But the really sad part is, at least when it comes to the over-the-top and unethical alleged behavior regarding Amazon Reviews, I can kind of understand what motivates it. Authors are sensitive creatures. We get freaked out easily. I totally understand that first rush of horror and anger when you read something that seems to threaten or disparage your work. It seems so unfair!

Sitting in front of a computer as much as we do, it’s easy to get sucked into the Internet and imagine that it actually matters (see my irrational mini freak-out over the other Bettie Sharpe, below). The important thing is to step back, relax, and remember that the only graceful response to a negative review–if you must respond–is, “Thank you for reading and reviewing my work. I hope you’ll enjoy my next story more than you enjoyed this one.”

Kinda makes silence look appealing, doesn’t it?

Yeah, what she said: Shiloh Walker has a calm and collected post on the matter. Want to read more? Go there.

1. Ann Aguirre has given me money. Not to review this book, but to make a promotional bookmark. Grimspace had been on my Must Read list for quite a while, and I was so eager to read it that I asked Ann to include an ARC as part of my payment. That’s me. I Will Work for Good Reads.
2. The lovely cover of Grimspace may appear innocuous, but don’t be fooled. It is made of flypaper. Pick it up, and it will be glued to your hand until you turn the last page. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
3. I’ve tried to write my thoughts on Grimspace without going off on a tangent about the Romance genre, what it is, where it’s going, and what it should be. I tried, really, but this addictive, fast-paced picaresque sci-fi action-adventure novel is also a damned good romance novel. And for me, it highlights things I want from Romance, but don’t often get.

The Book
The episodic plot of Grimspace follows interstellar navigator Sirantha Jax as she is broken out of prison by a rag-tag band of mercenaries out to end the Farwan Corporation’s monopoly on interstellar travel by setting up their own navigator academy, with Jax as the instructor. The group travels from place to place, usually leaving destruction in their wake. But as the book progresses, the action-packed journey through space becomes secondary to Jax’s emotional journey from the crash that killed her lover–a crash for which she has been blamed and imprisoned, and for which she blames herself–through grief, peace, and into love with her new pilot, March. March and Jax are both broken people in the process of putting themselves back together after tragic events and misspent lives. The touching thing about their story is that they know each other’s faults and strengths, and fall in love not despite this knowledge, but because of it.

Jax is a complicated, twisty pragmatist. She’s not lovable, noble or sweet, but she’s real in a way that makes her story compelling, and the ending emotionally satisfying. We see the action from inside her head in first-person present tense. You may think you have problems reading first-person present tense, but Aguirre’s novel will convince you that you don’t. The narrative style is much like Jax herself–tough, unflinching, immediate, and marbled through with lovely threads of imagery and phrasing that linger in your mind after you’ve turned the page, after you’ve closed the cover.

Possessor of the mysterious and rare “J” gene, Jax facilitates interstellar travel by guiding ships through grimspace with the help of a pilot. During the trip through grimspace, the pilot and navigator are mentally linked, bound up in each other’s heads, privy to the other’s private thoughts. When I closed the cover on Grimspace, I felt like Jax was tangled up in my thoughts, too. Great characters stay with you like that, and right now, Jax is sharing space in a corner of my brain with some of my other favorite first-person narrators like Hammett’s nameless Continental Op, Mosley’s Easy Rawlins, Baird’s Cass, Banbury’s Jill, and Carey’s Phedre. (They all hate each other, of course, but pass the time playing poker while they wait for me to reread their books.)

Maybe I’m just a sucker for flawed heroes and heroines, but characters like Jax and March are something I’d like to see more of in the romance genre. People do not have to be perfect to fall in love. Heroines do not have to be selfless martyrs to be worthy of love, heroes don’t have to save the day every time to be macho or attractive.

But for all my talk of romance, Grimspace, still works as a straight-up sci-fi genre novel. Aguirre’s imagined universe is a diverse, vast, violent, wide-open wild west of a setting, corrupt, confusing, and stuffed with possibilities. Good genre novels are often praised as “transcending genre” which is a backhanded complement if ever I’ve heard one. Grimspace doesn’t transcend the genre, it expands it. It fucks with gender stereotypes, and genre expectations, providing both the kick-ass action adventure you’d expect from a traditional action sci-fi tale, and emotional introspection, and a newfangled type of romance.

With its flawed, fascinating protagonist, its science fiction setting, and its blend of action, adventure and romance, Grimspace is not for strict genre traditionalists, for readers who like perfect heroes, or for the faint of heart*. It’s not perfect, but I thought it was one hell of a read–engrossing, entertaining, exciting. Aguirre has written a sequel, and I’m already brainstorming ways to get my grubby mitts on an advance copy.
*edited to clarify who “everyone” might be.

Also, last week, Jane at Dear Author wondered whether the ePublishing’s reputation for erotic fare was driving away potential readers. She used Like a Thief in the Night as an example, since neither the interest Ember might have garnered from The Serial, nor Sherry Thomas ’s public french-kiss–er, enthusiastic review of Ember and Like a Thief last week generated enough purchases at MBAM to put Like a Thief on their top ten bestseller list.

