Category Archives: D.B. Jackson

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Writing-Tip Wednesday: My Favorite Reference Books

Last week’s Writing-Tip Wednesday post was about the computer apps I use most when researching, outlining, and writing books and stories. As promised, this week I want to look at what are probably  the most important writing tools I have: my reference books.

I use the internet a great deal when I’m writing. I look up a ton of stuff every day. But to my mind, there is no replacement for having the physical books, for being able to thumb through an index, or flip through pages on our way to the topic we’re after only to discover some tidbit of information we hadn’t known we wanted until the instant we found it.

So with that in mind, here are the books I use most often and recommend most enthusiastically.

Let’s start with the basics. Every writer should have a good dictionary and thesaurus at hand all the time. My dictionary of choice is Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition. My main reason for using it, beyond the fact that it is comprehensive and widely accepted, is that for every entry it gives the date when the word first entered the popular lexicon. That is invaluable for authors who write in historical periods or fantasy analogues to historical eras, and who wish to eliminate anachronistic words and phrases from their books.

My thesaurus of choice is Roget’s International Thesaurus (6th ed.). This is the really big one – over 1200 pages. It is organized conceptually, by category of word, with an alphabetical index. The advantage of this is that if we look up a word like “total” we get a lengthy listing of possible meanings. Do we want a synonym for “total” that means “amount” (noun) or “compute” (verb) or “whole” (adjective)?

The other general writing reference I use is The Chicago Manual of Style, which is the industry standard for all matters relating to grammar, punctuation, and usage. I have a slightly older edition. I believe the most current is the 18th.

Another word oriented reference I have and love is English Through the Ages, which further refines the historical dating of words. It has an extensive index in the back that distinguishes among different meanings of words. Take the word “spleen”: The body part was named before the 1300s, but “spleen” was not used as a synonym for “temper” until the 1600s. I love tidbits like that.

I write fantasy, and so I am a big fan of the Scott Cunningham books on magic. Titles on my shelves include: The Complete Books of Incense, Oils and Brews; Cunningham’s Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs; Cunningham’s Encyclopedia of Crystal, Gem, and Metal Magic; Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner; Earth Power: Techniques of Natural Magic; and Earth, Air, Fire, and Water: More Techniques of Natural Magic. I will admit that Cunningham offers his books as guides for people who actually believe in the various sorts of supernatural techniques and objects he describes. I don’t. But I find the books indispensable as reference guides.

I also write mysteries into my stories and books, and have therefore relied heavily on the Writer’s Digest “Howdunit” series of books on crime and policing. These books are designed specifically for writers, and so they offer incredibly valuable information in a format that is easily digestible. They are made to be reference books. Titles in my collection include the following: Police Procedural (investigative procedures); Scene of the Crime (crime scene techniques); Cause of Death (forensics); Body Trauma (wounds and injuries); Deadly Doses (on poisons); Just the Facts, Ma’am (general investigative techniques); and Howdunit: How Crimes Are Committed and Solved. These are great books. Highly recommended.

I have several books on magical creatures and demons, all of them in encyclopedia format. Two of them are put out by W.W. Norton and written/edited by Carol Rose: Spirits, Fairies, Leprechauns, and Goblins and Giants, Monsters, and Dragons. I also have Demons and Demonology, by Rosemary Ellen Guiley (Checkmark Books); and The Element Encyclopedia of Magical Creatures, by John and Caitlin Matthews (Sterling Publishing).

I write about castles with some frequency and do my best to get all my architectural terminology right. I actually use two kids books on castles as my primary references: Castle, by David Macauley, and Castle: Cross Sections, by Stephen Biesty. I have supplemented these two books with small books that I have picked up at just about every castle I have ever visited while in Wales, Ireland, England, etc. These are basically self-guided tour brochures that give terminology and history and offer illustrations. Almost any castle gift shop will have one.

Another book I love is called What’s What: A Visual Glossary of Everyday Objects – From Paper Clips to Passenger Ships (edited by Reginald Bragonier, Jr. and David Fisher, Ballantine Books). This book gives you the name of every part of hundreds upon hundreds of objects, vehicles, architectural features, and more. It is out of print (as are many of the titles I have listed in this post) but can be found on used book sites, Ebay, etc.

I could go on, of course. I have dozens of books about the Revolutionary Era, all sorts of field guides, a book about animal tracking, books about baseball and history and weapons, about ancient Scotland and Ireland and Peru and Greece, about Civil War and World War II battles. I could go on and on. There is no rule for collecting reference books except to keep your eyes open. The bargain rack at your local Barnes and Noble can be a great place to collect helpful titles. So can flea markets and library sales. As I say, most of the titles I’ve shared with you here are out of print. But with a bit of legwork and digging you can find them and begin your own collection.

Best of luck, and keep writing!

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Not at all Writing Related

Monday Musings: Thinking of My Dad on Father’s Day

I’ve been trying to figure out how to write about my Dad for today’s post, and I find myself struggling.

I’m surprised, because it’s not for a lack of affection or great stories. I loved my father and I miss him all the time. I hear his voice and laughter in my head every day – bits of advice that remain relevant, remembered jokes that still make me smile, a strange surety – utterly at odds with my well-practiced agnosticism – that he sees my daughters growing up and is as proud of them as I am.

There’s a ton I could write, but everything I think of feels trite and well-worn. I’m sure I’ve said all of it before in Facebook posts and previous blog entries. And yet…

My father was born in 1919, lived through the Great Depression, lost a brother to World War II, married my mother half a year after V-E day (almost to the day). He supported Wendell Wilkie in the Presidential election of 1940 (although he would have been too young by a month to vote) and very nearly lost my mother when he confessed this to her before their wedding. Never again did he vote for a Republican for President.

He was caring and generous, devoted to his family and friends. He loved a crass joke, but he took great pride in being gentlemanly – a product of his upbringing. My grandmother demanded no less of both her sons, just as my dad demanded no less of my brothers and me. I remember in high school he and I drove my girlfriend back to her home – I sat up front and she was in back. We pulled up to her house, and he turned around and said, “M____, you stay right there until he gets your door for you and walks you in.” Which, of course, I scrambled to do.

