Books

Reading Slump

I hit a bit of a reading slump this weekend. I’d finished reading a big epic fantasy series, so I wanted something completely different. I dug through my to-be-read stash, looking for something along the lines of a romantic comedy, and I ran into an annoying trend.

I picked up one book that seemed to be a nice women’s fiction kind of story with a heroine close to my age, but the beginning of the blurb was along the lines of “She thought she had the perfect life, but then her husband left her for another woman and her teenage daughter got in trouble …” I wasn’t in the mood for a recovering from divorce and dealing with a troubled teenager book, so I picked up something more chick-litty. That one was about a 30-year-old who thought her life was over when her long-term boyfriend broke off their engagement, and now she has to deal with her cousin who’s getting married, and she’s realized she has nothing else going on in her life because she’s let her career and other interests slide. My reaction was along the lines of, “Oh, honey, no. Get a life.” I think I could have handled the book if it really had been about her finding her own life, but it seemed to mostly be about her juggling men.

Why does it seem to be that most of the changes in a woman’s life in books seem to be driven by men? There’s the whole subgenre of “my husband dumped me for a younger woman and now I have to find myself” in women’s fiction. There’s the subgenre popular in British books of “my boyfriend dumped me, so I’ll move to a village and run a bookstore/bakery/cafe.”

Not to mention, it’s nearly impossible to find a contemporary-set book about a heroine over 40 without a blurb that starts along the lines of “after her husband left her/cheated, she and her teenage daughter …” And it usually seems to be a romantic relationship that “fixes” her problems.

During all this dissatisfying reading this weekend (I tossed a couple of books after chapter 3), I realized that I’m having two different reading cravings, and my attempts to search for this sort of thing came up empty, so if it’s out there, I’m looking in the wrong categories or using the wrong search terms.

One is a light romantic comedy with some slight paranormal element — something along the lines of my Christmas book, but right now I don’t want it to be about Christmas. So, no full-on magical world like in my Enchanted, Inc., stories. More like one mystical element, like maybe the heroine’s wishes start coming true, or she gets the ability to read men’s thoughts (a la What Men Want), or a Groundhog Day kind of scenario in which she lives the same day over until she gets it right, or she gets to go back in time to fix one thing, etc. “Paranormal romance” mostly seems to get you a lot of shifter/witch/vampire, etc., books. “Fantasy romance” seems to be more of the full-blown fantasy world sort of thing. “Magical realism” is more literary and more about theme.

And I want women’s fiction that doesn’t center on romance — a woman who moves to a new place to start over, but it isn’t about a divorce or breakup. She gets her life together maybe by developing friendships or figuring out what she wants. Maybe she does fall in love along the way, but that’s not what “fixes” her. It might be a byproduct of getting her life together. Or maybe she goes on a grand tour to find herself, but not because she got dumped or broke up, and she finds herself through some experience other than sleeping with a hot, young foreign stud. And because it’s me, I wouldn’t mind some magical or mystical element.

I have read a few books like that, so I looked up one on the library web site to see what their “readalike” recommendations were. None really fit what I wanted, but then I found the “story elements” function, where there were tiles showing some of the key elements in that book. You selected the elements that you were looking for, and it would give you recommendations. I had to keep removing things I wanted before I finally got a recommendation, but I don’t think it’s very comprehensive because my Enchanted, Inc. books would have fit every tile I had selected, and they didn’t come up. I looked at the one book that came up. How did the blurb start? Along the lines of “after learning that her husband was cheating on her, she loaded up her teenage daughters and took off …”

Life

Enjoying Summer

I’ve really been trying to adjust my attitude toward summer, to not just look at it as something to endure, and it might be working.

I decided that I will celebrate the first 100-degree day of the summer by having ice cream, and I even bought a pint of ice cream. Wouldn’t you know, there isn’t a temperature over 95 in the 10-day forecast. Not that I’m complaining. I just find it amusing. Will that pint of ice cream sit uneaten in my freezer all summer? If we don’t get a 100-degree day by Labor Day, I’ll make a peach cobbler then and have ice cream. If we do get a 100-degree day, then I get ice cream, so win-win.

Because it hasn’t been too hot, I’ve been able to sit out on the patio and read in the evenings. I generally have enough light for reading until about 8:30. That’s something I can’t do the rest of the year.

