Well, folks, it's been an interesting month.  As some of you may know, Mercury has been in retrograde for most of it, which always means a heck of a ride for yours truly.  (Mercury is my ruling planet, and retrograde inevitably messes with communication and technology.  If you want to know more, you can read up on it here.)   I spent a fair amount of time not being sure which way was up ... but in spite of that, I've gotten a lot done in these last few weeks! 

I've started revising From the Desk of Buster Heywood for its rerelease to herald the completion of  Adjustments, and completed the brand-new artwork for its cover.   Patreon supporters of all tiers have access to the first look at that artwork ... click on the orange banner to your right to sign up, if you haven't already!   I also made some progress on the draft of Adjustments.

It may not seem like a lot for a month, until you consider that I've been working overtime at my current job - a mandated extra ten hours a week.  This doesn't leave a lot of time for much of anything when I get home from my forty-minute commute, so I usually only have enough energy to sit on the couch with my amazingly supportive wife and eat dinner while binge-watching something.    Our current fodder is Netflix's reboot of Queer Eye, though, which has inspired me to really fight for that work-love-life balance and carve out creative time wherever and however I can.  

I've also found inspiration in something that's been a favorite of mine for a while now.  I last flailed about how my fangirl side ties in to how I approach writing two years ago, in this post about Iron Man and Spider-Man: Homecoming.   This time, I need to flail at you all about the story structure of Captain Marvel, and how it showed me that all the misgivings I've been quietly having about Adjustments are not anything I need to worry about.

"But, Ang," you say, "I either don't care for hero movies, or I don't want to be spoiled for anything."   That's okay!  I won't go into great detail about the actual MCU (that's Marvel Cinematic Universe, the name of the movie series, for you non-dorks).  What I want to talk about more is what Captain Marvel does with its eleven-year backlog of canon.   

Chronologically, this is only the second MCU movie: it takes place in the 1990s, long before everything, save for the events of the first Captain America movie.  So the writers have so many little things they can seed in to make those of us who know what's coming point at the screen in recognition.  They reward the fans' attention to detail, without making anyone who hasn't "been there before" feel left out.  Certain side characters from previous movies make critical appearances, and some viewers know who they will go on to be, and the roles they will have to play... but those references do not detract from the main story.  

This is the lesson that authors with a series of novels or stories should take from Captain Marvel, in my opinion: you can reference other works without beating your readers over the head with them.  Slip them in quietly.  Those who notice them will be, without a doubt, your greatest fans: the keen-eyed who know and love your work for its richness and depth.  

I started writing the Lines of Power (formerly Novels of Aviario) knowing that they would be a series.  I had the plot out to a certain point already sketched out in rough form: where things would ultimately head, who would be involved, and to what degree.   Five years later, a few of the characters have surprised me by demanding larger roles. and new ones have appeared that I hadn't expected, but the foreknowledge has remained solid.   The first three novels may be able to stand alone on their own - as well as "The Lost Hour" - but all are strongly connected.  I hope you will all enjoy seeing them come together when Adjustments is finished.   This drawing together of everyone I've written thus far is only the beginning ... 

What movies really stand out to you as great examples of story structure?  Drop me a comment below, and we'll have a nice cinemaphile chat.  

​Until next week, I remain your hostess,

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,

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....  

Over the last five years, I've tried just about every form of author-to-reader interaction available to me, to see which ones work the best: not just in terms of self-publishing, but for me, personally.  At first, I felt inundated by the amount of options ... and by the price tags which came with some of them.  Out of necessity, I limited myself to those which were free ... and even then, there were a great deal.  Those of you who've been with me for the long haul know the laundry list ranges from Facebook to LinkedIn to Google Plus and back again.   But at the top of them all was the Mount Everest, the Mecca, and dare I say, the albatross of the self-published author: The Newsletter.  

"Every author has to have a mailing list".  It's the author's equivalent of a commandment: we see it everywhere online, in blogs, on websites about How To Self-Publish, emblazoned across colleagues' websites.  Join a mailing list, and be treated to updates, freebies, and exclusive content ... and for a while, I tried it.  Friday at Charlie's was my attempt at a mailing list, and the Friends of Aviario got art, photos, news, and the occasional short story.  Really freakin' good content, if I do say so myself.   But even when I offered a free e-book to subscribers, I never got that Golden Giant List of Subscribers.    And that was a problem.   Everyone touted the usefulness of newletters because of that giant list: in theory, everyone on your mailing list was a guaranteed customer in one way or another.   The trouble was, I only had a handful.  And they started to drop after a few months.   So I signed up for other authors' newsletters in search of a common thread, some magic elixir that might help me crack the code of The Newsletter.  Several subscriptions and newsletters later, I realized the secret keeping me from doing well with my own: 

I didn't like newsletters.  I found them tedious.  I had to open my email to read them, and was confronted by the leagues of spam from other sources - which were often also newsletters, but from retailers that had added me from online purchases and services.  My brain had equated newsletters with unwanted marketing, with the sort of spam you get and tolerate in order to get an occasionally useful benefit (Michaels and JoAnn Fabrics, I am looking at you and your coveted 60% coupons.  You have furnished my creative supply stash more times than I can count).  And most people - at least, the few who'd unsubscribed from Friday At Charlie's - probably were beginning to feel the same way.    So where did I go to find the things I wanted to engage with?

Twitter.  Facebook.  Instagram.  Pinterest.  And those led me to the sites and blogs of people I came to regularly enjoy.  Easy-peasy.  In a world where people want quick impressions before they click, time is an investment, and reading a blog (or a newsletter) takes time.  So ... I realized I need to go to the short-format marketing and look for my readers there.  

Before you say "how dare you accuse people of having no attention spans, is this another rant about millenials or whatever we're calling people nowadays when we don't like them" ... hold up.  Technically, I'm a millenial, myself (though I'm on the VERY VERY tail end of the spectrum, which is so weird, but another ramble entirely).  And I have a theory about creative people online, and how we're starting to view media through the lens of the internet.   

The internet is an amazing place for creative people!  It makes creating and sharing so much more accessible than it was in the 80s and 90s.  Even today's internet is better for creatives than the dial-up, AOL-and-Bravenet-and-ICQ internet of my high school days: which, incidentally, is when I decided that I wanted to write.  Hmmmmm.   But I'm coming dangerously close to veering off topic.  Focus, Ang.  Focus.  And that's the thing about the internet.   People don't have too much focus for it, because there are so many things everywhere.  We have a phrase for it, for Godsakes: FOMO.  Fear Of Missing Out.  So we make our impressions of things as small as possible, so we can devour more.  We call a show that needs our attention for longer than an episode or two a "binge".... but the great thing is, we still do it.   But how do we decide what to binge?   From seeing enough of those bite-sized peeks at a thing to realize that we're interested.   And that is not something that a newsletter can do.   That is the territory of the tweet, of the Facebook post, of the Pin, of the omnipresent hashtag and keyword.

So, to make a long story short (too late!), I'm not writing a newsletter, because I'm not writing you a circular ad.  I'm writing you postcards, hoping that they'll intrigue you enough that you'll want to take this journey, yourselves. 

Happy travels, and I'll see you next time...