THIS IS NOT AT ALL BAD -- EXCEPT AS PROSE

Gore Vidal said that of a book written by Harold Robbins. He also added : "To call Harold Robbins an author is like calling a woodpecker a carpenter."

Those words were brought to mind by a milestone of history trivia.

On this day in 1184 BC, according to calculations made some 900 years later by the North African Greek, Eratosthenes, Troy was sacked and burned.

And we've been sacking and burning it, and other icons, ever since.

I thought to myself : when did archetype devolve into cliche? And can we revive archetype back to life in our writing?

I asked that after thinking of the movie, TROY, and reading the reviews for DARK SHADOWS and BATTLESHIP.

An acre of craft goes into a bad novel.

How much more must go into a great one. You must fertilize it by going beneath the surface with wit and intelligence ... and love.

Yes, you must love your idea.

How else do you expect an editor to even like it if you don't love it?

And the protagonist ...

do you know him/her down to the depths of his yearnings, her doubts, his sense of humor?

Do you like him?

Would you like to spend time with him on a roadtrip? If not, why would expect a reader to want to spend days reading about him/her?

Whether he is Sherlock Holmes or Hannibal Lector, he thinks along lines that are beyond your abilities --

but not your dreams. He says and does the things you wish you could, whether in your dreams or your fantasies of revenge.

And you must know where he's going. Listen to Mickey Spillaine's wisdom :

Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle.

They read it to get to the end. If it's a letdown, they won't buy anymore.

The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book.

And know what the readers want of your hero. Mickey has advise on this as well :

Imagine a guy hits Mike Hammer over the head with a wooden coathanger and knocks him out.

No reader wants that.

You hit Mike Hammer over the head with a wooden coathanger, he'll beat the crap out of you. That's what the reader wants.


And how do you discover what the reader wants? Read the kind of books you are writing.

Time's a problem with that? Stephen King has a word for you :

"If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that."

And try to keep a sense of humor about it. Stephen King has a word about that as well :

When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, "Why god? Why me?"

And the thundering voice of God answered, "There's just something about you that pisses me off."
— Stephen King (Storm of the Century: An Original Screenplay )

King winks at us and says,

"Fiction is the truth inside the lie. Good books don't give up all their secrets at once. If yours does, guess what kind of book yours is?"

But I began this post by talking about how to breathe life into cliche, making it vibrant archetype. How do you do that?

BRING IT HOME :

I thought about this method while walking today across a hospital lobby as I delivered rare blood to an ailing patient.

On the wall TV was the tail end of an interview with a poor woman, sobbing in despair and loss over the death of a loved one in Arkansas.

The CNN camera switched to the newscaster in the studio.

Her face was glowing. Literally glowing. Not somber with empathy. No, her plastic Barbie face was bright, cheerful even.

"That video certainly brings it home to our viewers, doesn't it, Bob?"

And I suddenly realized why her face was so radiant.

The cameras had caught a scene certain to grab the audience and boost the ratings.

She was oblivious to the trauma of the woman, fixated only on her own needs as a reporter, eager to be promoted to a better time slot.

Some writers are like that reporter. They want a bestseller.

They want to snare millions of readers. They need a tragic trauma to happen in the lives of her characters. In the compulsion to write of an epic crisis, they see only the details of the situation --

not the soul of it.

To touch our audience, to make our novel throb with life,

we must bring it home to the readers. We must touch the heart. Do more than describe what happens.

We must merge the terror, the heartbreak of the characters with the mind of the reader.

Speak to the universal fears of people everywhere :

abandonment, loneliness, yearning for love, caught up in a desperate need to belong, yet feeling always on the outside.

I believe most of us who write are more aware, more sensitive than that CNN reporter.

I think we believe what William Faulkner once wrote :

"A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream."

I believe we as writers must bear that curse proudly and follow the path William Faulkner urged the writers who followed him to take :

"Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do.

Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. If you do that, you're a writer.

And a writer is a creature driven by demons. You won't know why they chose you. Luckily, you'll usually be too busy to even wonder why."

To me, TROY told the surface story. GLADIATOR, on the other hand, touched the heart, the soul of its viewers. Here's the trailer for that movie, followed by the song by Loreena McKennitt that I played on a constant loop while healing from my burns.


