KittywampusAs many know, I’m participating in this year’s Clarion West Write-a-thon. Last week I let people choose the title of the story I’d write for the write-a-thon’s first week, and the people’s choice was “How Deep Is Red”.
So here’s a chunk from this morning’s writing so far. The story will be the sequel to “Sugar”, which is available in Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight. If you’re interested in getting to see the whole story, then I invite you to support me in the Write-a-thon! I’ll be sending a weekly e-mail that will include the stories that I write for the Write-a-thon over its six-week course, so for a small donation, you’ll be getting what I’d like to think of as high quality fiction. 🙂
Laurana used a bowl of mercury to watch her lover’s battle. The thick, silvery liquid showed the ships from above, a fat-bellied Tabatian merchant, and the two pirate ships, lean-lined and fanged with cannon, converging on it from either side, the wind behind them making them race forward.
Tiny toy ships. The name of the merchant was Saffron Butterfly The pirate ships bore no names, only figureheads of women, one with a flaming skull for a head, the other with bracelets and necklaces of snakes. Flame’s Kiss and The Serpent.
The liquid didn’t transmit sound. For that Laurana relied on imagination: the deep-throated boom of the guns, the crash of cannon balls, the shouts of despair and defiance.
The Kiss neared the merchant. Laurana leaned forward, trying to find Cristina among the mass of pirates: some readying spidery hooks and ropes, others with hackbuts raised and aimed, all braced for collison, another sound dependent on Laurana, whose mind rendered it down to the taste of salt on one’s lips from the relentless wind, the crash louder than anything one had ever heard. There. A purple bandana tied across orange curls. Cristina, swinging herself aboard the pirates’ prey.
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
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Answers to Some Galaktika Magazine Questions
I’ve been following the controversy with Galaktika with particular interest because there are a number of SFWA members involved. My thanks to A. G. Carpenter for graciously sharing what they found out. In the process of talking to people, I dropped Istvan Burger a mail because I had these questions:
Would all writers be paid, preferably without their having to contact Galaktika?
Would all translators be paid? (my understanding was that the same lack of payment has happened with them.)
For any online stories, would authors be able to request that the story be taken down?
Would a process be put in place to ensure this never happens again?
Here’s the reply:
Dear Cat,
I’m writing on behalf of Istvan Burger, editor in chief of Galaktika.
We’d like to ask authors to contact us directly to agree on compensation methods. You can give my email address to the members. mund.katalin@gmail.com
The short stories were published in a monthly magazine, which was sold for two months, so these prints are not available any more. So Authors don’t need to withdraw their works. As we wrote in our statement, there is no problem with novels, as all the rights of novels were paid by us in time.
Also let me emphasise again that all the translators were paid all the time!
You can quote my reply. Thank you for your help!
Best regards,
Katalin Mund,
Manager of Galaktika Magazine
Next week SFWA will be sending Galaktika a list of affected SFWA members who need to be compensated. If you’re a member whose work was published in Galaktika and want to make sure you’re on the list, please drop me an e-mail, message me, or leave a comment here.
Later addendum: I requested clarification about the magazine not being available for longer than two months since there seem to be digital editions for sale on the website, which would seem to contradict that statement. I was told that authors will be able to withdraw their stories from the electronic editions if they so desire.
Did Hamilton know what a guilty pleasure her series would become? Also, what a terrible, terrible cover. Seriously.As a hardcore F&SF addict, I love the fact that nowadays I can go into the grocery store, look at the rack that used to hold nothing but Regency and Harlequin romances, and see covers with vampires and were-wolves and djinn and selkies and goddess knows what else. It makes me happy. I’ve spent a lot of time reading urban fantasy and paranormal romance over the past couple of years, and I wanted to provide a reading map of sorts for fellow genre lovers. So I’ll be posting about my favorites (and some not-so-favorites) over the next couple of months.
You can argue about where it all started (or even what it is) but I’d rather take the tack of looking at the authors that shaped the genre. Let’s begin, accordingly, with Laurell K. Hamilton, who started so much with her heroine, Anita Blake. Necromancer and private investigator, Blake kicks ass and takes names, at least early on in the series, which begins with Guilty Pleasures. (did Hamilton know the direction she’d go in from the first? The title seems to hint in that direction.) In the early books, Anita is tough as nails and prone to smartassery. She’s got two love interests: Richard the werewolf and Jean-Claude the vampire and, unlike a lot of romances, you don’t know what will end up happening. It’s great stuff.
Certainly Hamilton wasn’t the first person to write about vampires. The writer who had moved them into popularity was Anne Rice with her vampire series, which began a couple of decades earlier with Interview with the Vampire. On one level a sexy, intriguing story, the series also spoke to an anxiety floating around in the American zeitgeist at that point: sex and blood had become problematic with the arrival of AIDs. Its popularity rose as did media mentions of the disease.
But Hamilton came along and created a very specific vampire mix. She added Anita Blake, a tough but reader-identifiable character who was a smart-ass, had love-life problems, and tried to solve mysteries. Honestly, how could the series not be a hit? Blake first appeared in 1993, while four years later the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer would teach vampire lore to a new generation of readers who would soon discover Anita and her rapidly increasing ilk.
Somewhere along the line, though, the Anita Blake series…turned. Was that Hamilton discovered that sex sells or that with success she was freer to write the sort of thing she wanted to? Soft core porn began to get sifted in with a heavy hand, and none of it was vanilla. I don’t mind that, though. It’s fascinating to get a well thought out take on what sex with supernatural beings would be like. There are, unfortunately, some moments where it overshadows everything else. I’m thinking of Micah in particular, and if she stuck to the pattern of that book, I’d be about done. Luckily, she doesn’t. I like the fact that Anita has multiple lovers, that she’s in control, and that she changes her attitudes over time. But the books have become a guilty pleasure – although still, let’s admit, pleasurable when she maintains the balance between sex and storyline, and I’m certainly still buying them and, on occasion, re-reading them too.
Hamilton’s other series, the Merry Gentry books, which begins with A Kiss of Shadows, follows the same pattern. It’s a fascinating world, but sometimes we don’t get to see it because we’ve spent so much time in the bedroom. The overarching story line is that of a Faerie princess who must get pregnant. In case you don’t understand the implications, here’s a hint: Fairies do not reproduce through mitosis, but rather through lots of hot sex.
Again, a fascinating world, with a rich mythology and a premise that paves the way for plenty of nifty little jokes and eyeball kicks. Sometimes we don’t see as much of it as we’d like because we’re watching Merry get merry between the sheets, but it’s well-written and steamy sex that sometimes transcends space and time and/or summons ancient elemental forces. I found the most recent one I read, Divine Misdemeanors, which featured a serial killer of demi-fay who was using the tiny bodies of the victims to stage elaborate tableaus, nicely creepy and memorable.
So tell me what you think. Is Hamilton a guilty pleasure for you too or are you on some other terms with her books?
And for those interested in the books, here’s the lists, in chronological order:
