"The World Beyond the Story" and Release Day!

Today, I posted on "The World Beyond the Story" at Ella Drake's blog.

And it's release day for The Duke and The Pirate Queen! Imagine fireworks going off! And check out my new website design, including blog!!!

"Captain Imena Leung, imperial privateer, is a woman who answers to no one – until her parents decree that she must marry and give up her ship. Her employer, the magnificent Duke Maxime, is expected to marry according to his king’s wishes. Neither is free to love as they please. But when Captain Leung learns of a plot to assassinate Maxime, she abducts him and takes to the seas to protect him. And aboard her ship, fighting to survive pirates, storms, and the sex rituals they encounter on a desert island, they learn to live by nobody’s rules except their own.

In this sequel to The Duchess, Her Maid, The Groom and Their Lover (December 2008), Janssen creates an erotic world aglow with even more lush details. But even in this fantasy setting, the characters resonate with the maturity and the subtle, wry sweetness that Janssen’s readers have come to expect. In Captain Leung, Janssen shows the full glory of a powerful woman meeting her match."

Ella Drake - A Space Western World

Please welcome my guest, Ella Drake!

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A Space Western world


When I started to write Silver Bound, a space western releasing Nov 22nd from Carina Press, the elements of world-building excited me. What’s not to love about creating a world for a book with the tagline: “A dangerous journey across the galaxy”? During the course of the story, we visit five shuttle craft, two planets, two space stations, and two large spacecraft. Yet, the hero is Guy, a sheriff from a small town on a technologically limited planet. To create that space western feel, I created a world for Guy to make him the quintessential cowboy in a white hat. Only, he doesn’t wear a hat and he can fly a shuttle craft. And, his hat wouldn’t really be white-white. He has his flaws.

But as I worked through the science elements--including a slave collar which used implanted nanobots to control the slave, how a memory wipe might work and how it might look visually on a medical screen, stuff like that--the home world had a more historical feel juxtaposed against the futuristic. A seemingly small addition to his character, a lasso, became an intriguing element. Guy knows how to use his lasso, which is a crucial part of who he is and what he might do in the story. He’s a rancher. To add flavor, to show his skill at his job, it makes sense that he might take down a cow or a calf with his lasso. Maybe take down a criminal. But since I have never used a lasso, didn’t know what it was like to throw one, I did some research.

It turns out, roping cattle is a controversial practice. Thought it’s rare, it can cause neck and other injuries in the roped animal. A scene that I’d originally intended to be Guy roping a calf to inoculate it, turned into a scene of chase with his robot dog. He couldn’t hurt the robot by catching it with his lasso, but he still has the expert skills of using the lasso. But was this enough? If concerns over safety of roping cattle, or even a human, is contested, couldn’t a futuristic story find a solution? In this case, I decided to give Guy a lasso made of special material that wouldn’t constrict too tightly.

Within this same scene, striking a balance between the anachronistic and futuristic led me to considering the scene: how to set up the ranch. What kind of robot dog would a rancher/sheriff want or need? And, how does my research balance with the need to create a scene, get the reader into the hero’s head and world, and set the stage as a future set story? Just because my research led me down a path about lassos and rodeos, does the reader need that information?

This is what I came up with, the introduction of our hero:

The rope left his fingers and flew with precision to its target. With a practiced yank, Guy tightened the lasso around his robo-shepherd’s legs. Max tumbled to the dry ground with a woof.

Guy strode forward to stroke Max’s soft, synthetically furred head and removed the lasso. “Good boy. You put up a good chase this time, but I took you down.”

The mottled-brown Max appeared to grin, tongue slurping along the cuts on his hands—the dog’s saliva carried first-aid anesthetic. Its tail thumped on the ground and sent dust flying in a cloud. Guy chuckled and signaled to Max with a wave and a low-key whistle. The knee-height robo-dog took off, leaving a rolling wave of air-thrown dirt in its wake as it circled Trident Ranch’s smallest corral.

And there we are. A balance of today and tomorrow. After hours of researching lassos, holding rope, feeling its texture, tying knots, and generally spending more time with the concept of roping than figuring out what powered the spacecraft in the story, I’m reduced to the few lines above. I think it was worth it.

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Thanks, Ella, for sharing some of your process!

Spotlight on Shveta Thakrar

I first met fantasy writer Shveta Thakrar when her writing group invited me to give a reading or talk about my writing. I chose to answer their questions about writing and my experiences with publishing, and a good time was had by all. My life is the richer for the friends I made that day.