I love summer fruit. They had watermelon on sale last week, and I picked out one that had all the signs of being good — and, boy, was it. It’s so sweet that it’s like eating candy, and it’s huge, so I still have half of it to go. Then there are blueberries, strawberries, and peaches. I’ve got plenty of dessert stuff in my freezer, but with all this fruit, I haven’t wanted it.

Normally, I enjoy the swimming pool in the summer. We have a community pool that’s quite nice and usually not too crowded, depending on the time of day, but I’m not sure I’m going to use it this year. The kids don’t have a lot of other things to do, so they really need the pool, and I don’t want to be there while there are crowds. Maybe later in the summer it will quiet down some, and we’ll see whether they have in-person school in the fall. I tend to get the most use out of the pool after school starts in August, and it stays warm enough for swimming until late September.

Then there’s my patio garden. I didn’t plant anything this year, aside from planting a couple of morning glory seeds, but I’ve got a bunch of flowers. It seems that the packet of “annual cutting mix” seeds I thought were duds last year, when only a few things sprouted, really kicked off this summer. I’ve got all kinds of strange things growing. The one plant from that packet that did grow, the celosias (coxcomb), seems to have spread seeds like crazy. They sprouted from every pot on the patio. I’ve had a bit of a problem with squirrels digging things up or stepping on things and caterpillars eating everything in sight, so I’ve started bringing the pots in overnight (when the pests seem to cause problems). For the morning glory, I’ve been spraying it with garlic spray to discourage caterpillars and putting peppermint oil on cotton balls around the pot to discourage squirrels, and it’s put on some new leaves that haven’t been eaten. When I’m sitting out and reading, I like looking at my plants and noticing the little day-to-day changes. Since all the summer events have been cancelled, I won’t be traveling, so I won’t have to worry about how to make sure my plants don’t die without water while I’m gone.

So, those are some things I love about summer. I can get some of the fruit year-round, but the rest are things I can’t really do at other times of year, so I’ll enjoy them all while I can.

Cooking

Recipe Hoarding

While I’m stuck at home, I’ve been working on a massive organizing/optimizing project, going space-by-space in my house to sort through things and arrange them in a logical way to make it easier to find things. I’ve already sorted through my media racks to arrange my DVDs and CDs. Now I’m tackling my recipe collection.

I’ve come to the realization that I have a serious recipe problem. I collect so many recipes, and I end up using so few of them because I tend to repeat the usual favorites. I could make a new recipe a day every day and still never get through all the recipes I’ve saved from the Internet, and then there’s my clipping habit. I had whole folders, two recipe boxes, and a photo album full of recipes I’ve cut out of newspaper and magazines over the years. I have made a number of them. I have a fat file of recipes I’ve made and liked. But still, there’s a huge pile I’ve never even looked at after clipping them.

Over the past few days, I’ve been sorting through all the clippings. There are way too many recipes that fall into the “why did I ever think this would be good?” category. There are also cases of me collecting dozens of recipes for the same thing, and never making any of them. I seem to find the idea of tomato-basil soup, apple cake, and chocolate cake appealing. I’ve made some of the soup recipes, but I don’t think I’ve tried any of the apple or chocolate cake recipes. When I’ve made those things, I’ve used recipes from cookbooks.

Some of this has been an exercise in nostalgia, since there are whole newspaper food sections and magazine pages going back to the early 90s in this collection. I think of the 90s as being recent, but the graphic design and ad pictures now look really dated. Even the papers from the late 90s and early 2000s look old-fashioned.

After all this work, I have a trash bag full of newspaper and magazine clippings and newspaper food sections. All the recipes that I think I really might want to make are sorted by category in an accordion folder. I’ve also sorted the recipes I’ve made and actually use into another accordion folder, and the ones I use most often are in the photo album so the pages are protected by plastic. I’ve emptied one recipe box that I can now use for other things, and I’m in the process of putting the smaller clippings on notecards to go in my recipe box. This should save me a lot of time because a big part of my cooking process was digging through my recipe folders to find the recipe I needed.

