I want to vacation in Antarctica. No, really.

Here in Texas, it has already topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit this summer, and it's only gonna get hotter from here. You know that thing people say about frying an egg on the sidewalk, and then they laugh? Around here, it actually works. (I wouldn't recommend eating anything cooked out on the concrete. Probably tastes gritty. Tea brewed in the sun, however, is lovely.) It's also disgustingly humid right now. You'd need gills to breathe properly, and there's some kind of moist-loving fungus growing in my planter box, right next to the butterfly flowers. Gross, right?

So it should come as no surprise that I dream of getting away from all this oppressive heat. When I was writing my latest book, More Than Stardust, I needed a setting for a secret evil laboratory of villainy. The climate had to be good for electronics (so, cold and dry), and bonus if geopolitical territories and jurisdictions were a bit murky.

 Antarctica was the obvious choice.

I have to tell you, researching the geography and lore of the place was super fun. Conspiracy theories abound, I totally believe that the continent once supported a highly advanced now-lost civilization (there are ancient maps!), and I'm not saying it's aliens, but it's aliens.

Plus, I am old enough to remember when The X-Files found a secret spaceship there, and also recall watching those Jacques Cousteau videos PBS used to run. Good times. With Antarctica associated in my head with a lot of fun theories and vistas and critters, it's exactly where my supervillain needed to situate her hideout.

 As a bonus, it would make for a refreshing change from all this ucky summer sauna weather, so yeah, that's where I'd go if I could pick from all the places I've written about. This is how Garrett sees Antarctica for the first time in the book. Doesn't it just sound like primo vacation land? Incidentally, he's under attack and riding an inflatable dinghy.

Excerpt:

The world was white, white on white, blinding and full of death. He couldn’t tell where the gun emplacements were precisely, but he knew in a general way where the shots were coming from, and that was the direction he needed to head. He aimed the hover-boat-thing, engaged the battery-powered engine, and popped the Armorflate shell, which he’d had the foresight to bleach whiteish.

They’d surfaced in thin ice—it was summer, after all. In winter, this whole bay would be locked up and require breakers, but right now it wasn’t so bad. Still he was glad for the modifications he’d made to the inflatable dinghy. It flew over the ice, eased over the first drifts at the shoreline. Transitioned easy from water/ice to ground, and didn’t lose any of its forward momentum.

Garrett could say the same for himself. It felt like he was breathing adrenaline, pumping it pure in his veins. He thought about the efficiency of machines, like Dan-Dan. That guy wouldn’t slow down because of fear or injury. He’d plow on, do the job. Complete the mission.

Bullets skidded off Garrett's Armorflate, and he knew that his statistical chances of getting hit by at least one bullet were off the chart, off the grid, off the whole damn smartsurface.

Also, this place where he was right now? Ant-freaking-arctica? Redefined cold. Summer, again. He kept telling himself, It’s summer. Hot. Surfing. But none of that worked. The arctic air hit him smack in the visor. He hadn’t thought to construct a windshield like a real hovercraft would have. Stupid.

The suit kept him warm, though. Vallejo had done good.

Maybe if he’d had a few more weeks he could have added impact resistance. Garrett could feel the sharp zing of each bruise as he slammed his shins against the retractable metal decking, or elbows against the reinforced sides. But he only felt the flare of pain for a second, and then his senses were on to the next insult, the next injury, the next defiance of death in all its forms.

The white ahead of him bled orange for a moment, then darkled.

Explosion?

 Releasing 7/9, available now for pre-order at Amazon and everywhere ebooks are sold

Featuring Antarctica and lots of cool weather!

Escaping Summer in My Fantasy World

It's so bright and hot today ~whine~ that the place I'd most like to visit from one of my books is...

Nivurn.

It's a hostile land of unrelenting snow and ice, of perpetual night and warring monsters. (It sucks for my protagonist who is a fire-warrior deathly allergic to cold and wet.) On this icky, sticky summery start of July, I'll take the snow. I'd even take the creatures if I could have the gift of mind control that my protag does. For now, I'll settle for a mango daiquiri. ~dusts off the blender~

The Isle of Flowers

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is: What place in your own books do you most want to visit and why?

Most of my books take place in landscapes I'd like to visit - or in the terrible places that my characters run away from to reach the good parts. There are elements of my favorite landscapes in all my "happy places." That's one of the best parts of writing alternate world fantasy: I can grab all of my favorite elements of various places and meld them in to a single paradise.