He loved sports, and he especially loved watching sports with his kids. I was the youngest sibling by far, and so, long after my older brothers and sister had left for college and life beyond, I still lived at home. I had six years “alone” with my parents – a mixed blessing at the time, a treasure trove of memories now. Dad and I would watch some sort of game almost every weekend: football, hockey, basketball, tennis, golf, and, our favorite, baseball. We would guess what play was coming and then, after, talk about why we were right and the managers were wrong. Sometimes we rooted together. Often, if I got to the television first, he would ask me, “Who are you rooting for?”

“Team A.”

“Okay, I’m rooting for Team B.” Just because.

Like my mom, Dad, through his example, taught me so much about what it means to be a parent. The phrase has gone out of style, but it was truly apt in this case: He was the product of a “broken marriage.” My grandfather was a philanderer. Egotistical, self-centered, more interested in his professional status than his personal integrity, he left my grandmother when Dad was eleven years old. Almost as soon as the divorce was finalized, he married his (wealthy) mistress. Soon after, Dad went to visit his father and new stepmother. He tried to greet my grandfather with a hug, but grandpa stopped him at arm’s length and said, “You’re old enough now that I think we should greet each other with a handshake.”

Years later, Dad would tell me that story, adding, “I knew that I would be a good father, because I knew from my father all the things not to do.”

Dad was affectionate – demonstrably so. He hugged and kissed all his children. He doted on my mother. He cried at movies and was perfectly willing to put his sentimentality on full display. Without possessing the modern lexicon, he understood instinctively that modeling masculinity and strength for his sons meant being gentle and loving, honorable and generous, supportive and wise. In this regard, he was an anachronism for his generation.

When my mom got sick in the early 1990s, my father threw all his passion and energy into caring for her. Her illness consumed him. We always thought that Dad would live forever – his mother, my Gram, lived to ninety-one. His father lived to be 103. But after Mom died, Dad had nothing left. Two months after her funeral, he was diagnosed with Leukemia. He died a year later.

I have no trouble celebrating Mother’s Day and basking in memories of my Mom. For reasons I can’t explain, Father’s Day is much harder. Maybe because it’s a day I should be able to share with him and can’t.

I miss you, Papa. I wish there was a game on.

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Writing

Writing-Tip Wednesday: My Favorite Computer Applications

A few weeks ago, in response to another plea on my part for suggestions of things you all would like to see covered in these Writing-Tip Wednesday posts, someone mentioned that they would appreciate my take on various writer tools and resources. This reader had in mind computer applications and the like, and I will cover a few of those today. But I also thought of book resources that I draw upon regularly, and that will be the topic next week’s post.

For this week, let’s begin with a couple of basics. The app on my computer that I use the most – and I mean by a long shot; it’s not even close – is my word processing software. I have always hated Microsoft Word. Always, always, always. And my antipathy for the program goes far beyond my visceral disdain for Clippy. I simply don’t like the way Word looks, the way it works, the way it “feels” when I’m writing. Early on, back when computers still had a sheen of novelty, I used WordPerfect and loved it. Today, I use a word processing software that is, to my mind, the closest thing to WordPerfect that one can find. It’s called Nisus Writer Pro. It has all the things you’d want a word processing app to have – including a dictionary and thesaurus and all the formatting bells and whistles. It saves files in Rich Text Format, but can also save them as .docs to be Microsoft compatible, and exports them as .pdfs to facilitate document sharing. It has Track Changes and Comments and both features are fully compatible with Word, so you can edit with others across platforms.

“How much does it cost?” you ask. This is the amazing part. It’s $65.00 new. The one catch is, it’s only available for Mac users. Sorry. But if you are a Mac user interested in an affordable, professional-level word processing app, this is the one for you.

My other favorite writing app is Scrivener. Scrivener is made by Literature and Latte and it sells for $49. It started as a Mac-only program, but it now comes in a Windows version as well. Same price.

Scrivener is like that amazing Swiss Army Knife you have that has twenty-seven gadgets on it. Chances are, you might only use seven or eight of them, but it’s nice to know that they’re all there if you need them. I use Scrivener for a few things, but I am fully aware that I have barely scratched the surface as to its capabilities. I tend to use it as an organizational tool, a place in which to create and store character sketches, setting descriptions, and general documents that serve as my conceptual framework for each book. I store all of my research in Scrivener – the app allows me to import web pages so that I don’t have to go hunting for them once I’ve found them.

I don’t use the Scrivener word processing feature because I’m picky and I like the look and feel of Nisus Writer Pro. But with Scrivener you can outline your book, write it, and then export it into various formats, including .doc, .rtf, .pdf, OpenOffice, epub, and Kindle format. Better still, you can write the book as a single document, OR you can write each chapter, or even each scene as a separate file. The advantage of that approach is that Scrivener then allows you to shuffle files around until you have found the perfect structure for your project. Pretty cool.

I also use Pages, the word processing app that comes with Mac computers. I don’t think much of it as a straight word processor, but I use it for my newsletter because its graphic features are incredibly easy to use. That would probably be the one place where Nisus falls flat. I know there are fairly strong graphic features in Nisus Writer Pro, but I have never found them intuitive or easy to use. Pages is weak in other ways, but it does make a nice newsletter (or party invitation, or flyer, or… etc.). And it interfaces seamlessly with iPhoto, allowing me to import images of my photographs and book jackets with ease.

As a bonus addition to this post, I would like to recommend an app to the photographers out there. I shoot in RAW format and I used to process my photographs with Adobe Lightroom. Then Adobe went to its monthly subscription payment structure, which totally pissed me off. So I did some research and settled on a new RAW image processor: DxO PhotoLab. I could devote an entire post to describing all that this app does, and perhaps at some point I will. For now, suffice it to say that there is literally nothing I want to do with my photos that I can’t do with PhotoLab. DxO has a comprehensive library of profiles that enable the app to automatically make camera and lens specific adjustments to each image. It literally has a profile for every combination of camera and lens made currently or in the past by most major manufacturers. It is as powerful as Lightroom, and in many ways far better. (For instance, I found that Lightroom washed the color out of my RAW images, forcing me to push the vibrancy and saturation in processing more than I would have liked. PhotoLab does a much better job of preserving the true color of the captured image.) It is not expensive as these things go – $129 for the basic program. $189 for a suite that includes two other useful apps.

