Victoria Janssen's Blog, page 85

Gilbert Frankau, "Headquarters"

HeadquartersA league and a league from the trenches--from the traversed maze of the lines, Where daylong the sniper watches and daylong the bullet whines, And the cratered earth is in travail with mines and with countermines-- Here, where haply some woman dreamed (are those her roses that bloom In the garden beyond the windows of my littered working room?)We have decked the map for our masters as

Gilbert Frankau, "How Rifleman Brown came to Valhalla"

How Rifleman Brown came to ValhallaTo the lower Hall of Valhalla, to the heroes of no renown,Relieved from his spell at the listening-post, came Rifleman Joseph Brown.With never a rent in his khaki nor smear of blood on his face,He flung his pack from his shoulders, and made for an empty place.The Killer-men of Valhalla looked up from the banquet-boardAt the unfouled breech of his rifle, at the

Pirate Promotion

A friend of mine is providing me with quite a lot of her own time and energy to help me with promotion for The Duke & The Pirate Queen. Recently, we met for lunch a couple of times and she, who once worked as a journalist, walked me through an outline she'd created, of things she saw as easy opportunities for book promotion.She has a lot more confidence in me than I do. Which is one of the

Promotional Bookmarks

Back when I first posted about promotional bookmarks and postcards for The Duke & The Pirate Queen, I promised to give an update on how it was going. So, here's how it's going...sort of.I don't actually know yet how it's going. I carried quantities of the bookmarks and postcards with me to the RWA conference and to Readercon, and left them on the freebie tables. People took them. I had taken

Genre is the Highest Form of Literature

I think genre fiction is the highest form of literature. I really do. If "highest" means most important to humanity. How's that for a sweeping claim? Romance, fantasy, mystery, and science fiction. Those are the highest literature out there.For one thing, look at history. Today, Dickens is "literature." To contemporary readers, he was cheap "escapist" entertainment. So longevity, I feel,

Top Posts from 2010 (so far)

I like playing with the tracking on my blog sometimes. Here are the most popular posts on this blog, by month, for 2010 so far. It's very interesting to see which posts seem to be of more general interest.January: Tell Not Show, a writing craft post.February: My Favorite Girls Dressed As Boys (Fantasy Edition), which continues to get visits along with its companion post from September 2009,

Rear, meet seat; fingers, meet keyboard.

One of my favorite pithy sayings about writing is "ass in chair, fingers on keyboard." It's short and to the point. Unless you write standing up, or perhaps sitting on a rubber doughnut, it's pretty standard for a writer to sit in a chair and write. You can't write while roaming the streets or hurtling off a diving board or driving, or rather you shouldn't because that could lead to

Charles Sorley, "Barbury Camp"

Barbury Camp We burrowed night and day with tools of lead,Heaped the bank up and cast it in a ringAnd hurled the earth above. And Caesar said,"Why, it is excellent. I like the thing."We, who are dead,Made it, and wrought, and Caesar liked the thing.And here we strove, and here we felt each veinIce-bound, each limb fast-frozen, all night long.And here we held communion with the rainThat lashed us

Edmund Blunden, "After the Bombing"

After The BombingMy hesitant design it was, in a time when no man feared,To make a poem on the last poor flower to have grown on the patch of landWhere since a gray enormous stack of shops and offices rearedIts bulk as though to eternity there to stand.Moreover I dreamed of a lyrical verse to welcome another flower,The first to blow on that hidden sites when the concrete block should ceaseGorging

Research - When to Stop

I actually stole this topic from a discussion I read...somewhere, a while back. The question was, "when do you stop researching?" I have two answers.My first answer is never. You never stop researching because everything you read or look at might eventually find its way into your fiction. If you stop researching, I think your stories can grow stagnant.My second answer is to stop when you have