**

WE DON'T NEED NO STINKING RULES!_RULE NOTHING OUT ...

DARE TO GO TOO FAR ...

in your book. Press the limits,

push the boundaries of what you think will work,

then make it work somehow.

Aren't you as a reader tired of seeing the same old thing :

shy girl goes to new school and meets a hot bad boy who turns out to be :

a werewolf, a vampire, a cross-dressing son of a mad scientist (caught you with that last one, didn't I?)

How about a tiger named Hobbes who imagines his human boy doll is alive and talks to him?

Spin the expected on its ear. You will snare bored readers, making them your loyal fans.

You can't go beyond yourself. No matter how strange your twist ... shadows who live and breathe, casting people behind them as they walk in the sun. No matter your idea, it will still have the stamp of your personality, your style of writing.

Be open to any whim drifting from your unconscious. To create means to think beyond the limits we have placed upon our muse. The mind has no boundaries. The imagination is the key to infinity ...

and to bestsellers.

A persecuted boy cracks. He climbs to the top of the school with a rifle and the school's yearbook. He starts shooting.

His persecutors? No. He shoots every nice person he knows. Why?

To spare them the hurt he knows is waiting for them as it waited for him.

BE A TROUBLE MAKER!

Break the rules. The shy girl falls in love with the vampire. His love for her turns him human. Now, his coven is out to turn them both!

Extreme is good.

The vampire was confident and kind. As a human he is sullen and snotty. The girl wants him to be a vampire again even if it means the death of innocents.

Her shyness hid her selfishness. The vampire realizes what a monster she would turn into if she becomes a vampire. He kills them both ...

as a gesture of the last remnants of his kindness.

The only rule :

everything in your novel must serve a purpose, down to the painting of the dying swan on the girl's bedroom wall.

It is what he looks at as he smothers the girl he loves. He sees not the monster she has become but the lovely, shy swan he thought her to be when he first saw her.

Everything in your novel must do double-duty.

The murder of the girl. The painting of the dying swan. Even going to the prom. The surface meaning. The meaning behind the character doing it.

Have we moved beyond the rules, beyond the boundaries of what you think possible?

Now, we are free ...

GHOST OF A CHANCE_CHAPTER 39_WHEN THE STARS DROWN IN DARKNESS

{I am the Turquoise Woman.

Each life ends.

Whether it ends in whimpering

or in courage depends upon the soul facing that end.

It is, in fact, the only true epitaph your kind leaves.

DreamSinger, whom you know as Roland,

has entered the realm some call Hell to rescue Samuel McCord, whom he breathed into life with his words.

Now, riding Epona, the last unicorn, with Death behind him and Lakota Spirit Warriors beside him,

DreamSinger faces what seems to be the end. Let the words from his strange journal take it from here ....}



A distant roar sounded from all around us. Oh, crap.

Bristling along the horizon encircling us, hundreds of lost souls, creatures, and demons charged to replace their slain brothers.

I twisted around towards Death to see if she would scream again.

She sadly shook her head. "We near my Avatar and Samuel. I dare not scream again."

My heart went sick and cold as a familiar voice, DayStar's, laughed to my far right. "Do you know what the third white meat is? Cat!"

I saw only his hands appear out of thin air. They held Gypsy, my cat, her eyes wild with fear.

DayStar's hands hurled her directly in the path of the charging monstrosities of Hell.

She yowled, and I could have sworn it sounded like my name.

I tugged on Epona's mane to head for Gyspy. Death placed a bitter cold hand on my shoulder.

"We cannot turn. My Avatar and Samuel are close."

"Fine!," I snapped. "Have a great trip."

With a grunt of pain, I flipped my leg over Epona's head, scratching it on her razored tusk. I slipped off and hit the ground in a run towards Gypsy.

Sitting Bull yelled after me. "She is just a cat."

"Wrong! She's MY cat."

A minotaur lunged for me. I slashed across his eyes with Marlene's saber that healed. The manbull bleated shrilly.

"I - I was blind. Now, I see."

It shot up startled into the flaming hellsky. Suddenly Death was beside me. She was floating.

"If you insist," she husked and snatched Marlene's saber from my hand.

"Marlene will soon need this."

And Death was gone. Just like that. And I was weaponless ... except for harsh language.

