Remembering Vonda McIntyre

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is In Memoriam: a tribute to a writer you admire who has left us.

At SFWA's Nebula Conference in May, I was privileged to moderate a panel to remember Vonda McIntyre, her life and work. I was super excited about the opportunity because I'd never gotten a chance to meet Vonda - who died after a sudden illness in March 2019 - something I greatly regretted because her work had been so formative for me. The panelists were Asimov's editor Sheila Williams and authors Eileen Gunn and Connie Willis.

I figured that it didn't matter if I was kind of an impostor, since I couldn't personally contribute to remembering Vonda, since all I had to do was turn those powerful women loose on the topic.

Turns out, they all felt similarly - that they hadn't known Vonda as well as they'd have liked, and felt inadequate to the task of memorializing her. Eileen had known her best and brought little sea and alien creatures made of beads and wire that Vonda liked to create and give to friends.

But it was lovely to hear about the kind of person Vonda was. How she'd been pivotal in the early days of SFWA in getting female authors recognized and women treated with respect in the organization. She possessed a spine of steel and fiery determination - qualities the panelists found amusing to recall in retrospect, as Vonda had also been small in stature and quite gentle in personality. She baked cookies and gave them out freely. She helped people with websites and self-publishing before those were even much in use. Everyone remembered her as a warm and generous person.

They also pointed out how groundbreaking her work was. Early in my reading life, I'd been struck by her books - especially DREAMSNAKE - and their powerful female protagonists, their easy enjoyment of their sexuality, and the vivid, exciting, and unusual use of animals in her stories. The panelists spoke of how Vonda had been nearly unique in her biological approach to science fiction, how her biochemistry background illuminated her worlds in such different ways.

No wonder her work spoke to me.

Speaking of work, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention my own - and that THE ORCHID THRONE is available for preorder!

Preorder at any of these wonderful retailers!

         

Saying No Thanks to A Magic Do Over

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Our topic this week on SFF7: Free ReDo: If you could automagically change anything in any of your books, would you?

Short answer: No.

I don’t publish a book until I’m happy with it so….and of course being self published, I don't have to agree with any editorial changes such as a publisher might want and be contractually entitled to demand.

I have mentioned in this space in the past when we had a similar subject, a few things I wish I’d done differently with Warrior of the Nile (published by Carina Press). It was the second book in what is now an eight book series. Here’s the relevant bit:

I do a TON of research, all the time, into various aspects of ancient Egypt, but for this book, I veered off the track in the hero’s backstory in my opinion. I made him the last survivor of a mountain tribe that had its own gods and myths (conveniently created by me to fit my story), although since he was adopted by Pharaoh’s family at a young age, he also subscribed to the Egyptian beliefs. Indeed, the entire book revolves around a demand made by the goddess Nephthys and her personal involvement in the quest.

In fact, however, much of how the book’s plot is resolved ties back to this personal belief system the hero Khenet retains. There’s a key scene in a ruined temple belonging to an ancient goddess predating Egypt, again all from my own inventive brain. There’s another pivotal moment where Khenet receives a bit of help from his tribe’s god, fulfilling a prophecy. And then there are these jewels….

Now if I’d been writing fantasy, nothing wrong with creating and injecting all kinds of cool new mythos and lore and etc.

But I really try to tell these stories from the standpoint that the gods exist and interact in the daily life circa 1550 BCE the way the ancient Egyptians believed they did, and very much wanted them to do. I feel the success of the later books in the series revolves around that key aspect. Not in taking giant departures and left turns from the overall Egyptian culture. (Liberties and conscious anachronisms, yes. Wholesale invention of new stuff – no.)  So to me, book two rings bit false now, like a brass bell in a lineup of silver ones. Not the same tone. I haven’t repeated that ‘mistake’. I find a way to make my plots happen much more concisely within the ancient Egyptian framework. They had such a complex civilization and belief system to match.

