Talk Like a Professor

Impress your teachers and colleagues! Confound your friends! Sound really, really smart without having the vaguest clue what you’re talking about!

Try the Virtual Academic to generate academic-sounding sentences that may or may not actually mean anything, like these:

• The poetics of post-capitalist hegemony is strictly congruent with the construction of the gendered body.
• The linguistic construction of consumption invests itself in the ideology of agency.
• The fantasy of pop culture carries with it the (re)formation of power/knowledge.
• The logic of the gaze opens a space for the invention of linguistic transparency.

Or go here to generate a random sentence that’s automatically critiqued by another virtual academic. Great for copying and pasting into term papers. (Just kidding!!!!)

I was an assistant professor for a few years. Really takes me back. We’ve got Talk Like a Pirate Day. Why not Talk Like a Professor Day, too?

Skinwalker by Faith Hunter

Jane Yellowrock is a Cherokee skinwalker, a shapeshifter who can transform into any creature she wants. She rides a custom motorcycle and hunts vampires for a living. Jane has come to New Orleans to find and kill a rogue vampire who’s terrorizing the local population — human and vampire alike. In a nice twist, she’s been hired by the city’s Vampire Council, so she’s working for the creatures she normally kills.

Jane is everything you’d want in an urban fantasy heroine. She’s tough, skilled with weapons, and brimming over with attitude. She’s mostly a loner, but she has a close friend whose family she adores. She also has a mysterious past — she was discovered as a feral child and raised in an orphanage, and she remembers very little of her life before that. Jane’s attempts to uncover and understand what she is and where she comes from add depth to her character. The novel is on the darker side of urban fantasy, with lots of action set in a gritty and merciless world.

My favorite part of Skinwalker is the way Hunter handles Jane’s shapeshifting. Jane shares a body with Beast — how this happened is revealed as Jane recovers some of her early memories. Most of the time, Jane is in human form and her psyche is dominant. When she shifts, Beast takes over. The story is narrated by whichever of the two is in charge at the moment. Hunter handles this brilliantly. She’s created two distinct narrative voices and balances them perfectly. And she keeps a tension going between them, as well. When Jane is in her human form, for example, Beast frequently sends her comments and nudges (and vice versa). Although they share a body, Jane and Beast are two distinct characters, each with her own thoughts, memories, and desires. They work together, but they also come into conflict.  In fact, Hunter gives a whole new meaning to “internal conflict” through this character. I also loved the way that Hunter deals with the logistics of shapeshifting — for example, to shift into a creature that’s bigger than her human form, Jane needs to borrow mass.  Hunter has put a lot of thought into how shapeshifting might work, and that effort adds believability to the novel.

Vicky Vaughn, the main character of my book Deadtown, is also a shapeshifter, so I was super-interested to see how Hunter handles a similar character. And the answer is “amazingly well.” Even more than the plot, which is fast-paced and full of twists and turns, the voices and conflicts of Jane/Beast were what really drove the novel for me.

Note: I purchased this book myself and derive no personal gain from reviewing it here.

Countdown to Deadtown

Deadtown releases on Tuesday, December 29 — that’s  eight weeks from today.  To count down to The Big Day, I’ll be posting something each Tuesday that offers a peek into Deadtown. It might be an excerpt, background information, a character post — anything that cracks open a door into the novel’s world. To make them easy to find, I’ll collect these posts on a page called Deadtown 101.

Also, I’ll be sponsoring Countdown Tuesday contests here, starting in December. Check back to win books, Deadtown swag, and other great prizes.

So, for my first Countdown Tuesday post, I’ll start with the mythology that’s behind my series.

Welsh Mythology: The Mabinogi

The Mabinogi is a collection of stories found in Welsh manuscripts that were written in the 12th and 13th centuries, although the stories themselves are probably much older. In them you’ll find tales of heroes and monsters, King Arthur and his knights, magic and war. The stories were translated into English in the 19th century by Charlotte Guest, who called her book The Mabinogion.

Part of the Mabinogi tells the story of the witch-goddess Ceridwen and her sons. In this story, Ceridwen gave birth to a son who was so hideously ugly that she feared for his future. The only way he’d be accepted into court, she reasoned, was if he possessed extraordinary knowledge and powers.

So Ceridwen made a potion in her cauldron that would give her son this remarkable knowledge. The potion had to boil for a year and a day; once it was distilled to just three drops, it would hold the power she wanted for her son.

Ceridwen hired a boy, Gwion, to stir the potion, then went off to do other things. Time passed. When the potion was nearly ready, three drops flew out of the cauldron. Gwion consumed them, taking into himself all the knowledge and power of Ceridwen’s potion. The cauldron broke into pieces.

When Ceridwen found out what had happened, she chased Gwion. The boy was afraid of her and ran as hard as he could, but Ceridwen was close behind him. Using his newfound knowledge, Gwion changed himself into a rabbit so that he could run faster. Ceridwen was also a shapeshifter, however, and she changed into a greyhound. And so it went on — when Gwion leapt into a river and became a fish, Ceridwen chased him as an otter; when he flew into the sky as a bird, Ceridwen became a hawk.He couldn’t escape her or even get far enough ahead to rest.

Finally, the exhausted Gwion ran into a barn, dove into a pile of grain, and turned himself into a piece of grain to hide there. Ceridwen changed into a hen — and ate him.

Nine months later, Ceridwen gave birth to a son. It was Gwion, reborn. Ceridwen had planned to kill the baby, but the child was so beautiful and intelligent that she couldn’t bring herself to do it. The child grew up to be Taliesin, the most famous Welsh poet.

If you’d like to read Guest’s translation of this story, click here.

