Snippet from Saronna's Gift

From Chapter One: Duncan Trushenko and his father own and operate a large intergalactic grading company, headquartered on a tax-free but very backward planet called Kruegger's World.

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Duncan smiled to himself but was careful not to let his amusement show. His father had been curious about his breakup with Emily Pulaski since it happened, but Duncan had no intention of satisfying that curiosity, especially as his father had been right in his assessment of Emily’s intentions. “If you disliked her so much,” he said instead, “why did you hire her?”

“I didn’t dislike her,” Vladimir said. “When it came to navigating the seas of interstellar trade regulations, she had excellent skills. I’m happy you seem to have learned a lot of them from her. I just didn’t want you to marry her.”

“You can’t have it both ways, Dad. Either you want me to get married or you don’t.”

“Don’t be silly,” Vladimir said irritably. “Marrying the wrong person is worse than not getting married at all.”

Duncan didn’t know what to say. His parents had lived apart ever since he was a baby; the few occasions they had been together for any length of time had resulted in epic quarrels. Another awkward silence ensued.

“I’m sorry, Duncan,” his father said. “I wasn’t trying to cast any aspersions on your mother.”

Duncan put his glass down. “I know, Dad. Why all this eagerness to fix me up with someone? I thought that was Mom’s job.”

“Well,” Vladimir said, sounding oddly hesitant, “Your mother and I both want you to find someone—get married, have a family of your own. If nothing else, I’d like to think that someday there’ll be someone for you to pass Cameron Trushenko on to. It’ll all be yours someday. I won’t live forever, you know.”

Duncan grinned openly. “You’re not giving me the ‘I’m getting old’ speech, are you? You look pretty hale for that. Naomi must be taking good care of you.”

“She is, she is.” Vladimir’s face lit with affection. “I can’t tell you what a change it makes in your outlook to have someone who cares about you in that way. It’s meant a world of difference to me to have her with me.”

Almost the only good thing about his parents’ intense dislike for each other was it took away any guilt he might have felt for being pleased when one of them found consolation elsewhere. “Good. I’m glad you’re happy.”

“The thing is,” Vladimir went on, “poor Naomi had no one to keep her company. I mean, she looks after the house for me, but really, she had no close friends, nothing to occupy her leisure time. And sometimes I get tied up for days on end.”

Duncan frowned. What was the old man leading up to? “I know you’re busy. Cameron Trushenko is a major concern. Why don’t you just hire more help?”

“Well,” Vladimir said, a nervous edge creeping into his voice, “the thing is, Naomi wanted more than just to have me free up some time. She needed a friend—a woman friend.”

Duncan sat up straighter. “What’s going on, Dad? Are you trying to tell me something?”

Vladimir glanced at the window to the courtyard. He seemed almost reluctant to meet Duncan’s eyes. “Well, yes, I am, son.”

“Son?” Duncan moved to the edge of his chair in alarm. “Son? You never call me ‘son’ unless something’s wrong. The last time you called me ‘son,’ we had just lost three million credits.”

Vladimir looked almost relieved at the accusation. “Oh, it’s nothing like that. It’s just that, as I said, Naomi needed someone, and the people on this world are so stuffy. There are off-worlders, and there are natives and the two just don’t mix. There was no one Naomi was comfortable making friends with, no one who didn’t look down her nose at her. And native women almost never leave their homes. They don’t need friends, because they all have hordes of relations. And then I found out you were coming home, and I knew you’d broken up with Emily a while ago. It seemed like a perfect solution to both problems.”

“What did?” Duncan said, more mystified than ever.

“Well,” Vladimir said, still apparently finding it difficult to come to the point, “the thing is, son—Duncan, I sort of—well, I bought a woman for you.”

Duncan’s mouth dropped open. He must have heard his father wrong. “You did what?”

“I bought a woman for you.”

No, he had heard right. But the idea was incredible. “You bought a woman for me? You bought a sentient being?”

“Now, Duncan—”

The more he thought about it, the angrier it made him. “You thought I’d want some down-trodden, complacent, hapless little female to make use of in my free time? You thought I’d take advantage of a woman like that?”

