I learned this week that I need to be a lot more careful when I’m selecting books at the library.

It’s the time of year when I want to read moderately Christmassy rom-coms/chick-lit/women’s fiction. Not necessarily an all-out “Christmas” book, but a book that happens to be set around the holiday season. That makes them tricky to find. If it’s not mentioned on the cover, I have to flip through it and see if any particular keywords pop out. It’s especially helpful if there’s some kind of date to start each chapter.

On my last library trip, I found one that I thought might work. It was in the “unhappy wife wanting a different life” category, and I tend to prefer single woman stories to either “unhappy wife” or “wife discovers that her perfect life isn’t perfect when her husband dumps her” stories, but I didn’t have time to do a serious search in the library, and the storyline sounded interesting. A flip through caught a mention of Christmas. The cover was cartoony, suggesting comedy. So I checked it out.

I should have also read the marketing blurbs above the book description. I tend to skip those because I don’t want the publisher telling me that a book is “unputdownable,” “heartwarming,” or “hilarious.” However, it would have been a clue that they used the word “sinister.”

It turned out that this was not a quirky chick lit/women’s fiction. It’s a psychological thriller—a quirky one using a lot of women’s fiction/chick lit tropes, but it’s still about a woman who becomes obsessed with a serial killer to the point she ends up institutionalized (that’s in the prologue, then the book is about how she ended up there). The Christmas mentions were in a chapter of her in the institution (the book switches back and forth between the present and the past), comparing life there to Christmas afternoon, with the staff bringing out puzzles and games with the kind of forced cheer a mom has on Christmas afternoon when she’s trying to keep everyone together and in good spirits with lots of activities. My quick glance had shown me multiple uses of the word “Christmas” and the mention of a mother bringing out puzzles and games. I missed that it was an analogy, and a fairly dark one at that, since the Christmases the narrator was remembering were tense and unhappy.

That’s not exactly the fluffy holiday read I was hoping for. Yikes! I guess I should read the marketing stuff. I may or may not agree with whether a book is “unputdownable” or “hilarious,” but I do want to know whether the publisher considers the book “sinister” rather than “heartwarming.”

I have now done some research and found a couple of books that might fit the bill, and I’ve requested them from the library, and I checked out an e-book for the time being. This weekend will be busy, but I’m hoping to finish the draft I’m working on early next week, and then I will have some time to sit, listen to Christmas music, drink hot cocoa, and read, and I’ll have proper reading material for that.

Now I kind of want to write the book I thought this one would be. It’s the kind of concept that could either be quirky and funny or sinister, depending on how it’s handled, and I want to do the funny version. I’ll add it to the idea file.

If you like my Rydding Village books and need something to keep you entertained while I write book 3 (you’ve already read book 2, right?), I have a recommendation for you: The Spellshop, by Sarah Beth Durst. I’ve known Sarah a really long time. I think we first met in 2006, and we’ve hung out together when we’re at the same events, bonding over curly hair and fantasy books. As soon as she started talking about this book, I was excited. It’s along the same lines as the Rydding Village books, in that it’s cottagecore cozy fantasy about a woman finding refuge in a magical village.

An extremely introverted librarian packs up as many books as she can and flees when a revolution sets the city and the library on fire. The only place she can think of to go for refuge is her childhood home on a remote island. She initially plans to just keep the spellbooks safe, since unauthorized use of magic is absolutely forbidden, but when she learns that the people on the island are suffering because the sorcerers who were supposed to be visiting to take care of things haven’t been, she starts looking up spells she can use to help. She can sell “remedies” to help the islanders, including the handsome merhorse farmer next door. She’s safe as long as no outsiders come to the island, but then a storm blows in a refugee who could put everything at risk.

This is a sweet, charming book about community that also gets into issues dealing with resources and how they should be fairly allocated, as well as questions about the difference between what’s right and what’s legal. There’s a subtle, gentle romance, but it’s mostly about the loner heroine learning to allow herself to be part of a community and to open her heart and explore her abilities. It’s like one of those women’s fiction books about the woman going to a village and opening a bakery/cafe/candy shop/bookstore, only in a magical world with flying cats, sentient spider plants, tree spirits, and merhorses.