Don't get me wrong - I like the book and my hero, I love some of the 'Egyptian' elements in it wildly, like Lady Tuya's visit to the goddess Isis...I just think I moved away from what's at the core of my Gods of Egypt series by injecting a fantasy side story that had no roots in anything the Egyptians believed.

I’m not writing historicals. I am writing paranormal elements but I’ve always felt with Warrior I went too far away from what keeps me (and my readers) grounded in the Land of the Pharaohs as I visualize it.

OK, but when (if) I get the rights back in 2020, will I rewrite this? No. The story is the story and it all hangs together nice and tight. I just took a lesson learned from that experience and have worked hard not to go quite so far afield from actual ancient Egypt in the rest of the series.

By the way, I have a new science fiction romance release to report! REEDE, the tenth book in my Badari Warriors series about genetically engineered soldiers of the far future. The book is numbered as #9 but that’s because TIMTUR is book #2.5. Sorry for the confusion!) Here’s the blurb:

Lt. Fallyn Damara was sent by the Sectors to investigate a strange transmission from an isolated planet and determine whether the residents of a vanished colony had been transported there by alien enemies. Fallyn’s ship crashes and she’s taken prisoner by the Khagrish scientists, to await her fate in the slate of horrifying experiments being conducted.

Reede, the second ranking enforcer in the Badari Warrior pack, volunteers to be recaptured by the Khagrish in an effort to locate and rescue Fallyn inside the deadly lab complex.

While a prisoner Reede discovers Fallyn is the woman destined to become his fated mate but the moment is bittersweet because Fallyn will be leaving their world at the first opportunity, to report back to the Sectors. He refuses to complete the mate bond, believing to do so will lead to nothing but lifelong misery for them both, separated by lightyears and interstellar politics.

For her part, Fallyn wants to shake up the rule-bound enforcer and persuade him to take a chance on love.

But first they have to escape the Khagrish.

Amazon      Apple Books     Kobo     Nook     Google

Patching the Past

I am one lucky writer. Somehow, I managed to make friends with a bunch of scientists and Air Force test pilots. 99% of the time, this is awesome. 1% of the time, it bites me in the butt when they ping me to tell me I got something wrong. Most of the time, all I can do is gnash my teeth and whine. Cause usually, you can't correct a published book. No one is gone redo a print run because you got the hero's eye color wrong on page 387. BUT. At some magical point, it is within an author's power to request reversion of rights. And when that happens, it's a whole new world, baby.

So would I change things? Yes. Have done. Would do it again. IT'S TOTALLY WORTH IT. I say this as someone who has a thing about needing to be right. Maybe it's oldest child syndrome. Dunno. I've spent lots of years trying to get over myself and learning to embrace my mistakes with grace. Even if I'm gritting my teeth whilst doing so. But when I got the rights back for the Enemy series, I hit up my scientist and pilot friends, asking for a list of where I'd gone wrong specifically so I could fix my errors for the rerelease versions of the stories.

I got that list. The worst one was that I'd messed up insect life cycles when I should have known better. I hope to all the gods those are fixed now. There was also a scene in the second book of the series that I wished I'd handled differently.  Ten years of wishing. Now it's about to be published again, so I rewrote the scene. I think I'm finally happy with it.

Maybe it's a rare thing to get to tweak what should be left in the past. My ability to tweak existing books is at an end now because we've moved on books that haven't yet been published anywhere else. So my day in the sunshine of fixing what was broken may well be over. At least until the dev edits for book three land.

You know this wouldn't be a Marcella post without a cat photo, so behold Bug, a tiny, two month old kitten who'd been dumped at the feral colony. She came to me skin and bones and with massive eye infections. She was adopted yesterday to a lovely lady who shows Persians. She's going to show Bug in the household pet division. The great thing is that Bug's new mom has an Instagram account, so I can cute-stalk my former medical foster kitten and watch her grow up from afar.

Automagic Story Fix: Would I, Could I?