“Well,” Vladimir said, “no, not really. Actually, I just needed someone to keep Naomi company, but there’s no way I could get someone on those terms. And besides,” he added as an afterthought, “she’s not little.”

“What?” Duncan jumped to his feet. The old man had gone crazy. There was no other explanation. “I don’t give a damn how tall she is! You just send her back where she came from, Dad. I won’t have any part of this.”

“But, Duncan,” Vladimir said, his voice filled with righteous indignation, “when I brought Naomi home, you didn’t act like this. You were proud of me for stepping in.”

Duncan brushed aside this argument with a wave of his hand. “That was different. Her husband had put her up as his stake in a poker game. You kept her from ending up with some gun-running scum.”

“Saronna’s father was desperate to sell her.” The indignation in his father’s voice gave way to a virtuous note. “She’s twenty-two in Standard years, and she’s never been married. A year ago her mother died, and her father stopped looking for a husband for her and tried to sell her. None of the hill men were interested, so he came into the city. You know very well where she could have ended up if I hadn’t made him an offer.”

Duncan cringed. Just when he thought Krueger’s World couldn’t get any worse, he found out he was wrong. “Her own father?”

Vladimir nodded.

“All right,” Duncan said, “if he needed the money so badly, let him keep it. Just send her home with no strings attached.”

His father shook his head. “I can’t do that. If I did, they’d assume she’d been unsatisfactory in some way. If they let her live, it would be as a nameless drudge without any rights.”

“God!” Duncan clutched his hair. “Why the hell did you have to move to this miserable, primitive hunk of rock? What kind of place is this, where men sell their daughters to strangers?”

“It’s Krueger’s World.” Vladimir almost snapped the words out, as if he were losing patience. “And you know as well as I do why I moved Cameron Trushenko here. Krueger’s World is an ideal location for interstellar trading, and when you add in the tax break from operating outside of ThreeCon, we’re in much better shape than we were five years ago. Even your mother approved the move. The combination of New Hong Kong’s taxes and ThreeCon taxes was crippling us.”

Duncan turned away, unwilling to concede the argument. “We’re doing really well now. My two percent of the corporate profits certainly reflects that. Can’t we move back into the civilized universe?”

“Not yet,” Vladimir said firmly. “I don’t know how long it’ll be, either.”

Duncan shot him a skeptical look. “Are you sure taxes and location are the only reason, Dad? It wouldn’t have anything to do with Naomi, would it?”

Again Vladimir wouldn’t meet his gaze. “I won’t deny that the thought that Naomi might not want to leave this planet worries me. However, it’s a moot point for now. We can’t afford to move, and that’s the truth.”

Duncan sighed. “All right, so Cameron Trushenko stays here for a while longer. Is that any reason to go around buying people?”

“Maybe it is,” Vladimir said. “So long as we’re here, we might as well try to make things better for at least one person when we get the chance. If I hadn’t bought Saronna, her father might be walking the streets right now, looking for someone to buy her. As it is, she’s safe and comfortable. I presume you don’t plan to rape her?”

Repulsed, Duncan put a good deal of heat in his voice. “If that’s supposed to be a joke, it’s not very funny.”

“I wasn’t joking at all. I brought her here, and I feel responsible for her.”

“Then why didn’t you just buy her for yourself?” Duncan demanded. “Why did you have to bring me into it at all?”

For the first time, guilt suffused Vladimir’s expression. “Well, I thought about that, but Naomi got very jealous when I mentioned it. She was much happier when I agreed we could find someone for you.”

Duncan snorted with disgust, but Vladimir continued.

“Anyway, fortunately, I could tell Naomi that this woman stirred no twinges of passion in me. She’s not homely or anything, but she’s not in Naomi’s league.”

Somehow his father’s reasoning made Duncan even angrier. “And what the hell am I supposed to do with her?”

“You don’t have to do anything,” Vladimir said, his voice as soothing as it had been sixteen years before, when Duncan had broken his arm and cried all the way to the doctor’s. “But it would be nice if you made friends with her. I’m sure she’s a little scared. She may have been brought up to think this was all perfectly natural, but still it can’t be easy to leave your home so suddenly and move somewhere where you don’t know anyone.”

Duncan groaned and resumed his chair. “Good god, Dad. When did you buy her?”

