Myth, the Universe, and Everything

I've not been as active a blogger or article creator as I once was, in part because there seem to be so many ways to interface with the audience interested in reading my thoughts. Some of this shift is due to the way all my interactions with people have changed over the past two years; if the pandemic has brought any joys into my life (aside from the quality time spent with my immediate family), it's that I discovered Bookstagram.

I've been a reviewer for years—professionally for almost two decades! I receive a lot of review titles that I have the opportunity to cover. It's been incredibly fun to cover so many books at Den of Geek since I started writing there, and we've had a great time covering games, comics, and prose as a team at Outland Entertainment. (We're creators, but we love to consume media, too!) After I started updating my Instagram account (initially under protest, but Tara Cloud Clark insisted that adding one more social media account was important), I realized how much fun people were having with books. Makeup to match the covers! Props and beautiful backgrounds! Preorder goodies! Video or text reviews to go along with the images! I was won over.

So of course I started creating my own content. Some of the fun is finding the right location, like the steps of the Blackstone Library to feature Chantel Acevedo's #MuseSquad books.



I've made use of multiple backgrounds inside my house, like this shot of Jayci Lee's A Sweet Mess on my stove.



And I've realized that not every shot works with Instagram's framing; this shot of a book haul, complete with my Christmas cactus as an accent, ended up as just a book stack, minus the cactus, when I eventually posted it.



Every new post is a bit of an experiment, but the process of learning has been fun. If you're interested in keeping up with my regular posts and short reviews, give me a follow!

For awhile, I was burned out on vampires. I'm still not 100% back in the fold; as I told editor Rose Fox back when I was reviewing for PW, I'm running out of things to appreciate about vampire novels in paranormal romance and urban fantasy. (Which is not to say that the appearance of a vampire is enough to irk me; I don't mind vampires, but I've stopped picking up vampire novels, if that makes sense.)

Vampires are problematic. Even at their most civilized, they're either predators or parasites on humanity, and a good vampire novel should give me some cool insight into that, or insight into what it means to be a predator or parasite (if told from the vampire's point of view). That's what I'm looking for, anyway. I know the whole smexy vamp scene works for some, but there's nothing inherently cool about fangs or blood that draws me.



Unless the story is going back to vampires older than Stoker's popular Dracula icon. What prompted this post today is that I was reading a kids' folklore book about vampires for SLJ and I remembered a YA vampire novel I'd really loved--because it was based on older-than-Vlad-III Eastern European folklore. But I couldn't, for the life of me, remember the title, and since I read it before I started my book log spreadsheet, I didn't have a record to check. After some searching, I found this excellent review by Christina Chavez over at CSUF YA Book Reviews of Marcus Sedgwick's My Swordhand Is Singing. This, my friends, is the book whose title I keep forgetting, and it is an excellent and scary modern novel based on some of the spookiest vampires I've read. These walking corpses are out to kill the family members they left behind. Tricks like crossing water to prevent being chased, or throwing millet seeds because vampires can't help but stop and pick them up, feel fresh, not because they're new ideas, but because they're not as frequently used as so many other elements in vampire lore. The story is ultimately about the relationship between teen hero Peter and his father, rather than about the relationship between Peter and vampires, and I think that's part of the strength behind this book in a genre that so often identifies with the monsters instead of fighting them.

A friend posted on facebook recently about how much horror (mostly talking about film) has changed since the pre-90s creature features fell out of style. I noted that because a lot of horror and urban fantasy novels use the point of view of the monsters, the stories tend to focus on different themes:

• identity politics (esp. for vamps and weres--what does it mean to have a secret identity as something despised by humanity?)


• coming to terms with the drudgery of modern life (because how many of us have had jobs where we're "office zombies"?)


• embracing/taming the violent sides of ourselves (mostly weres)


• humans can be more monstrous to each other than any horror monsters

I love exploring those themes (and I'm sure there are others), but sometimes it's nice to sit back and watch humans be the heroes, and legitimately scary monsters be the villains. Sedgwick's My Swordhand Is Singing is satisfying for that reason, for its really excellent use of folkloric elements, and for creating a sense of historical period that feels concrete. I highly recommend it--and I hope I won't forget the title again!