So there you go. These are the creative programs I use most. I hope you find them helpful, too. Next week, my favorite book resources for writers!

Keep writing!

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Writing

Monday Musings: Challenging Ourselves

I will admit that my first impulse for this Monday Musings post was to write about something other than race and politics. Not because those things aren’t still on my mind. They consume me. But rather because I was thinking, “I’ve written about White privilege two weeks in a row. I don’t want to seem like I’m harping on it.” [Here are links to my post from two weeks ago and last week.]

My next thought, right after that one, was, “Why the hell not?”

College Town Protest March, David B. CoeThis past Friday our little college town had a peaceful protest march followed by a rally on the college quad. It was a terrific event: somber, but also uplifting. Several people spoke, including my wife, who is provost of the university. Most of the speakers were Black; Nancy is not. And her message was directed at the many White allies who were in attendance. Showing up is great, she said. But it’s not enough. We who consider ourselves allies of those fighting for racial justice, but who also carry enormous privilege, have to challenge ourselves to act, to fight every day for a better world. And she, in turn, challenged us. Think of things you can do. Commit yourselves.

She and I have been making donations to organizations that fight for racial justice. We are committed to voting, to supporting candidates who will help put an end to systemic racism. We have reached out to our Black friends to make sure they’re doing all right. We are more than willing to have difficult conversations with family and friends. We would be willing to have those conversations with our daughters as well, but, frankly, we have more to learn from them than they have to learn from us.

But after those things, I found myself wondering in response to Nancy’s challenge, what else I could do? The answer came to me pretty quickly; it should be obvious to anyone who knows me.

I write.

That’s what I do.

I’m not saying that race and racial politics will be the subject of every Monday post for the rest of time. But one of the great problems with American politics is that we as a nation have no attention span at all. We become obsessed with the issue of the day, the tragedy of the week – a mass shooting prompts calls for serious conversations about gun control. Until the next police shooting exposes for the thousandth time the need for a meaningful conversation about race. Until the next ridiculous or outrageous Tweet from the Infant-In-Chief prompts renewed obsession with the campaign and the latest polling numbers. Until a new spike in Covid-19 cases reminds us of the devastating toll the virus is exacting. Rinse, repeat. Rinse, repeat. Rinse, repeat.

My thoughts about this post are symptomatic of that short attention span. Two weeks in a row writing about race? Yikes! Time for another post about my five favorite rock ‘n roll albums.

And more to the point, that short attention span is an expression of privilege. I have the luxury of being able to turn away from the conversation about systemic racism if I want to, because I’m White. Because I don’t have to worry that my next traffic stop could prove fatal. Because while the unemployment rate among my people is high, it’s not at 16.8%, as it is for Blacks. Because my health care is affordable and readily available.

I can eventually look away after the next shooting sparks a new debate on guns, because while gun violence should concern all of us, Blacks are (according to the Giffords Law Center) ten times – TEN TIMES – more likely than Whites to be murdered with a firearm.

I can be distracted from the pandemic, because while Whites get the disease and die from it, preliminary data indicates that we are proportionally less likely to get sick than are Blacks, and we are far less likely to die from the illness than are Blacks and Latinos.

We in the White community can afford to lose interest, to get distracted, to move on to other issues. But we, as White allies in the struggle for racial justice, can’t. Just this weekend in Atlanta, Rayshard Brooks was shot and killed by Atlanta police in an incident that began with him sleeping in his car. I guarantee you, that is a sentence that has never been written about a white man.

And so, yes, I am writing about race again. Because once we open our eyes to the prevalence of bias and bigotry and harmful stereotypes (and it is another expression of lifelong privilege that we have the choice of whether or not to do this) we can find them everywhere. The only way to avoid them is to ignore them, or to be utterly oblivious. Race creeps into everything. The next time you’re watching TV, pay close attention to the commercials. Look at how race is treated. Watch for the racial sub-narratives. Be attuned to the archetypes. Once you start to see them, you can’t stop. Listen to sports commentary (if and when we ever get to watch sports again). Pay attention to the adjectives used to describe White and Black players. How many times are Whites referred to as “hard workers”? How many times is Black success credited to “natural athletic ability”?

“Why,” we hear people ask, “do they have to make everything about race?”

And the answer is, because people of color in this country – and throughout much of the world – inhabit a different reality from the one we Whites live in. In their world, racism is omnipresent. It is unavoidable. It is the knee on the neck. Being an ally means looking and seeing, listening and hearing, discussing and speaking out. It means answering my wife’s challenge by pushing ourselves outside of comfort and complacency, and committing ourselves.

And for me, it means writing.

Wishing you a wonderful week.

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Writing

Writing-Tip Wednesday: Special Guest, Alma Alexander!

Today, I welcome my friend Alma Alexander to the blog to talk about her new novel, The Second Star. She has lots to say about the book, about writing in general, and about advice for beginning writers. Please welcome her to the site!

*****

The Second Star, by Alma Alexander1. As we begin, please tell us about The Second Star. What is it about? What are its major themes?

The Second Star tells the story of the crew of Earth’s first starship, lost for 200 years, found and returned home, still alive but badly damaged by the experience. As one of my characters said – six people went out to teh stars; more than 70 fractured souls returned.

There are several LARGE themes in here.

It’s a novel about the big eternal questions – about who or what God is; about our own immortal souls and their ‘salvation’; what it really means to be human; and whether it is possible to go out to where the monsters dwell and expect to come home again unchanged.

In the two centuries that have passed on the ground since my starship originally departed, the world didn’t stand still.

Global warming has affected the world dramatically (but it is background, here, and is not a major factor in the unfolding of events except for details embroidered in – like the fact that air travel is now a rare event, for instance). There have been historical
developments which have shaped the foundations of the ‘new’ world, two centuries hence. Some of those changes turned us backward as well as forward – and my tech is commensurate with that – I am not portraying full-on high-tech utopia here.

