Keeping Time: a Guest Post by Alexandra Y. Caluen
There’s a group on Facebook for self-published authors that I follow, and recently there was a discussion about a crowd of Amazon reviewers who piled on to criticize an author for not accounting for the coronavirus pandemic in her book, which was set (at least in part) in 2020. The book in question was published in 2019.
Writing into the future is inherently risky, for this very reason. If you are writing fiction that is not fantasy or sci-fi, eventually real life is going to catch up with your book. And then, if you’ve created a scenario that real life has blown out of the water, your book is instantly and painfully flawed. Maybe not irretrievably so, but take it from me: fixing that kind of thing goes beyond ‘line edit.’
Last year, I wrote a novella in which all the action took place between December 2019 and May 2020. I always intended to hold publication until real life caught up with my story. Well, real life torpedoed my story. One of my main characters is English, the other is American; they fell in love in England and were going to get married. Except: they couldn’t. The registry offices closed in March. Ceremonies weren’t being permitted again until August.
But what if a person is in England on a six-month tourist visa? What if they got engaged in April, but even filing with the registry isn’t possible until August, and there’s a 28-day waiting period, and the visa expires in August, and there is a six- to twenty-four-month backlog of demand for ceremonies, and getting the visa extended looks like a nightmare? What if there are other compelling reasons to get married within the year? Meanwhile, what if the whole reason they met was because the English guy was in America … on a twelve-month ‘M’ visa? Meaning, he could go back to America, for purposes which might well include getting married. In – for the sake of argument – Las Vegas, where chapels opened up in May.
Time is of the essence, especially when a visa is involved. It wasn’t realistically possible to keep my American in England indefinitely, so I had to come up with something else. The novella remains in the holding pen. In fact, the wedding – which was meant to be the final turning point of the story – has precipitated so much change that the project is probably now a novel. Because if these guys decide to get married in America (spoiler alert: they do), they then – even though they intend to reside in England – must remain in America until a lot of new paperwork is done. Which, guess what, takes time. Time in which both of their lives are in flux, which means story happens. They might not make it back to England until sometime in 2021.
Time is always important in fiction, because it takes time to do things. Travel is not instantaneous. Finishing a degree takes anywhere from two to six years, on average, depending on the degree. Building a house takes months (or years). Which means fiction that is about people doing things has to take into account how long it will take those people to do those things. Thus it’s very possible to write something in 2019, which is about people doing things mostly in 2019, but in which those things reach their natural conclusion in 2020 … and which then turn out to be things that couldn’t possibly have happened.
Also written last year was a full-length novel, set in 2020, about two of my recurring characters (Andy Martin and Victor Garcia of Exposure, The Ghost of Carlos Gardel, and Never Enough). So much rewriting. It’s a good thing I like those guys.
A number of years ago mystery writers and readers were discussing the following question: can you write a good, believable suspense/mystery novel in the age of cell phones and internet? When there’s no good excuse not to be in communication with others apart from “lack of service in the area” how do you get a hero/heroine in jeopardy without making them seem dumb. Lots of authors manage to do it but it’s more of a struggle now that you can’t just cut the phone lines in a book. Some authors took the approach of setting their work a few decades past. Even pushing the story back to the early 90’s is enough to allow everyone to still be operating with a landline and the average person to rely on phone booths rather than cell phones.
I wonder if we won’t see romance authors deliberately putting a date of “June 2018” at the start of their books or using some other means to avoid all the the intricacies of setting a novel in the “present”. I know some authors like Linda Howard had done the opposite and pushed books into a undated “future” time. I think in “Mackenzie’s Mission” (published in 1992) Joe, a military pilot, is mentioned as having been in the “third Gulf War” or something like that setting it at an unknown future time.
