NOT FADE AWAY: A FEW TOUGH CHARACTERS

The construction of a series is always a complicated task, involving a growing ensemble cast and a multitude of bit players. My SFR Interstellar Rescue series has certainly been no exception, the world I’m building becoming more detailed as I go along. I’m discovering, too, that some of my newer cast members need more than a little bit of “wrangling.”

My latest novel, Not Fade Away, Interstellar Rescue Book 4 (on pre-order now on Amazon), stars some familiar characters from my previous books in addition to my new romantic couple, Rescue agent Rafe Gordon and home care nurse Charlie McIntyre. That was difficult enough to pull off. But a few unique secondary characters in this book took special handling to get just right on the page.

Happy, the therapy dog. I introduced Happy in a previous blog post here on Spacefreighters. He was a lot of fun to write, but he was a character in his own right, too, with his own consistent personality and behavior based on his breed and background. I wanted to make sure Happy acted like a real dog, not a Hollywood idea of a dog. I asked my friend Beki Weight, who has years of dog training and fostering experience, to read my manuscript. Her input was invaluable in molding Happy into a believable character.

Del Gordon, father of the hero. The premise of Not Fade Away is that Rescue agent Rafe Gordon must bring his father, legendary alien fighter Del, now suffering from dementia, to Earth to hide him from alien assassins. Depicting Del in a respectful, yet realistic, way was not easy. 

I was acutely aware every minute I spent with Del that many of my readers deal with this challenge every day in real life, caring for mothers and fathers, husbands and wives with the heartbreak of Alzheimers, of other forms of dementia, or of traumatic brain injury. To get it right, I did as much research as I could on the specific form of dementia that affects Del (Lewy Body—characterized especially by hallucinations, which figure in the story), and I drew on my years of experience teaching chi gung to dementia patients and assisted-living residents.

BiN, a sentient computer. At least for Happy or the elderly Del I only had to worry about characterization from the outside. That is, I didn’t attempt to write from either the dog’s POV or the elderly Del’s. (There is extensive flashback material from Del’s younger perspective, though, from a time when his mind was intact.) 

Building a POV for the character of BiN, the sentient computer, was necessary, since no one else knows what BiN knows of the story. The creature/machine doesn’t become sentient all at once. Like a child, it develops a sense of itself gradually as it accumulates information. And as it accumulates even more information and becomes more curious, it acquires a sense of ethics and morality, a development that was never contemplated or expected by its creators. That’s a major twist in the plot, so must come from BiN’s POV. I had to make it believable, which I just have to hope it is. Not being a programmer, I faked it pretty hard, but real programming language would probably have sent every other reader to sleep within seconds!

The good thing about writing challenges is that they make for an exciting reading experience in the end. Pre-order your copy of Not Fade Away, Interstellar Rescue Series Book 4 today so you’ll be ready to experience it June 12!

Earth shielded his secrets--

Until her love unlocked his heart.

Rescue agent Rafe Gordon is human, though Earth has never been his home. But when his legendary father Del becomes the target of alien assassins, Rafe must hide the dementia-debilitated hero in the small mountain town where the old man was born—Masey, North Carolina, USA, Earth.

Home care nurse Charlie McIntyre and her therapy dog, Happy, have never had such challenging clients before. Del’s otherworldly “episodes” are not explained by his diagnosis, making Charlie question everything about her mysterious charge and his dangerously attractive son. Rafe has the answers she needs, but Charlie will have to break through his wall of secrets to get them.

As the heat rises between Charlie and Rafe, the deadly alien hunters circle closer. The light they seek to extinguish flickers in the gloom of Del’s fading mind—the memory of a planet-killer that threatens to enslave the galaxy.

Available for pre-order now on Amazon.

Cheers, Donna

SFR IN THE TIME OF #METOO

Okay, in case anyone needs a definition of sexual harassment/assault, I recommend we all start with author Chuck Wendig’s excellent (and hilarious) blog post on the subject here. I’ll wait.

