COLLABORATORS is Lambda Award Finalist!

My science fiction novel, Collaborators, is a Finalist for the 2014 Lambda Literary Award! (It's under byline of Deborah Wheeler.) Needless to say, I'm thrilled!

From the Lambda Literary review: The love stories between the alien pairs were the most important, and the most tender moments of the book, Not only for the fascinating look at sexual biology and the way Wheeler has shaken and blended gender norms like a Bond martini, but because they are also beautiful romances, familiar family issues, and heart-touchingly domestic. The aliens’ whole way of life is built on the family structure, the treasuring of the all-too-rare children, and the valuing of honesty and generosity between clan kin. The relationships span all ranges and makeups – from widowers to young lovers; from established partnerships with adult children to newlyweds with a baby on the way; from unrequited loves to loves cut tragically short. In this way, Wheeler has given us aliens with hearts as human as the readers, and that’s the point.

A starkly entertaining allegory of Middle East tensions, and a romantic and intellectually sexy gender discussion wrapped up in a compelling novel that solidifies Dragon Moon Press’ swiftly growing place amid the new wave of socially-aware and unafraid-to-make-its-readers-think genre fiction publishers.

- See more at: http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/06/18/collaborators-by-deborah-wheeler/#sthash.lAYqCGiL.dpuf

I've read sections from this book at Gaylaxicon 2004 in San Diego, and more recently at SF in SF. Special thanks to everyone who kept asking when the book was coming out and to Gabrielle Harbowy, my editor at Dragon Moon Press, for believing in it!

To read more about gender and gender roles in Collaborators, check out my previous blogs: Collaborators - Thinking About Gender and World-Building in Collaborators – Designing a Gender-Fluid Race

Collaborators is available in print and ebook editions from Amazon.com and in print from Powell's and probably from other places, too.

World Building in Prose and Theatrical Set Design

Last year at Baycon, Juliette Wade and I did a discussion and reading on "World-building." One of the members of our audience, a theatrical set designer, offers some great insights into the similarities...and the lessons we can learn from one another.

The biggest lesson I learned from Ross was to present the world incidentally through the action of the story. I don’t want to imply that Ross was Worldbuilding by accident, far from it. Instead she introduced readers to the complex concepts of an alien world as she was dealing with other writerly stuff such as plot and character. While Wade’s reading demonstrated rich narrative passages that allowed the reader to see the world, Ross’s reading jumped straight in to the action, but carefully crafted that action and her telling of it to expose the world we were visiting. Ross’s approach is also one that relates organically to the theatrical designer. Theatrical designers do not get to give the audience a two minute guided tour of the design so that they can take in what it is and what it means. Instead, the curtain goes up, the actors enter, and the play is off and running. The audience has to pick up the world of the play while following the action. Is this the sort of play where a Styrofoam cup and some string symbolizes a phone? If so, designers show that to the audience. Whatever the world of the play is, it is important to show it through the action of the play.


Read the whole blog post here:
World Building | setsandlights