Philippa Ballantine's Blog

I’m excited for 2022, and it all has to do with my favorite movie of all time. At university watching Aliens on repeat, learning every line, and admiring Ripley’s strength and perseverance, I never imagined that I would be writing within that very same universe all these decades later. Alien as a series has birthed […]

A few years ago, you may remember I hope, I had a podcast called Erotica a la Carte.

I offered up polls for listeners to fill in, which picked out a bunch of ‘ingredients’—actually plots, characters, scenes—which I then used to write stories. They were all erotic speculative fiction.

I had a blast doing it. It pushed me to write stories I might never have thought about, and it created a sense for me of community and interaction, that I hadn’t really experienced in any other way in writing.

Eventually the selections and ingredients began to dry up, and I packed Erotica a la Carte up in 2012 after three seasons. But I missed those things I discovered there.

Then along came patreon.

If you’re not familiar with it, let me explain. William Shakespeare had a patron (a man of high status and full pockets) who paid for his living expenses and in return got his name put on poetry—even some written in his own name. The patronage model is as old as creatives.

Now, not many people these days have enough cash to keep a creative in food and housing, but the internet had made it so that all of us can contribute a little to it. Basically, crowdfunding patronage.

Patreons contribute as little as a dollar per month, and then in return get access to a variety of rewards. Creatives get to fund projects, eat, and generally survive.

I thought about what I could use this new platform for. Every creative needs money, and as a full-time one it scores pretty highly, but I wanted a direction for it.

Erotica a la carte provided it.

So my patreon was born today. I’ll be using that original formula of polling listeners/readers, but I am expanding it to all kinds of speculative fiction. I could end up writing horror, fantasy or science fiction. I’ll be taking patreons to new places, and myself too!

The first poll will go live on the 15th of June, and the first story at the end of the month. It’ll be an evolving process too, as I see how things go, what the community want, I’ll add new goals and rewards.

I’ll hope you’ll join me and see where we can go.

 

This week I have been watching a lot of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 with my husband Tee Morris. He was very surprised I had never actually watched this show before, but I explained to him it never made it to New Zealand. We didn’t get everything after all. Now after a massively successful Kickstarter campaign, it is available on Netflix, as we decided to dive in.

If you’ve never watched MST3K, it is a cute show where a host and a bunch of robot puppets watch, and make hilarious commentary on a variety of bad movies. It’s kind of like spending an evening with your witty friends, where you don’t care so much about watching the movie. It’s OK, they are so bad the riffing is the best part.

So I mostly avoided watching bad movies when I was growing up…though I did accidentally view a few (I’m looking at you Dungeons and Dragons—I’ll never forgive you for what you did.)

So while watching MST3K I had my eyes opened to the truly bad movies out there. Manos: The Hands of Fate was a particular horror. Seriously it is consistantly on the top worst movies of all time lists and for good reason. Poor Torgo, he was supposed to be a satyr but the only clue was his strange metal rigging under his pants. Also the word satyr was never even mentioned. It was certainly not apparent…even with these dodgy eyebrows.

via GIPHY

However after I had recovered from watching a bunch of these, I began to realize that bad movies do have something to offer to writers. Sometimes you need to see what not to do to, to point you in the right direction.

To illustrate this, I’m going to use the 1956 weird west classic The Beast of Hollow of Hollow Mountain that I had the dubious pleasure of watching last night. It has a stampede, a dodgy love interest, terrible racist stereotypes, and eventually…an allosaurus. But about that last part

Get to it

If your show is called the Beast of the Hollow Mountain, then don’t wait until the last twenty minutes before showing that the title wasn’t just a joke. Honestly, you have a beast, but you spend 3/4ths of this movie only the boring stuff. Viewers and readers will only get restless if you don’t get to the point. While watching I couldn’t help complaining ‘where’s that damn beast already?’ I just wanted it to show up and stamp the crap out of everyone. I had to wait a long…long…long time…

Yes there is something called building tension, but there is also the point where you will start losing readers. Honestly if I hadn’t been watching this hot mess in the structure of MST3K I would have bailed out ten minutes in. Don’t let that happen to your readers. You don’t have to show everything straight away, but give them a little something so that you know that you’re not just stringing them along. If there is a beast, then prove that to them!