A heavy weight hit me in the back as claws gouged into me. I huffed. Another creature slashed me across the chest. I reeled sideways and shouted in pain.

I grabbed its arm, pulled back on its wrist, slamming the flat of my palm against its elbow as hard as I could. A sword dropped to the ground.

I bent and snatched it up. I looked for Gypsy.

I spotted her. She was moving so fast it was hard to follow.

Sparks flew from her claws as she bounded across the broad chest of a stone golum. She leapt to the werewolf in front of her, ruining its eyes with those same claws.

Never in one spot long, she sped between legs, up furry chests, across massive backs. She yowled in defiance, heading straight for me.

Something big and furry lunged at me. I slashed. It grunted but kept on coming. A razored tusk sprouted from its chest.

Epona reared beside me. "I leave no friend behind."

Gypsy screamed in pain.

I looked to the sound. She was bleeding, holding up her left front leg.

Suddenly, a blur of lightning appeared next to her. Crazy Horse, human-size now, blocked a talon with his hatchet and drove his knife into a scaled chest.

He looked at me with a crooked grin and spoke in Lakota, "If I die for a cat, I will never forgive you."

I realized the other six Sioux Spirit warriors were fighting all around me. Human-size and without lightning bolts, they were having trouble standing their ground.

Gall scowled to my left. "You would die for a cat?"

I bent next to Gypsy, who nuzzled her head against my palm, and said, "I would die for family."

He nodded. "That I understand."

Gypsy growled low, glaring up at the hellsky. I followed her line of sight. Oh, crap.

A sphinx. An honest-to-Cleopatra Sphinx.

Gypsy rose, holding up her injured leg and baring her teeth.

The Sphinx rumbled, "Later, granddaughter of Bast. Your death is mine. I will slay all who would take that from me."

Epona reared, thumped a charging troll in the throat with her two front hooves, and whinnied, "Whatever. Fight now. Threaten later."

In answer, the Sphinx chomped off the troll's head and spat it back out. "Tasted worse than it looked."

I made a face. It had looked pretty bad.

A giant bull-man, wearing human skulls for shoulder decorations, tried to cleave Red Butte in two with a war-ax, only to have it wrested from his grip by the warrior.

Red Butte twirled it and brought it down in a huge blow which split the BullMan's head in two.

Muttering low and harsh, the five Lakota who remained unarmed quickly picked up fallen weapons,

from swords to hatchets to axes as Crazy Horse kneeled next to Gypsy and whispered, "They feed on you only after I am slain."

Slashing at his attackers with hatchet and knife, Sitting Bull yelled at us.
"Form a circle!"

Epona looked a question at me, and I answered it, "The Power of the World always works in circles. All life tries to be round. The sky is round."

I looked up to the fires sweeping across the skies. "Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing -- and always come back again to where they were.

The life of all Two-Leggeds is a circle from childhood to childhood."

I glared at the nearing Darklings, hate raw in their screaming throats. "And so it is in everything where Power moves."

Epona and Sitting Bull yelled as one. "Form a circle!"

And then the Darklings were upon us.

Borrowed shields and short swords, Epona's pounding hooves, Sphinx claws, Lakota ax and hatchets, my own flashing sword --

all were blurs as they met a wave of slashing claws, tearing fangs, and hissing weapons. The sounds of metal grating upon metal, screams, grunts, and curses were all about our small band.

I saw nothing clear, only a flurry of dark bodies leaping at me.

I heard the wet thud of blades sinking into flesh, the whimper of wounded Darklings sinking to the ground.

Clear up my arm, I felt the numbing impact of sword-blocked swords and lunging talons.

Out of the corner of an eye, I saw Burnt Thigh go down with a bloody wound to the side yet stagger back up to his unsteady feet.

But despite the pounding of steel upon steel, the rending of flesh by fang, I and my new friends stood our ground, stood it, and smiled grimly to one another.

And to this day, still do the Lakota sing of this battle over their campfires,

though the dark weighs heavy upon their spirits and the whispers of doubt and fear mock them.

It is a song of courage against despair, of light raging against the coming of night.

