Problematic Faves and Guilty Pleasures

We all have them, the books or movies or TV series we love which have problematic contents. Stuff we shouldn’t love, but love nevertheless. They’re like comfort food - not always healthy for you, but there’s times when you just need them to feel better. Whether it’s sitting down with an old-fashioned romance novel when you’re stressed out or whether it’s a pulp novel you take to the pool during your summer vacation, there’s books you just love and turn to when you want to be really comfortable.

Everyone has at least one favourite which is problematic to a degree, since no author is perfect and so there’s usually something in a novel which isn’t ideal or shouldn’t be there. Some stories are more heavy on this, others have only a slight problem that could have been avoided. It’s not uncommon to call something you love even though you know it’s flawed a guilty pleasure, but I’m not a fan of that. Pleasure should never be guilty, unless it involves hurting someone else.

Reading an old-fashioned romance novel where the female lead has next to no agency and just swoons into the hero’s arms is not hurting anyone. Sure, it’s not a feminist take and may not do any of the main characters justice, but it’s not hurtful. The same goes for reading a pulp novel which might be not only sexist (most are, turning their female character either evil or into damsels), but quite often also have racist undertones. It’s not hurting anyone to read it, either. As long, that is, as you are aware of the problems. As long as you not blithely claim that there’s nothing wrong.

As a matter of fact, the older your favourite story is, the more likely it is to have some aspects which don’t hold up well by today’s standards. Sensibilities were different in the past and what is considered wrong today wasn’t necessarily considered wrong twenty, fifty, or a hundred years ago. That doesn’t mean every story which is that old (or older) must be avoided and is too horrible to keep in print. If a book as old as a hundred years is still in print, that usually means the author didn’t just do things wrong, but must also have done at least one thing right.

I love “Dracula”, but I’m also aware it has quite some issues by today’s standards. I’m a huge fan of pulp novels, but that doesn’t mean I don’t get the sexist and racist undertones especially the old stuff has (and the new stuff sometimes copies without really thinking about it). Do I write the same things into my stories? I hope not and I look out for it, but I can’t guarantee there’s no scene in my stories which doesn’t have its problems as well. I’m just human and I do make mistakes.

Problematic favourites become a problem when you refuse to acknowledge that a story has problems and say ‘it’s fine and you’re just misinterpreting it’ instead. If you fight others over how they get the sexist, racist, or other part wrong and it’s all different and means something else which is good and right.

Does “Huckleberry Finn” have racist parts? Yes (also lots of cussing). Does that mean there’s nothing good in the novel? Hell, no. Does it mean that Mark Twain was a bad writer? Nope, definitely not. It just means that, because of different sensibilities, we can see today that some of the content isn’t okay and shouldn’t be seen as right.

Is most of Lovecraft’s work racist as hell? You can bet your soul on that. Does that mean he wasn’t a good writer? No. He came up with a completely new aesthetic for horror, a complete opposite of the gothic horror which came before. He gave us gods so horrible that just reading about them might drive you utterly mad. That is quite something. It doesn’t excuse his racism (which even surpassed that of his fellow citizens at the time), but it doesn’t have to. We can talk about the racism and condemn it and still accept that he wrote good horror. Only don’t try to copy his racism when you go for a take on the Great Old Ones today, m’kay?

I’m certainly not going to tell you to give up all those novels you love and have read more than once, just because parts of them are problematic. I’m not going to give up my occasional rereading of “Dracula” or Stoker’s other novels. I’m certainly not going to give up my pulp reading. I’m aware there are problematic parts and I would never try to excuse them or argue they’re not there. I just don’t let them get in the way of enjoying the rest of the story. Would I like it if they weren’t there? Sure. Do I want people to rewrite and censor old books? No, definitely not. There’s something to learn from them, something to learn about the time they were written in, something to learn about how not to do some things.