On the other end of the spectrum, I had a problem recently with a fantasy book trying to bring in the “real world” in a jarring way. Kindle Unlimited has led me down a rabbit hole lately of odd escapist books and if you read one, they keep recommending more. And they seem to get a little more “out there” as you go. I had clicked on one really kind of outlandish title that involved aliens and other stuff that seemed to be marketed as a lighter (kind of goofy) read. And it was on the lighter side with little world building (the aliens on the other side of the universe while looking different, drove “sport type car-vehicles” and referred to how much water they drank in “gallons”) However the author decided, in the midst of all the goofiness, to throw in some clear quotations from and allusions to the current President and current events, transposing it to this alien world.
The whole point of me reading this (really not great) novel was for pure escapism- and boom, all of a sudden I was back in the news cycle that I didn’t want to think about just for an hour or two. And being that this book makes Jayne Castle with “Coff-tea” and “dust bunnies” look like the most sophisticated world builder and science fiction author in comparison I’m pretty sure no one is picking it up looking for political commentary. (Nothing against Jayne Castle either, I think her books are fun and I enjoy them because of that, but they’re not hard science either).
I think whatever part of the political spectrum you are on, you aren’t picking up odd, quirky alien romance because you’re looking to examine the current political environment. You’re looking for an entertaining distraction. Maybe that’s just me?
“You’re looking for an entertaining distraction. Maybe that’s just me?”
Nah, I don’t think so. Look at all the movies made in the height of the Great Depression. A good chunk of the films of the 1930s, some of which are classics, were pure escapism complete with glamorous gowns, silly song and dance numbers, and melodrama. Things were bad enough outside the theater. I don’t think most people wanted the crushing troubles of the real world following them into the cinema!
“Kindle Unlimited has led me down a rabbit hole lately of odd escapist books and if you read one, they keep recommending more. And they seem to get a little more “out there” as you go.”
I’m not sure if this works for Kindle Unlimited, but whenever I download a free e-book, I can click a button on my Amazon account that says “Improve Your Recommendations.” (Maybe do a general Google search if you can’t find it. Amazon isn’t always the easiest platform to navigate.) Once you get there, a list of the books you own shows up. Each one has a box beside it you can mark that says something like, “I’d rather not use this title for recommendations.” Again, I’m not sure if this feature works for KU, but it does work for downloaded e-books. So, if your recs are getting really wonky, you might want to look this up to control the results a little better.
Give me glamorous gowns and silly song & dance numbers any day!
I’m so hitting that button for the last book! Thanks for the tip. I think I’ve finally hit the wall on the goofy space romances, at least for now.
You’re welcome! It’s a strategy I learned recently by accident when I got driven crazy by recs that didn’t interest me AT ALL. The “Improve Your Recommendations” tab has been fantastic.
Since my husband and I share our kindle unlimited account, we keep them guessing about what to recommend! Buddhism, hard sci-fi, urban fantasy, rom-coms, mysteries? Sometimes the recommendations are just funny. We keep getting recs for HQ “The Billionaires….Mistress” books and I never read those, so they aren’t very accurate! LOL!
I don’t question why some authors are compelled to editorialize about real-life issues. I will even cop to doing a bit of that myself – a very small bit, which comes up in context because I write about a lot of non-white, non-straight characters who live in the real world. Concerns for real people I know (e.g. healthcare, homophobia, immigration) are concerns for my characters too.
I do think it’s generally a mistake to use fiction to editorialize about a specific real-world event or person. Once you start writing commentary, it’s satire; and I’ve never yet read a successful satirical romance.
Real-world events can be very effective framing devices, or sources of drama, for books that are actually set in the real world. But not, I’d agree, for odd, quirky alien romances. :-)
I understand completely how the “real world” comes into play in contemporary romances. It’s pretty much impossible to ignore contemporary events and most readers wouldn’t want an author to do so. So many romances work in different messages, causes and other things they want to highlight. Something like Alyssa Cole’s recent suspense novel which covers gentrification amongst other themes springs to mind. I’ve even read alien or fantasy romance books that dealt with how differently abled people were treated. It all works for me in the right context and/or with the right author.