I was thinking about Shveta's journal recently as I gave advice to someone about their blog. Shveta sometimes posts interviews with other writers, like this one with Amal El-Mohtar. If blogging is community as well as personal platform, I can't think of a better way to show that than to establish new links, new connections, like when friends of friends of friends meet at a party. I've often found new blogs to read in that way, and even made new connections.

I've been thinking that, after I've done the major promoting for The Duke and The Pirate Queen, that I should work on my skills as an interviewer, perhaps featuring some of the people I've met over my years online.

For those who are interested in non-Western folklore, I highly recommend Shveta's article In Search of Apsaras in Cabinet des Fées. "I love faeries. I grew up reading all about them, believing in them, dreaming about them. I collected all the drawings, books, and winged figurines I could, I gobbled up lore like forbidden faerie food, I made wings out of poster board and glitter. I could rattle off bits of trivia like how the use of iron kept away unwanted visitors, that the fey inability to lie didn't preclude trickery, and that a brownie accepted gifts of food in return for cleaning a house. When things got bad, I told myself I was fey. It wasn't until I was in my early twenties that it even occurred to me there might be faeries outside Western Europe--specifically, outside the Victorian take on the Celtic and British traditions." Go, read!

Telepathy and Romance

Telepathy and romance are two great tastes that ought to taste great together. So why is it that, so often, a telepathic heroine or hero--finds true love with the one person whose mind can't be read?

It's part of a romance novel's plot, of course, for a couple to get to know each other better. There need to be obstacles in the way. If one person can read the other's mind, a lot of the tension is gone from the story. If one of the partners is immune to the other's ability, that creates tension and can also serve as a signal to the telepath that here is someone special.

But what if the telepathy did work? Usually, in those cases the plot tension arises from the non-telepathic character having secrets which the telepath might accidentally--or purposely--uncover. The telepath might learn things that complicate the relationship further.

But there's another way to use telepathy in romance, I think, a way that I've seen more often in science fiction or fantasy novels that happen to have a romance. Telepathy can be used as a kind of leveller, a new way of looking at how two people interact. "Normal" humans are isolated from each other in many ways. Their intimacies are negotiated and can never be total as we can't see another person from the inside. What if they weren't isolated from each other? What happens then?

If one or both characters can read the mind of the other, most of the simple romantic conflicts can be eliminated. The writer has to delve deeper for plot conflict, perhaps specifically engaging with gender roles in a relationship, or other power differentials. The writer could explore how their characters would interact on another level entirely.

LeGuin Festschrift

The Ursula LeGuin Festschrift, produced last year for her 80th birthday in an edition of one, will be coming out in print for the rest of us October 21, which happens to be Ursula LeGuin's 81st birthday.

You can pre-order (at a 25% discount) here.

Contributions include fiction from John Kessel, Andrea Hairston, Sheree Renee Thomas, Ama Patterson, and Pan Morigan, and essays and poetry from Richard Chwedyk, Debbie Notkin, Eileen Gunn, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lynn Alden Kendall, Brian Attebery, Gwyneth Jones, Vonda N. McIntyre, Karen Joy Fowler, MJ Hardman, Ellean Eades, Paul Preuss, Molly Gloss, Sarah LeFanu, Victoria McManus, Jed Hartman, Ellen Kushner, Pat Murphy, Nancy Kress, Jo Walton, Una McCormack, Julie Phillips, Patrick O'Leary, Eleanor Arnason, Deirdre Byrne, Suzette Haden Elgin, Lisa Tuttle, Judith Barrington, Nisi Shawl, Elisabeth Vonarburg, and Sandra Kasturi.

Recent Steampunk

Today, some recent steampunk novels.

Caveat - I have not yet read any of these books, but I've been collecting them for my To Be Read pile. Suggestions welcome if you have them! Please refrain from spoilers in the comments.

The Native Star by M.K. Hobson. "The year is 1876. In the small Sierra Nevada settlement of Lost Pine, the town witch, Emily Edwards, is being run out of business by an influx of mail-order patent magics."

The Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia. "Mattie, an intelligent automaton skilled in the use of alchemy, finds herself caught in the middle of a conflict between gargoyles, the Mechanics, and the Alchemists. With the old order quickly giving way to the new, Mattie discovers powerful and dangerous secrets - secrets that can completely alter the balance of power in the city of Ayona. This doesn't sit well with Loharri, the Mechanic who created Mattie and still has the key to her heart - literally."

