My Books

New Book Day

It’s new book day! My Audible Original book (which means it’s only available in audio), Make Mine Magic, is available today.


This is a fun contemporary fantasy with a touch of romance, along the lines of the Enchanted, Inc., books, but in a different fictional “universe.”

A woman taking her dream vacation honeymoon on her own after getting left at the altar does a good deed that leads her into a strange and magical side of New York that tourists don’t often get to see, and she finds herself in the middle of a magical power struggle.

The germ of this idea came from something that actually happened to me, though the outcome was very different. When I was in New York doing my location research for the Fairy Tale books, I was waiting for a “walk” signal to go from Columbus Circle to Central Park, and the woman standing next to me asked if I could help her cross the street. She was blind and using a white cane. The funny thing was, when I was in college, I volunteered for the services for blind students office, which mostly meant recording textbooks and exam questions by reading them out loud, but I sometimes was asked to escort students around campus, so I knew how to assist the woman. I found it interesting that out of all the people who were at that intersection at that time, she managed to ask a person who knew how to assist her.

When I was brainstorming ideas for a book proposal, that incident popped into my head as a good “what if” — how did she know, what if she had some way of reading who/what I really was, and what might have happened next? In reality, we went our separate ways after I got her safely to the other side of the street, but what if …?

Incidentally, this was an “oh, by the way” idea. When they asked if I’d like to write an Audible Original, I gave them several ideas. A couple of them were story ideas I’d been playing with for ages. I had chapters already written and had thoroughly developed those worlds. Right before I submitted the proposal, this idea popped into my head, and I added it as an “oh, by the way” thing. It was the idea they chose.

There may be a print version coming later, but it’s exclusive to audio for at least a year.

writing

Taking My Time

One of the most common bits of writing advice is to set aside a manuscript for at least a couple of weeks (or months) before you go back to work on it so that you can see it more clearly and be less attached to the process of writing it, but I’m not sure how many people actually do it. We end a book with great enthusiasm and can’t wait to get it revised and finished, or else we’re impatient about being able to submit or publish it, or we’re on deadline and don’t have the time to wait.

I will confess to being guilty of all of the above. I seldom have the luxury of being able to let a draft sit, and even when I do, I usually feel like I already have a good sense of the problems and know how to fix them.

Without really planning to, I ended up taking a more than two-week break over the holidays when I was in the middle of a revision round, right at the point where things needed to be fixed, and I have to say, it made a big difference. I’ve been able to see a lot more clearly where the plot problems were, and it’s been relatively easy to see how to fix them. Some of that may be because I’ve had time to mull it over, but I think a lot of it has to do with being hazy on remembering exactly why I wrote things the way I did in the first place. When you know why you wrote something, you’re more resistant to changing it because you can justify it to yourself. Once that memory becomes fuzzy, you’re just reading what’s on the page, as though you’re a reader or editor, and if what’s on the page doesn’t work, you know you need to fix it. There’s no arguing with yourself or rationalizing.

That’s especially valuable with humor, where the joke that might have made sense while you were writing it because you understood where you were going with it no longer works without whatever was going on in your head at the time, and that means readers won’t get it. You know it has to go.

Really, as much as I hate it, giving myself more time and slowing down really does make books better. I trained as a journalist, so I’m very deadline focused. Worse, I worked in TV news, so our deadline was absolute. We had a newscast going on at six, whether or not we were ready, so we had to be ready. In that world, being able to work quickly was valuable. I had a reputation for being able to sketch out a story in the car on the way back to the station, so I could get the script written and get it to the editor to cut together the story right away. They’d send me on the late-afternoon stories because they knew I could get back to the station after five and still have something ready to go on the air at six. When I was working in PR, my boss used to brag about me being able to “turn on a dime and give change” because they could throw an urgent assignment at me and have something written within an hour or so.

That can be helpful when writing novels because it means I hit my deadlines, but that sense of rush, rush, rush isn’t always for the best. I’m so focused on getting it done quickly that I may not be doing it as well as I should. I can still write quickly, but giving it a bit of time between phases would probably improve the finished product.

Since I’m developing a new series, I’m writing the first few books before I publish anything, and that should give me some time. After this draft, I’m going to write the next couple of books before I go back and do another draft on the first book. That way I know I’ll be setting up anything I need for the first few books, but I also will have plenty of time to let the first book rest so I can really revise it and make it shine. After all, I’m hoping this book will suck people so deeply into this world and these characters that it will make them eager to keep reading the series.

