Cheers to the Changing of the Year

 This Week's Topic: Thoughts on the Closing of the Year/Start of the New Year

As we say goodbye to 2023 and look ahead to 2024

I wish you all 

Good Health

Good Fortune

and

Good Company

Cheers to the changing of the year!

FaRo on my mind

 

FaRoFeb website

As we look back on 2023, I want to thank our group, FaRoFeb, for contributing to the SFF 7 Authors blog this year! I love this partnership. I really enjoy seeing the different perspectives on the blog each week, and adding a variety of posts from a diverse group of our authors has been a real joy for me. 

For those of you who might not know, HR Moore founded the Fantasy Romance February (FaRoFeb) group as a way to bring together authors and readers of fantasy romance for a month of bookish activities. Now the fun lasts all year long! The group supports authors and readers of Fantasy Romance, providing spaces on social media to build community and promote great books.

The FaRoFeb team of volunteers works tirelessly to make the magic happen. If you'd like to learn more about them, please check them out:

• HR Moore, www.hrmoore.com
• Vela Roth, www.velaroth.com
• Lisette Marshall, www.lisettemarshall.com
• Colleen Cowley, www.colleencowley.com 
• S. L. Prater, www.streetwitch.net
• MJ Faraldo, www.mjfaraldo.com
• Elsie Winters, www.elsiewinters.com
• Mimi B. Rose, https://www.mimibroseauthor.SheWritesSteamyRomance.com
• Jen Lynning, https://jenlynning.com/

Finally, follow FaRoFeb on social media and join their newsletter. There are games, book recommendations, character art, giveaways, and more.

• https://farofeb.com/, https://farofeb.com/newsletter/
• https://www.facebook.com/groups/429207234870645 
• https://www.instagram.com/farofeb/
• https://www.tiktok.com/@farofeb

Next week, we'll thank the volunteers who contributed to the blog this year and wish you a wonderful new year!

Blessings,

Mimi

Winter Solstice What's on My Mind

Blessed Winter Solstice. On my mind today - Time. 

Time in all its complexity and in its simplicity. We brought in a tea advent calendar from Friday Tea in Seattle. We're counting down to Christmas with a different tea each day. We also brought in a wooden puzzle advent calendar. These simple time keepers were an attempt to handle one of our more complicated time issues - family.

My father received news from his doctor this year that no one wants to receive from a doctor. We're all aware that as we count down to Christmas this year, we're also counting down how many more Christmases we'll have together. It's a fact of life, of course, but no one has to like it, and we don't. So we're focused on connection, on creating moments for slowing down, for pausing and looking around. We're concentrated on creating enjoyment. The puzzle has been a surprisingly good way to do all of that. Dad isn't fond of the holidays to begin with, so we were pleasantly surprised when he opted to engage with the puzzle advent calendar with us. Well timed batches of holiday cookies have helped a little, too.

I'm making some of my family's favorite things to eat, of course. The holidays are time for me to try new recipes simply because I enjoy experimenting. I'm contemplating how to create more time and space in my life for my dreams and my ambitions. During this solstice season, I'm pausing, taking a full, deep breath and holding it in the depths of the dark while I look around with eyes not clouded by my breath in the cold night. Solstice night is the time to leave behind the parts of me that no longer serves me. Time to strike the match and light the midwinter fire. This is the doorway out of shadow into light.

It's time to realize that our lives are advent calendars counting down the clock of our existence. What matters to us can no longer wait. 

Winter On My Mind

Food preparations, gift wrapping, laundry, my twin’s birthday, packing overnight bags, picking up dog food…these are a few things on my mind this week, and sadly none of them are writing related.

I knew the holiday time between Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years would be busy, but I naively thought I’d be able to write. I wasn't prepared for a few days to have gone by since I’ve had the time, or been home long enough, to open up my laptop.

Now I seriously understand every author who has said they don’t write during the holiday season. But I’m not beating myself up over it. It is what it is. I’ve also got a lingering bug that I caught at a family Christmas, so I’m choosing salt baths and hydration over pushing myself for words. I'm choosing to winter.

Yes, I'm wintering. That idea that we need seasons same as our environment. Winter is the time of year for salt baths, cozying up on the couch with a warm cuppa, quiet nights at home with loved ones. It's restorative and does wonders for the brain. If you haven't done any wintering yet, I highly suggest it! 

My imagination hasn’t taken time off yet, my plot continues to grow in my mind. So I’ve got that going for me. 

I hope your holiday preparations aren’t driving you crazy and that you either get time with your own words or turn some pages with someone else’s! 

Merry Christmas!

A Peaceful Pause

 This Week's Topic: On My Mind, the Winter Edition

It's the time of year when I give myself permission to not write, to pause marketing analysis, and to back off ad management. There's no guilt for missing word-count goals. No stress over skipping editing pages. My book discounts and winter ad campaigns were launched at the beginning of the month and are slated to run through the end of January (yes, I do winter campaigns versus holy day campaigns).  I check my sales mostly because it's a habit and not because I will do anything to adjust campaigns.

