Authorial Anxiety

Via Kay Kenyon: Scare of the Week, and What to Worry About (and What Not to Worry About).

It may be true that ordinary books are doomed. Right now I’m not going to argue the facts. But please, can we just put a lid on the anxiety, here?

As you may be gathering from all the writer’s blogs you’re following, writers have a lot of things to work on and maybe worry about. And then there are the scares of the week, and the perennial anxieties that made you nuts but are paper tigers. But which is which?

I definitely agree that everyone ought to worry themselves sick over the length of their fingernails because, as every successful author knows, it is impossible to create peerless prose unless said fingernails are exactly the same length.

I got to hang out a little with Kay at Radcon. She's a terrific writer (go check out her "The Rose and the Entire" from Pyr) and blogs intelligently about writing and the writing life. Not only that, she's lovely and gracious and fun. And manages to post exactly what I need to hear when I'm seized by paroxysms of literary self-doubt.

Check out Susan Wright's new ebook

The offerings from Book View Cafe get more interesting and varied all the time. Here's the skinny on the newest:

SLAVE TRADE (Science Fiction) by Susan Wright. $2.99

Human slaves can never defy their alien masters—or can they?

Rose Rico never believed the rumors that the government was secretly selling human beings to the Alphas in exchange for advanced alien technology. The idea that human sex slaves were a luxury item throughout the galaxy was just too ridiculous to take seriously—until Rose found herself, along with hundreds of other human captives, bound for the far reaches of space, and compelled to cater to the depraved desires of her new alien masters. As a rule, pleasure slaves don’t live very long, especially the stubborn ones. But Rose refuses to give up. Someday, somehow, she'll win back her freedom—or die trying!

Here's a snippet from the first chapter:

"Who's there?" a low voice demanded.

"Bolt, with a new girl." Bolt kept his hand around her upper arm, holding onto her.

Rose tried to see as her eyes adjusted to the darkness, but there were only faint blobs that could have been two people. There was a steady dripping from the rain seeping into the underground structure.

"How do you know her?" the voice asked suspiciously.

"We just had sex," Rose offered helpfully.

Originally published by Pocket Books (2003) as part of the Slave Trade trilogy including Slave Masters (2004) and Slaves Unchained (2005).

Sample chapters here. Order the multi-format ebook here.

Deborah Corrupts 8th Graders

Just in case you missed my blog on "Radcon Part I), here's what happened when I visited a library full of 8th graders (Radcon does an awesome job of youth outreach).

Okay, I said, let’s use something from that story to get going on our own. What should we use?

Kidnapping!

And who shall we kidnap? Anna!

Who are we? Movie stars!

Where are we holding her? At the zoo!

Why are we kidnapping her? For ransom money so we can make a movie! A zombie movie! No, a ninja zombie movie! (I am not making this up.)

Okay, what happens next? Rosie, her best friend, er, trusty sidekick, decides to rescue her! (Now both Anna and Rosie are getting into the act.)

So Rosie sneaks into the zoo…what goes wrong? She lets the Siberian tiger out of its cage!

About this stage, we ran out of time, which was really too bad because the kids were on a roll. A couple of kids, usually boys, kept wanting to kill off characters, which is something to watch out for if you try this collaborative writing yourself. They don’t yet have the sense of a whole story unfolding with rising tension and complications, but they respond pretty well if you show them how that just ends the story before it gets going. They also get it that it’s more fun to torture characters than to just kill them.