Carole Remy

Monday, June 17, 2013

Imagine the World of 2043 #TBSU

What will the world look like in 30 years? I picked 2043 as a year when teenagers of today would be beginning to have teenage children themselves.

For many teens and young adults, the future hovers like a gray cloud. The popularity of apocalyptic visions like The Hunger Games attests to young adults' preoccupation and anxiety over their own personal future. In my years of teaching high school, environmental degradation was the topic of many discussions.

While in the interim of moving to Mexico almost three years ago, I did some research on climate change and the various predictions of futurists. Being a realistic novelist, I wanted to create a future world that was believable. Being a person who loves teenagers, I wanted to create a future world where the physical challenges did NOT create a dismal dystopia.

The result was the first draft of a novel which still doesn't even have a name. When it's published, it will be under my real name of Mary Carol Moran, to distinguish the YA from the erotica! So, what does my world of 2043 look like?

Imagined World of 2043

School is vastly different. Gas is so expensive that travel is extremely restricted. Private cars are banned from all cities. One electric taxi can transport as many as 1000 people in a 24 hours. Zea and her friends gather in one of their houses every day and study through remote interactive telecasts. Teachers broadcast lessons from their homes.

Pretty much everyone is mixed race, and Zea hates her blonde hair. In a personal wish fulfillment (I did create this universe!), dogs live much longer lives. One of the biggest world adaptations is that everyone is restricted to one child. Choosing who to have that child with is a huge preoccupation of young women.

Of course, it's hotter and weather is more extreme. Houses hug the earth, and built-in underground conduits bring in cool air. People sleep in two shifts, maximizing their awake time in the dawn hours.

Overpopulation has strained the food, living space, and water supplies. All food is grown locally. Houses share exterior walls, and a set amount of household water is piped into a rooftop cistern every night.

The cistern system is already in use in Mexico.
This tinaco is on the roof of the house next door to mine.

Zea's mother is a policewoman, one of the few occupations that still moves around the city. Almost everyone works from home, and social structures have evolved to give individuals and three-person-families chances to interact.

What is now considered paranormal has become simply extra-normal. Zea's giftedness attracts attention through the Internet, and soon her life changes dramatically. At the same time, a murderer begins to stalk the city, and Zea's mother is the prime investigator. How the two stories intertwine becomes the plot of the novel.

My personal belief is that human nature itself won't change much. We'll still have lots and lots of really good people, and a few who cause problems. We'll still have families who love each other. We'll still have dysfunction and compassion and everything else that makes us human.

But the world we inhabit will look very, very different.

What are Your Ideas?

What do you think the world will look like in thirty years? Is the United States in fragments? Are some cities and even whole nations under water? What is the new average daily high temperature where you now live? What is the world's population? Has religion changed, and if so how? Have super-storms evolved and perhaps gained new names?

How have government and politics changed, or have they? Is there a world governing body with a mission to protect the Earth? Is the United States in fragments? Is Europe smothered in glaciers? Do we still have polar icecaps? Has Greenland become a major food source for the world? What world will your children and grandchildren inhabit?

Please leave your thoughts in the comments. I'd love to explore this fascinating and deeply important topic with you all. Who knows? Your ideas may make it into the novel!

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Vibe Shifting

Maria Zannini

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Sunday, June 16, 2013

All My Fathers #TBSU

Happy Father's Day, Dad! My father, Louis Joseph Moran, Jr., died 31 years ago, on June 13, 1982. The proximity to Father's Day makes the day bittersweet.

Me and my Dad, in student housing in the fifties.

I idolized my Dad, and I'm pretty sure he's turned up, subconsciously or consciously, in the male characters in all my novels. I've written twice about fathers explicitly, in Ophélie and Twelve Nights. Both are complex men who embody aspects of my own Dad.

The father in Ophélie doesn't appear directly in the story, but his legacy shadows Ophélie's life. When she was a girl, he dove into a river in front of her, to try to save a woman from drowning. He died, and Ophélie feels abandoned. My father died of cancer when I was 30. Though the circumstances are different, in some primitive emotional core, I also felt abandoned.

Link to an essay on Sir Toby

Aggie and Angela's father, Gordon, in Twelve Nights is a comic character, modeled loosely on Sir Toby Belch in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Sir Toby marries Maria, and Gordon's girlfriend's name is Mary. Like Sir Toby, Gordon is a problem drinker. I indulged in some wish fulfillment in the novel, because Gordon joins Alcoholics Anonymous and begins to make amends. In real life, my mother was the drinker, and she didn't join AA. My Dad didn't drink much, but neither did he curb my mother. My Dad was also a prankster who loved to tell jokes. Families are complicated, both in real life and in fiction.

Other male characters also embody aspects of my Dad. Jimmy Buko in Twelve Nights and the Master in Beauty of the Beast are both powerful, hardworking, hard driving men. Both also retain their compassion and empathy, empowering those around them. My Dad rose from a high school dropout before World War II, to the Dean of Arts and Sciences of the University of British Columbia. He was beloved for his championship of students and university office workers.

Bran in Fantasy Impromptu is modeled directly from a beloved friend. Keith Ditto was a principal male dancer in ballet companies around the world. Before he died, he asked me to put him in a book, and I did. Along with Keith's love of music, Bran shares my father's love of learning. My Dad was a psychology professor for many years. Bran is also a wise teacher, always a step ahead but sensitive to the needs of Chantal.

These are some of the Dads and Dad-figures in my novels. Happy Father's Day to them all, and to all the Dads out there enjoying your special day! Would you like to share a story about your Dad? If you're a writer, do your male characters reflect pieces of your father? Fire up the barbecue and grab a beer. Let's have a lively conversation in the comments!

