Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 109

Hard SF

A perennial topic, addressed again in this Twitter thread:

Who are the authors that come to mind when you think "hard science fiction"? I've been asking some people outside the SFF literary scene and the answers are a bit disappointing (though it's also a great opportunity to introduce them to modern (and diverse!) hard SF authors)!

— Arula Ratnakar 🧠 💕 (@ArulaRatnakar) February 21, 2022

I always find posts like this frustrating because of the lack of agreement about what “hard SF” is in the first place. Without agreement there, you’re stuck. You can say, “No one is naming modern authors!” but if no one agrees that those authors are in fact writing hard SF, your complaint goes down in flames.

Sure enough, the third comment on this thread mentions Octavia E Butler. As far as I’m concerned, she’s as far away from writing hard SF as, say, I am. If you drew a normal curve and put hard SF at one end, Octavia Butler would be … on some other axis completely, I guess. (Science fantasy would actually be at the other end of the curve.)

Butler was writing sociological SF, not hard SF. Lumping the two together does no one any favors, as people who love a lot of sociological SF (raises hand!) may not love all that much hard SF (raises hand again.)

Well, I’m sure I’ve done posts attempting to define hard SF before, and pointing to other people’s attempts to do so, and I don’t feel like doing that again right now. Let me just take a look …

Here are some of the hard SF writers mentioned in this thread. I’m picking out the authors where I personally agree that they indeed wrote and are still writing hard SF.

Vernor VingeGreg Egan Kim Stanley Robinson Hal ClementLarry NivenI know there are lots of others, but I’m stopping here.

Okay, and for some more modern authors, I haven’t read that many, but I agree with:

Mary Robinette Kowal, with her Lady Astronaut series. I read the first book and liked it a lot, probably because it’s got a lot of sociological stuff going on too in addition to the hard SF elements.Andy Weir, in The Martian. I don’t know about his other book; I haven’t read it and had the impression it’s more space opera.I don’t know, honestly, I barely read anything in hard SF. Who else would you all suggest?

An author who’s being mentioned in this thread is an example of a classic problem with defining hard SF — it’s Martha Wells. I definitely don’t consider the Murderbot novels hard SF. I’m not sure what I do consider them. Rapid handwavy hacking by cyborgs plus the existence of amazing bots like ART does not equal hard SF. In fact, once again, this seems closer to sociological SF to me. Much closer.

We really, really need an industry-wide recognition of sociological SF as a thing. That needs to be recognized so that people will stop trying to cram it into hard SF. Then it would be much easier and a lot more fun to argue about where Murderbot fits.

Anyway, I pulling this suggestion out of the comment thread:

S. Qiouyi Lu 陸秋逸@sqiouyilu·Feb 21 —-“chimera”—hard biogenetic scifi that literally cites a paper in footnotes and also “möbius continuum”—so hard of a scifi story that it’s math fiction

Those sound intriguing, so I’ve provided links. I haven’t read them, and I may not because hard SF isn’t really my thing, but if one or both are great, by all means let us know in the comments and I’ll definitely read the stories at that point.

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Available for Preorder

Whew, now that the Black Dog sale is over, I finally feel that it’s reasonable to announce that Shines Now, and Heretofore is available for preorder as a Kindle ebook. The preorder went live a week or two ago, but it seemed weird to announce it before the other sale was over.

Yes, I will release it widely, but I don’t even know if Draft to Digital has a preorder option or not. I’ll do my best to hit publish over there at about the same time Shines Now goes live at Amazon. Which will be May 21, by the way, which gives me all the time in the world to incorporate the suggestions of a final beta reader and then start the lengthy proofreading process. In fact, maybe I should start that now, even before final revisions, as I want to do several proofing iterations before I ask anyone else to do it.

Meanwhile, I’ll be interested to see whether Shines Now beats my other preorders. It might, considering it will be available as a preorder for close to three times as long as anything else I’ve ever put up for preorder, but on the other hand I haven’t run nearly as many sales on this series as my other series, so we’ll see.

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Recent Reading: The Invisible ring

I don’t think I completed even one new-to-me book during February. Pretty sure that is a new low in books read per month for my entire life. I mean, since I learned to read, anyway. I did read parts of four new-to-me books. all of which I actually do like and I trust I will complete at least some of them in March. But wow, is this a low-reading year.

