First off, I owe an apology to novelist Ralph Ellison, possibly on behalf of my entire 2002 literature class, which is where this whole thing really started to grow roots.  We received a handout of an essay, "The Sense of Place", by Wallace Stegner.  It's an excellent essay, but Stegner appoints his key thought - we can't know who we are until we know where we are - to nature writer and activist Wendell Berry.  For over 15 years now, I've been thinking it was his.  It's only until I went to look it up for this blog entry that I discovered, well ... it isn't.  So, thank you to Quote Investigator, and my apologies to Mr. Ellison.

Now that that's out of the way, let's start this new blog feature properly, with a quote from the proper author himself:

It's a Big Thought to wrap your head around, to be sure.  That literature class took it one step farther, when our professor, the lovely, inimitable, and quite memorable Dr. Ann Page Stecker, posed something to us: that the concept could be just as easily applied to literature.  Setting affects our characters on the page just as much as it affects us in our daily lives... like the setting of that particular class.

It was a little classroom, with long, short rectangular windows at the ground level, and for some reason, we were having said literature class in the science building.  I remember, because we all seemed so out of our element: a bunch of hopeful authors and essayists and brimming minds surrounded by shelves of gradiated flasks and posters detailing the layers and ecosystem of the nearby swamp.  In contrast to the tall, thin, balding professor I'd taken introductory Biology from in the same room as a freshman, Ann Page was short and round, with an elegant gray bob and fringe that moved as emphatically as she did from side to side of the room as she gave her lectures, thoroughly undeterred by the change in venue.   During this particular class, I realized the reason my first draft of a certain novel had been floundering for the past two years: it had plenty of characters, and the story was a whip-cracker, but the setting needed work.  Lots and lots of work.   After class ended, I approached her and shared my revelation.  

"Angelaaa D'Onoffrioooo," she said, in the mockingly stuffy tone that always made me feel not only welcome, but at ease.  "That is exactly the sort of thing I wanted you all to take from this.  Walk with me and tell me about your setting."

It wasn't a particularly long walk from the science building to the hall where the literature and communications courses were held, but we lingered outside her office for a moment, then moved right on into it.  I hadn't really been invited into a professor's office just to hang out before, so this was a particularly validating and amazing thing for me.  Over the course of that visit, we devised a brilliant idea together: that she would host an independent study for me in my next semester, where I would make it my goal to develop my characters' sense of place: a little town called Aviario.

I knew what it felt like: the towns in Connecticut where I spent holidays visiting family, with a heavy dose of stereotypical New England charm and heritage, proud of its history.  I'd never drawn a map before, but grew up loving fantasy books or other novels which started with one.  So of course, a map was required.  The first draft is long since lost to coffee stains and time, but the version you see above was lovingly copied from it to make room for more houses and locations as it grew, some time around 2009, when I started thinking about Buster Heywood, and what kind of story he would have to tell.  His apartment building isn't even numbered above, yet: but Charlie's Bar is.  Those with keen eyes will find it at the northwest corner of Centre Circle, #30.  In this early version, places like Millstone Antiques and Cameron's apartment building aren't present yet, either.  I've got an updated version with a page for each quadrant of the map, which I'll be posting piece by piece in the future.  Which brings us right  back around to the beginning ... and this new feature, Sense of Place, which will serve as a partner to What A Character. 

By the end of my sophomore year of college, Aviario had a map, and I had a mock travel guide which laid out some of its history and important locations.  I also wrote a narrative of a walking tour, where a tourist encountered a few townies who pointed out local landmarks, and each landmark segued into a flashback of the town's history.  While I'm brave enough to share a 17-year-old map, I don't quite have the courage to share writing of the same age.  I may clean it up for a future installment of Sense of Place, though!  Expect future installments to focus on specific locations in the Lines Of Power novels, with photographs of the places which inspired them, their place on the map (if applicable), and excerpts or anecdotes which help bring them to life.   I hope you'll enjoy them!  If there's a particular locale you'd like me to feature, leave a comment below! 

Until next week, I remain your hostess,

Longtime readers of this blog may remember that I am a fan of Boston singer-songwriter Amanda Palmer, and that her book The Art of Asking inspired me to start my Patreon, and made me feel a lot more comfortable with several aspects of my creative life.   I feel like getting into her music and her creations dovetailed with the period in time where I finally started to consider myself A Real Creative Professional, and not just someone who was trying to become one.  Then, of course, I realized that the only one who can assign you those coveted capital letters is yourself, in the creative world.  Art and writing are so relative, and subject to so many other different forms of validation than, say, someone who opens a shop to sell watches or golf carts or antique Pez dispensers.   

