Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 343

Recent Reading: SHIFTING SHADOWS by Patricia Briggs

Interrupting one book to read another is very rare for me. Almost unheard of. In fact, stopping in the middle of one book to read something else almost always means the first one is a DNF because even if I meant to go back to it, I probably won’t.

But Newman’s ICE CREAM STAR is an exception. I’m halfway through it, and so far I’m really enjoying it, although it’s pretty intense. The setting is pretty brutal, as you might expect for a postapocalyptic everyone-dies-before-twenty kind of setting. Which turns out to not quite be true, but anyway, comments on that book when I’m actually finished with it.

I was talking to somebody on Friday about Patricia Briggs’ short story collection, SHIFTING SHADOWS, which I’ve never read. It turns out that I’ve only ever read one of the stories in that collection, and hearing that the whole collection is good, I went ahead and picked it up. Then, since I recently read the latest Alpha and Omega novel and was in the mood, I paused with ICE CREAM STAR and read Briggs’ collection right then.

And I was glad to find that all the stories are indeed good, solid stories. I didn’t keep track of which were new to the collection and which had been previously published, because as I said, all but one were new to me anyway. My favorites were Kara’s story, “Roses in Winter,” and Ben’s story, “Redemption.” Oh, and David Christianson’s story, too — “The Star of David.”

Briggs mentions in her notes about the stories that readers have kept asking and asking about Kara. The Kara I mean here is the little girl who was turned into a werewolf when she was ten or so. (I specify because Briggs has used the name three times now for minor characters.) Well, I, too, have really wanted to know what was going on with Kara. So this story was very satisfying. Especially since I’ve always liked Asil anyway.

Ben is a secondary character who has always been interesting and sympathetic. I’ve loved watching his slow recovery from his horribly background. This was a fun story with a lot of humor but also some depth to it.

David Christiansen is the guy who was turned into a werewolf overseas and didn’t learn how to control his wolf until tragedy had already happened. I always wanted to see more of him, too, and I’m really pleased to see him reconnect with his estranged daughter in this story.

The character I would have liked to see but didn’t get in this collection was Honey. Honey is one of the most interesting female characters in Mercy Thompson’s world, maybe the most interesting; certainly by far the most sympathetic female werewolf. On the other hand, given what was going on in NIGHT BROKEN, the most recent Mercy Thompson novel, I am virtually certain that Honey is going to take on a more front-and-center role in the ongoing novels. So, fine. I can wait.

Okay. Now I’m going back to ICE CREAM STAR. I need to finish it before I can start revising HOUSE OF SHADOWS — and I would kind of like to have that done before the beginning of May.

Somehow it never occurred to me to sacrifice a goat

Marie Bilodeau posts at Black Gate: The Definitive Guide to Selling Books sans InterWebs

Gather round, Authors of Yore, Authors of Now and Authors of Soon, and learn the true ways of book selling success. . . . Next time you do a signing in a bookstore, sacrifice the goat right in the middle of the aisle. The bleating will attract the curious. The gore will disorient them. Your crazed eyes will make them buy. . . . Add a bloodied knife, a ritual sacrifice and a crazed seller, and you’ve got yourself a guaranteed sale!

Well, okay, this crazy post *may* not offer the definitive answers to all your marketing needs. But it’s funny! Click through and read the whole thing. The comments are also good. Has there been any kind of study on the role of the trebuchet in bookselling? See there? Now that’s the kind of question you need in advice columns.

This goat-sacrifice post actually led me, by a circuitous route involving The Passive Voice, to this post, answering the longstanding question: can you actually make money selling used books for a penny on Amazon? I always wondered about that. I do buy used books, still. I buy used books for all kinds of reasons:

a) I am buying used copies of older edition algebra books to loan out to students who are trying to prep for a test or reviewing algebra before their class next semester (something I wish more students would do). I try to pay under a dollar (plus shipping and handling) because a largish percentage of my loaned-out books do not return and I’m using my own money. (This is not because my boss is cheap. It’s because dealing with purchase orders is a nuisance and my book budget doesn’t really notice half a dozen algebra books a year.)

b) The book is out of print and there is no Kindle edition.

c) I happen to wander by a used book store or a library sale.

d) There is an enormous difference in cost between the new book and a used copy, and the author is famous. JK Rowling or Steven King are not going to notice the loss of a sale, so I wouldn’t feel guilty buying a used copy of one of their books.

e) I am suspicious that I may not like the book. I bought A Companion to Wolves by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear used because online reviews made me wary. Then I bought the second book on Kindle because I turned out to love the first.