But mentioning the Black Jewels trilogy kind of put me in the mood to read another book in this series that I’d never gotten to.

This is a prequel novel — it takes place well before the Black Jewels trilogy and is referenced by later books in the overall series. I don’t know why I skipped it initially. Reviews are not bad. It’s at 4.7 stars. I assume some of Anne Bishop’s fans just rate everything of hers five stars no matter what, but I’m surprised it’s that high. I sort of liked it and read the whole thing, but I’d rate it, oh, maybe a three. Maybe two and a half. Let me look at some of the three-star reviews … ah, yes, here’s one citing one of the failings I also noted: the characters are painfully slow on the uptake and the events are highly predictable.

The main protagonist is Jared. He’s just not the sharpest knife in the drawer. I realize he’s had a tough nine years, but here are the things that are painfully obvious that he either misses completely or takes multiple chapters to realize: the invisible ring is solely metaphorical; the Gray Lady is not elderly; the Gray Lady is not trading that girl to bandits for safe passage; the [situation] is a trap; Daimon Sadi should be trusted completely; the “pet” is [redacted].

Just conceivably someone might not realize that [the situation] is a trap or who the “pet” is, so fine, I’m not spoiling those details even though IT WAS OBVIOUS.

The main secondary characters also tended to do stupid things, especially Lia. If Jared had ruined everything at the last minute, I would have blamed Lia for not explaining the plan and therefore practically guaranteeing that Jared would not play his assigned part smoothly. The stupid excuse for not explaining everything to Jared was stupid. It was far, far riskier to withhold that explanation than it would have been to explain the whole thing up front.

This, this right here, is why every author needs a first reader who is not going to let it pass when characters do stupid things. I realize Anne Bishop is popular and probably her editor did not feel the need to help her improve her book, but that is a shame because it is always possible to come up with a smarter plan for your characters to execute if you just put your mind to it. If you have to make a character be slow on the uptake, then you need to justify that slowness. You can always come up with a reason better than “Well, he’s eye-rollingly stupid” if you decide it’s important enough to bother.

Second problem with the novel: a whopping huge proportion, maybe as much as a third of the entire story, is told from the villain’s point of view. I skimmed those chapters lightly and you know what? Those scenes are not in any way necessary to follow the story. As far as I could tell, no crucial information is delivered to the reader via those villain pov chapters. The good guys figure out everything important (eventually). The villain chapters add nothing to the book except for the opportunity to follow along as a weak-willed character becomes totally evil. Wow, was I not interested in that.

Third problem with the novel: everything was predictable. Jared might not have known what was going on, but the reader isn’t likely to be so slow. I would guess almost any reader will be at least three chapters ahead of the good guys even if the reader is skipping the villain chapters. I think I was mildly surprised by one minor plot twist.

Now, actually, I don’t always mind predictability. A story that follows a predictable path is lower tension than one that doesn’t, and low tension is fine with me these days. Part of why I’m re-reading a lot more than reading new-to-me books is because knowing what events are coming up is fine. So I’m actually not particularly bothered that The Invisible Ring was predictable. I’m just saying: it definitely was predictable.

I’m going to go re-read the Black Jewels trilogy now. It’s got its share of problems, but I like it much better. I’m going to do a good parts re-read, skipping all villain points of view and everything transitional and some of the bits where a main character is in especially dire circumstances. I’ll focus on the scenes I like best, including the wonderful scenes with the young Jaenelle interacting with Daimon and Saimon, and the scenes where Daimon and Lucivar get their lives in order.

Meanwhile, what can I say? This was much less a book review than a suggestion for anyone writing a novel: Don’t let your characters do stupid things unless you have an actual reason they ought to be stupid at that moment.

Bad guy points of view are a matter of taste, but no one likes blindingly stupid protagonists.