I do expect something more from modern authors, admittedly. Twain or Lovecraft or Stoker were not really aware of some of the problems in their books (although Lovecraft must sometimes have been told ‘dude, that’s racist’ even at his time), an author putting the same things into their books today should know better. That doesn’t mean that I will throw away every modern pulp novel just because it copies the sexist (not so often the racist) parts of the old pulp stories. There are nice exceptions (like the way the Brother Bones series handles both women and suggests an interracial relationship in the 1930s), but there’s a lot of stories which just sideline women and turn them into damsels, just as it was ‘always done’. Which, by the way, is a bad excuse - if we always went on doing things as they were ‘always done’, we’d still be living in trees (which would be better for our planet, no doubt). I can see why not everyone wants to have a female lead and there’s no reason for that, either. It would be nice, though, if more women were shown as their own person with their own agenda and a few male friends of the hero got themselves kidnapped and locked up instead. If you could top that with a few queer heroes - all the better.

Do not feel ashamed about your favourite books. They’re your favourites because they touch some part of your soul. Be aware they have problematic parts and don’t try to argue they don’t, but cherish them for what they are: comfort food for your soul.

Miss Frost Series Review

So, just in time for Christmas, here we have a review of the “Miss Frost” series by Kristen Painter. First of all, though, I have to point out that the series itself is a spin-off to her main series - the “Nocturne Falls” novels.

The “Nocturne Falls” novels are romance novels all set in the town of Nocturne Falls and all starring at least one supernatural being as part of the romance in question. The town is set up as a tourist attraction where it’s Halloween around the year, every hour of every day. That means that all supernatural beings living there can just walk around as they are without having to worry - all humans will simply think they’re living ‘in character’ and be cool with it.

Jayne Frost, the main character of the “Miss Frost” series (currently 7 books), fits well into that setting, being the only child and heir to Jack Frost, the Winter King (and brother-in-law of Santa himself).

In the first novel (“Miss Frost Solves the Cold Case”), Jayne is sent to Nocturne Falls to find out what happened to several of the employees in the local Santa’s Workshop - a series of shops throughout the world where real North Pole toys are sold alongside regular merchandise. She goes undercover as a regular winter elf and gets to the bottom of the problem. While doing so, she also meets up with the two men who become her love interests for the first three novels: broody and dark vampire Greyson and fiery and helpful summer elf Cooper (with whom she had a relationship in college already). With their help, she solves the cold case and decides to stay in Nocturne Falls for a while (mainly because she doesn’t really feel useful up north).

The following two novels (“Miss Frost Ices the Imp” and “Miss Frost Saves the Sandman”) draw Jayne back into crime solving mostly because she has unwillingly created the problem (her cat Spider has let the imp out) or it’s an extension of her tasks (she is responsible for keeping Tempus Sanders aka The Sandman happy and he’s not). She continues to go out with both Greyson and Cooper, still happily caught in-between them and not really striving to solve the question of ‘whom will I choose?’ any time soon.

Things go off in a completely different direction in the fourth novel (“Miss Frost Cracks the Caper”), when just before a big social event both Greyson and Cooper have to leave town (separately and for good reasons) and Jayne finds herself without a date while the woman whose lies broke the relationship between her and Cooper the first time is the DJ for the event. Jayne meets with Sinclair Crowe, a man who makes perfect doughnuts (all winter elves are addicted to sugar and need lots of sweets) and sometimes raises the dead - Sinclair is a necromancer. Yet, he’s also a nice guy she goes out with before the event, finding they have a lot in common (right down to both being cat owners). During the event, important jewellery is stolen and Jayne has to get to the bottom of this, not just for the family jewels, but also because it seems her former best friend (and lying relationship-breaker) has been set up. In the end, the love triangle resolves itself: Cooper has to stay with his parents and Greyson refuses to share her with a necromancer (because those are the only supernatural beings who have it easy to kill a vampire).

Sinclair, however, is not going anywhere. He’s staying with Jayne, continues to spend a nice time with her and Spider (bringing his own cat Sugar around, whom Spider likes very much), and proves an invaluable support during the next novel (“Miss Frost Braves the Blizzard”). When a suspicious snow globe is broken and North Pole weather invades Nocturne Falls (together with a large pack of yeti), Jayne is very glad to have Sinclair’s support and help, be it as a driver, someone who can send a spy into the enemy fortress (he’s on good terms with a ghost from his house and nothing can threaten a ghost), or someone who can produce a huge amount of sweets (yetis are just as hot on sweets as winter elves). At the end of the novel, he proposes to Jayne, who insists he needs to see what he’s getting into first before she answers him.