An interesting discussion of the perception of ePublishing resulted. Mrs Giggles blogged her thoughts. Nice Mommy/Evil Editor Angie started a weekly series at her blog highlighting Samhain’s non-erotic romances.

Another interesting result? It’s over there on the left.

What do I think of the whole thing? Aside from being thrilled to see Like a Thief in such great company (Hi Shiloh! Hi Bonnie!) I commented briefly on Dear Author, and in more detail at Mrs. Giggles’s blog. In an overlarge and overlong nutshell, my thoughts are these:

The thing I like about ePublishers is that they seem a little more willing to take risks and break genre rules. Like a Thief has plenty of sex and even more violence, but those aren’t the tough selling points. Like a Thief features a heroine who is, by her own admission, heartless, and the story crosses several genre lines–I call it an a sci-fi paranormal action-adventure erotic romance. Bit of a mouthful, eh? And its only 28,000 words long–roughly a third the length of the average single-title romance.

Writers writing for New York know what New York wants. Just as writers writing for ePubs know what sells. I knew going in that M/M and menage were hot categories. I knew Like a Thief’s violence and the heroine might be a turn-off for some readers. But I wrote the story I wanted to write, and Samhain published it, and I’ll always be happy about that.

I didn’t expect to see Like a Thief on that list. It’s my first novella. Ever. And the first thing I ever submitted anywhere. I expected a polite rejection from Samhain. Everything since then has been an awesome surprise. I did rather expect to see The Valentine Effect and Erotics Anonymous on the list on day 1. Both Bonnie Dee and Veronica Wilde have written some excellent and very well-reviewed stories. They have fans (I’m one).

The Strangers in the Night stories came out on the same day as the three stories from Samhain’s Court Appointed M/M anthology. All three stories from the M/M anthology are on the list, along with two menage stories. At the time of this writing, the top 5 books are M/M or menage.

What does that mean for new authors? Or for authors that don’t write erotic, much less M/M or menage? It means we are being subsidized by the more popular categories. The success of those subgenres is what allows ePubs to take chances on the next hot-selling subgenre.

So, while I think it’s a shame some readers are put off by the more exotic and/or sex-centered offerings, I’m won’t complain if my books’ sales numbers get trumped by shapeshifting threesomes or hawt gay lawyers. Popular erotic subgenres fund the risk-taking I admire in ePubs.

I’d like it if more people appreciated the diverse offerings available from ePublishers.
And, like Jane, I’m going to do my best to remind people who think ePubbed books are all erotic romance and/or pr0n that ePublishing offers a diverse array of genres and content.

Now, I hate mantitty, secret babies and clinch covers as much as the next gal-who-also-likes-to-occasionally-read- in-public-or-on-the-bus, but not even a tag team of Oprah, Tyra and Ty Pennington could spruce up the genre enough to get it an invite to the Mystery/Sci-Fi/We’re almost literature Prom.

It’s not that I’m down on Romance. You know I’m not. Thing is, Harlequin’s many secret babies, Fabio dressed up like a metrosexual Indian, and those clinches that defy the the limits of human flexibility–they sell. And since they sell, they aren’t going anywhere–not unless those of us who hate them rip off those cute calico “bookcovers” we bought at the last garage sale our romance-reading 80-year-old neighbor had (the one where she tried to sell you a whole box of Cassie Edwards novels for $0.50) and stop buying books with covers we hate.

And since I am not about to forgo one of my favorite genres for 3-5 years just to make publishers change their ways, I will suggest that those of us who would like to class up the look of our reading material give up on lifting all boats with a rising tide of respectability and focus our attention on the well-crafted vessels that aren’t weighed down by the claptrap and cliche for which our beloved genre is (somewhat justifiably) mocked.

In the comments at Dear Author, I suggested that the Romance genre follow in the footsteps of comic books–er-hem, graphic novels–and think up a new name for books that aspire to a more artistic level. Comic books were long reviled as thinly-plotted, tawdry niche-market geek-boy fantasies. There were plenty of good–great–comics out there, like Love and Rockets or The Watchmen, but they never got any respect because they shared shelf space in dingy, geek-filled little stores with the afore-mentioned tawdry niche-market geek-boy fantasies. And then some clever person decided to christen the good stuff “graphc novels” and the rest, you know, is history.

So here’s my question: What do we call our classier, more literary-leaning subgenre of Romance novel? And how do we make it stick?

Lately, though, I can’t seem to find a Romance hero under 6′4″. And don’t even get me started on paranormal romances, where the heroes remind me of that episode of Gilligan’s Island where the castaways found a box of radio-active seeds and inadvertently grew giant versions of garden variety vegetables. In paranormal, it seems, there isn’t a hero under 6′6″.