Will I make any of all the recipes in my remaining stash? Looking through them has given me ideas. When the stores are a little more back to normal and I’m able to more easily get ingredients, I may start a routine of trying a new recipe every week. There is a summer (no-bake) cheesecake recipe I want to try that I may get ingredients for next time I go shopping, and there are a few salad recipes I’ll have to try. This fall, maybe I’ll actually bake one of those apple cakes.

Lockdown Self-Improvement

If you found my discussion of some of the panels from the Nebula conference intriguing, you can still retroactively attend the conference, and the conference will also be continuing online all year. If you register for the conference, you can see all the panels, and now there will also be other networking and learning events going on all year. You don’t have to be a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America to participate, and there are scholarships available. All the information is here.

I’m afraid I’ve become That Person during lockdown, the annoying one who’s using the time for self-improvement rather than sloth. I’m studying a foreign language, attending online workshops, reading a lot, listening to classical music, watching Shakespeare productions online, trying new recipes, practicing the flute, and doing a massive home organization project. Sometimes I annoy even myself.

In addition to the Nebula conference, I’ve been watching some online seminars my university has made available to alumni, and I’ve been looking for educational videos on various topics on YouTube. I’ve really been enjoying the National Theatre productions that have been posted each week, along the the weekly musical. I’d thought I might need to get another streaming service, but so far I’ve hardly been watching the one I have. I might look into Netflix or Disney+ this fall, but during the summer I’ve been going outside in the evenings.

I did have actual social interaction last week when I ran into a friend from church while I was out walking, and we stood a safe distance apart and chatted for a while. I think that’s the first time I’d talked to a friend in person since March.

I’m getting close to the end of revisions on this book. I just need to rewrite the ending. What I’ve written is rather anticlimactic, so I need to write something entirely different. But first I have to figure out what that should be. That’s today’s challenge.

writing

Smart Characters, Stupid Characters

One of my biggest challenges in revising this book is that I seem to be making my characters too smart. They figure things out easily, and when they guess at something, they come to the proper conclusion. This is deadly in a mystery, where the path toward uncovering the culprit can’t be straightforward. You don’t have much of a story if your sleuth comes up with a theory, then finds the clues that verify that theory. I’m having to do a lot of revision to insert some red herrings or to make the sleuth go down the wrong path for a little while.

At the same time, one of my pet peeves as a reader is stupid characters or, worse, what I call Plot Stupidity, where the plot doesn’t work if the characters show an ounce of sense. The plot needs them to go alone into that dark basement when they hear a strange noise there and know a serial killer is on the loose because there’s no story if they’re smart enough to leave the house and get help, but the author doesn’t give the character any reason to go alone into the dark basement that makes their decision at least a little rational.

The old-school fantasy series I’m currently reading (and I’m almost done! Then I’ll be free and will have cleared a big chunk of shelf space because I know I won’t be keeping this one to re-read) is driving me nuts because there’s so much Plot Stupidity. A lot of it is in character, as the characters have been established as headstrong and impulsive, but it’s annoying to read about people who keep bumbling into danger because they refuse to listen to anyone else or practice even a bit of common sense—and then they don’t learn from their mistakes and do the same thing again. I really want to throttle a character who keeps charging off on their own because they think they can resolve everything, in spite of being warned that others have already tried that and it didn’t work, and they’re just heading into danger. And then they get into terrible danger, barely make it out alive, don’t accomplish what they set out to do, end up back where they started—and then do it all over again because they think it will work this time.

Or there’s a character who’s clearly shady. They’ve repeatedly shown that they’re not trustworthy. People who have reason to know have warned that this person can’t be trusted. But the other characters keep trusting them. And then, guess what? It turns out that character has been selling the others out to the villain all along.

It’s incredibly frustrating to read. (I’m using the singular “they” in an attempt to make it harder to identify the series I’m talking about so you don’t know the gender of the characters.)

As a writer, I’m trying to find a middle ground between a character who’s always right and a character who’s an utter idiot. Sometimes a character can make the wrong guess or assumption based on incomplete information. Sometimes the obvious, logical thing turns out to be wrong. There are times when emotions come into play, as even intelligent people have emotional biases. We all tend to side with people we identify with. You don’t want to think that a person who’s a lot like you would commit a crime. I think there’s also a difference between being given information or advice and refusing to listen and taking action based on faulty assumptions or information. I can tolerate someone doing something dumb because they’re misinformed and turn out to be wrong, but it’s more annoying when a character is specifically warned about something and completely disregards the warning.