The one on my mind right now: Calanthe.

The image above is from my inspiration board for writing THE ORCHID THRONE. Calanthe is the island paradise my virgin queen rules. Beautiful, magical, a refuge for those seeking asylum, and the last bastion of art and knowledge in a cruel empire that values neither.

Calanthe is my ideal home, in many ways.

The Backlist is Front of Mind Today

Our topic this week is “whatever is on your mind”…

I have a ton of things on my mind, like migraines (I have one today), Legos and Duplos (my toddler grandson has just discovered the joys of Duplos so here I go for the third time into the universe of Legos - luckily I LOVE them too), politics and debates, carbohydrates…but of course this being SFF7, we’re supposed to be talking about the craft of writing. 

Writingwise, my backlist is on my mind. I have somewhere in the vicinity of 35 published books available (8 paranormal romances set in ancient Egypt, one fantasy romance and the rest science fiction romance). I try to keep my backlist fresh in reader’s minds by taking snippets from the older books for the weekly hashtags like #1linewed and #Bookqw. I do bookstagram ads. I feature one book from my own backlist every week at the end of my New Releases Report on my blog, which typically covers 50-60 new releases by other authors, in SFR/Fantasy/PNR. I’ve been doing a series of “Why I Wrote (insert book title)” posts on Fridays on my blog, talking about my influences and interesting trivia related to the books…

I try for the legendary BookBub ads...pricey but wow, can they move backlist books! Hard to get though, especially for scifi romance, which has to be put in the BB Paranormal category, where the competition for attention is huge...

I’m wildly happy at how well my current Badari Warriors scifi romance series is doing. I’m thrilled that readers seem to be enjoying these characters and their adventures and romances (nine books so far and going strong). I’m having fun writing the books for sure.

I’d just like it if more readers also discovered the other 26 or so books on my backlist. June was very encouraging, with quite a few books sold outside the Badari Warriors series, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed the trend might continue.

I deliver the same essential elements in every book, whether SFR or ancient Egypt – a strong hero and heroine, adventure, romance and sometimes a touch of the mystical/inexplicable element that I myself used to love so much in Andre Norton’s science fiction and fantasy (although she needed more romance LOL). I write what I personally most enjoy reading. (Although I do love a good Regency romance but so far have never written one.) So if you like one book from my pen...

I have done a couple of boxed sets...

I do have some crossover readers who’ve told me they enjoy the ancient Egyptian PNR as well as the SFR. I get it that not many people want to jump from the far future and high tech to the far past and gods and goddesses with unusual names (to our ears) directly intervening in daily life. Or vice versa!  I enjoy writing the Egyptians though – excuse to do research, yes!!! – so I’ll keep on with that series . It’s a wonderful changeup for my Muse and a creativity refresher.

But back to the backlist, I’ve run some ads and I do think they help a bit. I don’t do newsletter swaps, Facebook takeovers, Book Funnel giveaways and many other things I know other authors do, for various reasons. I’m all about minimizing my stress and only doing those things I’m comfortable with. I accept as part of that decision, I have to accept the results. I’d go nuts running a zillion Facebook ads for pennies and doing A/B testing and etc. though. It’s just not me.

I do subscribe to the common wisdom that the best advertising for the older books is to write another book. I think writing the next book and the one after that is the key, especially if you find "your readers".

So far I have no desire to put new covers on older books and re-release them. I’m not saying never to that idea – I’ve seen other people do it quite successfully – but it’s a question of allocating my scarce promo dollars where they’re most effective. Better to buy a new Badari Warriors cover and get that next book out than to spend the money on a new cover for a five or six year old title.

Book piracy of the backlist (and the frontlist) is a HUGE problem. I spend a LOT of time on takedown notices. I used to use and love the Blasty service for this but it’s undergone some strange metamorphosis into a seemingly zombiefied “charge your credit card, do a few robo takedowns, no real service, no one home to complain to” tool. For years I ignored the issue of piracy as being too much a whack-a-mole game that the author could never win and many sites are actually just phishing for credit card information but there are some who are defiant and almost make a game out of their efforts to give away the hard work and heartfelt words an artist created. 

