in a family room corner, a dining room table, a laptop computer that can be stored away when not in use. Still others rely on co-working space outside the home, taking advantage of office machines, electricity, and an absence of distractions.

Every author has a preferred workspace. And for most authors, those preferences change over time as career needs modify, as technology advances, and as financial constraints ebb and flow.

Bottom line, the rational writer is flexible about workspace.  If a computer has run out of power, the rational writer switches to writing words in ink on paper. If a home office doubles as a guest room, the rational writer stows away writing supplies in a different location, ready to snatch a few moments of creative time if the possibility arises.

Those disruptions can actually be a positive thing. While changes in routine can be unnerving, they can also help the brain to break out of ruts.  Authors can find inspiration in new surroundings. They might enjoy brainstorms as they physically manipulate novel objects—paper, pens, recording devices.

Changes don’t need to be permanent.  A single walk, taken with a notepad and pen in hand, might shake free new ideas for a particularly stubborn story. Reclining in a family room chair might provide inspiration for a new book’s outline.

So? What about you? What is your current workspace? What is your ideal one? What barriers are keeping you from working in your ideal workspace?  Can you remove any of those barriers today?

(This is the thirty-seventh installment of Dice Tales, an ongoing series of posts about RPGs as storytelling.)

***

The best-laid plans of mice and GMs oft go astray.

I’ve spent a bunch of posts over the last few months talking about game planning. How I approach it, what tricks I use to pace and steer the game, the units I break my planning up into, the considerations I try to keep in mind as I’m doing all of this . . . so now let’s talk about what happens when my players blow all those plans right out of the water.

It isn’t a purely GM-side issue. I’ve definitely gone into game sessions as a player thinking “I’ll talk to X, and then I’ll convince Y to help me with that thing I’m doing, and then” — only to have little or none of that fall out as planned, or even get off the starting blocks. Because remember: RPGs are collaborative. No one person controls the whole thing, which means the story may at any time hang a screeching turn around a corner you didn’t even see coming.

This can take any number of forms. I’d recently promised my husband a scene outside of game time with an NPC ally of his, because my husband had to leave the previous session early to go pick up my mother (who was staying with us); I expected it to be a nice bit of personal RP, exploring and strengthening the bonds of friendship between those two characters. Instead my husband’s PC dropped the most destructive bombshell he possibly could have, sending the NPC into a fury that not only ended that conversation, but wound up eating the entire following session. Other times you plan for a big combat, only to have the players pull some trick out of their ears that ends the whole thing in the second round, or go off in a direction that bypasses the fight entirely. When my husband and I ran a Dragon Age game, we spent some time trying to figure out how to make a highly suspicious-looking NPC seem innocuous. Nothing we came up with was plausible — it would only cement the players’ conviction that he was sketchy — so finally we said, screw it; let’s just make it obvious that there’s more to this guy than the public story accounts for. Result? They spent three-quarters of the campaign ignoring him. Because clearly anybody with a blinking neon sign over their head saying “INVESTIGATE ME” is a red herring, right?

It’s proverbial in gaming: players will always think of a tactic the GM didn’t anticipate, fail to accept the bait dangled in front of them, go haring off after their personal plots instead of addressing the larger issue, and otherwise derail your carefully-crafted plans. This is true whether you’re a GM, or a player being sent off-course by the GM or the person at your side.

So what do you do when that happens?

It depends a lot on the type of derailment, but to start with, that word right there gives you a hint. All the way back in the second post of this series, I talked about “railroading” as a negative thing; that’s what happens when someone (usually the GM, but honestly, it can be a player, too) refuses to accept any deviation from the narrative they have planned. Answer Number One is, don’t lay down too much track. Be adaptable; follow the flow. Otherwise you’re like that person — we all know at least one example of that person, I suspect — who has a thing they’re going to contribute to the conversation, and by god they will contribute it even if the conversation has long since moved onward and the anecdote is no longer relevant to the topic at hand. Take your cues from the context, and work with it instead of against it.

In some cases this may just mean a temporary delay. You were going to ask an NPC a question, but when you showed up they were dealing with another problem and wanted your help. You could say “I won’t help you until you talk about something completely unrelated” . . . but is that a good idea? You’re probably better off helping, then voicing your query when there’s an opening. (Same as in a real conversation.) Maybe it’s later that scene; maybe it’s a few scenes later, or even next session. This happens to me a lot as a GM, to the point where I regularly expect that whatever I’ve got planned for a session, some of it will get kicked down the road. Doesn’t happen every time, but expecting it means I don’t try to cut things short just to pack everything in. (This approach, of course, only works for ongoing campaigns with a fair bit of time flexibility. If you’re running a three-hour convention one-shot, or everybody has to leave at 4 p.m. and you won’t have another session for a month and you’re in the middle of a thrilling bit of tension, you may need to prod things forward in order to reach a good conclusion in the time allotted.)

Other times, though, it means letting go of your plans entirely. You were going to challenge your arch-nemesis to a public duel, but an opportunity came up to politically ruin them instead, and the proposal for how to do that is really cool. This requires you to keep enough perspective to see when the alternative is worth it, which can be hard when Idea A is your baby and Idea B is somebody else’s, but maintaining that perspective makes you a better gamer. Or maybe there’s no ready alternative; it’s just that your plan hinged on succeeding at a particular thing, and the dice flat-out didn’t cooperate. You came up short; you can’t try again; you have to figure out something else, and deal with the fallout of the first attempt going awry.

A good playing group will leave room for the flexibility required there. You’ll be able to fail forward, or incorporate the change without chucking the whole plot out entirely, or whatever. If you need something to remain fixed, at least try to engineer it in such a fashion that the fixity is plausible and justified. Don’t put the Big Bad in front of the PCs and then tell your players they’re not allowed to attack him because your plot doesn’t call for him to die yet; have him show up in a dream, or when the PCs are unarmed, or when he’s so surrounded by minions that they can’t get close enough to do anything before he escapes. Or else put him there, let the players have a fair shot, and be ready to roll onward if your villain dies in the third session.