Victoria Janssen's Blog, page 3

My December Reading Log

Fiction:
You might be surprised to know that A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher is the first book by this author I have ever read, after receiving many recommendations for her work over the past I don’t know how many years. I would consider it to be dark fantasy with some fairy tale elements turned sideways. Set in an alternate Regency-like world, across the sea from the Old Country, it opens with a child being abused by her mother in a horrible magical way: her mother controls her body ...

#TBR Challenge – New Year, Who Dis?: Watson and Holmes by Karl Bollers

Watson and Holmes by Karl Bollers (Author), Brandon Perlow (Editor), Rick Leonardi (Artist), Larry Stroman (Artist), Khary Randolph (Artist), Paul Mendoza (Artist) is a comic series recommended to me by a Boston friend a while back. I bought it immediately, but then I shifted from a period of reading a ton of comics to reading none, and am only now just getting back to one of my favorite types of media.

As you can probably guess, Watson and Holmes is a revisioning of the Sherlock Holmes mysterie...

#TBR Challenge: New Year, Who Dis?: Watson and Holmes by Karl Bollers

Watson and Holmes by Karl Bollers (Author), Brandon Perlow (Editor), Rick Leonardi (Artist), Larry Stroman (Artist), Khary Randolph (Artist), Paul Mendoza (Artist) is a comic series recommended to me by a Boston friend a while back. I bought it immediately, but then I shifted from a period of reading a ton of comics to reading none, and am only now just getting back to one of my favorite types of media.

As you can probably guess, Watson and Holmes is a revisioning of the Sherlock Holmes mysterie...

SF Worldbuilding Techniques

While writing Finding Refuge, I revisited various science fiction worldbuilding techniques I’d learned from years of reading the genre, listening to writers, and of course practicing them myself. One of my most important goals is allowing the reader to be curious about what happens next. Worldbuilding can be a big part of that.

Many or most guides to writing science fiction hammer in the idea of “showing, not telling,” but no writing rule should be followed off a cliff. If you can make the “tell...

#TBR Challenge 2025

TBR Challenge 2025 is a fun way to actually read all those books I’ve been accumulating over the years. “Your mission, should you choose to accept it: once a month pull a dormant book out of your TBR pile and read it. On the 3rd Wednesday of the month, talk about that book. If you’re on social media all you need to do is use the #TBRChallenge hashtag – there’s no need to sign-up and your participation can vary throughout the year. You can use this hashtag on any day, at any time – but we’re sti...

TBR Challenge – It’s a Party!: Make the Season Bright by Ashley Herring Blake

My choice for December’s TBR Challenge book is Make the Season Bright by Ashley Herring Blake, in which ex-fiancées end up stuck in the same house for Christmas holiday fun. I chose the book because it has professional musician characters; the two women protagonists play violin (Charlotte/Lola) and guitar (Brighton). Charlotte is in a string quartet whose members are also all queer, and dare I guess they will have their own books later?

Aside from the various queer relationships, this was a pret...

My November Reading Log

Fiction:
The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst is a very cozy romantic fantasy set in a world that, to me, felt very dreamlike because there were a number of fantastical creatures with magical origins. Some of these, like the merhorses, required magical upkeep, which made sense; however, making sense left me tugging more at the worldbuilding than I might have done if they’d just existed. This is clearly a Me problem. Anyway. Kiela is a librarian in an imperial city undergoing a violent revolution; s...

#TBR Challenge – It Came From the 1990s!: Robert A. Heinlein: A Reader’s Companion

It Came From the 1990s!: Robert A. Heinlein: A Reader’s Companion by J. Daniel Gifford and James Gifford was published in 2000, but that’s the end of the 1990s, it counts!

This is a nonfiction catalog of all the writing by Robert A. Heinlein, almost all of which I have read in the course of my life; the first straight-up science fiction I ever remember reading was a copy of his juvenile space adventure Have Space Suit, Will Travel. Heinlein was notable for his strong narrative voice, rollicking ...

My October Reading Log

Fiction:
Snowspelled by Stephanie Burgis is fantasy romance novella set in an alternate nineteenth century England (Angland) where women do politics and men do magic. Humans have an uneasy truce with the powerful Elves. The protagonist Cassandra Harwood, a unique woman who formally trained in magic until suffering an accident, has broken up with her magician betrothed, but her beloved brother and pregnant sister-in-law drag her to a house party where, you guessed it, her former betrothed is also...

My September Reading Log

Fiction:
Payback in Death by J.D. Robb is fifty-seventh in this futuristic mystery series, and I continue to enjoy, from a writerly perspective, how Robb/Nora Roberts manages to both provide enough information for new readers and reward longtime readers with running gags (the obstreperous vending machine near the interrogation rooms, for example) and ongoing secondary character events (the continuing saga of the house being renovated by Mavis, Leonardo, Peabody, and McNab). This one also had a f...