On the blog this week we're talking about:

Free ReDo: If you could automagically change anything in any of your books, would you?

~slaps knee~ Oh, dear reader, yes, I would.  I--like many of my peers--would change all the dagnabit typos, misspelled words, MIA punctuation, etc. that snuck through eight passes of edits.

Is there plot or character dev stuff I'd change? Yeeeah. Probably. In LARCOUT there were some scenes I'd cut that I shouldn't have, scenes that revealed clues to the Whodunnit part of the story. I was rightfully called out by reviewers for dorking up the mystery thread, so if I could wave a wand and fix that, I would. Then again, the beauty of being Indie is that I could make those changes and release a "new and improved" edition. Might happen. Maybe. First I have to wrap up my UF series.

~Wanders off to ponder changes~

SciFi Romance Recent Recommendations

This week's topic is shining a light on 3 authors who we think you should be reading, aka Book Recommendations.

Since I’m primarily a science fiction romance author, I’ll stick to that genre this week and I’m going with some top of my mind authors who were recent reads, plus a few site recommendations.

My first recommendation would be Pauline Baird Jones and her Project Enterprise series, of which Maestra Rising was the latest release. Pauline writes these incredible plots that unfold with every page like the layers of an onion (no crying, I promise) and you think you know where the story is going but she changes it up and by the time you finish the book she’s tied everything together. She’s also very good at creating memorable and unusual aliens, including one spider villain from two books ago that still gives me the creeps and I’m not afraid of spiders. On occasion there’s a bit of time travel involved too.

The Key was the first book in the series and here’s the blurb: She’s a stranded soldier. He’s an alien castaway. Can their love save a galaxy torn apart by war?

Sara Donovan knew her top-secret expedition would be dangerous. But she never imagined she’d end up separated from her crew and stranded on an alien planet. When the smoke from her crash landing clears, she’s surprised to find a marooned resistance fighter ready to lend a hand. In a war-torn galaxy, Sara refuses to give her trust lightly… especially when she risks exposing the strange abilities she’s kept hidden since childhood.

Kiernan Fyn survives day by day on the hopes of exacting revenge on the warlord who murdered his wife. Sara is his ticket off the desolate rock to a new better future…until she’s targeted by hostile forces who thinks she holds the key to a long-lost civilization. In a fight for their lives, sparks fly as Sara and Fyn attempt to decipher their hidden connection with the powerful key before their ruthless enemies distort its power for galactic domination.

My second recommendation is Leslie Chase and her Crashland Colony series. One of the things I enjoyed most about the two books (so far) was the author’s ability to take some standard tropes – alien abduction, being marooned on an alien planet, indomitable alien warriors etc. - and turn them on their heads for enjoyable reading.  I also enjoyed the idea of a holographic cat. The blurb for Auric: Crashed on an unexplored planet, with only an alien warrior and a holographic cat for company… what’s a girl to do?

Tamara expected the trip to Arcadia Colony to be safe and boring. And it is — until an impossibly hot alien warrior crashes into the ship, bringing a warning that only Tamara believes. Helping the rugged alien means mutiny… but the threat he’s warning about is worse.

Auric turned his back on the Silver Band when they abandoned honor in favor of piracy. Drawn by the riches of the colony ship, the Band are on their way — and once they arrive, the humans are doomed. Now that he’s met Tamara, Auric knows he can't let anything happen to her. She's the woman fate has chosen for him, the woman he would give his life to save.

When the humans and their alien attackers are stranded on a forbidden planet, Auric and Tamara are flung together on a journey to find other survivors. Will fate be enough to keep Auric and Tamara together? Or will the dangers of the planet tear them apart?

Third, Regine Abel, who has many books to her credit but her Veredian Chronicles is perhaps her best known series. I love her world building, her feisty heroines and her wide variety of settings. Here’s the blurb for Escaping Fate, the first book in the series I’ve mentioned: Born and raised on a slaver’s ship, Amalia plans to escape before she’s forced to participate in her master’s psi breeding program. She finds refuge on a foreign planet where she meets the cousins Lhor and Khel. Together, they fight against those hunting her down, while attempting to rescue the other victims of her master’s slave ring.