A lot of my revision in this book has involved sending my sleuth down some wrong paths, sometimes because she jumps to an incorrect conclusion based on incomplete information and sometimes because her emotions get in the way and she doesn’t want to suspect someone she feels sorry for. I hope that’ll be enough to make the story work. And then I need to work to build that into the first draft so I don’t have to spend months rewriting the book.

writing life

Rebounding

One of the panels I watched during the recent Nebula conference was on rebounding — making a comeback after your career has had a setback. I found it rather reassuring to see that people I thought were successful had been through some kind of change or setback, and they’d all come out of it in some way.

I’ve had a bunch of “careers” along the way. I got a quick and early start, selling my first book to the second publisher I sent it to. It was a small press that distributed only to libraries, so I didn’t make a lot of money on it, but it was a foot in the door. I sold them two more books in short order. I’m afraid that this gave me a very unrealistic view of publishing. I’d sold everything I’d written and only had one rejection. I probably sounded like that scene in the movie Legally Blonde in which the blond sorority girl gets in to Harvard Law School so she can follow her ex-boyfriend and get him back, and when he’s astonished that she got in, she scoffs and says, “Like that’s hard.” People would talk about how tough it was to get published, and I’d think, “Like that’s hard.” That impression continued when I sold a book to Harlequin — a big publisher. I did have a little struggle after that. They rejected the next couple of proposals I sent, but then bought another book.

Soon after that, though, career #1 came to a crashing halt. My editor left publishing and New York, and I got passed around to other editors. The line I’d been writing for folded, so there really wasn’t a place for me at that publisher. They were trying to edge all their books to be “hotter.” Even the remaining “sweet” line wanted a lot more sexual tension than I could write well. I don’t know how many proposals I sent them, but none of them sold. My editor ended up sending a manuscript back to me (after months of back and forth of edits) with a photocopy of an article about a book called Bridget Jones’s Diary, the business card of an agent, and a note saying “I think you could write this kind of thing, maybe turn this book into a single title.” I did talk to that agent. She was encouraging about my writing, but she said she thought what I’d written was the perfect category book and she couldn’t imagine trying to sell it as single title. The “chick lit” books hadn’t yet taken off in the US, but the contemporary romantic comedy books were doing well. I don’t think Bridget Jones had even been published here, so I was assuming it was like the contemporary romances with cartoony covers.

I spent some time rewriting that book, found an agent who liked it, and she submitted it to a few publishers. They rejected it, but asked to see something else. I wrote something else, but never heard anything from any publishers. I now wonder if that agent even submitted it because I’ve since talked to the editors who supposedly had it, and they didn’t remember seeing it. After working with a different agent, I know that you get an answer, one way or another. An agent doesn’t let a book sit on an editor’s desk for a year with no response. Around that time, the chick lit craze hit the US, and I thought that was actually a better fit for that book, so I revised it for that market and sent it to my agent. The next thing I heard about that book, a package landed on my doorstep four months later. It was that manuscript (back in the days when they were still doing hard copy, not electronic submissions) with a note handwritten on top of my cover letter saying, “This will never sell.” I sent the certified letter firing that agent that day, not because she didn’t like the book, but because of the way she handled it.

I wrote a number of proposals and shopped them around to agents and editors. Finally, I was at a conference and chatting with an editor about this crazy idea I’d had about a chick lit story with magic. The editor asked to see it, and I wrote Enchanted, Inc. That editor didn’t buy it, but I got an agent and the book sold, six years after my last publication. Thus began career #2.

Enchanted, Inc. came out to very positive response, went back to print, and the second book did well, too. I got another contract for two more books. Things seemed to be going great. And then they dropped the series. I wrote a proposal for something different, and no one bought it. I wrote A Fairy Tale with the idea of having something to submit to those editors who wanted something like Enchanted, Inc., but I wasn’t really happy with it and put it aside to think about it.

