A comedian goes onstage and starts a routine.  Let’s say she’s got two choices:

1) She starts an anecdote that the audience can relate to on a universal level (i.e., something that anyone in the audience might be familiar with, either personally or through someone they know) — the humor comes out of exploring this universal concept, sometimes from a new or personal angle.

2) She starts with an anecdote that is, on the face, supposed to be universal, but instead is so deeply particular (and often disturbing) that the humor first comes from the audience realizing that the comedian’s “universal” experience is actually just her own, sometimes embarrassing one — and then again from watching the comedian realizing that her “universal” is anything but.

That second option can be funny in a comedy routine, but it’s something that I worry about all the time: What if I’m trying to describe something I think everyone can relate to, but instead it just shows how weird I am?

Here’s an off-the-cuff example: I happen to love the smell of cigarettes and cigars. I don’t smoke, but I’m happy to inhale and sigh dreamily if someone happens to be smoking near me. I know I’m not in the majority, though, so it’s important for me to remember when it’s appropriate to use the scent of cigarette smoke as a description.

I mean a couple of things when I say “appropriate” — obviously no one out there can tell me what I can and can’t write (though in reality, I have to keep in mind my editor, the copyeditor, the proofreader, and a few thousand readers…), but if I’m in the business of creating an experience in the audience’s mind, then writing something confusing or jolting isn’t going to help me. An unusual description can be appropriate when using it to highlight a character; it can be inappropriate when setting a scene using a third-person omniscient narrator to evoke a particular image in a reader’s mind.

Examples!

Good idea for a general positive-smoke description: Early morning, and the air was thick with fog and wet-wood campfire smoke.

Bad idea for a general handsome/yummy description: He leaned forward, the sweet smell of an early morning cigarette still fresh on his clothes.

In modern Western society these days, smelling like cigarette smoke isn’t going to be seen as a positive — in fact, without further description, the poor character might be immediately labeled as a bit untrustworthy, or deceptive. I find it hot, but my reader probably won’t.

This whole “hot or not” issue can get particularly awkward in romance, where the author is explicitly trying to induce a state of arousal in the reader. (Um, right? That’s what we’re all doing… aren’t we?) A particular description could be absolutely perfect for a vast number of readers, and completely horrible for the rest — as authors, we can’t know what’s going to work. We have some ideas — these days, for instance, a dubious-consent sex scene isn’t necessarily going to be something the majority of readers are going to find attractive as a major romantic jumping off point. But other times, our “universals” may just be whatever floats our own boat, and it’ll be a hit-or-miss proposition for any readers out there (who may then judge us for it. “This author likes dubious consent! GROSS.”).

For me, there’s a difference between knowing that you’re using a maybe-not-universal, and not realizing that your “universal” description is anything but.

My author crazy about universal descriptions: I can’t tell if what I’m describing is actually going to be universally understood! And what if someone thinks I’m weird for thinking it is? This haunts me as I write, and can be a big writing blocker — here’s my process to get beyond it:

1. Who cares if it’s not universal? It’ll probably work for somebody, and that somebody will be very, very happy.
2. Okay, I care that’s it’s not universal. Double-check whatever the problem phrase is with a trusted beta reader.
3. What if the beta reader is just as weird as me? Go back to not caring.
4. Not caring still doesn’t work. Fine. Recast the description to be a bit more universal.
5. I don’t want to give up my beautiful prose! That thing with the cigarette smoke really works. Is there a way I can recast the scene to make it clear that the smoke is supposed to be attractive? Well, if I make it a judgment call on the part of the female character, and maybe tie it in to some memory… maybe having to do with a past relationship that ended badly? But was worth the heartache? Hm…

And the next thing I know, maybe I’ve got a more rounded character and a better setup for my plot. This crazy might have a positive spin to it.

…or maybe not! Such is the power of the author crazies. Is there a description you’ve stumbled over that didn’t fit the bill? Did you write something that someone else choked over? Everyone’s a little mad here — join in!

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?

The next book from the Anna Katherine Co-op of Evil will be set in our Door-filled New York, and it will star vampires. I’ve gotten into a couple of comment-conversations with people regarding vampires and their current sexy popularity (while trying to explain that there are no sexy vamps in Salt and Silver!), and those conversations — and the thinking we’re doing regarding vampires in general — led me to wonder: How much does the average reader know about the foundations of vampire literature and/or folklore?

Vampire Lit

There is so much cool stuff out there, it is unbelievable. I am also vastly unqualified to talk about it, since it has been years since I wrote an academic paper, and I do not have a university library at my fingertips. Let us say the vampire has been a sexy (or at least highly/inappropriately sexed) thing in literature for a very long time — early 1700s, at least. Examples of this include John Polidori’s The Vampyre, the penny-dreadful Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood, Le Fanu’s Carmilla, and, of course, Stoker’s Dracula.