It certainly makes me look at my spider plant differently, and I feel a little sad about having to rehome the giant granddaddy one when I moved. The one danger of reading this as a follow-up to Bread and Burglary might be that you’d be even hungrier, as there’s a lot of talk about jam and baked goods.

One fun thing about the move is that now I have access to two local library systems, and they have different books from my old library system. Late last year, I read Mystic and Rider by Sharon Shinn, the start of a series, but my library system didn’t have the second book. I tried requesting it through Interlibrary Loan, but something must have gone wrong because even though several library systems in the metro area had it, they never got it in for me. But the library here did have it, so I finally got to read book 2, The Thirteenth House.

This series is structured somewhat like a romance series, with it being about a group of people, and each book has a different person from within the group as a main character. There’s also a different romance in each book. There’s an overarching plot about some political turmoil in the kingdom that this group is helping the king deal with, but this book could still function as a standalone. I barely remembered the first book, it’s been so long since I read it, and I was able to follow the story. It’s the sort of thing where you could follow the plot if you hadn’t read the earlier book, but you’d grasp more about the characters and situation if you had.

This book centers on the young noblewoman who has shapeshifting powers, and even though this seems to be a somewhat medieval-ish fantasy world (medieval technology, but it otherwise doesn’t seem to be pinned to any particular era from our history), this particular book has a very Regency vibe. It’s the social season, in which the nobles of the elite Twelve Houses of the kingdom each host big house parties and balls for the other nobles, who make the circuit of them all, along with some of the upper lesser nobles in each province, known collectively as the Thirteenth House. Our heroine is using her shapechanging abilities to impersonate her introverted sister and attend the social functions on her behalf. Meanwhile, the other members of the group are guarding the young princess, who’s making her big social debut. There are rumblings of threats from disgruntled lesser nobles, and the regent who would advise the princess if she became queen has been threatened. What complicates things for our heroine is the fact that she fell in love with this regent, and he with her, when she rescued him from kidnappers. The only problem is that he’s married. She’s never worried about social conventions before, but is this a social convention she’s willing to break? And if she does, could she lose out on another possible love?

This book is less of a “fantasy road trip” than the first one in the series, since they aren’t really on a quest, but they are on a journey as they travel around the kingdom. It’s fun seeing a lot of the conventions of the Regency romance placed in a magical world. The romance in this one is not one that could fit into a genre romance novel, and it provides an angsty contrast to the Regency-like fun in the rest of the plot. Romance readers might have issues with the relationship, but I would encourage you not to judge it without reading the whole book because it does work out in a satisfying way for the character, and there are some twists.

I really enjoy this kind of series structure, with the big-picture external plot that carries through the whole series and the individual romance plots in each book. We get to see the world and the characters through different eyes in each book since there’s a different protagonist. The main characters from the first book are secondary characters here, and we get to see how they’re progressing. Meanwhile, potential storylines are being set up for the other characters that I assume will play out in future books. This is what I’m trying to do with the Rydding Village series, though I’m sort of keeping Elwyn as a secondary heroine in all the books, so there’s the book heroine and then there’s Elwyn as the series heroine, and we’ll get both their perspectives in each book. The big picture plot will start to have a bigger effect starting in book three, which I’m gearing up to start writing.

One difference between my old house and my new place is that I no longer have a separate “library” room. Now, my bookcases are in my living room, which means that when I sit on the sofa (actually a chaise, as I don’t have room for an actual sofa) to watch TV, read, or work on my laptop, I’m looking at my book collection. That’s led to me getting the urge to reread books that catch my eye.

The one I’m reading right now is Promised Land, by Connie Willis and Cynthia Felice. Back in the 90s, these two authors teamed up for several books that are essentially science fiction romances. They have a lot of the tropes you’d expect from a romance novel, but they take place in science fiction worlds.