The six rescued crew members have literally aged only a handful of years in the duration of those two centuries, and when they are plunged back into their world… For the people on the ground – they’ve been the frogs in the pot all along, a pot which was simmering so that they didn’t notice the rise in temperature. For the returned ship crew, they’re very much frogs who have been thrust into boiling water without warning. For them, things HAVE changed. They have returned home, to the home world… but have they? Can they? That’s a huge theme thread running through the story – can you ever really ‘come home’ again?

Especially so if you return after a major and chaotic ‘first contact’ situation, a traumatic event for both the humans and the alien, resulting in a psychological crash involving the splintering into many different personalities. All of my characters return as multiples of
themselves. And dealing with that – and with the shattering aftereffects of that alien encounter – is the bones of the story.

It deals with science, and also with faith – about the things we hold holy, and the reasons we believe those things, and what happens if the rock we thought we were standing on crumbles beneath out feet.

It’s a big book. There’s a lot in it.

2. The story resonates so powerfully with what our world has been through in recent months — quarantines, fears of contagion. To what degree did you respond to events, and to what degree did you anticipate them?

The story was long written by the time the pandemic came roaring in. It might well be read differently by readers who have lived through/are living through quarantine conditions… but such “quarantine” as occurs in the book was neither a response to nor an
anticipation of what the year 2020 brought to our doorstep. In retrospect, if the thing wasn’t already done and imminent in terms of release… if I were writing it RIGHT NOW… it is entirely possible that I would have at least referenced the quarantine in terms of 2020, in this story’s distant past. As it is, I have to leave it to readers to do the necessary extrapolation.

3. Your lead character is, essentially, a a psychologist, and your narrative does a pretty deep dive into Dissociative Identity Disorder (aka Multiple Personality Disorder). Are you trained in psychology? What sort of research did you do as you prepared to write this?

I am not a trained psychologist but I AM a trained scientist, with a Master’s degree in Molecular Biology. I’ve already used that background in a much more focused manner, in my Were Chronicles books, where I posit an entirely plausible biological basis for Were
creatures and how they exist and what happens (genetically) to them as they change into their animal avatars. For Second Star, I did my usual research – but I probably took liberties with the subject matter because in our reality the so-called Multiple Personality Disorder arises from childhood trauma, abusive situations, a way to survive the unsurvivable. There is a precipitating event in my story, to be sure, but in THIS reality the precipitating event is both psychological and physical, in a very real sense. What that meant was that the syndrome would function in ways different from what current research into the area posited. I certainly don’t claim to be an authority – but I read up on a fascinating syndrome and then gave it the kind of shape thatmy story needed. In other words, if I may, Dammit Jim, I’m a storyteller not a psychologist…

4. From a craft perspective, what was the greatest challenge you faced while writing The Second Star, and how did you address it?

My six crewmembers from the lost-and-returned starship each came back carrying different fragments of personality – fragments which were just as real and ‘coherent’ as humans as their original personality might have been. The difficulty was that I was working in a written medium and all I had to work with was the words on a page – I could not rely on visual cues (except as described in those words, and I couldn’t do too much of THAT) – which meant that the personality ‘changes’ had to rely on changes of ‘voice’, as rendered through the written word. Sometimes writers do get envious of the ability of visual media to convey subtle changes through minor alterations of posture, through expression of face and eyes, through an actual AUDIBLE spoken voice which can ‘change’ as required – we have none of those luxuries, we rise or fall by power of word (and the reader’s imagination) alone. Doing a multiple personality book is HARD. Starting with keeping track of which personality is speaking at any given time, and adjusting voice and vocabulary for that personality, to trusting the reader, in the end, to ‘hear’ spoken words in the voice that you are trying to paint, and to differentiate – sometimes several times in the space of a single extended dialogue scene – between different personalities manifesting *in the same character*. As in, the reader knows that the character is speaking – there is only one mouth, only one set o f vocal cords, but they HAVE to hear the moment when one personalty flips into another, to hear that changed happen. Everything depends on that. It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever attempted to do in the written word…

5. You have written a broad spectrum of speculative fiction over the course of your career, and have made a name for yourself as a fantasy writer. Why this book at this time? Is this turn into more science fiction-based story telling a one-off, or do you plan to do more of this going forward?

Fantasy is still my primary milieu, as it were, but although this is my first serious ‘science fiction’ novel that doesn’t mean I haven’t dipped my toe in the genre before.

I did a science fantasy, so to speak, trilogy that is my Were Chronicles books (Random, Wolf, and Shifter) which posits a valid genetic basis for the existence and function of Were creatures in our universe; I did a science fiction novel with a humorous turn,
where time traveling androids take an entire SF con on a joyride to the moon (“AbductiCon”) – it’s my love letter to fandom and to conventions,I am something of a polymath when it comes to that. I am already in the planning stages of another more purely ‘science fiction’ novel, so The Second Star is probably not the last of its
kind. Watch my website for any further announcements…

6. In what ways has your artistic life changed with social-distancing, stay-at-home, and the rest? Has it impacted your creative process? Your output?

Becoming a primary caretaker of two loved family members who are high(er) risk for the Covid-19 scourge does take up a lot of time. I’m the chauffeur, I’m the grocery shopper, I’m everything that is necessary, and often that simply means shelving my ‘work’ and doing
whatever I need to do to fulfill my responsibilities there.

I’ve lost income – people who are themselves cash-strapped are less likely to seek out editorial work, for instance, which is what I do as a professional service, and I’ve also lost several people from my Patreon as they reduce non-essential spending in a time of uncertain income of their own. I’m also becoming prone to what has become known as the Pandemic Procrastination syndrome, and I find myself simply postponing things I have to do because there simply doesn’t seem to be any tearing hurry to do them right now. I have joined up with social media stuff that keeps me in touch with my tribe (there’s a ‘convention’ going on in Facebook – I don’t know I think it started in March sometime – and it’s still going strong – it’s a blast). Keeping in touch with friends through the computer screen is becoming New Normal, but maybe one day the real cons will return and we can all meet again. In the meantime…it’s a tough time.

7. Can you offer any advice to authors just starting their careers at this difficult time?

A jaded advice giver once said, “if there’s anything else that you want to be besides a writer… be that.” It’s not an easy choice. But as I tell people – if you don’t want to be a writer nobody can help you; if you do want to be a writer nobody can stop you. Things have slowed down but they have not stopped and neither should your vocation, if you truly have it. Write, not because you expect fame or fortune, but because you have to – listen to the voices inside your heart and your head – tell the stories that want to be told. Even if
the world ends tomorrow, those stories are important.

