Welsh Law and 'The Comrades'

We're here today with Lynne Sears Williams, well known to all of us over at the Books and Writers Forum.



JB:  Hi Lynne.  Glad you're able to be here today.  Your book, The Comrades, is set in Wales in the Ninth Century.  I understand you did a lot of research into Welsh law in that period, especially law relating to women Can you give us a quick overview of what was gong on in European law?

LSW: Many countries in the 9th Century had codified law to some extent.  The Anglo-Saxons in England had a lock on the feudal system, and decided the inheritance of a deceased man went to the eldest son. No money or property passed into the hands of a daughter; illegitimate children were ignored.

Wales took a different view, which focused on people in terms of status. Essentially, it was a caste system with a Celtic flare.

JB:  Give me some examples of how Welsh law dealt with the status of women.  Marriage law, for instance.

LSW:  Marriages were usually made for dynastic reasons, to form alliances and women never married a person of higher status. When codified in the 10th Century, "The Laws of Women" took up considerable space in the book.

The daughter of a king was worth 24 pieces of gold and brought a dowry that might include livestock, pots, pans, or jewelry.

JB:  What about divorce?

LSW: Divorce was permitted, though the Church, fostered by Irish priests, deplored it.

One factor could initiate the process. If a groom discovered on the wedding night that his wife was not a maiden, he could leave, with a certain weapon fully erect. Once he located witnesses to show his 'disappointment' they all had to go check the bridal sheets. No blood, no bride, no marriage. Divorce was instantaneous.

There were many categories for divorce; if one person changed his or her mind the next day, if a partner turned out to be infertile or wait seven years and divide everything.

A song in our century once asked, "What's love got to do with it?" The answer in Wales: "Nothing!"

JB:  Can you give us something of the flavor of the law in Wales in the Ninth Century?  What are some specifics that would feel odd to us today?

LSW:  Law prescribed everything possible. The seating arrangement in the Great Hall included specific people who would sit with the King, including the priest. He would sing the Pater Noster before meals. The falconer and the bard had places of honor.

The law stated that if the queen desired to hear more music, the bard would play quietly, just for her.

'Claim-time' occurred once a year when people who'd been arguing needed to settle the affair or have the king step in. The only capital offence was theft; in a land where controlled order was needed, to steal was anathema.

JB:  So you could say law dealt mainly with property.

LSW:  Every man, woman and child had a specific 'price' that would be considered by the King if a person was harmed. 'Honor price' entered the stage and could never be ignored. 

Land law, surety, how to treat a person not born in Wales were logistically calculated as were dogs, tamed or wild.  Then to the truly different: all of the king's possessions had a specific price, including his cat, who was worth a sheep and a lamb if killed or stolen.

Curiouser and curiouser, Alice might say.

Not in 9th Century Wales, my dear. Go on and chase your rabbit; we are busy looking for the King's Cat. It's missing.
Again.

JB: Heh heh.  Tell me a little bit about your book.


LSW:  In The Comrades, Evan, king of Powys, returns from a wedding to find a village ransacked, with women and children dead. Neighboring Gwynedd has broken the peace, crossing the mountain to pillage and murder. The dead babes tear his heart, and Evan vows to break the heart of Gwynedd.

Gwynedd's most guarded treasure is a pampered princess. In a bloody raid, Evan's comrades return to Powys with Gwynedd's heart.

Evan knows holding the princess will be dangerous and her safe-keeping may mean the difference between the lasting peace he desires and a bloody war. He's prepared for her to be kept safe but unprepared for the girl's intelligence, compassion and damnably kissable mouth.

"Evan took in the vision of a scarlet gown, which barely disguised the shapely form and a river of black curls that caressed to girl's waist.  Oh, Lord. He wished he had ordered sackcloth."

Morleyna's secret gift of Sight reveals a cruel betrayal that sends Evan on a mystical journey where he discovers his only chance for redemption rests in the hands of his captive.

