Guest Post: Valerie Nieman on Going Away and Coming Home

“This is the weirdest book I’ve ever read.”

That’s what one woman wrote in her pre-release review of my paranormal urban fantasy/romance/science fiction hybrid The Underground. What a fabulous compliment! I wasn’t going for weird when I wrote the story but that’s the way my mind works so I’m happy to know my weirdness shone through. Still, I wonder what it was about the novel she found strange. Could it be The Underground is the story of an alpha werewolf and an interstellar assassin who fall for each other? Hm”¦maybe it was the sex. It’s not every day one snags a ringside seat at the Bedroom Olympics where one of the partners is an eight-foot wolf.

I’ve been asked how I came up with an outlandish tale like The Underground. Well, it’s like this. One oppressively hot and humid afternoon, I was sitting in a city bus with no air conditioning, sweating buckets in my vinyl seat and breathing car exhaust from outside the open window. Between the heat and the pollution, I was close to fainting. I didn’t want that to happen because the bus people the city where I lived were notorious for swiping your stuff if you fell asleep or died or something. So I started playing the “what-if” game. The game starts with a question, and then I keep asking questions about whatever topic I’m exploring until I’ve spun it out to it’s logical””or not-so-logical””conclusion. It’s not that much different from a teaching tool called the Socratic method, a sick, twisted version of the what-if game professors play with their innocent students.

Sweltering in that uptown bus, I asked what would it take for a werewolf to survive in today’s world?

I flung myself down that rabbit hole with glee, envisioning various rural and urban scenarios, the problems they present and how our werewolf could successfully deal with them. I was noodling my way through a complication when it struck me that a werewolf trying to lead as normal a life as possible in his world where he is marginalized and hunted by those in power wouldn’t be that much different from someone trying to lead a normal life in our world where he is marginalized and hunted by those in power. People die every day because of their skin color, sexual orientation and identity, belief systems, and whatever else the various human tribes, being the xenophobic and murderous lot they are, find unacceptable. To live, a werewolf would have to spin a web of lies and keeping track of them all would be a Herculean task. Then there’s having to live in a constant state of hyperawareness, knowing every person who crosses his path is a potential enemy. Surviving the human horde would be like walking a tightrope a hundred feet above the ground without a safety net. What a hard and exhausting way to live. But how much different really, is the werewolf’s life from his real-world counterparts””those who can’t escape the closet, who can’t break out of the egg, or who can’t bear living life as a second-class citizen? I didn’t create a world for The Underground“”it’s our world.

That’s not quite the end of it, though. I was in the middle of an explanation about The Underground world to a friend (and potential reader) when she interrupted me and said, “so why the space alien?” First, let me tell you that rabbit hole took me to some mighty strange places. While I was rooting around down there, I began thinking about how someone from another planet might be treated by society’s outcasts if they discovered her. All things being equal, would they embrace her otherness, recognize her as kindred and hide her amongst themselves? Or, like humans, would they reject her, seeing her as a threat and betray her presence to the larger world? I had no answer. But the question intrigued me so I decided to explore it. If you want to know how it worked out, buy my book.

So the trials faced by werewolves and other paranormals trying to survive in a fantasy world where exposure means certain death aren’t much different than the those faced by any other persecuted people in the real world. Which led me to a final question: What would happen in The Underground’s world””or in this one””if the downtrodden reached the breaking point and decided they wouldn’t take their lot anymore? History tells us the answer. Oppress people long enough and hard enough, they will eventually rise up. And the results won’t be pretty.

About the author: Award-winning author Roxanne Bland was born in the shadows of the rubber factory smokestacks in Akron, Ohio but grew up in Washington, D.C. As a child, she spent an inordinate amount of time prowling the museums of the Smithsonian Institution. She also spent an inordinate amount of time reading whatever books she could get her hands on, including the dictionary. A self-described “fugitive from reality,” she has always colored outside the lines and in her early years of writing, saw no reason why a story couldn’t be written combining the genres she loved, and did so despite being told it wasn’t possible.

Today, she writes stories that are hybrids of paranormal urban fantasy, romance, and science fiction. She is enamored of Great Danes and has been owned by several. She lives in Maryland with her current owner, Daisy Mae. Discover more at http://www.roxannebland.rocks, or follow her on Twitter as @RoxanneBland2.

What if prose were written like music? What if, instead, of a common world, stories in an anthology were steps on a share emotional path? Those are the questions the upcoming anthology Score is attempting to answer.

Emotions are a key part of our experience of art. The books that stick with you are often the ones that made you feel something. Even when we don’t recall the details of a plot (or painting, or movie), we’ll often recall how it made us feel. Even if you don’t recall the details of Watership Down, for example -“” the names of the rabbits, the original warren, etc. “” you probably remember how you felt about the rabbits and what happened to them. You remember how you felt when you closed the book. Even if you mislay every detail of a book, you’ll remember whether it made you laugh or cry or feel wistful.

Score is an attempt to tackle the emotional side of writing head on. A group of almost 20 authors set out not to write about robots or aliens or magic “” though we have all of those “” but to write from emotion.

What does that mean, and how does it work? It means, simply, that each of the authors worked from a coherent emotional score, knowing the emotions in the piece before and after theirs, what emotions they were to emphasize, and … nothing else. They had complete freedom of genre, topic, tone, approach, etc. “” so long as they worked with the emotions they were assigned. The result is a fascinating collection of stories with a distinct emotional progression.

Putting together the score was challenging. As the editor and ‘composer’, I defined fairly early on the emotions we would work with. I knew the direction I wanted to score to take – an overall path of ascending hope that I thought a good fit to the times “” but choosing emotional terminology that would work consistently across many different writers took some work.

In the end, we worked from a palette of six emotional ranges – six emotions with four variants each, two positive, two negative. For example, Hope ranges from Hope at the positive end to Despair at the negative end. These aren’t quite the emotional pairs used by social scientists, and we could have ended up with a wide range of others, but these six emotional ranges allowed ample scope for ups and downs. The emotions are loosely grouped into two sets – the Hope set (Hope, Curiosity, Awe) and the Joy set (Joy, Love, Lust).

Each writer was assigned a specific major and minor emotion, and the score has distinct movements. Using musical terms very approximately, there’s an Overture, a Hope triad, a Joy triad, a Bridge, a Joy triad inversion, a Hope triad inversion, and a Coda. There are high points and low points, but … spoiler alert… it all ends with Hope and Joy.

It’s been a lot of fun putting this together. While I personally often write from an emotional basis, putting together an entire score was an intriguing and challenging exercise. Each writer interpreted the task in their own way, putting their own distinct stamp on it, as artists will. The result is intriguing, and I hope will be as much of an adventure for readers as it was for all of us.

Score: an SFF symphony is out on March 2nd from Metaphorosis Books.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

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