Watch This "Space"

See this blank area, directly to your right? Call that a reserved seating area. I've been to the websites of so many romance novelists, and the first thing they display is an image of their most current cover. Since I don't have a most current cover, I'll have to show you this white space where it's going to go! Ha. Until then, I'll let my Golden Age space girl watch over the ... space.

Romancing the Sci-fi Novel

Skiffy No More

I've been reading science fiction for so long, it's hard for me to start using that term sci-fi. You see, for the longest time, sci-fi was used in the industry to refer to a subset of the genre -- that subset populated by Godzilla and Mothra and other scions of the Ray Harryhausen school of stop motion. We called it sci-fi, but pronounced it "skiffy."

The cheesy science fiction movies, in other words. But now with the fame of the Sci-Fi channel and the imprint it's left on the field, everyone is using that term to refer to everything in it, and those of us who said "skiffy" are dwindling into a smallish minority.

Slipstreaming the Romance

So now that I'm a proud user of the term "sci-fi" (sort of – still getting used to it), how can I possibly put romance into it? Simple. A lot of the biggies have always done it. Very nearly 100% of Edgar Rice Burroughs' stories were romances, and teenage boys have loved them since the nineteentweens.

Catherine Asaro, Julian May, Anne McCaffrey, Robert Jordan, and even Robert Heinlein, in a bit of a twisted way, wrote about people teaming up to accomplish some purpose, and falling in love (or something very nearly like it) in the process. That's all I'm doing. I'm a big believer in the advancement of science. I'm also a big believer that two people who like each other should get together, so I decided to straddle the two. Hm. So to speak.

I'm in good company, with ladies like Susan Grant, Liz Maverick and Kim Harrison repaving that road, along with all the cool guys and chicks at SpecRomOnline and PNRomance.

I hope you like the stories we turn out. It's the wave of the future.

News and Stuff

7/8/2007 - Well, not going to make it to RWA, this year, obviously, but might check out Conestoga next weekend.

4/12/2007 - Seriously thinking about making an appearance at RWA National Conference this year. Let's see how that turns out.

12/7/2007 - Rejection from Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show. On to the next!

10/11/2006 - Completely failed to win or place in the FF&P contest. Some of the comments were nice. Others were quite mean-spirited. Back to work, I guess.

8/5/2006 - Entered my very first novel contest ever! Sent the first 15 pages (with a synopsis -- thanks to JP Edwards for invaluable help with that) of the work in progress to the RWA FF&P chapter contest. It's a waiting game now!

7/11/2006 - Near miss at Fantasy and Science Fiction with Schroedinger's Woman. Gordon said he'd just published one a lot like it a few months ago. Figures.

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