“This afternoon.”

Less than a day. Just his luck to arrive right as the old man suddenly went crazy. “Damn! Do you mean if I’d gotten here last week, I could have talked you out of this nonsense?”

“No, no. I waited until you were coming home, that’s all. Like I said, Naomi was jealous until I told her Saronna was for you.”

Duncan groaned again and covered his eyes. It just got worse and worse. “Will you listen to yourself, Dad? You sound as if you were talking about a house pet. You’ve been here too long, and that’s all there is to it.”

Saronna's Gift 

My X-Rays are in!

I finished the X-Ray set up for all my titles! It was actually a fair amount of work, not difficult but a little tedious. Electronic housework, in fact.

As I blogged about earlier, Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) platform has a new tool for indie authors and small publishers (possibly they have something similar for big publishers). The tool creates an X-Ray file for a Kindle book and enables that function for that book.

X-Ray is a very useful feature, especially in certain kinds of books. If you're reading a sprawling fantasy trilogy that has dozens of characters, spreads over a decade or two, and has six viewpoint characters, and suddenly a vaguely familiar character's name pops up, your reading pace can stall as you try to figure who the heck this new elf or mage is.

The feature isn't supported in all versions of the Kindle app. Kindle for PC still doesn't have it, but the Android and iOS versions do. And of course, the newer Kindles all have it (not entirely sure about the ones before the Kindle Touch).

How X-Ray Works

Here's what it looks like on my Voyage when I highlight a character's name:

Here's the same function on my Android tablet: About the only difference is in the menu that lets you create colored highlights, impossible (naturally) on an e-ink Voyage screen. 

You'll notice the source is listed at the bottom as Shelfari. The new X-Ray tool allows the author/publisher to either write custom descriptions for characters and "terms" or to link to Wikipedia articles. However, before there was a tool, Amazon would use the information that authors and publishers could list in Shelfari, a book-lovers site Amazon bought. I had done that for The Sixth Discipline, and when I had a BookBub promo and gave away 14,000 copies of The Sixth Discipline, Amazon created an X-Ray file from the Shelfari info I had entered. I have since edited and added a lot of the info using the new tool, but I can't see those changes unless and until Amazon support staff push the changes to my copy of T6thD.

Here's what it looks like when I pull up the menu and Select X-Ray (next to Go To):

You can see from the menus that you can get a list of characters or terms on the page, with references to where they appear in the text (clips). I couldn't find a way to use this part of X-Ray from Kindle for Android, but I don't know if that's because it isn't there or I couldn't figure it out

For any other authors out there thinking of using the new tool, I will say that you should always go back into the tool after you publish your changes, because either it is easy to miss something, or sometimes the changes I had marked did not actually get published. Also, the sorting features are very helpful in looking for variations of names and terms.

So now, anyone who looks at my book descriptions in the Kindle store will see X-Ray enabled!  Here's Saronna's Gift, to illustrate:

Questions?

Any authors who want more info on how to do this, or readers who want to know how to use it, feel free to comment!

I'm really looking forward to launching Alien Bonds with this feature enabled from the get-go! 

How is Saronna's Gift like the latest Mad Max?

I seem to be posting about movies lately. But this writer's post about Mad Max: Fury Road rang a bell with me.

The plot of the movie illustrates that an absolute matriarchy, where all men are seen as evil, can be just as toxic to humanity as an absolute patriarchy. And in Saronna's Gift, that is, in fact, the way Krueger's World is portrayed. I won't go into details, because that would spoil the unfolding of the plot, but the religiously-based colony on Kruger's World has both an absolute patriarchy and a hidden matriarchy. Neither is kind to its adherents.

There is a human tendency to  want to punish oppression with oppression—to oppress those who oppress you—but it's not a humane response. Nor is it healthy, because the act of oppressing someone else makes you less human as well as less humane.

The world is grim enough as it is. We all need to be kind to each other.

Saronna's Gift makes a Barnes & Noble science fiction romance list!

How did I forget to post about this? Saronna's Gift made a list of 20 science fiction romance books on the Barnes & Noble sci-fi blog!

As the Brits say, I am chuffed to see my book on a list with the likes of books by Lois McMaster Bujold and Linnea Sinclair.