On top of this, there is the long history of balladry and so forth that talks about romantic (or pseudo-romantic) “undead” figures, much of which influenced the vampire fiction listed above, such as Gottfried August Bürger’s Lenore and the Child ballad The Suffolk Miracle. I can’t delve too deep into these, though, because really then I start heading into the realm of…

Vampire Folklore

Oh, I am so in love.

I say in one of the comments on the Darque Reviews blog post that:

In straight-up folklore, though, while there can be a sexual edge to whatever’s going on, mostly vampires are just representatives of the Unacceptable Other (for instance, in Mediterranean regions people with red hair are or could become vampires. And let’s not even talk about Bulgarian vampires — the one-nostril thing? Yeah, I’d stake one of those in a heartbeat).

The Other is what “monsters” typically are — they are those who are socially cast out of humanity due to unfortunate physical abnormalities, mental difficulties, personal/social nonconformity, or simply being “not from around here” (which is often related to “boy, you look just like our god of death, maybe that is not such a good thing”).

Folkloric/historic vampires are also representatives of death and disease. Dead bodies (due to soil composition and other such mundane things) don’t necessarily decompose at the same rate — mix that up with mass graves being continually reopened, and you can have a case of a dead girl being suspected of vampirism during a plague year. Chinese vampires apparently have a greenish fuzz on them — either from the fungus that grows on the funeral clothes, as suggested by Montague Summers in The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928), or perhaps from decomposition in general. Death isn’t pretty, and it’s tough to understand what’s going on if you don’t have a microscope and a lot of time on your hands with which to desecrate the dead.

Of course, death/disease/Othering all fall under a single psychological drive: they’re all a function of humans trying to describe/systematize the Unknown, and then apply logic thereafter. Why do livestock die off suddenly? What’s up with plagues? Why would anyone want to become a cannibal? Can anyone explain why young Lucille is so sexed up? Or is Lucille instead “wasting away” for unknown reasons? Heinrich-the-new-guy is awfully weird — almost too weird. Butterflies eating carrion is really… gross. And you know, cats aren’t a good idea (for reasons we won’t go into here), so I bet it’s extra bad if they jump over the dead.

If you follow the “humans will do what their brains tell them” psychological idea of folklore creation/perpetuation (which I sort of bring up in the magic post from earlier), then a lot of folklore regarding vampires becomes a lot more understandable — and manipulatable in a fictional context, if you’re so inclined (which I am). You can see this in all that wacky Victorian vampire literature, which took the Unknown concepts from folklore and applied them to both the views (either personal or popular) of sex at the time, and to the dangers of the widening world of communication and travel (hence why so many of the books listed above feature either Eastern European — rather than strictly British — locales, or feature vampires from locations other than England).

Interesting Things

Which gets me to the point of this post: Here, have some interesting vampire folklore! I’ve stolen them utterly from the Summers text, but you can find other (and more varied) sources easily. You might want to consider how this folklore could’ve started — maybe even how it’s changed into the sparkly sex-darlings we have today. And, of course: Wouldn’t it be neat if someone wrote vampire romances using some of this stuff?

All suicides, after death, become vampires.

A man who is murdered will arise as a vampire to avenge his death.

Vampires, upon rising from their graves, will first attack their family or loved ones.

Being cursed by one’s godfather can lead to becoming a vampire.

Being unbaptized (or not Christian) can lead to becoming a vampire.

Babies born between Christmas and Epiphany will probably become vampires after death (and their lives prior to death aren’t exactly fantastic either — for some explanation of this, you might want to consider both the religious significance of these dates, and also the medieval safe sex flowchart).

If you eat a sheep that’s been killed by a wolf, you’re vampiric chances are pretty high.

Of course, if you’re bitten by a vampire, well. We all know what that means.

If you’re a witch, odds are you’re dabbling in vampirism.

Vampires are generally nocturnal — except when they’re not.

Vampires often have long claws or nails.

Vampires can appear very bloated following, presumably, a feast of blood.

Vampires can turn into mist — or may exist as mist. Like, you know, the plague.

Vampire breath smells super-bad.

People with hare-lips are probably vampires.

People with vast facial port-wine birthmarks are likely to be vampires.

Blue-eyed? Will probably become a vampire.

Red-haired? You totally are a vampire.

Born with teeth? Guess.

Do you hold the traits of someone totally charismatic and sexy? Vampire. No, really.

And finally, I’m just going to quote this directly, because how can I not? Enjoy!:

The vampire is, as we have said, generally believed to embrace his victim who has been thrown into a trance-like sleep, and after greedily kissing the throat suddenly to bite deep into the jugular vein and absorb the warm crimson blood. It has long since been recognized by medico-psychologists that there exists a definite connexion between the fascination of blood and sexual excitation. Owing to custom, to inhibitions and education this emotion generally remains latent, although a certain mental sadism is by no means a mark of degeneracy.

