Retelling the Fairy Tale

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is which fairy tale would you pick to rewrite and why?

It's kind of a funny question for me, because it's starting to be more accurate to ask me which fairy tale I *haven't* rewritten yet.

So far I've done retellings of Beauty & the Beast (PETALS AND THORNS) and The Goose Girl (HEART'S BLOOD).

Then there are all the books that incorporate fairy tale themes without being direct retellings. For example, the original Twelve Kingdoms trilogy began with the idea of the three princesses, daughters of the High King, each more beautiful than the last. All of the books in that trilogy and the Uncharted Realms and Chronicles of Dasnaria spinoff series play with various fairy tale themes. My first fantasy romance series, A Covenant of Thorns, also plays on fairy tale themes, that time about a person being transported to Faerie.

 As for the ones I still want to do... two have been on my list for a long time: Rapunzel and Cinderella. I have ideas for Rapunzel, but nothing yet that really gets to the feel I want. Cinderella poses its own challenges, but... I think I may have it now. :D

The Unwritten Projects Are (Briefly) in the Spotlight

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This week’s theme: Name three writing projects we've been planning to work on for a long while and haven't yet touched.

First would be the second book in my Magic of Claddare series. I definitely have sequels planned and even have the cover for book 2, The Shifter’s Witch, but fantasy romance isn’t my main genre and so I keep bypassing this one to work on science fiction romance novels, which is where my readers are to be found for the most part. In the meantime, I have all kinds of other plots in mind to set in this world. Time is always my issue!

Second would be the sequel to Dancer of the Nile. I

have the plot in my head and a cover already purchased but in this case other ancient Egyptian plots have been shinier and I’ve written them instead of continuing the story of Nima the dancer and her noble Egyptian general. I feel like I might be sneaking up on this one though and might even slot it into my writing schedule for this year. We’ll see.

Third would be the sequel to Escape from Zulaire, which readers do keep asking for. I have a plot – or as much of a plot as I ever have prior to sitting down and writing a book. I usually know the beginning, the ending and a few major scenes in between, and of course who the hero and heroine are. In this case it’ll be Mitch the sergeant who gets his own story. And surprise, surprise, I don’t have a cover already bought for this one! Which is probably a good indicator of how far off I am from deciding to write the book.

If we’re supposed to discuss entirely new projects, unconnected to previous books or specific series…this week’s topic caused me to remember a proposal I’d sent to Carina Press in 2013 when they and I were exploring what else I might write for them since they were no longer doing Ancient World (at that time. For all I know, they’ve since gone back to that genre. Things change in Romancelandia!). I dug through my old files and found the document – here were some of my suggestions to them for a new series from me:

1. DAUGHTERS OF FATE

Chloe, Allie and Maureen are modern day descendants of the Three Fates from Greek mythology….

(Apparently I’d even found a way to work a Navy SEAL into the plot somewhere…hmmm.)

2. TALES OF THE EPIC SAGA MOVIE STUDIOS

Rosalie Drake is an aspiring young actress with a classical theater background and one commercial to her name, who supports herself with temping…

(I remember now part of my inspiration for this was an actress who worked for me at NASA/JPL as a temporary secretary off and on for a couple of years. It was always so cool when she’d go off to be in a movie for a few days and then return to us…eventually she dropped out of sight…)

3. ZOO OF HOLLYWOOD

Taryn has been out of college for over a year, unable to find a good job with her newly minted Liberal Arts degree, living at home.  Her older sister is a Head Keeper at the Zoo of Hollywood and gets Taryn hired as assistant publicist…

(I’d probably just paid my LA Zoo membership that week and felt inspired…)

Interestingly to me now, #2 and #3 were apparently envisioned as straight forward contemporary romances, which is so not what I actually write. I probably would have put a scifi or paranormal twist on the actual books when I sat down to write them…thank you, Carina Press for not biting on any of them! 