Boneshaker and Dreadnought by Cherie Priest feature a Civil War-era alternate Seattle.

Leviathan and Behemoth, Young Adult novels by Scott Westerfeld, are set in a universe where WWI went differently. "This global conflict is between the Clankers, who put their faith in machines, and the Darwinists, whose technology is based on the development of new species."

Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare is linked to a present-day Young Adult series by this author.

Steampunk Worldbuilding Questions

I'm in the early stages of creating a world in which a steampunk Western can take place. Here are some of the questions I'm asking myself. Some of them I answered promptly; some of them I'm still pondering.

1. Alternate history or alternate world fantasy? How close will my world be to the "real" world? Is geography the same as in the real world?

2. Overall mood: is it utopic, dystopic, or somewhere in between? How is the world organized politically?

3. Technology, magic, technology that might as well be magic, or some other variant?

4. How are women and people of color positioned? What plot opportunities does that create?

5. What are the boundaries of technology? What can be done? What can't be done, and why? What plot opportunities does that create?

Readercon Linkgasm

For those who are interested, I've been collecting some links to reports on Readercon, which took place July 8-11, 2010. These are in no particular order, but grouped by topic. There are lots more than this. I recommend checking out Icerocket's Blog Search if you want more and have a few days to read.

General Reports and Comments

First, My summary report.

Rose Fox's report. Gwynne Garfinkle on her first Readerson; and reports from Barbara Krasnoff and Inanna Arthen and K.A. Laity and Matthew Kressel.

Greer Gilman on some joys of Readercon, and Michael Swanwick shares the coolest thing he saw at Readercon.

The best panel quotes from Readercon, and more quotes, collected by Caitlín R. Kiernan. Beth Bernobich offers possibly the best quote of the con when she reports on "The Closet Door Dilated" panel.

Reports on Specific Panels and Talks

Andrea Hairston on "Sexuality and Gender in Contemporary F&SF."

Kate Nepveu reports on "Fanfic as Criticism".

Andrew Liptak on "New England, At Home to the Unheimlich” panel.

Cecilia Tan's report on Alternatives to the Pay Per Copy System of Author Compensation.

Nora Jemisin on Brainstorming Immersive Inclusive Worlds.

Kestrell Verlager posted her talk on "What Writers Still Get Wrong About Blindness" in three parts as well as some panel notes.

Critic Graham Sleight's talk on And so.... "... it's remarkable that, in certain contexts, we put discrete entities like shots in a movie together into narrative. I think it's even more interesting when you consider sentences in a prose narrative."

Stacey Mason on the Non-Western Fantasy panel.

DXMachina reports on a number of panels.

Report on the Shirley Jackson Awards for horror.

Photographs

Ellen Datlow's photographs and Scott Edelman's photographs and Tempest Bradford's photos of attendees making sad faces.

I'm a guest later this week at the Novelists, Inc. blog. I'll have a direct link on Friday the 23rd, the date of the post.

Readercon 2010 Schedule

This is what I'll be doing while everyone else is at RomCon! I'll be at Readercon 2010 this weekend. For the special events, I'll be participating in the Meet the Pro(se) party and the marathon reading of Theodore Sturgeon stories.

Here's my panel and talk schedule:

Axes of Identity in Speculative Fiction
Friday 5 pm, ME/CT
Andrea Hairston, Victoria Janssen (L.), N.K. Jemisin, Vandana Singh, Kestrell Verlager
"[H]ow can you talk about one structural barrier without at least mentioning how… barriers for others are advantages for you? ... We all have races and genders and class levels and levels of ability. All of our identities contribute to our positions in society...this is not a radical notion." — Thea Lim, commenting on Newsweek's failure to mention race in a retrospective article about feminism. Writers like Nalo Hopkinson in The Salt Roads and Larissa Lai in When Fox Is a Thousand refuse to elide these intersections, presenting queer characters of color front and center to their stories. Speculative fiction also offers opportunities to create new axes of identity, like those experienced by the dadalocked narrator of Nnedi Okorafor's Zahrah the Windseeker or the information-immune protagonist of Geoff Ryman's The Child Garden. What other works of imaginative literature have portrayed or explored the complexity of social standing generated by our multiple axes of identity? What does an awareness of these intersectionalities add to both the text and our understanding of it?

