Samantha Sabian's Blog, page 5

Upcoming Release: The Sjöfn Academy

First off, thanks for all the fan mail. I love the new distribution available through Amazon because I have gotten responses from all over the world including places I didn’t even realize I was published, like Indonesia. It’s kind of funny, not a lot of social media stuff, more personal like direct email, and I must say I enjoy it that way.

I have had a number of queries about the upcoming release of The Sjöfn Academy, and all I can say is that I promise it is on the way. The book itself is complete; I’m just obsessing over the cover. And I’m doing this for a number of reasons. First, I really loved the cover of The Dragon’s Lover, and I would like to keep it consistent within that theme and look. Second, I have learned the hard way that good cover art is CRUCIAL to the success of a book, especially when trying to communicate what it is really about. I mean, it wasn’t that difficult to figure out what was going to happen in The Dragon’s Lover from looking at the two women, and it communicated the genre without really having to explicitly state anything.

And finally, I feel The Sjöfn Academy is a very special book. It is really unlike anything I have ever read and I have no doubt that fans of the series will be blown away. So I want things to be perfect. So bear with me, have a little patience, and I promise that you will not be disappointed in any way!

Funny Feedback

I’ve received some interesting early feedback on the project, but I think my favorite comment thus far was the bemused observation that the characters are “all women.” That is not exactly true as there are several male characters, but I found this a fascinating comment for a couple of reasons.

First off, the obvious reason is that this book is marketed to lesbians, so I don’t think it’s that unusual that the majority of the characters are women. That said, I don’t think it’s a typical “lesbian” book, although as I stated before, I am a little uninformed on this genre. What I really wanted was to write a “normal” book, i.e. one with a compelling plot, interesting characters, good dialogue, and overall, something that was just a fun, entertaining read. The fact that all the characters are really hot women who all have sex with one another, well, that’s just a fringe benefit.

The second reason I found this comment so revealing was the implied “other” status of women. How many books have been written that have a cast entirely of men, and yet no one comments or even notices? It reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend of mine a few years back. I was talking about a book that documented in great archeological detail the prominent role that women played in the earlier cultures that worshiped a goddess as opposed to a god. My friend (who is male) turned to me and said in a somewhat disparaging tone: “Was it written by a woman?”

His implication was that because it was written by a woman, there was automatically the tint of bias. Does that mean, therefore, that every text written by a man also has the tint of bias? (Although that does explain the last 2000 years of religious texts we’ve been handed). I think the most revealing part of his comment, though, was that he trotted it out without a second thought of what he was implying, it was just understood.

I like to turn things on their head. I like to tease out underlying assumptions and then break them in pieces. And that’s one of the reasons I really like writing in this genre.

And so it begins….

So, I have to admit that I started this project as a lark. It really began with me disparaging a friend’s book, to my mind the “typical” lesbian romance in which there is softball, beer-drinking, a night at the bar, and way too much drama. The dialogue was terrible, the plot non-existent, the characters stereotypical, and the sex scenes either mundane or so implausible they left me wondering how women could even get into these positions. The drama particularly turned me off because it wasn’t something I wanted in my own life, why did I want to read about it?

Now I confess, my opinion of lesbian romance was ignorant, and I use the term used in its purest form, i.e. uninformed. I had written books in numerous other genres under different pen names, but had never had the slightest desire to write in this one. So when my friend threw out the dare, “Well why don’t you write one?” I laughed it off and did no such thing. Time passed, I wrote other things, novels, short stories, technical manuals, but no lesbian romance.

Finally, I was motivated by cynicism. I had begun pulling in a steady paycheck thanks to the digital publishing revolution, and things that I wrote 15 year ago were suddenly beginning to make money. So I had the shallow thought, “I’ll crank something out, throw it out there in e-book, and see where it lands.”

I already had an idea, kind of a dungeons and dragons type fantasy, so I started writing. I was shooting for one short book, maybe 50,000 words, I’d finish it up, then that would be that.

And then a funny thing happened.

I really started to enjoy the story, and I completely fell in love with the characters. And I realized the project deserved far more than I had intended to give, so I started over. And when I finished the first book, I immediately began writing the second. And then the third. And then the fourth.

And so the “Chronicles of Arianthem” was born, and what was going to be a “lark” ended up being a sweeping tale.