First off, I’ve had a lot going on lately but I have been reading and lurking here and there. One of the esoteric “there’s” that I allow my inner self are various design sites just for the sometimes inspiring, sometimes amusing but almost always “oh, wow” images that pop up. Just recently I ran across a brand new blog to check out along those lines:
The Steampunk Home
I believe that Steampunk is more than just brass and watchparts. It’s finding a way to combine the past and the future in an aesthetic pleasing yet still punkish way. It’s living a life that looks old-fashioned, yet speaks to the future. It’s taking the detritus of our modern technological society and remaking it into useful things. Join me as I search for items for my house that combine the scientific romanticism of the Victorians with our real present and imagined future.
It was as I was browsing through a few of the posts there – check them out, they’re eye-popping – that it suddenly occured to me that there might be a very good, logical and non-storytelling reason why I like to watch science fiction and not read it.
It is the worldbuilding - just not in the way everyone usually interprets that term, phrase or whatever it is.
Consider this – and also keep in mind that I’m still working this thought out in my head so it isn’t at all fully formed – but when I saw the images on The Steampunk Home blog I realized that they only made sense to me as I was looking at them. Visually in context. Now someone else might find it fascinating to have that type of world described in excruciating detail but I like seeing the visual texture and haven’t yet figured out how to jump off that cliff yet.
A couple of weeks ago, Heather from The Galaxy Express approached me and asked if I’d be interested in participating in a round robin type feature on SF site discussing SF romances. I’ll be honest, I was kind of hesitant at first because I don’t read all that much science fiction. But I decided to at least think about it and give it a try. Final participants include Linnea Sinclair, Jacqueline Lichtenberg, Angela James, Susan Grant, Michael Banks, B.B. Medos (me), Elizabeth Hand, Laurie Green, Lisa Paitz Spindler, Sasha Knight, Sandra McDonald–and, of course, Heather. This is what resulted.
The topic?
From Star Wars to Avatar, stories blending science fiction and romance have persisted for decades in books, films, fan fiction, and even video games. However, despite such evidence, there are those who believe the two genres can;t, or shouldn’t be combined. We asked this week’s panelists:
Q: Is there a taboo against romance in science fiction? What does romance bring to the SF genre? What are some good examples of romance in SF that illustrate this?
I was like, huh. That’s almost scary to me for some reason. We’re talking the purveyors of the Leisure Books and Love Spell. Powerhouse lines in romances and yet also one of the most often mocked both for content and covers. It’s probably a toss-up between them and Avon for the “outrageous” prize and this is said by someone who has oodles and oodles of books by both publishers so don’t think I’m looking down my nose or anything.
Okay, why this sudden curiousity about Dorchester? Well, it started with A Brief History of Science Fiction Romance over on The Galaxy Express and a question about whether there were any science fiction romances - meaning labeled romances with SF elements and not science fiction with romantic elements – prior to 1980. Which in turn got me to wondering what publisher would’ve been the most receptive to actually publishing those elements in a romance during that period. And that led me to thinking about Leisure Books and Love Spell, naturally, since they were the ones who gave us our beloved futuristic romances in the first place.
May we ever be thankful. (only one-third of that was sarcasm – okay, half)
See, what I was actually wanting to do was find a “most likely” publisher’s name to go to BookScans and browse through some of their later covers. But BookScans only goes to 1959, more or less, which left me wondering where the heck was Dorchester. Not starting until 1971, apparently.
You know the really odd thing – or not – is that Dorchester doesn’t even list a SF category on its page. They do horror, westerns, thrillers, romance but no science fiction?
Oh, except for those futuristics… oye.
Well, back to the search. It seems Dorchester could have some books that might fit before 1980 but how to find them. Or maybe I’ll just try Avon. Yeah, vintage Avon and science fiction romance. That sounds right. o.O
You know what would really be helpful? If Fantastic Fiction was searchable by publisher and/or year. If any database was that to be honest.
You see, that’s the question that occurred to me whilst watching the scene in the new Star Trek movie where Kirk gets to confront his oh, so logical accuser, namely Spock, about his, um, little indiscretion regarding the Kobayashi Maru test when I rewatched the movie this last weekend. Now, for those of you not familiar with Star Trek, here’s something to help ‘splain things. For those of you that are familiar, you should get a real kick out of this montage.
You see, it’s not about whether or not the Kobayashi Maru is a valid evaluation of a cadet’s potential readiness for command. It’s about the fact that everyone knows Kirk will never, ever bow to the logic of it. Old Kirk. Young Kirk. Doesn’t matter. He does not like losing. He does not like giving up or giving in.
And watching Kirk and Spock argue about the test in the academy hall, it suddenly hit me that neither do romance readers. Call what we expect happy endings or whatever but the simple truth is that we don’t like to lose either. So, when people tell us that stories with those unhappy endings are more “realistic” and we should appreciate and learn from them, we instead think “rewrite”.
In the spirit of spring cleaning, I did something today I’ve been thinking of doing for some time. I switched my Facebook account around to focus on a page specifically for Bev’s Books instead of the individual account and got a personal account in my real name, which I’m not sharing here. Yeah, I could’ve probably done all that with the account I already had but it was giving me fits attempting to do it, so, I finally just started all over from scratch. On the plus side it allowed me to clean up some stuff.