My gripe is that I think people who agree or don’t agree with the author’s political opinion will find it unnecessarily jarring thrown into a (pretty goofy) escapist alien space romance. The tone (for me) just didn’t match.
“and I’ve never yet read a successful satirical romance.”
Yes, I’ve read cute or funny satires of romance and romance genres but I also cannot think of a very successful “satirical romance.’
I think The Reluctant Widow by Heyer may qualify as a satirical romance. I see it as two books in one. If you take the heroine at face value, it is pretty Gothic. If you assume she is sarcastic or facetious or ironic, it is very funny. I don’t know if Heyer intentionally wrote it as a satire of Gothic romances.
I am currently reading Carl Hiaasen’s Squeeze Me and while it’s very funny, it’s about (and deeply mocking towards) the current occupant of the White House and his cheating-with-her-Secret-Service-Agent-Ahmet (he’s been renamed Keith so the President won’t realize his background) ex-model wife. (As the NYT review said, if you’re a MAGA fan, you’ll hate this book.)
I find the overt satirization of the President distracting even as I giggle. There’s something too real world about it and yet at the same time too fictional.
The fantasy story “Lord Dampnut Loses His Hair” is full of anagrams, starting with Lord Dampnut. It was in The Grantville Gazette a couple months ago.
Speaking of fictional stories about presidents, have you ever seen the 1960s black and white movie Kisses for My President? I’m not sure why your comment brought it to mind, but it’s actually silly, cute, and sweet all at once. Fred MacMurray plays the nation’s first first gentleman and has no idea what to do with himself as there’s no precedent for his job position. So while his wife is trying to negotiate with some South American despot, the first gentleman gets into all kinds of scrapes that inadvertently undermine her work like accidentally punching an ambassador at a strip club. Meanwhile, all their intended romantic evenings get interrupted by some emergency or another. Really goofy stuff, and a lot of it is dated, but it’s a fun way to spend a couple of hours away from real life.
I was going to bring this book up also, but to note that Carl Hiassen puts in little asides like “since COVID-19” various places in the book to let readers know that in some way, his fictional Florida has come out on the other side of the pandemic. It was an interesting way to handle COVID, since the book pokes at DJT pretty explicitly.
It’s implied that the President has won a second term, that Covid-19 is mostly defeated, and that Congress has tried to impeach the President more than once. It’s just a little too close to possible reality to read as completely fictional to me. That said, I am still enjoying it–he’s a master of creating truly odd, hilarious characters.
Ugh! Hang in there, Alexandra. I don’t think critics understand how difficult it is to be a writer sometimes- or about long publication delays.
I don’t know the specifics in your book, but is it possible to backtrack one year to make the action take place from December 2018 to May 2019 without any other changes? It may not be, just asking.
One of the many joys of writing erotica versus other contemporary genres is the ability to be completely vague with settings and dates without causing an uproar. If you’re writing a story about a recent college graduate who spies the hot wife of his next door neighbor puttering around in her backyard, it doesn’t really matter if the backyard is set in Beverly Hills, California or Neenah, Wisconsin in 2010, 2020, or whenever. But other genres? Forget it. Authors are expected to be darn clear about time and place, often with good reason.
Having said that, I’m no stranger to embarrassing continuity errors and timeline fudging- especially now. Since erotica is supposed to be an escapist fantasy, I think a lot of readers and writers just tacitly pretend any reckless romps either take place before March 2020, or take place in a world where the virus and lockdowns aren’t real. (Keep in mind, this is a genre where well-endowed pizza delivery men getting seduced by bored, busty housewives is considered a totally legitimate plot and an astonishingly common occurrence.) On the other hand, a number of erotica authors have been using the lockdowns as a forced-proximity plot device as in two people are stuck together who wouldn’t ordinarily be and then… sexy times. Alternatively, travel bans make a good excuse for sexy webcamming stories.
