As an author, it was much less important to me! At the time of writing the story, I was much more concerned with getting across the characters’ personalities. What do I care what people think they look like?

(Kat and I did, though, have extremely specific pictures of the characters in our heads. We are method writers; we know who is queer and who is not; we know who is a person of color and who is white; we know who went to college and who did not bother; we know all!)

Readers know what Allie looks like because she’s on the cover of the book. (Actually, her skin is less pale in the book than on the cover! But, yeah, she’s white, with darkish hair, and wears a pendant with the Seal of Solomon on it. She’s not anywhere near as thin as the woman on the cover of the book, though.)

When I wrote the novella we ultimately based Salt and Silver on, I had a very specific picture in my head of the character of Ryan. I knew exactly what he looked like, down to the glint in his eye. Yet nowhere in the book is he concretely described for the reader!

I did a search for the phrases “Ryan’s eyes” and “his eyes” to see if we ever even described them. Ryan closes his eyes, and rolls his eyes, and there’s sympathy in them at one point, and later in the story they are sad, hot, lost, uncertain, and filled with something Allie’s never seen before.

(Okay, now I am laughing. I would like to do this with every book I’ve ever read! I actually both love and hate books in which eyes do amazing things, like crawl across the room and bore into people’s souls and jump from one person to another. Just picture a pair of eyes jumping around, and you will never read a scene like that the same way again!)

Anyway, his eyes are “hooded and dark” and have “tiny lines crinkling the corners” — but most of the time? Most of the time Ryan has pulled his Stetson down over his eyes so they are hidden.

We don’t describe his hair. We don’t describe his skin. We mention that he’s taller than Allie, but not how much taller — but we do say he’s shorter than Owen. We describe his scars more than his looks (and, come on, that’s pretty hot!).

Maybe this is a shortcoming, but I don’t think so. I don’t think so because it means that someone can read the book and picture whoever they want in the role of Ryan — Jensen Ackles or Taye Diggs. Or John Cho. Or Sendhil Ramamurthy, or Kirk Acevedo. Or whoever!

And that is awesome.

And here’s our newest review! This one comes from Aja, who can be found at livejournal (with a mirror at dreamwidth).

Salt & Silver is hellbent on giving you dark social satire with your demonslaying. In addition to populating the book with a host of complex, dark, memorable characters of all sociocultural backgrounds [...] the authors have gone one further and taken us on a taut, well-paced journey straight from our privilege zones directly into Hell; and, you guys, Hell is New York City, with all its excess and oblivion and disconnection from reality on display in horrific, compelling beauty. more…

Phew! Horrific, compelling beauty, huh? Wait until she gets the sequel about the vampires…

One of the biggest issues with writing any paranormal beastie is the need to bring something new to the table. With everybody writing about vampires these days, why should someone want to read about yours? Let’s say you want to make your vampires stand out from the pack by being different from your everyday Count Dracula stereotype. Where do you start? (more…)

Check it out for a quick mention of what’s coming up in the Door-world sequel!

I often think that the kiss, rather than the sex scene, is the primary romantic force of the romance novel. For me, a sex scene is emotional, sure, but for the most part shows up as titillation for the reader. The kiss, though, is where the love comes from. A kiss can tell you a lot about how two characters feel for one another, how they approach this strange new thing between them.

And there’s nothing quite like kissing someone for the first time — the leading up to it, the uncertainty, the raw delight and aching tension in the “what if” and the “when.” If a book just brushes past the first kiss to get to something ostensibly more sexy… well, it just makes my little heart break a bit. That there is a missed opportunity to make your readers really feel the investment your characters are putting into this thing.

Here are some examples of my favorite kinds of kisses:

• I’m a sucker for the slow approach. I mean really slow. Sam and Jill’s kiss in Gilliam’s Brazil (skip to 7:00 in the link)? Fantastic. And my shame when it comes to loving the kiss-before-the-reveal in the 1995 Sabrina? Epic. Though not as epic as my love of the kiss between Bella and Edward in the first Twilight film. If it takes two people five minutes just to close the distance, I am weeping with joy by the end of it. This works better on-screen than in text, I think.

• The unexpected kiss. Yes, this is somewhat in contrast with the above. I first discovered my love of this many years ago in Rosemary Edghill’s Turkish Delight, when the female lead is ranting about something (perhaps English weather?) on the back of a horse, and immediately following the end of an impassioned speech from her, the next line reads, “He kissed her.” This works absolutely best in text, though on-screen is no slouch.

