Talking Story Prompts by @vscotttheauthor

by Veronica Scott 

One of the things I love most about writing is how you can give a group of authors the same story prompt – whether it’s one word, a phrase, a concept or a few common elements – and you’ll get as many different stories as there are people in the group. 

Sometimes in the various author groups I’ll see a new person posting something angsty about their totally unique story idea and their fear someone will steal it, so how can they have beta readers, critique partners, be edited, submit to publishers…I just want to say “bless your heart” (which is an old Southern saying – I lived in north Alabama for quite a few years), take a deep breath and relax. 

MAYBE you do indeed have the most revolutionary idea since sliced bread but most likely you have a variation on something that’s been done by many people, many times. What you have is your unique take on the concept, to be written in your voice, which will be cool and hopefully attract readers, but other people have no need to ‘steal’ the fundamental idea.

Now plagiarism and outright book pirating of course are always despicable, deplorable and illegal and a genuine concern for every published author. I pay the Blasty service a nice round sum yearly to ferret out pirates and ‘blast’ them. We all have to be vigilant as a community for these issues and thank goodness for readers who catch plagiarists and notify us.

But usually the novice author is worrying needlessly.

Although in fairness, I do have to say I’ve heard of two cases where someone alleged another author heard their concept, rushed to write a novel with the exact same concept and published first. I can’t speak to whether this actually occurred as the first author perceived it as happening, but even if it did, two cases out of the thousands of books published annually is pretty insignificant odds.

I’m in a group right now that’s voting on what the common elements will be for possibly 100 books!!! And I’m willing to bet all 100 will be very different stories.

We’ve done two Pets In Space anthologies and are on the third one now (for October release) and have had an amazing range of fun novellas based on pets, space and scifi romance.

The Great Space Race group, the Cosmic Cabaret authors and the Valos of Sonhadra novelists all generated totally different scifi romance adventures, working with their central concept. (If you haven’t read any of these, what are you waiting for???)

I profess to hate flash fiction, yet when a group blog I belong to decides to create FF, it’s always amazing to me that the words inspire me to write something completely out of my normal genres. I don’t know why but the last two times we did it, I wrote a contemporary fantasy and a Wild West romance. (Looks around the room) Who wrote THAT?! Couldn’t have been me! I think my Muse likes the palate clearing effects of FF, no matter how much she protests initially. (I should probably add they were 500-1000 word vignettes, not entire books, but I was tempted to keep going.)

So my latest series is based on a genetically engineered race of super soldiers. Hello,  Lora Leigh’s Breeds, Laurann Dohner’s New Species, the whole ‘ferals’ genre (which wow, those are some steamy stories – way off the chart for my sort of midrange steam factor as an author – I might read one every now and then but I can’t write them), Christine Feehan’s Ghostwalkers…the list goes on and on. (Psst, tell me your favorites if I’ve missed them here – always looking for new-to-me authors!)

My Badari warriors are created by aliens, in the far future, I’m having a blast writing them and playing with concepts…but they’re my take on the whole ‘genetically engineered’ plot device, written in my established Sectors scifi universe, in my voice, and hence unique to me.

The third book, JADRIAN, will be out at the end of May. I just finished the first draft of book four, DARIK. Starting GABE, book 5, today. In the meantime, here’s the blurb for AYDARR, the first book in the series.

The story: Jill Garrison, a maintenance tech at the Sectors Amarcae 7 colony, goes to sleep one night as usual only to wake up in her nightgown stranded in the middle of a forest on an unknown world. There’s no time to think as she’s stalked by carnivorous predators and rescued by genetically engineered warriors calling themselves the Badari. Turns out they and she, along with her whole colony, are now prisoners of the Khagrish, a ruthless race of alien scientists. Working for enemies of the Sectors, the Khagrish have created the Badari to be super soldiers.

Aydarr, the Badari alpha, isn’t sure he can trust Jill but his attraction to her is undeniable. He impulsively claims her as his mate to prevent her death at the hands of the Khagrish.

Can he continue to protect her from the experiments already underway? Will his claiming her put his pack in jeopardy from their alien masters?

As Jill searches for a way to rescue her fellow humans and get them all to safety, she finds herself falling for Aydarr, despite the secrets he’s keeping. She has a few of her own.

The situation becomes dire when Aydarr and his pack are sent offplanet on a mission, leaving Jill unprotected, prey for the senior scientist. Can she escape the experiments he has in mind for her? Will she be able to thwart the Khagrish plans and liberate humans and Badari alike? How will she and Aydarr reunite?

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Author Bio and Links:

USA Today Best Selling Author

“SciFi Encounters” columnist for the USA Today Happy Ever After blog

Veronica Scott grew up in a house with a library as its heart. Dad loved science fiction, Mom loved ancient history and Veronica thought there needed to be more romance in everything. When she ran out of books to read, she started writing her own stories.

Seven time winner of the SFR Galaxy Award, as well as a National Excellence in Romance Fiction Award, Veronica is also the proud recipient of a NASA Exceptional Service Medal relating to her former day job, not her romances!

