THE VERY BEST OF KATE ELLIOTT is already available to purchase in both paper and ebook, but the OFFICIAL PUBLICATION DAY is tomorrow, Tuesday 10 February.
To celebrate I am giving away a copy of the trade paperback version, one each on Facebook, Tumblr, & Twitter where you can find me at KateElliottSFF.
Int’l okay. All giveaways end on Wednesday evening when I will choose a winner from each platform.
Sunday: Oh, that’s this post! I would have put this up sooner but my buggy internet keeps hanging and crashing.
You can sign up for my newsletter HERE. It will come out occasionally, as I have a new release, pre-order information, giveaways, or special previews. It will not be frequent. I don’t have time or energy to bore you with frequent. Trust me.
Monday: Giveaways on four platforms.
Tuesday: Official release day of THE VERY BEST OF KATE ELLIOTT.
I talk a bit about my relationship to writing short fiction, and share a few reviews.
Wednesday: I answer the question: What should I start with if I want to read something by you?
Thursday: An Enthusiasm for either Jupiter Ascending (if I like it when I see it on Monday) or Shadowboxer by Tricia Sullivan, which I loved and will write about either this week or next week
Friday: REMEMBERING JAPAN 1945-1946: Chapter One
Title: Remembering Japan 1945 – 1946 by Gerald Rasmussen. Type is set over a black and white photo from 1945 showing three American sailors in uniform standing in front of the Great Buddha at Kamakura, Japan. My father is on the left.
From October 1945 to June 1946 my father, a Navy signalman, was stationed in Japan at Toriga-saki by the town of Kamoi, at the entrance to Tokyo Bay. He was then nineteen years old, a young Danish-American man from rural Oregon. The experience made a profound impression on him and he spoke of it often.
In 2003 Dad traveled with my family (my spouse and three children) to Japan to track down the places he had been. We found the pier and the site of the signal station and were able to visit other landmarks he had seen at that time including the Great Buddha of Kamakura and the Kofukuji (Five Story Pagoda) in Nara.
With the aid of his letters home, his memory, and the assistance of his colleague Keith L. Miller, he wrote and published these memoirs in 2010.
I will be adding a chapter every Friday until the entire memoir is online (24 weeks).
Today we begin with
[I don’t have the temperament to write reviews so from now on I am going to call my “reviews” of books and media and other such things “enthusiasms.”]
It turns out Beth Bernobich’s novel THE TIME ROADS is what’s called a “fix-up novel,” in which linked stories, collected into a single volume, tell a fuller story when read together than they do when read separately because of their shared narrative elements. Normally I might be a bit skeptical that I could enjoy a novel of linked pieces as much as a complete seamless novel; I might even doubt that such a technique could tell as full a story as a novel in terms of a full narrative arc and growth and change within complex characterization.
Fear not, Bernobich manages it easily in this entertaining, well-done, and often sobering tale.
I’m not going to give you a run-down of the plot or characters except to say that it is a finely-wrought alternate history that follows the reign of a young queen of Eire (Ireland).
These are some of the things I most appreciated about THE TIME ROADS:
1) The writing is strong both stylistically (it’s a pleasure to read such assured prose) and in terms of how expertly Bernobich deploys detail and action in the right amounts.
2) The world-building is aces. I’m a hard sell on world-building, and Bernobich does SO MUCH both in terms of limning her setting and in suggesting how this alternate history departs from our own. I could read a trilogy set in this world. It’s fascinating, rich, and remarkable in how much she implies without any infordumping.
3) The science and math of time travel, and the unfolding of brilliant minds at work untangling strange and esoteric questions, intrigued me mightily.
4) Deft characterization that flows through all four stories regardless of who is the point of view character. I believed in all the interactions, in the highs and lows, approaches and retreats, the triumphs and defeats, and watching the two main characters mature and age and live their lives was so satisfying. The story isn’t a comedy, and isn’t quite tragedy; it has the feel of lived lives, hard choices, bitter draughts, and quiet victories.
Just a lovely book that I’m so glad to have read.
Published by Tor Books in the USA, in trade paperback and ebook.
In a bit, I’m going to tell you a story about a newborn baby, a two bedroom apartment, and the nine people who stayed there during the Christmas holidays.
Nine.
People.
All my in-laws.
But first, a note about being a writer. Like many of my kind, I used to have a whole bunch of little rituals when I wrote. I had to be seated at a certain place at my desk, with coffee on the left side of my Brother WP75 (shut up I’m old) and a notepad on the right. Beside the notepad was a Bic medium point with blue ink and a grippy rubber section near the tip. (I used to believe that, by using cheap disposable pens instead of fancy ones, I was valuing the process inside my head over the tools I bought).