But don’t take the easy shortcuts. Don’t “publish” stuff that should never have been published, just because you can. If you do, make sure it’s edited, and that you present the best possible product that you are able to present. And do understand that when people don’t like your offering – and if nobody has ever disliked it you aren’t being read by enough people – they aren’t out to destroy YOU. Never forget that there is no such thing as universal acclaim. Write something else. Write something better. There is no way out except through – and if you make it through the thickets and the chasms and the booby traps I’ll see you on the other side.

*****

Alma (A.D.) Alexander’s life so far has prepared her very well for her chosen career. She was born in a country which no longer exists on the maps, has lived and worked in seven countries on four continents (and in cyberspace!), has climbed mountains, dived in coral reefs, flown small planes, swum with dolphins, touched two-thousand-year-old tiles in a gate out of Babylon. She is a novelist, anthologist and short story writer who currently shares her life between the Pacific Northwest of the USA (where she lives with her husband and two cats) and the wonderful fantasy worlds of her own imagination. Find out more about Alma:

Website (www.AlmaAlexander.org)

Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/AuthorAlmaAlexander/)

Twitter (https://twitter.com/AlmaAlexander)

Patreon page (https://www.patreon.com/AlmaAlexander)

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe

Monday Musings: On Race, Privilege, and Uncomfortable Conversations

As I white progressive, I have struggled with how to write this post. I know that the white progressives in my audience will struggle to read and process it. All of this, I believe, is to the good.

This past week, as I discussed with my adult children the protests taking place in cities across the country, my older daughter sent me an article called “I, Racist,” written by John Metta back in 2015. This is an extraordinary piece and I urge you to read it right now, before continuing with my post. Seriously, read the article. We’ll wait.

Much of what follows here is my working through of Metta’s piece – the thoughts reflected here are more his than mine. There are four main points to Metta’s argument that strike me as central to all discussions of race in America.

First, “Black people think in terms of we because [they] live in a society where the social and political structures interact with [them] as Black people. White people do not think in terms of we. White people have the privilege to interact with the social and political structures of our society as individuals.”

Second, “The entire discussion of race in America centers around the protection of White feelings.”

Third, “the reality of America is that White people are fundamentally good, and so when a white person commits a crime, it is a sign that they, as an individual, are bad…. People of color, especially Black people… are seen as fundamentally bad.”

And finally, perhaps most important: “White people, every single one of [us], are complicit in this racism because [we] benefit directly from it.”

Last week, my Monday Musings post focused on White privilege, and I suppose this week’s does as well. The truth is, I am thinking all of this through as I write, so forgive me if this comes across as a work in progress rather than as something more finished. I know better than to claim that my thoughts on race and Metta’s essay are well-organized or comprehensive. Like so many of us right now, I am processing, figuring things out, asking myself questions. The fact is, Metta’s observations make for uncomfortable reading for Whites because they are so very hard to refute. But that is also the source of the article’s power and value.

Let’s start with points one and two. Once we accept the notion that Blacks think in terms of “we” while Whites enjoy the luxury of interacting with the world as individuals, we begin to understand how the conversation about race in America has failed so utterly to move our society forward. As Metta points out, Whites take such conversations personally. We see in the notion of systemic racism an attack on ourselves – which leads us to turn conversations about race into conversations about our bruised feelings. White privilege is by definition systemic. It filters into every element of our lives – our health, our shelter, our our finances, our relationships with institutions and their representatives (including police), and on and on.

And, I have to say, most of the progressive Whites I know are open to conversations about privilege and its prevalence. To a point. The problem comes when we turn to the notion of complicity. As Metta puts it, we Whites are unable to “differentiate [our] participation within a racist system” from accusations of being racists ourselves. We conflate the two, turn the conversation to our sense of being attacked and accused, and therefore shut down the discussion entirely. I know this pattern. I have too often gone down that path myself.

Hearing that we are complicit in a racist society hurts. No doubt. Our first response is to deny, to draw a clear line distinguishing ourselves from defenders of the the Confederate Flag, from the idiots who call 911 on people of color in parks and stores and “nice” (re. White) neighborhoods, from those who assault and murder. Defensiveness, though, helps no one, and it certainly doesn’t change reality.

In fact, I would argue this: If only we Whites could STOP taking these conversations personally, if only we could back away from our individual privilege and begin to look at our world and society as part of a larger “we” instead of always as “I, me, my” – in other words, if we could talk about the issues more like Metta argues that Blacks do – we might find that conversations about race progress far more smoothly. Our privilege is actually no privilege at all. It hurts us. It cripples our society. It hurts the people of color around us.

Recently, I happened upon a brief (one minute long), wonderful video that first came out in 2016 featuring educator and activist Jane Elliott. She is White, speaking to an auditorium filled with White people, and she asks them to stand if they would be willing to trade places with Black people in America. Not one person stands up. She asks a second time. No one. And then she tells them the obvious: that they know there is a racial problem in America, and they are willing to accept its consequences for others, but not for themselves. That is privilege.

Only when we can accept that our society is inherently racist, that we as Whites benefit every day, in every way, from that racism – only then can we start to improve our country for all Americans. It’s not enough to differentiate ourselves from the conspicuous racists we see on TV and read about in the headlines. It’s not enough to say “but my heart is in the right place,” even if it is. We have to be willing to do more – something my daughters have been telling me for some time now. We have to donate to organizations that support those who are fighting racism. We have to stand up and say to our fellow Whites, “Open your eyes and ears – see what is happening, listen to the people who live this racist reality every day.” And instead of saying, “I am better than those other racists because I have not done those terrible things,” we have to say, “From this day forward, I will be better than I have been, and here is how.”

Wishing you all a peaceful week.

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Writing

Writing-Tip Wednesday: “A Feat of Association”

Sometimes, originality lies not in the absolute novelty of what we come up with, but rather in the connections we make between two or more disparate influences.

