KAK's Top 3 Most Memorable Books of 2017

For 2017's Most Memorable list, I'll start with a bit of brownnosing our Thursday blogger, Marshall.

I absolutely loved A Murder of Mages with "Tricky" and "Jinx." The mystery was crisp, the guilty party unexpected, and the world richly built without being intrusive. Most important was the character development of the detectives. Their introductions, the formation of their partnership, the conflicts inside the station and at home, all of it served the story well and made me care so much that I'm itching to dig into An Import of Intrigue, the second book in The Maradaine Constabulary prong of the larger Maradaine world. It wasn't too dark, bleak, or depressing as some of the fantasy mysteries I've recently read. It was more in the vein of Guy Ritchie's spin on Sherlock Holmes...with less snark.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman makes the list because of Shadow Moon, the protagonist. With all the hype of the show, I figured I'd read the book first (I'm weird like that). 85% of the book is told from Shadow's POV. What stuck with me after I'd finished was how Gaiman crafted Shadow to be the moral gauge while being an unmoored lackey in a divine mob war. Shadow wasn't the king of emoting. In fact, he was a bit of a wooden plank. He had a personal code from which he did not veer, and that was his sole redeemable value. It's easy to classify Shadow as a beta male, a hair's breadth from being dopey...and yet something I haven't quite identified kept him in the "stoic hero" role. Pegging how an author made a character "work" is one of the things I like to do to help me better my craft. In this story, I haven't been able to crack it; perhaps that's why American Gods remains memorable to me.

Call of the Wilde by Jenn Stark, Book 8 in her Immortal Vegas series shows the street-smart artifact hunter who inherited a crime syndicate finally taking the reins and rising to the challenge of her new position. Instead of tiptoeing along the line separating magic from magical realism, Sara Wilde becomes a bridge between the two worlds forcing parties to work together who historically tried to kill each other. It's a fun romp that shows the stakes being raised in the great War on Magic.

Jim's Five most Memorable reads of 2017

My collection or reads is always eclectic. Comics, books, anthologies, etc. So I'll try to be succinct.

I should clarify that though thee are numbered, I'm not really ranking any of them higher than the others. these are the beasts that stick out for me this year. These are the ones that caught my attention and kept me thinking long after I was done with the actual reading.

At number 5, we have DOGS OF WAR by Jonathan Maberry, the latest in the Joe Ledger series of books. I love the action and I can never get enough to the humor and suspense combination that Maberry uses. It's clear the author is having a last writing these things and that in turn makes me have a  last.

Number 4, Bracken McLeod's STRANDED is an absolute blast. I love a good twist or turn in a story and there are plenty of them in the novel. It's a rollercoaster ride, and it's fun. As an added bonus, he managed to surprise me a couple of times and that is a rarity.

Number 3, Victor LaValle's THE BALLAD OF BLACK TOM is a spectacular surprise. I'd heard LaValle was good, but he's better than that. I was absolutely dazzled by his work on this novella, which is an alternate take on H.P. Lovecraft's "The Horror At Red Hook," which, frankly, was always one of Lovecraft's weakest for me.

Number 2, After waiting FAAAAR too long for it, Dan Brereton finally came out with another book in his NOCTURNALS series, NOCTURNA

LS: THE SINISTER PATH. The story is a cool mystery and there's great characters and great storytelling as always but as an added bonus, I really think, as hard as it is for me to believe, that Brereton's actually gotten better with his artwork. Believe me, that's saying something. He has always been a favorite of mine. his comic book pages are lavish, sumptuous paintings, that happen to tell a great story in the process of being beautiful. I would gladly recommend all of Brereton's work, but he has simply improved in leaps and bounds with THE SINISTER PATH.

Number 1, ARARAT By Christopher Golden. I've noticed a trend as I've been typing this. Thus year I'm favoring the  genre blenders. A little of this, a little of that and swirl the contents together until you have something bigger and better. ARARAT is no exception. It's an adventure, it's a suspense and it's got some horror, too.  What happens when a group of explorers finds what might be Noah's Arc on Mount Ararat? Nothing gentle is what. Loved it!

Jeffe's Five Most Memorable Reads of 2017

Our topic this week at the SFF Seven is our most memorable reads of 2017.

I've read 104 books in 2017 - a bit shy of my goal of 150. I'd say I've still got two weeks left, but I also have a book due on January 2, so who are we kidding? I might slip in a couple more, but...