Anyway, the links you may have won’t work anymore and this is my new Bev’s Books Facebook link. I’m still building things and refinding friends so be patient.
To be honest, I’m still deciding if I even want to keep my Twitter account. 140 words and me just don’t seem like a good match any way I look at it, for posting or for reading. That and the fact that I have never liked/enjoyed text chatting. It’s the scrolling and an eye/migraine trigger thing. You may have to live with it to understand it.
Be that as it may, I’m not sure I see the point in keeping a Twitter account simply to promote posts and not to join in the conversations. I know there are plenty of people that do it but it just doesn’t feel right. It’s a little different with Facebook where one can literally link/share the entire posts to the site, more or less.
I’ve been out and about the last couple of days doing some errands and clean up of my own and haven’t been able to post. But I ran across this video regarding the situation in Nashville. It literally brought tears to my eyes. At the same time it’s very inspirational. I hope everyone who sees it spreads it around. The link at the end of the video takes you to an article entitled We Are Nashville at a site for supporters of the Nashville Predators that’s also very good.
RT @avonbooks: RWA – Gaylord hotel update: they’re monitoring situation & will announce outcome as soon as they can http://bit.ly/dgNL6c
Technically, we’re in western Kentucky, just over the border slightly northwest from Clarkville, Tennessee, but we got a lot of rain ourselves over the weekend. Not nearly as much as central Tennessee, though. They got roughly 2 feet in 2 days. So, yeah, it’s a bad situation pretty much all around Nashville right now. In fact, I feel like we’re living in an island of calm since there are counties both to the east and west of us in Kentucky that have school closings due to flooding while our county didn’t. Our county is apparently on a ridge between rivers. Who knew.
The local station I watch out of Nashville is WSMV-TV (NBC) Channel 4 and they’ve been covering the situation pretty much non-stop since Friday night. So, go there if you want to see photo-slideshows or videos. The only one I was curious enough to find and link to was this one from I think Saturday during the early flash-flooding stage: Flooding Puts Cars, Trucks Underwater - because this was probably the most jaw-dropping thing I saw all weekend. Yes, that’s a building, portable, floating down an interstate. I-24 to be exact. I think it’s one of those portable school buildings.
But it definitely gives one an idea of just how bad things are because that’s how it started. And the river is still rising as of an hour or so ago.
I was sorting through some old posts and ran across this list. Hey, I said I was doing some spring cleaning. I think I put this together back when I first created Beverly’s Book Sanctuary, which make it about 1998-99. I could probably be even more precise if I dated the books although some of them were probably published before that. Anyway, I thought I’d toss it out there again just for the memories some of the titles evoke. I mean, wow, have I come a lone way in just a decade, more or less, cause there ain’t an ebook or erotic romance title on the list that I can see. Heck, there’s barely any paranormals… ;-)
The Christmas Cat anthology
In Our Dreams anthology (York / Henke / Kirk / Cummings / Evans / McFadden / Miller / Potter / Putney)
The Knights Of Christmas anthology (Barclay / Moore / Simmons)
Once Upon A Castle anthology (Roberts / Gregory / Langan / Willman)
Oh, get your minds out of the gutter. This is about comic books.
I ran across this article the other day about the movie wars between Marvel and DC comics and who might be winning. Or who might not be. It was an interesting read. For one thing, I hadn’t realized just how many movies Marvel had put out. They have been seriously cranking them out.
Something in particular, though, popped out at me and made me think of the oft-repeated discussions we romance readers have about the appeal of alpha vs. beta heroes.
Now this is where I get myself into trouble. I was raised on Marvel. To me, DC comics always seemed like goofy throwbacks to an older age in which no one ever died in comics and the heroes were so powerful I could never in any way connect with them. They were Greek Gods to the Marvel Comics Rock Stars, and so Marvel is what I read.
Ahem. Not that I would be comparing Marvel Comic heroes to, um, lesser beings or anything. Hey, the guy who wrote the article put the idea in my head! I swear.
I’ve been smiling over this one for days now and am still trying to wrap my head around the idea of a horse that weighed less than than both of my children at birth. Blink. Blink.
(Quick update: The Superman Homepage website that I’ve linked to several times in this post is changing servers so the links may not work for a couple of days, which meant I had to load the image from another source but eventually the text links will work. I hope. If not I will tweak them in a day or so. )
Would it sound totally crass and tacky of me to say that when I saw this picture of the original Lois Lane, Noel Neill, my eyes were immediately fixated on her belt buckle? Wow. Okay, so I’m a fan and a collector. I plead the fifth. Or something.
But doesn’t she look good for someone 90? What you have to keep in mind is that she’s the original not because she was Lois in the 1950s Adventures of Superman TV series with George Reeves, because technically she was the second Lois on that series. She’s the original because she played Lois Lane in the 1948/50 movie serials with Kirk Alyn for 15 episode each in 1948′s Superman & 1950′s Atom Man vs. Superman. Then she came back for five seasons of AoS.
