Last Friday in Boston and Learning to Read Paranormal Romance

Two completely separate topics here, but they equally captured my attention, so I'm posting about both.

The Writers' Strike continues, and on Friday, it brings some of its heavy hitters to Boston to lead fans in a social strike gathering. Your favorite store and mine in Cambridge, MA, Pandemonium Books, supported the fans and writers by supplying materials for sign making. You can read about the efforts of the Bostonians in the Boston Herald article that covered the strike. (I hear it's also over at Whedonesque, with possibly more details from those involved.)

I'll be at AnonyCon, the best game convention in Connecticut, but I'll be wishing the Boston crowd success!

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On a completely different note, I've just realized that I don't know how to read a paranormal romance novel when it's equal parts urban fantasy and romance. I know how to read a romance novel with paranormal elements--so long as it acts like a romance novel. I know how to read sexy urban fantasy. But when the plot structure seems half-way between the two--which is what struck me about Demon Moon by Meljean Brooks--I'm just not sure what to do. (I suspect that part of my struggle is that Demon Moon is, in fact, book four of a series, something I hadn't realized when I ordered it in from the library.) I was trying to read it like a romance novel--and it has those elements: the two characters who are going to be the steamy romance are obvious from the beginning, and the same two characters resist giving into temptation for somewhat concocted reasons--barriers set up by the author that don't necessarily follow logical sense, though in Brooks's case, one of them is a vampire, which is really reason enough. But at the same time, the world is under attack by dark forces, and the way that magic, evil, and chaos are dealt with has far more detail behind it than the average paranormal romance that borrows a bit of real-world mythology or a single supernatural element and runs with it. (Don't get me wrong--I even *like* that kind of shallowly plotted book from time to time. Even Karma Girl, the superhero romance that still makes me grin to think about it, went with cheese over depth, which really worked for it.)

So what to do when a book feels like a romance novel, looks like a romance novel, and bears the blurbs of a romance novel, but hovers somewhere between The Care and Feeding of Pirates and Kitty and the Midnight Hour? Apparently, I'm just not sure. I didn't finish Demon Moon, but I think I'm going to go back and start at the front of the series--which unfortunately I can't easily get through my library, and might take some research--and see if that helps clear things up for me.

Has anyone else had this trouble in a cross-genre book of any type? You all know I'm very pro-cross-genre, so I'm interested if folks have other stumbling blocks that I may not have encountered.

Writing for Hire

John Scalzi recently posted something I read with great sadness: Dragon magazine is unfortunately buying all rights for fiction, rather than paying 3-6 cents per word and first rights (or similar). That effectively makes it work-for-hire. I don't have any problems with work-for-hire, as a rule, but I'll only do work-for-hire fiction if I'm working in someone else's world. If I'm already using their IP, then it makes some degree of sense to me that they retain the rights.

I have discovered, however, that this is not always in the writer's best interest. I don't suspect Dragon (the new digital WotC published version, not the Paizo print version, which ended) will change their minds about this, which is a shame as I'd love to be published there. And knowing that there are others out there with similar magazine tastes, I figured I'd spread the heads up. The conversation on Scalzi's blog is really interesting as well.