Cecilia Tan's Blog, page 3

Going to Great Lengths to Definitely Not See the Sun

The total solar eclipse as seen from Colebrook, New Hampshire, with Venus visible in the sky and the sunset effect through bare trees.

 

In this newsletter

Thinky Thoughts: Going to Great Lengths to Definitely Not See The SunDaron’s Guitar Chronicles new vols 1, 2, and 3 are live!Free read: my oldest story on the InternetBook rec: The Night EatersRomCon in Ashland, May 18th! Neon Hemlock live on May 22!Photos from ICFA!WIP Report: dragons are eating my brain!A recipe: Scones!One Featured Backlist Book: Wild Licks

 

Thinky Thoughts: Going to Great Lengths to Definitely Not See the Sun

After seeing the total solar eclipse in 2017, and noticing that a 2024 eclipse trip would land on my birthday weekend, we started planning to see it right then. A year ago we booked our hotel, rental car, and flights to Austin, Texas, which would normally have the highest chance of being sunny in early April of anywhere in the country. By contrast, New England typically has the highest chance of being cloudy. So it made sense to plan well in advance to go to Texas.

However, Mother Nature had other ideas.

Our flight TO Texas was cancelled because New England was experiencing a nor’easter with ice pellets being driven by 60 mph wind gusts. Because we were going to be delayed by a day or more, we lost our rental car reservation. AND for the entire week leading up to when we were supposed to leave, we’d been watching the cloud cover predictions and Texas was looking like it might be entirely clouded over along the path of totality.

Well. I took the cancelled flight as a sign. We did not go to Texas. We pivoted, literally, from going south-south-west to going north-north-east. We considered Burlington, then Montreal, and finally settled on the northern reaches of New Hampshire.

The sunniest part of the entire eclipse path ended up a mere 3.5 hour drive for us. We ended up in the tiny and charming town of Colebrook, New Hampshire, where they trucked in porta-potties to every public parking lot, and local school groups happily sold us hamburgers, Gatorade, and sunscreen. It was a truly dramatic totality, people in the crowd gasped, cheered, and screamed, and a little girl in the car next to us exclaimed, “I didn’t know it was gonna do THAT!”

And as a bonus, because we didn’t go to Texas, we got to attend opening day at Yankee Stadium, which we were going to have to miss. And saved a pile of travel money we’re now putting toward a trip to the UK later this summer. All in all, it couldn’t have worked out more perfectly.

Of course the metaphor for my writing career is sitting right there in the open. I had long-standing, sensible plans for publishing with Tor, the company that has seemingly had so much recent success with both queer and Asian authors in sf/f… but then a storm, and cloudy weather, and boom here I am going in a completely different direction. I can only hope things work out as perfectly.

The self-publishing biz is constantly changing, and like the weather, is ruled by large forces that are outside of my control.  I’m reminded, sometimes you just need luck: we had some friends who did go to Texas, had complete overcast all day, then five minutes before the totality, the clouds parted! And five minutes after, it clouded over again. But they’d been in just the right spot.  I’m going to apply the same techniques to self-publishing that I did to eclipse-chasing: keep researching, keep adjusting, and just keep trying to be in the right place at the right time.

New volumes 1, 2, and 3 are live in Daron’s Guitar Chronicles!

If you haven’t read this series because it’s not erotica or not sf/fantasy, I understand. But.

But DGC is probably the most deeply emotional writing I’ve ever done.

And many of the readers who have gotten into it have told me it’s the most immersive, emotionally affecting thing they’ve read. And it’s so gratifying to have affected so many people and made them cry so m— I mean, make them so happy, you know?

There’s finally a romance buzzword that fits DGC now, too: slow burn. It’s such a slow burn that our love interest doesn’t even appear for the first 100 pages, and Daron and he spend multiple books working through the many emotional obstacles they have to being happy together.

But every time a barrier falls, it’s glorious, isn’t it?

I’m on a schedule to put out one revamped volume every month for 13 consecutive months. I’m proofreading the old versions of the paperbacks and I’m finding a lot of wee things to fix. Some are stuff like quotations marks that are facing the wrong way, which many readers won’t even notice. But then there are little continuity errors I’m catching… some of which I’m leaving as is, because you can chalk them up to Daron, our narrator, just having a bad memory.

A few, though, I’m fixing, or adding the missing explanation. Like at one point they spend multiple rehearsals before a tour getting a wireless headset microphone working for Daron. He complains about it more than once. But at one point in the tour, he’s back to using a regular wired mic on a stand with no explanation. I might just put a half-line in a la “The day we decide to abandon the wireless mic, I….” and leave it at that?

Right now the new editions are on Amazon (and in Kindle Unlimited), and after being exclusive there 90 days, they will pop up on other sites, one per month. Series page: https://amzn.to/4d5yn2m

If you subscribe to Kindle Unlimited please do go try them out.

And as I mentioned last time, if you want a review copy or ARC, or to otherwise feature me or the books, please hit me up! Drop me email or hit me up on Twitter. (Yeah, I am still on Twitter/X.)

And I love, love, love the new cover illustrations by Cheyanne Bueno, aka Milkychai. Please give them some love if you ever need to commission art or character designs: https://milkychai.weebly.com/

My oldest story online (a free read)

I was curious what the oldest story of mine that I could find free to read on the internet was.

If you really search deep and long you can unearth the very earliest draft of “Telepaths Don’t Need Safewords” from 1991, but the oldest legit publication that is still online is actually a piece of almost magical realism—the short story “With Open Eyes” which appeared at Strange Horizons in January 2001.

That’s right, just barely into the 21st century! Strange Horizons was one of the early sf/f publications going on the ‘free online’ model that is now so frequently emulated.

The story is so old that it’s one that I actually wrote in a university writing workshop. And I can really see the “MFA” flourishes in it. (Um, it might have gone all the way back to an undergrad workshop…) To me, it reads a bit clunky, and if I were sending it out now, I would “kill my darlings,” and plane off some of those “literary” flourishes that now strike me as superfluous. Overall, I just sound young. 

The story was originally titled “Eyes Open and Shut” but the editors thought people might confuse it with the 1999 Stanley Kubrick movie Eyes Wide Shut. (Don’t get me started about Eyes Wide Shut…yeeeeek, so many problems…)

Anyway, enjoy! Here: http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/with-open-eyes/

 

Monthly Book Rec!

The Night Eaters: Book 1
HC $25/PB $15
Bookshop • Amazon• Etc

I feel like there’s a coalescence happening in pop culture and literature around the voices of the Asian diaspora in English-language media. It’s coming at me from everywhere, from the latest sf/f awards lists to YouTube where Uncle Roger and TwoSet Violin have millions of followers. And many of the voices that are being heard are from half-Asians, from comedians like Steven He to writers like Aliette de Bodard, Courtney Milan, Alyssa Wong… (the list is very long). One of those on my list is Marjorie Liu, who I first met in the romance-writing world (Tiger’s Eye) before she and artist Sana Takeda took the world by storm with the comic book series MONSTRESS. (I highly recommend Monstress, also!)

Sana and Marjorie have another thing going, though, with a graphic novel entitled THE NIGHT EATERS: SHE EATS THE NIGHT. It’s the first of a planned trilogy, but you can read this one as a standalone. It manages to take the “Amityville horror” trope (house on Long Island tainted by evil) and combine it with a whole pile of Asian-diaspora generational trauma, snarky humor, and a deeply creep-tastic  story and art. To say any more would give spoilers, so I’m going to leave it at that!

From the official description:

Chinese American twins, Milly and Billy, are struggling to keep their restaurant afloat. Luckily their parents, Ipo and Keon, are in town for their annual visit. Having immigrated from Hong Kong before the twins were born, Ipo and Keon have supported their children through thick and thin and are ready to lend a hand–but they’re starting to wonder, has their support made Milly and Billy incapable of standing on their own?

When Ipo forces them to help her clean up the house next door–a hellish and run-down ruin that was the scene of a grisly murder–the twins are in for a nasty surprise.

 

UPCOMING APPEARANCES:

Two things to note in May! One in-person at the Ashland Public Library in Ashland, MA, on May 18th for the RomCon romance day, and one online, where I’ll be taking part in the Neon Hemlock Live streaming series, on May 22 via their instagram.

May 18: RomCon, Ashland Public Library, Ashland, MAMay 22: Neon Hemlock Live (Ihttps://www.instagram.com/neonhemlock)June 6-9: SFWA Nebulas Conference (in person!)July 11-14: Readercon, Boston areaAugust 7-11: SABR National Convention, MinneapolisOctober 16-20: World Fantasy Con, Niagara Falls

Where I’ve Been Recently

ICFA was just lovely. Smart people, smart conversations, terrific weather, and a swimming pool with lots of places good for writing all around it. I think I got something like 5,000 words written on the dragon romantasy book while I was there? A big chunk written AND I socialized. Win-win.

 

ABOVE: ICFA lunch banquet with Delia Sherman, Ellen Kushner, Elizabeth Schechter, and two scholars whose names I did not write down! (I swore I’d remember… but my brain just doesn’t retain things like it used to!)

BELOW: Awards Banquet photos with my fave folklorists, Linda J. Lee and Jeana Jourgensen, and with Joe and Gay Haldeman.

Works-in-Progress Report

The dragon romantasy plot bunny that bit me in the ass last month now has a working title—Windmark—and has just crossed 20,000 words. And it’s just starting to get to the really twisted stuff? It just keeps being more fun. I’d be even farther along with it by now, but my big deadline this past month was getting the Baseball Research Journal to press. Between that and the fact I’m re-proofreading the entire DGC series and then doing all of the necessary edits to the ebooks and all the uploads to retail sites, etc… I’ve got a lot on my plate right now. But if I keep on at this pace, I will be done with the first draft in a matter of months.

Meanwhile I’m still laying the groundwork for serializing and then self-publishing the Vanished Chronicles, but it’ll be a while yet. The ducks are not yet in a row. But they will be eventually. (I really, really have to get further along on the DGC releases first.)

 

A Recipe

I recently tried making these cream scones from Smitten Kitchen for a dinner party where I was supposed to bring the dessert.

I had only two hours between when I finished my last Zoom call of the day and the party, so it had to be something I could make quickly without going to the store for anything.

I replacing the currants with crushed chocolate chips, and the scones were snarfed up so fast that not a single one was left, so I had some bake another batch of them a few days later! They didn’t even need butter!