I just heard from my editor at Kirkus Reviews about a great contest they've announced for the 80th anniversary of the periodical. I'm posting the press release here verbatim -- you should all check it out!

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

MEDIA ALERT

What: Kirkus is giving away a trip for two to New York City.

Why: In celebration of its 80th birthday, Kirkus Reviews is hosting a contest to give away a literary tour of New York City. The winner will receive two round-trip tickets to Manhattan, two nights’ stay at the Library Hotel, two passes to the Greenwich Village Literary Pub Crawl, gift certificates to several of the city’s finest independent bookstores, breakfast at a round table at the Algonquin Hotel, and dinner at Public in SoHo.

How: Visit www.kirkusreviews.com/literarytour and enter one’s email address and name.

When: Entries will be accepted from Monday, September 16, 2013, until midnight on October 22, 2013. The winner will be selected on October 23, 2013.

Where: Visit www.kirkusreviews.com/literarytour to enter or learn more.

Who: Founded in 1933, Kirkus has been an authoritative voice in book discovery for 80 years. Kirkus Reviews magazine gives industry professionals a sneak peek at the most notable books being published weeks before they’re released. When the books become available for purchase, Kirkus offers the book reviews to consumers on Kirkus.com and in a weekly email newsletter, giving readers unbiased, critical recommendations they can trust.

Kirkus also has a full suite of author services, including Kirkus Indie, a book review service for self-publishers; Kirkus Editorial, book editing services for unpublished and self-published authors; and Kirkus Marketing, services that help authors get discovered by consumers as well as industry influencers, such as publishers, agents and film executives.

# # #

There are few things that sap my motivation as much as having a cold, and my house got hit last week with a whopper. Threestripe and I are both on the mend, but it's been a quiet, sleepy time around the house as we've made our best efforts toward recovery. Thankfully, the Kickstarter was in its two-week quiet period after the funding was raised but during which any kinks got worked out. Luckily, we had very few kinks, and all should be progressing forward very soon. Shawn Merwin already has Into the Reach in his hands to edit, so I expect the momentum to start gaining on that project very soon.



In the meantime, I've been following a couple of other Kickstarters, including Fireside Magazine, which got funded and now has its submissions guidelines posted for flash fiction. I'm thinking of taking a look at my 3000 word short story draft of "Retirement" and seeing if I can cut it down. It needed work anyway, and maybe reducing its size would work out some of the problems that substrater Max Gladstone helped me identify when I first wrote it. (Speaking of Max, he has a guest post on Romance of the Three Kingdoms up over at A Dribble of Ink. Check it out!)

I've also begun work on my next Choice of Game, a Western currently titled Kidnapping at Willow Creek. As that's just starting, it's fun to see Choice of Kung Fu still getting some Internet love. Club Floyd, a group that plays interactive fiction together, played through Choice of Kung Fu awhile ago, and the full link to their experience of the game is available up at All Things JACQ. If you haven't played it, this is full of spoilers -- it takes you through all of Club Floyd's decisions on how to play the game through. There are multiple endings, of course, and multiple ways to get there, so if you're interested in seeing how other people played it, this might be a fun read. (Their commentary was certainly fun for me to see!)

In addition to writing, I'm reading longlist books for the Mythopoeic Society Fantasy Awards, review books for PW and Kirkus, and I'm one of the readers for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards this year. It's the first time I'm reading for ABNA in the romance category -- I've done the YA section before -- and I'm having a great time. The two titles I've read so far were really enjoyable, and I have high hopes for at least one of those titles to make it into the final rounds. It'd be nice if the rest of my titles were as fun as the first two!

Since I can't talk about most the books I'm reading -- what are you reading now, and what would you recommend to other readers?

I admit, I have largely stopped doing volunteer writing. When I first started doing game-writing, I worked for free, or worked for product credit. To me, this was doing time: eventually, by doing enough volunteer work, I'd get some writing gigs. And largely, that process worked. Which meant that I stopped volunteering.

Ah, but Alana, you say. You blog. You write reviews you don't get paid for. You guest blog. You post free fiction from time to time. How does that gel with your aforementioned mercenary disposition?

In truth, it doesn't always gel, and that's why a lot of those free projects get pushed aside for contract work. But while I don't have a great answer to that question, I thought that Ilona Andrews did a fine job describing the free vs. paid conundrum here. She (or, really, they -- Ilona Andrews is a husband/wife team) are currently publishing a free serial (link on the cover image), which eventually they'll turn into an e-book for pay, but in the meantime are doing it for-the-love.