In the meantime, the Japanese publisher wanted more Enchanted, Inc. books, so I wrote book 5. Then I got the idea for Rebel Mechanics and wrote that. It didn’t sell to the fantasy publishers, so I revised it as YA. It still took another year or so to sell, and during that time I wrote book 6 of Enchanted, Inc. I finished A Fairy Tale and it went on submission, but it didn’t sell. Around this time, my agent convinced me to publish the Enchanted, Inc. books myself. This may have been careers 3 and 4, happening simultaneously — young adult and self publishing.

Career 3 tanked pretty quickly when the publisher didn’t want more books (never mind that the book got great acclaim and was put on a number of state library reading lists). Career 4 is still sort of limping along. I’m making a living, which is good, but am not wildly successful, and I doubt I’d be able to sell a book to a traditional publisher right now. I may be poised for career #5 when I try mystery. We’ll see what happens there. But there are a lot of ups and downs in this business, and I’m not sure you can ever really feel like you’ve made it and can relax. I guess maybe if you have a massive bestseller that gets made into a movie and the publisher then wants everything you write you can relax, and if you make enough money on that book, it doesn’t matter so much if the next one tanks. It would be nice to find out. The main thing I keep reminding myself is that you only really fail if you quit.

I suspect that this kind of career is pretty common. I’ve learned over the years that even authors who seem to be doing well have had a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes, getting dropped by publishers and agents, having to start over again with something new, going through rejections even after some success. In fact, that’s probably more common than the people who hit it big with their first book and just cruise on after that or those who have a slow, steady build without any setbacks.

writing life

The More You Know

I feel like I’ve spent forever revising the book I’m working on. It’s taken me longer to rewrite it than it took me to write it in the first place. But then I noticed that my “cut file” where I stick most of the things I cut from the book (in case I need them again elsewhere) is at around 8,000 words. There’s also a lot that I just cut without putting it in the file when it’s something I know I won’t use or when I’m just tightening up, condensing a paragraph or a sentence or removing something that’s redundant. Meanwhile, the manuscript is about 12,000 words longer than when I started. I’ve written nearly half a book while also having to make decisions about what needs to be changed. That explains a lot.

I’m starting to feel like the more I know about writing, the longer it takes me to do, but I think that’s because the more I know about writing, the more I can spot what’s wrong with a book. It just would be nice if I could figure that out on the first draft so I could do it right the first time and not spend all this time in revisions.

And that leads nicely into the topic of one of the panels I watched at the Nebula conference: Imposter Syndrome. It sounds like I’m not alone in struggling more with that fear that any of my success has been a fluke as I go further into my career. When you first start out, before reality hits, you’re full of confidence that your book is great and that it’s going to be a huge success. And then reality hits and it turns out not to be so easy. That’s when a lot of people start wondering if they really belong. The more you know about the craft and about the business, the more you doubt yourself. There may be some people who are totally confident in their abilities and are right about that, but I think it’s more common that the people without imposter syndrome are the ones who might actually be imposters. The people who really know what they’re doing doubt themselves because they know how much they don’t know. That’s not such a bad thing when it makes you strive to get better. Imposter syndrome becomes dangerous when it makes you give up.

It doesn’t help that the business makes it hard. Publishing is not a meritocracy. Some good books get handled well and do very well. Some talented, hard-working authors become successful. But many more don’t, while I’m sure we could all point to poorly written books that got a lot of publisher support and became big hits. I should know better by now, but I’m always surprised to learn what’s been going on behind the scenes in the careers of people I admire. So many of them have had starts, stops, and reverses, and some of the biggest successes tend to come after their careers seem to be almost over. It’s hard not to have imposter syndrome when your series gets dropped, when the publisher doesn’t do much to support your book, when you feel like your agent has lost interest in you, when your books never get mentioned when people ask for recommendations of something that’s exactly what you write. You have to wonder if maybe the problem is you, if maybe your books weren’t all that good and you should go find something else to do with your life.

The people who succeed in the long term are those who can get over that feeling and keep trying without giving up. And who constantly work to get better, even if it means spending what feels like ages getting a book just right.

publishing business

Romance and Fantasy

My panel last weekend at the Nebula conference was about romance and science fiction/fantasy. As usual, I thought of all the good things to say in the middle of the night days after the panel, so I’ll discuss the topic here.