Interestingly, although the only links are to the print and Nook copies available from B&N, I had a much bigger sales bump from Amazon after the list came out than I did from B&N, which suggests readers are browsing the B&N blog but still buying the Kindle version.  

Saronna's Gift is available on Barnes & Noble!

As of now, Saronna's Gift is no longer exclusively a Kindle ebook.  I loaded an epub version to the Nook Press platform and successfully published it to the Nook store. I had held off on leaving KDP Select for one additional 90-day cycle because the book was doing well with Kindle Unlimited (KU) borrows, but that was tapering off, and so I went ahead and launched it on B&N.

I plan to also load the book to Smashwords soon, so that I can make it available on iBooks and Kobo, and other vendors.  One reason I started with the Nook platform is that the print version is already available on Barnes & Noble, so with Amazon, this will make two retail stores that offer the book in both ebook and hard copy formats.

And there's one nice thing about KDP; Amazon is still reporting on (and thus presumably paying me for) pages of Saronna's Gift read by users who borrowed it while it was in KU. I'll be curious how long it takes for that to stop completely. I expect people borrow books but don't read them right away, so it might be weeks or even a month or two. 

Borrow my book— please!

I hate the fact that Amazon requires exclusivity for a KDP book to be in Kindle Unlimited. Exclusivity means the ebook version of a book can only be for sale in the Kindle store. Amazon doesn't care about the print version, but the ebook can only be a Kindle book. Amazon calls this status being in Kindle Select, and they sweeten the deal by allowing a limited number of promotions for Kindle Select books: the author can make the book free or on sale. Of course, you can lower the price of your Kindle book to 99¢ anytime you want to, but that's not the same as displaying it as "Regular price, $3.99, on sale for 99¢, YOU SAVE $3.00!" which is what the Kindle store buyers see with a Kindle promotion. It eevn shows how long the sale will last, which is a good impetus for a browser to click the buy button.

To date, I've never kept a book in Kindle Select for more than a single 90 day cycle. In the past, being able to make the book free for a few days was a great way to get some reviews, and reviews sell books. But once that first 90-day period was over, I always loaded the book on other platforms. I still plan to do that for Saronna's Gift, but not for another 90 days. I've signed on for another cycle because Kindle Unlimited has been pretty good to this book.

As I said in my earlier post, the Kindle Unlimited per-borrow fee paid to the author is running about half of what the royalty is for a #3.99 book. However, that doesn't mean you always make less money with Kindle Unlimited. That's only true if people who would have bought the book borrow it instead. As a new author, I think the borrowers I'm getting are people who might otherwise never have seen or bought my book. Ergo, I'm going to give it another 90 days and we'll see where we are then.

Hopefully, by then that book will have more than 6 reviews. Honestly, people, would it kill you to post a review?  They make it really easy! There's a button right on the product page.

The Value of Kindle Unlimited

Well, Saronna's Gift has been out for about six weeks now, and it's been a different experience from the other seven books. This is the first book I have marketed as a romance. Some of the others are very romance-friendly, but in this book, the point of the story is the relationship. It's also the first book I put out since Kindle Unlimited was an option.

In self-publishing ebooks, unknown authors have some tools (besides writing an engaging book) to get their work to readers. Two of the main ones are they can make books free (on some platforms), and they can price them very cheaply. Giving away a book works best as a marketing strategy if it's the first book in a series. But even that has limitations because there are so darn many free ebooks, that many of them are never read. People see “free” and click the button, but once they have the ebook, they don't feel any urge to read it right away. It might not even be a book they would want to read, but what the heck, it was free, right?

The Kindle Unlimited program is different. It's a subscription program, aimed at “heavy” readers, people who read a lot!  They pay a fixed price (I think it's $10 a month) and then they can download as many KU books as they want, but they can only have 10 KU books on their device at a time. Because they have already paid the fee, they feel a need to get their money's worth and read lots of books. They don't download as recklessly as they would totally freee books, but they are willing to take a chance on new (to them) authors.

Amazon pays KU authors for every time a book is borrowed and read to at least 10% of the book. Some authors are not happy because Amazon pays a flat rate, without regard to the book's price or length. Right now, the rate is approximately $1.40. That means if a book sells for 99¢, the author gets paid more for a borrow than a sale. But if the book sells for $3.99, the borrow pays only about half what the sale would pay.  Sounds like a terrible deal, right? I don't happen to think so.

