Space Squid Gone Wild is the Best of Space Squid collection you have all been waiting for. Yeah yeah, my story “Bad Amy,” is in it, in which I reveal the supernatural cause of the 2000 NASDAQ stock plunge. Remember that one? Before the latest recession that incinerated our life savings and future security? Well, its seeds were planted in the 2000 crash.

And there are dozens of other fine writers who have embraced the Squid.

Best of all, this is an e-book collection, in which case people who would normally look askance upon your choice of reading material wouldn’t ever have to know. I mean, check this cover out:

How can you resist?

Space Squid has just been annointed as a representation of Bizarro Fiction, and has been cited in a Wikipedia entry on same, along with Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens. Here’s your chance to see what all the fuss is about.

I am pleased and stoked to be a part of the Best of Space Squid. You can buy it for the Kindle here.

First up: if you haven’t gone over to My Jane Austen Book Club, what are you waiting for? My interview is up, and you can comment for a chance to win a copy of The Unexpected Miss Bennet. An excerpt:

Do  you think that all these adaptations, both written and for the  screen, could alter, mislead  or even distort the interpretation of Austen’s work?
Oh yes. Especially some of the most recent adaptations. I know film is a different storytelling medium but some of the televised adaptations that recently aired seemed to miss the point. Several years ago, a New Yorker film critic quipped that the reason there were so many adaptations of Jane Austen was because her work lent itself so well to conversion to screen. As the article put it, all you had to do was type Fade In, run Austen’s dialog, and type Fade out at the end. If that was the case, then some screenwriters didn’t get the message and messed with perfection.

Ever since I became immersed in the world of Jane Austen spinoffs and sequels, I have been amazed at the number of books out there along with their ardent fans. I’m pleased and humbled to be a part of this new world, and if I sound a bit bemused, it’s because I am. I simply had no idea.

What I’m reading, or, One of These Things is not Like the Other:

I just finished Louise Marley’s The Brahms Deception. I love Louise’s music-rich novels. She is such a music nerd, and I say that with great admiration. It starts a little slow but then gathers speed and does not let up. Seriously awesome and sexy, and it should come with a soundtrack.

Rare Earth, by Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee. From what these authors write, it’s not remarkable that there’s only one planet in our solar system with higher order life — it’s remarkable there’s any. Bacteria now, that’s another story. Awesome. I downloaded it for the Kindle and need to pick up a hardcopy because the Kindle can’t handle the diagrams.

The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson. Johnson looks at a cholera epidemic that flashed through a Victorian London neighborhood in the mid-1850s, leading two intrepid thinkers to confirm that cholera was caused by contaminated water, and not bad air, as was largely believed at the time. Even more remarkably, John Snow (not to be mistaken for Jon Snow, but wouldn’t that be neat?) and his map led eventually to one of the most remarkable feats of engineering, London’s sewage system,  and public health systems around the world. Also, I found out via this book that I am not a consilient person.  This book and The Great Influenza are must-reads for anyone interested in germs, cities, science, and public health.

Next up is Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth. I hang my head in shame to say I have not read any Jack Vance before. After that, I will go back to Alternate WWII and the Pacific Theater with Taylor Anderson, and after that, I don’t know. I’m sure I will not go book-less.

Ages ago I was a reporter for my hometown newspaper, The Ridgefield Press, and later I worked for computer magazines, but it’s been a while since I’ve interviewed someone for a feature. People mostly like to talk about themselves though, and the good part is I don’t have to write it all up afterwards.

Also in preparation for the convention and the interview I read Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker, which is really good. I read it in one day and had a very hard time putting it down. I haven’t plowed through a book like that in forever. I enjoyed it quite a bit. Everything came together — setting, character, and the technology, which is highly important in a science fiction novel. It has a Heinleinesque feel with a darker edge to it. If you have boys aged 12 and up, I think they would really like it.

Naturally since I have very little free time, I sat down and wrote the first 1,700 words to a new short story. It’s one I’ve been mulling over for years and there’s nothing like the feeling that I needed to do a million other things to get the creative flow going. I have to commit to it over the next two days, since starting Thursday night, it’s all con, all the time, until Sunday. If I can finish a rough draft by Wednesday night, I will be ecstatic.

In other convention news, WorldCon will be in San Antonio in 2013. The last time it was here was in 1997. That was my very first Worldcon, my very first major convention ever, in fact. I’m really looking forward to experiencing WorldCon again. I wish I had gone to Renovation, which just finished up this year, but it wasn’t meant to be. Alas.