The New YA Golden Age
Friday, 7:30 pm, Salon G
Paolo Bacigalupi, Judith Berman, Victoria Janssen (L), Alaya Dawn Johnson, Konrad Walewski
In her intellectual epic The Children's Book (2009), A.S. Byatt interprets the "Golden Age of Children's Literature" — including such authors as Rudyard Kipling, Kenneth Graham, J.M. Barrie, E. Nesbit, and H.G. Wells — as a direct outgrowth of the Edwardian obsession with childhood, itself a kind of national nostalgic regression. "The Edwardians knew they came after something...There were so many things they wanted to go back to, to retrieve, to reinhabit." At Readercon 18, we declared, "This is a golden age for young adult speculative fiction." If this statement still holds true, what are the driving forces behind our present high-water mark? Environmental factors, market forces, changes in categorization — or what are they putting in the zeitgeist these days? This time around, are we looking backward or forward?

Bookaholics Anonymous
Friday, 9:00 pm, RI
Victoria Janssen et al.
A great way for folks attending their first Readercon to meet some of the regulars and get into the spirit of the weekend.

The Career of Nalo Hopkinson
Saturday, 11:00 am, Salon G
Elizabeth Bear, Gemma Files, Andrea Hairston, Victoria Janssen, Gary K. Wolfe (L)

Fanfic as Criticism (Only More Fun)
Saturday, 12:00 pm, Salon F
Victoria Janssen (L), Alaya Dawn Johnson, Erin Kissane, Kenneth Schneyer, Cecilia Tan
Fanfiction is being produced online at a rate of millions of words per month. Fanfiction can expand on a shorter work, change a work's themes, or even attempt to "fix" things the author is felt to have done "wrong" (e.g., provide a backstory to explain otherwise undermotivated behavior). These dynamics are not unheard of outside of Internet fandom communities — Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway attempts to "fix" James Joyce's Ulysses (which itself retells Homer's Odyssey). In what ways can fanfiction be a valuable part of the criticism of a text? Can it appeal as criticism to readers outside the fanfiction community? If so, how can they find the most interesting works?

Great War Geeks Unite
Saturday, 2 pm, ME/CT
Victoria Janssen
Have you written a story or novel set during World War One? Read fiction of the period, or set in the period? Do you have a love for trench warfare, poison gas, and puttees that passeth all understanding? Then this is the discussion group for you to geek out with. What is the imaginary speculative WWI novel you'd most love to read?

Kaffeeklatsch, Victoria Janssen
Saturday, 3 pm, Vineyard Room

Theodore Sturgeon Marathon Short Story Reading
Sunday, 10:00 AM, Room 730
Victoria Janssen reads "Scars" and "Blue Butter"

Not Quite the Punctuation Panel
Sunday, 11:00 AM, ME/CT
John Crowley, Samuel R. Delany, Ron Drummond (L), Victoria Janssen, Barry Malzberg
We think of an author's style as being about vocabulary and word choice, but sentence structure can be equally important. Barry N. Malzberg and Alan Garner are examples of writers whose unique, fresh, and immediately identifiable styles are largely the product of the rhythms of their characteristically structured sentences. Try using a comma in place of a semicolon, you immediately sound like John Crowley. We're not confident that the possessors of such prose styles can have much to say about how they do what they do, so we'll discuss this from the point of view of readers. Our panelists have brought examples of writers who fit this description for our delectation and analysis.

Find out more about my fellow program participants here.

Top 5 Angsty Heroes

I love angsty heroes. You might have guessed that about me at some point. Ahem.

Anyway, my top five:

1. Any Laura Kinsale hero. I mean, how can you top the boy prostitute who becomes a ninja? Or the vertiginous highwayman? Go on, try. I dare you.

2. Any Carol Berg hero, despite them probably being dead from their injuries after she gets through with them. They suffer, yet also manage to kick butt, and get happy or semi-happy endings. Song of the Beast is a standalone and good to start with. The hero has just been released from seventeen years of being tortured. Not kidding.

3. Gerald Tarrant, from C.S. Friedman's Coldfire trilogy: Black Sun Rising, When True Night Falls, and Crown of Shadows. His angst has to do with being immortal and powerful and killing his whole family to get that way, yet he is still strangely moving to me. His powerful emotional relationship with a straight-arrow priest might be part of it.