I realize using coronavirus as a catalyst for smutty stories may be offensive to some, and I won’t pretend to be above writing some of those scenarios, but I also see the narrative possibilities as well as the resilient almost gallows humor of it all. Does that mean I want to read about people purposely infecting each other for kicks? No way! But a story about a kinky couple trying to maintain their relationship dynamic over webcam while trapped on opposite sides of the globe because of quarantines? That’s a legitimate possibility. Like anything else, it’s all about context.
And, of course, there’s nothing wrong with the pure escapism route where everybody is just happy, healthy, and hot. :)
Pure escapism is my favorite kind. :-)
With 40 titles to maintain continuity in, I’m pretty strict about when things happen. Changing when my visa-challenged characters meet isn’t possible because that book is already published. Honestly, the biggest challenge I have with conceiving new stories in the still-to-come part of the timeline is accounting for how some of my characters will make a living. Quite a few of them (like several real-life friends) are in the ballroom world, which is almost entirely shut down and may never recover. :-(
Once again, ugh! I had a feeling it wouldn’t be as easy as shifting the timeline back one year, but no harm in asking, right?
All 40 of your titles take place in the same universe? Kudos to you! That’s some hardcore commitment right there. But not totally unexpected. I know exactly what it’s like to fall in love with characters and their universe. ;-)
“Quite a few of them (like several real-life friends) are in the ballroom world, which is almost entirely shut down and may never recover. :-(” I’m so sorry for your friends, as well as your storytelling snag. Everything’s kind of crazy right now for everyone.
I know how you feel about unexpected world events forcing your work in a different, more challenging direction than you anticipated. Current world events might barge into my Joey & Johnny Forever Series pretty soon too, but thankfully, the nature of erotica and erotic romance lets me fudge quite a bit more than other types of contemporary series writers. None of the stories are hyper realistic anyway (think like a grown up, X-rated version of The Hardy Boys or Star Trek or Bonanza where weird, somewhat unbelievable things just sort of happen regardless of what would actually be going on in the outside world), the name of their (fictional) town didn’t even need to be revealed until Book 8, and I’m deliberately vague about dates except for Holiday-centered stories. Let’s face it. Everything is just sort of a backdrop for their over the top, episodic sex-capades and soap opera-esque/ fanfic-style drama. Outside of erotica or unaffected genres like historical fiction, fantasy, and SF, I’d say my fellow writers have their work cut out for them.
From what you’ve said, you can’t get away with pulling off in your series what That 70s Show did having something like nine Christmas episodes in a show that took place over only three years. As we’ve seen from the comments here and elsewhere, readers tend to be a lot less forgiving of timeline issues unless something is an episodic TV show or something really pulpy. (Just as a pulp example, I heard the approximately 60 Zorro short stories by Johnston McCulley were wildly inconsistent, full of plot holes, and ran roughshod over continuity. But being a swashbuckling adventure, who cared?)
Well, this is something I had never considered, that authors of books written for publication this year could find themselves in the totally unforeseeable position of unworkable timelines. Wow. And what about writing contemporary fiction now? I guess authors have to decide to make the exact year vague, or deal with the pandemic, which certainly doesn’t appeal to me at the moment as a reader.
Our family is dealing with this situation. One daughter is engaged to a man in England who is planning on coming over on a fiance visa and then applying for permanent residency once they are married. However, the furlough of 70% of the US Citizenship and Immigration Service staff means we have no idea if the fiance visa application will even get process. The cost of the application is in the hundreds of dollars, meaning refiling if the time limit runs out is a financial burden, as well. Once you file for a fiance visa, the person (my daughter’s fiance) is not allowed in the country until it is resolved. My daughter’strip to England was scotched by the pandemic, so now they have no idea when they will see each other. She has a chronic illness that could be worsened by getting sick,so she won’t travel until it’s safe.