 

One Featured Backlist Book

and as usual, I finish off my monthly newsletter with a look at one book in my backlist…

Wild Licks
PB $12.99, Ebook $5.99
August 2016
Bookshop • Amazon• Etc

WILD LICKS is the middle book in the Secrets of a Rock Star series, but it stands alone. This one has a broody British guitarist with a tortured soul and very twisted sexual tastes as the dom and a Hollywood heiress with a very very active imagination as the female sub, but where they really connect is over their mutual love of the British fantasy books they read when they were kids.

Both of them had their first vivid erotic fantasies imagining things from that fantasy world, which, in my experience in the BDSM community is very, very common. Tolkien, Harry Potter, Narnia, anything by Tanith Lee… when you have raging adolescent hormones, anything can become the basis for a horny fantasy, right?

I invented a fantasy author for this book. Maybe someday I’ll have to go and write the books that Mal and Gwen talk about in here…

Oh, and the reason there are two versions of the cover is that the publisher thought that the “covered up” version would sell better at Barnes & Noble while the racier version would sell better on Amazon. But I think in the end Amazon may have decided off-the-shoulder lingerie was a no-no and suppressed the sale at one point… (Also, Mal’s hair is nowhere near long enough.)

See you next month!

Occam’s Razor is Wrong, Sharang Biswas is Right (my March newsletter)

In this newsletter:Thinky Thoughts: Occam’s Razor is WrongDaron’s Guitar Chronicles new covers live at LGBTQ Reads!Newsletter Guest: Sharang Biswas! And an actual cover reveal!Book recommendation of the month: The Radiant Emperor Duology by Shelley Parker-ChanSee you in Orlando, FL, later this week! In Ashland (MA) on May 18th! And at the SFWA Nebulas conference in June!WIP Report: *muahahaha* (I got bit by a dragon romantasy plot bunny)Would you like a free book?One Featured Backlist BookThinky Thoughts: Occam’s Razor is Wrong

This has been bugging me for years now, but especially in the world of social media, arguments are most often “won” by those who can make the shortest, most direct case for their point of view. Simplicity is king.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a punchy encapsulation, like PennyRed’s recent essay on why we don’t love Harry Potter anymore, (from Realms of the Imagination, the companion book to the British Museum’s recent Fantasy exhibit) which contains the nicely nindblowing insight that it isn’t just that JK Rowling went “full TERF,” it’s that the promise of the Wizarding world itself was that a neoliberal status quo would save us, when that’s actually led to Brexit, new rise of right-wing fascism, wage disparity, etc. As she writes:

“[In the Wizarding World] there was no question about who was good and evil, and cruelty always came with a cost.

“This is a simple, beautiful lie. But it was a convincing lie back when the premise of neoliberal worldbuilding seemed to be delivering, before the fundamental plot holes opened up and swallowed the future. The Wizarding World is a fantasy about the British class system in the late 20th century translated into a magic aesthetic, with none of the savagery and bigotry and sexism that kept the machinery of power working in the real world.”

(The essay is about much more than that, and about how crucial fandom is, and why fandoms set up camp in certain authors’ sandboxes, and I recommend reading it.)

But while I love and admire a complex argument that is boiled down to a pithy one-liner, I have to take issue with how some people—including some of my closest friends—have made almost a fetish out of simplifying every explanation.

Occam’s razor doesn’t actually preach minimalism nor simplicity per se. The philosophical principle it embraces is that the explanation for a given thing is more likely to be the less complicated explanation rather than the more complicated one.

That may work fine for philosophy, but human beings and the world we live in are complex. At a population’s scale, the most improbable things can and WILL happen. A worldview that states that there is a single explanation for *ANYTHING* is suspect, so far as I’m concerned. Investigate anything deeply enough and you’re likely to find there wasn’t just a single fatal flaw that led to a failure: there were almost certainly multiple factors at work that combined to cause the failure. “The perfect storm” model is probably a lot closer to real life than the “simplest explanation” model.

Okay, sure, once in a while there is an obvious single failure mode, like the sole reason the recent mission to the moon was almost a complete failure was because the for-profit company running the launch was TOO DAMN CHEAP. (Story at The Guardian.) To save time and money, Intuitive Machines decided not to test the laser landing guidance system on Odysseus, so no one noticed that the safeties had never been taken off of the lasers until it got to the moon.

There is something very satisfying about knowing who to blame, who to label the villain, isn’t there? This is why in a manuscript, in story or novel, we love it when things can be reduced to a puzzle with a single solution. Throw the ring into Mount Doom and all will be well. Solve the mystery and reveal the culprit, and all will be well. If only Chris and Pat can figure out their Big Misunderstanding, all will be well!

But real life is not a story. In the real world, why did Chris and Pat break up? I guarantee you there wasn’t just a single reason. Chris’s mood swings from meds was only one factor of many. Pat’s need for novelty clashed with Chris’s need for predictability. Pat’s mother triggered Chris’s paranoia. Etc. etc… (Chris and Pat are fictional, of course, but you get the idea.)

What I’m struggling with these days in my fiction is that I want to put in more complexity for the sake of realism. When stories are too simple, then everything can feel too pat, too overly worked out. Fortunately for me, my characters rarely want to behave; they lie to me, and their Goals, Motivations, and Conflicts are moving targets… perhaps a bit like some real people I know. Also, things being “too simple” rarely happens when one is writing at the crossroads of multiple genres. Trying to make all the puzzle pieces fit together can be such a challenge, but it feels so good when they all snap into place!

I have to remind myself, though, that even if it feels good, I should not just storify my understanding of the world and the complicated people around me. Sirius tells Harry at one point that the world isn’t divided into good people and Death Eaters… but then both he and Harry proceed to act as if it is, anyway. Social media wants us to pick sides on every issue, but isn’t one of my bedrock principles “No False Binaries?” Because a binary is yet another form of oversimplification which is detrimental to wisdom and knowledge. I feel like as a storyteller I want to use my storytelling gifts to make the world a better place, but at the same time I am like Sirius, stating that it isn’t all as simple as the story wants to make it out to be.

COVER REVEAL… over at LGBTQ Reads!

It’s finally here! I’ve been teasing the brand new covers for Daron’s Guitar Chronicles for a few months now! Well, you can finally see the full covers of books 1 through 4, as revealed on the LGBTQ Reads Blog! Link: https://wp.me/p7lpmr-9PB

I’ve sent them not just the new covers but “old versus new” comparison shots. Remember the old ones were all stock photos that I searched and searched for, trying to find images that would fit? I’m SO much happier with commissioned art from Cheyanne Bueno, aka Milkychai. See their portfolio here: https://milkychai.weebly.com/ or give a follow on Insta: https://www.instagram.com/milkychai

The reveal also means book one is back on Amazon, for sale in paperback or digital, but also available to read in Kindle Unlimited for the first time! The new edition will be exclusive there 90 days and then go live everywhere else. If I’ve clicked all the right buttons, you should find the new book one here: https://amzn.to/43gJ79m

AND NOW… *another* Cover Reveal, this one for Sharang Biswas!

If you don’t know Sharang, I’ll briefly describe him as a force of nature driving much queer speculative sexuality into role-playing games. His publisher sent me a very boring author photo and one thing Sharang is not is boring, so I snazzed it up (as seen above).

Sharang is more than a game designer, artist, and writer, but to get a feel for him as a writer, have a taste of his fiction in the form of the short short story, “The Birds I Pull.” We are hotly anticipating his upcoming novella from Neon Hemlock Press, which is part of Neon Hemlock’s 2024 novella kickstarter campaign, which is going on RIGHT NOW (for the next 2 weeks). Sharang’s novella is entitled THE IRON BELOW REMEMBERS, and you can get it as part of the Kickstarter rewards: http://kck.st/3TjeDjN

Here’s the official description:

Set in an alternate version of the British Isles where South Asian imperial interest colonized much of the globe thanks to their advanced technology, Professor Laxman Yadav is dating Saviour, one of the world’s most famous superheroes, while also investigating the most important archeological find of all time.

Equal parts pulp caper and meta-textual academic text, this novella leans as heavily on footnotes as it does on explorations of queer romance.

I have it on good authority (Sharang mentioned it) that he was trying to figure out how to put sex scenes in the footnotes of the new novella. I of course has to ask him about that, so here’s a mini interview:

CT: You know one of my gigs is editing an academic journal, right? Tell me about this “footnote as a sex scene” you mentioned?SHARANG: Haha! There are no full-blown sex scenes in the book—they didn’t suit the tone and rhythm, really. However, there are a few fade-to-black scenes, plus many moments where the narrator Laxman describes various sexy things he’s been up to. Since Laxman is a scholar of archeology, the book is peppered with his footnotes, and a couple of them do include such sexy moments:Here are two teaser footnotes (subject to edits, of course):

[54] Yes, I know what you’re thinking, and no, I haven’t ever dressed as a cowboy for a drag show, or for a roleplay scenario or anything like that. I made an ex do it. And then I rode him till he screamed like a horse and shot his bullets straight into me.

[67] The complete poem has unfortunately been lost. As a result, the annual Critical Karthik Literatures Conference commissioned a “reimagined reconstruction” of the poem from celebrated poet Mehreen Pimpli-Montgomery a few summers back. The organisers had not bargained on the fact that Pimpli-Montgomery was going through complicated gender-transition-feels at the time, and the final poem ended up as an extremely unsubtle ode to the truck-stop fuck that first made her truly feel like a woman. It’s a marvellous piece of literature. I once made Ezra recite it to me wearing a lacy bra and panties.

CT: Who was the first superhero you had a crush on, and what was so hot about them?

SHARANG: Oh wow, I can’t remember which came first: Wheeler, the fire-wielding redhead New Yorker from CAPTAIN PLANET or Burt Ward’s Robin in the 60’s Batman TV show.  Either way, my interest in twinks clearly came at an early age. Also, Robin kept getting tied up and left in interesting predicaments…another interest of mine!

CT: If you could do a book tour event for this book anywhere, where would it be?

SHARANG: I mean, I’d be down to do a tour of various archeology departments or dig sites around the world, just to see what reaction I’d elicit! Like, I’d love to read out the book in front of an Aztec excavation!

Cover illustration by Veshalini Naidu

Monthly Book Rec(s)!

Okay, I am here to sing the praises of the Radiant Emperor Duology by Shelley Parker-Chan, perhaps better known by the titles of the two books:

She Who Became the SunHe Who Drowned the World

You might be thinking because these books have been so universally lauded that they must be full of boring, respectable content. I am here to make sure you know these books are deeply subversive and the kind of thing that ten years ago publishers would have said could only be “niche” published. Oh how glorious it is that these extremely queer books have hit it big!