Characters are more than one thing

When creating characters, make them more than just one or two motivations and character traits. Jimmy in The Beast of Hollow Mountain wanted to build his cattle ranch and be successful, and…ahhhhh…yeah that was pretty much it. Still he did better than every other character in the movie. His love interest Sarita wanted to…well she didn’t have any goal for herself. Even the villain seemed only there to try and foil Jimmy. They were as empty as a cracked open egg.

So please for your readers sake, make your characters complex. The ones in The Beast of Hollow Mountain were so flat, I was rooting for the beast to just eat them all.

Falling back on sloppy stereotype—just don’t

Pancho was painful to watch. The stereotype of a drunken foolish Mexican father was cringeworthy, so for the sake of all that is holy, don’t do it. He was supposed to be funny, but I don’t know what sort of moron would find that amusing. Probably some racist from the 1950s I suppose.

Instead do something the audience doesn’t expect, expand their minds by showing some of the variety of humans in race, gender, sexuality. Break stereotypes instead of perpetuating them.

His young son Panchito managed to overcome his terrible name, and had probably the most real character in the whole movie. As MST3K said ‘Panchito is a real baller’)

Plot holes…OMG the plot holes

via GIPHY

The Beast of Hollow Mountain must have been a first draft. It had to be. The plot holes were ridiculous. I mean there is suspension of disbelief, and then there is so much of a stretch the whole concept breaks.

The idea that an Allosaurus could live in a swamp, and no one see him for years. Too much. The fact that said dinosaur could exist in this swamp, and not know how to navigate it without being sucked to his death. Far too much.

Connect the dots, and make it reasonable. I would have happily believed the beast had just escaped from the zoo rather than it had been living there for years.

Write your first draft, but for goodness sake don’t stop there. Go back, look it over, and be critical. No one in this movie was being critical.

Don’t be a damn lazy writer.

There was a part of the movie where rancher Jimmy, found one of his herd had become trapped in the swamp’s deadly quicksand and died. Rather than the obvious conclusion, it had wandered in there, Jimmy said ‘well it was obviously shoved in there by Rios’. The writer wanted to set up bad blood between our ‘hero’ and Rios, but was so lazy didn’t even give Jimmy reason to think that.

Thus the character looks like an idiot and the writer looks lazy. Seriously don’t make your characters look like chumps. No one is going to root for a chump.

Poor Jimmy had a chance to do some real detective work, and instead he looked like an utter numbnut.

It’s OK to have a character make mistakes, they are human after all, but don’t make them so stupid that the readers are hoping for the beast to come swallow them up.

 

Immortal Progeny releases this very Friday! It is available for ebook pre-order right now. Print editions will be available next week, and as you can see I am working on the audiobook right now.

It’s a book that I have wanted to write since I finished Harbinger, the last book in the Books of the Order series.

That was a world where religion had been largely thrown away, and replaced with a healthy fear of the supernatural. Those that still did have faith, were largely ignored or laughed at.

So I wanted to write a book that delved into religion, and most especially fanaticism. If the world of Geist was sure of paranormal creatures, then the world of Immortal Progeny is sure of gods. They have evidence. They have seen them come from the God Void.

Temples of many gods war among themselves for the right to be called The One True God. It is a war that has killed and displace many. The monstrous creatures that the temples create to fight their wars, ravage the countryside.

In small free villages, atheist magicians, train with their magic, but are often the fodder for the temples wrath.

Until one day three sisters appear from the void where the gods are born. They don’t seem like gods, they are fragile and need help and shelter. What they are given instead will mould them and change the direction of the wars raging around them.

To give you all a taste of the world, I am releasing the first chapter of the novel for your listening pleasure. Keep an eye out for more release day events and competitions this Friday!

http://www.pjballantine.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/immortal-progeny-prelude.mp3

This weekend I’ll be at Farpoint in Timonium, Maryland. I’ll have a table in the dealer’s room, where you can buy signed copies of my books.

I’ll also be appearing at the following panels during the weekend.

Saturday

10am Publishing in 2017 – Chesapeake 1

10.40am Author Reading – Art Show

12pm Beggars and Chosers: Crowd Sourcing Artistic Projects – Ridgely 1

8pm Social Media for authors – Chesapeake 1

Sunday

10am Beyond the Female Sidekick – Chesapeake 1

Immortal Progeny is my next novel, coming in March 24th, and you can pre-order now.