One of my favorite musicals of all time is West Side Story. The music is gorgeous, the story line heartrending, the action poignant, gripping, deliciously tragic. And of course, there is a reason the story works so well. It is Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet set in 1950s New York City, with music and dancing added in. In place of family rivalry, we have gang violence. In place of the friar, we have Doc, the drugstore owner. In place of blades we have a pistol. But the story is just the same.

The legendary Japanese film director, Akira Kurosawa, used MacBeth as the inspiration for Throne of Blood, which he set in 16th century Japan. Later in his career, he would use King Lear as the creative inspiration for Ran, also set in Japan’s feudal period.

For those who prefer Disney films to foreign films, The Lion King is, essentially, Hamlet. Look it up.

Shakespeare, of course, is not the only source of adaptive creativity. Alex Bledsoe is a friend of mine and a fantastic writer. His Dark Jenny series is a fantasy/noir treatment of the King Arthur legends. “Jenny” is Guinevere. I recommend the books.

I have written about ideas before in this Writing-Tip Wednesday feature, and it seems I’m doing so again today. They are, as I have said, our bread and butter, the currency in which we do business. And I suppose I am focusing this time on adaptations because I have an idea for a new project, something utterly different from anything I’ve written before.

First of all, this new project is going to be science fiction rather than fantasy. If I had to classify it further, I would call it space opera. Why am I taking this on? I honestly couldn’t give you a reason beyond the obvious and most simple: When the story came to me – when I first imagined my narrative framework and my lead characters – it was in the form of an SF story. There were planets and interstellar ships and nebulas and cool shit like that. Who was I to argue?

Second, this project will take as its inspiration a set of classic books by one of my favorite authors. I am not ready to say who, or which books. I’ll just say that when the idea hit me, these books and the basic outlines of their plots came with it. I couldn’t tell you why. So now I’m reading. I’ll be reading for a while, since I envision a trilogy. And that’s fine, because I’m currently in the middle of writing another project.

This is supposed to be a writing-tip post, and so allow me to offer some advice in this regard: Coming up with new ideas is not always easy, and I have seen too many young writers beating themselves up because they think their idea for a book or story is too close to something else that has been done. Originality is important, no doubt. And I would certainly never tell any writer to copy the work of another. But to quote Robert Frost (who said this, or a form of it, more than once), “An idea is a feat of association.” Sometimes, originality lies not in the absolute novelty of what we come up with, but rather in the connections we make between two or more disparate influences.

My new idea is, on the face of it, not anything new. Space opera has been done a thousand and one times before. And obviously, if I am inspired by a work (or set of works) of classic literature, my narrative structure is not exactly breaking new ground, either. But I am certain that no one has thought to put these two elements together in this way. THAT is the originality, the novelty. That is what has me so jazzed about my “feat of association.”

Stay tuned.

And keep writing.

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Not at all Writing Related

Monday Musings: A True Story of Privilege

I can’t shed my privilege – it is part and parcel of who and what I am, as impossible to separate as chewed gum wadded in tissue.

This is a true story. Every detail. I swear.

When Nancy and I were in graduate school, we lived in Mountain View, California, about seven miles south of Palo Alto and the Stanford campus. Some days we rode our bikes to school, but mostly we drove. About two thirds of the way back to home from campus, on the left side of El Camino Real, the main thoroughfare running through that part of the South Bay, there was a strip mall. It was actually more square than “strip” – a horseshoe of storefronts surrounding a parking area. It included a grocery store, a drug store, a few restaurants, some specialty stores and clothing stores. It included a Tower Records. It included a bank.

One day in early spring – California spring; it was technically still winter – I went home at midday to work on my dissertation. I had done some teaching in the morning. I might have had office hours. But I was going home to write. On the way home, I stopped at the Tower Records. I had a birthday coming up, and I probably was looking for one CD or another to add to my growing collection. I remember that I didn’t buy anything that day.

As I pulled back onto the El Camino, turning left across traffic, a police car eased in behind me and began to follow. I was pretty sure that I had made my turn legally, so I didn’t think too much about it. After about a block, though, he turned on his lights. I pulled over at the first opportunity, my heart rate speeding up a bit. I rolled down my window, expecting the police officer to approach me on the driver’s side.

He didn’t. He opened his door and got out of the car, but he remained behind the open door, his right hand out of sight. From there, he called to me to get out of the car, to move to the sidewalk, and to brace my hands against the building there. By now, I was truly scared. I did exactly as I was told. The cop approached me, as did two more guys in uniform and one plainclothes cop. I hadn’t see the others arrive. All of them had their weapons drawn. They frisked me, asked me to remove my wallet, the one thing I was carrying, from my pocket. They wanted to know if the car was mine, and they had me show them the registration.

The more they talked to me, the calmer they grew. My panic subsided. They asked if they could search my car – a Toyota Corolla hatchback – and I gave them permission to look through every inch of it. I asked what they thought I had done and they told me that someone had just robbed the bank next to the Tower Records. The suspect fit my description ALMOST to a “T”: brown curly hair, beard and mustache, blue t-shirt and jeans. But – and this is why they were feeling calmer – the guy was described as being at least six feet tall. I’m five-seven on a good day, with a strong tailwind.

By this point, people were watching us – a crowd had gathered. Flashing lights, cops with their weapons in hand, a guy being frisked on the street. Of course we’d drawn attention. But after about ten minutes of conversation – “Where do you work? Where do you live? How long have you been in the Bay Area? Where are you going now? Why did you stop at the shopping plaza?” – they let me go. I got back in my car, shaken, but feeling that I would have one helluva story to tell Nancy that night. As I drove home to our apartment, I was almost certain someone was following me, probably the plainclothes cop checking on my story. When I pulled into the apartment complex, he drove on by. I never saw any of them again, and I don’t know if they ever caught the guy who robbed the bank.

That was on March 8, 1991.

How can I be so sure of that? Remember what I said at the outset: Every detail of this is true.

I know the date because it was the day after videotape of the Rodney King beating first was aired on a news broadcast in Los Angeles.

During the entirety of my encounter with the police, I never once feared for my life or my physical safety. Yes, I was scared, but that was because I didn’t understand why I had been stopped or why they had their weapons drawn. Throughout the incident, the police treated me with courtesy and respect.