Lately, I got in the mood to read something that wasn’t romance. Okay, blame it on watching too much Doctor Who. And maybe a healthy dose of the Ghost Whisperer, although it has a heavy romance thread. So someone explain to me how I ended up reading Storm Front, the first book of the Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher?
Weird.
All I can figure is that it was just laying around the house because my son had picked it up after the series was on the Sci-Fi network, read it and then left it for me years ago. I was suddenly curious the other day, didn’t have anything else to read and wasn’t truly in the mood for a romance novel for once. And there it was, staring at me. I mean just look at that cover. ‘Cause that’s the cover of the one that came out right after the show and not the current one available.
I liked it.
Now granted it took me awhile to get my head shifted into gear for the first person but once I did that, I enjoyed the mystery and the fantasy background. See, I can do first person with mystery plots involved. Or secrets or some such. There just has to be some reason for the use of first person other than pure naval gazing or I’m out of there.
Of course, there was Harry’s kind of whacky personality but then again that’s trademark detective style narrative so, again, I can live with that. Enough so that I think I may check out the next book in the series. How many of them I’ll actually read remains to be seen. I usually manage about three before bailing. I have this thing about trilogies being perfections. Four or five and people are pushing it, really. It takes an intriguing author voice to keep me going past that.
What most people don’t realize is that most long running romance “series” don’t count that way because they’re spin-offs, not sequential. The reader can generally dive in any old place – as long as they’re not totally obsessive and anal retentive. :D It’s only when the connected groups in romances are truly written sequentially that it becomes a problem. But most romance series do not have that strong of a connected plot arc between the individual books.
I’m a firm believer in laughter as the best medicine. Which is why I subscribe to five different humor feeds, four of which are connected to the Cheeseburger Network, you know the people who brought us the Lolcats and went on from there.
The one I get not connected to the Cheeseburger network, I follow almost as much to annoy my son as for the chuckles I get from the images. It’s Animals With Lightsabers. And, yeah, it’s about as crazy as it sounds. Sometimes it’s just dumb but other times it’s hilarious the situations people photoshop the lightsabers into. And then others are truly inspired. ;-)
I Has A Hotdog – the natural spin-off of the cats are their friendly rivals the canines and frankly I think sometimes their pictures and captions are funnier ;-)
Daily Squee – basically cute pictures of baby animals, sometimes funny, sometimes just for the “ah” factor
There I Fixed It – I’ve actually become quite addicted to this one and not necessarily for the humor, although it’s there. People “repair” things in some of the strangest, downright scary ways… o.O
My Food Looks Funny - I just found this one today. I wasn’t going to add it to my feeds because it was food related but then I I saw the following image and changed my mind. It’s philosophy in a picture. ;-)
I don’t have much time this morning before some really bad weather is heading our way but I thought I’d take a few moments to list several of the changes I’ve made to the blog in the last few weeks as part of my reorganizing & simplification efforts this year.
I’ve changed to a greatly streamlined theme with only one sidebar. This is major for me because I tend towards prefering themes that are full screen and fluid with sidebars on left and right but I fell in love with this Notepad theme when I ran across it recently. I have a thing for making lists on notepads – steno pads, mostly - and since I used to call my old blog Bev’s Notes, I think I was feeling a bit nostalgic. Okay, whatever. I am looking for a particular graphic to use as a logo and keep it from being quite so generic. I just haven’t found it yet.
Anyway, streamlining to just one sidebar also created the need to reorganize what was there, so I decided to move some of the sidebar content into pages that can be found at the top in the navigation bar. So, now there’s links there for:
Home
About
Archives
Categories
Links
Tag Cloud
The other thing I’ve been doing is simplifying the categories I use both for posts and for links. To me, categories, at least the way they’re used in WordPress are supposed to function as a Table of Contents. With the advent of tagging, those can be the index and I fully intent to start using them. As to the categories, I’m still cleaning out the ones for the posts. The categories for the links have an interesting story behind them, though. When I rearranged my book related feeds on Google Reader recently, I decided to do something different. I looked at each feed and asked myself “what kind of posts are there?” An extremely interesting thing happened because the choices were fairly obvious and had nothing to do with “who” was blogging. So I decided to use what I ended up there for the categories here. I still have some feeds to add to the links here but I’ll get to them as time allows.
And one final thing with regards to simplifying, one of the things I’ve been giving serious consideration to is what I use and what I don’t use. While I haven’t decided on the fate of my Facebook and Twitter accounts yet, which I don’t use all that much, I have found something extremely useful on Google Reader which I use all the time. It’s a widget that I’ve added to the sidebar that allows me to “share” links with comments to things I find that I might not necessarily have time or inclination to include in a full post here. The neat thing is that readers visiting the site can either go directly to the link or choose to go to my shared page and see them. Everyone should be able to see the posts and anyone with a Google account should be able to see my added comments. I think. There may be bugs to work out.
Lately, I got in the mood to read something that wasn’t romance. Okay, blame it on watching too much Doctor Who. And maybe a healthy dose of the Ghost Whisperer, although it has a heavy romance thread. So someone explain to me how I ended up reading 
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