She was honored to read the part of Star Trek Crew Member in the audiobook production of Harlan Ellison’s “The City On the Edge of Forever.”

Blog: https://veronicascott.wordpress.com/

Twitter:  https://twitter.com/vscotttheauthor

Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/pages/Veronica-Scott/177217415659637?ref=hl

To Trope, or Not to Trope @LexxxChristian

by Alexandra Christian

You can’t talk about the romance genre without talking about tropes. Tropes are certain conventions that appear in literature. Those comfortable little plot points that we can nestle down in and escape. Some people are of the opinion that tropes are bad. That our jobs as writers are to break new ground and blow those tired old tropes out of the water. And I can definitely understand that point of view. I like to read different stories that aren’t like every story I’ve read before. But I can also appreciate the familiarity of a tried and true trope that makes the story an escape.

We all love things we can predict sometimes. Take the success of Midsomer Murders. It’s a British detective series that’s been running for a thousand years. If you watch it on a regular basis, you start to notice a formula: a body is found, Inspector Barnaby is called away from some quirky family business to investigate, they talk to everyone in the village that has reason to want the person dead, you think you know who the murderer is until that person gets murdered before the commercial break, the killer ends up being the person you least expected, and we all live happily ever after. People tune in for it week after week because the comfort of that formula is there.

Tropes do this for romantic stories in a very effective way. We want there to be twists and turns, but we have basic elements that we look for when we start searching for a new favorite read. Here are some of my favorites:

1. MC in peril: Phoe Addison, the heroine of Naked, fits in easily with this trope. She is a woman that is in danger from outside forces and needs Cage’s help. I love these stories because the lovers are thrown together in difficult circumstances. They grow to rely on one another and their relationship grows through their teamwork at solving the larger problem. 
2. Fairytales: As a child, fairytales were my favorite kind of story. Incidentally, fairytales are often romances at their core (Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast… need I go on?). As a romance genre trope, the fairytale stories are often updated to present day, or transported to different settings or times in history. I love writing fairytales, as is evident in my books Beast of Burden and Huntress. In Beast, it’s an erotic retelling of “Beauty and the Beast” where the hero, Marek, is a werewolf. For Huntress, I found a very old Scandinavian dragon story for the basis of hero Malik’s redemption.
3. Performers: Stories where one of the protagonists is a performer of some sort (actor, musician, etc.). Sometimes they’re called celebrity romances. I think we can all identify with those. I know that I’ve been mentally dating Benedict Cumberbatch for years now. I wrote a short, summery piece called Mr. Hollywood about a romance novelist in Bora Bora who meets her celebrity crush and has a little rendezvous. Gee… I wonder where I got the idea for that?
4. Virgin: This trope can be controversial if the author doesn’t get the ages right. For me, the key to these kinds of stories is the slow-burning romance between the two main characters. Showcasing the alpha hero’s tenderness with an unsure lover can always bake my muffins. I tried to incorporate this trope a little in Naked with Phoe and Cage’s first love scene. Phoe is not very experienced and has been sheltered most of her life. She doesn’t come right out and say that she’s a virgin, but the concept is there. More obvious is in the first installment of my Queen Joanna series, The Virgin Queen. It’s a medieval romance where the heroine Joanna is married off to the king, who she assumes is a cold, disfigured brute. He turns out to be quite the opposite and their story is probably one of my more luscious stories.
5. Protector: I know, you’re going to take away my feminist card, but I love this trope. A story where the hero has to protect the heroine in some way-- those make me melt. Now, that’s not to say that in the same story, the heroine can’t turn around and rescue him right back. In Naked, Phoe is very timid at the beginning and Cage steps up and protects her from the men chasing her and from the terrible creatures that try to kill them. She’s terrified at the prospect of leaving her home and is paying this “big strong man” to help her through it. Of course, by the end, Phoe becomes a badass in her own right and has to help Cage out of some sticky situations.

So tropes can be useful tools in choosing stories as well as writing them. They can also be traps, so choose wisely. The trick is to take those comfortable tropes and give them a twist that will make them stand out from the rest.

 

BACK...

Macijah "Cage" St. John' didn't want the spy life anymore. He would have been thrilled to spend every morning lying in the field behind Phoe's home in smalltown Louisiana watching the clouds roll by. But his Miss Addison wanted to spread her wings, literally. So Cage accepted a mission that teamed him up with his lady love. If only he had trusted her.

TO THE FUTURE

Everything about being a spy was a million times more exciting, and scarier, than the books she'd read in her former life as a librarian. When her first mission with Cage turned into a colossal clusterf*ck because he withheld information and kept secrets, Phoebe's world narrowed into a long tunnel of betrayal. Captured by space pirates and delivered to a horrible fate, she wished the last words between them had been of love, because she was certain she would never see Cage St. John again.

 

About the Author:

Alexandra Christian is an author of mostly romance with a speculative slant. Her love of Stephen King and sweet tea has flavored her fiction with a Southern Gothic sensibility that reeks of Spanish moss and deep fried eccentricity. Lexx likes to keep her fingers in lots of different pies having written everything from sci-fi and horror to Sherlock Holmes adventures. 