I think I’m much happier the way the world turned out, with me going on to a full time career writing scifi romance and self-publishing, and continuing to write my ancient Egyptian paranormal romances and self-publishing those. I learned a lot from Carina and my wonderful editors there, but I really prefer to run my own author business and set my own deadlines as it all turns out.

The Dream List

Y'all, I just turned in The Book I Thought I'd Never Finish. Does that one count? No? Okay. Projects I want to work on:

1. For a decade I wanted to finish the arc of the SFR series I started in 2010. Now, thanks to The Wild Rose Press, I get to do that. We'll see whether it was worth the wait. At this point, there are only two books left to write - one for Colonel Kirthin Turrel and one for Her Majesty Queen Eilod Saoyrse. That's about all I can say about those books at this point.
2.  There are a couple of hot novellas that happen in the same story universe as the SFR novels. I have two of those stories at least half done. Now I want them finished. The sexy shorts are a lot of fun. I find them to be great palate cleansers after the bigger novels. But these guys don't have a contract. The novels do. So these two take a number and stand in line.
3. There's a little piece of weird sitting on my hard drive called The Curse of the Lorelei - It's spy versus spy during an oddly haunted Civil War. It's meant to be a slow burn romance that takes a couple of books to pay off. I have the first book done, but it needs a little finessing before it sees the light of day. But. Contract for other books, right? Again. This book takes a number and stands in line.

All of this is predicated on the notion that I never again have an idea that grabs me by the throat and threatens me into writing it.

Off the back burner and into the story oven

I'm super nosy, so I'm always asking folks what they're working on. I'm sure it's super annoying. How fortuitous, though, that this week our SFF Seven topic is "three stories I might have abandoned but would like to work on someday," which is pretty much permission to be as annoyingly nosy as possible, right!? Bliss for Miss Nosypants! So naturally I thought of Chandra Ryan, a writer who used to pen some of the awesomest sci-fi romance around, dropped out of the biz for a while because life, and has just started re-releasing old stuff and starting a brand new series about space dragon shifters (Golden: see pretty cover). She was kind enough to answer my questions, as follows:

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As an author, I’ve found that one of the most frequently asked questions I get is, “How do you come up with your ideas?” Which is a great question with, unfortunately, a decidedly boring answer, “They just come to me.” Granted, sometimes I hear a song that makes me experience an emotion and I decide I have to write something to capture that emotion (Bond Betrayed), sometimes I’m working through issues I have within my own life and I use the writing process in lieu of therapy (Ink in the Blood), or sometimes we’ve just had a horrible, horrible election that makes me so mad I want to throw a temper tantrum and break things (Golden) but most of the time an idea or character just pops into my head and I run with it.

A question I’ve never been asked, however, is, “What ideas have you had that you haven’t written yet?” At least, that was true until last week when a great friend and amazing author, Vivien Jackson, reached out to me about writing this blog. One simple question had me going through my mental notes. It really got the creative juices going and got me excited about some projects I’d put on the very, very back burner. So thank you!!

So which projects have I been dragging my feet on?

The easiest answer for me to come up with, the one that immediately popped into my head, was the third book in my Community series. I don’t even have a title for it. And that series has been out for, well, forever. Ink in the Blood, the first book in the series, was the first book I ever had published. It was the book that started it all. And I’ve known what the next book in the series should be for years. Isaac’s sister needs to have her story told. She was betrayed, kidnapped, and held hostage in Bond Betrayed, for Pete’s sake. If anybody deserves a happy ending, it’s her. I just haven’t been able to sit down and tell it, however.

The second project I thought of was a retelling of Rapunzel I’d dreamed up about two or three years ago. Only, instead of it being a fantasy setting, it would take place in space. Because everything is better in space. Stay with me here. So Rapunzel is the crown princess of a planet. This planet sees hair length as a social status. The longer your hair is, the more prestige a person has. Being crown princess, Rapunzel has the longest hair. Her tower is a metaphorical one. The walls she’s had to build around herself because she is royalty.