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Immortals

From Twitter, this thread:

Fantasy Writing Tip 15: Immortals!
Who doesn't love a fantasy immortal? They form a staple part of my writing. But they can also be a source of great frustration.
Here I'll be using "immortal" to mean "has a life span in excess of 1,000 years."
Let's dig in!#amwriting
1/18

— Ed McDonald (@EdMcDonaldTFK) February 23, 2022

I immediately thought of many of the characters in Anne Bishop’s Black Jewels series, who are 2500 years old, but from their behavior you might as well knock off the zeros because they act more like they’re 25. What is even the point of living thousands of years if those years don’t touch you? I realize there are lots of vampires like that in paranormals, but the Black Jewels is definitely the series that leaps to mind for me.

I should add, I quite liked this series. Many things about it appealed to me. It’s just that I would have liked it better if she had let the characters all be the ages they acted. There was no enormously compelling plot point that turned on so many characters being thousands of years old, so why make them thousands of years old? Especially why do that and then ignore the psychological effects of immortality?

I wonder what Tenai would have been like if her obsessive hatred for Encormio had been limited by a normal human lifespan. In fact, I wonder what Encormio would have been like if he’d died at eighty instead of going on and on and on? He was older than the Martyr, if you remember — which means over 2000 years old. He certainly did not act like any normal person. We don’t even have to have met him in person to know that.

Side question: Should I ask the artist to capitalize the “N” in “Now”? I didn’t notice it hadn’t been capitalized and now I’m not sure. There are various words in the other titles that might have been capitalized, but weren’t. Maybe it’s fine like this.

Anyway: other immortals in SFF. There are hordes, of course, and while some of them act like normal twenty-something people, some don’t. From the Twitter thread:

Our connection to other people (in any sense, not just romantic) defines us. Immortals have seen countless people come and go. They’ve forgotten more people from the first 200 years of life than they’ll meet in the next 100 years of life. How does that affect perspective? … When writing a 1000 year old, a good thinking point is to imagine that every mortal in the world will be born, age and die in 1 year. They’ll flit into and out of your life like pet mice. How much value is it possible to place on them? Where does their value to you lie?

Exactly. Taranah, the king’s aunt, told Daniel that Encormio thought of ordinary people the way that people think of dogs, and she didn’t mean nice dog owners either. Mice is probably a better comparison.

Remember my other immortal character? We did meet her directly:

People and dynasties and countries come and go, says the Kieba, or something very much like that. It is a mistake to grow too fond. Remember that line? By the time we meet her, Kieba isn’t very human at all. For a couple different reasons, granted, but one was certainly her odd sort of quasi-immortality.

Let me see, other immortals — Oh, right, here is one of my favorites — or two of my favorites:

Doro and Anyanwu, very different people handling immortality in very different ways. Of course Doro has to kill people in order to maintain himself, but also he’s just a lot older than Anyanwu. A LOT older. Humans are very much like mice to Doro. Anyanwu just maintains herself at any age she wishes, so she hasn’t been pushed into callousness the way Doro was. I loved this book, but it didn’t resolve anything. Anyanwu comes to accept a relationship with Doro in which she is relatively powerless; we see how that looks from the outside in a later book. Not just anybody could make me enjoy and admire a book where the central relationship is so pathological. Butler pulled that off all the time.

If you’ve got a favorite SFF novel featuring an immortal protagonist or immortal secondary character, drop the title in the comments!

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Fifteen Novel Openings

Okay, it’s been a while, and amazingly enough even though I’m REALLY not reading anything much that’s new to me, I’ve nevertheless managed to acquire a number of new books and samples. Fifteen, in fact, about half full books and about half samples, depending probably more on price than anything else. I honestly don’t think my book acquisition rate actually slows down a lot even when I’m reading literally fewer than one new-to-me book per month instead of fifteen. It’s remarkable, in a way.

I am reading a little, but slowly, and switching from book to book depending on my mood and, I don’t know, tolerance for novelty, I guess would be one way of putting it. Exactly one of these beginnings caught me enough to make me turn more than once page. I’ll tell you which it was at the end.

A lot of you will recognize one or another of the titles here because you recommended most of these. However, this first one was recommended by someone I follow on Twitter – Joel Dane, who wrote Cry Pilot. That series has been too high-tension for me to want to go on with it, but I liked the first book a lot and, so that recommendation was enough for me to pick up a sample.