It was a novel I wanted to write after doing the Books of the Order. The world of Sorcha, Merrick and Raed was a largely godless one. The gods had been proven not to exist there, but I wanted to explore more deeply the role of the divine. What people do with it. How they twist it. The damage and the good it can do.

So The Fragile Gods series leapt to life. Immortal Progeny is the first in three books set in this world of warring temples and towering monsters.

For generations the world of Rahvas has been awash in holy war between its many temples. 

Priests and priestesses have built towering monsters to destroy one another and prove their deity the One True God.  

But those temples also made two mistakes. When three little girls came out of the void where Gods are born, they mistake them for humans and let them live. 

Separated, Rowan, Vervain and Amaranth have lived out very different lives. One lived as a temple acolyte, another as meat for the creation of progeny, while the third learns the magic of the atheists.  

As the sisters’ power unfolds and they learn the truth of who they are, the temples and all those that fight for them will find a new war on their doorstep. Rahvas will become the battleground between gods and monsters.

And here is the cover, by Designed by Starla. Look for the ebook, print and audiobook in March.

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…sounds ominous, but it is.

2016 has been a hard year for what seems like the majority of people around me. It hasn’t been a terrible year for my family as a whole (massive touch wood, since we still have a few more days left), but perhaps I should have listened when David Bowie died and been prepared.

I’ve blogged about how important he was to me creatively and on a personal level as well, so that was not a good start to the year. Then in November I though for sure 2016 was going to kick me in the creative guts once more, when the wildfires hit the Gatlinburg, Tennessee area.

I’ve also blogged about the specialness of that place over the years, as it is where the talented Alex White organises Smoky Writers. Twenty writers, two chefs, moonshine, a beautiful log cabin, and a whole glorious week with nothing to do but soak up the creative environment and write. The Smoky Mountains are simply a stunning place to get in touch with your creative side.

Alex summed it up well when he said ‘this is my Disneyland.’

So right when the Smoky Mountains were at their driest, arsonists struck. Setting a fire on November 23rd, they caused massive and immediate damage to the area. 20,000 acres of the forest were burned, fourteen people died in the flames, and countless more lost homes and businesses.

One of those places was the cabin we had shared this year, and had booked for the next year. It seemed that 2016 was not done kicking people about. This beautiful place where many lived and even more visited was devastated.

I felt just grief thinking of this place, this beautiful place was gone. I thought of the view from the cabin, I thought of the family who owned it, and I thought of the long, winding road that the cabin shared, and that people had fled down while everything burned around them.

If there is a metaphor more suitable for this year, I don’t know one. Still it was hard to know what to do.

And then I realised all I had to do was look around me. In my immediate circle. Alex jumped in to secure us another cabin for 2017. Others set about immediately deciding what we could do. Of course our greatest strength is words, so there will probably be a project springing from the ashes with proceeds to go the community. The family of us Smoky Writers gathered, and found positive things they could offer to the situation. This place might not be where we live but it is our creative home.

Further out, the community of Sevier County began to pick itself up. Its most famous daughter, Dolly Parton, stepped in to help immediately. December 13th she raised 9 million dollars with a telethon, and also started her My People Fund. I’ve always had a soft spot for Dolly since not only is she talented, but she is unabashed about who she is. ‘It’s expensive to look this cheap’- reminds me of Mae West. Our plan is the next Smoky Writers Retreat is to hit Dollywood or the Dixie Stampede.

So we’ll be going back to the Smokys in February, and I am sure we are going to see plenty of devastation, but we will also see tough mountain folk rebuilding their lives. That toughness is the only answer when the world burns.

One foot in front of the other. Together.

 

 

Lately with all the negative and frankly terrifying things in the news, I have been thinking about the importance of story.

In a world of turmoil, how can stories and words possibly matter? As an author you can feel super small in that sea of vitriol and violence. Like you are throwing stones into an endless ocean.

Then I realized the world around us is made up of stories, because we are constantly telling stories to ourselves, as a towns and as nations.

America in the nineteenth century had a powerful story; come  to America, and no matter who you are, with hard work, you can make your dreams a reality. New Zealand around the same time had a different, but similar story; everyone gets a fair go here. In America recently it has become ‘America is the greatest nation in the world’, while New Zealand is ‘the little nation that punches above its weight.’ That’s why NZ loves its All Blacks rugby team; it embodies that story. Soldier Field in Chicago was filled with 60,000 people to see the ABs play. A story can be that powerful.