This brings them back to the North Pole in the sixth novel (“Miss Frost Chills the Cheater”). All Jayne wants is to show Sinclair what life at the North Pole and as a member of the royal family is like, but then strange things happen at the tinker contest and people blame Sinclair (who was never at the North Pole before, but happens to be a necromancer). There’s no way Jayne will just stand by and wait, so she dives into the next case, Sinclair by her side, and uncovers a lot more than she had bargained for. Yet, at least in private everything goes well for Jayne - Sinclair is not shocked by her royal life and prepared to adapt to his position as her consort. At the end, Jayne’s answer to the question from the last novel therefore is ‘Yes.’

The seventh novel (“Miss Frost Says I Do”) starts with Jayne being stressed out with the wedding preparations and inviting Birdie Caruthers (her long-time partner in sleuthing and a werewolf) for more help. There are additional problems, however, when a skeleton turns up in the royal Crystal Coach - which hasn’t been used since Jayne’s christening ceremony thirty years earlier. With this barely solved, there’s also the question of Sinclair’s parents - there’s only two ways to be born as a necromancer: two necromancers for parents or a zombie parent; in Sinclair’s case it’s the second option, his mother is a zombie. Nevertheless, there’s less drama about that and all’s well that ends well - even if the marriage turns into a double marriage with lots of drama.

What I love about the series is the great blend of romance (which is present from the first novel onwards, even if the love interest changes later) and mystery. A lot of cosy mysteries which try the same end up being less and less believable over time, at least on the crime side, because how can a regular person stumble upon so many crimes? Drawing out the romance until no tomorrow also doesn’t help believability much. The fact that not all of Jayne's cases are murders and a lot of the time it seems logical for her to investigate because she has high stakes in them, works to her advantage. The fact that there’s always a lot going on beside the mystery does as well. Jayne has a host of interesting and weird friends (stands to reason in Nocturne Falls) and there’s more to her life than just solving the cases. As the daughter of Jack Frost she’s also not your regular person - she is a winter elf whose powers are only second to his, so she’s also suited to doing more daring things. She’s not had a regular upbringing either, which is mostly shown in the last two novels set at the North Pole, so in her future kingdom.

The Miss Frost series ranks high on my list of Christmas reads (together with Terry Pratchett’s “Hogfather” and Charlotte McLeod’s “Rest You Merry”) and promises nice stories to read while it’s cold, stormy, and wintery (or rainy as at the moment, so much for white Christmas). If you like a mix of romance and mystery, you should give it a look as well.

New Writing Methods

As mentioned in the update on Wednesday, I have a few more things to tell you about my writing process. After my mother died in April last year, my writing has severely suffered and I only wrote few things during that time. For someone like me who is publishing four times a year, that did create a problem, as you might imagine.

It wasn’t so much the death of my mother which changed things for me (although I suspect it’s one reason why I have written “Alex Dorsey”), but what happened afterwards. I moved to a new flat further up in the same house, so my dad could take my old one on the ground floor. My dad visits me daily for tea - which happens to cut into the time frame when I was writing a lot before, so that changed the rhythm of my day severely. Don’t get me wrong, I love having my dad around - I just needed to figure out how to work around his visits.

I’ve been using a bullet-journal for several years already (since September 2014, as my very first one tells me), but I severely changed the way I keep it for November and now, one month in, I think the changes I made are good. I’ve started several trackers, among them both personal ones I’m not discussing here and ones for my work - more specifically a word tracker and a chapter tracker for months of editing and revising (November had one, December doesn’t, because I don’t publish this month). Like this, I have a nice, visual way of tracking my process during the month, in addition to my more precise notes for every day (I already put down my words per day per project from the beginning of my journaling). I just made things a little more visual overall and added long-term goals and suchlike, which is nice.

The bullet-journal is only one part, though. The new trackers are an additional motivation for me, which is good, but they can only do so much. Two more changes have had more impact on how I write now.