I will now attempt to recommend these fine books without actually giving away any spoilers. You’ve probably gathered that there is an ancient China setting. These read much like historicals rather than fantasy, because the fantasy element is subtle: the Mandate of Heaven is an actual visible power (and also, and the ghosts of Chinese folklore are real). But most of it is really just about the people, the larger-than-life characters.

If you thought there wasn’t anything new to be done with the “girl dresses as a boy” trope, then She Who Became the Sun is the book for you. The second volume, though, is where Parker-Chan really stretches their wings, taking everything that was in the first volume and cranking it up to a new level. The interiority of the narrative (despite being 3rd person) intensifies and deepens in the second book, and adds the points of view of a few new antagonists that are absolutely chewy and delicious in a way that left me not wanting to read another book for a while, because nothing else was going to live up to how good it was.

These new characters broaden the interrogation of gender that began in book one into multiple viewpoints, and there is a great deal of sadism and masochism and shifting of boundaries and negotiations in ways that feel very informed by BDSM without ever being explicitly “a kink.” Our main character, Zhu, starts out as a “girl dressed as a boy” but grows into being a truly genderfluid character, a person of great strength who ultimately seems beyond gender.

Bottom line is these are extremely extremely queer and kinky books, and that hasn’t kept them from being #1 bestsellers and award winners all across the sf/f and bookselling universe! They’re just THAT GOOD.

Hardcover, $26.99
Ebook, $14.99
August 2023
Buy:
Bookshop • Amazon

Right now, He Who Drowned the World is only in hardcover, audio, and ebook. The paperback is slated for release this summer.  Bookshop • Amazon

She Who Became the Sun meanwhile is in paperback and all the other formats. Paperback: $17.99, Hardcover $29.99
Bookshop • Amazon

Upcoming Appearances

Tomorrow I’m flying to Orlando to attend ICFA, the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, which has been one of my favorite conventions for a while now. It’s just a lovely mix of academics, both young and old, and professional sf/f writers who enjoy the brainy atmosphere. I often get a lot of writing done beside the pool, in between attending thought-provoking academic research presentations. I had to miss it last year because of my dad going into hospice care, and so it’ll be good to be back. 

Romance-lovers in Massachusetts! Get ready for the one-day “RomCon” put on by the Ashland Public Library! I will be there to speak on a panel and autographing books, along with Loretta Chase, Kosoko Jackson, Caroline Linden, and more!

It’s happening Saturday, May 18th. Details on the Ashland Library website.

SFWA NEBULAS CONFERENCE

I’m excited to attend the Nebulas conference in person for the first time since the BeforeTimes. It was the most fun convention to attend virtually during the lockdowns, because of course a bunch of sf/f fantasy writers leaned in to the virtual reality premise that we were all on the Airship Nebula together, merely separated into our own cabins because of laser bats attacking and other silliness that folks made up along the way.

Registration is open now for the conference in Pasadena, CA, June 6-9, and in addition to the awards ceremony, there will be various panels and professional development seminars aimed at genre writers at all stages of career. We don’t have details on the program yet, but I’ll share them when I know more.

You DON’T have to be a member of SFWA to attend the Nebulas conference, and registration includes access to a bunch of virtual programming all year long, as well. Register before March 14 to get the early bird price.

To register: https://nebulas.sfwa.org/nebula-conference/

Works-in-Progress Report

Don’t laugh. My writing time the past 2 weeks though has been taken up with a project that caught fire very suddenly: a dragon romantasy idea.

I know I said I wasn’t going to chase trends anymore, but I was looking through my old notebooks and this idea that I started making notes on in the year 2000 (24 years ago!!) ambushed me and will not let go. I’m four chapters in already, and still high energy. I haven’t written this fast or this enthusiastically in years! What’s changed?

Some might say my muse is feeling liberated by the fact we’re not tied to Tor anymore. But there’s also the fact that I started taking tryptophan supplements in November/December while trying to alleviate my post-COVID brain fog, and it’s not only helped the brain fog, but I feel like it’s restored my brain almost to a pre-menopause state! My libido woke up a bit, too, and some other personal life things that have happened, plus the house renovation nearing completion has meant I’ve been able to order my living space much better than the past few years, too…

So which is it? As I mentioned above in Thinky Thoughts, it’s the combination of ALL of these things that has brought my writing back to life and back up to speed. I wrote 6,000 words of fiction this week, which is very close what my old average used to be!  (I used to average 1000 words a day, though it was usually 200 words one day and 2000 the next…) Here’s hoping I can stay healthy and keep this up. This manuscript, which has the working title of Windmark, has me rubbing my hands together and laughing like a villain while I’m writing. So you know it’s going to be good. *muahahaha*

Help Me Do Stuff: Get a Free Book

If you’ve been following me for a while, you know I like to give away books. Would you like to get a copy of the new paperback edition of Volume 1 of Daron’s Guitar Chronicles in exchange for helping me launch it? I need folks to:

write reviews on Amazon and Goodreadsshare the cover and buy links on social media talk about the book or series on TikTok, Insta, or Youtubehost me as a guest on your blog or podcast something else I haven’t thought of…?

Fill out this Google form if you’re interested in any of the above, or proposing some other launch thing you’d enjoy doing! The form will collect your shipping address and email: https://forms.gle/9tEzhZ9xYrt9W9CD8

(I also would like to give folks copies of the DGC books 2-6 paperbacks in exchange for reading through the PDFs for typos and errors. Hit me up if you’re interested.)

One Featured Read

I end every newsletter with a throwback of some kind, either to a book in my backlist, or, this time with an online story you can read. Sharang’s academic and his footnotes reminded me of this one:

Back in spring 2016, writer and editor Molly Tanzer launched a new online erotic sf/f magazine called CONGRESS. I sent her a story I entitled “Crowdthink Consensus Thresholds: A Study.”

http://www.congressmagazine.com/article/crowdthink-consensus-thresholds-study/

A few months later, Trump got elected, and a bunch of life events hit Molly, so, alas I don’t think there’s ever been a fourth issue of Congress. (Note: the website has weirdly removed all the author names and replaced them with repeats of the title… but “Crowdthink” is definitely mine!)

Congress Magazine
August 2016
Epub, $2.99
at Weightless Ebooks, or from Amazon
or read free online at CongressMagazine.com

 

 

 

Next month we’ll have photos from ICFA, DGC vol 2 will launch into Kindle Unlimited, and maybe I’ll have a sneak peek excerpt ready…? Maybe. Maybe.

One more test post…

I’ll delete this in a few minutes, once I see if it propagates properly…

How BDSM is Like Frozen Yogurt

So, I’m reorganizing the way I handle my blog(s), email list, Patreon, and social media. I’m going to crosspost a monthly “news and notes” across all platforms. It’ll typically open with what I call “Thinky Thoughts,” followed by the “news” of where I’m going, where I’ve been, what I’m working on, and what’s new to read.

Previously this material was scattered across my various social media and then usual compiled in the newsletter, with sporadic posts at Patreon as well, but now that I’m about to start posting more fiction content to Patreon, it made sense to streamline the rest.

This post is the first full “news and notes” update I’m putting on my main blog at ceciliatan.com (and onto Tumblr and Medium and everywhere else it crossposts like LJ, Dreamwidth, Goodreads, etc!). Wherever you’re reading it, welcome! Come hear my tale of WHY it is that I’m about to start posting more to Patreon, and how the answer relates to the issue of How BDSM is Like Frozen Yogurt.

(If you’ve already read my newsletter or patreon update, this is the same stuff…)

In this newsletter:Thinky thoughts: How BDSM is like Frozen YogurtNew free read: “A Novel is An Empathy Engine” at UncannyBook rec: Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka AokiUpcoming appearances: ICFA! Nebs! Etc!Talks are live on YouTube now!WIP ReportPhotos from recent travelsDaron’s cornerThinky Thoughts: How BDSM is like Frozen Yogurt

First a quick note about masks and COVID at cons: I just got back from Capricon in Chicago, and a few weeks back we had Arisia here in Boston, right in the midst of a COVID surge. Both cons required masks, and both cons have reported minimal spread afterward. Arisia only 8 cases out of 1200 attendees.

Every time I post about this, people try to send me links to studies showing that “masks don’t work.” Of course, these same people aren’t interested in seeing the studies that show masks DO work. What seems evident from the cons I’ve been to over the past two years is that if you have a science fiction convention with a mask mandate, you get low (but not always zero) spread, and if you have no mask mandate, you have dramatically more cases. If you’re a mask skeptic, I would think of it this way: Maybe that’s just because the “mask believer” behavior is less risky in all respects while the “no more masks!” crowd is more likely to carry COVID, not because of masks per se, but because of other behaviors? The cause doesn’t actually matter, only the results, and so net result: I will be preferentially attending the cons that require masks.

The other mitigation strategy I’ve been employing at cons which I’m really enjoying is this: when I want to have a “let’s catch up” meal with someone at a con, instead of going to some noisy restaurant or bar, is having them up to my room and getting either room service or ordering some form of delivery food. It’s quieter and we can actually catch up with fewer distractions! And post-COVID, my brain can’t handle distractions as well as it used to!

And with post-COVID life on my mind, I am now attempting to re-focus my career on my self-publishing efforts. There are a few reasons for this, but one is definitely a feeling that time is finite. The COVID infection I had in September probably shortened my lifespan and/or my brain’s useful working years remaining. And I have a LOT of stories I still want to tell.

Another is that it’s become clear to me that right now the big publishers are just not that into me. The “kink fad” is over for them. But in indie/self publishing, the readers are still there. If you haven’t heard me gripe about it elsewhere yet, The Vanished Chronicles is not going to come out from Tor, even though they’ve had the series under contract now since Obama was president. I got reassigned to a new editor a while back, and she’s not enthused about it. So the rights are coming back to me, and I will be putting the wheels in motion to self-publish in the future.

HOW BDSM IS LIKE FROZEN YOGURT
Do you remember back when there were exactly two places you could get frozen yogurt and they were knock-offs of each other? TCBY and ICBY: The Country’s Best Yogurt and I Can’t Believe it’s Yogurt. The main place you would find TCBY and ICBY was in airports and in mall food courts. I don’t know which one came first, but the point is that they were a staple in these big capitalist slots for decades. They were basically like soft-serve ice cream, but made with yogurt, which was nominally “health food” but whatever.