Between her master’s dogged pursuit, deadly rivalries, assassins, and corrupted nobles, can the cousins keep Amalia safe or will their respective feelings for her tear them apart?

And since I’m in a rules breaking mood today, let me add another author, Kate Morris, and her Apokalypsis series. I love dystopian End of the World As We Know It fiction, starting with the day I first read Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank. I’m not saying her books are at the Alas, Babylon level! But, I find what I really enjoy a lot is the set of events leading up to the apocalypse, the hints and clues around the characters that disaster is coming, only  people refuse to see it. I wish the TV show ‘Fear the Walking Dead’ had done even more of this before going full zombie. Kate Morris does this really well. 

The first book is a bit Young Adult skewing for me, although I enjoyed it, but I thoroughly enjoyed book 2, which featured a Special Forces type soldier and a New Adult age heroine. Now these books do end on a modified cliffhanger and the author says we’ll see the characters again in book four…I loathe cliffhangers. But I’m definitely along for the ride with this series! The blurb for book 1, although I feel you could safely jump in with the second book:  Life was precious. People used to say things like that all the time, but none of them realized how true that saying would turn out to be. Life was precious, indeed. Each person in the room had lost someone or everyone…

Her life was simply about getting through each awful day of high school without being bullied or picked on. Jane Livingston had a full life, just not one that included friends, boyfriends, school clubs, sports, dating, or anything else the typical teenager experienced. She kept her head down, avoided people, tried to make it out of the war zone (the high school hallways) without any new battle scars.

His life was status, cute girls, cool cars and being the guy everyone else wanted to be at his high school. But there was more to Roman Lockwood than met the eye. He led a miserable existence until he realized the shy, picked-on poor girl he’d known for four years was a lot more than she appeared to be at first glance. There was more to Jane Livingston than met the eye, too. Unfortunately, Roman and Jane’s lives were about to intersect in a way neither would’ve guessed.

Life was delicate, and they’d realize just how much so as their worlds changed from one day being typical high school students to the next when they were merely trying to survive the end of the world together, the end of normalcy, the end of humanity, the end of life itself, when it became: Apokalypsis.

I want to leave you with three resources for broadening your reading list if you so desire, because I’ve found a lot of good recommendations on both:

Queer SciFi.com – I’ve found quite a few M/M paranormal and fantasy romances here, although they do emphasize science fiction…(and I love J Scott Coatsworth's Liminal Sky series...)

WOC In Romance -  covers all genres and here I’ve discovered several new-to-me authors and their backlist.

SFR Station – which has a fun feature where you can search the listings by ‘pairing types’ or subgenres (holiday, space western, weird science etc), in addition to the more standard searches by author name.

Happy reading!

Three Authors Who Deserve More Notice

All right, if we're naming three people who haven't quite gotten, in my mind, their due, I'm going to be DEEPLY biased.  These are all friends, and I'm plugging them.

Amanda Downum.  Her Necromancer Chronicles do brilliant things with necromancy, moving away from it as a "dark" magical art, and making her heroine, Isyllt, a magic forensic pathologist of sorts.  Part spy, part investigator, all awesome.  Start with The Drowning City.

Stina Leicht.  Her two Fey and the Fallen are lyrical and poetic yet STILL hit like a hammer to the chest.  Fair warning, the third chapter of Of Blood and Honey is rough, but it isn't pulling any punches.  And I'm deeply looking forward to her space opera gender-flipped Magnificent Seven coming out next year, Persephone Station.

Rowenna Miller.  My co-host for Worldbuilding for Masochists has two books out so far in her Unraveled Kingdom series: Torn and Fray, and I highly recommend you get those and delight in them.

