"Incursion" among top 20 Goodreads readers' choice sci-fi books

My little sci-fi story Incursion ended up, rather surprisingly, in the semi-finals on Goodreads: Here's the link. 

(Yep, I'll do a screen shot for myself, because OMG ARE YOU GUYS KIDDING?).

It's weird (and humbling and amazing) to be with a small-press LGBTQ book with a "disabled" character and a gender-fluid  cast of characters against, you know, Scalzi and IAN BANKS (my partner will never forgive me--he's a HUGE fan), and every multi-bazillion movie and sci-fi franchise in the history of ever (Alien? Star Wars spin-off, anybody?).

So, uhm, yeah. My little story's definitely going in as the underdogs to beat all underdogs. Nothing short of a "Rocky"-sized miracle will get me a round further, but getting *that* far is already a miracle, so I'm just going to take a screenshot of that and keep it in my "nobody loves me, I write only crap, I'll never make it" folder on the computer.

Because HOLY HELL.

Of course, Dani Alexander is giving the big names in the much-harder-fought Romance category a run for their money. Being up as an indie against Fifty Shades AND JR Ward is worse than me battling Orson Scott Card (though, honestly, I want to punch him in the nose, at least, err, book-versus-book, for his homophobia. I'd never encourage violence against the bedrock of the speculative genre--kinda. I try to a good guy here. It can be hard, because I effing love sci-fi and cyberpunk and I think in that genre, of all of them, we can actually explore gender and sexuality. Well, off the box now).

So, in any case, do vote for your favourites. (These don't have to be my books, BTW--I don't like vote-whoring very much, and there are many fine authors on the poll.) If that happens to be my book, awesome. If not, awesome. And thanks for playing. :)

(But I'm still getting a huge kick out of that cover between the others. I do. No lie.)

In writing-related notes, LA Witt (yes, HER), with whom I spent so much time laughing like a pair of hyenas at GRL, has dragged my ass out of the huge writing slump when she admitted to liking historical fiction (in one of her interviews regarding the release of The Left Hand of Calvus - a gladiator novel in my Warriors of Rome call at Riptide), and also liking/having an interest in WWII.

So, I ... may have ambushed her to write something.

I think that was Thursday. Thursday and Friday we talked about plot/characters.

Saturday we started writing. Sunday, we wrote. Monday, we wrote.

We're 51k in and it's looking like a 70-80k book. At that speed, we'll be done by Monday (latest). It's twisted fun, but it's fun. I'm finding it very romantic, but it's very good fun. but then, I'm twisted. I thought I'd never say that, but writing 50k in 30 days is for pussies. (No, I love all my NaNo-ing friends. Go you!)

We do have a working title, though it's not really "sticking" yet. More when I know, but it's... a little surprise!project to look forward to.