The first of those changes is that I, despite being a discovery writer, have started to plot more before I write. It’s not a detailed outline with a lot of notes and suchlike. I put down basic information on my main characters, such as looks, age, skills, and relationships. I write down shot descriptions (a couple of sentences) with what I expect to happen in a chapter, so I get the whole plot outline and see where the story is going. For me, it was quite difficult to work off such templates before, but that has changed to a degree. Having the time to sit down with One-Note (still my go-to for plotting, even though I do also have Campfire which isn’t bad) and to figure out what is happening when is giving me the time to percolate the stories before I start writing them, so I hope to outwit writing blocks to a degree.

Knowing what happens in a chapter doesn’t mean I know what the chapter is going to be like. I know that some stuff has to be happening to drive the plot, but how things get to that and what happens around those is a different matter. I knew before that Gabrielle was going to have to climb out of a window to escape from the police, but what exactly would happen on her escape was not in the notes, that was made up for the most part as I wrote the scene.

The principle already worked for both “The Mind-Control Beam” (the first story about the Eye) and for all three novellas which make up “The Cases of Benjamin Farrens”. Given I have been meaning to finish Benjamin’s story for over 15 years already, you might imagine how it felt to write the last word and close the file - and in a little over two weeks, no less.

Which brings me to the other change I’ve made which helps a lot with the writing: the pomodoro method. I’ve heard about this method of keeping focused before, but I never really connected it to my writing because it’s one thing to do regular work and another to be creative. Creative process is much harder to streamline than a regular bit of work. I’ll also be honest with you: my writing was pretty chaotic, so I really didn’t see how the regular rhythm of the pomodoro method would help with that.

That was before I plotted more. Just out of fun I used the pomodoro method (downloaded a free app for it) while I was writing, not expecting much. I managed a chapter of 2,500 words in less than one and a half hours. My regular output was usually one chapter per day before, two chapters every now and then, three on a very, very good day. The method was a game-changer for me.

Without the plotting, it wouldn’t work, because I wouldn’t know what to write in the 25 minutes of a pomodoro work part (the other part is a 5-minute break, every four pomodoro cycles, you take 15 instead of 5 minutes). I would be sitting in front of the computer, get annoyed and frustrated, and just stop the clock. With the plotting, being able to read what should happen in a chapter and then get to it, I can write a chapter in an hour to an hour and a half. I can write one chapter before and one to two chapters after my dad has been around for tea. I can consider two chapters my regular workload for the day and expand it to three on a good day. That helps a lot, as you might imagine.

It’s not as if I’ve never written that much before - I wrote the first two novels for the Knight Agency series in one and a half months, well over forty chapters of about 3,000 words each. It’s just that I was afraid I would never reach that output again and that I might not be able to hold up my ‘four books a year’ publishing schedule. Now I know I will be able to and I might very well manage to build up a bit of a reserve for the next changes in my regular life which might keep me from writing for a bit.

I will not deny that expanding my cast of main characters might also have helped. I have yet to plot the two novels I was working on before the changes (“Ignition Rites” and “Grey Eminence”) and which I was stuck in, because they weren’t done far enough in my mind. I will definitely get back to them. Yet, restructuring my bullet-journal, plotting my stories as far as I can without stopping the creative process, and picking up the pomodoro method for both writing and revising (I got ahead really well with it in November, so I’m keeping that going as well) are definitely a big part of how I got going again.

If you feel like your writing doesn’t work as well as it should, perhaps you will need to reorganize yourself as well. Take heart, it can be done and it can help a lot. We all change and sometimes that means changing the ways we do something as well.

Update and Roadmap 2020

Well, well, well, look at me, getting all organized and stuff … providing a ‘roadmap’ for 2020. Honestly, I have organized myself a little differently about writing now, but more about that in another post. This one is an update and a roadmap for the next year (with a few hints for 2021, too).

First for the roadmap, which is mostly about a book just released and books coming up.

John Stanton Vol. 2 (including “The Case of the Horrid Hellhound”, “The Case of the Goddess’s Assassin”, and “The Case of the Deadly Documents”) has been released at the end of November and is now available in a variety of places.