1.  The Misfit Soldier by Michael Mammay

When you join the military, none of the recruiting material shows you trying to stow away on a bot freighter headed to a war zone on a hellhole of a planet. But there I was.

I like this! Funny and interesting right off the bat. A promising first couple of sentences. I’m glad I picked up the sample.

2.  The Forgery Furore by Marissa Doyle

The ormolu clock on the chimneypiece was striking seven as Annabel, Lady Fellbridge, slipped into her seat in the white-and-gold paneled room and glanced around the table, taking a quick count. Ah, good – she was not the last to arrive. Even after more than a year, being the newest member of the Lady Patronesses of Almack’s still made her feel like a young girl allowed to dine with the adults for the first time: she’d thought about sneaking in under a concealing shadow in case she was late, but fortunately that had not been necessary.

Nothing particularly striking one way or the other. It’s fine.

For this next book, there was a brief prologue, but I skipped it: this is the opening of Chapter 1

3.  Through a Dark Glass by Barb Hendee

I was trapped, and I knew it. Worse, it came as a shock on my seventeenth birthday, the same day my elder sister died.

Daughters of the nobility are mere tools for their families, so in truth what transpired shouldn’t have come as such a surprise, but I’d been trained and honed as a different type of tool than my sister, Helena.

Again, this is fine. Despite the obvious differences, this is sort of similar to the one above as both evoke a Regency sort of setting. I don’t know that I’m exactly in the mood for something like this, but there’s nothing particularly off-putting about it.

This time a longer prologue; again, I skipped it.

4.  The Necklace by Carla Kelly

All romantic notions aside – Hanneke Aardema had few – marrying a cousin of the king of Castile and Leon seemed precisely what a man as ambitious as her father might attempt. Why hadn’t she suspected he might do something like this?

I like this better, even though it’s got the same sort of historical Regency-ish vibe. I like that first sentence a lot. That’s an admirable use of dashes. This protagonist immediately comes to life in a way that I think the two above don’t. Carla Kelly has a real tendency to make the father into a problem who kicks off the plot by being irresponsible or wicked, and she certainly seems to be doing that again here. Which is fine. I just happen to have noticed that she does that a lot.

Yet again, a long prologue; once more, I skipped it to take a look at the opening of Chapter 1

5.  The Phoenix Feather: Fledglings by Sherwood Smith

Mouse woke the next morning after dreams full of terrible images – her parents being chased by shadowy figures led by one wearing gold, and her mother kneeling in the surf with blood pouring down her face. But they were heroes! Her father fighting a duel against an evil prince, that was heroic! Her mother putting the charms down to raise the fog, that was heroic too. Also clever.

I think this might be the second time I’ve opened this one up. Some of you keep mentioning this series, so it came back to my attention and I downloaded it onto my phone, where I’m more likely to take a real look at it. Mouse sounds very young. I don’t know if I’m exactly in the mood for such a young protagonist. But it does matter a lot that some of you keep nudging me toward this story.

6.  Gabriel’s Ghost by Linnea Sinclair

Only fools boast they have no fears. I thought of that as I pulled the blade of my dagger from the Takan guard’s throat, my hand shaking, my heart pounding in my ears, my skin cold from more than just the chill in the air.

I wasn’t all that taken with Finders Keepers, which was just okay for me. This one has a prison escape, a trope I love, so I thought I’d try it. I do like this beginning.

7.  Greenglass House by Kate Milford

There is a right way to do things and a wrong way, if you’re going to run a hotel in a smuggler’s town. You shouldn’t make it a habit to ask too many questions, for one thing. And you probably shouldn’t be in it for the money. Smugglers are always going to flush with cash as soon as they find a buyer for the eight cartons of fountain pen cartridges that write in illegal shades of green, but they never have money today.

I love this opening. Light and quick, with an instantly engaging voice.

8.  Admiral’s Oath by Glynn Stewart

The universe could change in a thousand ways. A proud old indigenous nation could divide itself across the stars, guarding new world and old alike against the failures of mankind. A child of that nation could rise to some of the highest ranks of the military that guarded that nation and a thousand others.