I’m sure there are other reasons I might pick up a used book, but those are some of the most common.

But I always am amazed at how many books are listed on Amazon for a penny. It turns out that it works like this:

The price point is partly a result of the market’s downward pressure: at a certain level of supply and demand the race to the lowest price swiftly plummets to the bottom. What remains inflexible is the $3.99 fee Amazon charges the buyer for shipping. From that $4, Amazon takes what they call a “variable closing fee” of $1.35. They also charge the seller 15% of the item’s price – which in the case of a penny book is zero. That leaves $2.64 to cover postage, acquisition cost and overhead. “All told,” Mike Ward concedes, “we only make a few cents on a penny book sale like that.” Now that hardly seems like much, true. “But keep in mind,” he adds, “that last year we sold 11.5m books.”

Ah, yes, that does go some way toward explaining the phenomenon. Also, evidently there is a fairly important public service attitude involved in re-marketing used books rather than just sending them all to a landfill. There’s a quote from Better World Books that makes me glad they’re one of the used book venders I recognize by name.

Anyway: marketing! I doubt I will acquire a herd of goats for sacrifice, but if you’re an author and you try it, let me know how that works for you. Also the trebuchet thing. I expect the upkeep for a trebuchet would be less than for a herd of goats

Potlucks are an excuse to bake cookies

Mostly I make cookies between Thanksgiving and Christmas, aiming for about 30 kinds of cookies and candies. (I make cookies that freeze well, obviously. Most cookies freeze perfectly.)

Anyway, those are meant to be tiny and fancy. Everyday casual cookies are not allowed to mingle with tiny little fancy cookies. So I don’t make everyday casual cookies all that often.

When I do, though, I often make Toffee Cranberry Chocolate-Chip Cookies. They are good, easy, a little bit different, and not pretty enough to work as part of the Christmas assortment.

We had an office potluck yesterday, and several people asked for the recipe. No problem! Here it is, and then those of you can bake can try them if you like, and I can send them the link on Monday.

Toffee Cranberry Chocolate-Chip Cookies

1 C butter

3/4 C granulated sugar

34 C brown sugar

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla

1 1/2 C flour

1 1/2 C quick oats (or old-fashioned oats)

1 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

1 C dried cranberries

1 C mini chocolate chips (not regular size, really. Use mini chips.)

1 C English toffee bits or almond brickle chips

Cream butter and sugars. Beat in egg and vanilla. Combine flour, oats, baking soda, and salt. Stir in lightly. Add dried cranberries, chocolate chips, and English toffee bits. Stir in.

Drop by tsp onto parchment-lined baking sheets. Bake at 350 degrees for 8-10 minutes. Cool on baking sheets for a couple of minutes and remove to racks to cool completely.

Anyone who is an experienced baker should be able to see that these are going to come out rather thin and crisp, what with all that butter and only one egg. If you only like soft cakey cookies, then these are not the best choice. They are, however, really really good.

On the other hand, if you like cakey cookies and cranberries, you might try the following recipe instead. I would have made them as well except I didn’t have any vanilla chips. If you don’t like vanilla chips, I’m right there with you, but this recipe is an exception, I swear. They are just as easy as the above, but quite different in character. It’s the lower proportion of butter to dry ingredients, the extra egg and the use of baking powder as well as baking soda. Also, if you happen to want to exaggerate the cakey nature of these cookies, margarine will give you a softer texture than butter.

Cranberry Oatmeal Cookies

1 C butter or margarine

1 1/2 C sugar

2 eggs

1 tsp vanilla

2 C flour

2 C quick oats

1 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 tsp baking soda

1 C coarsely chopped dried cranberries (I don’t always bother to chop them)

1 Tbsp freshly grated orange peel (I just leave it out if I don’t have an orange handy)

1 pkg (12 oz) vanilla chips

Cream the butter and sugar. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each — this is a cake technique, by the way. Beat in vanilla.

Combine the flour, baking powder, salt, and baking soda. Stir in lightly. Add the oats, cranberries, and orange zest and stir in lightly. Add the vanilla chips and stir to thoroughly combine.

Drop by rounded tsp onto parchment-lined baking sheets. Bake at 375 degrees for about 10 minutes, until edges are lightly browned.