Here's where I think this works in their favor. When I get free stuff from a writer, and I like their stuff, I'm far more likely to shell out for their books, e-books, heck even t-shirts based on their work. I think a lot of free writing (blogs included) creates a sense of community, ownership, and loyalty. This is absolutely true of Web comics -- just look at the Kickstarter success of Rich Burlew's Order of the Stick -- and I think it works for fiction writers, and even publishers (look at Tor.com), as well.

At any rate, the Andrews's thoughts are quite insightful. Clearly the topic has been discussed whenever Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day comes around (link is to James Patrick Kelly's Asimov's article on the debate), but with all the interesting ways of getting content to readers that are growing and changing (crowdfunding, donation-driven, free, traditionally paid), I think it's a conversation that continues to be worth having.

These links have been keeping tabs open in my browser until I wrote about them, so here's me clearing off my desktop:

• My review of Grave Dance by Kalayna Price is up over at Black Gate. Spoiler: I loved it.


• Target has decided that selling Amazon's kindle is a conflict of interest, Bryan Bishop reported over at The Verge. So, what's going on between Amazon and Target? I suppose we'll known in a few weeks – or it'll fade from the news and we won't figure it out.


• Penelope Trunk wrote a really interesting post on Venture Beat on "Why Smart Authors Are Cutting Amazon Out." She's advocating what ends up being even more self-publishing than I usually see: effectively, be your own publisher and bookstore. I'm not sure I'm 100% behind her sentiment, but I do think it's a well-written and well-reasoned argument.


• Tor/Forge e-books are getting rid of DRM, as announced on Tor.com and at PW. Thank you, Tor! I'd not actually noticed your DRM before, so at least you made it the kind that wasn't annoying previously. But I appreciate that you're getting rid of it entirely! (Especially as it's in time for me to buy Safehold 5 when it drops to mm price this fall, and, of course, Three Parts Dead, which is not yet listed as a nook book, but I'm assured will be.)


• The success of Fifty Shades of Grey (the slightly-edited-to-not-be-Twilight-fanfic bestseller) is somewhat baffling to me -- PW reports that it was the top fiction seller in the country the last week of April. Smart Bitch Sarah Wendell posted with other recommendations over at Kirkus, and one of her comments made me suspect something: Fifty Shades of Grey may well be appealing to people who don't usually read or didn't previously read romance. I was reminded how I was relatively unimpressed with The Da Vinci Code when it came out, but it had huge, widespread appeal, perhaps also among people who were not typical readers or book buyers. I've nothing to back that up other than its just being a random thought. I've not read, nor do I intend to read, Fifty Shades of Grey.


• PW also reported that B&N has just gotten into bed with Microsoft for their digital initiatives. If this means I will eventually be able to play Jade Empire on my nook (rather than my X-box), I am completely doomed.

• Speaking of B&N, the nook's new advertising campaign (reported on by Lauren Indvik on mashable) is amusing.


• And last, PW's coverage of the upcoming ruling on Authors Guild v. Google.

Haunted just got a great review from Charisma Bonus, a site I'm so glad I discovered! It's a blog that talks about being a female gamer -- mostly table top, from what it looks like. So, not only was the review good, but the site is cool, too!



In other news 'round the internet, Stacia Kane is having a super cool contest for readers to win a pill box necklace like the one worn by Chess Putnam from her Downside series. Her newest title, Sacrificial Magic, releases at the end of this month, and I'm hoping she'll be stopping by Myth the Universe and Everything to talk a little bit about it!

In the meantime, I am up to my eyeballs in review books. What are you all reading lately?

Last weekend, Substrate got together -- mostly in Boston area, but a few of us stragglers couldn't get to the physical location. We logged onto Skype, our usual long-distance communication technique, and realized that with two of us off site, we couldn't all have video.

Enter Google.

The new Hangout feature on Google+ allows for unlimited (as far as I know) video connections on the same feed. And so, Substrate gathered, to me all on one screen, and we discussed a role playing setting and two short stories (one of which was mine), much to the benefit of those of us who had pieces critiqued. It was great to get the gang back together (as Kermit says), and I'm excited to get to work revising "Good Company."