When writing full-time--or any type of self-employment--we often forget to give ourselves permission to take a break. As creatives, it's imperative we step back, step away, and step into a place of regeneration and relaxation. Too many of us attempt to keep our work schedules during times of the year that we know will demand a lot of us outside our fictional worlds. Whether it's family obligations, religious observations, charity deliverables, or community interactions, the end of the calendar year is exceptionally taxing. Fighting the inevitable isn't worth my health or my sanity. Thus, I give myself permission to set aside my writing--both the creation and the business--to participate in the season of giving. Giving my time, my emotion, and my cooperation to those who've supported me throughout the year. 

Now, now, I don't give away all my time. I still maintain my restful hours. I even claim a few extras. Because, as stimulating as it is to reconnect with loved ones, it's also exhausting. This recluse can only handle so much of...people.

This winter, dear readers, I wish you the serenity of a peaceful pause.

Me and the Rise of Romantasy

 A weird thing about me: I'm always a bit ahead of my time. I don't know why this is, but it's been true all of my life. And it's not nearly as cool as it sounds (if it does sound cool). In truth, it's not a great thing at all, because it means I'm never in the full swing of the cultural zeitgeist. I'm the odd duck, the one not marching along with everyone else. 

Many of you have heard these stories of my trajectory (which implies a straight course and steady momentum which would be entirely incorrect). In summary:

1. No one knew how to market the weird cross-genre stuff I was writing, starting back in 2007ish.
2. Catherine Asaro told me to keep going and just know that writing cross genre would be like wading through hip-deep snow.
3. Agent at a conf in 2010 told me my work fell in the cracks between genres. I cried. Friends dubbed me "Crack Ho."
4. I didn't know I was writing Fantasy Romance until Carina Press took a chance on a crazy, cross-genre kid and published my books under that genre label.

Fast forward to today and the coining of the term Romantasy.

A number of readers have contacted me recently, having just encountered the term, largely via the new Goodreads Choice Awards category. I'm not sure who coined the term, but the portmanteau of Romance + Fantasy has now come to encompass Fantasy Romance and Romantic Fantasy. This has been occurring first in the Indie spaces and now is moving into traditional publishing as they catch onto the trend. Just last February - on Valentine's Day - Devi Pillai, Publisher at Tor, the notable publisher of science fiction and fantasy (SFF), announced that they'd created a new imprint: Bramble. Monique Patterson, Editorial Director at St. Martin's Press, moved over to head up Bramble, which will be SFF + Romance.

In very cool news for me, Monique was featured in Publisher's Weekly Notables of 2023 and namechecked me! (Along with my friend and colleague, Amanda Bouchet.) Monique said:

Romantasy may be the shiny new portmanteau on the block, but the fusing of speculative fiction and romance, Patterson notes, is nothing novel. She points to series by such authors as Amanda Bouchet and Jeffe Kennedy that would likely be categorized as romantasy now, but came out before the term was coined. It was tough putting out such books in years past, but they “would probably do wonderfully now,” she says.

Isn't that cool? I was so pleased to be mentioned in this context. From Crack Ho to Trailblazer! 

Ain't that just the way it goes?

Websites as Crutches

For the most part, I aspire to keep away from distractions. However, I find that good ambient sound works well for creating a cone of privacy around me while I'm writing. Especially when there are noise cancelling headphones involved. Therefore, I usually have YouTube up in the background. I'll run 3+ hour dark scifi, dystopian, or horror ambient tracks. I have specific needs for those - they need to run long and not allow ads. They can't have a ton of melodic line. These things are more a vibe than they are music, and they're just enough to keep my critical brain busy and out of the way of drafting while they also provide cover for the other noises of the household.

I'm a big fan of Wordhippo.com for word finding. My rule for this is that I must open and close the browser window for every single look up. It's an attempt to keep me from sheering off of making words with rando look ups. Some days, I don't open the site at all. Other days, I may need a little mental jog or two. Those days, I need to find just the right word before I can unclench and move on.

My final favorite website while writing is a website for writing. Consider this my ongoing plug for 4theWords.com. Timed writing, gamified, stripped down to a basic text editor so I can't get too precious about how stuff looks while trying to get x amount of words before time runs out. It's a great place to fast draft and a great place to write about writing. It's a perfect venue for doing a bunch of the prework of writing - compiling research / noodling how that research impacts plot and characters, getting characters hashed out, getting GMCs worked through, etc. I'm on the site every single day.

Once I have a draft, no matter how skeletal and bloody, I shift out of websites into Word. Edits and rewrites happen with fewer website interruptions. By the time I'm in edits, I pretty much know where we're going and how we're going to get there. I no longer need to anesthetize the critical portions of my brain like I do with drafting.  Until that point, though, websites are my crutches, and I lean on 'em.

Ugh

 

I’m sick, so this is what you get. Every inch of my body aches, but this fur ball still found me and hasn’t left my side…maybe he’s taking advantage of my bed bound state, but I appreciate it.