To fight distractions, I played music without lyrics, or music with lyrics in languages I couldn’t understand. That way I didn’t have to hear the pop songs my roommates were playing (lyrics were incredibly distracting) or sounds from outside like traffic or shouting kids.
I had to pull the curtains closed, and wait until after a certain time of day, and sit in a weird old chair designed for invalids (seriously).
Other writers do this, too. They need a yellow legal pad and a pen with brown ink. They need to be in their office with the floor vacuumed and the dishes clean. They need to swim for an hour first, then lift, then yoga, then sauna. Maybe they have a special mug, or something, anything that brings ritual and routine into the act of creation.
Like them, I told myself I needed to optimize my surroundings so I could be as productive and creative as possible. In fact, I created those rituals because I’d read somewhere that they made the work easier. That was the advice I was getting, anyway. You can see more on the importance of ritual to creativity here, although the article makes it clear that the ritual is actually doing the work, not fussing with our environment. Rituals! I made them.
And then life conspired to take it all away.
That Christmas in 2001 was just the end cap on a long process that started with music. The non-English lyrics began, slowly, to sound more and more like English words. I knew Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan wasn’t really singing “John Barleycorn” in his Qawwali devotional music, but that’s what it sounded like, and it disrupted my train of thought every time it came on. Out of the rotation it went, along with the rest of his stuff.
Then I switched jobs and lost my afternoon writing time. Then I moved in with my girlfriend and lost a private bedroom to write in. Things kept changing, and all the little rituals I thought I needed kept being taken from me.
Then came that Christmas.
I moved from Philly to Seattle in 1989. Total number of times I’ve gone back to visit my family since my mother died? One. Total number of times they’ve come out west to visit me ever? Zero.
It’s different for my wife. Her family is very close, and for years she flew back (or more rarely they flew out) twice a year. Later it was one visit a year, always at Christmastime. When the baby’s due date was established for the holiday season, my in-laws decided that everyone would celebrate in Seattle. In our apartment.
So we had my wife and me, plus my one-day-old son, plus my wife’s sister and brother, their spouses, and my wife’s parents. Also, our clutter and decorations. And about ten years worth of my wife’s canvases. Let’s just say things weren’t spacious before our guests arrived.
Anyway, I was used to waking early and working in the morning quiet, but that was impossible. There was no place to go that didn’t have people in it, and I wasn’t ready to give up my writing, even if I’d trimmed back my work time for the new baby. So I had to do the one thing I thought I’d never do. I went to Starbucks.
In a Starbucks, I had no control over anything: what seating was available, what music was playing, who was nearby—in fact, the location closest to home was known for troubled homeless people who sat for hours to get out of the cold and the rain, and they could be disruptive.
I mean, sure, I was glad to be out of that crowded apartment, and my in-laws were always happy to see less of me, but I was not at all sure I could work in that environment.
It was then that I understood that my rituals were hurting me.
I was treating my ability to work—what a less self-conscious writer might call a “muse”— as a hothouse flower. I was pretending that it was so delicate that it needed a special kind of pen, and a special kind of music, and a special chair/desk combination, when all it really needed was me and my willingness to focus and write. While that’s not exactly avoiding work, it is making each writing session into an ordeal that had to be arranged. Basically, I was working against myself.
Once I decided to do without, it was like having a weight lifted off of me. I was taking control of my own creative process rather than outsource that control to talismans around me.
And I’m luckier than some, because I never tied my vices to my writing. I’ve heard of authors who quit smoking or drinking and suddenly found themselves unable to put words on a page. One activity was so tied to the other that they had become inseparable. Not a good place to be in.
That’s why I recommend that writers kill their rituals. That doesn’t mean to never do the same thing twice, or to give up a workout routine, or even to abandon a system that works (I have a system).
It does mean that we need to be adaptable. Don’t fetishize your tools. Don’t blow off a day because you aren’t in your special writing place. Don’t even tell yourself that the day’s word count will be more difficult than usual. The only thing we really need is what’s inside our heads. Grippy pens are optional.
BIO: Harry Connolly’s debut novel, Child Of Fire, was named to Publishers Weekly’s Best 100 Novels of 2009. For his epic fantasy series The Great Way, he turned to Kickstarter; currently, it’s the ninth-most-funded Fiction campaign ever. Book one of The Great Way, The Way Into Chaos was published in December, 2014. Book two, The Way Into Magic, was published in January, 2015. The third and final book, The Way Into Darkness, was released today. Harry lives in Seattle with his beloved wife, beloved son, and beloved library system.
Here’s the original cover (yes, she is indeed naked and somewhat uncomfortably placed atop that spiky dragon):
Zysk went on to publish Książę psów (Prince of Dogs):
and Głaz Gorejący (The Burning Stone):
The translation then fell into hiatus for a couple of years.