It’s not just nations, but cities too. Wellington, my hometown, told itself it was in the 1980s and 1990s a boring, grey, only the government kind of spot. Then in the new century, they changed that to arts, culture and a foodie paradise. Detroit in the 1890s was The Paris of the West, then the story became Motor City, then more recently depressed and wrecked. Now it is turning to arts, hope, and a we-can-do it attitude.

So who makes these stories? What winds of change blow through to make these narratives change? It’s a gathering of wills, a change in the mindset of the people. While one person can instigate change, it has to be picked up and carried by the people as a whole. They have to buy into that story and move it forward, making it a reality.

So in our world it is the people that make the change. Right now, it feels like America is still trying to find its new story, and as a writer I can tell you, finding a new story, and working it properly can be difficult.

So in this national emotional turmoil, I still manage to find a story to write, inspired by this storytelling of place and heart. It’s one about that human mind-meld, and a little bit about the spirits of the Fey. (You didn’t think Chasing the Bard was the only story I had to tell with them) It also contains the Iron Lily, my 19th century strong-woman, and an older immigrant grandmother in New York City. It’s about a city finding its story, and who gets to decide what that will be.

It’ll be told in multiple first person stories, a first for me, but one that works well for this story I think.

It’ll be full of the joy, the madness, the beauty and the darkness of New York City, whose history I am falling in love with.

And it will reflect the importance of the stories we tell ourselves and each other. Hope among the shadows.

Hold on there Pip, is probably what you are thinking. Did you just jump into the Tardis and head back to 2012?

Well, dear reader, we live in a brand new world of publishing, and since I am *ta DAH* a hybrid writer, I love using all kinds of publishing tools to keep the roof over our head.

I write for New York publishing houses, I jump into small press anthologies, and I produce my own work. Hybrid all the way!

In the dim dark past, when you got your rights back for your writing, there was not much else you could do with it. However, in these wonderful days of diversity and agility, we authors can take these books, spruce them up, adjust the price to how we want, give them new covers, and put them out ourselves.

Thus this brand new cover reveal for Hunter & Fox, with Kindred & Wings to follow. I have added into this edition a short story, Dragonsoul, which I wrote to delve into the history the Shifted Worlds. It’s a little bonus for those of you who might already have the novel.

The ebook is available now, and the print editions will follow once I have Kindred & Wings out. Once again Starla had done a wonderful job of giving me a beautiful cover. I just love the burnished effect.

So click here to buy the ebook, or if you use KU you can read the whole thing.

This week is the cover reveal for The Curse of the Silver Pharaoh.

This is the first book Tee and I have written a specifically Young Adult story, and it is a little nerve wracking…after all it is some time since I was a YA myself…quite some time….

However, I do remember the stories I liked reading back then—even if there was no particular category for young adults in those days. I liked stories of people just enough like me to be able to connect with, but with fantastic situations around them.

I loved Ann McCaffrey’s Pern series—growing up with dragons, what’s not to like. I loved Ender’s Game for what it taught me about being different—about how that was OK. I loved Wizard of Earthsea for all the trials and tribulations Sparrowhawk went through to reach his goal—important messages for a child that wanted to become a writer. Not really that dissimilar to becoming an author actually…

I also remember what I didn’t like. Books that talked down to me. Books that were really instruction manuals for how children should grow up, and what rules they should follow. I tried reading books my mother had grown up with, and the only series I did enjoy were The Secret Seven and The Famous Five.

And that’s a bit of the secret; The Ministry Seven have always been equal parts The Baker Street Irregulars and the Famous Five. These days we don’t let our children spend all day on the moors catching criminals, but the orphans on the streets of a steampunk London had far more latitude.

So that’s my hope for Verity and the Seven. That they are fun adventures in the huge world of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences. That they meet familiar faces but that they also bring something new to our world; the point of view of a young, intelligent girl, growing up, and figuring out all kinds of mysteries.

So please pre-order right now, and get ready for shenanigans with the Ministry Seven.

Verity Fitzroy and the Ministry Seven have the run of London, and that is the way they like it. 

While she loses herself in machines and adventures, and the work they get from the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences, why her parents were killed remains a mystery she can’t leave alone. 

When an archaeologist from the British Museum is kidnapped, and the only clue leads to an academy for young engineers, the Ministry sends the Seven in to investigate. What they will find within the walls of the country house, will lead Verity and the Seven down a dangerous path.