Then in the early 2000s, here in Cambridge, MA, a company started up called Berryline (their two stores were along the Red Line T, one by Harvard and one by MIT) with the concept that they wanted frozen yogurt that actually tasted like yogurt (much more sour) and not faux ice cream. They quickly had lines out the door and expanded to a third location, etc.

Capitalists took notice. This area is known for incubating successful chain concepts, and quickly a whole passel of copycat chains began proliferating across the country. Pinkberry, Red Mango, Yogurtland, 16 Handles, and more and more. The peak came around 2012… right around when the 50 Shades of Grey hype was exploding.

Kinky books had a similar trajectory. For decades there were a couple of stodgy, reliable outlets for them: Blue Moon Books and Black Lace among them, which could be very reliably found in the chain bookstores like Borders, Waldenbooks, and Barnes & Noble. They were the ICBY and TCBY of BDSM books.

But upstart publishers like Circlet Press, and romance publishers who were starting to dabble in kink, showed there was upward movement in the market, then the 50 Shades boom happened, and all of a sudden every big publisher was acquiring kinky books. When my book Slow Surrender hit the market was at the peak of this boom, which is why that book was sold in Target, alongside Christina Lauren, Sylvia Day, Tara Sue Me, et cetera.

But of the ten (TEN!) fro-yo places that tried to open in my neighborhood during the boom… ZERO of them are still in business. Even the Berryline store that had opened a few blocks from my house has closed. Does this mean people don’t like frozen yogurt anymore? Not at all. There are still a few shops doling it out to dedicated customers. But the craze for it is over.

And the craze for BDSM and kink among the big publishers is over. Does this mean readers don’t want it anymore? No. There are still thriving readerships for both queer and het BDSM, but the authors who are doling it out are back in the indie/self-publishing spaces for the most part.

So that’s where I’m redirecting my energy now. Into my own books and my own efforts. I took a workshop recently, offered by the SFWA romance writers subgroup, about writer burnout. They asked, when was the last time you really felt energized and lit up by your work? When was the last time you really felt on fire for it, like you couldn’t wait to get to the computer to write?

For me, that feeling was when I was juggling serializing The Prince’s Boy and Daron’s Guitar Chronicles simultaneously while I was writing Magic University. Far from feeling “burned out” by all that work, I was waking up every morning with writing ideas, and going to sleep every night thinking about my characters.

So. It’s time I leaned in to my queer and kinky stuff again, time to listen to my muse and not try to chase a Big 5 trend. It was nice to ride a capitalist wave for a while, because that’s what got me out of credit card debt and onto a decent financial footing really for the first time ever. And it would be great if another publisher wanted to throw a lot of dollars (or Euros) at me, but for now I should be concentrating on controlling my own creative and financial future.

CHANGES TO THIS NEWSLETTER & PATREON
What that means is I’m getting organized to start serializing some of my works in progress through my Patreon. My plan is to keep sending out this email newsletter once a month, but I’ll also crosspost it to Patreon (where there is now a free “follow” function) and to my blog(s).

I expect to begin a weekly serial on the Patreon within the next couple of months. What I haven’t figured out yet is WHICH of the back-burner projects to serialize first. One entire book of The Vanished Chronicles is finished and in the can, but I’m letting my agent solicit a few other publishers about that before I do anything with it myself (but I’m expecting it’ll come back to me). I also have a very queer cyberpunk novel that has been in the works for over 10 years. And a “trapped in a game” series that would be ideal to serialize. And so on. I will probably run a poll next month asking for which to do first!

People also keep asking me for book recommendations! I’m going to try to read more, and try to recommend at least one book per month in the newsletter.

Thanks for reading this newsletter whether you are getting it through Mailchimp or on one of my other platforms! (Please consider getting it through Patreon if you’re not as they seem to be the best at bypassing the spam filters…? They have some secret sauce!)

New Essay

I have a new essay up for reading at Uncanny Magazine! It’s entitled “A Novel Is An Empathy Engine.”

My previous essay at Uncanny (“Let Me Tell You…”) goes viral every few years when some new crop of MFA students discovers it and gets their minds blown. (It’s a rant about how “show, don’t tell” is bad writing advice and details how that belief works against both sf/f as genres and anyone writing from a marginalized point of view.)

I figured there was no way I would be able to replicate that virality, so I just zeroed in on a topic near and dear to my heart, which is fiction as a tool (possibly THE ONLY proven effective tool) for building empathy. While many writers, going all the way back to Aristotle (!) have spouted that fiction is good for the soul, we actually have a lot of proof coming out of cognitive science that both people’s urge to empathize and their capacity for empathy are increased by reading fiction.

Read the new essay here: “A Novel Is An Empathy Engine“

Watch more talks online!

By coincidence, I had two separate talks go live on Youtube this past week!

“Death to Show, Don’t Tell!” This was a talk that partly grew out of that old Uncanny rant about “show, don’t tell.” I did it a while ago for Writing the Other, where K. Tempest Bradford, Rebecca Makkai, and I spend an hour absolutely trashing the old saw. WTO finally released it into the wild for all to see. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZUYNz5bSikThe other was the event that I just did with Ann Bannon, the “Queen of Lesbian Pulp” put on by the Rare Book & Manuscript Library of the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. The recording is now up for anyone who missed it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeyaveFkFXQFinally, my Writing the Other master class on Writing Bi/Pan Characters is now available on demand. Folks can pay to watch it anytime. https://writingtheother.com/on-demand-bisexual-pansexual-master-class/Book Rec!

I’m still kicking myself I didn’t get a selfie with Ryka Aoki when we were on a panel together at Arisia on “Writing with the Rainbow.” (Along with Elijah Kinch Spector, JR Dawson, and Sacchi Green). Knowing that the panel was coming up, I bought the ebook LIGHT FROM UNCOMMON STARS intending to read it before the con. I actually didn’t manage to start it until after the con though, which is just as well, or I would have spent the whole panel gushing at Ryka about what a great book it was.

LIGHT FROM UNCOMMON STARS is a little hard to describe, because the book biz wants to make very hard divisions between “science fiction” and “fantasy” — much the way many people insist on making very hard divisions between “male” and “female,” and then when an example comes along that doesn’t fit their neatly labeled boxes, they get angry and try to pretend it doesn’t exist.

Very fortunately, people did NOT pretend this book didn’t exist, and instead embraced its madcap mix of space aliens who run a SoCal donut shop and violinists who sold their souls to the devil. The book garnered a Hugo finalist slot and won the Otherwise Award, and it is a DELIGHT to read. If that’s enough to convince you, just go read it and discover the book’s delights for yourself.

(I get a kickback if you buy through either of these links: Amazon – Bookshop.org)

What I loved about this book is that all these disparate elements felt like they came together very organically. There is classical music nerdery in spades (you guys already know about my fandom for TwoSet Violin, right?), and a trans coming of age story, and heaps and heaps of Asian diaspora representation. The “representation” felt much more natural to me here than it did in “Death by Bubble Tea by Jennifer Chow, a cozy mystery I also read recently (Amazon, Bookshop). Both books are set in Southern California and have a lot of scenes set in Asian-family owned restaurants and food establishments. Part of what feels different between them might just be I am not as much of a mystery reader as a science fiction reader. I liked Death by Bubble Tea almost in spite of how it felt a little “paint by numbers”, but I LOVED Light from Uncommon Stars. 

Content warning: Some trans readers may be triggered when Katrina experiences misgendering and abuse in the course of the story. Ryka Aoki is a trans woman and presents a very clear-eyed view of what Katrina goes through, neither sensationalizing it nor downplaying it. Ultimately this is a sweet book with a lot of healing in it, though. 

Works in Progress Report

The Vanished Chronicles, as I mentioned above, is not going to come from Tor after all. I know, I know. We came SO CLOSE to book one, Initiates of the Blood, being released in 2018 that we handed out tote bags and swag at the RT convention featuring the book’s cover. I know this will be disappointing news to some of you who are waiting for it to come out. Now that it’s coming back to me, the title of the book and what format it appears in are up for grabs again. I am expecting I will serialize the chapters on Patreon, for paying patrons only, unless my agent finds another publisher willing to cough up a lot of dough for it. I was never in love with the title “Initiates of the Blood,” so we’ll probably be trying to cook up a new title.

What a Man Wants was a short story I wrote a while back for the Ladies of Trade Town anthology edited by Lee Martindale, but it always wanted to grow into a novel, and I played with expanding it into one a few years back, but projects under contract took priority. Now this one is back on the front burner and I’ve spent most of my writing time over the past few weeks moving this one forward. I don’t know yet what the novel will be called, but the concept behind “what a man wants” is that the pilot who is he absolute best at serving the straight male clients who hire a PerfectWifeTM is actually a man. When this top-rated WifePilot gets tabbed by the company CEO to pilot a bot of his own real-life wife on a business trip, though, hijinks ensue.

The SABR Writers & Editors Guide: I’m also finally writing the “usage guide and advice for baseball writers and editors” book that I’ve been wanting to write since I took the SABR job in 2011. I’m working on sample chapters now and a proposal to send to a publisher. I know it’s got nothing to do with my fiction projects, but I’m listing it here because some of you might be curious, and because it definitely counts as a WIP. It takes up writing time, after all!

There are other irons in the fire, too. And many ideas surging now that the Vanished Chronicles has been freed! More to come in future newsletters.

Next Appearance(s)

I have added some more conventions to the 2024 schedule, including SFWA’s Nebulas conference, which will be June 6-9 in Pasadena, CA, and World Fantasy in Niagara Falls.

I don’t know yet if I’ll do the Nebs in person or only online, but I’m looking at the budget now to see about in-person! Here’s hoping!

And although I have skipped World Fantasy Con for years now, partly motivated by aggravation over the concom’s failure to respect the needs of both disabled professional writers and BIPOC authors, the Niagara con is being mostly run by the same folks who bring us Heliosphere (a NY/NJ area con that I’ve been Guest of Honor for) which impressed me with their commitment to diversity. So I’ve registered.