I’ll admit that I have mixed feelings about being put on the romance and sf panel every year, at just about every convention. I don’t mind so much at the Nebulas, since I probably do have more expertise in that area than most people at that conference, having actually written romance novels, and that conference is aimed at writers. But I also feel like I’m getting “typecast” by the industry in general, both at conventions and by publishers, and the fact that I keep ending up on the romance or paranormal romance panels may perpetuate that typecasting.

The thing is, I last wrote romance more than 20 years ago. I haven’t been involved with Romance Writers of America for about a decade. The books I write now could not be shelved as romance and wouldn’t even be considered by a romance publisher. The Enchanted, Inc. books got shelved as general fiction because they were published as “chick lit,” which is not romance, and that publisher keeps doing Book Bub ads (which is good) for them as paranormal romance, which they aren’t (which is not so good). When you look at that book, the heroine has bad dates with multiple guys, and just has a bit of attraction to the guy who ends up being the romantic interest for the series. There’s not even a kiss until book two. I said on the panel that I write “shipper bait” because the romantic content is more about readers wanting my characters to get together than it is about actual romance on the page. People consider my books romantic, but I think that’s mostly because they make readers feel romantic. It’s not because there’s that much romance in the books.

When it comes to readers, I don’t care how they consider the books, as long as they’re reading them. The problem I have is when it comes to publishers, because they persist in seeing me as a romance writer. As I mentioned, the publisher for Enchanted, Inc. promotes it as paranormal romance. If someone is really looking for paranormal romance, they’d be disappointed in this book, in which the only real romantic content is a general sense that you like this guy the heroine has no romantic relationship with and you want them to get together. Some readers are cool with that. I’m sure others are disappointed, and then there are all the readers who might like it because they aren’t looking for romance, but they aren’t being promoted to so they don’t find it or know about it. Then the fact that it’s promoted as paranormal romance means that the people who buy it also buy paranormal romances, and that triggers the bookselling algorithms, so it’s recommended to people who also bought paranormal romances, who are less likely to actually like it, and it’s not being promoted to people who might like it.

Then there’s the way publishers see other things I write. A Fairy Tale was rejected by multiple fantasy publishers, most of them with the comment that it was “too romancey.” This is a book without a single romantic relationship in it. There’s a little sexual tension between a couple of secondary characters, but the most that happens between the two main characters is that they both have moments in which they each admit to themselves that they find the other somewhat intriguing. There’s not even a kiss in the book. I’m not sure what’s “too romancey” about that. I suspect they read the first few chapters, saw that a man and a woman met, and assumed it was a romance because I have written romance and because they see Enchanted, Inc. as romantic. In at least once case, I’m pretty sure it’s because the editor “shipped” Owen and Katie, so she saw Enchanted, Inc. as romantic and classed me as a romance writer. Maybe there were other issues with that book that made them decide against it, but the reason they gave was that it was “too romancey” to be published as fantasy. The same thing happened with Rebel Mechanics. It was initially submitted to fantasy publishers, and at least one suggested I submit it to a romance publisher instead. Never mind that, again, the only real romantic content relating to the love interest is an awareness of attraction and the other relationship is strictly related to the non-romantic plot. A book that doesn’t even have a kiss between the hero and heroine wouldn’t sell to any romance publisher. I was eventually able to sell it to a young adult publisher.

And that’s an issue for a lot of authors. Women authors are more likely to get shoved into YA with their sf/fantasy books, even if they aren’t really YA stories. If the main character is young and female, it’s more likely to end up published as YA. Not that this is entirely a bad thing, since YA sells very well and there are a lot of adult readers who choose to read YA, but there’s also the problem that because so many books that really could or should be adult fantasy/sf are being published as YA, there’s less real YA being published. Librarians and teachers are complaining about not being able to find books for the 6th-8th grade readers.

It’s not entirely sexism, as I’ve certainly read books with far more romance than I write that are written by female authors and published as adult sf/f. In some cases, it seems like a female author who establishes herself in fantasy with a male main character and with little to no romantic content can then go on to write something that’s a lot more romantic. But then I know of at least one book by a female first-time author that was published by a fantasy publisher in spite of it being something that could just as easily have been published as paranormal romance. I don’t know what the difference is, why the same editor who said Rebel Mechanics was too romancey and should be submitted to a romance publisher would have had no problems publishing a book that had kissing and sexy sparring between the hero and heroine in chapter two.

