H. P. Lovecraft Was A Sickly Child

I like this one. A little closer to the Science Fiction feel than Fantasy, but could easily also be one of those mystical trancy special-effects moments in the story.

Most of all, at least a little space shows between paragraphs.

The title doesn’t get cut off by the text block. While the preceding Cloudy Sunset was pretty cool looking in the abstract, I should have previewed it for how it’d look with actual text in.

One of the good professional novelist habits I need to cultivate is Blogging Well. Using a keyword like “theme” and then cleverly talking about themes and ideas in novels as well as what new theme I stuck on my blog. Using the theme artistically to show some of my personality – and the feel of my books, which is what book readers who don’t know me will get out of reading my blogs.

This is something that helps sell books.

It may be farther off for some of us than others, but one of the natural consequences of having written a novel is that someday you will be selling novels. Or at least giving them away and trying to build up enough audience to get trickle income on the ads at the download page. That’s a perfectly good thing for a leisure novelist to do.

It could even keep you in replacement netbooks if your budget’s tight. Nothing to sneeze at.

Part of the blogging thing is keywording. Theme is one of the things people might search on. They like certain themes and not others. They share your slant — your general ideas in life — at least some of them. Your core readers do. Marketing is really more about making sure your core readers know your book exists than about trying to fool everybody and their dog into buying your book whether they’d like it or not.

Okay, some people get so skilled at writing that marketing is more a matter of announcing that they did another one. Everybody and their dog does buy it, if only to pan it. But that’s far away from any first novelist’s current milestones.

It is a selling point in a cover letter if you’ve already got a blog with an online readership. The more people who know who you are and buy your book because they’re your friend, the more likely buzz will reach the thousands on thousands of readers who aren’t your friend. If they remember your name and connect it with your writing and actually remember what flavor of fiction you do, that’s enough “friend” factor to shove you way ahead of millions of other novelists they don’t remember or don’t like that flavor.

This is part of why those superstars stay superstars because if you only have enough spending money for one new novel and like Stephen King, you might not want to pay just as much for a different scary novel from some guy you never heard of in hopes he’s as good as Stephen King. Even if the other guy is Richard Bachman and actually is Stephen King under a different label.

Or you write more than one flavor of novel and your publisher or agent suggests that you create a pseudonym. A new persona. The one that does the horror novels isn’t the one that does the nice happy fantasy-comedies and isn’t the one that did the romance novel. This can work out well for the prolific because the same publisher may buy three or four of your books in the same year, giving you multiple incomes and chances at the Literary Lottery.

That’s my personal term for what happens if you get a best seller. It seems to be random. Writing a brilliant good book helps, but only so much. Brilliant good books sometimes get buried for years and become cult classics instead long afterward. It more seems to be something random between a general audience and something that is at least halfway decent or publishable quality.

It’s a fad, and if there was some artificial way to create fads, advertisers would do it and then it wouldn’t work so well any more. They all would and it would flatten out.

So I think of that as something like the State Lottery, except that while the prizes are huge, there are fewer players and skill counts. It’s not predictable and the only things you can do to increase your chance of winning are to get more tickets and to write better books — consistently well, so that it doesn’t matter which of them became the hot big deal. That way your core readers will come back and get copies of all your other books too, but not be disappointed because only the bestseller was a good one.

Themes are funny things.

Some are controversial. Others only seem so because they were controversial thirty years ago and the majority of undecided lean in your direction on it. Others are so universal that they’d unite extreme conservvatives and extreme radicals on how moving the story is.

To me theme is something in a novel that just happens.

The story’s meaning is not clear to me till its end. It’s there as a force driving everything in it, but I don’t consciously recognize it till the end. I did not expect “Magic in the Streets” to be about someone overcoming past abuse and standing up to the ultimate bully — the ghost of an abuser, someone for whom no order of protection could do any good whatsoever.

Yet that’s one of the main themes in the book and was foreshadowed from the moment that waif turned up drifting around a week after her eighteenth birthday confused without having eaten for days. Her old world of abuse was gone and she hadn’t figured out yet what to do in life. She lucked.

She got an eight week old kitten for a guru and he was a good one.

So that was fun to write and I cried while I was finishing it. I was so moved at the end that I sat there stunned. I could not believe the story had taken that direction or done it that powerfully.

Creative writing is sometimes right-brained, intuitive and unconscious. It’s not always planned. It’s not always organized. It happens and when it goes right, the high is like nothing else.

So if you don’t pre-decide the theme of your book, reading over it afterward will probably give you some idea of what your themes are. There’s usually a central theme but may be several other subthemes. Love is a big theme in Magic in the Streets, explored not just between lovers but between both those young people and their cats, familial love among the cats.

Creative activity as something positive that pushes back the dark is another big theme in it. So is learning. So is joy, these things aren’t incompatible at all, much as schools tend to try to separate them.

Hope you enjoyed a second ramble on Theme and Themes. At least this one’s more readable than my first experiment!