And when wounded Time draws her final, faltering breath,

when the moon herself has become blood, and the gasping stars slowly strangle on the darkness,

even then will the Lakota stop in the midst of their Death Song, stand tall, and look to one another and remember --

-- remember when one small, defiant band of noble spirits fought, not for glory, not for land, nor for power -- but for one small life and the bond that one brave heart feels for another.
***
Read the passage that begins "And to this day ..." with the first minute of the following music. I wrote those words to this very tune :

THIS IS NOT AT ALL BAD -- EXCEPT AS PROSE

Gore Vidal said that of a book written by Harold Robbins.

He also added : "To call Harold Robbins an author is like calling a woodpecker a carpenter."

Those words were brought to mind by a milestone of history trivia.

On this day in 1184 BC, according to calculations made some 900 years later by the North African Greek, Eratosthenes, Troy was sacked and burned.

And we've been sacking and burning it, and other icons, ever since.

I thought to myself :

when did archetype devolve into cliche? And can we revive archetype back to life in our writing?

I asked that after thinking of the movie, TROY,

and reading the reviews for KNIGHT AND DAY, VAMPIRES SUCK, and THE LAST AIRBENDER.

Two losers. One so bad it was painful to watch. You guess which that one was.

An acre of craft goes into a bad novel. How much more must go into a great one.

You must fertilize it by going beneath the surface with wit and intelligence ... and love.

Yes, you must love your idea.

How else do you expect an editor to even like it if you don't love it?

And the protagonist ...

do you know him/her down to the depths of his yearnings, her doubts, his sense of humor? Do you like him?

Would you like to spend time with him on a roadtrip? If not, why would expect a reader to want to spend days reading about him/her?

Whether he is Sherlock Holmes or Hannibal Lector, he thinks along lines that are beyond your abilities --

but not your dreams.

He says and does the things you wish you could, whether in your dreams or your fantasies of revenge.

And you must know where he's going. Listen to Mickey Spillaine's wisdom :

Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle. They read it to get to the end.

If it's a letdown, they won't buy anymore. The first page sells that book.

The last page sells your next book.

And know what the readers want of your hero. Mickey has advise on this as well :

Imagine a guy hits Mike Hammer over the head with a wooden coathanger and knocks him out.

No reader wants that.

You hit Mike Hammer over the head with a wooden coathanger, he'll beat the crap out of you. That's what the reader wants.


And how do you discover what the reader wants? Read the kind of books you are writing. Time's a problem with that? Stephen King has a word for you :

"If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that."

And try to keep a sense of humor about it. Stephen King has a word about that as well :

When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, "Why god? Why me?"

And the thundering voice of God answered, "There's just something about you that pisses me off."
— Stephen King (Storm of the Century: An Original Screenplay )

King winks at us and says, "Fiction is the truth inside the lie. Good books don't give up all their secrets at once. If yours does, guess what kind of book yours is?"

But I began this post by talking about how to breathe life into cliche, making it vibrant archetype. How do you do that?

BRING IT HOME :

I thought about this method while walking some days ago across a hospital lobby as I delivered rare blood to an ailing patient.

On the wall TV was the tail end of an interview with a poor woman, sobbing in despair and loss over the death of a loved one in a mine-collapse in New Zealand.

The CNN camera switched to the newscaster in the studio. Her face was glowing. Literally glowing. Not somber with empathy. No, her plastic Barbie face was bright, cheerful even.

"That video certainly brings it home to our viewers, doesn't it, Bob?"

And I suddenly realized why her face was so radiant.

The cameras had caught a scene certain to grab the audience and boost the ratings. She was oblivious to the trauma of the woman, fixated only on her own needs as a reporter, eager to be promoted to a better time slot.

Some writers are like that reporter. They want a bestseller. They want to snare millions of readers.

They need a tragic trauma to happen in the lives of their characters. In the compulsion to write of an epic crisis,

they see only the details of the situation -- not the soul of it.

To touch our audience, to make our novel throb with life, we must bring it home to the readers.

We must touch the heart.

Do more than describe what happens. We must merge the terror, the heartbreak of the characters with the mind of the reader.

Speak to the universal fears of people everywhere :

abandonment, loneliness, yearning for love, caught up in a desperate need to belong, yet feeling always on the outside.

I believe most of us who write are more aware, more sensitive than that CNN reporter. I think we believe what William Faulkner once wrote :

"A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream."