Privilege comes in many forms and manifests itself in many ways. That day, my privilege kept me safe. It kept me from being beaten or shot. It kept me from being handcuffed or put on the ground. I have no doubt that, had I been black, had the suspect been black, I would have been cuffed, face down on the sidewalk, a knee in the small of my back, if not on my neck. It wouldn’t have mattered how short I was.

But really the larger point is this: I don’t need to go back nearly thirty years to find examples of how being white gives me privileges denied to those whose skin is brown or black.

As most of you know, I birdwatch. On spring mornings, I walk through local neighborhoods with my binoculars, peering into bushes and trees. Sometimes, I’m sure, it looks like I’m skulking rather than birdwatching. We don’t have to imagine what the reaction to this would be if I were black. Just look at what happened to Christian Cooper in Central Park last week.

Then again, if I were black, I wouldn’t need to be birdwatching to draw unwanted attention from ordinary citizens and law enforcement. I take walks just about everyday. Walking while black can get a person harassed. It can get a person arrested. It can get a person killed. And yet, it’s safer than running while black. Ask Ahmaud Arbery. It’s safer than driving while black. Ask Philando Castile, or Sam Dubose, or Alton Sterling, or too many others.

If I were black, but everything else about me and my finances was the same, I would 1) have a lower credit score; 2) pay a higher mortgage; 3) pay more for every car I’ve ever bought; 4) have a harder time booking places to stay when we travel; 5) have a harder time being seated in restaurants; 6) have less access to affordable quality health care; 7) have a lower life expectancy. These are not guesses on my part. This is fact, supported by research and data.

Privilege, as I say, takes many forms. All of it, though, leads to the same place: The freedoms I am able to take for granted as a white man in this county – the freedom to enjoy American prosperity, the freedom to avail myself of the health care system politicians are so fond of boasting about, the freedom to walk and run and drive and recreate without fear for myself or my family – all of these freedoms are denied to black Americans. There is no freedom when you fear agents of the State. There is no freedom when your economic viability is subject to the prejudices of strangers who wield the power to destroy you. There is no freedom when white people in parks, in playgrounds, in college campus common areas, in malls and supermarkets and Starbucks, have the power to sic the police on anyone they deem too different.

Friends of mine, people of color, have written about all of this with more eloquence than I have to offer. But change will only come when all of us speak up, including – especially – those of us who enjoy the privilege of being white Americans.

Our country is on fire right now. It is on fire because a white police officer, after stopping a black man for far less than suspicion of bank robbery, knelt on the man’s neck until the man died. He knelt on the man’s neck. Until the man died.

Our country is on fire because our President, the very embodiment of white privilege, is more interested in firing up the white supremacists in his electoral base than he is in promoting tolerance and healing and greater equality.

Our country is on fire because after a shameful racial history that dates back four centuries plus, we remain a nation that is governed by prejudice and fear.

I can’t shed my privilege – it is part and parcel of who and what I am, as impossible to separate as chewed gum wadded in tissue. What I can do is use my privilege to speak up, to say “enough,” to draw attention to the advantages I enjoy in the hope that this will make my brothers and sisters in privilege see what is denied to those who aren’t as lucky as we are.

Blogging, Blood of the Southlands, Case Files of Justis Fearsson, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Islevale Cycle, LonTobyn Chronicle, Thieftaker Chronicles, Winds of the Forelands, Writing

Writing-Tip Wednesday: Single Point of View v. Multiple Point of View

If you know me, if you have been with me in panel discussions at conventions, if you have ever received any sort of writing advice from me, or even heard me give such advice to others, I need for you to sit down and prepare yourselves. What I’m about to tell you is shocking. For some of you, it may be more than you can handle. But we’re in this together and we will get through to a better place. I promise.

Ready? Here goes…

It is the last week of May – we are twenty-one weeks, twenty-one Writing-Tip Wednesday posts, into the year – and I have yet to write about point of view.

I know. I can’t believe it either.

Don’t worry, though. I’m going to make it up to you today. Who knows, I might even return to the subject in the weeks and months to come. I’m confident that, by the end of the year, you’ll be as tired of hearing me go on and on about point of view as you usually are. A bit of normality in a topsy-turvy world…

Point of view, for those of you unfamiliar with the term, is, essentially, the narrative voice used to tell a story. And the initial choice of point of view for each project we write usually focuses on the relative advantages of writing in first person (action and emotions and descriptions treated with “I,” “me,” “my”) versus writing in close third person (action and emotions and descriptions treated with “she/he/they,” “hers/his/theirs”).

(Yes, there are other choices. One can write in what is known as omniscient POV, a challenging voice to use and master, because it demands that the narrator know what all characters are thinking and feeling WITHOUT resorting to what’s referred to as head-hopping. And one can write in second person point of view, in which the author writes the entire narrative in effect addressing the reader – “You walk into a bar and order your drink. Sounds and smells assault you from all sides…” Etc. Both of these are difficult, even risky choices for beginning writers.)

One day last week, though, I had a conversation with a writer friend (let’s call her “Haith Funter”) about the other choice we make when deciding on the narrative voice for our projects, and it is this element of point of view I wish to focus on today. Specifically, our conversation centered on whether Haith should consider using a single point of view character or multiple point of view characters for a future project she’s considering.

And being me, the moment she mentioned that she was grappling with this I launched into a lengthy (and unasked-for) recitation of the relative merits of each approach. A recitation I offer again here.

Children of Amarid, by David B. Coe (jacket art by Romas Kukalis)Let’s start with what I mean when I speak of multiple point of view characters. This is NOT an invitation to jump willy-nilly from character to character, sharing their thoughts, emotions, and sensations. That is called head-hopping, and it is considered poor writing. Rather, writing with multiple point of view characters means telling the story with several different narrators, each given her or his own chapters or chapter-sections in which to “tell” their part of the story. When we are in a given character’s point of view, we are privy only to her thoughts and emotions. In the next chapter, we might be privy to the thoughts of someone else in the story. This is an approach used to great effect by George R.R. Martin in his Song of Ice and Fire series. Martin goes so far as to use his chapter headings to tell us who the point of view character is for that section of the story. Guy Gavriel Kay uses multiple point of view quite a bit – in Tigana, in his Fionavar Tapestry, in many of his more recent sweeping historical fantasies. I have used it in my epic fantasy series – The LonTobyn Chronicle, Winds of the Forelands, Blood of the Southlands, The Islevale Cycle.