Her brothers will arrive to claim their sapphire-eyed sister. Will her kinsmen, bent on revenge, destroy Evan and his comrades? Or will destruction come from Morleyna who may be the reincarnation of someone whose beauty captivated a nation?

JB:  Lynne's book is available from Amazon and as an e-book kindle, Nook, and iTunes.  And here's the lovely book trailer.

Hands. Just because.

I have a scene in the back of my mind that I really want to sit down and write.  I will, as soon as I get some mental space.

I'm about to introduce the character of Pax -- Camille and Pax -- to each other.  I want Camille to notice Pax's hands.  So I'm thinking about hands in general.  You are about to reap some of that.

Some gems and some heroines

Jess, Maggie, Annique and Justine. 
Four heroines.
Four gems.

Which gem goes with which heroine?

Can you match 'em up?

Find out over at The Romance Dish, and get a chance at a copy of The Black Hawk.

Diamond and pearl are Smithsonian.  Ruby attrib JOBAfunky. Amber attrib ericskiff. 

Giving Away Black Hawk. (Where I'm doing this . . .)

I've bumped the giveaway post up a bit, just so it stays on top.  I'll do this as long as I'm blogging around the town and giving away books.

Technical Topic -- You're Out of Order

Someone asks, more or less,

"When it comes to publishing a series, can I start somewhere in the middle and fill in the blanks as I go?"


Well, of course you can.
People do weirder things than that every day of the week.

You can start anywhere in the timeline and slip the next book in before or after, as you please.  This is what I do.
I'm headed into planning the sixth book, the PAX STORY, and it'll hit about midway through the series, timewise. 

If I were giving advice, I'd say:


-- Every story should be standalone.

This doesn't just mean each story has a full story arc and that you've shovelled in the needed backstory.

It means your twelve-year-old minor character doesn't telegraph what he's going to be at twenty.

You suppress foreknowledge.  Even though you know a character will die six years after the close of the book, you don't write her as 'doomed'.   In this book, she's not.

And you try not to pull characters in from other books just to say hello.  Continuing characters appear if they earn a place in the plot.  If not, they wander off to live their lives outside the book.


Certainly, leave Easter Eggs for your insiders.  That's part of the fun. But these references have to be invisible to the novice reader.








--  Be stingy with backstory

Well, one is always stingy with backstory. 

But in a discontinuous series it's especially wise to avoid handing out all the particulars of, 'what has gone before'.  You may want to write something cool ten years in the past.  Something that hasn't occurred to you yet.

Give yourself room to maneuver.  The more you've tacked down the past, the more you limit what you can do there. 


-- Every book is trapped in its own moment of time.

We deal with this all the time when writing historicals.

We know the French Revolution turned out badly. Folks in 1789 didn't. They had high hopes.  When we write what characters thought and did, we can't let our knowledge of future events creep in.



-- Imagine the entire lifetime of the characters.

When you write your fifty-year-old man, try to image him as a twenty-year-old and a twelve-year-old.  You may someday need him in that capacity.  You want to make him a useful character, doing interesting things at all ages of his life.

I find it easier to imagine forward than to imagine back, as it were.  Easier to see the old man who grows from the young dude than pulling the young dude out of that old man.




-- Leave big empty patches in everybody's life.

When we write chronologically, we're free to build any future.  ("Always in motion is the Future.")  We are so powerful and unconstrained. 

When we set a story in our fictional world's 'what has been', the action must be consistent with and lead to what comes later. Our feet are all tangled up.

Some of it we can avoid somewhat.
I mentioned above that we don't get specific with backstory.  Being vague about our character's past is particularly important.   We try not to just randomly predetermine our character's life left, right, and center.

So we might be specific about stuff that won't affect anybody's action but coy when we assign life events that do constrain.  We'd say, 'he was promoted to lieutenant in 1809,' rather than 'he fought at the battle of Corunna'.  That way we don't sit down to write a scene set in Paris in 1809 and suddenly notice, (by way of those charts we're keeping -- see below,) that somebody we need is off fighting in Spain.

And we leave some years in the chronology just as empty as we can.  We don't say what anybody's doing.  Those years are vacant lots where we can build something.