The other good news is that now I get a new computer. I have been looking at laptops. Not because I feel the urge to write in coffee shops, but it might be nice to have more flexibility (she writes wistfully).

I wrote 3 novels and countless short stories on the old computer. Had it for years. It was a complete workhorse until the end. A moment of silence for the Dell whatever it was. It probably far outlived its expected lifespan. RIP old son.

In other news, I’m working on a new project after a good six weeks of not working on anything. Also as in the way of things, that process has loosened up the blockage and now I’ve got another couple of ideas in the works. It sucks that I have to wait for a few days before I can start up again, but there you go — this time I am raring to write. Maybe I just needed the well to fill up again.

I’m on twitter, if you care to follow me. Also, let me know if you are on twitter and I will follow you. Thanks to my friend Lynett for getting me started. I am still feeling my way but my first impressions are that it’s quite egalitarian and therefore fun.

Books I’ve read

Doc, by Mary Doria Russell. Breathtaking and wonderful. I highly recommend it. It is absolutely lovely. Russell has such affection for her characters and I love that about an author. We are told to make things hard for our characters. I think Russell treats hers kindly because she knows that they have been through hell. I wish I could write with such compassion. (Coming after my rant about G.R.R. Martin, this should come as no surprise.)

Monster, by A. Lee Martinez. Funny and dark.

Reading:

Soulless by Gail Carriger. I’m coming late to the party and enjoying it immensely. If Georgette Heyer wrote Victorian steampunk with vampires.

I tend not to write too much about my emotions here but I ended up in a funk today, partly because of the computer situation and partly because of who knows what.  But in the process of rescuing files from the old computer, I came across this one. Call it puppy therapy. I’ll take it.

Here’s my schedule (my commentary in parentheses); if you are in the Houston area, hope to see you there.

Friday

6 pm. Out of the Basement: Fan stereotypes (hee!)

9 pm. YA Heroines: The joys of having a spine

Saturday
9 am – noon. Workshop  (yay!)

3 pm. Reading, shared with Rhonda Eudaly

4 pm. Darkness in YA: Depravity or Reality? (they must have read my blog and/or the Wall Street Journal)

Sunday

10 am Left Behind:  The Scientific Wasteland

Noon: The Next Generation: How We Raise Tomorrow’s Fans (I have OPINIONS on this)

It’s still not quite finished. We’ve got an antique mirror that will go over the bookcase my husband made, and then there’s the matter of putting the pictures on the walls, and I need a place for my wire shelves o’ writing stuff — paper, research materials, correspondence, and miscellanea — but for all intents and purposes, I’m moved in!

From this:

My office.

To this:

The new office to be.

To this:

The flooring project gets underway.

The idea behind Rheinhart & Ritter came from my day job. Like many businesses, the company I work for hires consultants to come in and provide support or ideas or strategy and then ride off into the sunset to their next job. And I have to say, they often made no appreciable difference to the way the company operated or to its bottom line or its quarterly results.

If I sound jaded, well…

But what if there was a consulting company that really did make a difference? Well, that consulting firm would have to be supernatural, because none of the mundane firms ever did.

Thus was born Rheinhart & Ritter, a consultancy with intriguing employees who could handle the most interesting problems. Like, say, that most pesky of coworkers, the lunch thief. Or a hapless salesperson who just can’t seem to get it together.

Please enjoy The Lunch Thief and Comitatus, Incorporated, and let me know what you think.

The new office to be.

We have moved one step closer to the new office space. Here’s how it looked over the weekend, when we finally got started on the floor. We chose laminate after all, since it turned out the hardwoods were too beat up to restore. I was bummed, but it looks fantastic. I’m really pleased. As I write this we have finished the floor. All that remains is installing the quarter rounds on the bottom of the baseboards and the transition pieces on the threshold of the door and the closet.

Here’s the beginning of the installation process:

The flooring project gets underway.

I hope to have pictures of the finished room this weekend. I can’t wait — it will be so exciting to have a real! desk! and space to spread out and my books and files all in one space.

The wisdom of the Golden Chobo -- listen to your critique group but trust your instincts.

At Cryptopolis tonight we critiqued a chunk of one member’s new novel. Listening to the critiques was rather like hearing an elephant being described by a group of blind men — everyone had a different idea of what the novel needed. Sure, we joked about agreeing and disagreeing with each other, but the upshot was, we advocated cutting vast swaths of the work (that was me), or fleshing it out further, or compressing chunks, or recasting events so they carried more emotional weight. Etc. Etc. As E said, “I think I’ve been told to cut every scene of this novel so far.”

What is a writer supposed to do with all that?