The third project was a horror romance where the heroine buys a book at a second hand store that is cursed. I don’t remember much about the plot, though. It was shortly after my mom gave me our family Bible. Which was weird because I’m not terribly religious, but my sister is. So I asked her why she gave the Bible to me and not my sister. As you’ve probably guessed by now, she said, “Your sister thinks it’s cursed because your father bought it.” So she gave it to me instead. Ummm… Thanks?

So there they are. Three of my projects that I hope to get written someday but haven’t as of yet!! Huge thank yous to The SFF Seven for having me on their blog today and thank you to everybody who stopped by.

If you wanted to check out all the things I’ve actually completed, feel free to stop by my website:  www.ChandraRyan.com 

And to find out about all the things I’m in the process of completing, come hang out with me in my reader’s group: Chandra's Clubhouse

My next projects and some sexy aliens

As Tom Petty said, the future is wide open, and I'm a rebel without a clue.

Yesterday, the final book in my cyberpunk romance series was released, and now I'm free to work on anything I want to. Woohoo! Which of course has had be going back through my "In Process" folder and perusing stories in various states of dishabille. People, there are SO MANY stories in this folder. So. Many. But because you don't want to be reading this blog post for the rest of your day/week/life, I'll pick just three to sum up:

1. Twenty years after they allied heroically to defeat the necromancer, all the kings of Eyath are... gone. Disappeared. Missing. Dead? It falls to the next generation, led by a princess who should not exist and a tree who cannot die, to uncover what happened, repair the damage to their land, and confront the sins that led them all to this doom. (I've never pitched this one, so I don't have a back-cover-copy write-up of the story. This little bit will have to do.)

2. (Did pitch this one -- it didn't pass committee -- so here's the extended version.) Metallurgist Gal Gutierrez takes a job to examine and retrieve samples of a material that even the archaeological dig lead won’t touch. But Gal has no such qualms. She’ll touch it, bag it, bring it to her lab, and science the shit out of it.

Until she gets to the site and, uh, meets it.

Ashim, the Destroyer of Worlds, is a prisoner on this backwater planet Earth, strapped to it by a radiation barrier that protects all these pre-evolved life forms from the dangers of space. And keeps him from anything like stretching. He hasn’t flexed his power in ten thousand revolutions of this ball of iron and tedium, and lo, it begins to wear upon him. He’s paid for his crimes, and his sentence is drawing to a close. There’s just one thing he has left to do: blow this place and get out.

But when the human woman steps into his cavern, touches him, speaks to him, all his plans are whatever and he can think of nothing other than touching her right back. Sifting the aura that surrounds her. Listening to her delicious voice and inhaling her intoxicating scent. No matter that those physical things would require him to reduce himself to human form.

For...love?

O, Great Bang, he is lost.

3. My riff off of Guardians of the Galaxy wherein a secret prince busts out of an orbital prison with help from a tech-smart but whiny teenage rebel, a double-crossing security guard, and whatever Olorin is (a science experiment? a cosmic god?). Anyhow, they steal the exact ship they oughtn't, meet a quantum-entangled chinchilla, and hie across the galaxy with all the law on their tails to save Davon's mom, the queen, from an alien threat that wants to kill her and the planet she rode in on. Good times.

As I mentioned, there are others, but these have the most words done, and I should probably finish them. Now that I've done the self-publishing thing once, I'm less worried about what my agent will find sellable, which frees me up to write whatever crazysauce pops into my brain. And hoo-boy, there are some things.

So, hooray for next projects! I just got to pick one.

#SciFi #Romance Release Day: MORE THAN STARDUST by Vivien Jackson

It's a celebration today as our Wednesday blogger Vivien releases the third book in her sexy Wanted and Wired Sci-Fi Romance series! 

MORE THAN STARDUST
Wanted and Wired, Book 3

Chloe, a self-aware, highly illegal nanorobotic artificial intelligence knows a thing or two about wanting.