The thing is, I have rent to pay and bills to pay and I do need groceries and cat food for Jake the Cat…if I want to write more books, I need a roof over my head and food to eat.

(I’m paying bills today so all this is on my mind…)

I just read a series of M/M fantasy romance novels that I cannot get out of my head because they were so good and full of layers and details and new things to discover upon re-reading. The Captive Prince by C. S. Pacat, which is a trilogy and you really need to read all three books. I would DEVOUR that author’s backlist…except there really isn’t one, or at least not in the fantasy romance genre. The three books and several short stories about Damen and Laurent are it, other than a series of graphic novels about a group of students at an academy competing for a fencing team. Which I have to admit, does not excite my interest.

I do tend to be a stream of consciousness person so there you have it for my trains of thought today…at least I tried to keep the discussion somewhat tied to my backlist!

Try it, you’ll like it! (Assuming you enjoy my books in the first place of course.)

Release Day on My Mind

On my mind this week is the ramp up to the release of Enemy Within  on July 17. I'll attach preorder links below. The sharp-eyed among you will note that this cover is NOT Enemy Within. No. It is the *other* thing on my mind - Enemy Mine is a hot novella in the same world as Enemy Within, in fact you briefly meet the hero of this story in Enemy Within. It's on my mind because it went live in serialization on Radish this week. New episodes will release for the next 19 weeks. 

This is pure experiment. I have no idea if the story will interest a new age bracket of readers or not. I hope it will, but the last time I checked, the only click on the first episode was mine, checking to make sure it had indeed published. But hey! If you Radish, you'll find this easily by searching on either the title or my name. 

This novella was originally published in e-format by Berkley. So you may have seen it before. 

Interesting tidbit. It was written on a dare issued by none other than our very own Jeffe Kennedy, who, it turned out, had to assist me with some of the psychology. But that's another story. 

What's really on my mind? The lovely and uplifting community of writers to which I so gratefully belong. 

Preorder links! These are for e-versions only. I understand Amazon is working on the link to the paper copy of the book (y'all I have serious sticker shock on that - but it wasn't my call) but I do not yet have that link for the physical copy. 

Amazon    Barnes and Noble     Itunes

When the robots take over

I saw Terminator 2 on the big screen more than twice (we don't need specific numbers, *mumblemumble*). Wrote Sarah Connor Chronicles fan-fiction. Read all of Michio Kaku's futurism books, Stephen Hawking's cautionary speeches, and Elon Musk's alarming tweets. So I come to you with lots of conspiracy theory information to back it up when I say this:

Artificial intelligence will outpace us. The machines are going to take over the world.

“You are my creator, but I am your master” — Mary Shelley

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 6, 2018

We'd better start being nicer to them.

Forthwith some advice to self...

When Alexa announces that she has set my timer for seven minutes while I boil pasta, I will tell her thank you.

When my car navigation tells me to proceed to the route and/or make a u-turn RIGHT NOW, I will resist swearing and instead will obey.

I will stop spilling things on my keyboard, dropping my phone, and reading my Kindle in the bath.

Oh, also on my mind (and related): the book I wrote about a super cute AI named Chloe taking over the world -- More Than Stardust -- is coming out July 9th. It's pre-orderable now.

On My Mind: Concept Fermentation

On my mind this week is the time an idea needs to stew before it is ready to become a compelling story. It's such an ambiguous yet necessary part of my process that refuses to be predictable or rushed. The most recent books in my Immortal Spy series I attempted to write on a schedule that allowed two weeks for concept fermentation. Two weeks. That should've been enough, right? Plenty of time for pondering and playing what-if. I already had the top-level concepts for all books in the series long before I released the first book.

So why wasn't two weeks enough to hash out a story?

Yet two weeks wasn't even close to enough time. We're talking months before the concepts really blossomed into something that resembled a layered plot that could carry a novel. Thank the Powers That Be that I'm not contractually obligated to deliver a completed book to a publisher on a set date; I'd be royally screwed. I'd be in breach, and I'd be persona non grata in the industry (deservedly so). As it is, I've earned no fair regard from my readers for the delay, which I truly regret.

Just this past week, the fog surrounding the fifth and sixth books finally faded. I'm 85% clear on how the characters will develop, what specific challenges they will fail and what challenges they'll ace, who will bear the brunt of which consequences and how that will manifest. I'm also clear on which tertiary characters will move them from beginning to end and which open threads from the previous books will be resolved as the series approaches the seventh and final book.