Everybody got that? Good. I agree with Chuck’s base line: We all learned to keep our hands (and other parts) to ourselves in kindergarten, or we should have. It’s no longer cool to assume your sexual interests are automatically returned by everyone in sight, Austin Powers.  I would add that, as authors, if our heroes and heroines are having trouble following those rules in our stories, maybe we ought to rethink their actions. 

In this age of #metoo, there are at least a few outmoded science fiction romance tropes we might want to send back to spacedock for some radical reworking. 

--Fated Mates—It is undeniably romantic to think there is only one person out there for each of us. These stories speak to that yearning in all of us to mate for life, like swans or wolves. But perhaps we can agree that the time of the dogged, single-minded pursuit of the alpha male of his Fated Mate may be past (can we say “stalking?”). The heroine invariably knows nothing of this Fate; she isn’t “ready.” The hero must be steadfast in his courting and never give up! Acck!  I’ve read and enjoyed dozens of these, but I will probably never read them the same way again. Now they are just creepy.

--Abducted for (Whatever)—In the pulp-fiction past these stories were known as “Mars Needs Women” tales, but they’ve recently become more popular and “mainstream.” Earth women are abducted by aliens for use as sex slaves, mates, queens and similar biological fodder. The main point here is the lack of agency on the part of those Taken. The abducted rarely escape their fate; they must make the best of it somehow. Or worse, the abduction is portrayed as a good thing, with lots of fun sex and/or a rescue from a dull Earth life!

--Harems/Reverse Harems—According to Veronica Scott’s USA Today/HEA Blog, this is an up-and-coming sub-sub-genre of SFR, sometimes flipping the script to portray stables of sexy men-beasts owned by a lucky female. Is it any more humane to keep men as slaves for the sexual pleasure of women than the other way around? Doubtful.

--Coerced Sex and/or Violence—Do I even have to say it? Forget “safe words,” some things just go too far. Slaves forced to have sex, to breed, or to fight as gladiators may be historically correct and an idea that could be projected to alien planets, but when used as titillation in a romance, we approach sexual exploitation, ie. ick factor.

But even without wading in these murky pools, if we’re writing romance, by definition the issues of sexual dynamics underlie everything we write. We owe it to our readers to examine the relationships we portray on the page to make sure: Is the hero the kind of man he should be? Is the heroine his equal as they build a relationship? Alpha males are all well and good, but Neanderthal attitudes toward women should be the last thing a reader should expect in a genre primarily (though certainly not exclusively) written by women for women.

My first novel was a Star Trek fan fiction story titled Mindsweeper. In it, Captain James T. Kirk has been suspended from his post pending a hearing for sexual misconduct. (About time, you might say! Kirk is nothing if not an alpha male with a predilection for interaction with females that skirts the line of what is appropriate.). He meets a lone-wolf trader named Kate Logan, who asks him if the story is true.

“Does it matter?” he says.

“Does to me,” she says.

Right away, we know she is his equal, and not about to take any of his usual BS. (Turns out, he’s undercover trying to ferret out a Federation mole. The misconduct rap is part of his cover.)

The risk of sexual misconduct is part of the plot in Unchained Memory, Interstellar Rescue Series Book One, too. Psychiatrist Ethan Roberts is attracted to his patient Asia Burdette from the moment she steps into his office, but, as a professional, he dares not act on the feelings she stirs in him. She’s strong and independent, no longer in need of his professional help, and, most significantly, no longer his patient by the time circumstances drive the two of them into each other’s arms.

I even wrote a Fated Mates story in Trouble in Mind, Interstellar Rescue Series Book Two. But at the first sign of their mutual fate, the heroine reacts quite justifiably as if the hero violated her, and the hero is equally horrified at his own actions. It takes the couple almost another third of the book to reconcile.

The point is that I made sure in these cases to acknowledge the elephant in the room, and deal with it as part of the plot. My heroes and heroines struggle with their sexual dynamics before they earn their happily ever after.

As SFR authors, we have more freedom than do historical or contemporary romance authors to create the world we want for our characters. All the more reason for us to be conscious of the limits we place on the men and women of the futures we build.