I believe we as writers must bear that curse proudly and follow the path William Faulkner urged the writers who followed him to take :

"Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do.

Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors.

Try to be better than yourself. If you do that, you're a writer.

And a writer is a creature driven by demons.

You won't know why they chose you. Luckily, you'll usually be too busy to even wonder why."

To me, TROY told the surface story.

GLADIATOR, on the other hand, touched the heart, the soul of its viewers.

Here's the trailer for that movie, followed by the song by Loreena McKennitt that I played on a constant loop while healing from my burns.

**

GHOST OF A CHANCE_CHAPTER 39_WHEN THE STARS DROWN IN DARKNESS

{I am the Turquoise Woman.

Each life ends.

Whether it ends in whimpering

or in courage depends upon the soul facing that end.

It is, in fact, the only true epitaph your kind leaves.

DreamSinger has entered the realm some call Hell to rescue Samuel McCord, whom he breathed into life.

Now, riding Epona, the last unicorn, with Death behind him and Lakota Spirit Warriors beside him,

DreamSinger faces what seems to be the end. Let the words from his strange journal take it from here ....}



A distant roar sounded from all around us. Oh, crap.

Bristling along the horizon encircling us, hundreds of lost souls, creatures, and demons charged to replace their slain brothers.

I twisted around towards Death to see if she would scream again.

She sadly shook her head. "We near my Avatar and Samuel. I dare not scream again."

My heart went sick and cold as a familiar voice, DayStar's, laughed to my far right. "Do you know what the third white meat is? Cat!"

I saw only his hands appear out of thin air. They held Gypsy, my cat, her eyes wild with fear.

DayStar's hands hurled her directly in the path of the charging monstrosities of Hell.

She yowled, and I could have sworn it came out, "Roland!"

I tugged on Epona's mane to head for Gyspy. Death placed a bitter cold hand on my shoulder.

"We cannot turn. My Avatar and Samuel are close."

"Fine!," I snapped. "Have a great trip."

With a grunt of pain, I flipped my leg over Epona's head, scratching it on her razored tusk. I slipped off and hit the ground in a run towards Gypsy.

Sitting Bull yelled after me. "She is just a cat."

"Wrong! She's MY cat."

A minotaur lunged for me. I slashed across his eyes. It bleated shrilly.

"I - I was blind. Now, I see."

It shot up startled into the flaming hellsky. Suddenly Death was beside me. She was floating.

"If you insist," she husked and snatched Marlene's saber from my hand.

"Marlene will soon need this."

And Death was gone. Just like that. And I was weaponless ... except for harsh language.

A heavy weight hit me in the back as claws gouged into me. I huffed. Another creature slashed me across the chest. I reeled sideways and shouted in pain.

I grabbed its arm, pulled back on its wrist, slamming the flat of my palm against its elbow as hard as I could. A sword dropped to the ground.

I bent and snatched it up. I looked for Gypsy.

I spotted her. She was moving so fast it was hard to follow.

Sparks flew from her claws as she bounded across the broad chest of a stone golum. She leapt to the werewolf in front of her, ruining its eyes with those same claws.

Never in one spot long, she sped between legs, up furry chests, across massive backs. She yowled in defiance, heading straight for me.

Something big and furry lunged at me. I slashed. It grunted but kept on coming. A razored tusk sprouted from its chest.

Epona reared beside me. "I leave no friend behind."

Gypsy screamed in pain.

I looked to the sound. She was bleeding, holding up her left front leg.

Suddenly, a blur of lightning appeared next to her. Crazy Horse, human-size now, blocked a talon with his hatchet and drove his knife into a scaled chest.

He looked at me with a crooked grin and spoke in Lakota, "If I die for a cat, I will never forgive you."

I realized the other six Sioux Spirit warriors were fighting all around me. Human-size and without lightning bolts, they were having trouble standing their ground.

Gall scowled to my left. "You would die for a cat?"

I bent next to Gypsy, who nuzzled her head against my palm, and said, "I would die for family."

He nodded. "That I understand."

Gypsy growled low, glaring up at the hellsky. I followed her line of sight. Oh, crap.

A sphinx. An honest-to-Cleopatra Sphinx.