Some people look at a borrow and see it as a lost sale. I don't. I see it as a reader gained. The thing is, if you're Stephen King or J.K. Rowling, anything you write will get a lot of attention. If you're Carmen Webster Buxton, your books have a ton of competition for readers' time and money. A program like Kindle Unlimited gets an unknown author over the barrier of the reader plunking down money to find out if they like a book or not. The free sample feature helps a lot, but I know a lot of people feel like it's not enough to really tell them if they'll like the book. With KU, there really isn't much of a barrier except the reader's time commitment, and they can stop reading any time, return the book, and go on to something else.

And I have to say, when it comes to “heavy” readers, romance readers have it all sewn up! They read more books than almost anyone. Which is fine with me!

Now if they would only write more reviews . . .

Addendum:  Adding a link here to an excellent discussion of this topic on Jane Friedman's blog.

The books are in the mail!

The Goodreads giveaway (see post below) is over, and the books are in the mail! If you were notified you won a paperback copy of Saronna's Gift, you should get it before the end of the week.

If you're not familiar with Goodreads, you should check it out. Lots of authors host giveaways. The cover all genres, and it doesn't cost anything to enter.

Saronna's Gift giveaway on GoodReads

I'm hosting a giveaway of three paperback copies of Saronna's Gift via Goodreads! You can enter to win using the link below.  Note that you do need a US mailing address.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Saronna's Gift

by Carmen Webster Buxton

Giveaway ends February 20, 2015.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

First US review of Saronna's Gift

At last, the US Kindle store has a review of Saronna's Gift. Reviewer M. Sutton gave it four stars. She wanted more sex (the reader has to wait a long time and nothing overt happens on the page) but she called it a good read and praised the lack of typos and grammatical errors, so I call that a good review.

She mentioned she borrowed the book through Kindle Unlimited. I checked and the review shows up on the paperback version, too, so they are fully linked.

Flat out bragging

I dedicated Saronna's Gift to readers who write and post reviews because reviews are what tells an author he or she has made a connection.  They also help sell more books, by the way.  The book actually got its first review on the Amazon UK site, rather than Amazon US, where it has sold a lot more copies, but in any event, here is the text of the review: "This review is in my husband s name ,but your book made me sad and made me smile, I wish every woman in the world. Was free . Keep writing."

It's short, but it gets the job done! That is what I call a connection! Thank you, wife of ericdavey!  You made my day.

Just released!

Now for sale at Amazon, Saronna's Gift, is available in both papaperback and ebook formats. If you buy the paperback, the Kindle Matchbook feature will let you "buy" the ebook for free! The ebook is also available to borrow for free from both Kindle Unlimited and the Kindle Owners' Lending Library. KU is a subscription service Amazon offers. The KOLLis a benefit for people who have Amazon Prime and also own an actual Kindle or Kindle Fire device.

This has been a long time coming, and I have learned a lot from the process. In a few days I will post about the it. Meanwhile, here's the opening of the new book:

A warm summer breeze caught Saronna’s veil and almost pulled it loose. She stopped to tuck the folds around her face, to ensure nothing showed except her eyes. By the time she had picked up her valise, her father had almost disappeared into the crowd. She hurried to catch up, darting in and out among the throng as fast as she could without attracting notice.

Where were they going? Her father had told her to pack her belongings. That had to mean he planned another attempt to sell her, but he had given her no clue whom he planned to visit today. 

Even after their earlier trips to New Jerusalem, the city still disconcerted Saronna. Vendors’ cries, chattering voices, ground cars rolling past, and countless footfalls were enough to distract her, let alone the sight of so many strangers. Faces flashed past, some veiled, some bearded, and disappeared into the mass of humanity, never to be seen again.
She caught up to her father just as he turned suddenly, moving through the tall steel supports of the Strangers’ Gate, into the off-world quarter. Saronna had never been there. She gripped her valise tighter as a shiver of apprehension ran through her. Would her talent work as well on an off-world man?

Almost there!