However, Zysk reissued the first three books with newly redesigned covers when they translated and published Dziecko Płomienia book four (Child of Flame) and, now, Nadciągająca burza book 5 (The Gathering Storm).
I think the new redesigns are great, and I’m happy to share them. (It was also fabulous to have several Polish readers bring books for me to sign at Loncon/London Worldcon.)
As a teen, I secretly gravitated to comics, especially superhero comics. If I thought no one was looking I would browse the circular rack of comics in the grocery store and I even once, defiantly, purchased with my own money the re-launch with new characters of a comic called X-men. That Krakatoa figured into this exciting adventure only increased its appeal. A sentient volcano! How cool is that!
But I understood that comics were “low” entertainment, not worthy of my time and attention. Unfortunately my fear of being kindly criticized (by sympathetic people whose opinions I respected) for wanting to read comics overwhelmed my desire to read them, so I did not in fact begin reading comics in any number until I started dating the man I eventually married. He read comics. How cool was that?
This was his favorite comic series at that time. He was totally built like this when I met him. SWEAR TO GOD.
Despite the dicey literary worth (as considered in mainstream circles) of science fiction and fantasy, they at least were books and thus slightly less suspect than comics. Furthermore I was fortunate to have a high school English teacher who read, taught, and edited sff, so I read and experimented with writing the genre stories I loved even if they weren’t the realism my college writing teachers thought I should concentrate on.
With the exception of VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (which is properly speaking “bestselling women’s fiction,” not romance) I did not really meet genre romance novels until college. Work-study offered me the opportunity to work the night shift at the phone exchange (yes, I’m old) where sat an entire shelf of Barbara Cartland Harlequin novels. Although I loved Jane Austen’s PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, the Cartland novels, I quickly discovered, were not to my taste.
Too . . . many . . . ellipses . . . she . . . shyly . . . and. . . haltingly . . . breathed . . .
However at this time I was also introduced to Georgette Heyer and some of the other classic romance novels, all far more appealing than Cartland.
What I mostly found out (really, was I *that* sheltered a child?) was that many people read romance novels, even women at a women’s college where we presumably should have “known better.”
Known better than what?
Now we pause and ask ourselves why the calumny heaped upon certain forms of entertainment?
Like me, Lucy Liu is concerned.
I began to publish science fiction and fantasy novels and soon became acquainted with the disdain with which romance novels of any stripe could be mocked and scorned by the writers and readers within the sff genre, which was itself mocked and scorned by the mainstream. Even to write books with the merest hint of “romance” in them was to invite derision from certain quarters of the sff field.
I well recall the time I was on a panel at an sff convention (on what subject I can’t recall) and a certain male writer of hard sf (whose name I will not share), in answer to a question, suggested that he and the other man beside him at *that* end of the table wrote real sf as opposed to us two women at the other end (he waved contemptuously toward us) who wrote material tainted by romance. That I can only paraphrase his words saddens me; I wish I had written down the comment although really it was the confluence of the words, his tone, and the gesture that sealed it, all done in a manner that suggested he knew the audience would naturally agree with him and thereby publicly refute us and our problematic, inferior narratives
This debate and discussion has of course gone on for decades.
For years Catherine Asaro–whose scientific credentials are impeccable and whose sf melds hard sf and romance in a unique way–bravely championed romance as a legitimate subject and as a feminist subject. As well, Heyer has long had her champions in the sff field.
Meanwhile the internet came along and with it the rise of book blogging. The book blogging I noticed first (being an sff writer as I am) fell into two modes: on-line critics who wrote about a certain type of literary sff (often great stuff, sometimes not to my taste) and the explosion of blogs relating to epic fantasy novels. The early years of epic fantasy book blogging skewed heavily to male writers. Romance, or anything romance-brushed, obviously need not apply as serious writing. That was the takeaway.
And then one day I stumbled upon Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and I fell in love.
INSTA-LOVE.
Taye Diggs and Moon Bloodgood in DAYBREAK
I am more of an occasional reader of romance; most of the fiction I read is sff (it’s my first true love if we leave aside my thwarted calf love for superhero comics). I do definitely love a good romance novel, and obviously I’m known for writing love stories into my novels (in a way that sometimes causes some readers to consider my works not really quite rigorous enough to be true sff).
SBTB took readers’ love of romance and shoved it in the face of a world that by and large mocked romance and romance readers. SBTB said, “Say what you will. We see no need to feel embarrassed by what we love to read, and we are going to talk about it in public. With each other.”
I can’t tell you that was their mission statement, but that’s what I took from it. Suddenly there was connection between readers who had felt themselves isolated.