{See : http://rolandyeomans.blogspot.com/2010/07/gypsys-tale-you-call-this-safe.html }

Gypsy rose, holding up her injured leg and baring her teeth.

The Sphinx rumbled, "Later, granddaughter of Bast. Your death is mine. I will slay all who would take that from me."

Epona reared, thumped a charging troll in the throat with her two front hooves, and whinnied, "Whatever. Fight now. Threaten later."

In answer, the Sphinx chomped off the troll's head and spat it back out. "Tasted worse than it looked."

I made a face. It had looked pretty bad.

A giant bull-man, wearing human skulls for shoulder decorations, tried to cleave Red Butte in two with a war-ax, only to have it wrested from his grip by the warrior.

Red Butte twirled it and brought it down in a huge blow which split the BullMan's head in two.

Muttering low and harsh, the five Lakota who remained unarmed quickly picked up fallen weapons,

from swords to hatchets to axes as Crazy Horse kneeled next to Gypsy and whispered, "They feed on you only after I am slain."

Slashing at his attackers with hatchet and knife, Sitting Bull yelled at us.
"Form a circle!"

Epona looked a question at me, and I answered it, "The Power of the World always works in circles. All life tries to be round. The sky is round."

I looked up to the fires sweeping across the skies. "Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing -- and always come back again to where they were.

The life of all Two-Leggeds is a circle from childhood to childhood."

I glared at the nearing Darklings, hate raw in their screaming throats. "And so it is in everything where Power moves."

Epona and Sitting Bull yelled as one. "Form a circle!"

And then the Darklings were upon us.

Borrowed shields and short swords, Epona's pounding hooves, Sphinx claws, Lakota ax and hatchets, my own flashing sword --

all were blurs as they met a wave of slashing claws, tearing fangs, and hissing weapons. The sounds of metal grating upon metal, screams, grunts, and curses were all about our small band.

I saw nothing clear, only a flurry of dark bodies leaping at me.

I heard the wet thud of blades sinking into flesh, the whimper of wounded Darklings sinking to the ground.

Clear up my arm, I felt the numbing impact of sword-blocked swords and lunging talons.

Out of the corner of an eye, I saw Burnt Thigh go down with a bloody wound to the side yet stagger back up to his unsteady feet.

But despite the pounding of steel upon steel, the rending of flesh by fang, I and my new friends stood our ground, stood it, and smiled grimly to one another.

And to this day, still do the Lakota sing of this battle over their campfires,

though the dark weighs heavy upon their spirits and the whispers of doubt and fear mock them.

It is a song of courage against despair, of light raging against the coming of night.

And when wounded Time draws her final, faltering breath,

when the moon herself has become blood, and the gasping stars slowly strangle on the darkness,

even then will the Lakota stop in the midst of their Death Song, stand tall, and look to one another and remember --

-- remember when one small, defiant band of noble spirits fought, not for glory, not for land, nor for power -- but for one small life and the bond that one brave heart feels for another.
***
Read the passage that begins "And to this day ..." with the first minute of the following music. I wrote those words to this very tune :

THIS IS NOT AT ALL BAD -- EXCEPT AS PROSE

Gore Vidal said that of a book written by Harold Robbins. He also added : "To call Harold Robbins an author is like calling a woodpecker a carpenter."

Those words were brought to mind by a milestone of history trivia. On this day in 1184 BC, according to calculations made some 900 years later by the North African Greek, Eratosthenes, Troy was sacked and burned.

And we've been sacking and burning it, and other icons, ever since.

I thought to myself : when did archetype devolve into cliche? And can we revive archetype back to life in our writing?

I asked that after thinking of the movie, TROY, and reading the reviews for THE A-TEAM, SPLICE, and THE LOSERS. One winner. Three losers. You guess which.

An acre of craft goes into a bad novel. How much more must go into a great one. You must fertilize it by going beneath the surface with wit and intelligence ... and love.

Yes, you must love your idea.

How else do you expect an editor to even like it if you don't love it?

And the protagonist ... do you know him/her down to the depths of his yearnings, her doubts, his sense of humor? Do you like him? Would you like to spend time with him on a roadtrip? If not, why would expect a reader to want to spend days reading about him/her?

Whether he is Sherlock Holmes or Hannibal Lector, he thinks along lines that are beyond your abilities -- but not your dreams. He says and does the things you wish you could, whether in your dreams or your fantasies of revenge.