Upcoming Tour Dates 2024:February 1-5: Capricon, Chicago, ILMarch 13-16: ICFA, Orlando, FLMay 18: RomCon, Ashland Public Library, Ashland, MAJune 6-9: Nebulas Conference (still figuring out if I’m going in person or online only)July 11-14: Readercon, Boston areaAugust 7-11: SABR National Convention, MinneapolisOctober 16-20: World Fantasy Con, Niagara FallsOn the plane to Chicago, for Capricon, and by the way, to have dinner at Alinea while in town.At Alinea, one of the dessert courses came in a sort of test tube. It was “bubble gum” with boba in it!Help Me Do StuffI’m still trying to get a committee together to administrate the a new erotic sf/f award, the Diadem Award. If you’ve got experience or interest in incorporating a non-profit, please let me know!It’s probably obvious, but now that I’m back to self-publishing as my main source of income, I would like to double my Patreon subscribers. If you’ve got a Patreon yourself that would be simpatico, please let me know if you’d like to collaborate on something for our followers!ABOVE: Hanging out at the bar at Capricon with all four Guests of Honor, K. Tempest Bradford, Ariela Housman (Geek Calligraphy), Victor Raymond, and Catherine Lundoff! Tempest, Victor, and Catherine and I go waayyyyyy back. Ariela is a new acquaintance and is really awesome!

BELOW: A couple of photos from Arisia. Dropping by the OTW table, and before our Meet the Authors Tea Party, doing some green-tea eye gels to try to reduce my undereye circles. (It did not work, alas, but seeing a lot of my old Circlet peeps, including Nobilis Reed, Monique Poirier, Sacchi Green, Bethany Zaiatz, Avery Vanderlyle, and more lifted my spirits a lot!

One Featured Backlist Book

Today’s featured “backlist” book is last year’s release, Bent for Leather, which I lost a lot of the usual opportunities to market when I spent the spring caring for my dad in hospice, and the fall recovering from COVID. It’s a collection of my kinkiest, queerest BDSM stories, including one entirely new science fiction story, “Personalize Your Netherparts.”

Find it wherever books are sold:
• Amazon
• Bookshop.org

“Tan’s collection of recent stories is a symphony of lust: queer desire, heartbreak, power, surrender, and a dulcet submersion into the inner ache of wanting.”
—Sinclair Sexsmith

Daron’s CornerThe launch of the new book versions is hopefully happening later this month! There’s still one ebookstore overseas we have to get to take down the old version before we can go into Kindle Unlimited to start with. I’m working on getting that taken off, and then we’ll be ready to go!Watch the Patreon posts for cover reveals!

Duck Day 2023: Full Canto

If you’ve read my “Duck Day” posts before, you know it’s my rundown of what corwin and I made for Thanksgiving. In 2023 we left for Aruba with my Mom that Saturday, and I thought I would work on the recap post then. But “Aruba” and “work” do not mix, and instead I read two lovely books and lounged about in the shade (and finally began to feel a little bit recovered from having had COVID in September…)

Anyway, now it’s February 2024 and I’m finally posting this so I can close the dozens of tabs still open on my browser since November!

In Duck Days past, corwin and I have cooked up some high concept menu themes (like the time we traced a map of the Silk Road, or the parody menu “American Classics,” or the year we did “togetherness“…), while other times we’ve stuck to a single cuisine as a theme (i.e. French). This year we decided to go for full-on Cantonese which means including a couple of nods to the Philippines and Singapore, where there are large Cantonese populations and the cuisine has been adapted with local flair. (Same could be said for the USA….)

Having grown up as a mixed-race Chinese-filipino kid in the 1970s, I spent a lot of my childhood eating in Chinese restaurants throughout suburban New Jersey, with very regular trips to NYC Chinatown. We ate a lot of takeout from “American” Chinese joints, and often had Christmas Day dinner at one of the slightly fancier Chinese restaurants (because my mom’s birthday is on Christmas and she would rather not cook on her birthday). If we went shopping in Manhattan in the morning, we went to dim sum after. If we went to a Broadway show at night, or even to Yankee Stadium which is way up in the Bronx, we still drove all the way down to Chinatown for a late-night dinner.

I understood as a kid that there was something “cultural” about going to Chinatown that I was supposed to “get,” but I didn’t really know what it was, and my family didn’t explicitly talk about it. But it meant I felt some kind of connection even if there really wasn’t a functional difference between me and non-Chinese tourist kids from the suburbs.

If I absorbed some cultural values on these trips they probably boiled down to these:
– It’s a virtue to eat.
– It’s a virtue to eat everything.
– It’s a virtue to eat everything your ancestors (probably) ate.

For a while my grandfather came to live with us, and I found it extremely frustrating that we had no common language, because I really wanted to grill him all day long about what his life was like growing up when there was still a dynasty going on. Like, whoa.

He liked going to Chinatown even though he spoke a different dialect from most of the merchants there. Because he could write things down, though, he could request special things from the waiters and go into the Chinese pharmacy and get various remedies. One thing, though, that he had going on was high blood pressure, and so his doctor (and my dad, who was an MD) had told him to cut salt out of his diet. So my mom was cooking everything low salt. (My grandfather must’ve just thought she was a terrible cook.) But his blood pressure didn’t go down. They couldn’t figure it out.

Until my dad found the tub of pork floss he had hidden in his room. For those not familiar with pork floss, try to imagine if chewing tobacco were made from beef jerky so finely shredded it had the texture of dryer lint. (It’s DELICIOUS.)

Anyway. Probably 90% of my identification with my Chinese heritage comes through food (the other 10% comes through kung fun movies, and I’m not even kidding).

tl;dr — Deciding to do a heavy-duty Cantonese meal is kind of a big deal for me.

But of course this is us, so we couldn’t ONLY do straight-up traditional, we had to find ways to bistronomize and fuse and elevate and have fun with the dishes.

The menu at each dinner guest’s place, a take-off on the old cheesy US Chinese restaurant menus from our childhoods.

The Menu:

1) Amuse & Opening Cocktail:
A Savory Fortune Cookie
Name of the cocktail: ネグロに (Ne Gu Ro Ni, yes we’re writing it in Japanese)

2) Dim Sum:
Chashu Duck Baked Bun
Duck Meatball w/ Yuba
Chinese Broccoli in Oyster Sauce

with Oolong tea

3) Soup:
Duck Kut Teh with You Tiao (Chinese “crullers”)
served with a Crispy duck-confit filled Lumpia

4) Noodles:
Hand-cut Sweetwater noodle w/ ground duck topping

5) Palate Cleanser:
Trio of sorbettos: ginger, lychee, orange

6) Main Course:
Sticky-rice stuffed roast duck
With Scallion & Cucumber garnish

7) Dessert:
Yuzu Creme Brulee
Pineapple Bun
Orange Slice

8) Tea & Coffee
** Candied things

The cocktail is garnished with candied Buddha’s Hand that I made. In the background you can see the savory fortune cookies.

 

Opening Cocktail: Ne Gu Ro Ni (you can spell this with katakana)
Inspired by a friend’s recent musing on what counts as a negroni (e.g. by some definitions, concrete is a negroni…), corwin invented this one using the idea that a negroni is one part base spirit, one part bitter, and one part sweet. It uses Gokoo Shochu, which is very whiskey-like, as the base spirt, a Japanese “Bermutto” as the sweet component, and a black jasmine tea as the bitter.

The savory fortune cookies. (Scroll to the end of the post to see what they said inside.)

The Savory Fortune Cookie:
I like my amuses to be, well, amusing, and this seemed a good way to inject some whimsy. When I ran the test recipe for this, I made test fortunes that said things like “This is a test of the fortune cookie broadcast system.” “This is only a test.” “If this had been an actual fortune cookie, you would have received some Orientalist B.S.” and so on.

I based my recipe on this one for “Brown Butter Fortune Cookies” from Cook It Delicious: https://cooktildelicious.com/brown-butter-fortune-cookies/

The consensus among my foodie Twitter/Bluesky/etc cohort is that because the fortune cookie batter is mostly sugar and egg whites, trying to reduce the sugar wouldn’t work. But plenty of Cantonese cooking is savory while also being sweet, so I kept the sugar content the same and just pumped up the savory aspect. One test batch I added sesame oil to the brown butter and they were okay. Next batch I added the sesame oil FROM THE JAR OF LAO GAN MA and that kicked it right into the savory stratosphere! Delicious! (it also made the cookies slightly pink) The other thing I added was a sprinkling of sesame seeds and flake salt onto the unbaked cookies right before putting them in the oven.

They came out fantastic. The biggest problem I’ve usually found with homemade fortune cookies is that they come out soggy (or chewy) rather than crispy. What I found during the tests was that I could just keep putting the shaped cookies — held in shape by putting them into an egg carton the moment they’re shaped — into the oven on a low-ish heat (300 degrees, I think) for another few minutes beyond the expected bake time.

The fortune cookies, still soft, right before being peeled off the silpat and shaped by hand.An egg carton is the best thing to tuck the fortune cookies into the moment they are shaped, and then stick them back in the oven to finish crisping up.

 

THE DIM SUM COURSE: 

We don’t go into restaurants indoors when the COVID numbers are over a certain threshold, which means we haven’t been to a dim sum palace since before Omicron. And damn, I miss it.

Chashu Duck Baked Bun
Duck Meatball w/ Yuba
Chinese Broccoli in Oyster Sauce

All three elements of the dum sum course.

The chinese broccoli in oyster sauce is basically an excuse to get some green vegetables into our guests. According to Buddhist tradition, oyster sauce is vegetarian. No, really. (Chinese Cooking Demystified did a whole video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDC6Q5upKPE)

DUCK MEATBALL on Yuba

This is a duck version of the beef ball you usually get on tofu skin. corwin learned the technique that makes those balls so soft yet bouncy (it has to do with lye water), and guess what? It works for duck, too. (Another nod to Chinese Cooking Demystified, who posted their recipe here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Cooking/comments/bh7pjc/recipe_dim_sum_beef_balls_%E9%E7%9A%AE%E7%9B%E8%E7/ and the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsEPOKveJFQ)

Chashu Duck Baked Bun

This is basically the classic charsiu siopao but with duck instead of pork. We’ve made these before, but it’s a classic and good to return to to scratch that dimsum itch!

For one friend who keeps kosher, we gave her the meat filling without the bun, which is made from a milk bread.

 

Duck Kut Teh with You Tiao (Chinese “crullers”)
served with a Crispy duck-confit filled Lumpia

One of the best foods we ate in Singapore was Bak Kuh Teh, which comes from the hokkienese (Fujianese) words for “pork bone tea.” We had it both at the truly delicious and well-known chain restaurant Song Fa, and also as late-night eats in the one area of Singapore where there are all-night dim sum joints (because no matter how much the government wants everyone to get up early to go to work and be orderly and sorta British about everything, you simply cannot completely stamp out this Cantonese cultural norm, apparently?) Song Fa has a Michelin Bib Gourmand award seven years running, and yeah, damn it’s good.