I only put my favorite reads into Goodreads, and then I perused the ones I gave five stars. Of those, five stood out in my memory, so I picked those as memorable.

Ah logic.

I realize this system favors recent reads, but - hey - I never claimed this process was objective.

For the headliner, I'm picking DANGEROUS, the debut novel by Minerva Spencer. This doesn't come out until 2018, but I read an ARC because Minerva lives in Taos and has become a friend. I would say it's terribly biased for me to lead with her book, but it was *such a relief* to LOVE this book. And love it I did! It's so wonderful to read a book by someone you like, as also like what they write. Especially when it's a genre (Regency Historical Romance) that you've fallen off reading. This book has a mature heroine, a cool and supercilious hero - and reminded me of everything I love about regency romance.

I read OFF THE CLOCK because it won the RITA Award for Erotic Romance, and because I'd been meaning to read Roni Loren for a long time. Loved this so much more than I expected to! Erotic, yes, but also rich, emotional, and tender.

BY THE IOWA SEA is a memoir by Joe Blair that came out in 2012. I read it with a friend who's writing a memoir and studying the craft of it. This book blew us both away. Unapologetic and unflinching in its look at the minor tragedies of a normal, middle-class, Midwestern life, this book still has me thinking.

This year I was privileged to meet Jane Yolen when she was named SFWAs Grandmaster at the Nebula Conference. She's a gracious, witty, and generous woman and I was chagrined I'd never read her. So I bought her BRIAR ROSE and had her sign it. It's an incredible, haunting story - part fairy tale, part mystery, part history. Amazing book.

I'm a huge fan of Jacqueline Carey, and of The Tempest, so I snapped up MIRANDA AND CALIBAN as soon as it released. It's magical, lovely, and heartbreaking. This is another one I'm still thinking about.

What about you all - what were your memorable reads? What did I miss??

Picking an Era of the Past to Write In

I imagine I would have been a story teller in any era, but there probably would have been a lot of barriers to success.  In ancient Egypt for example, I could have made up great stories about the gods – just look at my series of paranormal romances set in that time frame! – but unless I’d also been trained as a scribe (unlikely) or a scribe really loved my work and wrote it down for me in flowing hieroglyphics, the stories would have been lost. Even if my mythical handsome and smitten scribe did write it down, what are the odds anyone would find an entire Sheshemetka tale intact all these centuries later? (Do you like my flowing pen name of 4000 years ago?)

Jane Austen’s time is appealing in some ways, but since the real Regency wasn’t much like the romance-y Regency with waltzing Dukes, I’m not sure how I’d have prospered there. Unless I was born into a good family situation to start with, I’d probably have been too busy trying to survive as a governess or housekeeper, or other occupation, to write. (But there would have been a Duke, we would have waltzed….uh oh, I’m digressing again…)

Actually, I can envision myself quite successfully writing ‘pulps’ at the turn of the century, maybe even on into the 1950’s. I can tell adventure stories like Tarzan and John Carter of Mars, Flash Gordon and the like just great. Not too science-y, got a romance sort of and constant action. I write fast so I could have churned those babies out. Maybe Johnny Weissmuller or Buster Crabbe could have played one of my hunky heroes in an endless cliffhanger movie serial! (Author gazes off into space, goes off into space-time wormhole, develops entire plot about fast-talking, hard-drinking, glamorous pulp author self, bleached blonde, holding her own in Hollywood and….) Oh, where was I? Errol Flynn in his prime was going to play my hero on the big screen???

No?

I’d have had to take a male pen name of course, or one that was suitably neutral, like Andre Norton. Not that she wrote pulps – I love her books – but I would have loved to have written science fiction at a desk close to hers and compared notes a lot.

At any rate, I’m glad I write now, where the only gate keepers are the readers, and I have all the tools at hand to create my stories and transcribe them and publish them. And if I want to try my hand at something new, or cross-genre, I’m perfectly free to do so. No disapproving Egyptian priests, hoity-toity Patronesses of Almacks or anyone else to stop me. Their modern day equivalents can leave reviews of course!

Just a reminder of my new release (speaking of action, adventure, romance and scifi):

Amazon      B&N  Google   Kobo     iBooks

Richness of Time

Until today when a bunch of gits decided that the internet should rake in even more cash than already it does, this was a great time to be a writer. It still is, mostly. With a few bumps in the road, certainly. I mean, there are videos of baby otters chasing fish. There's Fiona the hippo at the Cincinnati zoo. You know. All of those underdog stories we love so well. Because hey, if a tiny, premature hippo can survive and thrive, surely I can finish one stinking manuscript, right?