• The kiss everyone is pretending means something else. My absolute favorite example of that right now is from Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, when Bob and Charlotte (both married) are on the elevator in their hotel, returning to their separate rooms, and they’re both pretending that wanting to touch, wanting to be together, isn’t why they’re kissing goodnight — even though they both know it is. (4:10 in this fanvid shows a little bit of what I mean.) It’s awkward, it’s a little bit wrong, and it’s fooling no one, but you can feel every second of it on your skin.

• Kissing as seduction. This would seem pretty straightforward, but think about it — usually you get stuff like “witty conversation”, “deep spiritual connection”, “shared history”, or, you know, “mutual feelings” as the way to get characters to fall in love. And those are all great, don’t get me wrong. But sometimes, I just want there to be kissing. Kissing for bad reasons, like bets, and kissing for no reason, like an empty terrace and boredom. Kissing because someone’s there, and the character just really wants to kiss someone. Basically, I want all the characters to be wearing this t-shirt when the book starts. And then… it becomes something more. Maybe it’s a really good kiss. Maybe it’s all a lot less boring than everyone thought it was going to be. Maybe it was an awful kiss, and everyone backs away and says, “Whoa, what? What happened there?” — and has to think about what they’re doing. Mary Jo Putney’s Thunder and Roses has kissing thrown in to shake up a bet; the heroine just wants to get through it without embarrassing herself, and the hero just wants to see what happens if he messes with her. That entire book (and a lot of Putney’s works, come to think of it) basically becomes an ode to “kissing is awesome”.

• Finally, the memory of kissing. It’s not a kiss that happens onscreen — it’s the kiss that happened years ago that no one can forget. The kiss that’s been built up and worried over and made huge (sometimes even when it shouldn’t be) — the kiss that dulls every kiss after it, because nothing can compare. With movies and television, I like little sudden flash-cuts of hotness in the middle of mundane activity. With fiction, though, I like a good solid wallow. I want every detail, and then I want to know exactly what made this kiss the one that’s stuck. Everything builds from that. Yum.

So: Kisses! Those are my favorites — what are yours?

More information as we have it…

If our publishing contract allowed for it, we’d put our work under a Creative Commons license, which would also allow free distribution of the e-text of the original work — but since it doesn’t, we cannot legally do that. However, we do encourage readers to use their local libraries to access the text of our current book and future other books if purchasing it isn’t an option for whatever reason.

We do ask that you do not screw around with our ability to earn our livings from writing, which means that you cannot ever sell any of the transformative works you’ve done based on our stuff.

We are also concerned with being sued and with keeping our ideas for the characters and universes we’ve created more or less “pure” in our brains — to that end we are not going to access any of the transformative works based on any open canon of our writing. Once we’ve closed the canon (officially stopped writing about the particular characters/universe), all bets are off!

(Basically we’re pretty selfish and so we’d like to encourage people to write Allie/Roxie — or Narnia/Roxie! Or Ryan/Harry Potter (their love is so full of adolescent angst!) — fanfic and put it up on the Archive of Our Own so we’ll be able to eventually read it!)

If you have any questions (or want one of Kat’s ten billion interesting copyright links), leave a comment — we have a lot to say on this subject.

One of the things we wanted to discuss and did not get around to is the difficulty of writing with a loud internal editor. It is really difficult to turn that editor off and just put the freaking words down on paper (or, in our case, type the freaking words into the shared Google document). Everyone who has a loud internal editor learns a different way to turn it off. I wish I had any super-effective tips or secrets to share—but I don’t. You just have to get past it, one way or another.

The way I personally silenced my inner editor most of the time was by making a deal: I would write for X words or hours, and then edit to fix.

(Anna: “Kat, how did you silence your inner editor while writing?”
Kat: “Panic.”)

Kat says that having a deadline was very reassuring—and that while writing, she felt confident in our backups. Me, our editor, our copyeditor, the proofreader, the production editor, our agent…

I too found it extremely reassuring that if I missed something in my own edit, Kat would be there to catch it. One does not necessarily need a co-writer for this—just a trusted critique or proofreading partner. It is much easier to fall backward blindly when you know someone is there who will definitely catch you—or at least cushion your fall.

Something to remember is that all authors feel the same. Seriously, you are not the only one who has ever had these problems, even if it feels like it sometimes. It’s very comforting to know that author and editor problems are actually universal—and if you as the author are annoyed with something to do with the book, probably the editor feels similarly, or can actually reassure you that your insecurities are not based in our reality.