4. Bentley, in Liz Carlyle's The Devil You Know, even though I guessed he'd been sexually abused long before any one in the book did. The hotness was him coming out the other side of trauma.

5. I can't not mention Francis Crawford of Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles, which begin with The Game of Kings and continue in Queens' Play and so on for six books total, of which the most supremely angsty is Pawn in Frankincense, but don't bother trying to read them out of order, it is totally impossible. Francis is in an angst category all his own, making over-the-top into brilliance. I still can't believe Dunnett got away with what she got away with in this series. She is the mistress to whom all writers of angstful historical epics should aspire.

How about you? Who are your favorite angsty heroes?

Voirey Linger - Guest Post

I'm elsewhere today! You can find me talking about my top five favorite Marriage of Convenience novels at Monkey Bear Reviews.

Read a 100-word story I wrote here.

I'm also a guest poster today at the Novelists, Inc. Blog on "Real Writers Have Business Cards?" Please drop by and check it out!

Now please welcome my guest, Voirey Linger, as she chats about the paranormal element of her new novella, Risking Eternity.

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Information for an erotic romance can come from funny places. Sometimes you find exactly the little bit you need in a place you never expect.

My world building is usually pretty basic. I like to set things in a contemporary setting, a city that can be just about anywhere. I set up the characters in a world I already know. When writing angels, this took me back to my roots as a pastor's kid.

I grew up in a home that was an odd balance of Christian Fundamentalist and Liberal Christianity. Creation and science were balanced on a fine edge and there was a constant pull between staying rooted in Biblical beliefs and living in a modern world.

When the idea of the angel books came to me, it made perfect sense to throw that same tug-of-war between the conservative values and modern life into the mix.

As part of this balance, I needed to cement the world of an angel, make it as simple and natural as the human world. I dug up all kinds of internet information and read multiple books on secular Angelology, but nothing seemed to fit the natural order of how things worked in my head.

When researching paranormal elements, there are many myths, legends and traditions to draw on for world building. The information I found on angels was vast, varied and often contradictory. On one hand it left me very confused in terms of what was 'right' but on the other it gave me the freedom to simply create what I wanted without worrying about being correct.

So I went back to my roots, where I first learned about angels. I went to Christian tradition and the Bible.

Yes, the Bible as research for an erotic romance.

There are areas where I wander a bit, filled in my own imaginings, other places I had to choose between Bible scholars deductions and some of the old traditional beliefs, but that's to be expected in writing fiction.

In the end I simply chose information fit my storyline as long as I could find something in the Jewish-Christian tradition that supported it. This tradition is wide-spread and at least partially familiar in much of the English-speaking world today. With Risking Eternity, I tried to tap into these deep-seated roots.

My hope is that the result is easy for a reader to assimilate and accept. I want to push a but, suspend disbelief, and never hit a point where the reader has to stop and choose to accept a detail.

Did I succeed? I don't know. That's up to the reader to determine.


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Thanks, Voirey!

Adventures in Pronouns - Jessica Freely Guest Post

Please welcome my guest, Jessica Freely!

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Hi everybody and good morning! First of all, I want to thank Victoria for generously opening her blog to me -- again. I had a great time last time I was a guest here and I'm sure today will be just as much fun.

In a second I'm going to tell you a bit about my new release, Amaranth & Ash, and one particular challenge I faced in writing it. Before I do, I want to make a couple of announcements. We're running a contest today, right here on Victoria's blog. Leave a comment and you'll be entered to win a free copy of Amaranth & Ash. That's easy, isn't it? Secondly, a free short story featuring some of the major characters from Amaranth & Ash is up in the files section of my newsletter group. It's called Amaranth & Grail and it's available exclusively to newsletter members, so if you'd like to join, here's the link.

Okay, on to the matter at hand. Amaranth & Ash is an erotic male/transmale fantasy romance set on a highly stratified colonized world. Amaranth is a vasai, born with both male and female characteristics and forbidden from sexual relations with any but the ruling class. Ash is a chel, a member of the underclass. Their unlawful passion ignites a rebellion and transforms their world.

In my other life I'm a science fiction and fantasy author and with Amaranth & Ash I decided to create a full-blown world with all the bells and whistles. I created a society, a religion, an economy, and a geography, and I had a blast doing it. Harken's Landing, the setting of the story, is a city founded by colonists from earth who came to their new world to escape oppression back home. As these things sometimes go, no sooner had they landed than they began oppressing one another. The society is strictly segregated by caste, and each caste has its own distinctive physical characteristics.