B & G Made in Danmark
In her post on the tenth anniversary of the blog’s beginning, co-founder Sarah Wendell makes this very point:
“I joke that I vastly underestimated two things when Smart Bitches began, one being the number of readers who love romance and feel isolated and alone because they have no one to talk to about the books they love. But it’s not actually a joke – it’s very true.”
It’s very true, indeed.
Diminishing people, telling them that what they love to read or watch or eat or do for recreation is trivial or stupid is a tactic. It’s not always a deliberate and conscious tactic but it serves the same purpose nevertheless: to create a hierarchy of judgment in which some can establish their taste as superior (morally or intellectually) to others and thus judge which books (or even lives) are good and worthy while relegating others to the rubbish bin of history and human culture.
Now let me briefly detour to reassure you that I know some of the books I read and enjoy are trash. So what? What does that even mean?
I’m not getting into issues of writing craft here except to say that writing skill is a real thing and some writers have developed it better than others, but those skills aren’t directly linked to genre. To use an example close to home, all sff novels aren’t automatically less well written than any literary novel (as sff writers have sometimes complained they are told), and if that is true of sff then how is it not true of any other genre?
To some extent I (and I suspect SBTB) are using the word “trash” affectionately and as a means to pushback against the idea that intense stories of human relationship and interaction that center on women’s lives and experiences and on consensual and positive sex and romance are, by definition, trashy or less “serious” than stories that revolve around endeavors and concerns identified by our culture as male-focused.
I know exactly what Rayna and Juliette think of THAT.
Hayden Panettierre and Connie Britton in NASHVILLE
Finding SBTB ten years ago was one of the tools that allowed me to stop feeling I had to apologize for so many things. Book reviewing websites like SBTB, Dear Author, Book Smugglers, and far too many more to list here, have broken open the narrow gatekeeping portals of the olden days, allowing more people than ever to discuss the books they read and love (or hate).
In other words, most of us no longer have to be solitary readers if we don’t want to be. How cool is that? How empowering is that?
This poster from the alternate universe we SHOULD be living in.
As Sarah Wendell goes on to say:
“Having a safe and welcoming space in which to discuss honestly how the books we read make us feel is vitally important.”
Thank you, Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. Thank you.
While January remains the first month of the Gregorian calendar, February marks the real beginning of an incredibly busy and I hope not too stressful year for me.
In 2014 I published a single piece of fiction ( Spiritwalker-related novelette posted as free fiction on my web site), no novels, and a few scattered pieces of non fiction in the form of blog posts. While that seems sparse, I also did a LOT of work on other projects. You can find a retrospective of 2014 and a list of forthcoming 2015 projects here.
On February 10 my first short fiction collection, THE VERY BEST OF KATE ELLIOTT, is released by Tachyon Publications.
February also brings two interviews (one at writer Gail Carriger’s blog and the other at SFSignal), a very personal blog post at Book Smugglers tomorrow (February 2), an AMA at Reddit on February 17, as well as a few other posts yet to be scheduled. Reviews of THE VERY BEST have started to drop: Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Interzone, with more coming.
For the month of February I will try a steady diet of keeping readers apprised without engulfing them with too much promo, which means I am trying to make a schedule for myself that will include writing about other things in order to counteract the sense that we are all of us being inundated by a promotional barrage.
So, stealing outright from the Book Smugglers with their weekly Sunday “Smugglers Stash and News,” here’s what’s up for this coming week:
Monday February 2:
The Courage to Say Yes, a guest post at The Book Smugglers
On my blog, a post wishing Smart Bitches, Trashy Books a very happy 10th anniversary and explaining why I think SMTB has been so important.
Tuesday February 3:
Showing off my Polish covers for Crown of Stars. After publishing the first three some years ago, Zysk did a re-design for the whole series that I really like.
Wednesday February 4:
Kill Your Rituals, Not Your Darlings, a guest post by Harry Connolly
Thursday February 5: Enthusiasm Thursday
A long overdue “enthusiasm” (I don’t really write reviews which is why I prefer to call this an Enthusiasm) for THE TIME ROADS by Beth Bernobich. My goal is to write an Enthusiasm every Thursday on whatever takes my fancy.
Friday February 6: Memoir Friday
I begin a 24 week series, each Friday blogging a (often very short) chapter from Remembering Japan 1945 – 1946, my father’s memoirs of his nine months posted in Japan after World War II. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while and his granddaughter (my daughter) kindly got everything ready to go. However else my blogging goes, this series will run on Fridays until all the chapters are posted.
Saturday: Shabbat and thus no post.
If all goes as planned my first newsletter will launch next week, 10 February. You can sign up here on the blog page (right sidebar) or on my webpage.
The newsletter will be occasional and short, with pre-order and new release information, updates or momentous news, and a few surprises and previews that subscribers will get before anyone else.