And, finally:

-- Keep records

From the first chapter you set down in electrons, make notes.  Make charts, year by year and even month by month over the whole period covered by your books.

What's going on in the world?  Where is everybody?  What have they got themselves up to?

If you don't write this down, you are not only going to get stuff wrong and feel like an idiot, when somebody points it out to you,
you're going to get cross-eyed with looking things up when you have three or four books out.

The Dragon and the Pearl and an interview with Jeannie Lin

Joanna here, with Jeannie Lin, author of Butterfly Swords, (Harlequin Historical, 0373296142, buy it here,) winner of RWA's 2009 Gold Heart Award.  Lin was also a break-out favorite in my personal 'exciting heroines I wish I could write,' category.  

Now she's back with her newest book, The Dragon and the Pearl, (Harlequin Historical, 0373296622, you can buy it here.)

I like me some strong heroine and I like me exotic locales and strong, protective heroes.  That was Butterfly Swords.  I'm expecting the same three-for-three in The Dragon and the Pearl. 

On to the promised interview . . .

Me:  What sort of books influenced you when you were a growing up? 

Jeannie: I was highly influenced by adventure stories: King Arthur's tales, Greek myths, fantasy adventures (former D&D geek here), and martial arts movies. I always had a thing for larger than life heroes and heroines and ultra-dramatic scenarios (we might even say melodrama). 

 

Me: I also love me some ultra dramatic.  Nobody's going to be surprised to hear that.  What draws you to this period in history?  With me and the Napoleonic era, it's the clothes.  *g*  You?

Jeannie: Oh, I do have to admit the clothes were a part. 

I used to watch these gorgeous Tang Dynasty costume dramas (think Curse of the Golden Flower with Chow Yun Fat for a more recent reference). They featured Empress Wu and her irrepressible daughter Princess Taiping. It was an elegant, glorious, treacherous and bloody time and these little clever women emerged as the biggest badasses of them all in a court full of powerful men. I loved it.

Me:   What do you consider the Historical Romance canon?

Jeannie: Actually I feel super unqualified to answer this as I'm not well read in the canon and feel I must catch up! The historical romance police will take away my card when they learn I've only read Laura Kinsale's Flowers from the Storm and Judith Ivory's Beast this year. Woodiwiss' The Flame and the Flower is on my TBR. Similarly The Rake by Mary Jo Putney is also TBR'ed. 

Every time I read one of these "canon" books I'm blown away and think people who look down on historical romance "back then" weren't reading the right books. Can I lump Gone with the Wind in there? (I have read that one!) My foundation was Johanna Lindsey, Amanda Quick, Julia Quinn and Lisa Kleypas.

I'd really love recommendations on this front.

Me:  I like your choices of canon, and agree with them.  My own favs, in fact.  Let's talk about The Dragon and the Pearl.  How is your new heroine, Ling Suyin, alike, and different from, Ai Li, the heroine of Butterfly Swords?

Jeannie:  Both of the women are empowered, but I think of Ling Suyin as experienced in wielding her power whereas Ai Li was learning and earning her independence. Because of this, Ai Li was more willing to take risks and make mistakes whereas Suyin is more strategic and cautious. 

Ai Li was so darn nice! I know everyone thought she was all kickass and such, but at her heart she was a really good girl and always trying to do the right thing. The swords fooled everyone--even as a swordswoman she practiced all the time. Ling Suyin is not as honorable. She's a survivor. 

Me:  Random questions here.  What was the hardest scene to cut from Dragon?   

Jeannie:  This is a thought-provoking question.  Almost two-thirds of the book remained completely intact through all edits whereas the ending was tweaked quite a bit. There was an assassination attempt on Suyin's life where she was saved by a secondary character, the cripple named Jun. In the end, it wasn't needed for the central story, but I so loved the nod to so many martial arts elements in the scene (remember Jeannie, you're writing a romance...not a kung-fu flick). 

