Victoria Janssen's Blog, page 73
January 7, 2011
Philadelphia Mummers 2011 Part 1
Check out this lovely review of The Duke & The Pirate Queen at The Discriminating Fangirl!
On New Year's Day, a friend and I went to the annual New Year's Day Philadelphia Mummers' Parade. I took a ton of pictures, so even a selection is going to take me a couple of posts.
Supermen!
Note the Superman curl.
There goes Clark Kent!
A few of the floats.
Who Dat Froggy Carr?
These Frogs posed for me. The brick building behind them is the historic Academy of Music.
Still more Frogs!
Still Life Between...
January 6, 2011
Kindle Field Test
A few days ago, I returned from a two-week vacation that involved a lot of traveling, both in airplanes and in cars. I brought along my Kindle (which I bought in late November), one trade paperback novel (Cold Magic by Kate Elliott), and the most recent issue of the SFWA Bulletin (the size of a slim magazine).
I still enjoy reading paper books a bit more than reading on my Kindle; it takes more effort for me to ignore the flash of a page turn on the Kindle than it does to simply turn a paper ...
January 5, 2011
Betty Neels, Outside of Time
I am not nearly the connoisseur of Betty Neels' 134 novels as the gracious hostesses of specialist blog The Uncrushable Jersey Dress. But, having read about a half-dozen of her novels, I now venture to have some general thoughts on the contemporary world Neels portrayed.
So far, every Neels novel I've read features a young English woman who works as a nurse and is overlooked and underappreciated, particularly by her family and by men…until she meets an older man, distinguished, Dutch, a...
January 4, 2011
Sexy Pirates
This post was originally written for The Smutketeers; I've expanded it here.
Why did I want to write about pirates? Well, because they're sexy. It's the outfits, you know. All that silk and tattered finery! The amazing tattoos. The cutlasses. The way they grab hostages and lock them in cabins for their own pleasure. And finally, the isolation. Being stuck on a ship together is like the traditional "trapped in a lonely cabin" story, only with the possibility of being eaten by sharks....
January 3, 2011
Life in the Freezer
I really love David Attenborough. He's so interested in everything, and he communicates his interest through a television screen. Which is a writing lesson–putting yourself and your interests into what you're saying or writing gives those words more energy.
I recently watched the documentary he did on Antarctica, Life in the Freezer. It wasn't specifically for research; I was just interested! Also, I shocked myself by how little I really knew about Antarctica and the animals that live...
January 2, 2011
Chris Boucher quote
One of my favorite quotes ever:
"There are no good guys. There are no bad guys. There are only better guys, and worse guys."
–Chris Boucher
I post it at the start of this year because one of my goals is to learn to write better villains!
January 1, 2011
Happy New Year!
My goals for the year:
Read. Write. Sing. Enjoy life. Be myself.
How about you?
December 31, 2010
The Year in Sales – 2010
Aside from The Duke and The Pirate Queen being out this month, I sold some short stories this year.
In January, "The Token" appeared in the print edition of Alleys & Doorways: Stories of Queer Urban Fantasy, edited by Meredith Schwartz.
In July, my flash fiction "The Princess"–only one hundred words long!–was in Alison Tyler's anthology for Spice, Alison's Wonderland.
In October, a reprint of "The Magnificent Threesome," a fun Western story, appeared in Linda Alvarez' anthology The Mammoth...
December 30, 2010
Best 3 Books I Read in 2011
Ask me tomorrow and I might change my mind, but at the moment, these are my three favorite books that I read in 2011. I chose each one for a different reason.
1. A Madness of Angels: Or The Resurrection of Matthew Swift by Kate Griffin. This is a fantasy novel, and urban fantasy in the truest sense because the magic is drawn from the city. It reminds me of the comic Hellblazer
in some ways, but it's more wondrous, deeper and richer, and in the end much more hopeful. Griffin, who writes...
December 29, 2010
Satisfying Endings
This post was originally written for Shelley Munro's blog.
Though I read a lot, I was never good at articulating what made a satisfying ending for a novel. Over years of writing, I got better at endings, mostly thanks to fellow-workshoppers Ann Tonsor Zeddies and Holly Black and the trenchant comments they made on my first novel.
The main thing I learned from them was that if certain things don't happen at the end of a novel, the reader won't be happy (both have a gift for identifying...
