Tara Maya's Tales

"So," I asked my 5-year old. "What have you learned in kindergarten so far this year?" "Well, actually, we learned nothing at all." Okaaaaaaaaaay, then. Nice to know. Supposedly, kindergarten is supposed to teach you all sorts of foundational things -- from early reading and arithmetic to sound morals. My son has a different idea about what he's learned. Aside from "nothing at all," these are ten things he's told me he's learned in kindergarten: 1. Dolphins can fight sharks. 2. You have to hide your bakugan during class, otherwise the teacher will take it away, even if you're just fixing it, not playing with it. 3. Aaron is Emily's boyfriend. [Both children are five.] 4. Ants are stronger than dinosaurs because dinosaurs went extinct, but ants didn't. Also, ants can bite humans and it hurts really bad. 5. Speaking of dinosaurs, if you have dino babies, you have to get shots from the doctor. ["Dino ba...

There's a stupid myth promulgated in some romance books and especially in Hollywood chick flicks that just drives me crazy. It goes like this: If you hate someone enough, you love them. Both books and movies do this. On the theory that opposites attract, they put together two people with nothing in common, or worse yet, who actually hate one another, and call it love. If you are writing a romance, you know it needs tension. Having your characters hate one another and bicker constantly can create tension, but is that really how true love begins? Or lasts? In a word: no. John Gottmann at the University of Washington has found that couples with a ratio of fewer than five positive interactions for every negative one are destined for divorce. A story with too much lovey-dovey and not enough tension would be boring, and it turns out this is true in real life too. If you have a too high a ratio of positive statements for negative statements (13:1 or more), your affect comes acro...

It’s Cinco de Mayo.  And the #1 question is how the French gave Americans (and some Pacific islanders) a great excuse to get plastered.  Right behind “Were piñatas really made out of pottery?” and “which beer is best for Cinco de Mayo?”) Hold onto your bottle openers folks, I shall reveal the secret history of Cinco de Mayo. It began 159 years ago, in the ye olde Nineteenth Century. It started out so well. All over the world, people were tweeting, “Screw #kings. Let’s rule ourselves. #99%!” Hello, American Revolution! Bonjour, French Revolution! Hola, Latin American Revolutions! True, the French started lopping off heads almost at once, and the new Latin American nations were as much a republic as the Kardashians are talented. Mexico alone went through fifty forms of government in fewer years. The United States bought some time by putting off the question of whether democracy was compatible with slavery. Spoiler alert... it wasn’t. So by mid-century, the world ...

I have an interesting book called Brain Lock about how to overcome Obsessive Compulsive Disorder with meditation techniques. The way that OCD works is that the part of the brain normally reserved to signal DANGER is overactive. That's why a person can know, intellectually, that they turned off the stove, but still feel, at a "gut" level that something is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.... It's not the gut but the brain that is flooded with those feelings of danger. The interesting thing is that the more someone with OCD gives in to the temptation to appease that sense of danger--be it check the stove, count the numbers, reorder the shelves or wash hands one more time--the worse the sense of danger grows, and the more the person "has" to do in order to try to make it right. It's a loop. I don't have OCD, except when it comes to writing. When I'm writing the DANGER zone of my brain can definitely get caught in a loop. One scene is wron...

When I was just out of college, my mother used to proudly tell people I was a writer, unless I first managed to stop her. I tried to stop her because I knew what would come next, the dread question, "So what has she published?" The answer at that time was one humiliating word: "Nothing." The conversation would then wither up in shame. I lived a double life. Inwardly, I considered myself professional writer, who would one day be published. Outwardly, I hid this identity from all but close friends and family. It's perhaps not surprising that the heroine of my fantasy series, Dindi, leads a similar double life, practicing her magic art in secret. However, I became so adept at concealing my passion that once my novels were actually published, I found it difficult to switch from secrecy to publicity. I belonged to several writing communities online, that helped me bridge my shyness. After all, it's okay to tell friends who are sharing my journey toward ...

I should know better than to watch Chinese movies, but I do anyway. Tragedy, comedy, romance, it doesn't matter. They always end with someone face first in the dust. What is with that? It used to be that only Red Shirts would have to worry on Away Missions. In epic fantasy, they were known as the "spear holders." The bit players meant to die tragically, so the heroes could press stolidly onward. Now it's all the rage in fantasy to kill off major characters. Joss Whedon and George R.R. Martin and Joe Abercrombie whack major characters right and left, just to prove they can. I really hate that. The rationalization is that if you know the major characters won't die, this sucks the tension from the narrative. If the hero dangles from a cliff over a toxic ocean with a wyvern attacking from above and a kraken's tentacle grabbing at him from below, the reader is only going to believe he's really in danger if the author has proven I'm Really ...

Occasionally, I refer to "story space" and it occurred to me I ought to explain what I mean. I call it "space" for lack of a better term. It's not spatial, but I find it helpful to envision it as though it were to organize my creating process. (Insert Usual Caveat That Your Creating Process Will Differ). A simple, although false, way to think about it is as word count. This is a good shortcut, as long as you understand it's a shortcut. Take a hypothetical novel from The Unfinished Song series. I'm weird in that I like to pre-determine how many chapters a book will have. Most authors don't do this. But I do, and in the case of this series, every book has seven "chapters." I'm aiming at 70,000 words for each book. That works out to 10,000 word chapters, which are on the long side--the length of a novelette. (Which works out for me, since I package them that way for the Serial.) However, it also means that there's a dist...