One of the things I struggle with the most is also one of the most common questions people ask when I tell them I'm a self-published author: "How are your sales?"   I instantly become Mrs. White from that infamous scene in Clue: ​

The more I think about how visceral and immediate my anger is at that question, the more I feel it needs unpacking.  While my sales at the moment are very small, that speaks to a number of factors.  I just caught myself beginning to list them, and made myself stop, because that isn't the point.  For creative people, it is not first and foremost about the money.  (Sure, we like it.  We have bills to pay just like everyone else, and any creation costs money to produce.)    The heart of why most people create - books, music, art, film, you name it - is because they are inspired, and they feel a deep-seated need to share that inspiration with the rest of the world.  Not for the sake of our own aggrandization, but because we feel that what we are making has something to say.   When someone asks a creator about the monetary value of their work as an icebreaker. it hurts.  It sends the message that they are only interested in our social and economic standing, not in what made us want to do these things in the first place.    The problem is ... I got this question a lot.

It began to make me think that my work would only be legitimate to other people if I could say "Oh, it's in the top whatever, on Amazon", or "I made enough money  on my books last week to pay one of my bills", or something similar.  I started thinking I needed to market better.   Then I had to job hunt, and took a position that at first seemed ideal for an author.  Unfortunately, all it turned out to be was demoralizing and draining, and on top of that - as you may recall - a number of stressful and unfortunate things happened over the course of late 2017 and the first half of 2018.  Then the summer of 2018 became another struggle similar to the last job hunt.  I found a position which is supporting me rather well, though it has its flaws, and I find myself once again thinking about What I Really Want.  Which brings me back to Amanda Palmer.

As a "We Survived" sort of thank-you present to my wife and two close friends, I bought us tickets to Amanda's upcoming There Will Be No Intermission tour.  One of these friends is only passingly familiar with her music, so I curated a YouTube playlist for her.  When I did, I found myself listening to one particular song over and over, because of how much it resonates with me:​

I started thinking of all the people I'd convinced myself I wanted to be: the maybe-not-best-selling-but-definitely-recognizable-author,  and then maybe just the locally-recognizable-famous-in-a-small-town-sort-of-way-author ... and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that those were both things other people had seemed to want for me or aspired to for me.  The sort of people who would joke, "Oh, I'd better hang on to this receipt, it'll be worth something when you're famous".  But I don't ​want to be famous.  I don't even really think I want to be rich.  Financially comfortable, sure, but rich just seems a bit too much.  All I want ... is to write books, and make art, and create things that will make people's lives just that little bit nicer.   Am I still going to compare myself to other authors or crafters or artists, and be jealous of their success?  Of course.  I'm only human.  But I'm also going to be proud of them, and happy for them, because they have something which I am realizing is incredibly rare.    

Don't get me wrong: this isn't me making an excuse to not try as hard, or to work as hard.  I still intend to work at consistently improving my writing, at getting this self-marketing thing down, at building a decent Etsy store for Hazel's Moving Cottage, and whatever else may come along with all of that.  But I'm reminding myself that I don't have to be that super-woman who holds a 40-hour job (with frequent overtime), helps keep an apartment in shape, spends quality time with her wife and friends, still has hobbies, AND somehow manages to crank out a novel a year and market it with panache, precision, and a constant stream of brilliant and witty social media across multiple platforms.

Maybe every other year.   Maybe I'll become the next George R. R. Martin - no, who am I kidding, I wouldn't be able to stand waiting that long between books, myself.  I don't know when Adjustments is going to be ready.  All I know is, I'm still working on it as often as I can, along with a lot of other things, and I will always let you know where I'm at.  You'll have plenty of advance notice.  And I'm going to fill this blog with lots of other fun stuff in the meantime - like more What A Character entries, and things about the background of the books, the places, and other neat things - so that you have plenty of reasons to stick around.  

In short, the next time someone asks me how well my books are selling, I'll respond, "You know, I haven't looked at my metrics in a while.  I'm just happy that they're out there."   And that'll be the truth.  Because that's the kind of author I want to be. 

What kind of You do you want to be?  Is it the same answer now as it would have been a few years ago?  I'd love to hear your thoughts.  Drop me a comment below.   

Until next week, I remain your hostess,

I've always felt that the hallmark of good, strong fiction was a cast of characters who felt real, no matter who or what they were.  By the time I've finished a book, if I wanted to know more about them, or felt like I had made friends, it's a good one.  I feel particularly fortunate and grateful that so many readers have told me that Lines of Power is full of such characters ... and I decided it might be fun to let you get to know them a little more, one by one.   So now, once a month or so, I'll be starting a new feature here on Between The Lines ...

Given my recent blog about hopepunk as a genre and what it represents, it seemed only natural to start with the character who embodies it most, and who has been in every single novel so far: Crowley.  Some of you who have only read From the Desk of Buster Heywood know him as The Spanner, and in The Proper Bearing, he goes by another nickname for a while: Topper.   But none of these are his real name, which remains to be disclosed (sorry, no spoilers here - yet).  Crowley is, however, his favorite of his nicknames, and the one his friends and colleagues in the Organization know him by.  