Me: I admire your strength.  I hate to cut good scenes.  I just hope you'll post it on your blog as an out take some day.  More random question.  Did your characters have any surprises for you while you were writing?  Anything you didn't foresee?

Jeannie: Oh...how do I do this without spoilers?

I knew Li Tao and Suyin before the story started because they had been featured in the previous book. Ling Suyin remains as the only character that appears in all three of my first books as they were originally written (Book #1 precedes Butterfly Swords and its fate is still in the air). 

What I didn't know is their past and I felt it was so important to who they were now. I see my scenes unfold like a movie and so though I sense the characters' secrets when I imagine the present scenes--because movies always do that, you know? Mysterious looks, close-ups, hidden innuendos--I had to learn who they were to know what it all meant. 

This is my only book that uses flashbacks which I normally don't favor, but I couldn't see Li Tao sitting down and ever revealing his past to anyone in a conversation, not even to the woman he loves. The same thing for Suyin. It seems like the trend in romance today is that when you love someone, you reveal all your dirty laundry to them. I don't think that's true-to-life and it wasn't true to the culture of background of these characters. 

There were also a few turns at the end with Suyin's character that I hadn't anticipated and that I had no personal experience with...darn spoilers.

Me:  Flashbacks are the very devil, aren't they?  *g*  What are you working on right now?

Jeannie:  Right now I'm going back to the series with a star-crossed love story about Shen Tai Yang (Ai Li's 3rd brother) and a daughter of the Gao family (Gao is the enemy warlord in The Dragon and the Pearl). 

It's a Romeo and Juliet tale if Romeo and Juliet had to consider fighting to the death. I've finished several projects that are now in the Harlequin queue that didn't have swords and warlords and focused more on the high culture of the Tang Dynasty, so that's why I'm going back to the melodrama.

Me: Thank you so much for stopping by, Jeannie.

So.  Here's a recommended read.  And if you haven't latched onto Butterfly Swords, I recommend it as well.(See the wiki here for a discussion of butterfly swords, which is interesting in its own right.)

I love both of her covers too.  Just saying.

Grappling with Hoops of Steel

Which refers to Polonius' speech, in case you were wondering . . .

Joanna here, talkin g about the history of hoop chasing and the many misconceptions we nourish about this.
 
Right off, let me explain how chasing or bowling or driving or rolling or trundling a hoop came about.

Bright young lad's father

About seven minutes after the invention of the wheel, some bright young lad standing in the back of the cave noticed you could roll the thing and chase after it.  It probably took a half hour's experimentation to discover you could roll it even better by knocking at it with a short stick.  You could make it go fast or slow, turn, even spin backwards.  A new human activity — part sport, part contest, part art, part meditation — was born. 
It proved amazingly popular.  There's something in the human race that wants to chase a rolling object.  We're like golden labs. 

I want to claim Classical sources for my subject.  And, indeed, the Classical Greeks were great hoop trundlers.  

The rest of the post is at Word Wenches Here.

I'll be giving away an early copy of Black Hawk.  I'm hoping I get my copies before they start selling them in the store.  But, in any case, It's free.

Technical Topic -- How do we find our setting?

Someone asks, more or less --

I want to write a scene about the first kiss. I  want the setting to be special but anything I'm coming up with is a bit cliched.

What do I do?




I am reminded of Harriet Vane and Lord Peter on the bridge in Oxford, and later, 'kissing madly in a punt'.
There are romantic settings that are just exactly . . .  right. 

But if you can't find just the right place,
and you're saying to yourself -- 'Wouldn't it be romantic if they kissed at the top of the Eiffel Tower?' --
and taking the characters to France,
you could approach 'first-kiss setting' the way you would any other setting.


This leads me to my newly composed, handy-dandy

Guidelines for Good Setting --

. . . which is just my own take on this so feel free to come up with something entirely additional and contradictory.

1) Good setting lets the characters perform useful plot action.


Sometimes, we got busy protagonists.  They do not have leisure to wander off into a new setting just to lock lips.
When our hero and heroine do the Big Moment of mouth to mouth, they are simultaneously stealing a car or baking a poisoned cake or escaping from jail.