The growing Machine Rebellion wants her to become its god.
The technocratic global Consortium wants to cage her, take her apart, and reverse-engineer her.
Her family wants to keep her a secret.
Her best friend Garrett wants her safe.

Chloe is a thing made of wants.
It's time the world knew hers.

BUY IT NOW: Amazon | B&N | Kobo

The Island of Lost Book Projects

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is all about the things we want to do. We're asking everyone to name three projects we've been planning to work on for a long while and haven't yet touched.

It's kind of like the writer version of the Island of Lost Toys. Ever so sad.

Except that these kinds of lost projects still have hope of being rescued. I keep them in two subsections of my overall tracking workbook (in Excel spreadsheets!) called "Tabled" and "Potential." Really, the tabled projects don't count for this topic, as it specifies they must be untouched. The tabled projects are ones I at least started to write, then back-burnered for various reasons.

In the potential section, however, I have seven projects listed. One is a contemporary romance trilogy that I did start to write up a long time ago - relatively: six years ago - so technically it's a tabled project. Being a purist for these things, I moved it to that subsection.

That leaves four projects in there - one a more or less total surprise because I forgot I was ever going to do it. And really... I'm not going to. It's the third book in my Blood Currency series. See, the deal is, way back in the mists of time, I'd submitted PETALS AND THORNS to several publishers. Loose ID bought it and when I notified Ellora's Cave about the offer, they gave me a weird, disorganized answer. (In retrospect, this was a harbinger of their eventual implosion.) Later, the EC editor contacted me to buy it. I had to disappoint her, but she asked me to her write something else. That became FEEDING THE VAMPIRE. She asked for more and, because EC had this weird thing about there having to be three books in a series before they gave you a series title and something better than their one-size-fits-all reusable covers (and we wonder why they went out of business...), I pitched her a third idea for the series as well. I wrote book two, HUNTING THE SIREN, but by the time it came out the implosion had begun and I never wrote the third book. I don't even remember what the concept was, though I'm sure it's on my laptop somewhere. Anyway, I've bundled the first two books into one volume called BLOOD CURRENCY (the name of the series).

I really doubt I'll write more. Nobody has asked for more, so that says something!

Another project is taking one of my very first fiction stories, PEARL, and working it into a novel. I might still. I took down the story because it has a tragic ending and I figured that was off brand. But I'd love to have that tragic moment be a black moment prequel to a happier outcome. It could still happen.

The other two projects are kind of in the same bucket: anthologies I'd discussed doing with Megan Hart and that we kind of dropped for various reasons. One was an anthology of fairytale retellings and the other was an erotic anthology called SIN CAVE, a followup to THE DEVIL'S DOORBELL. Both titles are a play on misogynistic terms for female genitalia and pleasure. I'm kind of sorry we never got around to doing the followup of SIN CAVE, but I also think that if projects fall apart that way, it's for a reason. They don't have enough energy to carry them through. Also, with SIN CAVE, several of the authors in THE DEVIL'S DOORBELL are no longer writing. Maybe someday with a new cast?

I should caveat, too, for those of you with fingers poised to type outraged comments about the stories you're waiting for in my other worlds - this doesn't include those! Those are absolutely on the stove and simmering.

Visiting a Ship from My STAR CRUISE #SciFi Romance Novels

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This week’s topic: What place in your own books do you most want to visit and why?

I had to ponder this one a bit because in my books it’s not really about the place, as it is about the planet or the ship…or ancient Egypt, sometimes.

Another cool spaceship from DepositPhoto

I’ll leave ancient Egypt for another post because I decided for today I’d choose my interstellar cruise liner of the far future, the Nebula Zephyr, which  has featured in a number of my science fiction romance novels. She’s run by an AI named Maeve, who’s a bit terrifying. She’s actually a military AI, who used to run a huge Sectors battleship and who would have been terminated when her ship was decommissioned except for Captain Fleming. He was the last captain of Maeve’s battleship and he managed to somehow have her transferred from that ship into the brand new luxury liner he was taking command of upon his own retirement. Maeve does a great job of running the luxury liner of course but remains military at heart and little glimpses of that attitude show through in some of the stories.

