February Contest! Follow the Links!

Everybody writes about love in February. Why should I break the trend?

Read on and follow the blog trail to your next target! Find out who hosts the next stop on the blog trail at the bottom of the page. Then post a response to this blog before 12 midnight on Monday, February 9th for a chance to win a copy of The Joining before it hits the cyber-shelves on Wednesday!

Now let me tell you. There’s more to love than greeting cards and roses.

Of course, a greater number of books and plays have been written about it than any other subject. But fiction writers are not the only ones to ponder the nature of love.

Why don’t we look at what philosophy says about it?

First, let’s learn about the word itself.

Yes, I do mean the word. I’m not going to recount any emotional first meets, or tell you the best way to set up a romantic dinner.

No, I want to look at the meaning of the word love and what it signifies for our relationships.

But have we imagined that love comes in several different kinds, and that each can have a multitude of qualities and degrees?

We know of a mother’s love, of brotherly love, of the warm feeling of a deep friendship. However, have we considered that all these are entirely different types of love, rather than degrees of one and the same feeling?

The Greek language (so beloved of ancient writers and philosophers), differentiates between four kinds of love. There’s storge, philia, eros, and agape. They refer to different bonds between different people. We all know (or think we know) eros. But what of the others?
Philia is not unfamiliar from compound nouns we use quite often: philosophy, Francophile, bibliophile, philanthropy, not to mention the less pleasant ones… that I’m not going to quote here. They all refer to someone who likes or loves something. But there is an even deeper meaning to philia.

Agape is the Greek equivalent of the Latin caritas, charity. And the meaning of charity in our language is charged with centuries of cultural changes, so that the modern English word doesn’t reflect anymore the original agape.

Storge is an entirely different term, and refers to affection. But before you dismiss affection as a lukewarm and weak emotion, let’s see how one philosopher discusses the differences between The Four Loves.

Meet Clive Staples Lewis.

We all know C.S. Lewis for his Narnia stories. But Lewis wasn’t just a children’s writer. He was a philosopher of religion. In The Four Loves, he explores the nature of love from a Christian perspective through thought-experiments and examples from literature (Wikipedia).

Not only did he define the various terms in the context of our Western culture, but he also gave them an order of importance, agape being the greatest of loves. I will take the liberty of upsetting his order, because I’m not looking at love from the strict point of view of philosophy, but rather from my own -- that of a fiction author who can’t help but add romance to her stories.

In Lewis’ words, agape is an unconditional love directed towards one's neighbor which is not dependent on any lovable qualities that the object of love possesses. Agape is the love that brings forth caring regardless of circumstance. It’s the emotion that urges us to help a stranger. It’s the emotion of a civilized society, that which holds it together and transcends its laws and rules.

Storge, affection, is fondness through familiarity, especially between family members or people who have otherwise found themselves together by chance. It’s the feeling you have for your siblings, even though you can’t stand to be in the same room with them. It’s the comfort of knowing you have relatives and acquaintances who fill your life, and that you are not alone.

It’s also the feeling necessary to survive the anxieties of raising children. Parental love, too, is storge.

Friendship, philia, is a strong bond existing between people who share a common interest or activity. In other words, if you don’t have anything in common with someone, you cannot experience philia for that person.

A common cultural background, a common pride in your heritage, engenders philia. Belonging to the same association. Sharing a passion for books or sports. Philia is the emotion that makes football-watching a successful social event.

Eros is love in the sense of “being in love”. We associate eros with physical expressions of love, love-making, and sensuality. But Lewis separates it from sexuality, although he does spend time discussing sexual activity and its spiritual significance in both a pagan and a Christian sense (Wikipedia).

Because, while eros does lead to, or contain the seeds of sexual expression, it is neither limited by it, nor dependent on it.

What does this discourse mean for writers and readers of romance?

Something we already know: love isn’t simple. True love, the love of a lifetime that binds the partners, is a construct of all of the above. It is eros, because we should never fall out of love. It is storge, because our partners become our family. It is philia, because if we don’t have anything in common, nothing to share, our lives will be barren, and there will be nothing to feed the relationship. It is agape, because true love must be unconditional and spiritual.

Now lest I become too maudlin, allow me to share C.S. Lewis’ warning, that love—commonly held to be the arch-emotion—becomes corrupt by presuming itself to be what it is not (Wikipedia) — “love begins to be a demon the moment he begins to be a god" (C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves).

Now leave me a comment, and enter to win my latest story of intergalactic love!

On Tuesday, follow this link: Ginger Simpson (http://mizging.blogspot.com) for the next wayside on the blog trail!

The Contest is On!

Even though I missed posting on February 1st... Now I'm catching up.

Visit this blog to start your quest:
http://www.amberleighwilliams.blogspot.com

And follow the road from blog to blog. Collect your clues and enter your name to win a grand prize!

Don't forget: I'm offering a copy of The Joining, coming out on February 11th at The Wild Rose Press.

My Muse novella got a review!

The Brightest Heaven earned 4 1/2 books:

The Long And The Short Of It: The Brightest Heaven by Masha Holl

“The Brightest Heaven” is beautifully written and entirely unpredictable. Dialogue is snappy and believable. Modern life interweaves with mythological characters as if perfectly naturally; as if indeed, space and time wove them together.

I'm thrilled.

You know the greatest fear of an author is that no one will like her story.

Well, at least one person like mine. And made my day.

News and Catch-up

The Romancing the Blog event is drawing near!

You'll have a chance to win a grand prize, so don't forget to stop by my blog on February 9! I'll be offering a free e-copy of my brand new short story, The Joining, available February 11 at The Wild Rose Press.