If the plot action is just speeding along and the next important plot point is they confront Uncle Ned about his gambling addiction --  then set that kiss when they're leaning against the slot machines on the grand arcade. 

One way to find the setting is to keep the protagonists moving forward through the action. 

Guideline: Where the action is, there shall your Setting be.


2) Good Setting is interesting.

Not the MacDonalds.  The cowboy bar down the street.
Not the laundromat.  The morgue. 

Guideline:  Good setting is interesting in-and-of itself.
 

3)  Good setting is vividly and knowledgeably described.

Unless you know what heathery hills look, feel and smell like, you probably do not want to set scenes in the gloaming on heathery hills because you will be vague and, quite often, wrong.
Many a fictional lass has laid herself down in the gorse and heather.  To which I say, 'Ouch.' 

If you want to write about a bar fight, fer Pete's sake go sit in some bars.

If you want to write about anything, take the time to look at it.  Really look.


4) Good setting reveals character.

Where possible, you put your people in scenery that matters to them or is somehow characteristic of them.

Not a stretch of anonymous beach.  A beach where they are waiting for a drug shipment.  The stretch of beach where she lost her virginity ten years ago.  The rocky cove in front of his grandmother's house.

My books open with the protagonist imprisoned in a house she knew as a child; crouched in the burned-out shell of her family home; walking mean streets she used to run as a young girl; collapsing at the threshold of her lover's headquarters.

Not random scenery.  Scenery that resonates with the POV character/protagonist.  That means something to her.

Guideline: Build character with every part of the story.  
This includes setting.


5) Good setting contrasts with the settings before and after it.

Go inside if they've just spent time outdoors.  Go quiet if they've been somewhere frenetic. Safe after danger.  Bright after dark. Crowded after solitude.  Shiny and mechanical after pastel and pastoral.

Guideline: Contrast keeps the reader from falling asleep.  

This is why we do not make a whole meal of yellow food.


6)  Good setting builds mood.

You pick the setting to display the exact type of kiss you need.

The rocking, icy-cold deck of a motorboat as they flee the Drug Lords is going to deliver a different mood for kissing than the slithery peace of the reptile cages at the zoo.

Guideline:  Mood is the grease that slides the action forward.
Apply liberally.




7.  Good Setting tells story

All by themselves, the settings and the order in which they're placed, tell your story.  Where your people are conveys meaning, symbols, impressions, emotion.

Cavern phot attrib espritdesel 

The underground cavern of Forbidden Rose is not merely a convenient place to set the action.  It calls up the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, (with a more fortunate ending.)  It's a symbol of rebirth.  The passage from the womb.  When I put my folks in that setting, the caverns themselves do a lot of the talking.

When Jess walks away from her hotel and her office, into the maze of dirty streets near the docks . . . she's not just moving geographically.  The setting tells the story of the longer journey she's making -- back to her past.   The setting is a sign of her commitment to leave safety and undertake a dangerous enterprise.

Guideline:  Use setting to show what's really going on.

Technical Topic: Creating Characters

Elsewhere, someone writes, pretty much:

My characters never develop beyond something used to fill a gap in the story or follow the plot as directed by the writer.  

What goes on through your head when you create a character?



There are dozens of good ways to develop characters.  You get thirty writers talking and you're going to hear thirty methods, most of them contradictory, some of them involving lists and interviews and diagrams and scrapbooks.  Some of them mentioning alcohol.

The best way to create characters is to try a bunch of these methods with an open mind and then go along doing what works for your particular and idiosyncratic creativity.

When I suggest this stuff below, you are advised to take it with a grain of salt because it may not work for you.  But here something to try:

Sit down where it's quiet and you don't have anything you need to do for a while. Get comfortable. Close your eyes. Think of your character in one particular scene, in one specific time and place.


This is a visualization exercise. You're going to crawl inside that character. You are going to see the world from his POV.

Try real hard not to feel silly, ok?

We enter the character by imagining what comes to his senses.

