Victoria Janssen's Blog, page 13

2021 Guest Posts

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My 2021 Guest Post Round-Up:

Sapphic Book Club gave me an Author Spotlight in December; I wrote about SF Worldbuilding Techniques.

I Heart Lesfic’s Project Kindness hosted a blog post from me on December 3, about growing closer to my work colleagues during the early days of the pandemic.

Queer Sci Fi featured Finding Refuge on November 28th.

The Lesbian Science Fiction Index now includes both Finding Refuge and Accepting Refuge.

#TBRChallenge 2022

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This year, I’ll again be participating in the TBR Challenge hosted by Wendy the Super Librarian. My goal is to post reviews of a themed book on the third Wednesday of every month. Feel free to join me! Tag your social media posts with #TBRChallenge. The monthly themes, and my choices to fit those themes, are listed below. All of the books are from my To Be Read shelves (physical and virtual) as of December, 2021.

January 19 – Quickie
Instead of Three Wishes: Magical Short Stories by Megan W...

#TBRChallenge – Festive: Cotillion by Georgette Heyer

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It’s true! I’ve never read Cotillion by Georgette Heyer! Until now. This book was published in 1953, so I felt free to include spoilers in this post.

I found the novel charming, with typical Heyer character types, plotlines, and shenanigans, except for one aspect, which I’ll detail later on. Oddly, given the title, there was no actual cotillion (formal ball, presenting young women to society), which surprised me. Instead, there are a couple of masquerades and a night at Almack’s, only one o...

My November Reading Log

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Fiction:
Empress of Forever by Max Gladstone is space opera on a grand scale with a seemingly all-powerful Empress, a giant pirate with fur and a tail, space monks, massive fleets of spaceships and the pilots who can merge with them, be-weaponed machine-people, people made entirely of nanomaterials, souls in The Cloud…you get the picture. Scope! Sense of wonder! Homage to Journey to the West! Plus there are Space Lesbians, including the main point of view character, a too-powerful, morally ...

Accepting Refuge Launch Day is today!

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Accepting Refuge: A Place of Refuge, Part Two, is now available!

Excerpt:
Accepting Refuge, A Place of Refuge, Book Two

Miki woke early, from a nasty dream of living in the humid, congested Gamma Habitat back in the Federated Colonies. She’d been searching for Jon Churchill, who needed her, pushing her way through crowds of people who ignored and blocked her at every turn. The places she searched grew steadily more absurd. She’d even crawled inside the works of some kind of gear-based horo...

Accepting Refuge pre-order is available!

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Accepting Refuge: A Place of Refuge, Part Two, is now available for pre-order. Release date is December 6, 2021.

I haven’t uploaded to Smashwords or Google Play yet, but hopefully will take care of that soon.

Excerpt:
Accepting Refuge, A Place of Refuge, Book Two

Miki woke early, from a nasty dream of living in the humid, congested Gamma Habitat back in the Federated Colonies. She’d been searching for Jon Churchill, who needed her, pushing her way through crowds of people who ignored and bl...

5 Useful Lessons from Indie-Publishing

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My adventure with indie-publishing Finding Refuge with the Kalikoi collective got me writing again, and has been fun. Plus I have actually learned some things about preparing, publishing, and *cue music*…myself.

1. Writing is a thousand times less stressful when I am writing primarily to please myself. You’d think I would’ve learned this lesson long ago, and I sort of did, but print publishing messed with my head.

2. I cannot comprehend the complexities of Photoshop or even its simpler rela...

#TBRChallenge – Competition: The Galaxy Game by Karen Lord

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The Galaxy Game by Karen Lord is a complex, far-future space opera that includes the sport of Wallrunning. The skills and implications of Wallrunning, it turns out, influence events on an interstellar scale.

I was very pleased to re-encounter characters from Lord’s earlier novel The Best of All Possible Worlds (described at the end of this post), though The Galaxy Game focuses on other protagonists. A prologue helped orient me to the spacefaring civilization featured in these novels, and a ...

My October Reading Log

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Fiction:
Scandal in Babylon by Barbara Hambly is a reworking of her fantasy novel Bride of the Rat God as a straightforward historical mystery set in 1920s Hollywood. I was always sorry there weren’t sequels to Bride of the Rat God, so this made me very happy, and I hope it turns into another series. British scholar Emma Blackstone was widowed by World War One and lost her parents and brother to the 1918 influenza pandemic; she now works as a secretary for her sister-in-law, lovable and ext...

Dutch translation!

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My World War One romance “Under Her Uniform” has been translated into Dutch! The ebook has been collected in the anthology 5 Tinten verder historisch 6 – een trio, 6 February 2018.

Original English version, Under Her Uniform:
Isobel Hailey disguised herself as a man to fight in the British Army in WWI. Only a few people know the truth, including her pair of officer lovers–so why can’t she stop thinking about handsome Corporal Andrew Southey instead? Isobel has to keep her wits about her an...