That image was how Crowley first appeared to me, fully formed and full of attitude.   The only difference is that when he's out and about as The Spanner, he sports a leather jacket instead of his usual denim vest - formerly a jacket, with the sleeves cut off, just as covered in buttons.  Each one of the buttons is either sarcastic, political, or punk in nature, and anyone who looks close will note that some of those political buttons date all the way back to the 60s, right along with the yellow smiley face he keeps front and center amid all that punk, right over his heart.   

While I was filling out the Organization, I knew that I'd need someone who kept to the darker side of its balance, someone who did the deeds nobler people would balk at doing.  A punk fit the bill nicely, but someone young wouldn't understand why it needed to be done: they'd only do trouble for trouble's sake.  I live in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire, where we have an annual tradition called Motorcycle Week(end).  Every June, the town next to mine is flooded with bikers who gather to participate in rides, races, and a myriad of other events, and a sea of vendor tents, entertainment pavillions, and leather and denim consumes us.   As such, I've seen more than my share of aging dudes with 'tudes, people who have had their inner anarchy tempered by time.  I knew that was exactly the sort of person the Organization needed, but I still lacked a face and a name ... until I picked up a Greatest Hits CD of a certain musician on a whim.   Listening to it in the car, a particular line struck me like a bolt from the blue, and with it, came not only the face, but Crowley's singular name. 

Crowley - a name that instantly evokes the darker side of magic: occult secrets, meetings in the dead of night, rituals with daggers, all the negative aspects of modern new age witchcraft.  It's the sort of name someone slated to cause trouble would use to his absolute advantage.  And just like that, I could picture im lounging in my passenger seat, hanging an arm out the window to flick his cigarette ashes out into the road.  And we had a nice little conversation about where he was from, and what he did for Janus, and what some of his favorite moments were.  I won't spoil them all - they're bound to make their way into future Lines of Power installments - but I will say that he was among the bikers at Altamont, and that the mining story he tells Miles in The Proper Bearing was prior to his joining the Organization.   Also, a fun fact for those who've read In The Cards: he wasn't Ral's original trainer!  That honor first belonged to Felicia Sabrien, the Enforcer who becomes Janus' right-hand-woman.  See one of the stories in "Finders Keepers" for the details...   

Clearly, there's a lot more to Crowley than just his attitude and his penchant for showing up to annoy the heroes of my tales.  He has his own story to tell, and it will likely come out in small pieces over the course of everyone else's.  As much as I'd love to give him his own novel, it doesn't really seem his style.  The devil is in the details, and he's content to stay there.  In the meantime, I take comfort and pleasure in knowing that he's out there, somewhere, no matter what I'm writing, making sure things don't go too well.  I have to be able to give my heroes something to fix, after all.  It's a good working relationship, and one I'm glad to have.  

Want more Crowley?  You can find him in everything on the Novels & Short Stories page, with the exception of Times of Trouble: try as I might, I couldn't find an easy spot for him there.   Got a favorite Crowley scene?  Or maybe you've got a question about him I didn't address?   Hit up the comments section, let's talk!  I love character chats.  

Until next time, I remain your hostess,

Welcome back ... and welcome to a fresh new site design.  I'm pleased to announce that this marks the first phase of The Novels of Aviario becoming the Lines of Power series.   There are a number of reasons behind my decision ... the largest two are that it helps include any stories not set largely in Aviario, such as The Proper Bearing, and it's easier for folks to pronounce.  (Hey, with a last name like mine, I need to give you all a break somewhere!)

When I first started this website several years ago, I only had a few things: I had a story I wanted to tell, just enough web design knowhow to get things off the ground, and a lot of will to get it all done.  I almost wish I had screenshots of those early days... back when From the Desk of Buster Heywood was going to be a serial novel, when I was over at Freehostia, when I barely even knew that there was an author community on the Internet.  As time passed, I began to learn more about self-publishing, and in applying that knowledge to the dream of sharing my creations with the world, the form those creations took began to change and grow.  I've met so many wonderful people who have left their mark on me, and influenced what I do, and how I do it: from the writing itself, graphic design, social media, marketing (who knew I'd come to love learning marketing?!  not me!), and even to how I define and set my goals.  

I am grateful to each and every one of those people.  You, reader, are one of them, whether we know one another or not.  I hope that this growth and change is a trend which will continue for years to come... one which will keep allowing me to not only tell my stories and expand my world, but bring it to you in ways which make you happy and keep you coming back.

This was a short blog post, I know, but it's a simple message: one I'm not sure I want to risk bogging down with too many links, or graphics, or even quotes about change and progress.  I'd prefer it speak for itself.