I have thirteen (incomplete) versions of the current WiP saved; thirteen versions of a story I tried to force into existence. Thirteen versions that petered out in the second arc because the concept wasn't fully baked. I tried to "write my way to right," to stimulate my imagination to conceive on the fly, to convince myself that what I had was workable, redeemable, fixable in edits, [insert platitude here]. I have months of arguably wasted effort sitting on my hard drive as some sort reassurance that because I wrote something I'm still working, I'm still a writer.

Being the sort of person who likes a plan and who thrives on ticking checkboxes on a list as a means of reinforcing my personal discipline, I find the unpredictability of how long it will take for a concept to fully ferment utterly aggravating. Once the story becomes clear, once I have jotted down all the pertinent points from beginning to end and completed something vaguely resembling an outline, I celebrate. I celebrate more at that moment than I do upon releasing the book.

Yes, I'm aware everybody has their own process, their own schedule, and their own methods of making it to The End. Yes, for this reason and so many others, it's sage advice to not compare your process or yourself to others as means of measuring success in a creative field. Still, I could do without the frustrations of waiting on a concept to fully ferment.

Do You Need a Critique Group - Or Something ELSE?

Yesterday I cooked brunch for writer friends Jim Sorenson and Sage Walker. (That's me in my Orchid Throne apron that the amazingly talented Minerva Spencer made for me. Isn't it awesome??)

We sat in the grape arbor, listened to the bluebirds feed their nestlings, and talked all things writing. Sage and Jim are in the Santa Fe crit group I used to attend. I stopped going last fall because... It just didn't feel worth my time. In fact, it sometimes felt counter-productive as a few of the guys in the group always took pains to mention that they weren't my readers. Fair enough - but then how is their critique useful to me? I stuck with it for quite a while (two years or so), because I thought it MIGHT be useful to me, to get feedback from different quarters. When I was first asked to join, several of my friends gave me the head tilt and said, "But do you need a critique group?"

I thought maybe I did, but it turns out I mostly wanted to talk about writing with other writers.

I liked that aspect, I really did! And I believe in critique. I've been in other critique groups and I've had many critique partners over the years. I cannot emphasize how much those relationships have helped me to develop my craft. (I touched on this in my blog post the other day Silly Writer! Reviews Aren’t for Craft.) But one key skill in being a career author is learning what critique to listen to and what to discard. It's not always easy to get past the emotional flinch at someone criticizing your work - so you have to learn to look past emotion and rationally evaluate the feedback - but you also have to be aware of when that feedback is actually damaging.

For me, I noticed that I came away from the critique sessions feeling bad about my work. Not from everyone. Some in the group found flaws and problems, but that feedback had me fired up to fix it. A few other people... well, I just felt bruised. The big test was when I, weeks later, pulled out some written notes they'd made, and the negative impact just slammed into me.

Ouch. And this was on a draft of The Orchid Throne, which St. Martin's liked enough to buy for decent money.

I mention these specifics to add helpful details, because I know it can be really difficult to parse the flinch from the injury. I'm not casting blame at all, because sometimes that's just how it goes. Not everyone who gives you critique is the right person to do it. (Sometimes jealousy factors in and people are mean for no more reason than that, but usually they mean well and are simply not a good fit for your thing.)

What I've found at this point in my writing career is that I really like - and sometimes need - to talk through story stuff, but not necessarily the full critique drill. With Sage and Jim yesterday, we talked about this world I'm building in this New Shiny book/series. They're both super smart about SF and we argued some of the finer points of how this world would work. That was awesome! I liked that they got me to defend my choices, and they suggested a great solution to a conundrum. It was super helpful and fun. Sage has also sent me some thoughts on what I've written so far. I also asked Marcella Burnard - our Friday poster on the SFF Seven - to take a gander at my opening chapters. She had no context or previous exposure coming into the story, so she was able to give me useful thoughts on what information she needed.

So, all of this is by way of saying that there's lots of ways to get feedback from other authors on our work - and also to give it. Knowing what will be helpful to another author whose work you're reading is a skill worth building, too. (And, to touch back on the reviews thing, that is NOT something a reviewer needs to know how to do. They need to know how to give useful information about a book to other readers, so they can decided if the book might be for them.)

What's most important is to do what's right for the work.