 But grandmothers didn’t change, and Rear Admiral James Tecumseh of the Terran Commonwealth Navy grinned at his incorrigible ancestor as she waved a hand at him.

I’m not particularly taken with the first paragraph, but I do like the second paragraph.

9.  The Border Keeper by Kerstin Hall

She lived where the railway tracks met the saltpan, on the Ahri side of the shadowline. In the old days, when people still talked about her, she was known as the end-of-the-line woman. She had other titles, many more, although most lay forgotten and buried now. Whispers of her presence rustled down through the centuries, a footnote here, a folksong there. Rumors. Myths. Yet she did not dwell in a house of bones, or eat children, or carve hexes into the entrails of men beneath the light of the full autumn moon.

A thoroughly artistic beginning. I like it, but this immediately makes me feel that the story where I’d have to pay attention to the worldbuilding and the writing itself. It’s all artistic and literary and I’m not sure I’m in the mood.

10.  Quest for a Maid by Frances Mary Hendry

When I was nine years old, I hid under a table and heard my sister kill a king.

Some of you mentioned this in glowing terms. That certainly is a catchy first sentence.

11.  by Kate Stradling

I was a mistake.

My mother always says this as a joke. “Oh, Jen was our little mistake, but she’s turned out well enough so far.” And then she squeezes my arm and shares a laugh with my dad, and I force a smile at whichever dignitary they’re schmoozing.

If we’re looking at toxic family relationships, I’m not into that, especially not right now. Also the protagonist instantly strikes me as self-absorbed, which again, not what I want right now.

Next up, another book with a long prologue, and then this:

12.  Dreamwalker by CS Friedman

“Tommy?”

No answer. I pushed the door open the rest of the way and stepped into the house. The interior was gloomy, not at all what you’d expect on a summer afternoon. It took me a few seconds to register that all the curtains had been drawn shut.

Nothing interesting here. Or at least, nothing that particularly catches my attention.

13.  Winter’s Orbit by Everina Maxwell

“Well, someone has to marry the man,” the Emperor said.

She sat, severe and forbidding in a high-collared tunic, in her reception room at the heart of the warren-like sprawl of the Imperial Palace. The arching windows of the tower were heavily optimized to amplify the weak autumn sunlight from Iskan V; the warm rays that lit the wrinkled Imperial countenance should have softened it, but even the sunlight had given that up as a bad job.

Oh, yes, this is one of the arranged-marriage stories that came up in the comments recently. I might be in the mood for this. Hmm. I hadn’t realized that, but yes, could be. … I see it’s $13 for the ebook. That’s a heck of a high price for a new-to-me author. Who set this price? Ah, Tor. Well, I don’t know whether I’m that interested.

I will say, I can’t tell whether the Emperor is the woman sitting severe and forbidding or whether the Emperor is speaking to that woman. One would not ordinary paragraph if the Emperor is the woman, but the author might have paragraphed to make the first sentence stand out. However, I hereby offer this piece of advice:

If you’re going to use a title that is usually gendered, and you’re going to reverse the gender, please indicate that immediately, in crystal clear terms, the very first time you use the title. That way the reader will be able to tell how many people are present in the scene. Please do not puzzle the reader by making simple questions like how many people are present a big confusing deal. It turns out – I’m pretty sure – that the Emperor is the woman. Ah, yes, she is. It took several paragraphs to arrive at that conclusion. Please. Don’t do that. All it would have taken to avoid that confusion in this case would have been following ordinary paragraphing conventions for fiction.

14.  Crown of Shadows by KM Shea

I was on my way out the door from my parents’ house on a humid spring day, eager to launch my long-cherished plan to become a Responsible Adult, when I glanced over at the horse pasture and saw it. A monster.

I could like this.

15.  Jade City by Fonda Lee

The two would-be jade thieves sweated in the kitchen of the Twice Lucky restaurant. The windows were open in the dining room, and the onset of evening brought a breeze off the waterfront to cool the diners, but in the kitchen, there were only the two ceiling fans that had been spinning all day to little effect. Summer had barely begun and already the city of Janloon was like a spent lover – sticky and fragrant.