He or she is sitting, as you are. What's underneath him -- the stairs, a log beside the campfire, a velvet sofa? Is there wind? What do you smell in the air? What do you hear?

We enter our character by imaging the interior of his mind and body. He is filled with emotion and needs. Is he warm, cold, tired, hungry, excited, angry, annoyed, afraid?
Our guy has just finished doing something. What? He carries the immediate memory of those recent actions and feelings.

And we enter the character by imagining his needs.

Your character, at every moment, is just chock full of some goal.
What does he want, right now?

A sandwich? Directions to the zoo? A chance to kiss Molly? The combination to the safe? Escape from the toothed boomerslings?
What emotion does he feel in regard to that goal?
What action does he plan to get him what he wants?

This is how we create our people.  We don't look down from on high as if they were chess pieces we're going to move around at our convenience.  We get down in the mud with them.  We gain our insights from sensing what goes on inside the skin.  We find out how the characters see each other at eye level.
Because that's where we are.  At eye level.

I don't mean to say we shouldn't set down a list of parameters for the characters.

In Forbidden Rose, right from the start, I knew Justine had to be very young, no older than Adrian.  She had to be intelligent and educated, of the nobility, a great and loyal French spy, more fond of guns than knives, and with a horrific past.  I pictured someone of sorta midbrowny coloring, so she wouldn't match Adrian's darkness.

These are character parameters I needed for the long-term plot of Forbidden Rose and Black Hawk.

But see how none of this is important stuff about her.  None of it helps me know who she is. Any kind of persona at all could fit inside those parameters.

I didn't know 'Justine' herself till one day I was writing along in the early imagining of the story and I closed my eyes and there she and I were, in her bedroom, with Severine and Adrian.  It was one of the first scenes of the book I could visualize.  That's when Justine began telling me about herself.  And that's the first time I saw Severine and knew how I'd wrap up the story.

So this is what I'd advise.
Instead of laying down the law on what our folks have to do for plot reasons or what they have to be so they match some consistent and usable character we want them to be,
we let them tell us what they feel and think and need.

We learn this stuff because we are inside their skin.

Eventually, we can ask what they want, long term, and we can go back and look into their past to discover why they want it.

My Earthquake

And the earthquake . . .

We are 30 miles from the epicenter, so we got the full surround-sound experience.

The house shook quite a bit.  You could hear this thing.  A deep rumbling noise.  The feeling was rather like being on a train going over rough track and swaying some.  Stuff jittered and moved.

I took a second or two trying to decide whether this was an earthquake, (get outside) or a nuclear strike on Washington,(duck and cover,)  decided on earthquake and yelled for the kids (my own and five friends)  to get out.

They were all -- 'Get in a doorway' -- which was good enough practice as that went, but this seemed to be a long rumbly one rather than a 'house coming down around us right now' one, so I got them outdoors.
I was so proud of them for being knowledgeable and wise.

It lasted a while.  I think I could have recited the whole Gettysburg Address if I had kept up a fast clip.

This is my -- I had to think about this a while -- third good shaker of a quake and my fifth quake if you count a couple little bitty tremors.  And it's in Virginia.  I didn't feel any quakes when I lived in California.
 Go figger.

I didn't even have stuff shake off the shelves.  This is in part because I do not have shelves full of breakable stuff.  I have books. The TV slid across the old wood chest I keep it on but did not fall over and break, which is a pity since it is the TV-that-will-not-die and dates from the Seventies and has tubes in it.

My friend who owns an antique shop just about ground zero says a lot of little brickabrack suicided.

The DH  was outside working on the motorcycle.  The shaking made it hard for him to keep his footing.  He said the walls of the house moved and flexed in an interesting manner.

 I have not been down to look at the foundation or checked the chimney.  These will no doubt tell us if they are no longer tight in their own good time by (a) flooding or (b) setting the house on fire.  

The epicenter is 8 miles from the North Anna nuclear power plant.  I am assured there is no important structural damage.
This removes all nervousness.  The government would not lie to me.