Cheers, Donna

YOUR BEST GAL'S BEST PAL: SECONDARY CHARACTERS IN SFR

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know I’m what is known as a “plotter” in writers’ jargon. I start out a new book by—oh, joy!—sketching out characters and backstory and a rough outline before I ever write a line.

So, I usually know my main characters—hero, heroine and villain—pretty well before we even get started. But the secondary characters of my novels? That’s where my intuition really comes out to play. All sorts of vivid personalities come out of the woodwork of my mind as I’m writing to solve problems, take the plot in new directions and help the hero and heroine unburden themselves. The only problem is corralling these critters. They’ve been known to take over a book, and they often demand a whole new book of their own!

I set boundaries for my secondaries by giving them defined jobs to do. That way they aren’t just cluttering up the story with diverting, but essentially useless character sketches. The jobs I assign most often:

Where would Frodo be without Sam, his best pal?

--Best pal. Heroes and heroines need someone to confide in, someone with whom they can share their feelings about that new person they’ve just met, someone who may even want them to think hard about what they’re doing. Without a best pal, H/Hs may be forced to recite 38 straight pages of dull internal monologue, rather than participating in three pages of spritely dialogue. I’ve given this role to a big-hearted older secretary, a snarky teenager, the hero’s former psychiatrist, a space pirate’s first officer. In my current WIP, Follow the Sun, a “child-of-the-Sixties-turned-mountain-woman” takes the role.

--Villain’s minion. For the same reasons the good guys need best pals, villains need, well, somebody. Usually that somebody is a fall guy or a minion, who is forced to listen to the villain rant on about how he (or she) is going to destroy the couple and take over the galaxy, etc. etc. But this is such a cliché that I like to split the villain himself in two. That is, I have two villains so they can talk to each other: the bloodthirsty Dar brothers in Trouble in Mind ; the husband-and-wife Thrane spies in Fools Rush In. Sometimes the “minion” can be the boss, dispatching the villain on his murderous errand, as is the case in my current WIP.

--Red herring. Since I write thriller/suspense kinds of plots, sometimes I don’t want to give the villain away too soon. In that case I need a good-guy-turned-bad-guy, or a bad-guy-turned-good-guy. These are the hardest characters to write, and, believe it or not, they sometimes even surprise me!

--Information sources. These characters hold key pieces of the puzzle for the hero and heroine without which they can’t continue to solve the central problem of the plot. There are just one or two of these per book, and the H/H almost always pay a price—emotional or otherwise—for the information they get.

--Help/support. These characters can include anything from family or community members to pets, bartenders or ship’s crew. Because I am now on my fourth book in a unified series, characters from previous books show up in these roles (and satisfy regular readers’ needs to find out how they’re doing). This category is where crowd control must be strictly enforced!

There are a couple of things I try NOT to do with my secondary characters, too:

--Have too many of them. I write big, complex novels with lots of subplots, but I try not to get carried away with secondary characters. In Trouble in Mind, I may have a hero and a heroine trying to save a mother and her son being chased by two alien hunters on behalf of another alien who is trying to take over his planet (oh, and in the end the good guys are helped by a Navajo tribe), but I try not to sketch out every gas station attendant along the way. Really.

--Name all of them. Unless that server at the diner has something important to do with the plot, do not give her a name. She may need to be there because your H/H must stop at the diner and have the conversation of their lives, but she must remain nameless forevermore. The exception to this rule is the bridge crew of a starship. The helmsman may have nothing else to do with the plot of a space opera, but a captain just can’t say, “Hey, you, warp speed NOW!” over and over again. All the bridge crew members must have names and, depending on how long your cruise is, you may need several names in those seats to allow for different shifts. So, I apologize to a recent reviewer of my space opera Fools Rush In, who complained there were too many names to keep up with. That was unavoidable. Maybe s/he should try reading Trouble in Mind instead.

How about you? How do you wrangle your secondary characters to keep them in line?

Cheers, Donna