When it came to the vasai, who are intersex, I had some decisions to make regarding pronouns. I realized I had an opportunity here to play with gender neutral pronouns. But before I'd even finished writing the book, I had people telling me I couldn't do that. Reasons given were that it's distracting to the reader and that gender-neutral pronouns "just sound silly."

I'm not real big on being told I can't do something, especially when the evidence summoned to support the sanction is subjective. Isn't speculative fiction supposed to be about imagining worlds and people radically different from our own? How far can we really get if we must constantly adhere to a gender binary system? I felt locked into a male-female dichotomy that I don't happen to think represents contemporary humans very accurately, let alone the people of Harken's Landing. Worst of all was the expectation that I was supposed to accept that as "just the way it is."

So, predictably, I started fooling around with all kinds of pronoun systems. A great resource I found is Regender.com. With this handy web tool, you can read any internet web page a variety of ways: with gender pronouns switched, with gender neutral pronouns, or with pronouns based on race instead of gender. It's a fascinating way to shake up your preconceptions and I recommend it.

I had a wealth of ideas to play with. My personal favorite was a caste-based pronoun system I devised. It made sense! After all, in Harken's Landing the most important thing that everyone needs to know about you, before anything else, is your caste. So it stands to reason that their language conventions would enshrine caste divisions instead of reproductive roles. To keep it simple, I created pronouns for each caste based off of the name of the caste. It looked like this:

Male - He smiled. - I kissed him. - His hands shake. - That is his.
Female - She smiled. - I kissed her. - Her hands shake. - That is hers.
Elai - Ei smiled. - I kissed Eir. - Eir hands shake. - That is Eirs.
Vasai - Va smiled. - I kissed var. - Var hands shake. - That is vars.
Pel - Pe smiled. - I kissed per. - Per hands shake. - That is pers.
Chel - Che laughed - I kissed chem. - Ches hands shake. - That is ches.

See? Simple!

Here is a section of Amaranth & Ash and how it would have read if I had gone with this idea:

Evanscar inclined var head. Even with var soul packed up tight as a fist, Amaranth could feel the vasai’s eyes boring though var back as va made var way to the refreshments. Va handed var empty glass to Build, the pel attendant. "Thank you," pe said.

Then, Parnal appeared. Amaranth went to Eir immediately, took Eir hands, and bowed over them. "Can you forgive me?”

Parnal was a middle-aged Elai of solid proportions, a hair shorter than Amaranth but wider and thicker. Ei was balding, and the hair that remained was dark with flecks of gray and trimmed short. Eir eyes were pale blue, Eir face rectangular and stolid. “I wondered if perhaps I had done something to put you off,” Ei said.

Hmm. Interesting? Perhaps. But readable? Well... even I had to admit that the pronoun business was distracting.

I had a decision to make. Was I going to market Amaranth and Ash as a romance, or as experimental science fiction? Call me mercenary if you like, but I had a pretty good idea of the respective markets for each. I knew I was choosing between getting Amaranth and Ash in front of a decent sized audience within the year, or in front of a tiny audience in two to three years, maybe. Since Amaranth and Ash began as a love story, I decided to do what I had to in order to keep the romance front and center for my readers. That meant scaling back on my adventures in pronouns quite a bit.

But I didn't want to abandon the idea entirely. I decided to compromise by having individual vasai adopt a pronoun of choice that can be male, female, or gender neutral. While Amaranth identifies as male, Grail, a third major character in the book, identifies as gender neutral.

Now the question became what gender neutral pronouns to adopt. I have a wonderful editor at Loose Id, and she worked with the copyediting staff and me on this issue. We considered keeping the va, var, vars pronouns, but finally decided to go with sie and hir. Next to the colloquial use of the singular they, sie and hir are the most common gender neutral pronouns currently in use in English. They look more like what we expect to see as pronouns too, making them less distracting. Hopefully my approach serves to introduce the concept of gender neutral identity without turning the story into a vocabulary exercise.

In the end, I'm highly satisfied with the way Amaranth & Ash turned out. The story is one of love across social boundaries and the backdrop of Ash and Amaranth's love affair is the breakdown of a rigid hierarchy based on class and race. Gender identity is actually a minor part of the story, but it's the part I struggled the most with because our own culture and language place so much emphasis on he and she as absolute and exclusive to one another.