There you go, next time you have a potluck or whatever, try taking a plate with both of those. I expect you won’t be taking many back home with you.

Romance and Fantasy

Michelle Sagara / West has a post up at Fantasy Book Cafe that you might like, if you’re into fantasy with romance. I know some of you are big Sagara / West fans — I have some of hers on my TBR pile right now, mostly (entirely, I think) because of your recommendations.

Me, I can take or leave romance, in fantasy or elsewhere. But I really do like a romance when it is well done. I expect a central romance in most of Sharon Shinn’s novels, and of course look at The Sharing Knife series. I find that books like that move straight into comfort-read territory, especially if the central problems faced by the protagonists are not toooooo horrible.

Michelle says:

When you are a woman writing in the SFF field, many people—some of them even women—will decide that you are de facto writing romance, or paranormal romance, or books that are whatever patina-of-genre over romance. And, as if they are still in that particular mode of “my interests good, your interests infantile”, they will outright dismiss the work without, you know, actually reading any of it. …

But the truth is, women who are not writing romance or romance-tinged books are caught between rocks and hard places. The people who would probably best enjoy those books are often those who give the books the side-eye. If you’re writing urban fantasy, for instance, like Kat Richardson’s, people assume you are writing books like Ilona Andrews’ (and I love her books – this is not meant to be a slam).

But people who like Ilona Andrews’ work and pick up yours expecting it to be tonally similar…are often not going to like your books. So while the theoretical reading audience is larger, in practice, you’re not actually writing what that audience is looking for.

I think this is essentially true. Mind you, I don’t de facto assume women’s books will include romance as a central, driving feature of the story, because there were a ton of exceptions when I was growing up. But I think that it’s generally assumed that a) UF is a woman’s subgenre, b) because it is basically paranormal romance with a city setting, and c) women write romance. So I think there is a big assumption there (or several big assumptions). More so than for fantasy as a whole.

And this also opens up the discoverability can of worms, too. Cover art serves a signalling function; that’s mostly what it’s for; but right now we don’t really have a way of signalling UF-but-not-really-romance-heavy. Do we? It seems to me we do not.

I never really know how to describe BLACK DOG and the associated work. UF? It’s not urban. Paranormal? It uses some of the romance tropes, but just glancingly. So then what?

Anyway, good, thoughtful post by Sagara / West.

Well, this is too bad — but not surprising

I’m not at all surprised to see that some of the Hugo nominees are withdrawing. It’s a shame, but totally understandable. I’m sure a lot of authors are asking themselves what they would do if they were nominated because of slate voting — and what kind of difference it would make whose slate it might be. Here’s Annie Bellet:

I am not your ball. My fiction is my message, not someone else’s, and I refuse to participate in a war I didn’t start. It has become clear to me that the only way to stay out of this is to pick up my ball and go home. So this year, I will not put on a princess gown sewn with d20s. I will not win a rocket. But I will be able to sleep and know that when I get up, there won’t be fires waiting for me. . . . I don’t want to stand in a battlefield anymore. I don’t want to have to think over every tweet and retweet, every blog post, every word I say. I don’t want to cringe when I open my email. I don’t want to have to ask friends to google me and read things so that I can at least be aware of the stuff people might be saying in my name or against my name. This is not why I write. This is not the kind of community I want to be a part of, nor the kind of award I want to win…

I am pretty sure I would feel exactly like this in her shoes. I would truly detest being caught in the middle of someone else’s war. And here’s Marko Kloos:

It has come to my attention that Lines of Departure was one of the nomination suggestions in Vox Day’s “Rabid Puppies” campaign. Therefore — and regardless of who else has recommended the novel for award consideration — the presence of Lines of Departure on the shortlist is almost certainly due to my inclusion on the “Rabid Puppies” slate. For that reason, I had no choice but to withdraw my acceptance of the nomination. I cannot in good conscience accept an award nomination that I feel I may not have earned solely with the quality of the nominated work.

And again, I have to say, this seems like, well, not the only possible right decision to make under the circumstances, but certainly a right decision. I know I would love to be nominated for a major award — who wouldn’t? — though my first choice would be the World Fantasy Award and then the Nebula or the Mythopoeic, with the Hugo after those. But I know I would hate it if I thought I’d been nominated on the basis of a slate; and, far worse, nominated by a lot of people who might not even have read the book in question.