I really should’ve bought 20 of these when we were in Singapore…

 

Song Fa sells spice packets for making bak kut teh at home both in their stores and on the website (I’ve also seen it on Amazon) and in Singaporean grocery stores. I’ve made bak kuh teh a few times since our 2022 trip and I think it comes out best with a combination of the Song Fa packet and additional fresh spices. The main thing you can’t believe until you do it is just how much white pepper it takes to really get the flavor right. (Also 5 heads of garlic per rack of ribs.)

I used the following reference recipe, as well as the instructions on the Song Fa packet, and a few others I looked up: https://delightfulplate.com/bak-kut-teh-singapore-pork-rib-soup/

But here’s what I ended up with:

My BAK KUH TEH recipe

1 rack of pork ribs (12-13 ribs)25 fresh peeled garlic cloves (or 5 heads of however many cloves)one Song Fa spice packageseveral slices of fresh gingerone cinnamon sticktwo tablespoons white peppercorns2 star anise1 tsp dark soy sauce1 tsp light soy sauce

If you don’t have the Song Fa packet, you can replace it with 30 grams of white pepper (yes that is most of a grocery store container of white peppercorns) whether as whole peppercorns or ground, 10 grams of sea salt, 5 grams of cinnamon chunks or sticks, and 4 broken star anise. (And MSG if you want it. I find this meal has enough umami and salt without it.)

Buy a long flat rack of pork ribs when it’s not grilling season and you can find them on sale for $5.99 a pound (they’ll jump to $12.99 a pound or more in barbecue season). In fact, buy a few and freeze them until you’re ready to use them for bak kuh teh.

First bring a LARGE pot of water to a boil (large enough for all the ribs.) Cut up the ribs and peel 50 cloves of garlic while you’re waiting for the pot to boil. Put a few pinches of salt and some slices of ginger in the water. Once it gets to a rolling boil, put all the ribs in and return it to a boil. Parboil one minute, then discard the water and rinse the ribs well with cold water.

Clean out the pot. Some recipes now have you toast the spices and garlic cloves in the bottom of the pot before you refill it with water, but I have not done that. Add fresh water, and the ribs, and bring it to a boil again. Then add all the garlic cloves, and both soy sauces. Have the spices in either tea balls or other infusers, or those disposable tea bags, and halfway through the cooking, be sure to move them around a bit (but don’t break them or the soup will be gritty).

Simmer 90 minutes to 2 hours. Serve with 3 ribs per large soup bowl and a ladle or two of the broth. In the Song Fa restaurant, they strain the garlic cloves out to make the broth clear again, but I leave them in. (They’re mostly disintegrated.)

If you’ve ever wondered why “vegetarian delight,” the really bland vegetable dish served at Cantonese restaurants, exists at all, it’s because it’s the perfect balance to offset the intensity of bak kuh teh.

Of course, because this is DUCK DAY, we cooked up a version that used duck legs with some meat still on them as a stand-in for the ribs, and duck stock, and the rest was the same spice mix and garlic, and it came out fantastic. (There are many non-pork variations including duck to be found around Malaysia, Indonesia, etc. but I didn’t really look up any recipes, I just swapped in duck for pork and it worked.)

Somehow I didn’t get a photo of the duck kuh teh, but here’s one from Regis’s instagram (full post here: https://www.instagram.com/p/C0CC9Z2L0oM/):

Duk kuh teh as served. Photo by Regis.

 

The other traditional accompaniment is a long, bumpy “cruller” — you tiao. The first time I made the crullers, I used a gluten free recipe because I was making this meal for a friend who with a few dietary restrictions and they came out surprisingly great! So I thought surely with actual gluten in them they should be even better? (I actually think they came out about the same.) The gluten free version came from Fun Without Gluten (https://funwithoutgluten.com/chicken-congee-with-gluten-free-chinese-doughnuts/) and the regular version came from What To Cook Today (https://whattocooktoday.com/cakwe-you-tiau.html).

The lumpia and the crullers ready to deep fry! 

 

DUCK-CONFIT FILLED CRISPY LUMPIA

So, lun pia, or lumpia if you’re filipino, are another southern Chinese specialty that are all over the Philippines. They require super-thin, almost lacey skins, and I’ve made them by hand before. The recipe I use comes from the indispensible cookbook that is Andrea Nguyen’s ASIAN DUMPLINGS. You can read a review of her recipe on the aptly named Burnt Lumpia blog: https://burntlumpia.typepad.com/burnt...

However, this time, in the middle of the heat of service of an already too-long meal… I could not get the dough to work. The pan was too hot, then it was too cold, then the dough was too wet, or maybe too dry? I don’t know why it didn’t work, and I didn’t have time to figure it out, so I defaulted to the back-up plan: the “shanghai style” extra-thin spring roll skins I had bought at H-Mart a few days earlier, for just such a contingency.

The filling was shredded duck confit, which stands in very well for the finely shredded pork one often finds in these at parties catered by filipino caterers. (I just gave myself such a craving for lechon, holy cats.)

corwin and me plating the noodle course. Photo by Scliff.

Hand-cut Sweetwater noodle w/ ground duck topping

corwin learned to make these thick, chewy, rustic noodles from, where else, Chinese Cooking Demystified. Here: https://chinesecookingdemystified.substack.com/p/chengdu-sweet-water-noodles

But I’m the one who ended up actually doing the hand-cutting of the noodles, and I fixed up these accordion dividers out of wax paper to keep them from sticking together.

Making sweetwater noodles by hand.

Trio of sorbettos: ginger, lychee, orange

We made these three sorbets that came out in three different textures as well as three flavors. The ginger was so intensely gingery and so intensely sugary (because corwin used the sugar that was left in the pot after I candied ginger to make it) that it wouldn’t actually freeze. It remained creamy in texture and had to be kept in the deep freezer, not the upright, or it turned to soup. And he used the sugar leftover from me candying the buddha’s hand to make the orange sorbet. And we used canned lychee for the lychee sorbet, but I don’t remember the details now…

The main thing is we have a decent ice cream maker (Whynter brand) that can be left unsupervised while it aerates and freezes.

Closeup on the candied buddha’s hand.

 

The roast duck before carving.

 

Sticky-rice stuffed roast duck (main dish)
With Scallion & Cucumber garnish

The traditional roast duck accompaniments, cucumbers and scallions.

This is a variation on a duck we’ve done before, the first time probably around 1994 or 1995,? The recipe comes from the cookbook entitled WORKING A DUCK by Melicia Phillips. (Used copies are on sale on Amazon) The variation is that we now use the Kenji Lopez-Alt recipe for getting the peking-duck style skin on the exterior (at Serious Eats; https://www.seriouseats.com/peking-duck-mandarin-pancakes-plum-sauce-recipe), which is to use maltose syrup on the exterior. You debone the interior of the duck and then stuff the large remaining cavity with sticky rice stuffing, which is just delicious no matter what.

corwin carving the main course.

Yuzu Creme Brulee

I just followed the usual creme brulee recipe from Joy of Cooking that we love, the one with only egg yolks and no whites in it, and added about a 3/8ths of a cup (6 TBS) of Yuzu juice and some yuzu zest, inspired by this recipe here: https://www.essentialingredient.com.au/blogs/essential-recipes/recipe-yuzu-creme-brulee

The yuzu creme brulee right after being torched. Scliff commented on seeing the sheet pan under it, “this pan has seen some shit.”

Pineapple Bun

Another dim sum classic that I’ve been craving. Clearly the only solution was to make our own. Because this was already a very long and heavy meal, I thought I would make these smaller than usual. But I forgot. I followed this receipt at Woks of Life: https://thewoksoflife.com/pineapple-buns/

(For Chinese New Year this year, though, I’ll be trying to make a custard-filled version)

Pineapple bun!!!

 

Appendix: The Fortunes

Yeah, I wrote these. I do have a box that I’ve been saving fortunes for cookies in for over 40 years, but I wrote these from scratch, which seemed more fun than recycling:

Your next big accomplishment will be like a stray cat, either, arriving unexpectedly and bringing much joy, or covered in fleasAn acquaintanceship will blossom into a friendship, if you put some sunlight and water and don’t mind the thornsStop denying yourself that which you really want (unless what you want is a pan flute)Don’t forget that sometimes to hear the music, you have to put your earplugs inWhile it is true that oil and water don’t mix, it is also untrue if you believe in emulsification“The sky is the limit” is supposed to mean your success is limitless. But pedants would disagree.Your life will soon run like a well-oiled machine, needing constant upkeep from fosssil fuels.The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, I hope your tea won’t oversteepTo weather future trouble, heed this timeless advice: “Take your protein pills and put your helmet on.”Sometimes if you’re a big fish in a small pond, the best thing to do is grow legs and walk to the beachAn unexpected offer will be coming your way. Accept it (unless it’s from an online ad of course)Today’s outlook: either Martians will attack or you are not starting a new diet today.When you look into the eyes of someone you love, they should be like tidepools, teeming with mystery. And maybe starfish.Bruce Lee said “Be water” but he didn’t specify sparkling or still. That part’s up to you.

Ann Bannon / Cecilia Tan Lesbian Pulp Fiction Talk

Well, that was fun! My talk with Ann Bannon went swimmingly. We could have easily talked for another hour. Over 200 people had RSVP’d for the event and all throughout, each time one of us said something funny or pointed, we could see the emojis floating up our screens in the back-end of Zoom.

The recording is now live on YouTube for anyone who missed it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeyaveFkFXQ

Turns out Ann and I have a lot of parallels.

We both studied linguistics in college and ended up with linguistics degrees.We both wrote defining works right when we were fresh out of college, her Odd Girl Out, me Telepaths Don’t Need Safewords.We were both writing about sexuality and lifestyle that were taboo at the time, but which later became acceptable to depict in the mainstream (lesbian relationships, kink & BDSM).We both had the experience of our publishers selling our books, successfully, to readers outside of our subcultures.We have both had readers treat our fiction as if it was some kind of how-to manual!We’ve both heard from readers who were validated by seeing themselves in our books, and whose lives were changed because of it.