Promised Land is basically a Hallmark movie set on another planet. We’ve got the city girl ending up in the country when she inherits a ranch, complete with the trope of her being entirely inappropriately dressed for the environment in high heels and a short skirt. She even has a purse dog (or something like one). Then there’s the local guy she has to be married to for a year or they’ll both lose their land. Except it’s all on another world. It’s a backwater planet colonized fairly recently, and that’s the reason for the weird inheritance laws to keep the land with colonists rather than speculators. They found that the size of the plot they were given wasn’t enough to make it viable, so neighbors combined theirs, and to ensure that the plots stayed together, they married their children, with the marriage becoming legal upon the death of the last of the original owners. The heroine was sent off to boarding school on another planet and hasn’t come back. Oh, and the “purse dog” is a bug-like alien creature.

Then they throw in some trappings of historical romances. There’s a “wagon train” across this planet to get to the ranch, only the wagons are being pulled by solar-powered vehicles rather than oxen. I got on a weird kick about the westward expansion last summer, and I recognize some things in this book as being related to some specific incidents from history. Knowing how Connie Willis does research, I bet she read the same accounts I did, or at least read about the same incidents. And then there’s the “settling in the homestead and learning how things work while having to work as a team with the husband she didn’t initially want” part of the story, which is right out of historical romance.

However, it doesn’t really read like a romance, even though it’s absolutely a marriage of convenience romance (there’s even a “there’s only one bed” situation). The emphasis is more on the heroine getting over herself to recognize the good in her situation and in the husband she hasn’t seen since they were children, and the attraction is much more emotional and mental. There isn’t the emphasis on sexual tension that you’d get in a genre romance.

The funny thing about this hitting all the Hallmark movie tropes is that this book was published when “Hallmark movie” meant “Hallmark Hall of Fame,” so award-winning literary adaptation starring actors who usually work on the big screen rather than on TV, not cheesy romance. A lot of these same tropes did tend to come up in some of the Silhouette romance novels, which were fond of “save the ranch” type stories, and I think some of those “show up in the country in high heels” bits came up in rom-com movies (though the one that came to mind came out more than ten years later).

Still, if you like those “city girl has to go to the country and meets a hunky farmer” type stories, but you wish they involved spaceships and aliens, you might like this. There’s kind of a Firefly space western vibe (there’s even a character mentioned named Kaylee) but this was several years before Firefly. I’m having a lot of fun reading it. No one writes screwball comedy-style chaos in novel form like Connie Willis does.

One of the most-repeated bits of advice in the independent publishing world is “find your lane and stay in it.” In other words, narrow down on the kind of thing you want to write that has an audience and focus on it. Write in one subgenre — maybe even in one series. So, not just stick with, say, contemporary romance, but small-town contemporary romance, maybe even small-town contemporary romance with veteran characters. And they should all be connected, set in the same small town, so that the secondary characters in early books will be the main characters in later books, and the main characters in early books will still be around as supporting characters in later books.

There’s nothing wrong with that advice. In fact, people who follow it are making a lot more money than I am. But I get twitchy around book 7 of a series, and it’s unlikely that I’ll want to keep writing in the same subgenre. Twenty years ago, I was enjoying the chick-litty tone of the Enchanted, Inc. series and couldn’t imagine writing a book that wasn’t set in contemporary New York. Now I can’t bring myself to write something with a contemporary setting.

What I think is more important about having a “lane” is offering readers a similar experience, no matter the subgenre or series. It’s about voice and vibes, the way a book makes you feel. For instance, one of my favorite authors is Connie Willis. She writes science fiction, but in subject matter she’s all over the map. She’s written books about time-traveling historians, a rom-com about implanted communications devices that link you with your true love, a road trip with an alien, adventures on distant planets, and a whole book on near-death experiences and the afterlife. But they all tend to have a certain kind of humor and worldview, they don’t have a lot of sex or violence, and her main characters tend to be practical, down-to-earth people even if they’re in crazy situations.

