Karen Sandler

Category: The Writing Life

  • Can a Heroine be Weak?

    Mindy Ruiz blogged yesterday about weak vs. kick-ass heroines. In response, a commenter on G+ wondered why a strong heroine has to show her vulnerabilities, but the same didn’t seem to be true for heroes, i.e., that male characters don’t always have those same weaknesses.

    Here’s what I think. Characters in your stories, whether they’re male, female, or some fictional other-gender, have to be complex. They have to be complicated. On the surface they can be simple and seemingly one-dimensional, but as the reader gets to know them, as they peel off layer after layer in the course of the story, the character should become more and more compelling, more and more relatable and appealing (if we’re talking hero/heroine) or more and more repellent (if we’re talking villain).

    So that kick-ass character Mindy was talking about, if she’s able to use her strength and martial arts skill in every situation she encounters, if she can immediately solve every problem that she encounters, your story is gonna be b-o-r-i-n-g. (Side note and confession: I found the first HP book a bit boring because Harry seemed to solve his problems too easily.) If on the other hand you set your heroine up as that kick-ass girl/woman, seemingly invincible, then introduce her Achilles’ heel, whether it’s physical (think kryptonite) or emotional (think Katniss’s sister Prim), the reader will care about what happens to that character and will be more engaged in the story.

    In my opinion, an emotional Achilles’ heel trumps a physical weakness every time. Katniss faced innumerable physical threats in The Hunger Games, but her love and caring for Prim, Peeta, and Gale made her far more vulnerable than did anything thrown at her in the Arena.

    In my own book, Tankborn, Kayla is physically abused more than once by the enforcers. But while those blows are painful, she shrugs them off as part of her life as a GEN slave. Where she’s truly vulnerable is through the threat of having her self ended by the trueborns. She’s terrified of being wiped away, her personality erased by trueborn enforcers. I would think that any of us can relate to the fear of our mind, memories, our entire being torn away from us in retaliation for the most insignificant infraction.

    So your main characters have to be complex. They have to be the actors in the play you’ve set for them. They can’t drift along in the story letting others take action while they stand back and watch. That’s the danger of a “weak” heroine/hero. While they can appear weak, they have to be layered enough to have an inner store of strength  so that they can be the one to change their world.

  • RTW: A Rose By Any Other Name

    Today YA Highway‘s Road Trip Wednesday asks: If you couldn’t use your own name, what would your pseudonym or pen name be?

    I feel like I’m cheating here, because I already have a couple of pen names. Back when I was writing adult romances exclusively (as Karen Sandler), I decided to write a children’s book so my then-young sons could read at least one of my books. I ended up publishing that book, then titled Time in a Bottle (but soon to be re-released as Timewrecked), under a pseudonym. I thought it would be better if young readers didn’t stumble across my very sexy romances, so Time in a Bottle was published under my pen name, Karen Anzalone. Anzalone was my grandmother’s maiden name.

    Now I’m focused exclusively on writing children’s books (my first being Tankborn). I don’t intend to write any new adult romances. But last year, I got the rights back to several of my older romances and decided to re-release them myself as e-books (as I’m doing with Timewrecked). Since those romances are entirely different books than Tankborn or the other YA books I’m planning to write and hoping to publish, I decided to market my self-published books under a pseudonym.

    So I stole the name of my main character in Tankborn for a first name (Kayla) and appropriated my mother’s maiden name, Russo. I only have two paranormal romances published under the name Kayla Russo so far (Dark Whispers and The In-Between), but there are more in the queue.

    It’s a bit ironic that when I re-publish my middle-grade book, Timewrecked (I’m currently waiting on cover art), I will be using my real name, Karen Sandler. Now I have a bit of a track record in children’s literature under that name, so I want to take advantage of that.

    But maybe I ought to have a few other pen names on the back burner for future books. Like for that mystery novel I haven’t been able to sell, I could be Agatha Agapantha. Or I could pen that dessert cookbook I’ve always dreamed of writing under the name Chocolate LaRue.

    How about you? Have any cool pen names in mind for yourself?

  • RTW – A Christmas Gift for My Main Character

    This week, YA Highway’s Road Trip Wednesday asks, What would be the ideal holiday present for your main character? Since my characters tend to talk to me like real people, walking around in my created world as if they really exist, I guess it makes sense that I’d add them to my Christmas gift list.

    I’ve written dozens of main characters over the years, but none of them mean as much to me as the main character in my YA science fiction novel, Tankborn, Kayla 6982, nurture daughter of Tala. She’s had a difficult life, and I’ve been putting her into one hazardous situation after another, first in Tankborn, and now in the sequel I’m writing, Tankborn Awakening. If anyone deserves a Christmas gift, it’s Kayla.

    Kayla doesn’t celebrate Christmas (no one really does on the planet Loka), but I’m sure she’d appreciate a present. If you asked her what she wanted, she would surely say, Freedom for all GENs, or something equally altruistic. She tends to put the good of the many ahead of her own needs, so it’s unlikely she’d ask for something for herself personally. If you pressed her, she’d probably want something she could give to her best friend, Mishalla, like a gorgeous scarf made of uttama-silk or a pretty piece of metal jewelry. She might ask for a month’s supply of kel-grain for her nurture mother, Tala, or a bleeding-edge gadget for her tech-crazy nurture brother, Jal.

