Victoria Janssen's Blog, page 25
October 16, 2015
September 2015 Reading Log
Fiction:
That Scandalous Summer by Meredith Duran is the first historical romance I’ve read in, it seems, forever. The characters are intriguing! The hero is a doctor whose brother is trying to bully him into marrying; the heroine is a widow whom he discovered drunk and sleeping under a bush. It turned out I wasn’t as much in the mood for a romance as I’d hoped, but I did really like the complex relationship between the hero and his manipulative brother; they’re at odds, and angry with each o...
October 9, 2015
CapClave 2015
October 9-11, 2015, I’ll be at CapClave in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
My schedule is below.
Saturday, October 10, 2015, 12:00 PM – 12:50 PM
“Urban Fantasy & Paranormal Romance”
Victoria Janssen, Alma Katsu, Dina Leacock (moderator), Sherin Nicole
What is the genre? What authors and works should people be reading?
Saturday, October 10, 2015, 1:00 PM – 1:50 PM
“Food In Fiction”
Ann Chatham, Brenda W. Clough, Victoria Janssen (moderator)
Even heroes and dragons have to eat. The food in a work of f...
October 2, 2015
CapClave 2015
Next weekend, October 9-11, 2015, I’ll be at CapClave in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
Here’s my preliminary panel schedule:
Saturday, October 10, 2015, 12:00 PM – 12:50 PM
“Urban Fantasy & Paranormal Romance”
Saturday, October 10, 2015, 1:00 PM – 1:50 PM
“Food In Fiction”
Sunday, October 11, 2015, 10:00 AM – 10:50 AM
“The Appeal of Doctor Who”
September 18, 2015
August 2015 Reading Log
I’m finally caught up with book logging!!! I did less pleasure reading last month because I was working on review books (which I don’t discuss here).
Fiction:
I was so satisfied with Power and Majesty by Tansy Rayner Roberts, first in the Creature Court trilogy, that I moved on to the second book, The Shattered City. Things got worse all over the place, hooray. There are multiple intriguing female characters, and though it shouldn’t need saying, I will say that they interact with men but are...
September 4, 2015
2015 Sales
I actually have some publishing news for once!
Thunder of War, Lightning of Desire: Lesbian Historical Military Erotica will be out in October 2015 from Lethe Press, edited by Sacchi Green. I ended up with two stories in the anthology.
“Delivery” is set during World War One (try to contain your shock) and takes place during a very long ride in an ambulance through unsafe territory. The ambulance driver is tough and tomboyish, from the American West, and the English engineer is realizing how...
August 28, 2015
July 2015 Reading Log
Fiction:
I re-read Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in order to moderate a Readercon discussion on the book, for which I volunteered at the last minute.
I also read Persona by Genevieve Valentine for a Readercon discussion. It’s not that long. Set in a future where international politics takes place (nominally) through the medium of national celebrity diplomats – Faces – and the freelance press is underground, sometimes in the guise of paparazzi (Snaps), it follows one Face (Suyana Sapaki)...
August 21, 2015
June 2015 Reading Log
Fiction:
Archivist Wasp by Nicole Kornher-Stace starts off violent and world-weary and continues to be gripping but painful. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic world (isn’t everything, nowadays?) in which human cruelty and desperation take center stage. Wasp, the protagonist, is weary of it, and tries to do a good thing, but her attempt fails miserably and results in more hopelessness. …I’m not making this sound very appealing, am I? But the writing is great and it kept surprising me. I backed aw...
August 14, 2015
May 2015 Reading Log
Nonfiction:
A Companion to the Fairy Tale edited by Hilda Ellis Davidson and Anna Chaudhri is what is says on the tin. The introduction and the first couple of essays gave me a pretty good grounding in fairy tale scholarship as it stood at the time (2006), at least so far as I can tell. I had fun comparing arguments about how tales should be recorded with similar arguments I remember from my anthropology background about how ethnography should be recorded, and how methods of recording data af...
August 7, 2015
April 2015 Reading Log
Fiction:
Lone Wolf (Bluewater Bay Book 4) by Aleksandr Voinov and L.A. Witt is a male/male romance. I’d read one book previously in this series, which focuses on the creative personalities surrounding a series of werewolf books and the television series that follows (based on the two I’ve read!). This was the werewolf series author’s book, and it was great fun for me in particular because aside from the romance, it was all about fandom! And writing! The author, to relax, hangs out anonymously...
July 31, 2015
March 2015 Reading Log
Fiction:
Bring On the Dusk by M. L. Buchman – I’d read and enjoyed a previous book in this series, but this one ended up being a DNF, despite having a female military helicopter pilot as protagonist. I liked the neepery about flying and about climbing giant redwoods, but the romance bored me because it was too easy, and both characters were just too awesome, and they had too many awesome friends around from previous books in the series. I think you have to be in the mood for that sort of thin...