We also talked at the presentation about a list we made up of things that authors can do that will make easier the lives of everyone involved in making the book—but we didn’t really go into each of these things in detail, so here’s the annotated list.

1.) Proper manuscript format. People blow this off all the time, but it is extremely important. It is important not just to the editor/agent to whom you submit, but to the people who are going to work on your manuscript once it’s purchased and in production. Editors who want a format that is not the traditional proper ms. format will specify what format they want; with no specification, use this: 1” margins all around, double spaced, 12 point Courier New typeface.

2.) Do not put images in your manuscript. You might think it’s cute to put a heart at the beginning of each chapter, or insert an image of a star everywhere you have a scene change, but it is not. It’s just annoying for everyone who looks at your manuscript and has to do anything technical with it. (If you have a specific request for the type design—for example, if you want the published book to have a heart at the beginning of each chapter—that is something to let your editor know once the book is finished and going into production.)

3.) In the header, put your full name, the title of your manuscript, and the page number. In your footer, put the page number. Page numbers should be on the right hand side of the page always; that is where publishing people automatically look for them.

4.) Make a reference guide. This will be handy for yourself, your editor, and everyone involved in the production process. Kat and I, despite knowing we should do this, did not. This resulted in our bad copyedit being even worse, and made us feel totally stupid. So after we spent many hours wrestling our copyedit into submission (and scrawling STET—meaning “keep as originally written”—on everything), we wrote a letter to the proofreader, which you can read here.

Your reference guide should include:

• A list of the names of main characters and any nicknames used in the story (with their correct spellings!)
• Brief character descriptions and notes on any special characteristics (ex.: Anna Louise, 29, black hair, blue eyes; also referred to as: Lou, Annalou, Pineapple, Banana)
• A list of places that appear or are referred to in the story; this is particularly important if your characters go to foreign or alien places with names that are not commonly used in English or are in languages you’ve made up
• A list of difficult words—any non-English word or phrase, or uncommon usage of a word or phrase. For example, in Salt and Silver, our narrator says a couple of times, “I cannot even.” This is a complete sentence, generally conveying frustration beyond words, but it really confused our copyeditor. Another problem is sometimes colloquial phrases, which can trip up non-native English speakers/readers. So, for example, if your character calls sidewalks “pavement” or something, note it.
• Any uncommon non-English words or phrases; whether it is French, Welsh, or an alien language you made up, it is important to provide a list of what’s in the book and its translation. This is both so these things can be double-checked easily and because this way if the people working on your book are not familiar with the words, phrases, language, or font, they will know exactly what’s going on anyway.
• Any particular style items. For example, Kat and I wanted “gray” to always be spelled “grey”; we wanted “sulfur” to always be spelled “sulphur”; we wanted the serial comma used. Often there is a “house style” that will be imposed upon your manuscript, but if you have a particularly strong opinion about something (or it is important somehow to your narrative), that must be said to the editor early on so everyone knows.
• A timeline. If your characters attend school, what is the school schedule? If the character works, what is the work day like? What is the order in which things happen in the book? Lists of this type can not only help your editor, copyeditor, and proofreader do a better job on your book, but it can also help you organize the events of the book.

5.) After phone conversations with your editor (or anyone at your publishing company), send a follow-up email to confirm the information you exchanged—and, if you have an agent, CC your agent. This will not only help prevent miscommunication, but it will also protect you in the event that your editor (or whomever) is a jerk. Written records are the best for keeping track of things, and email is awesome because it never has to go away. (Kat and I suggest Gmail.com for a free email account with nigh unlimited space for email storage.)

6.) Do not be an idiot on the internet. Editors (and agents and other people) not only search their own names, but have friends. Your editor (or agent) may not say anything to you, but rest assured: when you say mean things about your editor/agent/publisher/whoever on the internet, we know. And we don’t forget. Ever.

(Separately from being that type of idiot, check out RaceFail for many examples of authors losing current/future readers by being careless and/or malicious, and not apologizing for their mistakes, and defending their bad decisions. Please try not to do this, and if you make a mistake, don’t defend it—just apologize. Sincerely. If you’re not sorry, think about why.)

