The Legacies We All Leave

So, while I was thinking about who I would write an "in memoriam" tribute to, there has been a discussion this past month over Joseph Campbell and James Tiptree (Alice Sheldon), and the awards named after them.  It has put me in mind of legacy, specifically the legacies we each are building for ourselves here and now.

(For the record, I am for renaming both awards, but that’s largely academic: official decisions have been made on both scores and my opinion matters not one bit. But that’s tangential to what I want to talk about.)

As I’ve been navigating this business of being a professional writer, I’ve been thinking more and more about Legacy, what we build today and what we’re going to be leaving behind for the future.  I addressed some of that in my speech at ArmadilloCon:

“We have to be able to accept that some of the great masters of yesterday might have become the forgotten trivia of today.  Just as we have to accept that the fresh new genius of today, might become the problematic favorites of tomorrow.”

In the past, Campbell’s troubling opinions and Sheldon’s final acts in this world were largely— often intentionally— overlooked in favor of honoring the impact their work had. But Legacy is never just about the work, is it? That’s why this conversation is being had now, after all.  Every aspect of the work, of their personhood, that’s a matter of record.  But the opinion of how and why those matter has shifted, and the Legacy shifts with it. This is very much a Good Thing, that the old skeletons are dragged out of the closet and re-examined.  But it’s also a hard thing to think about, especially the idea that some day, in the future, that skeleton might be your own.  

Now, I’m not so egocentric to not be aware that in my case (and in many cases), said legacy might be little more than a footnote: a bit of genre trivia, a smattering of polite applause at the In Memoriam section of an awards show. That is how it goes.

But I also think about one aspect of this business that continues to be surreal to me is how things like the Hugo & Nebula nominees has shifted from “all time giants” to personal friends and acquaintances. It’s humbling and awe-inspiring.

I mean, consider, many of you reading this, especially the Hugo & Neb noms & winners follow me: 

You might be one of the All Time Giants of tomorrow. 

Which also makes us the potential problematic faves of tomorrow. The venerated special guest at WorldCon 2059 that makes The Young People roll their eyes (or whatever Gen∞ does in ’59) and say, “That old relic? Must we have them?”

And there the things that last beyond us, beyond just the work. The notes, the communications. We hear about, say, the letter Sheldon wrote to Silverberg, held up as an example of her desires and state of mind. 

Imagine that email you just sent being given that same weight of history.

Imagine it being held up as evidence of why your name should or should not be on an award.

Imagine, my friends, the idea that your name might be on an award.  It's not that radical a notion.

I think about those future genre scholars who might some day pore through our emails and twitter rants and our DMs (OH DEAR LORD, OUR DM’S) and reconstruct us in ways we never intended. Or that someone would even care to do it.

How will our friendships, our enmities, our secret joys and bitter rages be viewed in 30, 40, 50 years?  If we are fortunate enough to still matter, in what ways will we matter?  How kindly will what we built be looked upon once we’re gone?

These are some of the thoughts that keep me up at night.

I strive to do the best work I can do; to be the best version of myself possible, in the hopes that whatever Legacy I leave, if any, will reflect the person I try to be. That’s the best any of us can hope for.

That said, if you decide to delete some of your mean or cruel DMs, I wouldn’t blame you.  You never know where that could end up decades down the line…

In memoriam: Madeleine L’Engle

I was a weird kid: nerdy, awkward, fuzzy-headed with black-caterpillar eyebrows and the opposite of grace or talent or athleticism. I went to a music magnet school for elementary and a math-and-science middle school, and though I diligently played violin and competed in math contests, I wasn’t a superstar and mostly flew under the radar. Other kids teased me for a variety of reasons, and I can’t really fault them. I was a mess. The lone thing I did well was write things, but I did it in private for the most part, because whoever would want to read this nonsense I was churning out?

And then one day I read A Wrinkle in Time, and it was like someone had written a book about me, for me. First, Meg, the heroine, was a girl. Second, she was different, weird. Third, she didn’t have to save the world with her brilliant problem-solving or physical bravery or derring do. She saved the world by loving people.

This book changed my life. And even more, when I read up on the author, Madeleine L’Engle, her personal story spoke to me. I mean, my parents weren’t rich and distant artists, but my sense of isolation in childhood and adolescence was very prominent. When she described the peace of her private writing bubble and talked about how it helped her get through some rough spots, I was inspired to inhabit a similar peace.

Madeleine L’Engle died in 2007, long before I published even a short story, but I credit her work and her personal life as reasons I kept going, kept working, kept hoping that despite all my strong feelings to the contrary, someday someone would want to read fantastical stories penned by a weird little girl.

Hey there, Ms. L’Engle, up among the stars: thank you.

The Most Awesome Book Signing That Never Happened

In my fantasy, it would've been the most awesome Romancelandia book signing ever:

Krantz, Krentz, & Krantz

Alas, it wasn't meant to be. Nevermind that I've never published a romance novel much less entered the same authorly stratosphere of Judith and Jayne Ann. Judith Krantz passed away in June at the lively young age of 91. (Don't panic, Jayne Ann is still with us!)

Did you know Judith published her first novel Scruples at the age of 50? 50! Sure, she'd had a long career as a fashion journalist and editor of leading magazines like Good Housekeeping and Cosmopolitan before launching into fiction. She lingers in my memory as the unapologetic creator of high glitz, glamour, and excesses of 80s romances. Back when getting a book made into a TV miniseries for a network was a BFD, especially when the show was a romance, she had seven of her books make it to the small screen. In those days, cable TV was a newfangled thingy, getting out of your seat to change the channel was way more common than using a "remote controller." She and Danielle Steele were the titans of the time.

I remain fascinated by the woman behind the pages, the businesswoman, the proud author who repeatedly stood up to the literatti for demeaning romance as a genre and the readers as vacuous housewives. Considered a feminist by many and a topic of study in universities, she wrote heroines with agency amid sweeping sagas--think more salacious content than Margret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, but nonetheless gripping. Thirty years on, we might roll our eyes at the high drama of Mistrial's Daughter, but we'd devour the book for the privilege of following Maggy Lunel's ups and downs of love, loss, and bonus baby.

Here's to the legacy of Judith Krantz, the woman with the brass to pen an autobiography titled
Sex and Shopping.

#RIPJudithKrantz

~raises glass of bourbon~

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

DepositPhoto

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!