You can buy Amaranth and Ash here.

I wonder what other kinds of ideas the conventions of our language make it difficult for us to have? What do you think?

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Thanks, Jessica!

Vulnerable Vampires

I would love to see vampire heroes and heroines who are more vulnerable, even, than ordinary humans. I know most readers don't want to see that, but I do. Vulnerability is what draws me to a character. I want them to be in trouble so I can become involved as they struggle to get out of trouble.

The vampire novels I enjoy aren't any different. If the vampire is all-powerful, I can't get interested in him or her as a protagonist. A protagonist without flaw is...not a protagonist, not the way I think about it.

It's easy enough to include vampire vulnerabilities such as sunlight burning them, deathlike sleep during the day, or susceptibility to yummy buttered garlic bread. Being able to subsist only on blood is an exceptionally good one--all the best vampire books have the vampire in danger of starving unless fed willingly by his or her unwilling best friend or random stranger. (Like that scene in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode in which Buffy has to offer her blood to Angel so he won't die from poison.)

I don't think it's enough to just mention those vulnerabilities. I think, as a writer, you have to show them, and their effects. As a reader, knowing the vulnerability exists is one thing; experiencing it through the character is much more vivid.

And I think that, whatever magical physical weaknesses the vampire character has, they should be matched by emotional weaknesses. Emotional weaknesses are what we, as humans, can really understand. The vampire who hates what he is, or can't resist drinking from his beloved even though it leads to future doom, or merely gets depressed because he's outlived all his friends--that's the vampire I want to read about.

A Little History With Those Vampires, Ma'am?

I absolutely adore historical fantasy, and that carries over to vampire novels that happen to be historical fantasy.

Moonshine by Alaya Johnson just came out this month; I was fortunate enough to receive an advance copy in April, due to running into the author at a convention and, umm, begging. Moonshine is set in 1920s New York City, and is one of the most original vampire books I've ever read. Vampires and various other "Others" are common and known in the novel's world; Others are part of a growing social problem, as some vampires feed on humans indiscriminately, usually turning them against their will. Another group of vampires restrict themselves to blood banks and try to fit in with humans, becoming yet another underclass, mirroring and emphasizing experiences of the various immigrants, non-white people, and working class inhabitants of New York City.

Johnson ties these themes in with the first-person narrator, Zephyr, a young woman who teaches night school to Others and immigrants on the Lower East Side, participates in demonstrations, and works with various social activist organizations, resulting in a lot of realistic social diversity that's inextricable from the plot. There's also an excellent romance element between Zephyr and (literal!) hottie Other, Amir. I am really hoping this becomes a series, as there are numerous interesting secondary characters and more than enough scope for many, many books.

My favorite long-running vampire series is P.N. Elrod's Vampire Files. In this case, mystery and fantasy blend with a 1930s Chicago setting and a great first-person voice, leaving me willing to settle in with volume after volume. If you like Jim Butcher's (more recent) Dresden Files books, you'd probably like these.

Despite the setting, I wouldn't call the series noir, except for numbers ten and eleven, Cold Streets and Song in the Dark. They're detective novels on the lighter side. Jack Fleming, the protagonist, is at heart a moral and good-hearted person, with a hyperintelligent sidekick named Escott and a sweet girlfriend named Bobbi. Unlike in vampire romance novels, whether Jack will turn Bobbi is not a major issue between them; it's just another part of their relationship, which they talk over now and then. (This might also be because they're series characters.)

The Vampire Files, Volume One and The Vampire Files, Volume Two collect the first six novels in the series.

Barbara Hambly is one of my favorite fantasy writers ever, and her vampire novels set in the early twentieth century are no exception. Those Who Hunt the Night and its sequel, Traveling with the Dead, portray a world in which vampires are not-so-nice; the heroes of the first book are James Asher, an Oxford professor (and former spy) and his wife Lydia, a physician with a powerful intellect. An intriguing and ambiguous vampire character, Simon Ysidro, approaches them to find out who is murdering vampires all over London. The second novel focuses more on Lydia, who has to seek Simon's help to aid her husband, which leads to even more moral/ethical exploration of vampires in that world.

What are your favorites?

Related Posts:
Historical and Paranormal.

Science Fiction Vampire Books I Like.

The photos are from the 2002 silent film Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, featuring the Royal Winnipeg Ballet.

