Reading Update

Here are the books I re-read since the beginning of May:

N.K. Jemisin, The Inheritance Trilogy (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, The Broken Kingdoms, The Kingdom of Gods). Epic fantasy. Not earth Medieval Europe based, wonderfully developed characters. Naha is a favorite.

Lois McMaster Bujold, Sharing Knife Series (4 books: Beguilement, Legacy, Passage, Horizon). Fantasy/romance. Has a great depiction of riverboat culture.

Kate Elliott, Spiritwalker Trilogy (Cold Magic, Cold Fire, Cold Steel). Epic fantasy. I love Ms Elliott's worldbuilding. An example: an intelligent species based on troodons.

Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens. Because it's a delightfully funny apocalypse tale.

Elizabeth Bear, 2 books: Blood and Iron and Whiskey and Water. Urban fantasy. Inventive combination of classic Fairie, the Morgan/Arthur myth, mages, werewolves, and a dragon, centered in New York City. Her Morgan is my favorite Morgan ever. And Ms Bear gives the kelpie realistic horse-like behaviors when he's in human form.


Here's what I read that was new for me since the beginning of May:

C.J. Cherryh, The Morgaine Saga. A collection of three SF novels; interplanetary time travel and culture clashes.

N.K. Jemisin & Hiromi Goto, Systems Fail. A collection of short stories and essays published for WisCon38, where they were the Guests of Honor.

Ursula Vernon, Toad Words and Other Stories. Ms Vernon tells delightfully original fairy tales. She is also very good at re-imagining traditional fairy tales. If you're unfamiliar with her work, starting here would be a good choice. Then read Digger (beginning of the story)  - just sayin'.

I finished Toad Words today. I think I'm ready to tackle more new books now.

I Wrote A Post for My Blog!

The day job has been claiming an increasing amount of my time since around the middle of June, leaving me tired and with few active brain cells come the weekend. Training five people at the same time with little help will do that. If they'd started at the same time, I could have trained with easy, lecture-like sessions. So their starts were staggered. A week or two apart. I mostly get to say the same stuff five times over!

Writing has been sporadic to non-existent.

I did read many books - well, that should be re-read many books. Didn't feel up to the thinking required when reading one for the first time.

I consider re-reading as writing research. When a book is well done, I just devour the story. It takes two or three tries for me to be able to pay attention to how the author managed that magic! So during the re-reads, I flagged pages that might help me with the revisions I have looming.

My novel and a short story need revising. I'm up for critique in September. Last time it was my turn I had to pass. I will not do that again.

Also, I'll start posting here more often. I have a target of once a week.

My plans haven't been working out very well recently. I still make 'em. Maybe I'm the Overly Optimistic Poster Person.

WisCon 38 is over :(

I returned home today from this year's WisCon.  WisCon LINK

It was an amazing weekend. The Guests of Honor (GOH) and the Tiptree Award winner's speeches were beautiful, provocative and kickass. I cried and cheered along with 1000 friends.

That's how WisCon feels. Like you're there with friends. The atmosphere is welcoming, inclusive. It's easy to strike up conversations, you can wave and say "hi" to someone you saw in the audience at a panel and most likely they'll return the greeting. Con friends.

So. Pictures or it didn't happen, right? Here's the view from my hotel room, because View. It's the Wisconsin capitol building near sundown.

April Summary

Hi.

Only hours remain before April Camp NaNo is over. The structure is different than November NaNo.  You get assigned cabins. Like going away to camp!

You can request cabin mates, so the members of my on-line writing group as well as a British NaNo friend were all in the same cabin. There were also seven people we hadn't met before camp. We had s'mores, scimitars, and chocolate wine. Also Baileys and Guinness and cocoa. Some reached their goals and others didn't, but we had some fun conversations.

I signed up to edit for 25 hours on Rising Tide. I put in more than 27. The final battle scene is longer now and I punched up Rori's role at the end (as requested by beta reader Theresa L). Just a few more tweaks and it will be time to start on synopsis and query.

Scary.

I read five of the seven volumes in Kate Elliott's Crown of Stars series. (I read the first two books in March.) Ms Elliott writes epic fantasy. Each of these books was about 600 pages long (mass market paperbacks). I enjoyed the series, but I like her Spiritwalker series better.

And that pretty much accounts for my free time for the entire month of April.

Oops, I did it again

My on-line writing group just decided to do Camp NaNoWriMo in April. Spontaneously. During our meeting. We all signed up and requested each other as cabin mates. During the meeting. There were many giggles.

I'll be editing Rising Tide.

Maybe writing a new short piece as well.

It's camp.

No Pressure.

I think I'll be playing ukulele around the campfire now and then.

I helped!

Some dude on the internet was lamenting what he perceived as the sorry state of science fiction. I didn't see his rantings myself. One of the things he said was that women are destroying the genre.

Well, that went viral on Twitter. As these things do.

In short order (about a half hour), the editor of Lightspeed Magazine, John Joseph Adams, decided they would do a special issue - Women Destroy Science Fiction. A kickstarter was set up for $5000.

The idea tapped into folks' outrage. Stretch goal after stretch goal was unlocked. The project successfully funded at over $50,000! There will not only be Women Destroy SF (out in June), but also Women Destroy Fantasy and Women Destroy Horror (in October). All the stories will be written and edited by women.  And early next year there'll be Queers Destroy Science Fiction.

I'm proud I helped make this happen.

My pledge package includes every issue of Lightspeed (#1-46), 24 issues of Fantasy (my choice among the 57 issues they had - Fantasy was rolled into Lightspeed several years ago), and 24 issues of Nightmare Magazine.

I haven't done the math, and probably won't, to figure out how many short stories I now have waiting to be read.  All these, plus two anthologies I purchased about a month ago.

Reading fuels the writing.

Maybe I'll acquire afterburners!