The Cerddorion

Ceridwen’s story is the starting point for the race of shapeshifters I created for Deadtown, the Cerddorion. Cerddorion means “sons of Ceridwen,” but I use it to mean the entire race descended from her through Taliesin. My protagonist, Vicky Vaughn, is Cerddorion. She can change her shape to any sentient creature, up to three times per lunar cycle.

Among the Cerddorion, only females have the ability to change, and that ability manifests at puberty. Cerddorion women can shift at will, or sometimes strong emotion can force a shift. Shifts last anywhere from two to twelve hours, and they’re strongest at the full moon. If a Cerddorion woman gives birth, she loses her ability to shift and becomes the same as a normal human woman. (This was the choice made by Vicky’s older sister Gwen.)

Since their beginnings, the Cerddorion have also battled demons. Vicky spent seven summers training with her Aunt Mab in Wales. Now, she’s the only professional demon fighter in Boston.

Plot Twists

Everyone loves a good plot twist. It jolts the story in an unexpected direction and gets your adrenaline pumping as you sit up and wonder what’s going to happen now. For writers, plot twists can be a little tricky to handle. You want them to be genuinely surprising yet not so out-of-nowhere that readers scratch their heads and wonder “WTF?” instead of eagerly turning the page to see what comes next.

Here are some thoughts on plot twists and how to make them work:

• Plot twists are hard to plan in advance. If you’re a plotter rather than a pantster, you can work in some twists and turns as you plan out your plot. Personally, though, I find this hard to do. Some of my best plot twists have appeared when I wrote a scene, expecting it to go a certain way, and then events took a turn I hadn’t anticipated. I’ll be zeroing in on the last few lines of the scene, and one of the characters will say or do something completely unexpected. I love it when this happens — it energizes my writing and makes the story suddenly fresh.
• Don’t fight a good twist. On the other hand, it can be disconcerting when a story takes an unexpected turn as you write. If you’ve taken the time to map out the plot, it might feel like everything’s suddenly in disarray. Don’t jettison a twist just because it doesn’t fit your outline. Instead, take some time to play with the outline and see where things might go now that the twist has appeared.
• Need a twist? Ask “what if?” Often, the next thing that happens in a story is the obvious thing — and following an obvious chain of events isn’t all that exciting. If you’re at a juncture where your story could use a good twist, try this: Write down what you think will happen next in one sentence. Then write 25 alternatives. Ask yourself “What if?” to come up with possibilities: “What if the letter never arrives?” “What if the character gets fired?” “What if the building they’re about to investigate burns down?” Twenty-five alternatives may seem like a lot, but pushing yourself to think of that many takes your thinking out of any rut that your story may have slipped into.
• Don’t let a plot twist slow things down. If a twist requires pages of explanation, it’ll bog down the plot instead of speeding the story off in a new direction. When a twist appears, don’t give in to the temptation to quit showing and start telling. This is doubly true when a twist happens at the climax of a novel. Readers expect a climax to be exciting; don’t slow things down to stop and explain or to fill in backstory. Agatha Christie could get away with gathering all the suspects in a drawing room and having her detective explain the final plot twist, but you can’t.
• Plot twists must seem both surprising and inevitable. This is where you avoid the WTF? factor. And it happens during revision. When a plot twist shows up, resist the temptation to explain how it happened. (In other words, keep pressing forward instead of going back.) When you write the next draft, tweak the story to set things up for the twist. Again, don’t overexplain. Foreshadow, but don’t bludgeon.
• Avoid amazing coincidences. An out-of-the-blue coincidence is a sure way to lose credibility with your reader. If the characters are thinking or saying, “Wow, I can’t believe it!” your readers are, too. Stop and ask yourself how you could set things up so that the twist is not a contrived coincedence but an integral part of the plot.
• Use diversion. Magicians produce astonishing effects through sleight of hand. Novelists use the literary equivalent. Focus readers’ attention over here while something is happening over there. Don’t hide the latter, but play it down. Then, when the twist happens, readers will believe it because they can see where it came from.
• Be careful with unreliable narrators. Occasionally I’ll read a book with a first-person narrator who hides things — prior knowledge, events, conversations — from readers. As a reader, I find this incredibly frustrating, and any plot twists that arise from this withheld information feels like a cheat. Much of the pleasure of reading a story with a first-person narrator comes from being inside the character’s head as events unfold. If the narrator knows something, the reader should know it, too.
• Your narrator can be a liar, BUT . . . It can be a lot of fun to read a story narrated by a liar or a con artist who likes to trick people. If the narrator is going to lie to readers, however, clue the reader in that this is likely to happen. That way, pleasure comes from trying to figure out what’s a lie and what’s the truth in the narration. But readers don’t like to feel tricked, duped, fooled — in other words, they don’t like to feel stupid. It can be fun to catch the narrator in a lie, but it’s not so much fun to be caught up in lies yourself. (By the way, the best unreliable narrators tend to be those who lie to themselves.)

Check out this just-for-fun plot twist generator to shake up your story. I just got this one: “Only penguins can save this story.”

Damn, I knew it. Off now to figure out how to get those penguins up onto the summit of a mountain in the Catskills . . .

Happy Halloween!

When my publisher was first discussing Deadtown’s publication with me, a fall release date was mentioned. This would’ve been great, because Deadtown’s climactic scene takes place on Halloween. (When else? ) I ended up with a late-December release date — and believe me, it’s wonderful to have a release date — but it would have been fun to have Vicky and friends out in the world today. They join me in wishing you a happy, spooky, candy-loaded Halloween!

If you missed my guest post at the League of Relucant Adults earlier this month, click here for a helpful list of safety tips in case of a zombie attack while you’re out trick-or-treating.

And speaking of trick-or-treating, if you’re in the U.S. take advantage of that sugar high to set the clocks back while you’re zipping around the house.

Have a great Halloween!