Writing What I Read

This week at the SFF Seven, we're asking: "Do you read in the genre you write?"

What's funny is that my answer is absolutely yes - but that I didn't always write in the genre I read. Does that make sense?

I have always read Fantasy and Science Fiction, since I was a little kid, and I've been reading Romance since I was old enough to walk to the used bookstore to buy my own books, as my mom wouldn't let me read "that trash." (Because she thought Romance was low-brow and anti-feminist, not because of the sex.) But when I started out as a writer, I wrote Creative Nonfiction.

Some of this was timing and coincidence. When I decided I wanted to be a writer instead of a scientist, one of the first classes I took was "Essays on Self and Place," from a visiting writer at the university. I fell easily into writing essays and had success with them. My first book was an essay collection. And, sure, I read some essays. I read a lot of essay collections and memoir. But I was always reading them as research and reciprocity.

All that time, what I read for pure enjoyment? Anything with a paranormal/SFF element and plenty of Romance.

It was only after my first book came out that a friend - a bookseller who knew my tastes and sold me hardcover releases of JD Robb, Laurell K. Hamilton, Stephenie Meyer, and Jaqueline Carey - asked me why I wasn't writing in the genres I so clearly loved to read.

Funny that. It simply hadn't occurred to me. But then I started to, I wrote this Fantasy Romance* (not a genre then, but what did I know??) that was SO MUCH FREAKING FUN TO WRITE. I couldn't believe how much more fun I had writing my crazy tale about a scientist who falls into Faerie, becomes a sorceress, and ends up in a bargain with a fae lord to bear his child. I even got a really nice rejection on the book from Stephenie Meyer's agent! (Though it took a long time for me to sell it, which is another tale.)

The rest is history. ~ Waves at catalogue of Epic Fantasy Romances ~ I haven't looked back. Writing what I love to read has absolutely been a great decision.

*The book that became ROGUE'S PAWN

 

Book Club Love

I miss my book club. If you know me, you know my book tastes don’t run with the typical book club types. Which was why I started my own with the goal to read fiction and introduce a wide variety of genre fiction to our members: Fictively Reading!

One of my favorite book club reads was Polaris Rising by Jessie Mihalik. Only one other person out of our group of eight had ever read science fiction before. It was one of the best discussions because they were all blown away by how much they got into the story and the characters, which also meant I got to geek out about space operas and what they are and why this one hooked us all so well. 

I think being in my self-created book club was such a good fit because I picked a few books and let everyone else vote on which one they wanted to read next. Had I actually read some of them before hand? Yes, but I wanted to be sure they were really good! There’s nothing better than suggesting a book to someone and they fall in love with it, come back to you and gush about it. And in our book club we all got to do that together! 

Another huge plus of being in a book club: you get out of the house and actually talk to people. As writers we don’t get a lot of face time IRL. And as introverted as I am, I still need connections with people. Meeting for book club was in part excuse to introduce SFF and romance to new readers, but also for our group to get together and catch up on everything that is life. 

*sigh* The good ol’ days. Unfortunately, the pandemic put an end to our book club meetings since we couldn’t actually meet in person. I have been asked by a few of the members if we’ll ever start back up. And you know what, we really should! 

Are you in a book club? 

The Care and Feeding of the Writer in Your LIfe

I was away at MileHi Con this weekend and missed posting yesterday, but since James is on leave, I thought I'd cross-post my podcast, First Cup of Coffee, here. I address this week's topic at the SFF Seven: the care and feeding of the writer in your life. 

About MileHi Con and more on success as the progressive realization of a goal. Also on the care and feeding of the writer in your life - and Exciting News on the Frolic Podcast Network! Article here. https://deadline.com/2019/10/frolic-podcast-network-romance-genre-launch-1202764475/

First Cup of Coffee is part of the Frolic Podcast Network. You can find more outstanding podcasts to subscribe to at Frolic.media/podcasts! 

The Origin of Story

Story starts in darkness, in the cracks of the self. In nightmares and in dreams. Story starts in everything I believe I hate. It starts in all the self-loathing that drifts through the gray matter spiraling up and flashing like fireflies signaling for mates. It coalesces into noxious fruit I can pluck and examine. Until I learned better, I used to consume that terrible fruit and feed the monsters living inside. Somewhere along the path, and this probably saved my life, I learned to hold the nastiness in my hand and instead ask, "How is this useful?"