Well. I feel terrible for these authors and bad for the people administrating the award this year. But I continue to hope that the fallout from this situation, as early as next year, will be a LOT more fan participation in nominations and voting. I hope that if slate voting is a thing next year, as I expect it will be, that there are a LOT of competing slates so that none have so much influence. Interesting times, interesting times.

Incidentally, I see that LINES OF DEPARTURE has been replaced by THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM by Cixin Liu. I strongly suspect that the latter is by far the more ambitious book. I also strongly suspect, based on the opening scene, that I will not be able to stand to read it. “Goodnight Stars” by Annie Bellet has been replaced by “A Single Samurai” by Steven Diamond, which I know nothing at all about.

Also, “Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus” by John C. Wright turns out to have been originally published online in 2013, so it has been replaced by “The Day the World Turned Upside Down” by Thomas Olde Heuvelt (Lightspeed Magazine, April 2014).

Has there ever been a year with so many nominees withdrawn and replaced by other works? I haven’t paid much attention to the Hugos until the last couple of years, so I don’t know. But this is certainly going to be a memorable year.

Recent Reading: Contrasting fantasies

So, over the weekend I finished THE VOYAGE OF THE BASILISK by Marie Brennan

and DEAD HEAT by Patricia Briggs

And wow, what a contrast. This was not a coincidence, as if I’m going to read one book after another in quick succession, I vastly prefer to choose titles that are quite different from each other. These two are definitely as different as two novels can be and still be included in the fantasy genre.

They are both very good!

Brennan’s title is, as you know, written as a memoir, by an intellectual, reserved, emotionally distant woman who assumes we are familiar with the high points of her life. This gives the books in this series a dramatically different tone than a more typical novel that pulls us into the action. I enjoyed VOYAGE very much, but it is an intellectual enjoyment, despite various adventures with sea serpents and whatnot. I must admit I cannot at all work out what the evolutionary history of dragons could possibly involve. Very weird stuff going on back in their history. I *think* I trust Brennan to put it all together in an intellectually satisfying way eventually. I hope she does!

It’s really funny how Lady Trent keeps being thrown out of every single country she visits. I wonder if that’s going to continue?

I appreciated how Brennan handled Isabella’s nine-year-old son, Jake. I personally know of several scientists who took their little kids with them while they did research in Africa. The helicopter parents that have gotten so ubiquitous in the past twenty years would have an absolute cow. Even there, though, I think Brennan toned down the massively less protective attitude toward children, just as she’s toned down her world’s racist attitudes compared to the real past, and toned down the perfectly cheerful way naturalists used to kill every animal they came across. Plainly she’s doing all that in order to make her book more appealing to modern audiences. It’s a fine line and she walks it like a tightrope artist.

I’m looking forward to seeing where Isabella goes next, and I want to see how the relationship between Suhail and Isabella develops. Also between Tom and Isabella.

Incidentally, there’s no need to be creative when it comes to the text inside a print book. BLACK PRINT on white paper works just fine. BLUE PRINT is not as easy to read. What was with that?

Now, DEAD HEAT was utterly different.

OH MY GOD THAT TERRIBLE COVER. What is it with this series? Every cover is worse than the last. Now that we have reached the absolute bottom, the next cover might actually be better?

I actually got this one as an ebook despite having the others in paper because a) much cheaper, and b) I never want to see that cover again. Who ARE those people? Not Charles and Anna.

Okay, now that that’s out of the way. I know not everyone likes the Alpha and Omega series as much as the Mercy Thompson series, but I do. I’ve always liked Charles and Anna, especially Charles. I liked seeing them meet and I have enjoyed watching them work out their relationship and I appreciate how much trust they have in each other now.

The murderous fey subplot worked fine for me. I trusted that Patricia Briggs would not ACTUALLY let that mother kill her own children, as it seemed she might have in the subplot, because that just does not seem like a Briggs thing to do. I was right, so that was fine.

The ultimate outcome of that situation with Beauclair and his daughter does look like it’s going to be war and that will certainly be dramatic. This low-level nastiness is quite believable in the meantime.

And, of course, I really enjoyed the horses. I mean, horses! And talking about conformation in a knowledgeable way! Perfect subplot for me. If Patricia Briggs had gone out of her way to deliberately chose a subplot that would particularly appeal to me, she couldn’t have done a better job. The selecting-a-horse-for-Anna thing supplied calm moments between disasters and crises, but I’m the sort of person who would have enjoyed the whole book if there hadn’t been any disasters or crises, but just day-to-day life with horses. Did I mention that I read nothing but animal stories when I was a kid?