What a mess, in real life and in fiction. Best of luck to you and your re-writes.
Thank you! A few things have happened recently that give me hope. For example, while most of Europe is still keeping Americans out, American actor Woody Harrelson was allowed to travel to Sweden for a movie shoot. It took a lot of extra paperwork plus the now-to-be-expected preventive measures, but if he can do it, than my fictional actor can probably get into Spain. :-)
Best wishes for your daughter and her fiance.
I agree with Elaine S: I really don’t want to read about covid or the lockdown right now. However, I will say that authors should not pick and choose whether to bring topical references into their books. I just read a recently-published book that referenced murder hornets, but had no mention of covid/quarantine/social distancing, etc. I think if an author is going to make a reference to one topical item, they are going to need to mention other contemporaneous topics or it seems quite odd: Ok, you’ve created an alternate universe where murder hornets exist, but not covid. Hmmmmm…
I was a technical writer, proofreader, and copy editor for two decades and, while I understand that is a completely different skill set than writing fiction, one of the cardinal rules was: never setup a conflict in the reader’s mind. Avoid anything that will make the reader resistant to the material or will distract their focus. When I’m reading fiction, things like, “Who’s taking care of her cat while the heroine is whisked off to the Alps?” or “Why was a package delivered at three in the morning?” will take me out of a story very quickly. My mind is on that poor cat—no one to give her food, fresh water, or change the litter box.
I’m sure we all have our “favorite” timeline gaffes. I once DNF’d a book which had the following setup: the 38-year-old heroine was taking care of her younger sister’s 15-year-old twins. The story made casual reference to the fact that the heroine was five years older than her sister, which meant the sister was 33, which also meant the twins were born when the sister was 18. Ok. Well, the twins are very spoiled, which the heroine does not like, but she explains to someone that her sister had to go through multiple rounds of fertility treatments before she got pregnant with the twins and that’s why she spoils them. Who has fertility treatments at 18?? And, if there were multiple rounds of it, how old was the heroine’s sister when she started the treatments? It made no sense—and I was so distracted by imagining a teenager going through IVF, I couldn’t stay focused on the story. Also, I figured if the author couldn’t take the time to figure out her timeline, I couldn’t take my time to read her book.
Life is too short for nonsensical books!
I have this problem with TV shows as well. Plot things that make no sense often derail my enjoyment of a show. DETAILS MATTER!
“……a crowd of Amazon reviewers who piled on to criticize an author for not accounting for the coronavirus pandemic in her book, which was set (at least in part) in 2020.”
Oh, FFS, get a life, people. Actually, I really don’t want to read about coronavirus anyway. Anyone with half a brain would realise that publication dates are some time past completion of a novel let alone the author or their agent selling it, getting it edited for publication, waiting for the publisher to put it on their calendar of releases, etc., etc. Poor author, perhaps her crystal ball had run out of batteries though “the crowd” apparently had run out of common sense.
I know. I couldn’t help feeling bad for her. The only way to address those kinds of complaints is to pull the title, update it, and republish. If she’s not a self-published author, that ain’t happening.
Can I jump on the bandwagon and say the last thing I want to read about right now is the Coronavirus. I want to read whatever is the opposite right now.
I buy and borrow what I enjoy, and that is Fiction. I’m continually surprised by the criticism from readers and reviewers about certain elements in fictional books. I have triggers or preferences, so before I buy, I read the ‘blurb’ and take my chances. I love how fiction takes me outside my comfort zone, and gives me experiences, and other perspectives. Some of the reviewers I follow discuss books that don’t meet their politically correct standards. I’ve found a number of great books and authors as a result!
“Some of the reviewers I follow discuss books that don’t meet their politically correct standards. I’ve found a number of great books and authors as a result!”
That’s definitely happened to me. Sometimes a scathing one-star review can be more compelling than a five-star fan fest.