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Friday, June 14, 2013

Let's Not Be Twits on Twitter! #TBSU

Three friends recently and separately have mentioned that they don't get the point of Twitter, or that they aren't sure how to make the most of it. I've ended up emailing my approach to tweeting to them, and they've tried it and liked it. So here's the Handy Dandy Carole Remy Twitter Plan! Tested and approved by three (count 'em three!) non-empirical, non-scientist friends!

Warning, this takes a bit of time. I don't use any paid services, only TweetDeck to schedule tweets. I love doing it all myself! The people I meet are awesome and often turn into friends over time.

To Get New Followers

We all want Twitter friends who follow back, and who Retweet us every once in awhile. The best way to find them is to Retweet and follow them yourself first! BTW, 'retweet' looks strange, even with unlimited characters, so I'll switch to RT.

Go to 'Home' on your Twitter tab and start browsing. Or go to the profile of someone you know and find people who have RTed them.

When you see someone interesting, click on the person until you get to their Profile page.

Check that they have recent tweets, and that they RT other people, not just send out tons of self-promotion.

Find something you want to RT of theirs, preferably one of their direct tweets and not just something they retweeted.

RT it and follow them.

Send them a message (not a DM) that you just RTed and followed them. Add a personal note if you can. "I love your blog," if it's true. "Cute Dog!" if there's a dog! I always add, 'Nice to meet you!'

You now have about a 90% chance that they will follow you back.

It does take awhile, but it's worth it. If I do this for 30 minutes a day, I can pick up 10-15 new followers, and they stick! They are real people, because I picked them carefully in the first place! Also, I try to find people from all over the world, and not only writers.

Click here to follow me, if you want. I'll follow back!

Woohoo! Have fun! I actually love doing this! I've met so many people who feel real to me, even if we only communicate on Twitter.

You Have Followers! What Now?

Now you get busy RTing. I have various Lists on Twitter. The Go To List for me is Frequent RTers! These are the 100 or so people who RT me consistently, and they get the royal treatment. At least once a day, I run down the list and RT everything that looks interesting. Yes, I do RT advertising of authors' books, but sparingly. I try to RT something from at least half of the people on the list every day. This part is pretty quick, maybe 20 minutes.

I'm also part of The Blog Scratchers Union, a group of bloggers who support each other. At least once a day, I search #TBSU on Twitter, and RT most of the tweets. You are welcome to join the group! Seumas Gallacher started it, and gives a full explanation here on his blog.

What to Tweet?

I have a simple rule for this. Tweet what you like to read.

I like quotes, so I look for fun quotes in Bartlett's and I tweet them.

I appreciate when people give me a heads up for an interesting post they wrote awhile ago, that maybe I didn't catch at the time, so I tweet the posts from my archives that have enduring interest.

I appreciate hearing about free books on Kindle, so I RT and tweet those notices, though I try to check out the Amazon page first to make sure the book is a good read.

I LOVE it when someone spontaneously tweets one of my blog posts, so I try to find and tweet a few new blog posts every day.

When someone writes a post I really enjoy, it goes onto the list along with my own archives, for rotational tweeting.

Here's my sneaky way of slipping in a bit of advertising. When I send out an archive that relates to one of my books, I tack on the Amazon link. That's it. NO direct, "Buy this amazing book!" Just a little link added to something of general interest.

Organize It All Efficiently

All this could be a ton of work, so it pays to be super-organized. I keep a Google Drive document of "Tweets to Use Again" open all the time on my desktop. If I see something to put in rotation, boom, it gets copied into the document immediately. The document generally has 100-200 available tweets, including quotes, my archives, and other people's archives.

On to Tweetdeck... I schedule one tweet per hour, 24/7. Sometimes I don't schedule for a few hours or a day, and that's fine too. I just go to the Drive file of available tweets and copy and paste whatever strikes my fancy, an hour at a time, changing the wording just a bit each time. After I use a tweet, I highlight the background so I won't use it again too soon. If a tweet hasn't appealed to me for awhile, I bump it out of the rotation.

That's it. It's really pretty easy, and doesn't take more than a few minutes a day to schedule something for once an hour. Then I relax and only tweet stuff occasionally that appeals to me in the moment, usually something interesting that I've read or an RT from someone else.

Say Thank You!

This is the part that still bogs me down! I often get 20 or so new followers to thank every day, and another 40 or 50 RTs and mentions. Whew! I make lists, but haven't figured out a way to do that except by hand. I batch up the actual thank you tweets, but hand check each person's profile before I add their name. Sometimes I need to follow someone who has RTed me, or someone who has followed me first. Unfortunately, I can't remember all the names, so I always check!

My latest innovation is to print up an A to Z page with lines, to add @names of RTers and mentioners in alpha order. My hope is that I can keep track and thank people once or twice a week, and won't need to make a new list every day! Today with #FollowFriday is the first try for this. I'll let you know how it works.

If you have ideas about how to thank people personally, that don't involve being tied to the keyboard 24/7 or handing over control of following and unfollowing to a third party, PLEASE let me know!

Plea for Help!

That's the end of the Twitter post, folks! And the end of my limited social media tips, such as they are... Now, I'm asking for your help! I do NOT understand Goodreads—HELP! I kind of like Google+, but clearly haven't gotten the hang of using it—HELP!

My Facebook fan page, sigh...—HELP! There's a new Like-My-FB-Page button you can click on this page, right below the Skelat badge on the top right. Or, better yet,

LIKE my Facebook page right now,

please and THANK YOU!

Maybe if we all stick together, we can get the hang of this social media thing! What's your favorite medium? Have you written a blog post about it? Feel free to share links to your social-media-tips posts in the comments. Whew! And thank you again, both for reading this blog so faithfully, and for helping me figure out what the heck to do with the other media!

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