The answer is that it's useful in creating characters and plots and conflicts. You'd think I'd be writing horror based on this, but I'm not all snakes, spiders, and blood dripping down the walls. There's the other side of the coin - the deeply, (maybe naively) optimistic part, wanting to believe the best of everyone and everything at all times. That's where the romance and the HEAs come from. The dead bodies and violence are courtesy of the shadow version of me that loves nothing more than to stab happy me in the back with grotesque nightmares and manipulative old awful thought patterns. You know those memes about "Oh, you're trying to sleep? Here let me replay the past 20 years of everything you've done wrong, ever." That's the shadow's favorite weapon.

Grab that weapon, though, turn it over in your hand and ask how it applies to the book you're writing right now - where does my character feel like this - and the blade dulls. It doesn't hurt as much when your shadow tries to stab you with it again. Since I'm doing my best to pretend this is all totally normal and not that I might out to be trussed up in a fancy white jacket, I want to hope this resonates with readers. I hope that my characters and stories and conflicts feel true. Even if the beings experiencing them are darting around the galaxy.

Speaking of which. Guess who got a cover for Enemy Games, Chronicles of the Empire Book Two? This is the first look. Isn't it pretty?? Can I just shout out how much I adore my cover artist, Debbie Taylor?

The release date for this book is October 16, 2019. If you've read this book, I did some rewrites that altered a few scenes. It doesn't change the trajectory of the plot in any way. But there are changes. If that sort of thing matters to you.

When Book Marketing Betrays the Reader

Recently an old family friend asked me for advice. She was coming out with her first book, had hired someone to help package for it - formatting, cover, uploading, etc. But she wasn't happy with what that person advocated for the cover. She wanted an image that represented her author's vision of the story, which was her coming to peace with a problem, whereas the designer's cover images all focused on the problem.

I gave her my pick from the choices, and then explained that it's not the job of the cover to express the author's vision. The entirety of the INSIDE of the book does that. The cover has two jobs: 1) to entice a reader to look more closely, and 2) to convey the genre and kind of story it will be. In her case, a cover that transmitted the problem was what she needed, so readers would understand what the story would be about.

The cover above is one of my least favorite because it fails on both parts of its job, in my opinion. I don't think it's particularly enticing, as the guy looks ill enough to be mostly dead. Also, nothing about this cover communicates erotic paranormal. The font looks like something post modern, and he... well, NOT sexy. MASTER OF THE OPERA is actually a modern retelling of The Phantom of the Opera, set at the Santa Fe Opera. Kensington published it as a six-act serial novel starting in January 2014. Those covers are marginally better - at least giving a Phantom of the Opera vibe - but I think the genre communication is murky still. Also they didn't do the marketing the way a serial novel needs to be promoted.

Anyway, the zombie cover (though Assistant Carien says I'm insulting zombies by calling it that) was on the print version that brought all six acts together in one place, which came out in the fall of 2015. I asked then if there would be a digital version compiling all six and they said no.

Then, last week, I got tagged on new release congratulations for ... the digital version compiling all six acts, complete with zombie cover and a release date of April 30, 2019.

Surprise!

So, no. This isn't really a new release at all. It's barely a new format. Coincidentally enough, our topic at the SFF Seven this week is marketing suckering readers into reading a genre they don’t enjoy.

In this case, I'm irritated by the marketing attempt to sucker readers into thinking this is a new release from me. The cover mostly just fails to do much of anything, really.

It's even worse, however, when the marketers decide to cash in on, say, the Romance audience. I think this mainly happens with Romance, though I'll be interested in the takes from the others in the SFF Seven if they've seen it happen in other genres.

What happens in Romance is, a story with a love affair in it gets marketed as Romance, but then has an ending that doesn't satisfy the Romance promise. The affair ends in some way - with a death, a sacrificial parting, or a permanent parting of the ways for one reason or another.

It happens a lot in Romance for two reasons: 1) The Romance audience is huge, avid, and passionate, therefor a tempting market, and 2) marketers (and some authors) regard Romance readers as kind of silly and short-sighted in their desire for a happy ending to the love affair. They think the readers don't know what they really want and that this book will change their minds because it's just THAT good. Either that or the marketing folks don't care past getting that one sale. The advertisers of widgets can be like that, not understanding that the book is not simply a one-sale product, but the beginning of a lasting relationship.

(Of course, this is also why the big box bookstores failed. They never understood that readers have relationships with the books they buy that goes far beyond something like acquiring groceries or the latest tech gadget.)

The thing about reading is we do it for pleasure. We scour covers, copy, and reviews to find the story that will sing to us. If we get suckered in by misleading marketing and are disappointed in the end?

UGH.

(But MASTER OF THE OPERA is a Romance and the story is way better than that cover. Just saying.)