That's all from me: I've got miles to cover and words to mine.  See you out there.

Reading recs you need to get all over

You know how when you see a movie or a TV show and you suddenly need all your friends to watch it too so you can talk about it? That's how I am with books. I have forced my husband to read sooo many things. (Don't feel sorry for him; he's done the same with me, and we both have experienced plenty of happy surprises.)

At any rate, I'm gonna do that now to you. Right now. Brace for it.

You need to read:

Sharon Lynn Fisher, writer of science fiction romance and other assorted awesomeness. Once upon a time, she judged a contest that I entered, and when I read her scores--which she kindly signed--I looked her up. I read her books, all the time thinking, Holy wow this is the person who read my crap? Because she has oodles of talent and I want to be just like her when writer-me grows up.

Her next book, The Absinthe Earl (Irish fairies, absinthe, an earl, and "a door sealed for centuries"), comes out in October but is pre-oderable now. I adored both Ghost Planet ("a world where every colonist is tethered to an alien who manifests in the form of a dead loved one") and The Ophelia Prophecy (who knew genetic engineering could be so sexy and so, er, buggy at the same time?), both of which are just sitting there ready to be clicked on.

Of course, the reason I started writing science fiction romance in the first place was Catherine Asaro. She was already a legend when I saw her speak on a convention panel years and years ago, and she was so in-your-face that abso-freakin-lutely her hard-SF books had kissing in them, and none of the shocked and horrified dudes on the panel with her dared say anything about it. Maybe because she's awesome. Maybe because she has more scientific advanced degrees than all of them combined. I dunno. At any rate, the first book of hers that I read was The Phoenix Code (android nookie! scientist heroine!), but her Skolian Empire books are sublime. She started a new spin-off series in that world a few years back, the latest of which was published in 2017. I hope she continues writing those books because whoa.

Shifting gears a little, the book I'm reading right now is adorable and I want others folks to read it too--so we can talk about it, right. Ha! It's called David Mogo, Godhunter, and it's Suyi Davies Okungbowa's first novel. Although the description calls it "Nigerian god-punk," it's kind of urban fantasy with a Nigerian accent and a wrapping of YA. I'm loving it so far and want the writer to keep going, so buy his stuff. I mean, it's only one book. You can afford it.

And than we can talk.

Book Recs: 3 Fantasy Authors You Need To Read

This week's topic is shining a light on authors who we think you should be reading, aka Book Recommendations.

Side Note: This weekend, the big SFF gathering of WORLDCON went down in Dublin, which was capped off with the HUGO Awards Ceremony (aka, peer-nominated Best Of Genre spanning authors, editors, fanzines, illustrators, TV, and movies.) Check out the nominees and winners here.



1. Aliette de Bodard
Nominated for a Best Series HUGO for her Universe of Xuya (think Chinese-influenced Sherlock with a sentient ship in the role of Watson). These are short stories and novellas. While they're great, I'm putting forth her Dominion of the Fallen UF series because a) dragons, b) gothic Paris in a post-apocalyptic setting. There are three novels (so far) and novelettes. Yes, she won the British Science Fiction Award for the first book in the series.




2. Laura Bickle
Once upon a time, Laura was one of us, a regular blogger on what was then known as the Word Whores. Laura writes YA and adult UF, and I'm a huge fan of her Modern Weird West UF series The Wildlands. When the protag is a geologist, the sidekick is a coyote, and the alchemists are running amok, you know you're in for a fabulous ride. Five books in this series so far. Laura has a lot of books under her belt, and all of them worth the read, whether you're interested in tarot, fire salamanders, or even Amish horror.




3. Allison Pang
Another graduate and founding member of this blog, Allison has published traditionally with her Abby Sinclair UF series (featuring Phin, the world's tiniest, horniest, most-bacon-loving unicorn). Since then, she's shifted to writing High Fantasy with her IronHeart Chronicles. It's steampunk with a touch of zombies. Two books in this series so far.