I’ve been reading an Old School epic fantasy saga, and the way romance is handled in it does make you wonder. In book one, the young male hero is joined on part of his journey by a girl. There’s maybe 50 pages of them traveling together in a 700-page book. After they reach their destination in the last third of the book, they split off into separate journeys, and he spends the rest of the book and the next two books pining over her and longing for her, thinking of the time they spent together, as though they’d established a deep, meaningful romance. I had to flip back through to look at the part they spent together because I’d missed it entirely. He didn’t show signs of admiring her in any way. There was very little awareness of her. He did do a little posturing, but it came across to me more as him competing with her in trying to impress others with them than trying to impress her. They are actually around each other in the last book, which is described as being “a romantic journey,” but I can’t tell why these characters like each other, aside from him being the main character and her being the only girl his age in the series. If those 50 pages of being around each other without really thinking about each other are supposed to establish an epic romance, then I can see where editors used to that sort of thing might be like, “Whew, better send this to a romance publisher,” when there are characters who actually show signs of attraction.

The nice thing about publishing for myself is that I can classify my books however I want, but I still have to try to find readers who might have trouble discovering my earlier works. I’ve started turning down romance-related panels at most conventions (not that there are a lot of in-person conventions right now). I’ll keep doing the romance panel at the Nebulas because we get into this sort of issue. I’m not opposed to romance. It’s just that I don’t really write it, and being classified that way has hurt my career.

A Brief Real World Intrusion

I’ve been struggling with what I should say about recent events in this country. I know that a lot of my readers turn to my books to escape from the real world, so the last thing they want to hear from me is stuff about the real world. I also don’t want to make these issues about me or come across like all those “we’re here for you in these uncertain times” e-mails I’ve been getting from every company I’ve ever given an e-mail address to. I use my online presence to promote my books, and I don’t want to use other people’s pain to promote my books.

At the same time, silence is cowardly. Some issues are big enough that you have to speak out. So, on this occasion, I’m going to let the real world intrude.

I like to think of myself as someone who isn’t racist. I’ve always had a fairly diverse group of friends, which is one of the benefits of growing up on military bases. I liked to think that everyone was pretty much alike inside and we were all equal.

But the fact is that the world treats us differently, and we have to acknowledge that in order to change it. My big wake-up call came when I tried to watch the movie Hidden Figures on HBO. I couldn’t deal with the opening scene, in which the women were confronted by a racist cop. I got so infuriated on their behalf that I was actually shouting at the TV. I wanted to throw things. I wanted to hurt him. I had to turn off the movie because my blood pressure was spiking.

And then it struck me: I didn’t have the strength to watch a movie about that treatment. Just imagine what it must be like to have to live it — all those daily indignities of dealing with people who regard you as lesser. It has to take so much strength to not be exploding with rage all the time.

It would be nice to say that things have changed since then, but clearly they haven’t, and what we’ve seen has to be the tip of the iceberg, given that this is how some police officers are acting when they know they’re being filmed, when there should be heightened awareness because of so many other recent incidents. That suggests they don’t fear the consequences, and that means there’s some rot at the core for them to feel safe acting that way in public view. I have friends who are cops or former cops, and I know that there are a lot of good ones, but the fact that there are those who fearlessly act this way in public suggests that there’s not a lot of peer pressure to the contrary. Things have to change, at the very least to the point where police are afraid to be brutal to the people they’re supposed to protect because they know there will be consequences. I don’t care what crime has been committed, the police are not judge, jury, and executioners.

It’s alarming how similar today’s world is to the Gilded Age era I researched for Rebel Mechanics. We still have so much systemic inequality. I wish I could make everything better. In the meantime, I’m trying to listen and learn so that in my own interactions I can do better. And I vote. I would encourage my readers to do likewise.

My Books

Enchanted, Inc. Anniversary

Yesterday was the 15th anniversary of the first publication of Enchanted, Inc. I can’t believe it’s been so long. Amazingly, that book is still in print and still selling. It’s never been a bestseller (outside of some really narrow Amazon categories), but it’s sold steadily for a decade and a half, which is pretty good.

Thanks to all the fans who’ve gradually spread the word over all these years so that people keep discovering it.Enchanted, Inc.