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.

One of the books that languished on my To Be Read bookcase, in advance copy form, until after the third book came out was A Plague of Giants by Kevin Hearne. I think when I started reading it, back when it was still ahead of publication, I was afraid it was more intense than I was up for at that time. So it went on the shelf until I decided I really needed to read it a few weeks ago. I suppose it is intense in places, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. It’s definitely not cozy, but it’s not grimdark, either.

This book has a really interesting narrative structure. There’s a framing story about the aftermath of a barely averted invasion of a city by a strange race of giant-like creatures. The city is now full of refugees from places where the invasion wasn’t averted. A bard from a nearby land shows up, saying he has news that may be able to explain something about the invasion and he has reports from other lands. Our first-person narrator is a scholar who gets assigned to work with the bard to help him and record his stories (and also figure out if he’s a spy or enemy agent). Each night, the bard regales the crowd with stories of what happened in the other lands, and he has magic that allows him to “become” the people whose stories he’s telling, looking and sounding like them. Most of the book is these other people’s first-hand accounts. To keep the audience eager to come back each night, he tends to stop each person’s story on a cliffhanger and move on to a different person’s story. We get bits and pieces of a greater story that eventually comes together. In between these stories, our narrator tries to figure out what’s going on with the bard while also dealing with the impact of living in the aftermath of the attempted invasion.

I love it when a story is told a bit out of order, limited to the perceptions of just one person at a time when those people don’t have the big picture, and it’s up to me to put the pieces together and find the patterns, so I found this to be really engaging reading. Writing something like that is on my literary bucket list, but I don’t yet have the right story to tell that way. The magic in this world is also interesting. Each of the lands has its own “kenning” or form of magic that allows some people to manipulate a particular part of nature. To get this power, a person has to go through a particular ordeal that will either kill them or give them power, and there’s no way of knowing which one it will be. But then using the power drains the person’s life force. In small amounts, it’s barely noticeable, but if they have to go all-out, they may age decades. That means that there are real stakes in the use of magic.

Now that I’ve finally read the first book, I’m going to have to read the rest of the series, as we don’t yet know everything about what’s going on with these giants, and the threat isn’t over yet.

I’m trying to read as much as possible from my To Be Read bookcase so I can clear out the ones that I want to read but don’t necessarily want to keep. And, yes, I have a whole bookcase, plus a couple of boxes. One of the fun things about being a writer is that when you go to writing conferences, they give you free books! Publishers give away books to writers because they know that writers talk about books, so they’re a good way to get buzz going about a book. My first few conferences, I got a bit excited about it and eagerly scooped up All The Books. I eventually realized that most of them went unread, so I tried to limit myself to ones that I thought I might actually read. Even then, I find that there’s a difference between my eagerness to read books I bought for myself and books I got for free (though there are books I bought that are on the bookcase, too). I think part of the reason is that, aside from things like special sales or used bookstore finds and the occasional booksigning for a writer friend, I generally buy a book because I want to read that particular book at that particular time. The giveaways may be things I might have bought, but they weren’t what I was looking for at the time I obtained them.

I’m afraid I’m mostly useless for building buzz because it can take me years past publication to get around to reading an advance copy. I just read an advance copy for book one of a series, and book three is about to come out. I may post something about it, and maybe that will help book three. I’m ashamed to admit that I got an advance copy of A Game of Thrones but didn’t read it until after the TV series came out. Actually, I did start reading it before publication, but I got it at a romance writers conference (not sure why they thought that was a good place to promote that book) and was therefore expecting it to be a romantic fantasy, so it wasn’t at all what I wanted it to be and I put it aside after a few chapters.

But there are some books I don’t remember obtaining. For instance, the book I just finished reading is an old hardcover copy of a book published in 1983. It looks like it was used, but I don’t remember buying it. Maybe someone else bought it and gave it to me. Although it was published in 1983, it eerily reflects some recent events. In fact, if not for the very 1980s graphic design on the cover and the copyright date (and the fact that the author has been dead for more than a decade), if you gave this book to someone to read now, they’d probably think it was a COVID-inspired book.

The book is Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern, one of Anne McCaffrey’s Pern series. This series straddles the line between science fiction and fantasy. It’s technically science fiction because it’s about a distant world colonized by human settlers. After the colony was established, they learned that every so often the world gets attacked by these spores they call Thread that destroy life. They genetically engineered some of the local life forms to be dragons they could fly around on and shoot down this thread. But because the society reverts to being pre-industrial and there are dragons, it reads like fantasy. If you want to start a debate among science fiction and fantasy readers, throw out the “is Pern science fiction or fantasy?” topic. I read the main part of the series when I was a teenager. This appears to be a standalone prequel. I don’t think I’ve carried this book around since then, but I may have picked it up at a library sale.

This particular book is about an epidemic that hits at a very bad time, and it pretty much sounds like the COVID pandemic with dragons. There’s social distancing, the search for a vaccine, the people who resist the efforts to stop the spread of the disease, the people who think the rules don’t apply to them, the strain on healthcare workers, etc. Even most of the symptoms sound kind of COVID-like. The book is really interesting, up until the ending, which I pretty much hated. It was almost like she’d reached her contracted word count and was nearing her deadline, so she just ended it and then wrote an epilogue to tie up the loose ends without actually resolving anything. It was really abrupt. Since it’s a prequel, it’s possible that this was some element of that world’s history mentioned in the earlier books (which are but a dim memory for me) and that ending was already set in stone.

Anyway, aside from the ending it was interesting reading, and it kind of made me want to revisit that series. I’m not entirely sure I’d recommend it, unless you want to read about fictional pandemics. It will probably go in the box that’s getting donated for the library book sale because I don’t imagine I’ll be reading it again, but I’m glad I did read it.