Guest Author Adrienne Jones

Hey folks! Author Adrienne Jones is visiting today!

Her genre-blurring novel The Hoax was published by Mundania Press (with a recently issued brand new edition) to critical acclaim from reviewers and readers alike.

Here's the blurb:

Bored accountant, Joey Duvaine, needed a career change. World domination seemed like a fun gig.

Allowing himself to become a puppet in his genius friend’s religious con, Joey plays his part in a fraudulent miracle devised by a private special effects team. As the media and the public are divided on whether he’s a modern prophet or a clever scam artist, an FBI agent becomes interested in Joey’s financial transactions, possible terrorist motives, and the overnight popularity of his new cult.

But the agent’s investigation leads him down a path he’s unprepared for, as Joey’s benefactors have barbarous motives beyond the smokescreen of the hoax, and for them, humanity is merely a disguise.

Adrienne's here to chat today about crossing genres and making your reader believe your fiction.

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Waiter, there's a fly in my genre

Adrienne Jones

If you're a writer you've probably said more than once that the process is the best part of the trip. I can't argue with this, when you're in it you don't think too far beyond it. You're writing a novel, making a new world, creating people out of nothing like some coffee-stained, bleary-eyed god. But then comes phase two, when the book gets out there and other people experience your brainchild. No matter how many ways you imagined seeing your work through another's eyes, nothing can prepare you for the weirdness of this.

I'm not talking about reviews, because they can be oddly diverse. You get a few magazines saying you've reinvented the wheel, then the next week a reader spews such venom that you'd think you crept onto their lawn and shot their dog instead of writing a book that didn't quite agree with them. We get used to this. But when your book has been out there a while, you start seeing patterns in reader responses, and that's when you learn something about yourself. Your strengths are not necessarily what you thought they were.

When I finished my novel The Hoax, I thought I had a great imagination. Because that's what it's all about, right? We're writers, we make stuff up. Look at me and my crazy ideas, I'm Imagination Lady! But when the book was released, I started getting a strange question, over and over.

“You know that thing you did, with the thing and the other thing?”

Ah, I'd say. You like that, huh? You like what Imagination Lady made for you?

“Yeah but, that's a REAL thing, right?”

Real? Imagination Lady does not understand real. But the same question came, again and again, and I was baffled. Here I've got a book peppered with historical research, some genuine mythology and a few cold hard facts. But people kept asking if the 'thing with the other thing', the most fictional, over-the-top plotline in the book, was real. That's when it occurred to me. Damn! I'm not Imagination Lady. I'm Bullshit Lady. That is my gift. How did this happen?

I write cross-genre novels, and I'd never give anyone advice about doing this, because I only know how I do it. But having been asked, I tried to self-dissect, and figure out what helped me become a passable Bullshit Queen.

With cross-genres, you're trying to bridge two worlds, be they literal or just conceptual, and this takes work. I'm not saying straight fantasy or straight science fiction authors have it easy. I love it. I read it. But as far as writing it, not my thing, with the detailed off-world maps and twelve thousand year histories of three-headed orange slime mutants. My preference is taking the world I live in, grabbing some nice, normal people off the streets of urban America, then throwing the otherworldly nasties down on them. It's sort of like when you were a kid and you'd play with bugs. Sure, a jar full of house flies can be fascinating, but throw a spider into the mix, things are gonna get interesting.

Say your three-headed orange slime mutant crash lands its little mutant pod in the mountains of its home world, Planet Slime Mutant. You don't have to explain that slime mutant's presence there. You've already established his existence with the setting. He's a slime mutant, why wouldn't he be on the slime mutant planet? On with the story.

But take that same slime mutant and crash his pod in Yankee Stadium, on a nice spring day in 2010. Now you got some 'splainin to do. And you best find a way to make the reader suspend their disbelief and accept that mutant into their own realm. I've always hated when characters in films and books too readily accept a warped intrusion into their reality.

“My God, Roger, we've got a Slime Mutant problem in Manhattan! First, we figure out what can kill them. Then, we design a weapon and blow those orange-headed bastards to kingdom come!”

No. First you freak out and pee your pants. It's a mutant slime monster. You're entitled to have a meltdown. That's what real people would do. If you have any chance of keeping the reader on board, your main characters must stay grounded in reality as long as possible, no matter what sort of oogedy boogedy bollocks you're dropping on their heads. Use them. They're your pawns in this chess game. If you're bringing that level of unreality into your nice cozy urban setting, your characters should react the way the reader thinks they might. Would the reader let out a string of obscenities, then soil their boxers if faced with the same scenario? Use your character's action and dialog to make that happen.

But of course none of that will work if you haven't padded the plot with enough reality to make your unreality palatable. Your oogedy boogedy infiltration needs to be buffered with down-to-earth elements to contrast it. With my novel The Hoax, I chose to play with some established mythologies that most everyone is already familiar with. That was my grounding stone, the reality that offset the imaginary. It's a sleight of hand, and you want to keep those face cards showing all the while you're slipping jokers and alien slime mutants into the deck. You can shuffle, mix it up, get as crazy as your beloved imagination will allow, but if you lose your control group, your experiment will likely fail.

So toss in as many exotic poisonous spiders as you wish, but don't forget your little jar of house flies. Otherwise the spiders have nothing to feed on. And your house flies have nothing to fear. Except maybe a sadistic kid with a jar and a pair of tweezers. But that's a whole other genre.

To learn more about Adrienne and her work, visit her website at www.adriennejones.net

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Thanks so much for visiting, Adrienne!

Want to know about that thing she did with the thing and the other thing? Get your very own copy of The Hoax right here: http://www.mundania.com/book.php?title=The+Hoax AND if you enter in AJONES10 at checkout, you'll save 10% on your order!

And hey, if you leave a comment (or ask a question, or talk about world domination, or share your own story of awesome bullshitting abilities etc) on this entry, you can win a $10 gift certificate to the Mundania Press store! Make sure the comment is on this post and include your name plus the words "enter me" and you'll go in the random draw. (Don't want to be entered for some reason? That's cool too--you can still play and leave a comment.) I'll pick a winner some time on Friday and post the results.