I am totally fine with this idea. Since magic often takes the place of (or artificially creates) real-world systems, it makes sense that there should be rules, if only to know when you’re breaking them. (Boy hero survives killing curse — news at 11!)

But here’s the thing: Real world magic, historically speaking, doesn’t really happen that way. It’s not organized, and it’s not bound by a common magical language or a single set of ideas — it’s just a mishmash of anything we humans could get our hands on.

When I talk about “real world magic,” I don’t mean modern Wiccan religion, or Satanism, or whathaveyou. I mean the stuff Classics majors drool over and folklorists clutch to their collective bosoms. The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation; Agrippa’s Natural Magic. In “real” magic, people are walking around living a giant Skinner box experiment:

[A pigeon] is put into an experimental cage for a few minutes each day. A food hopper attached to the cage may be swung into place so that the pigeon can eat from it. A solenoid and a timing relay hold the hopper in place for five sec. at each reinforcement.

If a clock is now arranged to present the food hopper at regular intervals with no reference whatsoever to the bird’s behavior, operant conditioning usually takes place. In six out of eight cases the resulting responses were so clearly defined that two observers could agree perfectly in counting instances. One bird was conditioned to turn counter-clockwise about the cage, making two or three turns between reinforcements. Another repeatedly thrust its head into one of the upper corners of the cage. A third developed a ‘tossing’ response, as if placing its head beneath an invisible bar and lifting it repeatedly. Two birds developed a pendulum motion of the head and body, in which the head was extended forward and swung from right to left with a sharp movement followed by a somewhat slower return. The body generally followed the movement and a few steps might be taken when it was extensive. Another bird was conditioned to make incomplete pecking or brushing movements directed toward but not touching the floor. [...]

The conditioning process is usually obvious. The bird happens to be executing some response as the hopper appears; as a result it tends to repeat this response.

Skinner goes on to relate this to common human behavior:

The experiment might be said to demonstrate a sort of superstition. The bird behaves as if there were a causal relation between its behavior and the presentation of food, although such a relation is lacking. There are many analogies in human behavior. Rituals for changing one’s luck at cards are good examples. A few accidental connections between a ritual and favorable consequences suffice to set up and maintain the behavior in spite of many unreinforced instances. The bowler who has released a ball down the alley but continues to behave as if he were controlling it by twisting and turning his arm and shoulder is another case in point. These behaviors have, of course, no real effect upon one’s luck or upon a ball half way down an alley, just as in the present case the food would appear as often if the pigeon did nothing — or, more strictly speaking, did something else.

This accounts for stuff like turning your coat inside-out when you’re having a bad run of cards, throwing salt over your shoulder to avoid bad luck, or any number of childhood magics that we all grew up with (avoiding sidewalk cracks, holding our breath at the graveyard, etc.). But what about the big stuff — the magic you do on purpose?

Turns out that back in the (papyrus) days, if something sounded like a good idea, they’d stick it in on the principle of the thing. For instance, one of my favorite Greek invocations is for Abrasax, the year god. He wasn’t a member of the traditional pantheon, though — someone just took the number of days of the year, added it all up, converted the numbers to letters, and came up with Abrasax. With all that math and cryptography involved, it had to be magical! The logic seemed good, the name was added to a bunch of already-in-progress magic, et voila, Abrasax kind of takes off.

Math wasn’t the only thing that made stuff magical — words, gods, and anything else that was Not From Around Here could easily be taken up and applied to the magic already being done. Georg Luck, in his academic text Arcana Mundi, says:

Incidentally, the borrowing of names, concepts, and rituals from foreign religions is one of the characteristics of ancient witchcraft, as the magical papyri attest. Even though cities like Alexandria and Rome were already full of sanctuaries of exotic deities, apparently there was still room for more speculation and more experiment. No doubt the religions of ancient Egypt were similarly misinterpreted or at least simplified by the Greeks of the Hellensitic period who lived in Egypt, and these religious practices survived, through a series of transformations, in the mainstream of magical doctrine.

So in Salt and Silver, our characters fumble around with magic and demons that have been around forever — or that they maybe just discovered last week. They mix together religions and folklore and cultures, just in case. They do things they don’t understand because it seems to have worked in the past. They make stuff up, just in case it might work.

What this all comes down to is: Rules for magic? What rules? The only rules that apply here are whatever makes people people. Rather than a rigid system of magic, there’s just psychology (as in: “this is how humans behave — because we are humans, we will do what humans do, even if, logically speaking, it makes no sense whatsoever”). In real life, we take stuff that sounds good, and if it works — or seems to, anyway — we’ll keep doing it. We’ll pass it on to others. And at some point we’ll even forget where it came from and just assume that it’s always been like that. The magic may not make sense if you pull it out of context, but that’s kind of the point — the context is us. Without people, there might as well be no magic at all — in either the real world, or, at least in this book, in romantic escapades.