For 2020, the following releases are coming up:

• Alex Dorsey, February 2020
• The Cases of Benjamin Farrens, May 2020
• Theoretical Necromancy Vol. 1, August 2020
• The Eye Vol. 1, November 2020

By the time this post is released, I will be in the middle of writing the third novella for “Theoretical Necromancy Vol. 1” and I have the second novella for “The Eye Vol. 1” plotted out already. I’m sure I can come up with a third story by the time it’s going to be released.

This brings us to the little peek for 2021 as well. As you might have realized already, there’s no Knight Agency or Black Knight Agency story lined up for next year and also no new adventure for the Magpies, but all of them will come eventually. I have plotted out another stand-alone novel (as “Alex Dorsey” is), currently named “The Jar and the Nail”. This will be out in 2021. The same goes for the first collection of stories about D.I. Colin Rook. I will catch up with the series I’m writing already, too, and I already have plotted one story for the eventual third volume of John Stanton.

With this said, an update on my series makes sense, I think, given that I have just given you three new ones to look at - “Theoretical Necromancy”, “The Eye”, and “D.I. Colin Rook”. Let’s have a look at them, then.

Currently, I’m working on “The Death Mark”, the third story about Gabrielle Munson who practices theoretical and, quite often, practical necromancy in a Steampunk world where it’s an offence punishable by death. Gabrielle is living under the guise of a man (Victorian-age Steampunk) and getting into trouble with scaring regularity. Honestly, I’ve given her a lot of trouble already, but then, I list ‘improvisation’ as a skill on her character sheet, so she can take it.

Madison ‘Maddie’ Dempsey is the main character of the stories about the Eye, a vigilante in a 1930s pulp setting. Maddie works as a reporter, but sneaks out at night in the guise of the male vigilante the Eye to deliver criminals to the police and solve cases which leave the police stumped. Not only does she have to stay out of the way of the criminals who don’t like snitches, she also needs to keep her distance from the police because certain detectives would like to snatch her as well.

Colin Rook, finally, is an over-ambitious detective inspector of Scotland Yard who finds himself dumped into the one department nobody ever gets out of again and learns that supernatural entities and monsters exist. To a degree, he’s my homage to John Sinclair, a Scotland-Yard-based demon hunter who’s been a part of German pulp publications for longer than I’ve been alive (or almost as long, which really isn’t any better).

John Stanton will continue to be around, of course. A first story for the third volume is plotted already and I will get around to writing it soon enough, I hope. More will come and John will also have new help (introduced in “The Case of the Goddess’s Assassin”).

Jane Browne and Jane Doe will continue their adventures as well, but I need to figure out the full plot for both “Ignition Rites” (Knight Agency) and “Grey Eminence” (Black Knight Agency) first. I might also have to rewrite some of “Grey Eminence”.

The second adventure of Inez and Tom has a title, but little more, although I have an idea about what the big heist will be. The Magpies will return eventually in “Two for Joy”.

Anything more? Well, I’m still going for a third Swenson & Carter novella which will complete a full book about them (adding to “Vengeful Ghost” and “Raging Blood”). Apart from that, I’m not sure what will pop up in my mind, so there might be more to come. After all, half a year ago, I had no idea that Gabrielle, Maddie, and Colin would come into existence (or that I’d finally finish Benjamin Farrens’ cases, the concept of which has been on my mind for more than 15 years).

That’s the update and the roadmap. Next year’s releases are certain (which I wasn’t sure about at the beginning of this year, believe you me) and I have more stored for the year afterwards and, perhaps, even the year after that. Jane, Jane, and Inez are taking a little break, but after the mass of stories I’ve written about two of them, I think that is okay. I need a change in my stories and a lot of what I write is less realistic and more peppered with pulp and suspense (starting with the next release, “Alex Dorsey”). I will also probably start adding some kind of afterword to the books, starting with the new ones and, perhaps, getting back to the old ones to a degree as well, talking about my ideas which led to the stories.

Keep tuned for a regular post next Saturday. Remember that I do have quite some books out already or just enjoy reading what you like most!