It's a great time for me personally to have discovered that being warm and having sunshine makes me a pleasanter person. Being a pleasant-ish person makes writing easier. Strange but true. The video is the backyard on a sunny, windy day. Assuming the video actually works.

Do I pine for 'simpler times' or some golden age when everyone had it easier(TM)? Nah. Cause that's hindsight talking - all we see in hindsight are the successes - the results of all the angst and trials and failures. No matter what time you live in, you're experimenting - always trying things - always evaluating what you're doing and making minute course adjustments trying to get where you want to go - whether you're on a road trip or writing a novel. The grand thing about writing now is that I can look up anything online. I can connect with other writers the world over. I can reach out to other authors and I can learn whatever I do not know about the process, the business, the marketing, what ever. And ultimately, because of the technology available to me, I can bypass anyone and everyone who wants to tell me my stuff isn't good enough. It may be true - but I can choose to publish anyway and let the market place tell me I suck. Or that I don't.

Writers have a lot of freedom right now. It is both blessing and curse. It's human nature to want to know you're on 'the right path.' But with so many options available to us for publishing, there IS no right path. There are only choices.

But you know, the single greatest thing about being alive right now? I get to call a whole slew of people I've never actually met in person my friends because we're all connected and laughing and commiserating over this thing we love to do. It happens via email, social media, and on rare occasions in person. Sure, salons happened in earlier times. Maybe I'd have been just as happy in a Parisian coffeehouse or maybe I'd have had my throat slit in some dark alley after I'd downed one too many glasses of absinthe, but I wouldn't have had access to so many people from so many nations with so many different perspectives. From that standpoint, this, for me is the richest time in history to be a writer.

Writing in the Here and Now

Every once in a while the idea crosses my mind-- what might it have been like to have been a writer in a different time and place?  Writing plays in Elizabethan England, for example?  But most of the time, I'm fairly anchored to the here and now, which is possibly the best time ever to be an SFF writer.

I'm the right age to remember how dire the SFF options were when I was young.  For me, Sci-fi and Fantasy was a single rack of shelves in the back corner of the Waldenbooks. 

Not too long ago, there was a twitter thread , talking about the fantasy genre and the tropes within it. But the whole thing addresses "fantasy novels" in the most painfully generic way. It's not about actual fantasy novels. It's more about the idea of how fantasy novels are, from people who know little more than the cliches, and outdated ones at that.

Thankfully, nowadays, so much of what that thread accused Fantasy Novels of aren't true anymore. Today, just in "mainstream", traditionally published stuff, we've got a ridiculous wealth of new Sci-fi and Fantasy, and there's so much creativity and vibrancy and variation in the genre, it's astounding.  I'm thrilled to be writing in this genre right now. 

And right now, exciting things are happening.

What's Next? Seph or Jovienne?

Note: This post is off-topic this week. 

In many ways, 2017 has not been my best year.
Ragnarok Publications, who released my novel Jovienne (Immanence #1) this past May, has had some ups and downs. As a result, they canceled all contracts for novels for 2018. That means the second book of the Immanence series which I had started working on… now has no home.

This is a reality many other authors have faced, and not just those of us who’d been working with Ragnarok. Many small presses fell this past year. This is, sadly, for me, familiar territory. Simon & Schuster’s imprint Pocket Books decided years back that they wanted no more Persephone Alcmedi series books from me. Despite that, fans still consistently contact me. They say they just found the series and want more, or they say they loved the books when they were first released and wonder if there will be more.

I’ve started and stopped working on #7 more times than I can remember. I’ve pitched it to small presses and always garnered interest, yet, for a variety of reasons, they all fell apart before they could start. At one point recently, it was on the table with a small press and I thought a contract would finally culminate…but it just didn’t feel right. That time, I backed out.

Again, 2017 has not been my best year.

I think it’s healthy to acknowledge feelings, good and bad, but not to let them rule. So, to that end, I allowed myself wallow in the dejection of that canceled contract for a few days. And then I turned to music.

Musically speaking, 2017 was a good year. 

I composed, created, produced, mixed and mastered and released my first CD. It’s even available on Spotify and other music streaming channels. That’s a remarkable dream come true. (Spotify link HERE. If you dig any of the songs, give 'em a thumbs up please!) 