As a side note, never buy a horse with straight pasterns. You really need the whole front end to be correct, but straight pasterns will give you worse than a choppy, uncomfortable trot. The front pasterns are major shock absorbers and quite liable to injury; that horse is probably going to have serious issues with lameness later in life. You see the same thing in dogs with straight pasterns, though dogs’ pasterns are not supposed to slope as much as horses’ because their functional anatomy is very similar but not the same.

Wait, have I digressed?

What I meant to say is that the whole point of an urban fantasy series is to get you to connect emotionally to the characters, make you feel they’re real people you actually know, and draw you into the story. These are stories you’re supposed to read with your heart, not your head. I mean obviously if the plot falls apart in some major way, or if there are gaping holes in the worldbuilding, that can be a problem. But the author gets a lot of leeway in those respects because ultimately, super-tight plotting and utterly consistent worldbuilding are not the point.

I didn’t notice anything major wrong with either the plotting or the worldbuilding, by the way. I’m just saying that I wouldn’t necessarily care too much if I had. The Memoirs of Lady Trent are all about worldbuilding. The Alpha and Omega series are all about character and story. Reading these two books back to back really makes one feel that the term “fantasy” tells you nothing at all about a book, because they are so utterly different. I could imagine a genre system where we distinguished between the emotional dimensions of different categories of books rather than details of the setting. If we did that, these two would be widely separated. I really enjoyed them both.

Not reading when you’re writing: it could be worse

So, on Twitter the other day, a few of us were having a conversation. And by “us” I mean Brandy from Random Musings and Sage Blackwood. Sage commented that she also has trouble reading while she is working on a project of her own, but this is not for the same reason that I have trouble with that.

For me, the problem is that reading is absorbing. First it takes up time that I need for writing (if I start a book and enjoy it, I *will* finish it, ignoring other minor things like deadlines), and then also at some point in the writing process, if it’s going well, I will get absorbed in *my* world and I do not want to interfere with that. If things are going *very* well, I don’t even WANT to read anybody else’s work.

Also, I used to find other people’s writing styles invasive, which was both an advantage and a disadvantage. I mean, it’s fine as long as you want to absorb their writing style for your current project; otherwise not so much. If I ever settle down and seriously attempt to write another fairy tale (like THE CITY IN THE LAKE, I don’t mean a retelling, I mean the fairy-tale tone) then I will once again read through all of Patricia McKillip’s books beforehand. But basically this is less of a Thing for me than it used to be. CJ Cherryh’s style used to be terribly invasive for me; now, not so much. She gets into my speaking style a bit, though. I find myself saying things like, “One is certain that this pie crust would have been far superior had you made it,” to my mother. (Really.)

But Sage says she is simply enjoying books less now that she is a writer — as she tries to edit Annoying Stuff out of her own work, she notices it more in other people’s work. It makes it hard for her to read any fiction unless it is by authors who, quote, “… are far better than I could ever be.”

Well, that’s dreadful. Not that there is going to be a shortage of Extremely Good Writers, although given that, what, 800,000 novels are published every year, finding them among modern writers will of course present exactly the same discoverability problem that everyone faces. But it’s still dreadful.

I am much more aware of Annoying Stuff than I used to be, but this is still not a big problem for me and I don’t think it ever will be. And I think this is because I stop reading fiction for a month or two at a time, once or twice or even three times a year. This is hard and I don’t like it, but on the other hand, I think this could be what keeps reading exciting and enjoyable for me, even when I can see Annoying Stuff in a book. This relates to what I discovered last year, that I can enjoy a book even if it has clunky prose as long as the dialogue is good.

I am positive I have heard of a phenomenon in which critics stop liking most fiction. I can’t find a link describing this phenomenon, but I’m sure that’s a Thing. Of course this makes sense.

If you read A LOT of genre fiction (say), then you are going to start thinking that everything is derivative of something better. You will say, “Another werewolf book,” and roll your eyes.

You will encounter Really Great Books and then whatever you read next isn’t going to measure up.

Whatever stylistic things or plot components or particular tropes especially annoy you, you will encounter six books in a row that have that issue and after that you won’t be able to bear it, no matter whether the book is otherwise great.