Being Proud of Being Different

I'm just back from #WorldCon76, which was a whirlwind of great stuff. I caught a moment of downtime at the lovely Fairmont pool, including a much-needed nap.

This week at the SFF Seven, we're asking "What are you most proud about with regards to your writing?"

It's an interesting question for me, coming out of WorldCon, which is the World Science Fiction convention. While there is some fantasy representation, the con is heavily focused on Science Fiction fandom. It's also an older institution and seems to attract a lot of the "purists" in the field.

SFF fandom can be weird that way, at least to me - and I often feel like an outsider. I sometimes joke that I'm an exoplanet. It's funny to me to discover that I'm as serious a Trekkie as any, though I never got involved in that community. And for me, coming from this blend of SFF and Romance, I'm not really what people who are solidly SSF expect.

And yeah, there's an ongoing perception of Romance Cooties. This one gal came by my autographing table and tried to explain how the romance tropes in Paranormal Romance just hit her all wrong. I explained that I don't write Paranormal Romance - and that it's quite different from Fantasy Romance - and she said "I know, but still."

There's a lot to unpack that way - about reader expectations, internalized misogyny, the perception that positive emotions are less important, that male-gaze sex and romance are fine but the female-gaze versions are "icky" - and none of that is all that relevant to this post. Except to say that it can be easy to from that kind of convention feeling "less than."

Really, any of us can find opportunities to feel that way, right?

Because, the next person to come up to my table said "I didn't know you'd be here or I would've brought all my copies of your books." Then she bought copies of all three that I had so I could sign them for her, and had me sign bookplates for the rest.

It's easy to focus on the negatives and forget the positives. I received a whole lot of positives at WorldCon. People saying I did a fantastic job on a panel, even that I was the best one on it. My fellow SFWA Board members taking time to say how much they appreciate my input on the board. Meetings with friends and fans who think I'm special.

I think that being proud of what we write takes constant reaffirmation. Like renewing vows in a marriage. I've known from the beginning that my choices would make my career more difficult. "Like wading through hip-deep snow," Catherine Asaro told me, way back before I published my first book. I could've tried to change this about myself - or at least about what I write.

I've repeatedly chosen not to. And I am proud of that.

While I'd love to have lines out the door like Seanan McGuire, I also don't want to write what she writes. I love to read her October Daye series. I don't want to write that.

So, what am I most proud of in my writing? I'm proud that I am writing the stories that I really want to tell. I've been called stubborn, but I think my tenacity has paid off and I've found an audience - one that's growing all the time. It's not easy to stand up to the pressure to fit in with the more mainstream, more successful stuff. I feel it in myself all the time. Every time someone says "Romance" with that eye-roll and sneer, I feel it. Every time someone wants to read my books and someone else warns them off because it's too sexy, I feel that pressure to change.

That's part of creating art, whatever kind beckons to us. Creating means bringing something into the world that wasn't there before - so sometimes people don't recognize right away. Or only some do.

And that's okay, too.

Background Characters with Minds of Their Own

I wonder if the romance genre doesn't much lend itself to tertiary characters with delusions of stardom. Something I say because I'm with Jeffe on this one. Tertiary characters? We don't need no stinking tertiary characters. Mainly because there's just not space. We've got internal conflict reflected in or exacerbated by the external conflict. We're maximizing hero and heroine page time. Or hero and hero. Or heroine and heroine. Or any combination thereof.

Secondary characters? Absolutely. Even the most committed of romantic partners need challenges and/or narrative outside of the primary pairing. Unless this is where we're talking 'tertiary.'

Anyway. I am 100% guilty of grooming my secondary characters to become the primary characters of their own novels. If I've ever had tertiary characters, they were zombie squirrels, and even then, I feel like those where more plot device than anything else. In Enemy Games, Silver City might be a tertiary character. I wanted the station to have personality - for it to feel like a familiar city with idiosyncrasies all its own, but there's no danger that I'm ever going to have a space station be the main character of a book. I don't think. Granted, as I type that I kinda want to - just to see if I could pull it off. Maybe I need to get out more.

What does everyone else think? Do romance writers have to spend enough page space on other issues that we don't have room for tertiary characters who want to break out of the background? I'm trying to think of anyone I've read with a background character chewing the scenery. If there is one, it'll come to me at 3AM. I won't get up to tell you about it. I know I haven't yet had a character try to take over a book. So far. If that ever does happen, I'll probably have to bargain with the character - behave and I'll get you your own book. Or novella. I look forward to having to deal with it if ever.