    But if you could dig deeper, maybe download her bare brain (yes, not possible since only a GEN’s annexed brain is accessible via a datapod download), it would be clear what she wants most. The one thing she’s least likely to get–Devak. The high-status trueborn is so out of her reach, she doesn’t even hope for him. But if I could give her that one special gift, it would be at least one night with Devak, just to be with him, to talk, to kiss, to hold his hand, and be close.

    Sigh. That would be Kayla’s best Christmas gift of all.

  • RTW – How far would you go to get published?

    Today for Road Trip Wednesday, YA Highway is asking, How far would you go to get published? In my case, I’d have to answer the question How far did you go to get published? since I’m already published and have been for 13 years.

    Along with the blog prompt, the RTW post shows the graphic here of a baseball field on which is represented four escalating options for how far a writer would go to get published.

    I’m here to say that getting every one of my 18 books published has always required a trip to home plate. While I haven’t chased a trend (first base), and not all my books were agented and so did not include agent feedback (second base), while I wrote and published romance, my editor always put in his or her two cents (and sometimes a whole dollar) before the book was ready to be published. I learned to go with the flow (except for my dirty little secret below) and make those changes that would improve the book.

    Then came Tankborn. Young adult wasn’t the big hot new thing when I started writing Tankborn, or if it was, I didn’t know that fact. All I knew was that I wrote five proposals for my romance editor (each one comprising three chapters and a detailed synopsis) and he turned down every one. I was starting to think that maybe it was time for a genre and market change. YA science fiction sounded like just the ticket.

    So maybe I hit a double and I went straight to second base. Once I wrote, edited and polished the manuscript for Tankborn, I went on the agent hunt. Thirty agents and four months later, I signed with my agent and it was time for that mad run to third base. My agent wanted some fairly extensive changes, much of it cutting back on the “throat clearing” in the opening chapters.

    So now I’m done, right? That sucker must be polished so shiny, it’ll put your eyes out looking at it, huh? Um, no. Because I’m still stranded on third base. I need to make one last all-out run to home plate.

    My agents submitted Tankborn, and Lee and Low bought it for their new Tu Books imprint. I galloped toward home, along the way performing one, two, three major revisions (luckily three strikes and you’re out did not apply). Maybe I should have scored three runs during that process. Instead I got the MVP award of seeing my book in print.

    Let me tell you the little secret about all those revisions that I alluded to above. When I receive my agent/editor notes, I don’t bounce around saying, Thank you, thank you, thank you. Well, sometimes I do when they point out something that makes a light bulb come on and I realize, Doh, that’s why that part wasn’t working.

    But usually my response is (a) sheer terror that I won’t know how to fix the problem, (b) anger that they have a problem with what I’ve written, or (c) a sense of being totally overwhelmed by the amount of work required to make the change. It’s kind of the stages of grief, I guess. I’ll often let myself wallow in those emotions for a few minutes.

    Then I’ll put on my big girl panties and start working.

  • What’s Science Got to Do With It?

    Last Thursday, #MGlitchat’s topic of the week was science fiction in middle grade books. I write YA rather than MG, but I was kind of jonesing for a writerly discussion (and science fiction is a subject dear to my heart), so I joined in. It proved to be a lively topic.

    In the course of the hour or so I was participating, a few of us got into a side discussion of what constituted science fiction. Since I’m of, ahem, a certain age, and have been reading SF for a few decades (no, I won’t tell you how many), I ascribe to the classical definition of the genre. That is, it’s science fiction if, were you to remove the science element, there would be no story.

    One of the other folks on the chat wondered if that definition is no longer valid. I think it’s a fine question to ask, but I just can’t think of another definition that would serve the same purpose. It is, after all, science fiction, so there has to be science. I guess the only question would be, can you call it SF if there’s no actual science? Or if the only “science” aspect are space ships, or laser guns, or people use unfamiliar slang?

    Are there books that one might want to call science fiction, but have no science integral to the story? For instance, is Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games science fiction? It certainly has a science fiction feel to it. But what’s the science?

    How about the Games themselves? There’s a great deal of science not only in the creation of the horrific arenas, but also in the tracking of the participants every moment. There’s a certain scientific aspect to the projection of the future as well (although that element of the series could also be labeled “speculative fiction,” which is a more generic term).

    What about my own book, Tankborn? Is it truly science fiction? I believe it is. Yes, I could have created a straight fiction novel based on the Indian caste system but it would have been an entirely different book. Instead I used caste in a futuristic novel in which a bastardization of that system re-constitutes itself in a society that has left earth and colonized another planet. There is science in the creation of the genetically engineered GENs, science in the circuitry wired in their bodies that is used to control them, science in the devices that are used to interface with the GENs’ annexed brains. Some of the “science” in the book, e.g., my lev-cars and illusory holographic projections might not be strictly necessary to the story, but they do flesh out the setting. However if the science of the GENs were pulled out of Tankborn, many crucial aspects of the story would fall apart.

    So are dystopian books, in and of themselves, automatically science fiction? I can’t speak for every dystopian out there since I haven’t read them all (yet :-)). But in addition to the Hunger Games trilogy, there are other dystopians that would certainly qualify in my mind as SF. Neal Shusterman’s Unwind is an excellent example, as is Mary E. Pearson’s The Adoration of Jenna Fox. In both books, certain scientific advances (in addition to social changes) led to the dystopian world depicted in the story. In fact, without the science and social aspects in tandem, there would not be a story.

    I’d love to hear others’ opinions of what science fiction means to them. I’d like to hear what books you think are science fiction and why you think they are. For instance, I believe Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a fantastic SF book, but some might call it literary. So what are you reading in science fiction? And what’s science got to do with it?