And you must know where he's going. Listen to Mickey Spillaine's wisdom :

Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle. They read it to get to the end. If it's a letdown, they won't buy anymore. The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book.

And know what the readers want of your hero. Mickey has advise on this as well :

Imagine a guy hits Mike Hammer over the head with a wooden coathanger and knocks him out. No reader wants that. You hit Mike Hammer over the head with a wooden coathanger, he'll beat the crap out of you. That's what the reader wants.


And how do you discover what the reader wants? Read the kind of books you are writing. Time's a problem with that? Stephen King has a word for you :

"If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that."

And try to keep a sense of humor about it. Stephen King has a word about that as well :

When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, "Why god? Why me?"

And the thundering voice of God answered, "There's just something about you that pisses me off."
— Stephen King (Storm of the Century: An Original Screenplay )

King winks at us and says, "Fiction is the truth inside the lie. Good books don't give up all their secrets at once. If yours does, guess what kind of book yours is?"

But I began this post by talking about how to breathe life into cliche, making it vibrant archetype. How do you do that?

BRING IT HOME :

I thought about this method while walking today across a hospital lobby as I delivered rare blood to an ailing patient. On the wall TV was the tail end of an interview with a poor woman, sobbing in despair and loss over the death of a loved one in Arkansas.

The CNN camera switched to the newscaster in the studio. Her face was glowing. Literally glowing. Not somber with empathy. No, her plastic Barbie face was bright, cheerful even.

"That video certainly brings it home to our viewers, doesn't it, Bob?"

And I suddenly realized why her face was so radiant. The cameras had caught a scene certain to grab the audience and boost the ratings. She was oblivious to the trauma of the woman, fixated only on her own needs as a reporter, eager to be promoted to a better time slot.

Some writers are like that reporter. They want a bestseller. They want to snare millions of readers. They need a tragic trauma to happen in the lives of her characters. In the compulsion to write of an epic crisis, they see only the details of the situation -- not the soul of it.

To touch our audience, to make our novel throb with life, we must bring it home to the readers. We must touch the heart. Do more than describe what happens. We must merge the terror, the heartbreak of the characters with the mind of the reader.

Speak to the universal fears of people everywhere : abandonment, loneliness, yearning for love, caught up in a desperate need to belong, yet feeling always on the outside.

I believe most of us who write are more aware, more sensitive than that CNN reporter. I think we believe what William Faulkner once wrote :

"A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream."

I believe we as writers must bear that curse proudly and follow the path William Faulkner urged the writers who followed him to take :

"Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. If you do that, you're a writer.

And a writer is a creature driven by demons. You won't know why they chose you. Luckily, you'll usually be too busy to even wonder why."

Ever wonder what a winning query letter looks like and why the agent asked for more? Wonder no more. Check out this link :
http://www.guidetoliteraryagents.com/blog/Successful+Queries+Agent+Rebecca+Strauss+And+Stay+By+Allie+Larkin.aspx

To me, TROY told the surface story. GLADIATOR, on the other hand, touched the heart, the soul of its viewers. Here's the trailer for that movie, followed by the song by Loreena McKennitt that I played on a constant loop while healing from my burns.

**

WHEN DARKNESS FALLS IN FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE

"May it be when darkness falls,
Your heart will be true."
-Enya

Darkness falls in all manner of ways. Disaster. Death. Disease. They play no favorites. Is any shoulder strong enough when the clouds cry?

I blend historic fact in with supernatural shivers, focusing on a battered man trying hard not to buckle under the darkness in FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE.

Each chapter begins with a true quotation of the times, then blends in with Samuel McCord's struggles with questions of honor and enemies in the shadows.

CHAPTER FOUR

ISN'T ANYONE COMING?

"The looting is out of control. The French Quarter is
under attack."
- New Orleans councilwoman, Jackie Carlson
{August 30, 2005 }

-- As Councilwoman Carlson spoke, President Bush was playing
guitar with country singer Mark Willis in San Diego. Bush
would return to Crawford, Texas for one more night of taking
it easy before cutting his vacation short.

*******************

As I made my way down the flooded street towards the Convention Center, I looked up at the full moon. It seemed closer than civilization or any semblance of rescue. If there was to be any help for those suffering at the center, it would have to come from me.