Okay, so, several people have recently made comments that made me get this book. However, I really do not like this opening. I see that a lot of people highlighted that last sentence because it’s underlined in my version. Well, I can’t imagine why anybody finds that line appealing enough to highlight it. It’s vivid, certainly, but not in a way I appreciate.

I will add that, of these books, Jade City is the title that I keep hearing about. Every time I turn around, I’m tripping over yet another rave review or at least another positive comment. I will almost certainly try it for real eventually, but probably not soon because all the recent comments I’ve heard have been like, “I’m amazed I like this because it’s very violent, but somehow it’s working for me anyway.”

Okay! Which of these openings do you think made me go on and read several pages?

Wrong! (Probably.) I normally do read a few more sentences than I type up for these posts, and the entry that kept me turning pages was Crown of Shadows. It’s an UF or something in that general vicinity. Arranged marriage; reluctant fae queen who decides she’d better marry the assassin who (I think from the book description) initially tries to kill her. Disregarding the book description, I was hooked enough to read onward. Here’s how this story continues:

I was on my way out the door from my parents’ house on a humid spring day, eager to launch my long-cherished plan to become a Responsible Adult, when I glanced over at the horse pasture and saw it. A monster.

It was a skeletal creature that was only vaguely horse-like. Even from this far away I could see the bulges and indents of its bones. Its ribs and spine stuck out uncomfortably, and its neck was too thin and made its head look huge and blocky.

A fae creature if I ever saw one – which meant that it was deadly at best and murderous at worst. And it was standing about three feet away from Bagel, my pet donkey.

And that’s why I turned the page. I was worried about the donkey. But not that worried. This really doesn’t seem like the tone of a story where a donkey is going to get eviscerated in the first chapter. (Spoiler: the donkey is fine, at least so far. I’m betting it stays fine. This honestly does not seem like a donkey-evisceration sort of story.)

I’ve read the whole first chapter; I like it; this story doesn’t seem to be taking itself too seriously and I guess I’m in the mood for that. I didn’t think I was particularly interested in paranormals or UF and would definitely not have thought I’d pull this one out to read, but fine, I’ve gone ahead and picked up the full book — $4, which makes a huge difference — and we’ll see. Maybe I’ll actually read it soon.

However, this isn’t the story that I think has the best beginning, not at all.

The openings I like the best are #1, #4, #7, and #9.

The openings I think are objectively the best are #7 and #9.

If I had to pick just one, it would be #7.

What do you all think? Any standouts in a good or bad way?

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Just what you’ve been Waiting For

An ordinary millipede has, as you probably know, about 300 legs. This is a trial to those of us who prefer that prefixes mean what they say.

Right? I mean, I’m sure that the disconnect between “milli” and the number of legs a millipede actually possesses must have been keeping you up nights since you were a tot, correct?

Well, fortunately, we have now located a species of millipede that actually does have a thousand legs — at least.

This is an amazingly teensy millipede, Eumillipes persephone, which looks a lot like it has cilia or something until you whip out a magnifying glass. It’s only three and a half inches long! That’s shorter than an ordinary garden millipede! I mean the ones we get in Missouri, which are Narceus, and about four inches long. But a whole lot wider. A Narceus millipede looks like a tanker truck next to an Eumillipes, which more closely resembles a strand of sphagetti.

The name is excellent. Good for whoever named this new little critter Eumillipes.

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Back in Action: BVC

The Book View Cafe website redesign and the massive amount of stuff going on behind the scenes has all been finished, or nearly so. Therefore, here is the new —

Book View Cafe blog

Which today features a post by Steven Popkes about handling multiple points of view

This part of the discussion covers two questions: how to approach multiple POVs and how to manage them. The first is an esthetic discussion of how one could present multiple POVs. The second is mechanical: how to keep track of all those POVs over a long narrative. …

This can definitely be a challenge. I’ve done multiple points of view more often than not — usually two, or two primary points of view, but sometimes more. I think Winter of Ice and Iron has more points of view than any other book of mine. Kehera and Innisth are the protagonists, but a lot of secondary characters carry the pov here or there — Tiro, Gereth, a couple of others very briefly.