I finally finished the corrections on the proof copy of Saronna's Gift, and uploaded new files to both CreateSpace and KDP. I decided to get the next proof copy with a glossy cover, though, because I am not entirely happy with the look of the matte version.

I am getting excited!  Here's the blurb and front cover:

Saronna Maynard never expected to be sold into an off-world household. She and Duncan Trushenko, her new protector, have very little in common, except for living in the same house. Saronna grew up in a small village outside of New Jerusalem, the largest city on Krueger’s World. Duncan grew up on many worlds, and has traveled the galaxy. He is dumbstruck to return from a business trip and find that his father has purchased a companion for him.

Saronna is terrified by the strangeness of the house and her sense of powerlessness, but in a very short time she realizes she might be better off—and safer—in Duncan’s house than in her father’s. For one thing, Duncan doesn’t believe in witches. Also, the more she’s with Duncan, the harder it is for her to believe all men are as evil as her mother taught her. But safer or not, Saronna is still intent on keeping her secrets. After all, she’s still on Krueger’s World. 

Proof copies are here!

I got my proof copies of Saronna's Gift today! I don't care what publishers say, publishing in print is much, much more work than publishing ebooks. And since you can't tell a reader to re-download a print book, proofing for errors is much more wearing.

Here's how it looks so far.

We have a cover!

Isn't it pretty? I might ask the designer to scale back the shadow effect, but otherwise, I really like it!

Finally, a draft at least!

The cover for Saronna's Gift has been plagued by problems. This is my first cover that used an actual model, and the photographer had technical difficulties that required a reshoot.

Anyway, it's only a draft, because the colors aren't right and the typography is missing, but here is (more of less) what the cover of Saronna's Gift will look like.

Happy Thanksgiving, 2013!

I am thankful for many things, first and foremost being my family. And right now I am thankful that Saronna's Gift is back from the copyeditor. I hope to be thankful for a cover soon.

But in the meantime, I am cooking a turkey for 18 people this year, so I won't be posting again any time soon.  Here's a painting of the somewhat mythical first Thanksgiving, to remind us all to give thanks for our modern appliances as we prepare (and clean up from) our own feasts.

Saronna's Gift has gone to the copyeditor!

I have (finally) finished my structural and character-based revisions to Saronna's Gift, and it's ready for the copyeditor's attentions. I was hoping that I could post the cover but the artist isn't finished with it yet, so instead, here's the first page of the story:

A warm summer breeze caught Saronna’s veil and almost pulled it loose. She stopped to tuck the folds around her face, to ensure nothing showed except her eyes. By the time she had picked up her valise, her father had almost disappeared into the crowd. She hurried to catch up, darting in and out among the throng as fast as she could without attracting notice.

Where were they going? Her father had told her to pack her belongings. That had to mean he planned another attempt to sell her, but he had given her no clue whom he planned to visit today.

Even after their earlier trips to New Jerusalem, the city still disconcerted Saronna. Vendors’ cries, chattering voices, ground cars rolling past, and countless footfalls were enough to distract her, let alone the sight of so many strangers. Faces flashed past, some veiled, some bearded, and disappeared into the mass of humanity, never to be seen again.

She caught up to her father just as he turned suddenly, moving through the tall steel supports of the Strangers’ Gate into the off-world quarter. Saronna had never been there. She gripped her valise tighter as a shiver of apprehension ran through her. Would her talent work as well on an off-world man?

After a block, Saronna noticed women in trousers, walking with their faces uncovered. She looked away in confusion, but the men bewildered her just as much. They walked beside the women, sometimes even touched them. Even elderly men had no beards. The buildings, by contrast, seemed ordinary, although many were very tall. Ten and twelve-story structures dwarfed their neighbors, seeming to shut out the sun.

The crowd thinned first, then the buildings, and Saronna realized they had entered a residential area. After a few blocks, her father made another abrupt turn to enter the arched doorway of a large, sprawling house. Saronna stepped back a pace to study the facade as her father waited at the door. The gray stone house looked very like the ones back in her village except more spread out. Only the recessed archway that sheltered the entrance broke the line of the featureless walls. A few noticeable oddities caught her attention—two small cylinders mounted on either side of the door, and a flat rectangular screen placed at eye level on the right.