DEATH'S RIVAL, by Faith HunterThis is in contrast with single character point of view, in which we have only one point of view character for the entire story (and that point of view can be either first or third person). Think of Haith’s Yane Jellowrock series, or my Thieftaker or Justis Fearsson series, or Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden books, or Suzanne Collins Hunger Games series, or even (for the most part) J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books.

With both approaches, the point of view of each character is inviolate, meaning that your reader can learn nothing from a given character that the character her- or himself can’t know. The key is that this limitation means vastly different things in single POV on the one hand, and multiple character point of view on the other.

You might notice that the examples I give for each approach are distinctive. Granted, my examples are FAR from comprehensive, but they are instructive.

SPELL BLIND, by David B. Coe (Jacket art by Alan Pollack)For single character point of view we have essentially two kinds of books: urban fantasies that have a mystery element, and YA novels that concentrate as much on the lead character’s emotional development as on external factors. Single character POV tends to be intimate. Readers form a powerful attachment to the narrators of these books. And, of even greater importance, readers learn things about the narrative at the same time the characters do. Even in books that begin with our narrator looking back on past events, we are soon taken back in time so that this older narrative has a sense of immediacy. This is why single character POV works so well in mysteries. The reader gets information as the “detective” does. Discovery happens in real time, as it were.

My examples of multiple character POV books are almost all grand, sprawling epics of one sort or another. In part, this is because it can be more difficult to tell such stories from the vantage point of only one character. But more than that, the power of multiple POV lies in two simple facts.

First, because we are following several POV characters at once, we are drawn into a number of subplots. All of these are braided together in some way, contributing to the larger story line. And since we can leave one to pick up another, we almost always have several characters in danger, or creating danger, at any one time. Each shift from one POV character to another leaves one story hanging in order to pick up another. The shifts in narrator actually impart momentum to the story.

Second, in multiple POV, our readers always have more information than any one character. We see traps as they’re being laid, we see intrigue from all angles, we can recognize the perils for one character based upon the machinations of another. Rather than discovering things as our narrators do, our readers are almost always one step ahead of them. This knowledge creates anticipation, feeds expectation, some of which we can satisfy, some of which we might thwart, all of which ratchets up the narrative tension.

Different stories lend themselves to different point of view choices. I would never dream of telling anyone (not even Haith) what approach to use for their story. Chances are you’ll know what your story requires as soon as you begin to write it. But my hope is that a clearer understanding of the relative strengths and advantages of each option will make that choice a little easier.

Keep writing!

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Not at all Writing Related

Monday Musings: 29 Years Ago This Weekend

Wedding Day Photo 1 It’s Memorial Day – and, it seems to me, a particularly somber one at that – and so I won’t write too much for today’s Musings.

But this is also a very significant weekend in my life. Twenty-nine years ago, on Memorial Day weekend 1991, Nancy and I were married. (Our anniversary is actually tomorrow, the 26th.)

To this day, memories of our wedding, and all the festivities surrounding it, warm me and comfort me and bring a huge smile to my face. We lived in California at the time – Mountain View, in the Bay Area, to be precise. We were graduate students at Stanford, Nancy in biology, me in history. The tradition, of course, is that the bride’s family pays for the wedding, but Nancy’s folks ran a small family farm, and even with our modest plans for the ceremony and reception, a Bay Area wedding was beyond their budget. They helped us out, and so did my parents.

Wedding Day Photo 2But we did everything we could to keep costs down. Because we were students at the school, Stanford allowed us to marry in the Rodin Sculpture Garden, near the university museum, for something like $200. It was a gorgeous venue — we have joked since that we were married in front of the Gates of Hell, because, well, we were. We had our reception at a reasonable local restaurant – part of a Bay Area chain called, I kid you not, the Velvet Turtle. Not amazing, but decent food and lots of it. We hosted a party the night before the wedding at our apartment, and then did the same for brunch the day after the wedding. Our big activity? On Saturday afternoon, after the rehearsal lunch, we had a softball game for the entire guest list – whoever wanted to play. (We played a lot of softball in grad school – her bio lab had an intramural team.) The game was bride’s team against the groom’s team (randomly selected). I have no idea who won. But the two key rules were, 1) Nancy didn’t have to play in the field, and 2) she got to bat whenever she wanted, no matter which team was up. She would just announce, “Bride’s turn to hit!” and then she would…

Mostly, we spent the weekend catching up with family and dear friends from near and far. And, of course, celebrating our love. That sounds like the worst sort of cliché, but I honestly don’t care. It’s the truth. From start to finish it was about the joining of our lives, the bringing together of nearly all the people in the world whom each of us loved most, so that they could be with us when we declared our intention to build a life together.

Yes, the memories are bittersweet. We have lost too many of the people who stood with us that day. Nancy’s sister and one of her brothers, one of my brothers, my parents, other relatives and friends… As I say, too many. And I won’t stand here and try to claim that the entire weekend went smoothly, that there were no conflicts or problems or logistical issues. There were. Some were truly comical, others just annoying.

Overall, though, it was wonderful – the perfect kickoff to what has been an amazing 29 years.

Across the country this Memorial Day, young couples are dealing with wedding plans that look nothing like what they hoped for, or that have been postponed until who-knows-when? It’s not something we hear about often – such disappointments are overshadowed by the breathtaking scope of this tragedy. For those affected, though, it must come as a terrible blow. I can say in all honesty that it’s the love that matters, the bond these couples mean to celebrate. I can also say, with equal candor, that this would have brought me small comfort had we lost out on our big weekend all those years ago.

I wish I had more to offer by way of wisdom and solace for those whose plans have been ruined by the pandemic. I will spare you sappy declarations of my love for Nancy (except to say that I honestly do love her even more today than I did back then, which I wouldn’t have thought possible). Part of the point of Monday Musings is to share with you where my thoughts have wandered over the weekend.

This weekend, they were in a sculpture garden two thousand miles from here.

Wishing you a great week.