And I’m sure there are more I’m not thinking of! I was particularly struck by the “how to” manual thing. At the time when Odd Girl Out (Bookshop.org | Amazon) was published, there was no way for people to find out what the lifestyle was like. All they knew was what their homophobic teachers, clergy, and parents told them. So Ann’s books really functioned as a window into how things could be…

When I first started publishing BDSM fiction, there were not a lot of how-to resources, but there were a few (Remember The Lesbian S/M Safety Manual? And Larry Townshend’s Master’s Manual?), but by the late-1990s a plethora of handbooks and online sites had proliferated (SM 101, Screw the Roses Send me the Thorns, the entire catalog of Greenery Press…). Even with that, though, I had people come up to me at conventions and bookstore events to tell me that they had used books like The Velderet (2001) and Telepaths Don’t Need Safewords as examples to model consent. Which blows my mind in the very best way and is one of the reasons why I keep on digging into issues of consent and boundaries in my fiction. It’s at the core of what I do, and turns out to be crucial to some readers.

Ann regaled us with a few tales of the olden days when you could be arrested and publicly humiliated for being caught in a gay bar, and I told of how when the police in Attleboro, Mass. tried to use the same tactics in the year 2000 on a group of kinky people having a play party (just Google “Paddleboro” for more details) it was ultimately the police and the district attorney who ended up humiliated, becoming laughingstocks in the press.

Really, an hour was too short, but I am grateful to Lynne M. Thomas and the folks at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana’s Rare Book and Manuscripts Library–and to the technology!–for getting us together virtually. Ann Bannon is a living treasure and I am happy I was able to be a small part of shining a light on her journey and the remarkable phenomenon that is the Beebo Brinker series of lesbian pulp novels.

 

 

Ann Bannon and Cecilia Tan Discuss 20th Century Lesbian Pulp & Erotica

From Closet to Classic: Ann Bannon and Cecilia Tan Discuss 20th Century Lesbian Pulp & Erotica

I’m very excited and honored to be doing this online talk with Ann Bannon, the legendary author of the Beebo Brinker books, the foundational novels of the lesbian pulp genre in the 20th century. (I’m still getting a kick out of talking about the 20th century like it was a long time ago! If only!) The Rare Book library at the University of Illinois is hosting us on Zoom, so you don’t have to be at UofI to attend!

To get the Zoom link invite, sign up here: https://go.illinois.edu/closet

The official description: 

Please join the Rare Book & Manuscript Library via Zoom for a conversation between two of the most influential writers in lesbian pulp and erotic fiction of the 20th century.

Ann Weldy, better known by her pen name Ann Bannon, is the author of a series of five lesbian pulp novels known as “The Beebo Brinker Chronicles.” Written from 1957 to 1962, the books were bestsellers when they were first released, and have had remarkable longevity, especially for genre fiction. They have been published in five different editions and in several languages and are often taught in women’s studies and LGBT studies courses. The books’ popularity and impact have earned Ann Bannon the title of “Queen of Lesbian Pulp Fiction,” as well as numerous awards for pioneering gay and lesbian literature. A play based on her books has been produced twice in New York and now all over the country, from Boston to Seattle.

Cecilia Tan is an award-winning writer of science fiction/fantasy, romance, and erotica, and a 2010 inductee to the Saints & Sinners LGBT Writers Hall of Fame. Her books include Bent for Leather, Black Feathers, and the Magic University series, named by Autostraddle a “Trans-Inclusive Fantasy Series for Harry Potter Fans.” Her short stories have appeared in Ms. Magazine, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Absolute Magnitude, Strange Horizons.

Please join us!

Con schedules! For Arisia, Capricon, and ICFA!

I’m speaking at three cons in three months to start 2024:

Arisia: January 12-15 in BostonCapricon: February 1-4 in ChicagoICFA March 13-17 in Orlando

Details below!

ARISIAFriday Night Erotica Reading!

Room: Faneuil
Time: 10PM
Date: Friday, January 12, 2024

The Arisia tradition resumes after a couple of pandemic years off! My Friday night erotica reading at Arisia has gone through many incarnations over the past 25+ years. Sometimes in the 1990s it was a group reading with multiple authors, and other times it was a solo show with just me reading smut to people for over an hour. As I used to announce, my goal was to turn people on enough to send them rushing back to their hotel rooms to scratch that itch. At least one couple not only did that, they conceived a child… who has since grown up to be a 20-something fan of mine. Oh my. One year, in the “Charles Hotel” years (where there wasn’t enough function space) the con cut the reading from the schedule, so I held it impromptu in a regular hotel room. Somewhere I have photos of about 50 people cramming into the room.

This year, we’ll have a special guest from out of town, Nobilis Reed of the Nobilis Erotica podcast! And I believe Sacchi Green will join us, as well.

SF/F Erotic Books Tea Party

Room: (number TBA, on the party floor, likely the 4th floor)
Time: 3PM to 5PM
Date: Saturday, January 13, 2024

Come meet me, Nobilis Reed, and other erotic sf/f authors. First 25 guests will receive a free book from the Circlet Press archives! Although I sold Circlet in January 2020 to Riverdale Avenue Books and got rid of all the old backlist inventory, this year a friend on the West Coast discovered a box we’d sent them around 1999 and shipped it back to me! I’m turning those classic erotic sf/f books into the door prizes for the party. Come have some tea and chat with us about the erotic sf/f genre!

CAPRICON

It’ll be my first time at Capricon, and I’ll be doing a LOT OF panels and events! It’s going to really be a blast since three of the four GOHs are longtime friends and colleagues from the ongoing efforts at diversifying the sf/f genre, K. Tempest Bradford, Victor Raymond, and Catherine Lundoff. I’m just going to paste the schedule in here because it’s a lot:

Writing When You Have No SpoonsColumbus • Writing • Panel • Thu 5:00 PM–6:00 PMMost folks know what it’s like to come home from work and have no energy left. Add in all the pressures of the real world and it can sometimes feel impossible to put your fingers to the keyboard. So how do you find the energy to keep writing? Our panelists explore their own struggles with a lack of spoons and share some of the strategies they’ve found helpful to get words down on the page.LGBTQIA+ GatheringWrigleyville • Fan Interest • Participatory Event • Fri 11:30 AM–12:30 PMLGBTQIA+ convention members are invited to meet and greet!Professional Organizations for WritersColumbus • Writing • Panel • Fri 1:00 PM–2:00 PMSLF, SFPA, SFWA, and RWA aren’t just acronym soup. These organizations are ways for authors to network, learn about their craft, and more. Current members will discuss what these organizations offer and how they can benefit you.Interview with GoH K. Tempest BradfordSheraton II • GOH • Panel • Fri 2:30 PM–3:30 PMCecilia Tan interviews Capricon Author GoH K. Tempest Bradford.Sexy Words: Erotica with Cecilia Tan and Catherine LundoffTBD • GOH • Reading • Fri evening? (Time and place TBD)Featuring short readings from their work and some thoughts about what makes fiction hot (or not).Making Magic Make Sense in FictionColumbus • Writing • Panel • Fri 8:30 PM–9:30 PMFor many fantasy readers and writers, magic systems require rules. Magic, after all, comes at a cost, whether that involves time, energy, or even the health of its user. So what works and doesn’t? How do you make a magic system that makes sense? Our panelists discuss some of the best examples and offer tips for developing your own magic systems.Reading: Herkes/Jorgensen/TanBridgeport • Reading • Panel • Sat 2:30 PM–3:30 PMKM Herkes, Jeanna Jorgenson, and Cecilia Tan read from their works.The Many Hats of a CreativeGold Coast • Art • Panel • Sat 4:00 PM–5:00 PMIn the present market, freelancers (artists and writers) are expected to be marketers, bookkeepers, customer service reps, production and distribution managers, and more. And they do all that in addition to writing and/or making art. But how exactly does one manage all of that? Our panelists talk about some of the tips, tricks, and tools you can use to make the ancillary work easier to manage!SFF RomanceGold Coast • Literature • Panel • Sun 11:30 AM–12:30 PMWhile there are countless stories with romantic subplots, there is also an entire universe of romance novels set in SFF worlds. Our panelists discuss what makes SFF romance such a compelling genre and share some of their favorite works.ICFAI think the time and day of the following is still subject to change, but last I heard…Anthologies: Curation, Crowdfunds, and Copyedits

Room TBA • Panel • Friday 8:30 AM–9:45 AM
Panelists: Cecilia Tan, dave ring, Zelda Knight, and moderated by Kagunda Shingai Njeri

Yes, you read that right, I’m on a panel at 8:30 AM. ICFA is the only con where I’ll do anything that early, because I’ll spend the rest of the day absorbing photons beside the pool and reset my sleep schedule to be almost like a typical human’s. (As soon as I return to the frozen north I return to my vampiric ways.) I haven’t seen the official description of this panel, but here’s what I wrote when I proposed it:“Several of the big anthologies from marginalized creators recently have been crowdfunded rather than published by traditional publishers, and small presses like Neon Hemlock and Atthis Arts rely on crowdfunding to launch anthologies with so-called ‘niche’ audiences. See Death in the Mouth I & II edited by Sloane Leong and Cassie Hart, Dominion: An Anthology of Black Speculative Fiction edited by Zelda Knight and Ekpeki Oghenechovwe Donald, the Sauutiverse anthology edited by Wole Talabi, and many others. Many award-winning stories have appeared in these crucial anthologies as well. Why would marginalized creators choose to self-publish and self-fund from their own readers rather than seek the support/approval of a large or traditional publisher? What advantages does crowdfunding provide, and what drawbacks?” We’ll talk not just about the money, but about how a strong editorial idea or vision translates to a strong campaign, and how artistic freedom and artistic vision relate.Say hello if you see me out there on the road!

 

2023 in Review

So. This was the year that my cat died, my Dad died, and I got COVID. I keep saying I’ve been getting no writing done. But that’s not exactly true…?

It’s mostly that I haven’t been progressing on the Big, Important Novel Series that has occupied the center of my writing life for the past decade (aka the Vanished Chronicles), so it doesn’t FEEL like I got “any” writing done. Certainly in comparison to the years when I had three books (maybe even four?) come out, while publishing a serial with 2-3 chapters per week, plus short stories, my output is minuscule when juxtaposed. It also feels like I didn’t “write” much because much of what DID come out this year were “inventory” stories, which had been sitting around in the hard drive waiting for their final polish or rewrite. But they all count, don’t they?

They do.

So here’s a recap of everything I wrote in 2023. 

BENT FOR LEATHER and the story “Personalize Your Netherparts”

This year has been a slow rollout for my new short story collection, Bent for Leather. I say “slow rollout” because the initial goal was to publish in April to coincide with my keynote at International Ms. Leather and Bootblack (IMsLBB). An IMsL edition was printed, but to fulfill the Kickstarter stretch goals, two new pieces of interior art needed to be commissioned and then completed by the artist. So it took until September to get that edition finished and uploaded, and my plan had been to do the “official” launch in November.