To which I say WTF?! Heroes have gotten super-tall, but heroines have remained small and feisty. Whenever I see such a pairing in print, I imagine the heroine as a fluffy Pomeranian (not unlike my current favorite TV dog, Mr. Muggles) yapping around the hero’s feet. If authors are going to keep writing giant-sized heroes, they could, at the very least, make their heroines a few inches taller, too?

Darkfever was fast and readable, but rather stale. Perhaps I’ve seen this sort of young, snarky, fashion-obsessed first-person narrator before? Lately when I pick up a first-person narrated paranormal I get the same queasy feeling I get when I’ve eaten too many beignets. The difference between “enough” and “one too many” is always one – and you never know which one until it hits you. Mmm. Hungry. Who wants beignets?

Maybe I should give up on the first-person dark fantasy story that’s been sitting on my hard drive for the past two years…

With heroes that have morphed from rapacious asshats to billionaire sheikhs to brooding vampires/werecods to Navy Seals and heroines that have gone from TSTL, to feisty, to kick-ass and back again – it’s no secret that the Romance genre is prone to trends. Print publishing, by virtue of the time and money it takes to print and distribute books, is always a little behind the curve. Epublishers, on the other hand, can not only bring their product to market faster, they have real time information about what’s selling and what isn’t. Epublishers also seem more willing to take chances on new authors, many of whom go on to successful careers in print.

Print publishers that partner with ePublishers or – as I’m sure will soon be the case – create their own ePub imprints will be able to develop new writing talent and track genre trends faster, more cheaply, and more efficiently than their print-only rivals. I’ve no doubt that epublishing will play a big role in romance fiction’s future.

The second interview is with Jaid Black (a.k.a. Tina Engler) the founder of Ellora’s Cave. Engler addresses the recent brouhaha on Karen’s blog about possible declining standards at Ellora’s Cave.

(To put my $0.02 in: the Vampire/Werewolf/Clusterfuck genre may make bank for EC, but it does tend to go bad if not properly refrigerated.)

I often wonder if the ubiquity of certain settings – New York for chick-lit; quaint, generic small towns for the inspirationals; England for historicals – occurs because it is easier for the author to focus on the story when she uses settings that are already familiar to most of her readers. A Regency set in London, for example, often seems to require only a few cursory mentions of Almack’s, Hyde Park, and Bond Street to sketch in the backdrop. Set a similar story in Edinburgh, and the writer has a lot more work on her hands.

Musing on the subject of setting, I began to wonder if an author who chooses an unusual historical or contemporary setting has to do as much, or almost as much world-building as SF/F writers who create their worlds from imagination. Both writers must familiarize the reader with the lay of the land, the local customs, and whatever bits of local history are pertinent to the story. Both writers must make the setting intriguing enough to draw the reader in, and believable enough to keep them from hurling the book against the wall in disgust (ask me, some time, why I so rarely read novels that are set in L.A., and I will point out the dent in my living room wall).

Added to the responsibility of rendering unfamiliar settings intriguing instead of intimidating, is the research authors must do when they use a real locale, instead of one they invented for the story. I started this post intending to explore the importance of world building in Science Fiction and Fantasy novels, but the more I think about it, the more I appreciate the the unsung world builders of historical and contemporary novels who make real places live and breathe as part of their stories.

Instead of hanging around like talkative drunks at the end of a party, foreign shows go out on a good note. They last a season or three, and they leave you wanting more.

American shows go to crap. They don’t just hang out on your couch after the booze is all gone and the lights are turned out, they take up residence there, annoying the shit out of you until you’re ready to call them a cab and charge it to your own card just to get them the hell out of your house. Think Buffy, think Alias, think The West Wing, think ER, for god’s sake! (ER without George Clooney is just like the sorry losers who hang out after you’ve turned the music off, nursing a lite beer and never even offering to help clean up.)

“But Bettie,” you say, “what the shit-all does this have to do with novels?” Stick with me chickadees, this is what they call, the build-up.

Ah-hem: Series books are a lot like those malingering TV shows. While they don’t always suffer from reuse of the same old characters – or, worse yet, twee new characters – the way TV can, they do suffer from too much of the same thing.

Some authors love a family or set of characters so much they are loath to leave them. Some authors just like to make full use of all their fingers and toes. And some just plain don’t know when to quit. But everyone should remember: the law of diminishing returns has to kick in some time.

“But Bettie,” you say, “you’re an aspiring writer. Haven’t you got a series or two knocking around in your noggin?”

Maybe I do. Stop looking at me like that! How the hell do you think I started musing on this subject in the first place? Here’s the question keeping me up (and away from my writing) tonight:

How does one write a series without it getting old?

So far, I’ve come up with a few ideas. Feel free to add your own.

1. Write loosely connected stories set in the same place.
2. Limit books in your series to 3 (Hey, it worked for this guy)
3. Change your name to J.D. Robb

Ok. That’s it, I’m tapped out. G’night, folks.