7.) Let your agent do hir job. If you have an agent, let the agent do what an agent does. Let the agent handle the business stuff with your editor and publisher. Let the agent negotiate the contract. When there is a problem and you’re upset, go to your agent first. Your agent can explain to you whether you’re overreacting to a normal publishing process or if you have a really valid point that the agent will follow up on. The agent is your buffer and part of the job is protecting your working relationship with the editor and other people at the publishing house. Use that.

8.) Relatedly, ask questions. If you do not understand something, ask that it be explained. The more you understand about what’s going on, the easier it is to participate in the process.

9.) Be proactive with your questions, but don’t be annoying. Let your agent be annoying. If you don’t have an agent, say to your editor, “I have all these questions. Here is my list of questions. I don’t want to be annoying, so please get to this when you have a chance, and if I don’t hear from you in a week or two, I will bug you about this again.” Be reasonable. Be practical.

10.) Have blog posts prepped in advance. Seriously. Even if you just have a document full of rough sketches or two line ideas of what you want to write about, it will help you in the long run when you realize that authors who blog successfully write entries more than once every eight weeks.

11.) NEVER TWITTER OR BLOG IN ANGER. Take a deep breath, take a step back, walk away from the computer. If you must blog about something that pisses you off, get a trusted friend who is clever to read it over for you to make sure that it doesn’t read like this: STUPID MEAN HORRIBLE AWFUL HATE HATE HATE BITTER ANGRY ANNOYED!!!!! No one wants to read that except people who want to cause or observe your drama, and that’s not why you want attention.

12.) Related: People on the internet are often wrong (whether with reviews, comments, history, whatever). You will see these people, and wish to inform them of their wrongness. Perhaps even loudly. DO NOT DO IT. Don’t engage, don’t talk about how you’re not engaging but you really want to, don’t send other people to engage for you—just don’t do it. You won’t be hailed as a modern-day folk hero, or the unlikely victim of a vast conspiracy—you’ll just come off as an ass. DO NOT BE AN ASS.

For those who saw a draft post up for a moment on New Year’s Day, don’t worry, it’ll come back! Except this time, it will not be a horrible embarrassing accident. Happy New Year!

Iwa

She grew up being told that her mother had wanted to name her Roxanne because of the song. It wasn’t true, though. It was just the name in the last paket kongo her mother had made; nobody knew why. Her father had chosen Roxie’s middle name, though: Kri. In Creole it meant to shout, yell, scream. It’s what her mother had done, just before she died giving birth to her.

Roxie was ten when she felt her first loa. Ezili Dantor crawled into her bed and held her, humming under her breath, the hilts of her knives digging into Roxie’s back. The tune was long, and low, and filled with blood — a mother’s blood, shed for Roxie. Maybe even shed willingly. After a time, Ezili whispered in Roxie’s ear how she was a chosen one, she would be a great warrior, and she would be a living aspect of Ezili. And then the loa held her again until Roxie could stop shaking.

By the time she was sixteen, Roxie had met all the Petwo family of loa, met them and knew them as her own. It was Ogun who had ridden her when she’d come across her first Door to Hell, who’d shown her how to wield her knives while smoking a cigar. Kalfu was there to teach her tricks and sorceries to keep herself alive, though she’d never had quite the same fear of Doors afterward, a fear she should have kept. Marinette . . . Marinette had killed the man who’d hurt Roxie on her sixteenth birthday, and later Marinette had washed her hands in the blood of the babe that would never be.

Marinette liked to free her, even when she didn’t want to be free.

When Roxie had been seventeen a month, she discovered what she was: a hunter. That’s what the girl at the movie theater said; a demon hunter, a knife against the Doors — and not alone. That night Roxie and the girl, the other hunter, worked together to fight an elemental. Roxie’s knives flew, and she felt the Petwo around her; her face was cut deep before she killed the demon. She breathed hard, retreated, and looked around for the other girl. It took her a moment, staring at the dark, to recognize the body.

That night Roxie dreamed strange and terrible things. Ezili came. The weight against Roxie’s back was hot, and soft breasts pressed against her skin. Ezili’s hand stroked her cut cheeks. Oh, lady, the loa whispered. Oh, lady, ma chere, I need you too much. She laughed a little. You and me, she said, and pulled away.

So then Ogun came, and poured rum over her face, and held down her arms. Kalfu came, pulled out a silver necklace, and breathed charms against it. Marinette came, laid the necklace along the cuts on Roxie’s face, and pressed it down hard enough to make Roxie scream. Finally Ezili, her body a drumbeat, burned, and burned, and burned the silver into place.

Oh, ma chere, ma chere, such things we will do.