So with that, I encourage you - as always! - to chime in in the comments below with any thoughts, and I'll see you next time!

My first introduction to hopepunk was a link to its inciting Tumblr post, from a friend.  I was intrigued, but by the time I finished reading that post by fellow author Alexandra Rowland, I was not only hooked, but convinced: hopepunk was the elusive genre I had been searching for since I began this journey in 2014.  

So what is hopepunk?  

It encompasses just about every walk of life, and they are all tied together with a silver thread of thought, a belief, a way of looking at the world.  It is a way of thinking that I have personally ascribed to for most of my life, one which I refer to as "pessimisic optimism": the thought that yes, things can be pretty awful, but that will never mean they can't be improved.  I've scoured the internet for others' thoughts on hopepunk and found that it is, as most things are these days, a pretty polarizing concept.  Those who approve of it embrace it wholeheartedly, while others are quick to refer to it as "liberal nonsense" and "a word for something we didn't even need".   (Most of those were comments in comments sections or forum posts, and were taken at face value.  I have yet to find a longform. coherent article which has anything detrimental to say about hopepunk, which seems to say something in itself.  Alexandra Rowland has this to say about it in her essay "One Atom of Justice, One Molecule of Mercy, and The Empire of Unsheathed Knives":

So why are my novels hopepunk. and not urban fantasy, as I previously attributed them?  Simple: hopepunk is the thread that they all share.  ​ From the Desk of Buster Heywood's eponymous and unlikely hero defends his little corner of Aviario from the corrupt forces trying to bend it out of shape, because it is his, and he believes it can be better.  He doesn't have any magic at his disposal, but these decisions will lead him to people who do: people like Troy and Ral from In The Cards, who do their part to solve a string of disappearances, or like The Proper Bearing's Nicholas, who leaves his home behind in pursuit of his own answers, and in hope that he can help stop the people who turned his own world upside down.    The Organization which Ral - and several other characters, omitted for the sake of spoilers - belong to is the very core of hopepunk: they believe in maintaining the balance of magic in the world, that everything has its time and purpose.  They believe that in order to do good, sometimes you have to be a little bad... and no member embodies this philosophy more than the only character who has appeared in every single novel to date. 

I didn't even plan it that way, to be honest.  He sneaks into my outlines, at every chance he gets, whether I like it or not. There just always seems to be a place that he fits.  He showed up to assist Buster under one of his many nicknames: The Spanner.  As Ral's half-hearted mentor, we know him by his favorite name: Crowley.  And we get a bit of a glimpse of his past as a former gallery owner when he helps Nicholas in tracking down his friends' kidnappers.  No matter where and when he shows up, Crowley is quite happy to get his hands dirty if it means trouble for the people who cause trouble.  He is as punk as punk gets, working for a group who is as hopeful as hope can get.  If that isn't hopepunk, I don't know what is.  

When it comes right down to it, hopepunk has been my personal aesthetic for a very long time.  Examples that Rowland gives, such as Sam and Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter series, Star Trek ... all of these are things which I embraced as a book-and-film-loving Younger Me, stitching them into the patchwork quilt which would become my taste.  I liked my fictional friends to be put up against insurmountable odds, to go through terrible things, to live in imperfect worlds.  And I didn't always like it when they found perfect happy endings, either.  As I grew older and learned more about the way the world is, I wanted what I read on the page to still ring true.  Not everything could be put right, but as long as something could still survive and thrive, that was good enough for me.   It's why I'm adamant that people who have defined hopepunk in other articles, such as Vox's piece defining the genre for those who hadn't found it through Tumblr, have missed the biggest hopepunk example of all: Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events.  They start out as children's books, but evolve along with their protagonists to teach some important lessons about what "good vs. evil" really amounts to outside the pages of a book or, if you aren't a reader, the easily bingeable confines of a phenomenal, very faithfully created Netflix series.

I have long said that I aspire for my own series to be as tightly-woven as Snicket's books (attributing the talent falsely to his literary representative, adult author Daniel Handler), because there are plot points for the final books scattered liberally and cleverly throughout each Unfortunate Event.   While I think I'm doing nicely on that front (wait and see!), I didn't realize that I'd carried along that same spirit.   So while Buster, Ral, Nick, and this year's newcomer, Annick, may not have lives as tumultuous and dire as the Baudelaire orphans. they do share the same indominable spirit: the spirit at the core of hopepunk.    I'll leave you with one final quote of Rowland's, from the Vox article mentioned earlier: 

Standing up and surviving ... in the end, isn't that what the best stories are about?  I like to think so.  If you do, too ... if you haven't already crossed the town lines into Aviario, you might find it worth a visit.    If you have any personal favorite examples of hopepunk, or thoughts on the genre, I'd love to hear them!  Please leave them in the comments below ... I may end up with some things to add to my growing read & watch list!

Until next week, friends....