Victoria Janssen's Blog, page 18

Steerswoman Series Book Club, Readercon 2019

This is a spoiler post! All spoilers, all the time, for all four books of Rosemary Kirstein’s Steerswoman Series.

Rather than put this off until I feel I can make a beautiful coherent post, I’m just going to post the notes I scribbled during the panel while trying to keep track of the discussion and at the same time mentally prepare what I was going to say next that fit into said discussion. As I am not Archie Goodwin, I cannot tell you which bits are verbatim and which summarized on the fly;...

My Readercon 2019 Schedule

Here’s where you can find me this weekend at Readercon, July 11-14, 2019, Quincy, Massachusetts.

Friday, 3:00 pm: Kaffeeklatsch
Theodora Goss and Victoria Janssen

Saturday, 12:00 pm, Salon A
“Classic Fiction Book Club: The Steerswomen Series”
Kate Nepveu [moderator], Elaine Isaak, Victoria Janssen, Yves Meynard, Cecilia Tan
Since the publication of Rosemary Kirstein’s first novel, The Steerswoman, in 1989, the Steerswoman series has become a quiet classic for its powerful female friendships,...

My May Reading Log

Fiction:
The Shirt on His Back is tenth in Barbara Hambly’s Benjamin January series. I always buy her new ones in hardcover, and the line of unread ones on my shelf is a little embarrassing, so I dove in. Such bliss.

Alliance Rising: The Hinder Stars I by C.J. Cherryh and Jane Fancher is the first book set in this universe for a really long time, but since I’d read all of the earlier books in the series, some multiple times, I found I didn’t need to re-read anything to understand what was goi...

My April Reading Log

Fiction:
I finally read The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, which everyone and all their cousins has been recommending as a terrific Found Family space opera since it came out. And it is that. For me, it had a slightly retro feel, which is by no means bad. I enjoyed it a lot.

A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine follows the new ambassador, Mahit, to the powerful Teixcalaan empire as she tries to figure out how and why her predecessor was murdered. So far as names go,...

My March Reading Log

Fiction:
Mira’s Last Dance: Penric & Desdemona Book 5 by Lois McMaster Bujold was delightful to read, but it felt like it ended too soon, not just because it leaves the door open for the next story, but because it felt like less had happened overall. It’s a transitional story, all of it escaping from one place to another.

Leverage in Death (In Death, Book 47) by J.D. Robb was a bit more interesting than some of the recent entries, alas due to an overly-complex murder method that seemed a bit...

My February Reading Log

Fiction:
The City and The City by China Miéville is actually a mystery, though set in a bizarre speculative world. Two cities occupy the same space, and the inhabitants learn to “unsee” and “unhear” their counterparts. There is bureaucracy surrounding interactions between the two cities, which we see when the protagonist, a detective investigating a murder, needs information from both sides. As usual with Miéville, the world is densely built, especially politically; it’s subtly and meticulous...

My January Reading Log

Fiction:
The Ritual Bath by Faye Kellerman is first in the contemporary Decker/Lazarus mystery series. A violent rape and then a brutal murder take place in a tightknit yeshiva community in California; we get the pov of Rina Lazarus, the widow of one of the scholars, and Peter Decker, the police detective. The two protagonists develop a romantic interest in each other that I assume is further addressed as the series progresses. I will probably read the next one in the series, once I get throu...

My December Reading Log

Fiction:
Mile High Murder (A Hannah Ives Mystery) by Marcia Talley was a contemporary mystery centered around two women who take a fact-finding trip to Colorado to look at the marijuana industry, in preparation for creating legislation for Maryland. I was mildly entertained. The first person protagonist is an older woman, which was nice, but the overall tone felt, to me, a little coy and precious, possibly because the narrator abstained while those around her indulged, and maybe that made it...

My November Reading Log

Fiction:
Lies Sleeping by Ben Aaronovitch had some resolutions happen in the series! I shall not spoil which ones. The plot raised some new questions in Peter Grant’s quest to understand how magic works, because it’s always much more complicated than it appears. As usual, I loved the neep about how to facilitate the use of magic in police work (creating procedures for training, etc.). Peter’s parents only have a brief appearance, but Abigail appears in several scenes, and there was a fair amo...

“Still Marching,” a tale of our times

Best Lesbian Erotica of the Year, Volume 3, edited by Sacchi Green, is out, and it includes my story “Still Marching.”

On Saturday, December 8th, there will be a release event for the book on the Lesfic Reading Group Facebook page. A list of all author posts about the anthology is here at the editor’s blog: Commenters on any of these posts will be entered in a drawing to win an ebook copy of the anthology.

Though I wrote “Still Marching” in 2018, I conceived the idea in January 2017, shortly...