I did not feel a sense of foreboding and would have been of no use whatsoever to my primitive tribe in warning them of impending danger.
I did feel rather odd afterwards.
But then, one would.  I wasn't scared, but my chest felt tight and my stomach was unsettled.
You cannot possibly be interested in the details.  Really. 

The animals did not act oddly beforehand.
They are obviously less sensitive than Chinese chickens.
I have long suspected this.

The cat was deeply distressed, however, when it struck and went streaking out of the house to jump around in the leaves out back, scared of the way the ground was acting.

The dog slept through it.

We've had a few little aftershocks.

Banner finis

And I have a banner concept. 

Not final.  Not just the way it's going to look.  But I expect it will bear some relationship to the final design. 
The web designer is either pleased or tactful and we are talking technical details about drop down menus and search boxes.  I like it that we've got to the point I have no idea what is going on and cannot add usefully to further websiting.   


Could Romantic Scientist and Skittles get in touch with me.  You guys won an ARC of Black Hawk.  Hard decision, when everyone was so very helpful and intelligent.  Yeah! 

Technical Topics -- Building Minor Characters

Someone asks,

I want to expand the role of a minor character.  I want to make him a villain.
How do I make him more real?

Lots of ways to approach this.

First off,  you get to use all the tricks you used in building your major characters
on the small fry.
Give him something to believe in; give him a problem to solve; give him an interesting and complicated past; give him something that makes him hurt; something that he delights in, give him something he wants very very much, give him some small oddities of appearance, action, movement or belief.

That's pretty basic character building.

Here's four more approaches that might be useful:

-- What does he sound like in dialog?
Consider cadence of speech.  Word choice.  Accent.  Big words or small ones. Modern slang or precise, scholarly finicky. Long sentences or short. Concrete terms or figurative. Metaphoric language or literal.

But it's not just the words.  It's the delivery.  It's how he speaks.  What are the customs of his dialog.
Does he rush to agree with what other folks say? Does he interrupt? Does he respond to what has been said or go off on a tangent? Does he wait before replying, or jump into speech immediatly. Does he stay silent and carefully watch others?

Compare the dialog and delivery of Uriah Heep with that of Bill Sykes.  Look at the accompanying body language.  (Go ahead.  I'll wait . . . )

And moving right along.

-- What does your character do?  Nothing defines a character like what he does.   

A small behavior;
(he hides his meat under a pile of rice at the cafeteria line so he doesn't have to pay for it;)
reveals larger behaviors;
(he's an embezzler.)

The lovely young girl who casually stomps on a cricket, ('insects give me the creeps',) is not lovely inside.

What folks do stands up and shouts so loud about what they are, that we can't even hear them explain that they are not really like that but are something else altogether.

-- Minor characters, maybe especially villains, tend to have simple and consistent behavior.

But while the balance and pace of the story may demand this simplicity of character, it's worth remembering that no one is all of a piece.  We may not show the many depths to this villain bloke, but those many layers exist.   We know this, even if the reader doesn't.


-- And it's often useful to remember that every character is the hero of his own story.  How would he see things?

For some interesting comments on hero-age and villain-age, see the Wenchposting  here.

Banners Yet again.

So.  Still playing with the banner:

This one has a blue banner and the 'e' is not covered.
Then the same banner with the 'e' covered.

I am not at all sure about this shade of blue.  No.  Not sure.
And I have to work with the edge of that door.  It needs to look like a door.  Maybe I can add a dark strip down the side.

 This one has a more active woman.  I like the concept, but the picture of her takes more space, it being active and all.

In the first case, I've moved the lettering on top of her.
This might work with more powerful lettering, but seems illegible as is.

Here, I keep the picture, but make the name smaller so it all fits.
I do not know what to do with the right side of the picture.
The whole photoshop thingum is kinda beyond my grasp.  Obviously more tinkering is required if I want to do this.

  This one has a wedge-shaped upper line. 
Somehow I think the concept of wedge-shaped upper line is cooler than the execution.

 And here we see one with a thicker upper line altogether.