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Super exciting good news since I last wrote: Haunted came in first in the Critters Writers Workshop Preditors and Editors Readers Poll!



We also got a very nice review from Dave over at Hellnotes.

I couldn't be more pleased with how well Haunted, is doing, and I hope those of you who have picked it up have enjoyed it!

Oh me, oh my, how quickly I abandoned my (earnest at the time) resolution to blog more frequently. I've noticed several writers who have dropped off the blog radar in favor of having more active twitter accounts. Not so here -- I just tend to drop off the Internet circuit and have trouble catching back up.

Don't ask me how many messages are in my inbox. If 30 messages or less is success, well, I've got a long way to go until I'm successful again.

But in the meantime, there's a very complimentary review of Haunted up over at Drive Thru, which makes me quite happy. (If you are a book blogger -- or are willing to post reviews on your Good Reads account or elsewhere on the internet -- and are interested in getting a review copy, comment here and I'll let you know how to do it!)

I also found some things in my writing drawer that I thought it would be fun to share, since I've not done much of that lately. This is from an art book project I did for Empty Room Studios awhile back; a few writers (mainly me and Andrew Schneider, who had a recent adventure appear in Dungeon here) wrote scene snippets for artists in various subgenres of fantasy and science fiction. This one was from a private eye meets interstellar politics mash up. The scenes were a great exercise -- and also a ton of fun to write!

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Don't get me wrong. There are good things to be said about working for space tyrants. The job may be difficult, but it's always lucrative. They pay in cash (or wire it into your account from an anonymous bank in New Switzerland), and they pay on time. They are nothing if not predictable.

Right away Myrah Deen, Tyrant of Saitoga, some inter-corporation built on the side of a half dead moon, defied my expectations. Where most Tyrants had a paunch straining their well-stretched belts, she had a petite waist surrounded by curves that might have been old-fashioned, but I'd always liked a curvy woman better than the waif that had cycled back into style. She wore her red hair sitting on top of her head, held by two silver pins that I highly suspected doubled as darts, as opposed to the traditional comb over. She also came into my office herself instead of sending some underpaid aide who would be disposed of after the fact if they heard anything too important.

I'd gone through her records. If she'd ever had anyone so much as detained on the edge of legality, her tech-clouds had better cover than even I could break through. When she entered, I stood, watching how the stars outside my window framed the wisps of auburn that fell around her chin.

"Ms. Deen," I said, and she nodded. "Pleasant surprise."

"I'm full of surprises," she said, straight like it was business, without a hint of coyness. Then she smiled and undid the whole effect.

"Gin?" I offered.

She watched me pour. "I don't drink," she said, took the tumbler, and downed it all in one throw.

For those of you at GenCon right now (who still have time to read blogs while you're in Indy), I'd like to recommend that you pop by the Ookoodook booth (#1649) and take a look at Rich Burlew's new Order of the Stick compilation, Snips, Snails, and Dragon Tales. I preordered it back when it was initially announced, and due to printer delays, I just received my copy last week. I think this is the most fun collection that Rich has put out -- and it was all content that was new to me, which is a plus in my book. It includes the full OotS run from Dragon magazine (and though I love the new Dragon online, I think the sadness about the print version's demise is handled with the love it deserves in the final Dragon strips). There's also a whole 3.5e vs. 4e section that made me giggle; mocking the rules was one of the things that hooked me on OotS in the first place, so I'm glad to get some new jokes about the edition I'm currently playing. A final section, presumably meant to occur after the current web arc, give us fairy tales as told by Elan and Haley, a James Bond parody by Belkar, and Hamlet as told by Roy. (The last is clearly my favorite, if only because Hamlet is required reading for every student at Simon's Rock, and thus, seeing it get the gamer treatment was awesome.)

Several of my gamer buddies have taken a break from reading OotS as it posts, due to the delays in posting in recent months (years?) and because it's become very plot-centric as opposed to joke-centric. Snips, Snails, and Dragon Tales brings back the funny that made me love OotS in the first place without sacrificing any of the character interactions that I've stayed on for. So, if you're at GenCon and have a chance to get by the booth to check it out -- or if you're wavering on buying the new book from the site -- you should. It gets my thumbs up.