But I got COVID in September so all I managed in October and November was to ship the copies due to backers. I didn’t do any of the marketing I had planned. I haven’t had the brain cells.

But I did write one brand new short story for the collection, also instigated by stretch goals, entitled “Personalize Your Netherparts,” and I think it’s really a good one. I guess these days the term would be, “it slaps.” (Pun intended.) If you’d like to read the story, you can either find it in the book, or if you are my Patron over on Patreon, you can either listen to the audio reading I did of the story earlier this year or read the story in the post I just made.

Content warnings:   genderbent ex-lover angst, blurred boundaries, and misuse of detachable genitalia.

Audio version: https://www.patreon.com/posts/new-story-read-84991752) 

Text version: https://www.patreon.com/posts/95405300/

or

Buy BENT FOR LEATHER at  Bookshop.org ,  Amazon , or  Porter Square Books  (my local indie bookstore!)

ADVENTURES IN BODILY AUTONOMY and the story “Just Killing Time”

I’ve had the story “Just Killing Time” kicking around in my hard drive for a few years now. It’s one of those stories that I’ve sent to numerous magazines over the years, and every time it ends up being one of the stories that the editors hang onto for a long time before they ultimately reject it, usually with a lot of apologetic praise.

It’s a Tarantino-esque pastiche of gangster-ninja pulp with a lot of graphic sex and violence, and a deep vein of psychological thriller, about a woman desperate to gain some agency or freedom. Is she a reincarnated assassin destined to take revenge? Or is she a trafficking victim?

When Raven Belasco contacted me about an anthology on the theme of women’s bodily autonomy, being published by Aqueduct Press as a fundraiser for NARAL ProChoice America, I told her I had a story making the rounds that was a “difficult” one. But it kinda sounded to me like a fit for the theme. Raven loved it, and when it got booted out of yet another slush pile it was all hers. I’m so glad that it found the perfect home.

Get Adventures in Bodily Autonomy from  Bookshop.org ,  Amazon , or  Aqueduct Press

HOT & STICKY and the novella “The Blossoms of Summer”

I first wrote this erotic steampunk novella after reading Sarah Rose’s nonfiction book FOR ALL THE TEA IN CHINA, which tells the story of adventuring British botanist Robert Fortune and how he literally performed agricultural espionage to steal the secrets of potable tea production from China in order to found the tea-producing plantations in India that fueled the British empire. I also sent my adventuring botanist to China, but with a dirigible, and it being me, his adventure turns rather more carnal than vegetal.

But again, I could never place the novella. It was too long for the erotic steampunk markets, too sexy for the regular steampunk anthologies (though I did get a very very praise-packed rejection from Ann Vandermeer), but not long enough to sell as a standalone book. So I shelved it.

Until this year, when Passionate Ink put out a call for erotic romance and erotica novellas for their HOT & STICKY bundle. Passionate Ink is what had once been the erotic chapter of the RWA, but after the RWA meltdown broke off into its own organization. Every so often they publish a fundraising bundle, collecting together steamy novellas and short novels, making it available for a limited period of time, and then releasing the rights back to the authors. Again, it seemed like a serendipitous fit, and I’m so happy the “Blossoms of Summer” finally saw the light of day.

I’ll probably release a standalone ebook of it in 2024, and when I do, Patrons, I’ll have a download for you!

THE OTHER THINGS I WROTE: A ROLEPLAY GAME MODULE!

Possibly the most fun — literal FUN — thing I wrote this year was a pairing and scenario for the game STAR CROSSED. This is the jenga-tower based game about forbidden love (“when you really really want to, but you really really can’t”) which got an expansion guidebook added this year which includes modules written by me, Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar, Sharang Biswas, and other faves of mine. It had a crowdfund campaign on Backerkit and should be out in 2024.

Thanks to Alex Roberts for thinking of me for this one. We were literally introduced to one another via Twitter by the folks who had made Slash: The Card Game years and years ago as “you two should know each other!” Ah, yes, the days when Twitter was like a wild cocktail party in the middle of the public square with occasional breaking news on the Jumbotron overhead (as opposed to now where literal Nazis are trying to hold rallies in the square and drowning out everything else).

THE OTHER THINGS I WROTE: CLASSES AND SPEECHES

I suppose I can’t discount the fact, though, that a lot of my writing time in 2023 ended up going to writing speeches and presentations. I gave keynotes at IMsLBB and the Editorial Freelancers Association, I taught a new class on “How (And Why) To Write a Sex Scene,” first for Mary Robinette Kowal’s patreon, and then for StoryStudio Chicago, and I developed a class on Writing Bisexual and Pansexual Characters for Writing the Other. (The Bi/Pan class is now available for purchase on-demand through Writing the Other, btw: https://writingtheother.com/on-demand-bisexual-pansexual-master-class/). I also gave presentations at Arisia, MISTI-Con, Readercon, etc.

THE OTHER THINGS I WROTE: NON-FICTION

I have to count the non-fiction essays, too. I just approved copyedits on an essay that will be in Uncanny magazine very soon, entitled something like “A Novel is an Empathy Engine.” I have also written a couple of different baseball-related articles this year, including one on the 2004 Red Sox “Trophy Tour” which will be coming out shortly in a SABR book on the 2004 Sox team, and several essays that I hope will form the core of a new handbook for baseball writers and editors that I’ve been wanting to do for SABR for the past 12 years.

Plus I wrote another article for The Strad about TwoSet Violin, this one a review of their World Tour concert in Montreal.

Which brings me to the last thing that ate up a chunk of my writing time in 2023:

THE DRAGON’S DAUGHTER and what’s happening at Tor

If you’re new here, here’s a quick recap of my history with Tor Books. I was contracted to write a three-book erotic paranormal fantasy series for them almost ten years ago. My editor there was not quick, things dragged on, and then she was let go by the company (after nearly 30 years there!) in 2022. My new editor has also been there 30 years, but is also not quick (she has long COVID, and yes, I empathize), and took a long time to catch up to reading the manuscript. She finally read it and said, with great honesty and candor: she feels it’s dated.

So for all intents and purposes, that whole project is dead at Tor. The Vanished Chronicles has literally vanished after ten years in development. 

But I’m supposedly still a “Tor author.” My editor said she would really like to work with me on something else, and she requested a look at an unpublished novella of mine, “The Mystery of the Unbitten Peach.” Part of the rationale for a novella is it would be shorter and my editor said that should mean a quicker reply.

This is a novella I wrote for a lesbian fantasy mystery anthology that never did come to be, and looking it over again before sending it to her, I realized it needed some updating. In particular I wanted to incorporate flashbacks that would bring in the events that happened in the main character’s previous story, “The Dragon’s Daughter,” which were published in the late 1990s in a lesbian small press anthology called To Be Continued…

I spent about two months of writing time picking the stitches out of each piece and then melding them together. I sent it around to several writer friends for critique and got back mostly praise–in fact, I started hitting some of them up for blurbs as a result. I got a polished final draft together and sent it along in early April. 

Well, over eight months have gone by and I haven’t heard a peep. Stay tuned: maybe I’ll have news by the 2024 Year in Review?

 

Readercon 32 (2023) Schedule

I’m finally returning to Readercon after a few years of pandemic-forced break! And the schedule I’ve got looks quite juicy! Readercon, if you’re not familiar with it, is a science fiction convention, but it’s focused entirely on books and magazines (no costumes, no gaming room, no film room). Outside of academic conferences, it’s got the highest level of discourse of any con I’ve ever been to. It now takes place in the Boston area in the Quincy Marriott on July 13-16.

Thursday Night Reading
Things open with my reading on Thursday night, 9pm in the Blue Hills room. Traditionally, programming on Thursday night at Readercon has been free and open to the public, so please come by and hear me read from my brand-new erotic short story collection, Bent for Leather. (I’ll probably even read the newest story in it…)

Friday
“What has RWA got that we ain’t got?”
Salon 4, 12 noon
This is slated to be a panel on “Can we re-imagine SFWA as an organization that does more for its authors, while avoiding the pitfalls and structural racism that have plagued RWA?” We lost a few panelists, though. If we don’t recruit some replacements, it may end up being a two-person discussion. (If you’ll be at Readercon and have strong opinions about RWA and SFWA, please ping me or the programming dept!)

“Crowdfunding for Wordsmiths”
Thayer Boardroom, 2pm
This is the latest update of my workshop on best practices for crowdfunding publishing projects. “If you are considering Kickstarting an anthology, funding an online magazine, or seeding a publishing imprint, award, or writers workshop, what do you need to know before embarking on a crowdfunding campaign? Which platforms are best suited to which projects? What common problems do crowdfunders run into, and how are they best avoided? Bring your questions and your notebooks!”

Autographing
-outside the bookshop area- 6pm – 7pm
I’ll bring some copies of Bent for Leather (since no bookstores have that yet).

Saturday
“Writing Sex Scenes Without Fear”
Salon A, 1pm
This is the panel I’m most excited about, since I’ll be moderating this group which features three of my favorite writers, Ellen Kushner, whose Swordspoint contained a sex scene so poetic that I recited it for one of my MFA workshop classes (so poetic that some of my classmates were like, wait, was that a sex scene!?!), K.M Szpara, whose erotic near-future SF novel Docile is one of my favorite kinky novels ever, and Sunny Moraine, whose short story submissions to Circlet Press many years ago were so mindblowingly good that the editors all wanted to read them (even if they weren’t working on that particular book). The fifth panelist is the one whose writing I don’t know, Robert V.S. Redick, but both his academic and social justice bona fides look sterling, so I think we’ll get along well.

Sunday
“Fanfic: Progressive, Regressive”
Salon 4, 2pm
This is another one I’m really looking forward to. The inimitable Foz Meadows moderates and, not totally surprisingly, all three panelists have written for Circlet Press as well as fanfic: myself, Catt Kingsgrave, and the aforementioned Sunny Moraine. Here’s the official description:
“Speculative fanfic can go far beyond mainstream speculative fiction in imagining other worlds, other relationships, and other ways of being. But it’s written by fallible humans in the here and now, and can just as easily incorporate bigotries and mindsets that we’d rather leave in the past than carry into the future. This panel of longtime fanfic writers will explore the nuances of these facets of fanfic and how they parallel mainstream speculative fiction’s similar contradictions.”

Single-day and full-weekend registrations are available.