I think I’m pretty similar, but with fantasy. It may be contemporary fantasy, alternate history steampunk, small-town paranormal mystery, or secondary-world cozy fantasy, but you’ll get a touch of humor, not a lot of sex or violence, a practical heroine, and an adorkable wizard. There are readers who only want to read one particular genre or series, but I think most readers who like an author are willing to give other books a shot.

I felt like my views became validated by a book I read recently. I’m not going to name names because the point here is not to drag the author. Back in the early days of the chick lit craze, I took a couple of trips to England, and I ended up mostly buying books as souvenirs, since they had a lot of chick lit books that hadn’t been published in the US. There was one I particularly liked that was in the same vein as Bridget Jones’s Diary, only instead of just having diary entries, it also had e-mails between friends, notes left on the refrigerator door from roommates, and other bits and pieces of written material, and it told about a year in the life of a young woman living in a small town in the Cotswolds who was figuring things out and looking for love.

While I was going to a lot of bookstores signing books as the early Enchanted, Inc. books were being published, I found a book by this author in the bargain books section of a Barnes & Noble. It was a UK publication (the only price printed on the cover was in British pounds, with the American price just on a B&N bargain sticker). It was a bigger book, but it also involved women living in a small town in the Cotswolds. I never got around to reading it because I was so busy at that time, but I rediscovered it in my stash when I moved, so I finally read it, and I got a massive case of whiplash.

While it seemed to cover a lot of the same subject matter as that other book by this author and might have been considered staying in the same lane, it was incredibly different in tone. Instead of sweet and funny, it was rather raunchy. All the characters were horrible people, and a painfully toxic relationship was depicted as being true love. It was a very different reading experience (and I need to find a little free library to donate it to, or I’ll hand it over for the library’s book sale because I won’t be re-reading it). I’d have been happier with a mystery or a fantasy with a similar style and tone to that first book of hers I read than I was with the book that had a similar subject but that was so different.

The tricky thing about making your lane be about the voice and vibes is that you have to have a strong voice and know what your vibes are. What is it that readers like about your books? Then you have to make sure you can communicate that to readers and teach them to trust you enough to go wherever you go. You may not make quite the same amount of money as someone who can produce a 40-book series that keeps readers hooked, but I think you’ll be a lot happier. At least, I will be. I’d rather get a regular job than write the same sort of thing forever.

I’ve mentioned before about how long books can languish on my To-Be-Read pile. My move actually gave me a chance to do some catching up. I tried to mostly read books from that pile before I moved so I could get rid of them. But there was one book I’d been saving for the right occasion to read. I got a copy of The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson years ago at a WorldCon. I’d met Brandon a couple of years before that when we were on some convention panels together. I’ve read a couple of his shorter pandemic projects, but this book was so huge that it was daunting. It’s something like 1300 pages in mass-market paperback. I tried starting it a few times but always had to put it aside because I just didn’t have the time to dive into it.

But I figured that if I was going to have to spent a week or so without my furniture and without TV or Internet, that would be the perfect time to read a Big, Fat Fantasy, so I brought it with me when I moved. It turned out to be the perfect thing for the occasion when I had days without anything to do. I set up my lounge chair on the back porch and read for hours on nice days. When it was a rainy day, I set up the lounge chair in the living room and read for hours. On the day my furniture was supposed to arrive, with a delivery window between 8 and 10 later changed to between 1 and 4, and then it showed up at almost 5, I had nothing really to do but sit and read. I think I actually finished the book in a week.

And now I need to get the sequel, but there’s a waiting list at the local library and the e-book at my old library (where my card is still good for electronic stuff for another couple of months) is checked out.

Because this is a Big Fat Fantasy that sets up a whole series, it’s hard to explain what the plot really is. I guess it boils down to the fact that a war has been raging for years as one kingdom tries to get revenge against an enemy kingdom for assassinating their king, but the war has gone nowhere because it’s turned into a chance for profit and political maneuvering among the various princes of the kingdom, who are all out to further their own positions and can’t trust the other princes to actually work together with them against the enemy. In this war, there’s one prince who’s begun having visions that are either of the past or the future and that warn him of actions he needs to take, but he can’t get anyone to listen to his advice. Meanwhile, there’s a soldier turned slave who finds himself in the worst position possible in this war, but he might be able to make things better if he can get the rest of his crew to listen to him.