That's all for now. I hope to have a cover image to post soon!

Catching up

Is it really July already? How did that happen? I am deep into the revisions stage of Saronna's Gift. When I give a manuscript to my writing group, I always have to weigh their comments against my own sense of what the story is about and what tone I am going for. As you can tell by looking at almost any book's Amazon reviews, people have varied taste. What one person finds edgy, someone else will see as too dark. What one reader admires in a character will sometimes make other readers dislike him intensely. This is why Baskin-Robbins makes 31 flavors!

The group has been in existence for about 20 years, although the membership has varied during that time. One “new” member just rejoined the group because she retired and finally has time to write again. Another is new-new, as he had only attended a few meetings.  The folks who have been in the group for years do have some predictability in their critiques of stories submitted. One guy always wants more physical description of the characters. One woman always loves the character everyone else hates. And one bloodthirsty guy always wants the writer to kill off one or more characters.

When I review the comments my fellow writers have made, I look for two things. First is consensus. Is there something everyone hated or thought didn't work?  Because if so, that is something I need to change. The second thing is harder to pin down. Does a suggestion resonate with me, with what I want the story to be? Because it's my story, and no matter how interesting an idea sounds, of it doesn't make the book into the story I want to tell, then it's a suggestion I won't use.

At least not with this book. But I save everything. A writer is really a kind of idea vampire. He or she feeds off chance observations, friends' life struggles, newspaper items, and anything else that comes his way. It's what we do!

Writing in a series: why I created my own universe

I got a wonderful email the other day, from a reader who was requesting the free story I offer via this blog. It was the kind of email authors dream about because she said she had read The Sixth Discipline (which she got free in iBooks, but it's also free almost everywhere) and loved it enough to buy the sequel No Safe Haven, and loved it enough to buy all my other books in the iBooks store. On top of that, when I checked, she had left a review on iBooks! Talk about your ideal readers!

When I sent her the story, I suggested she read Tribes first, because it's most like the Haven books in overall tone, and I warned her that Shades of Empire is noticeably darker and more explicit than my other books. But when I was writing the email, it occurred to me that in some ways, the fact that she loved the Haven books so much could make it difficult for her to enjoy the other books.

Readers love books in a series. Once they find a character they like, they want to stick with him or her. When a local book club read my fantasy novella Where Magic Rules, one of the questions the readers asked me was did I have any books in a series.

Authors, on the other hand, often find it difficult keep finding new things to say about a character. The Haven “series” is only two books long, and I didn't know it would be two when I started it. As it turned out, I had too much story in my head for it to fit into one book. Fortunately, there was an eight-year gap in the story, which made a logical place to end the first book; I just had to be sure there was enough resolution of all but the one significant plot point that continues in the second book.

But in a sense, most of my books are in a series. All of my far future science fiction stories take place in a universe in which people from earth colonized other worlds in a way that left them cut off from our earth. The societies and cultures they created varied, depending on why they left their own world. I call them "sleeper worlds," partly because the colonists traveled in suspended animation. In the Haven books, there were three distinct groups on the colony world of Haven: one looking for new resources, one wanting isolation to experience harmony with nature, and one hoping for a total lack of government. In Tribes, the world was a prison colony, and its culture and government evolved from prison gangs. The colony world in The Nostalgia Gambit is an exception in that it's not a sleeper world.

I named my universe the ThreeCon universe, for the Third Confederation of Planets, the organization I created to oversee commerce and other interaction between the worlds. Although there are no characters shared between stories (except for the Haven books), the universe has a consistent, shared history. There are events mentioned in one that carry over into other stories, too.

My next book, most likely titled Saronna's Gift will be a romance, but it's also set in the ThreeCon universe, and the sleeper world the story takes place on was founded as religious colony by a charismatic but despotic leader who believed in an Old Testament-style patriarchy. After a few centuries of isolation, the world is a pretty awful place, in a lot of ways. The story starts when a young woman's father takes her to a city to sell her. I'm hoping the book will appeal to both romance readers and science fiction readers.

Really, my kind of series is the kind authors like: low overhead for the writer in creating the overall history, and a new set of characters each time. I don't know how much benefit that is to readers. If you have an opinion, let me know in the comments.