My Books

My Award Eligibility Post

It’s award season for books as well as movies. Ours aren’t quite as glamorous as the Golden Globes, but it is nice to be recognized. My books cross genres, so there are a variety of areas where they might be eligible for awards, but probably fit best in science fiction and fantasy, where the main awards are the Nebulas and the Hugos. The Nebulas are given by and voted upon by the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (of which I’m a member) and are more of a peer award. The Hugos are nominated by and voted upon by members of the World Science Fiction Convention, and although there are probably a lot of writers voting, they’re considered more of a fan award. People who were members of the previous year’s convention and those who have already registered for this year’s convention are eligible to nominate.

My only publication last year was Enchanted Ever After. I don’t have any expectation of it being nominated for best novel for either the Hugos or the Nebulas. It’s not the kind of book that tends to get nominated, and the final book in a series most people haven’t heard of is a long shot.

But the Hugos have an award for best series, and the Enchanted, Inc. series would be eligible for that, and since the series has ended, this is the last year it would be eligible. I think it’s a series worthy of consideration, with nine volumes ranging from 2005 to 2019. It’s mostly flown under the radar in the SF/fantasy, but it’s been consistently well-received critically, and even the first book in the series is still in print and selling steadily.

So, if you were a WorldCon member last year or have registered this year, I hope you’ll consider nominating this series.

There are supporting memberships available, so you don’t have to be planning to go to New Zealand in order to nominate and vote. All voting members get access to the voting packet, which generally includes electronic versions of all the nominated works. In the series category, it often includes the entire series, so it’s more than worth the money just for all the free books.

So, that’s my awards pitch. Thank you for your consideration. I don’t know what difference a nomination would make for sales. It might boost my profile a bit and help me sell other books. It might even revive chances of a TV show or movie based on the series. But it would be nice to have all these years of work recognized.

Looking at 2020

Happy new year! After taking a couple of weeks off for the holidays for the first time in years (usually I have a deadline early in the new year, since editors and agents love to clear their desks before they go on holiday, and they expect the revisions they requested soon after they get back to work), I’m ready to get back into the swing of things and charge into the new year.

I’ve got a book launching this week, my first Audible Original. That means it’s an audiobook only for the first year. If you’ve been thinking about giving Audible a try, now would be the time. There may be a print edition coming after that, but that will depend on a lot of things.

I’ve also heard from the narrator for the audiobooks of the Enchanted, Inc. series, and book 9 will be coming soon. She was getting to work on it last month.

I’m developing a new series that I hope to launch later this year. I’m trying to get a few books written before the launch so I can make a bigger splash. This one is structured more like a traditional mystery series, but it still has magical elements and a dash of romance. I have a first draft of the first book and am revising that, as well as starting to plot book 2.

And I’m starting to do the research to build a new fantasy world where I can set a series of semi-standalone novels — the connecting tie for the series would be the world, with some overlapping characters, but the plots of each book would more or less stand alone. You’d get more out of the story if you read all the books, but you wouldn’t be totally lost if you hadn’t. At least, that’s the idea.

I don’t have a lot of book events planned this year. I’m still waffling on whether to attend the Nebula Awards conference or possibly the World Fantasy Convention. I’m not really getting invited to conventions or other book events these days. But I think this is mostly going to be a year for buckling down and writing. You have to have something written before you can sell or promote it, so there’s not much point in going to a con for either promotion or networking unless you’ve got something ready to go.

So, off to work, and here’s to a fabulous 2020.

Holiday Countdown

I’m now in the most annoying phase of illness, when I mostly feel pretty good, but I get tired easily, and when I get tired the coughing starts. So I start out with energy, eager to get things done. But then I get tired and start coughing.

I was able to sing enough to run through my choir music. I’ve got a voice, and I can even stay on pitch. But as I got later into the day, I started getting tired and started coughing, so I didn’t try to go to choir practice last night. I figured rest would be better for me. And it must have been. I woke up without the usual morning coughing fit, and at about my usual time, with some energy. If I keep resting and improving, I might be up to singing on Christmas Eve night. That’s what I’m aiming for.

In the meantime, there’s Star Wars. I have a ticket for an early matinee tomorrow. Then I’ll spend most of the weekend resting and relaxing. Maybe I’ll watch some Christmas movies.

This afternoon, I’m planning to venture out to get groceries and finish my shopping. I’m going to try something wild and crazy this year and wrap my gifts before Christmas Eve. I’m usually frantically finishing that between services on Christmas Eve night, even if I bought them weeks before.

I also need to finish this draft of the book I’m working on. I’d like to take all of next week totally off. That does mean I’m not going to meet my arbitrary goal for hours spent writing this year. However, that goal was 100 hours over what I did last year, and I’ve passed last year and am fewer than 20 hours under the goal. I think it’s more important to give myself some work/life balance than to hit some made-up number, especially since I’d be doing busy work to hit that number rather than working on a deadline.

Getting Christmas Done

I finally got my Christmas tree up and decorated. Last week, on the last day before I got really sick, I brought the tree in from the garage. It then lay in pieces on the living room floor because I was too sick to deal with it or care.