As I waded along into the night, the black mists curled and creamed in the humid darkness like an unspoken fear trying to form itself on the edge of consciousness. A trick of the thick air, the moon of blood leered down upon its reflection on the dark waters of the flooded street. Ripples of its long bloody image flowed from the floating dead body of a cat, looking like fingers caressing its kill. The cat’s death apparently hadn't been pretty nor was its corpse. The night became colder than it should have been. Much, much colder.

Rind, the Angelus of Death whose blood had mingled with mine ,whispered in words only I could hear. “At night the dead come back to drink from the living.”

I didn’t need Rind to tell me that the night was not my friend. Too much death had happened too recently. Spirits, lost and angry, were walking beside me. Torn clothing. Hollow eyes of shadows. Sharp, white teeth. Long, writhing fingers slowly closing and unclosing.

Because of Rind's blood in my veins, I could see them slowly circling, hear their trailing, splashing steps behind me, feel the heat of their sunken, hungry eyes upon my back.

Were they soul-echoes, mere refracted memory of a will? Or were there such things as literal ghosts? Just because I could see them didn't mean that I understood what they were.

I turned the corner and came upon the startled, fragile grace of a too-white egret standing alert in the middle of the flooded street, staring back at me. Its long sleek neck slowly cocked its sloping head at me. Then, gathering its huge wings, it launched itself into the air with its long black legs. I saw the spirits of the dead around me longingly stare after its curved flight of grace and freedom into the dark sky. I watched with them.

I felt a tug on my left jacket sleeve. I looked down. My chest grew cold. The dead face of a little girl was looking up at me. Or rather the face of her lost, wandering spirit, her full black eyes glistening like twin pools of oil. Her face was a wrenching mix of fear and longing. She tried to speak. Nothing came out of her moving lips. Looking like she was on the verge of tears, she tugged on my sleeve again and pointed to the end of the block. I followed her broken-nailed finger. I shivered.

She was pointing to her own corpse.

I took in a ragged breath I didn’t need to compose myself. The Convention Center would have to wait. I had sworn a long time ago that no child would ever ask my help without getting it.

A haunted singing was faint on the breeze. Somewhere the dead had found their voices. I nodded to the girl’s spirit and waded to her corpse, the force of the rushing flood waters having washed it up onto the sidewalk and against a store front where it slowly bobbed in place. I saw the girl’s spirit out of the corner of my eye, studying the shell of flesh she had once worn. Her head was turned slightly to one side. The expression to her face was sorrowful and wistful at the same time. She pointed again.

I followed the broken-nailed finger. A rosary all wrapped up in the balled fingers of her left hand. She gestured sharply, then looked at me with eyes echoing things I did not want to see. I nodded again and kneeled down beside the girl’s swollen corpse. I pried the rosary loose, wrapping it around the fingers of my own gloved left hand.

I looked up at the girl’s spirit. She just stood there frowning as if in concentration. Her brow furrowed, and her jaws clenched. I could swear beads of sweat appeared on her ghostly forehead.

I jerked as suddenly guttural words were forced from the long-dead throat of the corpse at my boots. “T-Tell M-Mama ... peaceful now.”

And with that, she looked up into the night. I followed her eyes. She was looking at the retreating body of the egret slowly flying into a filmy, billowing cloud. I looked back to her spirit.

She was gone.

“I promise,” I said to the empty night.

Where had she gone? Had her spirit held itself together just long enough to pass on those words of good-bye to her Mama? Was her soul flying alongside that oblivious egret slowly evaporating within the filaments of that cloud? Or was she finding out the truth about the Great Mystery that haunted me still?

I had no answers. Only more questions. Questions in the dark.

**********************************************

I am listening to Myleene Klass's haunting piano interpretation of "Now We Are Free" from GLADIATOR. After her shot at success from a British form of AMERICAN IDOL ended due to feuding within her band, she had to reinvent herself from a pop singer to classical pianist -- and succeeded. She is an inspiration to all of us who will have to re-invent ourselves several times in our adult lives. Check out her website www.myleeneklass.co.uk/ and wish her luck on her upcoming baby.

Thank all of you for dropping by. Have a healing weekend. Roland