BTW, love you’re overall attitude toward reading, Barbara! I’m glad you are open to books that push you outside of your comfort zone. That’s really refreshing. I have some hard limits (I’m sure everyone does), but I try to let authors and their characters take me on a journey, even if it’s totally contrary to my real-life beliefs or sense of ethics. I totally get it if some readers can’t, but it seems like some readers are increasingly offended by practically everything. The protagonist makes a snotty, throwaway remark about women early in the story? The book is nothing but sexist trash! A character is surprised and a little bewildered to learn the character she has been interacting with online is a different race than she thought when they finally meet in person? Racist garbage! A white character wears hoop earrings in one scene? Cultural appropriation! And on and on.
Look, there are definitely things out there that are going to make certain readers uncomfortable. And everyone has a different tolerance level for particular subjects. That’s inevitable, and some of our recent conversations at AAR have delved into that quite deeply. (I definitely learned a lot!) But I get worried when certain vocal readers act like they’re sitting around waiting, just itching to find something offensive to complain about online. It goes hand-in-hand with certain noisy segments of our culture that have been pushing safe rooms and call out/cancel culture rather than fostering reading with an open mind and engaging in intelligent discussions afterwards. AAR is excellent at the latter, for which I am thankful.
Furthermore, do these cultural critics really want a world where 99.9% of fiction aligns with their own views? What would be the point? That’s not expansive, thought-provoking, or even enjoyable. That’s just creating an insular echo chamber. If someone wants to read nothing but woke 21st century crusaders, fine I guess. But I think one of the points of reading, even silly fluff, is to look at things in a different way and let characters take us on a wild ride we would probably never dream of taking in real life. Besides, in fiction, isn’t riding along in a car chase with the bad guys a lot more fun than sitting on the sidelines at a college rally that’s trying to ban a controversial speaker from attending? You be the judge.
But I get worried when certain vocal readers act like they’re sitting around waiting, just itching to find something offensive to complain about online.
This.
So … the reviewers were upset that the author wasn’t psychic?
I can understand that if a book is set in a specific year, you want the events of the time to be reflected in the book (as much as they may impact the events of the book). I think this is more a situation with contemporary novels though. In historical novels, authors seem to have more leeway with incorporating factual events in their book. (I like it when an author includes a note saying, for example, “I know this event happened in Year X, but for plot purposes I needed to move it to Year Y.” )
What bothers me most is when the novel’s internal timeline doesn’t reflect reality. I have a friend who is a copy editor. She told me about a book she edited in which, based on the time frame of the book, the protagonist was pregnant for 15 months. The book had passed through numerous hands before reaching her and no one caught this essential element (most of the book was about the pregnancy so the error was not a mere typo).
An uneven timeline can be confusing to a reader, or jarring enough to take you out of the story, or perhaps only momentarily distracting. (I know folks have different tolerance levels.) I recently read The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary. In it, there’s a chapter that’s included in the July section, but the events of the same night continue in a chapter in the August section. Am I to conclude that the day was July 31st and events extended past midnight? Or was it an editing error? Or purposeful artistic license? I don’t know.
Timelines are important. I’m one of the few people who didn’t like The DaVinci Code. The time line (and plot) didn’t make sense. The whole story takes place between 10 p.m. Friday night and 2 p.m. Saturday afternoon. The hero, at the beginning of the story, is suffering from jet lag and coming down with a cold. The jet lag and cold mysteriously disappear when he starts to solve the story’s puzzle of a plot. He never does get to sleep that night and is somehow clear headed enough to avoid the police and Vatican assassins, while making huge mental jumps to figure out what happened and why.
i feel for the poor author who didn’t anticipate the pandemic. Who among us, except a few virologists and conspiracy theorists, did?
I loathed The DaVinci Code. So. Dumb.
I DNFd. I think I got about 12% in and said ‘you’ve got to be f**king kidding me’ and threw it across the room.
15-month pregnancy?! That poor woman.