Nirvana in Fire Fanworks Exchange

I guess DW doesn't permit vids, as I tried to upload a wonderful 24 seconds of the train running alongside a bird drifting down the Hudson. Ah well, try to imagine it!

I had a delightful stay in Montreal (a bit crispy at first, then RAIN, then perfect weather) and another delightful Scintillation. So much book talk! Bought Cameron Reed's new book, What We Are Seeing and Jo Walton's just-about-to-come-out Everybody's Perfect, and for a launch panel discussed Emmet O'Brien's first two books in his Vega Victrix series, which he is publishing AT LAST. (I'd read some of it in draft over the years.)

Let me pause and give some thumbnail thoughs here; indie publishing depends on word of mouth (don't I know it!) and I think this space opera series really deserves it.

Both Your Houses is the first book. This series represents everything I want in space opera: intriguing skiffy balanced with complex characters whose emotions are not overwhelmed by the worldbuilding. Which is quite complex, but we learn about it gradually through Corin Oshima, our first-person narrator. She has a wry voice and a dry wit that makes everything, including info, interesting.

The author chose to keep the focus of this book on a specific case, while gradually widening the lens to afford a glimpse of the larger mystery.

Great alien design is another plus, and plenty of action. Corin is my favorite kind of hero--smart, cool, cognizant of conflicting moral algebra without being a jerk. I don't like jerk main characters; when everyone is a jerk, I lose interest in a story. Corin's story immersed me right from the start.

The second book, Ever Vexed With Storms, carries on from the first book. Don't begin with this one! This is a complex space opera universe and a complex story, though in the first two volumes, the author chose a mission/mystery structure, which provides enough guidepost for the reader to start assimilating the complicated background.

Corin continues to be awesome. I love it when the action catches up with her to see how she gets out of it. There's no "and then she leaped from the pit" cheats. Great aliens, high octane emotional entanglements, and a dry, delicious wit kept me immersed until the last page.

Right now they are only available at Amazon, which--whatever else you can say about them, and there's plen-ty to say--makes it relatively easy for the first timer to upload their work. More platforms will happen, and eventually print.

I got the rights back to my INDA series at last, and I've been like a pig in mud, cleaning up all the errors that I wish had been addressed long ago. It didn't get a professional copyedit, which I desprately need, but of course I'm responsible for the crap prose. Cringe, cringe, cringe. So it' time to address that the best I can, and this time there will be a list of characters, something about the ships, and the CORRECT map. That will happen early next month.

Aside from that, so many beautiful things seen and experienced! And today the homeward trip begins; I'd planned to walk to the train station, using up that four and a half hours between latest hotel checkout and needing to be due at Albany/Rensselaer, but the weather will be eighty. Not sure I want to drag a suitcase almost two miles in 80 temps, with sporadic thunderstorms in the forecast. Rain in June? In SoCal that would be a joke, but back here, it's entirely possible! Anyway so I will find a cafe, and hole up with a book and an iced chai latte instead, and decorously take a Lyft.

It's pretty hot and humid here, but wonderful. But yesterday I was trying to cope with the news that Jane Yolen is no longer among us.

I got to know her through an apa we were in together; through that, I was invited along with a pair of other writers to stay with her in Hatfield, where she had a fifteen-room house, before going to World Fantasy Con. It was Halloween. Her daughter, in high school at the time, breezed in the night before we left for the con to report that she and friends had been going around smashing people's Halloween pumpkins on their porches, and Jane laughed like a fellow teenager, making me feel that she was ageless. Also I wondered if smashing pumpkins was a thing. (There was a band called Smashing Pumpkins.)

On the drive to the con, I was in the front seat and two other writers in the back. Jane was talking writing as she drove. (Very fast.) I gained the impression that she respected everybody who was trying to write, wherever they were along the path, but impatient with those who wanted to have written. (Writers know what I mean, for example the folks who say, "I've an idea, but I'm too busy to sit down and write it. How about me telling it to you, you write it, and we'll split the profits?" or, further along the weedy path, plagiarists who seem to need to be known as writers but can't quite do the work themselves.)

Then she asked us what we were writing, and my friends in the back described their project--they wrote together as collaborators. Then it was my turn and I said I was writing a sequel in a sequence. She said, "How many books are in this sequence?" and I said, "One hundred and thirty-five notebooks." And she slewed around to look at me--while still driving. The car swerved with a dramatic swoop and my friends in the back got saucer-eyed, but Jane straightened out the wheel as she said, "Are they any good?" "Probably not," I said.

Which was oh so true--it's taken me another forty years of slow labor to learn to RE-write, still learning--but that aside, it was a pretty funny episode. She then at that con introduced me to the woman who would become my agent. Which turned out to be problematical to a painful degree, but that was not her fault.

Subsequent meetings were always at cons, or in New York, which included insider data on how the publishing world worked, as she knew all the editors of the day. What a force of nature she was! And how generous to those of us further back on the path!