I really like the characters in this book and got caught up in their stories once I got into it because the main characters are good people doing their best in difficult circumstances. I’m a sucker for that kind of person, the one who tries to not only raise himself but bring others along with him. One thing I like about a big epic fantasy with multiple perspectives and storylines is seeing the collision coming, when you know it’s going to be interesting if these people ever run into each other, and you can see them getting closer to that intersection throughout the book.

Sanderson is known for his worldbuilding, and I would have to describe this as a fantasy novel taking place in a science fiction setting. It’s not in the generic medieval-ish Europe that’s so common in fantasy. It’s an alien planet with its own kind of plants, animals, and weather. If people were going around in spaceships and landed here, it would work as science fiction. But instead a fantasy plot is what plays out, with swords, armor, horses, and magic. That made it feel very different from most epic fantasy I’ve read. I have to confess that I love the quasi-medieval European fantasy world, but it’s fun to have a world that’s utterly alien.

If you love the plot complexity, political maneuvering, and multiple points of view in something like A Game of Thrones but could do without the excessive grittiness and want something a bit more uplifting, this might be a good read if you’ve got the time for it. Or if you’re a science fiction reader looking to try fantasy, this might be a good transition.

I’m really late to the game with this, I know, as the rest of the world has already discovered these books, but I’m not sure if all my readers are aware of what they’re all about, so I thought I’d share my perspective.

I love fairytale retellings, novels that take familiar tales and flesh them out and give them context and twists. When you read the original tales (or as original as they were when collected and put in books), the stories are actually pretty thin, the characters are mostly archetypes, and there’s little context. Books that take the basics of these stories and turn them into novels or books that tell us what happened after the happily ever after are high on my list of favorite things. I wrote my own with Spindled, and I’ve written a draft of one involving Cinderella that I haven’t revised and published because I’m still not happy with it and am not yet sure how to fix it. I really love it when the book twists up multiple stories or implies that all the tales take place in the same universe.

I recently found another one of these, After the Forest by Kell Woods. This is a retelling/sequel of the Hansel and Gretel story, with elements of the Snow White and Rose Red story, as well as bits from the other, more familiar, Snow White story and a few others that are pretty deep cuts from the Grimm collection. It’s a sequel in that it takes place after the events of the Hansel and Gretel story, when they’re adults, but it’s also a retelling because it puts that story into a new context, adds elements, and has some of the events happen in a different way.

In the aftermath of the Thirty Years War in a village in the Black Forest, Greta earns a living for herself and her somewhat lazy, gambling-addicted brother by baking gingerbread using the recipe in the book she swiped from the witch’s cottage. But then she learns that her brother is so deeply in debt that they may lose their home, an old friend has finally returned from the war, some wandering mercenaries have come to town, there’s a mysterious stranger living in the woods, the baron has a beautiful new wife, and there have been bodies found in the woods that people think were killed by a bear. All of these things mean Greta’s life is about to change as she learns more about her heritage and the events that happened when she was a child.

I really liked this book. It hit a lot of my buttons. I’ve been reading history of the Thirty Years War in the past few years, so I’m intrigued about that. I’ve visited the Black Forest and lived not too far from where the book takes place. Putting the story into that particular place and time gives it a lot more weight than with the generic “once upon a time.” A lot of the theme is about a woman coming to realize what her power really is, which is a storyline that I enjoy. And there’s a subtle romance that gradually grows and builds. Plus all those fairy tales. It makes me want to re-read the Grimm collection to see which other stories are in there. I think I’ve spotted elements from a few, but I don’t know if my memory is playing tricks on me. I also like that most of these are less commonly retold tales. Snow White does come up a lot, but the bits used here are mostly the ones that didn’t make it into the Disney movie.

I’d definitely recommend this one if you like fairytale retellings but want to get beyond the Disneyfied stuff.