The CLC Line is run by veterans,  in part to provide good jobs for veterans, so they’re quite understanding of some of the things my captain and crew do in the course of the books. As Captain Fleming explains in Star Cruise: Stowaway, “I always had Special Forces Teams as key elements of my strategy when I commanded a battleship,” he said as he sat and stirred cinna spice into his drink. “When I agreed to join the CLC Line, I saw no reason not to have a similar capacity on board. As we’ve seen in recent years with the rise in space piracy and other challenges, even a civilian vessel may need a core of well-trained operators at some juncture. Jake Dilon is one of the finest Special Forces officers I ever met, and I back his decisions. Anything he and his team did for you was under my authority. I’m the man in command, and the responsibility is mine.”

 I always admired the Flying Tigers who came home from World War II and set up their own airline, so the CLC Line and its corporate policy was my little tribute to those pilots.

Maybe someday I’ll tell the story of Maeve and the captain, which readers frequently ask me for, but it’s not on my list of upcoming books.

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I never really define what the Nebula Zephyr looks like from the exterior. Partly that’s so I can use whatever stock photos are available to me for the cover art and not upset anyone too much. I do have a detailed layout of the ship in a notebook that I refer to fairly often. Suffice it to say she’s a huge ship, with twenty decks or levels, which gives me a lot of room to have adventurous plots.

Below the bridge deck, Level A has the huge casino, the observatory (where Maeve can order up any galaxy or star system a passenger might wish to see), restaurants, shops, the theater where the Comettes dance troupe performs, a host of other amusements and entertainments for the passengers and a state of the art sickbay, presided over by Dr. Emily Shane, heroine of Star Cruise: Outbreak.

Nebula Zephyr carries cargo as well as passengers, with two entire levels devoted to the cargo hold, run by Cargo Master Owen Embersson, who took the lead in Star Cruise: Stowaway.  In this respect I adopted the Titanic era model, where the vessel was a luxury liner and a working cargo ship. Captain Fleming is very deferential to the Cargo Master, because transporting interstellar freight is a highly lucrative business and the CLC Line does expect its ships to turn a nice profit.

Level 5 is the beach, with the entire space given over to an ‘ocean’, with special water and sand brought from the resort planet Tahumaroa Two and elaborate holograms projected  by Maeve for the enjoyment of passengers and crew. It’s not a holodeck like the Star Trek concept, where all kinds of adventures can occur, but it’s a great site for parties, volleyball and late night strolls. My characters go there often. The water gets quite deep, there are waves and everyone seems to have a good time there. Mostly.

Movement between levels is via antigrav tubes, although there are some retro stairs for passengers with an aversion to antigrav.

As you might expect the Nebula Zephyr has a five star chef in charge of fine dining and all food operations. I always enjoy working Chef Stephanie and her kitchen into the plot – it gives me a chance to draw upon all those seasons of watching ‘Top Chef’!

There’s a lot more to the Nebula Zephyr (and new features come up regularly in the books) but I think I’d really enjoy my time aboard the ship, mingling with the other passengers, who range from the very rich in First Class -the ‘Generational Billionaires’ and ‘Socialites’ (also very rich but young, heedlessly arrogant and constantly pleasure seeking) to the solid  and sturdy Second Class of your more every day Sectors citizen. (There is no Third Class in the Sectors.) I’d devour Chef Stephanie’s gastronomic delights, take in a lot of shows, gamble at the Casino, get to know the members of the crew I write so much about…maybe even have a romance and HEA of my own with one of the ex-Special Forces Security Officers (Jake Dilon alas is spoken for, being married to Dr. Shane.)… I think I’d probably want to stay aboard forever, maybe as their Writer in Residence, which as yet the ship doesn’t have!