Last weekend, I realized that I either had to commit and put it up or I had to give up and take it back to the garage. I put it together as a tree, and it stayed that way for a few more days.

I’d been hesitating about putting up a tree at all this year, since it goes on the wall where they’re going to have to do repair work, but I figured that at this point in the holiday season, they’re probably not going to schedule any construction work, so I’m probably safe. So yesterday I got out the decorations and actually put up the lights and ornaments. I went fairly minimalist with the ornaments. Normally, a lot of my decor involves silk roses tied on with gold ribbon. It’s a sort of Victorian look. But that was more than I wanted to deal with, so I went more traditional, just with ornaments. I have some ribbons to put up, but I have to find them first. They weren’t in the first couple of boxes of decorations I brought down. Next time I have the energy to go upstairs, I’ll look for them.

I also haven’t put up my Nativity scene, but that’s also upstairs.

I actually feel a lot better, but now I’m very tired. I suspect my body has to recover from all the effort put into fighting the infection. I fell asleep yesterday afternoon while editing and had about an hour nap. This morning I slept really late after getting a decent night’s sleep without waking up much for coughing. I’m not sure whether or not I’ll manage to get to choir rehearsal tonight. I have a voice, but I haven’t tried singing, and I don’t know if I’ll have the energy by the end of the day. Maybe I’ll take another nap.

movies

Looking Back at Star Wars

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been rewatching all the Star Wars movies. It’s been an interesting experience, since I hadn’t rewatched most of them in ages. I hadn’t watched the original trilogy since the prequels came out, and I hadn’t watched the prequels since their original release era. That meant I hadn’t really looked at the originals in terms of what was revealed in the prequels, and I hadn’t considered any of them in light of the newer films.

I have to say that while the first movie still holds up really well, the rest of the original trilogy doesn’t. Some of that is because Lucas undermined himself with some decisions he made in the prequels. For instance, all the “Luke is our last hope, no, wait, there’s another Skywalker” drama. Well, the Jedi were supposed to have been celibate. They weren’t allowed to marry and have families. There’s only a Skywalker bloodline because Anakin broke the rules and married. That means the Force-sensitive people who were Jedi candidates had to have just randomly appeared all along. If it was strictly a genetic trait, then making the people who had that trait be celibate would have led to it dying out. Where did the Jedi find their candidates all along? Wherever that was, couldn’t they have found those kinds of people again now? The galaxy should have been full of “hopes” who had just as much potential as the Skywalker kids, maybe even without so much Dark Side potential.

In fact, why were they waiting around for Anakin’s kid to grow up, with no effort to train him? They had twenty years to prepare. They didn’t find Force-sensitive people and get them to Dagobah? What would have happened if Jyn Erso and the Rogue One crew hadn’t defied orders to get the Death Star plans, which led to the droids ending up on Tatooine and bringing Luke into the fray?

I know a lot of people were really distressed by the revelation in The Last Jedi that Rey was nobody, that her parents were nobody. While I’m not sure I believe that, since Kylo Ren was trying to manipulate her at the time, where did they think the Jedi came from during the glory days? They were all nobodies. There was no noble line of Jedi families because the Jedi were celibate.

The Empire Strikes Back is often considered the best movie in the series, but I’ve never liked it that much. Some of that was because nothing could have lived up to the anticipation, some because I was so thoroughly spoiled from reading the novelization so many times before I saw it that I had the movie memorized before I saw it. But analyzing it from a story perspective, I think it’s pretty weak, mostly because the stakes are actually pretty low. After the opening battle and escape from Hoth, the Rebellion no longer matters. Everything becomes entirely personal — will Han and Leia manage to escape, will Luke be able to train as a Jedi, will Darth Vader catch Luke. Personal stakes aren’t necessarily bad, but in something that’s supposed to be epic, you need a bigger story question than “will they repair the ship?” And we have more undermining from the prequels — there, becoming a Jedi is a lifetime thing, with children taken away from their parents at an early age, then going through an extensive program of training, followed by apprenticeship. Luke can’t have been on Dagobah more than a few days, and yet he’s declared fully a Jedi. I guess the other Jedi wasted a lot of time. And how did he learn to build his own lightsaber? Did he find a YouTube video?

The Last Jedi follows a similar story arc and pattern to The Empire Strikes Back, but the stakes are much higher — the survival of the Resistance. It’s not just whether one ship can escape, but whether any of them can. Rey isn’t meant to have had a full Jedi training while with Luke. She gets a crash course in connecting with the Force, but there’s no “you’re a full Jedi now, I have nothing more to teach you.” The bit about Rey already having everything contained in the sacred Jedi texts wasn’t because she’d learned it all but because she’d already stolen the texts.