To some degree, we probably all experience this. I think this is probably one reason we all fall in love SO HARD with whatever books we love when we’re in high school. For me this was The Riddlemaster of Hed and The Blue Sword and Lens of the World and, I don’t know, various others that no doubt I will think of as soon as I close this post. We aren’t tired of anything yet, so a great book hits us right where we live, even if it is quote derivative unquote or otherwise imperfect.

Then we read ten million more books and eventually start going, “This one isn’t doing it right” and from then on we’re pickier. Not everyone. I have met someone, an adult, who shows no signs of being able to tell Terry Brooks from Tolkien. No perception of quality at all, as far as I can tell. But surely that is rare. Certainly that can’t be the case for any decent writer. Or critic.

This is separate from the snobbishness of those critics who can’t bring themselves to like anything popular. You know the type. But I don’t mean that, particularly.

I like this post from Book Riot, in which Greg Zimmerman poses the question Does liking vastly more books than you didn’t like make you a less discerning reader?

And answers it: The simple answer is certainly not.

I don’t agree that every book, no matter how terrible, has bits to like in it. (Sword of Shanarra?) But I do agree that a lot (a LOT) of flawed books are decidedly enjoyable.

Actually, to answer Zimmerman’s question: Liking vastly more books than you don’t like just means that you are pretty good at selecting books that you are probably going to like and pretty good at not picking up books that you are probably going to dislike. That is why (thank you, Internets) you find people whose tastes are similar enough to yours that you can trust their recommendations.

Of the 200 or so books on my TBR piles, I expect to like about, what? 175 at least. (If I ever get around to reading them, of course.) And the exceptions will probably mostly be books I picked up on a whim at library sales or whatever.

How about you all? Do you mostly find that you like the books that you start?

Different question: Do you finish the books you don’t like? And if so, why? Because that one baffles me.

Whew, my summer is now in order –

Okay, I’ve gotten a definite two-thumbs-up from my Knopf editor: THE WHITE ROAD OF THE MOON is a go. That’s a relief! I *thought* she would like it and feel that it fit the imprint, but then, I’ve thought that before.

It’s a relief because, although it’s still mostly unwritten, I have a lot to go one with — the first hundred pages, plus a lot of scenes and basic ideas about the plot. If Michelle had given WHITE ROAD a thumbs-down, I would now be planning to start a different novel from scratch.

This one is due to Knopf in September. This gives me practically all the time in the world to work on it. I don’t want to let time get away from me, but I am thinking that I may glance over it during the first half of May, get moving on it during the second half of May, and then take an easier pace to finish it during June and July. Even if other things take over my life for a bit — there is some potential for craziness in early June — then I should still be pulling WHITE ROAD together pretty much on time.

So, good news! I hope I enjoy writing this one, and I think I will.

Oh, hey, another short story collection worth a look –

This:

New Treasures: Between Worlds: The Collected Ile-Rien and Cineth Stories by Martha Wells

I saw this on Black Gate, in a post which says:

Martha Wells was one of the most popular writers ever published in Black Gate. In fact, her three Cineth stories featuring Giliead and Ilias helped bring us a host of new readers.

Those three stories have never been collected — until now. Between Worlds: The Collected Ile-Rien and Cineth Stories, one of six anthologies to be funded by the successful Six by Six Kickstarter in December, is now available. It contains “Holy Places,” “Houses of the Dead,” and “Reflections,” which first appeared in Black Gate 10, 11, and 12, as well as “Night at the Opera,” a brand new Nicholas and Reynard story set before The Death of the Necromancer, and two other stories.

Actually, I have most of Martha Wells’ short stories. On the other hand . . . a brand new Nicholas and Reynard story. Hmm.

I see that like me, Martha Wells chose to price her collection at $2.99. For that I will pick it up just to have the stories collected. And, of course, to get the Nicholas story.

Jane Austen vs Georgette Heyer

Sherwood Smith has a really interesting post up at Book View Café, wherein she contrasts Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer, arguing that Heyer was writing romances but that Austen really wasn’t.

I, like Sherwood Smith’s friends, would have been like, Well, but, weren’t they basically writing in the same mode? And now I see that they weren’t, really.

Austen’s stories end with marriage because that was pretty much the only choice open to women of her social stratum, and she writes from a woman’s perspective, giving women’s points-of-views first place at the table. But her context is social criticism.

Well, when you put it like that.

Also, now I know what a hapax legomenon is. I fear the term might prove difficult to work into casual conversation, but you never know, you never know. Maybe I will be chatting with one of the English faculty on Monday and a chance will arise.