Gemma Files, "Everything Old is New Again" - Guest Post

Please welcome my guest, Gemma Files!

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Everything Old is New Again
By Gemma Files

Back when I was a kid, in much the same way that I would have been utterly startled to be told that even an incredibly mainstreamed version of Rap music would eventually occupy most slots on a computer-file equivalent of the Billboard Top 100, the idea that vampires would have become the go-to monster of the Milennium's turn would have amazed me beyond measure. And yet: Everywhere you look, these days, it’s a cornucopia of fangs--though usually coming firmly attached to a very specific type of vamp, ie the pale, sexy, mournful, conflicted kind so stringently popularized by books, movies and TV series like Twilight, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and True Blood.

Oh, every once in a while you get a throwback to the pre-Anne Rice tropes—-Steve Niles' 30 Days of Night graphic novel springs to mind, along with the movie it inspired. But in my chosen genre, the vampire--once a Horror mainstay--has become so much of a joke that when guidelines routinely warn against submitting anything featuring the "classic" monsters, vampires are assumed to go right up the very top of that list. Vampires, like werewolves (and, increasingly, fairies), have been relegated to the ever-expanding Paranormal Romance sub-genre, with categorical emphasis falling extra-heavy on the latter part of that compound, rather than the former.

So the question becomes not "Can one still write vampires and succeed?", because obviously, one can...but rather "Can one still write vampires which startle, discomfit, surprise, let alone scare?" Can one possibly keep the vampire fresh as both a monster and as a character, even now it's become so amazingly ubiquitous?

My thesis is that the best way to break free from the Bram Stoker/Anne Rice/Stephanie Meyer paradigm is by re-examining the roots of the legend--a creature neither dead nor alive, which subsists on something stolen from human beings, possibly conjured to explain the effects of various natural occurences and diseases--and simultaneously opening yourself up to alternate visions of "the vampire" from around the world: The Gaki of Japan, the Strix of Ancient Rome and the Bruxsa of Portugal, the Lamia of Ancient Greece, the Jiang Shih of China, the Baital of India, the Ekimmu of Ancient Mesopotamia, the Langsoir, Pontiannak, Polong, Pelesit and Penanggalen of Malaysia, the Civatateo of Mexico, the Obayifo of Africa and the Loogaroo of the Caribbean, etc.

What is it they take from us, and how do they take it? Maybe blood is too easy a substance, too intimate, to actually scare us anymore. In the Philippines, for example, the Aswang is a shapeshifter that delights in sucking unborn children straight out of their mothers' wombs using a long proboscis; ironically, an Aswang is often the result of a botched attack by another Aswang, which only succeeds in robbing the foetus of its humanity. But what if the vampire in question robs you instead of memory, or time, or ability--like the Leannan-Sidhe of Ireland, which inspires poets to do their best work while simultaneously sucking their life-force from them? And how are their table manners? The Ekimmu tears its prey apart, arriving and leaving through solid walls, while the work of the Lamia, Jiang Shih, and even the Strix or Obayifo can easily be mistaken for that of simple wasting diseases, tropical or otherwise—the same impulse which once conflated tuberculosis, or "consumption," with vampirism.

One way or the other, there's no mistaking any one of these alternate forms of vampirism for the pseudo-civilized, almost "expected" tropes of Sookie Stackhouse’s universe. Even something as apparently simple as the Bruxsa, a vampire-witch hybrid which seals its transition from human to monster by killing its own children, then becomes a type of night-flying bird like an owl or raven--think about the horrific impact of a woman sitting at her kitchen table whose head suddenly swerves ninety degrees, so she can confront the person sneaking up on her. Or the Langsoir, who also often travels in an owl's shape, whose beautiful black hair parts to reveal a "feeding mouth" on the back of her neck; in order to defeat her, her nails must be cut and stuffed into this same orifice. Sort of beats a stake all to hell for originality, doesn't it?

Each of these "new" types of vampire is actually A) not new at all and B) fairly easy to research, especially in the age of Google. So look around, and go to town; no one ever lost points for originality, that I know of. And the norm was made to deviate from...as all good vampires certainly know.

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Thanks, Gemma!

Gemma Files is an award-winning horror author who’s published two collections of short fiction and two chapbooks of poetry. Her first novel, A Book of Tongues: Volume One in the Hexslinger Series, is available from ChiZine Publications.