I found the newer movies a lot more engaging than everything but the first one. I have a lot more thoughts about the views of heroism and all that, but this is getting long and I need to think more.

When Christmas Attacks

I’ve reached the annoying phase of illness in which I’m well enough to be frustrated with not being 100 percent. I’m close, but not quite there yet. Fortunately, today is cold and gray, so I have no urge to go outside and do stuff. That gives me another day of rest, which should get me closer to being well. My voice seems to be more or less back. I haven’t tried singing and I haven’t tried talking much, but at least I’m not rasping and I can get above a whisper without pain.

Now I’m really ready to be well and to get back to normal. I have things I want to do!

I tried watching some Christmas movies this weekend, and either I chose badly or I’m not really in the mood for these things. There seems to be a whole subgenre about meeting someone in an elevator. In the first one, there was an elevator mishap that got two people stuck and led to one of those “we’re going to die” moments, which led to a kiss. Which kind of works as a meet-cute. But then there was another one that seemed to be a sequel of sorts — it’s in the same office building — and in that one, the guy just randomly kissed the girl in the elevator because she was wearing a sexy Mrs. Claus outfit and he figured that made her slutty so that was okay. And this was the hero of the movie. I thought that since she pretended her neighbor/best friend was her boyfriend to fend this guy off that she’d end up with the friend. After all, if you pretend someone is your significant other in one of these movies, you either realize or develop feelings for them. But no, the elevator rapist guy was the hero.

And then there was another that could have been cute, but that guy ended up with red flags, too, where he got furious when she wouldn’t instantly commit to him the moment he brought up the idea of them getting together, even though she just broke up with someone. That’s actually on the “he has abuser potential” list, if he demands a fast commitment.

I’m almost done with my Star Wars rewatch, so maybe I’ll get to more Christmas movies soon. I don’t really have plans for the weekend and should probably take it easy and finish recovering, so that may be my plan. Though I do need to do some shopping at some point, I guess. As usual, Christmas sneaks up on me. I go straight from “it’s too early!” to “it’s here!” I need to pace myself better, but getting sick threw off my schedule.

writing

Bad Research

While I haven’t been feeling like doing much else, I’ve been doing research reading for preliminary input for some worldbuilding I want to do. In other words, reading history and calling it “work.” I guess I’ve steeped myself in the subject pretty well, since I was reading a book, thought its assertions sounded off, looked it up online, and found that historians were screaming about this book and how wrong it was.

The book is A World Lit Only By Fire by William Manchester, and it’s a pretty inaccurate depiction of the medieval era. I have no problem with “pop” history — written for ordinary people rather than academics — but this is just bad. He’s using secondary sources (when he even cites a source), and they’re outdated Victorian sources that have been debunked. He’s looking at things from an era in which they thought the “classical” world (ancient Greece and Rome) were the pinnacle of civilization, with the conceit that the current (Victorian) era was a revival of that. But this book was published in in the 1990s.

Here’s the bit that had me jumping online to look it up: he asserts that medieval peasants had no sense of time, I guess because they didn’t have watches. But as historians have pointed out, that doesn’t mean there was no sense of time. The churches rang their bells for the offices of the day, and just about everyone would have lived in earshot of a church since they’d have to be in walking distance. They’d have had more awareness of time than a modern person who doesn’t wear a watch.

Not to mention, in an agrarian society they’d have been tending to animals, and anyone who’s ever dealt with animals knows that animals are very routine-oriented. You don’t have to have a watch for your animals to let you know that it’s time to eat, time to return home, or time to sleep.

It seems this author got all his info about how peasants lived from writings by noblemen who were trying to justify treating their peasants like animals.

From a history standpoint, I want to throw the book against the wall, but since I’m getting ideas for creating a fictional world, I may as well read his fictional version of the world. It’s basically a fantasy world. Fortunately, I bought it used, so I didn’t send any money to this bad research.

Another Silent Day

I still have no voice at all. This shouldn’t bother me, as I have no reason to talk, but it does. I don’t like knowing I can’t talk. Also, it’s sunny and pretty outside, which makes it a bad day for a sick day. When I feel like this, there should be clouds at least, preferably some rain. You know, a day for staying in pajamas, snuggling under a blanket with a cup of tea and a good book.

I missed choir practice last night, which gave me a chance to catch up on my Star Wars rewatch in preparation for the new movie. I’m trying to get through all the films. So far, I’ve done the prequels and the interstitials and am heading into the original trilogy. I think I’m going to skip the first one since it’s way more familiar and I watched it earlier this year. But I don’t think I’ve watched The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi since the special editions were in the theater.

I’ve been live Tweeting these rewatches, so if you want to see my immediate thoughts on these films, check out my Twitter feed.

And now it’s time to get back under the blankets and rest a bit. It may not be cloudy, but tea and rest are still pretty much what I need.