Music will bring me out of whatever slump my head thinks I’m in. I’ve been composing for another novel, an epic fantasy that is currently with an editor. It is my intention to self-publish it in 2018, so this is a good time to work on it and the themes are a lot of fun to play with. I’m enjoying this step away from writing words very much.

This, however, is not permanent. I want to finish the Persephone Alcmedi series. I want to finish the Immanence series. Both are sitting at a bit under 20k words. Realistically, I could turn to either one with equal zeal and find completion in the same amount of time.

But which one?

This is where you come in. 

Which would you be more interested in reading:

Persephone Alcmedi #7 or Immanence #2.

Please, if you have a preference at all, head over to my website HERE and use the contact form to email me your vote. The one with the higher demand will get my time and attention in 2018. And with any luck, I’ll be self-publishing two books next year.

Release Day: Amid the Winter Snow & Aydarr: A Badari Warrior

In the throes of holiday shopping?  Perhaps you're done...or maybe you're procrastinating. Treat yourself and a friend to an anthology of fantasy romances with Amid the Winter Snow or to a steamy SciFi romance with Aydarr. Why not buy both? The anthology features a story by our own Rita® Award winner Jeffe Kennedy, set in her much-beloved world of the Twelve Kingdoms. Aydarr kicks off a new series for Veronica Scott.

AMID THE WINTER SNOW

As the snows fall and hearths burn, four stories of Midwinter beginnings prove that love can fight its way through the chillest night…

THE DARKEST MIDNIGHT, by Grace Draven
The mark Jahna Ulfrida was born with has made her a target of the cruel and idle all her life. During the long, crowded festivities of Deyalda, there’s nowhere to escape. Until a handsome stranger promises to teach her to save herself…

THE CHOSEN, by Thea Harrison
In her visions, Lily sees two men fighting for her tiny country’s allegiance: the wolf and the tiger, each deadly, each cunning. One will bring Ys chaos and death, one a gentler path—but she’s destined to love whichever she chooses. The midwinter Masque is upon them, and the wolf is at her door…

THE STORM, by Elizabeth Hunter
When her soul mate died in a massacre of the half-angelic Irin people, Renata thought she’d never feel happiness again. She’s retreated to the snowy Dolomites to remember her hurts—until determined, irrepressible Maxim arrives to insist on joy, too. And before she can throw him out, they discover a secret the Irin have to know…

THE SNOWS OF WINDROVEN, by Jeffe Kennedy
As a blizzard threatens their mountain keep, the new Queen Amelia of the Twelve Kingdoms and her unofficial consort Ash face their own storm. Ash knows a scarred, jumpy ex-convict isn’t the companion his queen needs. But when a surprise attack confines them together in their isolated sanctuary, the feast of midwinter might tempt even Ash into childlike hope…

Buy It Now:  Amazon   |   B&N   |   Kobo

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If you like your romances to be out of this world, then check out our Saturday blogger, Veronica Scott's, latest SciFi romance, AYDARR.

AYDARR: A Badari Warriors SciFi Romance Novel 
(Sectors New Allies Series Book 1)

Jill Garrison, a maintenance tech at the Sectors Amarcae 7 colony, goes to sleep one night as usual only to wake up in her nightgown stranded in the middle of a forest on an unknown world. There’s no time to think as she’s stalked by carnivorous predators and rescued by genetically engineered warriors calling themselves the Badari. Turns out they and she, along with her whole colony, are now prisoners of the Khagrish, a ruthless race of alien scientists. Working for enemies of the Sectors, the Khagrish have created the Badari to be super soldiers.

Aydarr, the Badari alpha, isn’t sure he can trust Jill but his attraction to her is undeniable. He impulsively claims her as his mate to prevent her death at the hands of the Khagrish.

Can he continue to protect her from the experiments already underway? Will his claiming her put his pack in jeopardy from their alien masters?

As Jill searches for a way to rescue her fellow humans and get them all to safety, she finds herself falling for Aydarr, despite the secrets he’s keeping. She has a few of her own.

The situation becomes dire when Aydarr and his pack are sent offplanet on a mission, leaving Jill unprotected, prey for the senior scientist. Can she escape the experiments he has in mind for her? Will she be able to thwart the Khagrish plans and liberate humans and Badari alike? How will she and Aydarr reunite?

Buy It Now:   Amazon   |   B&N   |   Kobo