A self-proclaimed “Southern Belle from Hell,” Lexx is a native South Carolinian who lives with an epileptic wiener dog and her husband, author Tally Johnson. Her long-term aspirations are to one day be a best-selling authoress and part-time pinup girl. She’s a member of Romance Writers of America.

Website: http://lexxxchristian.wixsite.com/alexandrachristian

Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/b5c_Un

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheSouthernBellefromHell/

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4684601.Alexandra_Christian

Amazon Author Central:

https://www.amazon.com/Alexandra-Christian/e/B009QU3UD4/

 

Tropes Can Be Your Friend or Your Enemy

Tropes can be your enemy, plotwise, or your friend, especially if you can bend them somehow to be fresh again in your story.

One of my favorite sites is TV Tropes, where this is part of their mission statement:

The wiki is called "TV Tropes" because TV is where we started. Over the course of a few years, our scope has crept out to include other media. Tropes transcend television. They reflect life. Since a lot of art, especially the popular arts, does its best to reflect life, tropes are likely to show up everywhere.

I like to click on the Speculative Fiction genre link because there are so many choices, including the “Grand List of Overused Science Fiction Cliches”.  Feel free to use them or not, do whatever is right for your story. It’s good to have the awareness, however, that the tropes do exist, in any genre. Personally, I don't mind a plot based on a trope, if the story is well written and I'm engaged with the characters.

So, selected from the TV Tropes site, with my comments after the italics:

Discussions, ending with a joke, about how bureaucracies are the same everywhere in the galaxy: OK, I was coasting along pretty well in the movie “Jupiter Rising” until they made their pit stop at the intergalactic DMV or whatever that bureaucratic version of hell was supposed to be. It was kinda amusing but went on for too long AND didn’t feel like it fit into the otherwise serious movie with populations of whole planets dying…so if you're going to do this one, don't get carried away with it.

It was all just a dream/game/simulation: Some people do this very well, as with the “Matrix” or “Inception.” And then of course there’s “Running Man,” where the whole thing is a deadly game and everyone knew it, which was kinda cool.  Or “Tron”. I didn’t think the remake of “Total Recall” went so well. I believe if you’re going to spring this surprise on your readers or viewers, you have to have amazing worldbuilding, and subtle clues they can go back and ferret out later, so it’s obvious that you the Author knew what you were doing all along. The readers can rest assured they were in good hands and the author didn't just throw in a trick ending when they ran out of inspiration and the deadline loomed. No! See, there was a clue and there was another clue and....

Time travellers go back in time to prevent some Bad Thing from happening and in the process actually cause the Bad Thing to happen and its corollary Time travellers go back in time to prevent some Bad Thing from happening; they succeed, but cause something worse to happen: I suspect this is so prevalent because what is the point of time traveling if you can’t meddle? See all the “Back to the Future” movies. The underrated movie “Grand Tour in Time” is a really good use of this trope. I loved the old Jean Claude van Damme movie “Time Cop”, where there was a whole bureaucracy (oops, see above) set up to deal with the issues.  And of course, the other trope is that the people go back in time, to the sinking of Titanic perhaps and find they can’t prevent the disaster. Rod Serling got good mileage out of that for “Twilight Zone.”

Humans have a special quality that makes us unique, so that even superbeings can learn something from us: Excuse me? We ARE intergalactically unique in all ways, what are they talking about here??? Moving on…

A pet survives the disaster, and is discovered at the end of the story: I’m not arguing with this trope! Any pet animal in my stories will survive. This is so well accepted that people often get upset when the dog does die. A nice spin on this trope was Groot in "Guardians of the Galaxy," who (SPOILER) created a "cutting" or baby version of himself. Awww....

The gang of cute and/or misfit kids rescue the universe, where a large group of competent, organized and well-armed adults failed: Well but this one is SUCH a good trope that it can be spun many many ways, especially in scifi.  Hunger Games, Divergent, The Maze, “Super 8”…."Goonies" (hey, it has fantasy elements...)

A high-ranking matriarch, in a society that oppresses men, falls for the Hero's rugged charms: OK, but we write romance so of course this is going to happen on occasion in our books, right fellow Authors? We’ll just write it SO well, no one will complain about the tropery.

Veronica Scott is the USA Today Happily Ever After blog’s SciFi Encounters columnist and a three-time recipient of the SFR Galaxy Award. She’s written a number of best-selling science-fiction and fantasy romances. Her latest release is Star Cruise: Marooned. Veronica grew up in a house with a library as its heart. Dad loved science fiction, Mom loved ancient history and Veronica thought there needed to be more romance in everything. When she ran out of books to read, she started writing her own stories. She made the jump to fulltime author this past March.
All views expressed are solely my own and not those of the SFR Brigade!

 You can find out more about Veronica at https://veronicascott.wordpress.com/ or on twitter @vscotttheauthor or Facebook https://www.facebook.com/pages/Veronica-Scott/177217415659637