Personally, I have a list of chapters with that shows pov character and page count so I can keep track of how much of the narrative each character is carrying. I only switch pov at chapter breaks. Well, that’s not quite true: every now and then, usually not more than once per book, I do switch pov in the middle of a chapter. I don’t like to do that and always consider simply having some very short chapters instead, but every now and then I’ve done it. Steven Popkes has used more different tools to keep track of points of view than I ever have, so click through if you’re interested in various ideas for how to manage that.

And here is the new —

Home page, where new releases are featured.

By an amazing coincidence, two of my backlist titles are being featured today. Of course I put off this post until today for that reason, but honestly, the site only went live in the last week or two, so it seemed okay to hold off mentioning it till today.

I’m putting out Door Into Light and The Sphere of the Winds through BVC because, well, it’s a total non-brainer to do that, so much so that I’m embarrassed I didn’t think of doing so first, before any other book of mine. These have never been in KU, so there is literally no downside whatsoever to putting them out through BVC as well as everywhere else.

I like the new browsing feature — browsing by genre — shown here. There was quite a bit of discussion about which genres to include, as you can imagine. Too many would create deleterious clutter; too few would prevent people from selecting genres and subgenres they prefer; thus discussion. I think the genres selected are a good compromise. Four Fantasy categories; three categories for Historicals; Paranormal shown next to Romance; Space Opera broken out of Science Fiction, etc. Of course people then had to decide what to call their books. Click through and browse to see if you agree with where everyone put their titles.

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Progress Report: Not Much Progress, but It Was A Busy Week

Do you realize tomorrow is March? Wow, suddenly spring!

Crocuses, snowdrops, grape hyacinths will all be appearing in the next week. In fact, once the last of ice turns to slush and melts away — probably this afternoon — I’ll have to take a good look, because I bet the first crocuses are coming up right now. I do love spring, even though another reasonable term for spring in Missouri is Mud Season.

I don’t know whether you all got ice or snow or both last week, but we had pure ice, an inch or more thick, as smooth and perfect as an ice skating rink. Not only did the dogs not leave tracks, not only did I not leave tracks, my car literally did not leave tracks down the driveway.

The ice disarranged my plans somewhat, but not too badly, I hope. I drove to St Louis four times last week: once for heart clearances for four of the dogs and three times to breed Leda to Ish, which required my reproductive vet for reasons to complicated to go into. Except I’ll say that this is Leda’s third try and this time if she misses again, I’ll be placing her as a pet because this will be very strong evidence that she is unable to get pregnant. Well, now I can put that out of my mind until March 25th, which is when I will do an ultrasound and see whether she is pregnant or otherwise.

Meanwhile, that was all fairly tiring and I didn’t do a whole lot. Fiddled with Kuomat’s story; began revising Suelen’s story according to the comments of a first reader; paused Invictus once more in order to work with those.

I sent Kuomat’s story to one more first reader this morning and I’ll send Suelen’s story to one more first reader this week sometime, and then I will wade into the final 65 pp of Invictus that I haven’t revised yet.

My goal for the end of the week is to begin actually moving forward with Invictus. My hope (not a plan) is to have it actually finished by the end of March. If I don’t make that, then by the end of April. That ought to be more than reasonable because even though all this revision has been a pain in my neck, the manuscript really is in pretty reasonable shape. I think. I’m pretty sure.

The hard part recently has been figuring out (a) Why, in story terms, the captain of Invictus is going to do a thing I need her to do in the upcoming scene; (b) The reason she is going to give out loud for doing that thing; (c) The real reason she is doing that thing; (d) how that thing drives her to make a startling decision and what happens next. I mean, I know what happens next, but turning that flow of action into a correct and even inevitable flow of action is a challenge.

I actually had to pause and brainstorm reasons for doing the thing. I almost never brainstorm in writing, but I was stuck and sometimes that helps. I think I have plausible reasons lined up now.

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Ongoing sale

I realize lots of you know this, but:

Big sale on the series for the next few days.Please Feel Free to Share:

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Entertaining Quora Q&A

Just for fun this Friday —

Quite a few odd questions turn up on Quora. Here is one I saw recently that made me pause:

What are not the characteristics of a volcano?

And here is my favorite answer.

Click through and enjoy. I didn’t chuckle out loud until the twelfth item on the list.

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