In the meantime, if you're short on reads and low on cash, consider the following plea from The Long and Short of It Reviews:

Are you an avid romance reader? Would you like to have the opportunity to read as much as you have time for?

The Long and the Short of it Romance Reviews (The Long and Short of It) is currently in need of more reviewers to help with the amazing abundance of requests for review that we have in our database! We offer an incentive program for our reviewers that includes Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble gift certificates, free advertising on our site, free print books and more, not to mention all the eBooks and occasional print books that you can handle.

Reviewers are asked to complete at least two reviews each month and we also allow and encourage you to review other books you read, in addition to the ones in our database if they fall within our guidelines.

You need to be able to write using proper grammar and punctuation, though all reviews do go through an editor prior to publication.

If you're interested, please email us at lasreviews@gmail.com if you were referred by a friend or associate, please mention their name. We look forward to hearing from you soon.

Just what my kids are saying...

I have a feeling that education-minded adults don't listen enough to their students. In particular when those students are middle-school kids.

Here's an interesting article:

Critics Say Newbery-Winning Books Are Too Challenging for Young Readers - washingtonpost.com

Even more interesting are the comments made by reading middle-schoolers about book choice.

What do they dislike? Essentially, gloomy, sad, and didactic reading.

What do they like? Engaging books.

Why are engaging books (read: entertaining) equated with fluff? Why is "literary value" so often substituted for pure reading pleasure?

My own child has noticed that the books selected by the schools have an overly-high instance of missing parents and miserable childhoods. And she doesn't want to read them. Now my child is an advanced reader. She doesn't discard books out of laziness, but out of dissatisfaction and boredom.

So did I. I essentially disliked the literary masterpieces we had to read at school. True, it was a French curriculum, and the education system there was even more rigid than it is in the USA, so the teachers didn't have much choice (and I'm not saying it is or isn't as rigid today -- I'm not involved with it, so I have no comment).

However, dissatisfaction and boredom didn't prevent me from reading classics as a teenager. Like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. War and Peace and Crime and Punishment come to mind. And others, many others, including poetry, just for the pure enjoyment of it.

Why not Zola, or Balzac, or Melville?

I wasn't enchanted by them.

Enchanted by War and Peace? Well, sure. It's a historical saga. It has adventure, romance, elopement, fight scenes. That I preferred the War over the Peace only says something about my own inclinations. That I didn't skip the Peace and remember it to this day says something about the entertainment value of this masterpiece.

And Crime and Punishment? I was very fortunate that my father urged me to read that one as an introduction to Dostoyevsky's world. Because it's a psychological thriller, full of suspense and dark, twisted characters. It was fun. Really.

Where did my enjoyment of reading lead me? To a Master's degree in literature, to writing my own stories.

The difference between the authors I like and can read over and over again, and those I can't get into, is usually in their entertainment value. If necessary, I can read anything, and retain it. I've had to read books and authors I found dull and pointless in my quest for a graduate degree. But there was no enjoyment.

Because, for my part, I love storytellers. I love world-weavers. I want a book to take me away from my world, my characters, my life, and into the world and mind of the author. I want to be told a story, with enough skill that my own imagination will supply details and subtleties, without pushing every single detail on me.

The oldest profession in the world is not what you think. It's that of the storyteller. Think about it. Sheherazade seduced the King and bound him to her through her tales. The rest is just a small part of the seduction. The tales came first. The stories. Imagination. Narratives that illumine and instruct, and make a point, for certain, but she had to catch the King's interest first, and maintain it from night to night. She had to engage him.

Now before you start saying that I reject literature that's all language, that has more to do with style and structure than with plot and character, please wait.

My other daughter delights in texts that are difficult, that play with sentence length and rhythm, with words and sounds. She understands the interplay of language and meaning, of plot and style. She values it over pure narrative, over intrigue and resolution.

Content vs. form, plot vs. language -- we could state it as an opposition, as two mutually exclusive elements.

Then open a great classic. Read it as a Story meant for entertainment and delight, not a big, heavy book you have to slog through. And you'll see that the greatest writers blend form and content into a mesmerizing whole.

Try it. You could be surprised.

Holidays Approaching!

There are presents everywhere. Under our tree (it seems to sprout them), at work, on the Internet.

I've been busy at work with the end-of-semester rush (all the grades that need to be collected, students registering at the last moment, and a zillion requests from all the offices of the University coming in at the same time).

So has the Wild Rose Press. As usual, my publisher proves to be more than a business, it is a virtual home on the Web. We have coffee hours (chats), our own mail system (the mailing lists), games (like the Win a Sony E-Reader contests), and gifts!

The latest offering is a cookbook! And it's free!

Recipes gathered by WRP writers and formatted with the usual skill and flair by the WRP editors.

Go get it:
http://www.thewildrosepress.com/publisher/

I can't wait to be on vacation to play with all the toys I already got! And my family had this look in their eyes today, so I can expect something fun under the tree, too!

And don't forget that there's no waiting for an e-book! You can buy it and have it even on Christmas Day, should you have forgotten someone!

If you like the supernatural, myths, and other strange happenings, check out the Song of the Muses collection. My story, The Brightest Heaven, is one of 9.

And they're available in print, too!

The Brightest Heaven is out in Print!

Right Here! And I'm late announcing it!

That's because I've been busy investigating the mystery surrounding the second story Urania has charged me with writing. The Second Song of the Muses is in the works. The Muses are at it again! Laughter, tears, and drama.

In the meantime, I'm also creating avatars for the Muses, who have their own blog. They haven't been very busy yet, but then Halloween happened, and they've been otherwise occupied. All those mischievous spirits loose at this time of year keep them running.