While the idea is not to try to rewrite someone else’s novel, it’s also true that we are all writers, and we all approach the problem differently. So if you know going in that readers are going to want to “fix” your novel the way they would fix it, then it’s easier to sort out the responses and get at the useful meat of them.

What are readers saying that doesn’t work? I’ve discovered that when my readers dislike a section, they often disagree on what is wrong but they all zero in on one scene. Okay, that scene or section, or plot movement doesn’t work. How to fix it is up to me — not according to a group’s critique. I do know people in critique groups who get that wrong.

They often think — and they are often beginners — that they must follow what the readers advise. This can be tricky if they get lots of conflicting opinions. Writers will either only hone in on one critique and not listen to the others, or become paralyzed by the range of opinions and be unable to make revisions.

The best way to avoid critique group confusion or paralysis is to remember that you the author are not looking for ways to fix your novel, although I have often gotten excellent ideas that I’ve followed from my readers. The point is to say, hey, this section isn’t working. What is the best way I can get my point across? How do I take this information — X doesn’t convey Y — and make it work?

Listen to your first readers, but trust yourself. You know what your novel needs and where it needs to go.

During my last signing at Barnes and Noble, I spent more than half my time explaining to customers that no, there aren’t any vampires in the book, the main character is male, and the only tattoos present on any character are prison tattoos. As much progress as has been made in SciFi and Fantasy circles* and in American society in general, we’ve still got a long way to go. So, let me get something off my chest here and now. As much as I’m okay with Romance’s interest in all things Fantasy, it can be, let’s just say, extremely frustrating for someone like me.

Because I don’t like Romance as a literary genre, and I never have.

And then from a blogger called Mfred there’s this rebuttal:

Which leads me to the part where I do start to feel a little bit of a gender betrayal— Leicht, wanting to both write a good novel and to be perceived as a good writer, changed her character to male and makes sure to emphasize how it’s not a romance?

Now I don’t know Mfred, but I would probably like talking about books with her. I do think that she took Leicht’s blog post too personally, and knowing Leicht, I bet that if the two of them sat down to talk they’d probably find plenty of common ground. Also, Mfred, if you are reading this, go buy Stina’s book. It’s really good  — you’ll like it. So she pissed you off — all the more reason to buy the book and find out what the hullabaloo is about.

The thing is, I agree with both of them.  I know what Leicht is talking about. I write fantasy, yet my books have romance covers (we’re setting Miss Bennet aside for the moment).  My books are not conventional romances, ie, they do not have happy endings.

As a result, I caused unhappiness in many romance readers, who were led to expect by the covers that my books would have happy and fulfilling romances. (Seriously, there were Team Joe and Team Crae. I should have sold t shirts.) For one reader at least, the fact that at the end of Gordath Wood, no one got the person they wanted ruined the book for her.  It seriously bugged her.

• So here’s the thing — I have no control over the covers.
• I thought I was writing fantasy, not romance.
• My books also confound people because they don’t have very much magic in them.

I love romance — but my ideal romance is the sad romance. You know, a Mal and Inara type romance. I love serious romances, like Adam and Jenny in A Civil Contract (I always want to tell Jenny that she got the better deal, Adam really loves her, etc. I have this terrible need to comfort fictional people.)  I love romances where love isn’t fantastic sex in impossible positions but people who are damaged yet strong, who have demons (metaphorical) but overcome them.

HEA (happy ever after) endings are great too, but I love them the way I love Kitkats and Reeses peanut butter cups — too much of a good thing leads to extra pounds and a queasy feeling.

And that is where Mfred and I part company. The insistence, partly marketing and partly the readership, that Romances should have great sex and an HEA, is what makes the genre so frustrating.

One of the things  that Romance does is pigeonhole women writers. A male reader of mine wondered why Gordath Wood wasn’t considered science fiction, because it was very similar to Eric Flint’s 1632. Seriously — modern people go back in time, etc etc. Flint’s were a group of United Mine Workers from West Virginia — mine were horsewomen from New York.  His had overt alien presence, mine a portal that is an alien presence (although that doesn’t come out til Red Gold Bridge and won’t be fleshed out more til the final book in the series).

My books got pigeonholed, y’all. They got pigeonholed as fantasy because I’m a woman, and the covers further identified them as Romance. And while yes, Romance is an enormous genre, and it is the most lucrative (during the recession, the only books that sold well were Romance novels), the emphasis on certain tropes is actually confining.

It’s a big tent, but it turns out, there’s not a lot of wiggle room there.

Anyway, both blogs are thought-provoking and exciting, and there’s room for discussion and commentary. Go for it — enjoy!