Blurb for Young Seasons Short Story Collection

I'm still not done drafting one of the stories in my Young Seasons short story collection, but I'm already starting to think about what I'll need to publish the collection. This will be in eBook format only for now. (At some point, I'll combine more of my short stories into an eBook/paper collection, and I'll include the Young Seasons stories.) I'm not ready for Maria Zannini to design the cover yet, but I have started working on the blurb. It's a little more challenging to write one for a collection since there are four separate stories, not just one. Here's my first draft:

A child must tap into the Spring Avatar’s memories of previous lives as she tries to save her mother and baby brother….

A Winter Avatar with newly woken magic faces enemies she didn’t know she had…

The Fall Avatar must protect a kitten she’s bonded with from her disapproving family….

When the Summer Avatar tries to get the attention of her true love, the wrong person responds to her call….

Before the Season Avatars of Challen came together, The Four Gods and Goddesses of Challen sent Their Avatars to vastly different lives. The challenges the four young women faced shaped them as they grew ready to claim their destinies. Learn more about Gwen, Jenna, Ysabel and Kay as Young Season Avatars. Includes the first chapter of Scattered Seasons, Book Two in the Season Avatars series. 

 Any thoughts? I'm sure I'll need to revise the blurb a couple of times before I come up with a final version. Feel free to leave constructive criticism in the comments.

Science of the Week, 1/6/17

Here are some of the most interesting science news articles I read during the first week of 2016:

Flood threats changing across U.S.

Epigenetics and the direction of anti-aging science

Dying of a broken heart

Using "fire to fight fire" to combat disease could make it worse, tests show

A new home on Mars: NASA Langley's icy concept for living on the Red Planet

"Heart-in-a-dish" sheds light on genetics of heart disease

Have a good weekend, everyone, and see you Monday!

IWSG: A Rule to Ignore--Cautiously

Welcome to the first Insecure Writer's Support Group of 2017! This month, our co-hosts are Eva @ lilicasplace, Crystal Collier, Sheena-Kay Graham, Chemist Ken, LG Keltner, and Heather Gardner.

This month's question is What writing rule do you wish you'd never heard?

As soon as I read this question, I knew my response definitely had to be about adverbs. While this rule has the good intention of pressuring writers to choose strong verbs, it does so at the cost of persuading them that an entire class of words should be stricken from their vocabularies. Sometimes using an adverb can subtly shade meanings in a way that would be difficult, if not impossible, to do with a single word. For example, "She smiled forlornly." Grinning, grimacing, beaming, and smirking don't convey the mixed feelings of this character.

Adverbs can also be part of a writing style for a particular story. A melodramatic character would use more of them than an emotionally stable character. Similarly, adverbs feel more at home in my fantasy Season Avatars series set in a Victorianesque world than they do in my science fiction, where my POV characters tend to have scientific backgrounds. (Disclaimer: I'm sure there are adverbs in my Catalyst Chronicles series; they're there for the reason I cite above.)

A third reason for disregarding the rule to avoid adverbs is to improve your writing flow. Often as I'm drafting a story, the sentence that first pops into my head comes with an adverb. If I tell myself to rewrite that sentence every time that happens, it would interfere with my ability to make progress on the story. I find it easier to type the adverb and keep going. The best time to decide if a particular adverb is worth keeping is during the revising/editing stages. I remove a significant fraction of the adverbs in my stories when I revise, but I don't eliminate them completely. Sometimes I even add them. For example, I changed "I don't remove all of them" to "I don't eliminate them completely" to remove a word and make the line punchier. Being flexible with my use of adverbs allows me to adjust word counts to the optimum length for each story.

Are you a fan or foe of adverbs? Are there other writing rules you disagree with? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

2016 Reading Review and 2017 Goals

Happy New Year! I hope you enjoyed the holidays. I didn't get as many "fun" activities done during my break as I'd hoped, but I purged a lot of old documents and other things from my office. I also updated the back matter (including book links and info about my Instafreebie giveaway) in all my works and put everything in wide distribution.

Anyway, I managed to get a lot of reading done on December 30th and finished the year with 202 books read. (Goodreads includes everything from short stories to multi-book editions as a single book, and my reading spanned the gamut.) Here's the breakdown by genre:

Science Fiction: 34
Fantasy: 95 (this is always my biggest category)
Other: 26
Non-Fiction: 47

Most of my stories were eBooks, but about 67 of the books were paper. The vast majority of those were library books. Only a handful were books owned by me or a family member. My paper To-Be-Read stack comes up to my shoulders, and I doubt it'll shrink much in 2017.

Here are some of the standout reads for me this year:I'm too lazy to hyperlink them all, but please let me know if you'd like more information about a particular book.

The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World
Binti
1491
Uprooted
Wonder City Stories
The Ugly Princess
Miss Landon and Aubranael
Sorcerer to the Crown
Too Much of a Good Thing
Kingfisher
The Dorito Effect
The Sixteen Burdens
The Deathsniffer's Assistant

For 2017, I've scaled back my Goodreads reading challenge to 180 books. I might unofficially strive for 200 books since that's a more impressive number, but I don't want to worry about making my goal as much as I did last year.

Here are my writing and publishing goals for this year:

Writing

1. Complete the Young Seasons short story collection. I'm almost done with the last story, but I'm still working on the resolution.
2. Complete a children's (middle-grade level) book that I've already started. I may publish this under a pseudonym, so I'm not going to discuss it much in detail yet.
3. Draft the first book in a new urban fantasy series. I need to do some more research and story development before I start. This one may carry over to 2018 if necessary.
4. If time permits, finish some of the short stories that have been hanging around for a while.
5. Write a holiday short story set in the Season Avatars world.

Publishing

1. The Young Seasons collection, tentatively in the first quarter of the year.
2. Summon the Seasons, the fifth and final book in the Season Avatars series. This may come out mid-year or later.
3. The Season Avatars holiday story mentioned earlier, probably in November or December.


Do you set goals for yourself every year? If so, feel free to share them in the comments.

Science of the Week, 12/16/16

Happy Rogue One Day! Are you planning to see it this weekend?

Here are some of the most interesting science news articles I read this week:

Scientists track restoration of communication in mimially conscious patient

Going tooth-to-tooth with dinosaurs

Beans and peas increase fullness more than meat

Today's children face tough prospects of being better off than their parents

Telomere growth predicts reduced chance of death from heart disease

Flexible device captures energy from human motion

Telomeres--too much of a good thing?

NIH competition seeks wearable device to detect alcohol levels in real time

Mitigating the risk of geoengineering: aerosols could cool the planet without ozone damage

Low-cost paper-based skin patch monitors dehydration by changing color from sweat

People can control a robotic arm with only their minds


I'm planning to take the rest of the year off from blogging. Happy Holidays to all, and I'll let you know in 2017 if I managed to make my reading goal for this year!

To-Do Lists and Other Organizational Methods

Friday will be my last day of work for the year. I'm always stingy with my vacation days, since I never know when my son will get sick or if something happens at school or daycare. That means I still have a lot of time to use up. I'm not planning to go anywhere; instead, I'm making a master list in Word of everything from chores to do around the house, writing/publishing tasks to work on, other personal project, and even fun things for me and my family to do. By the time I finish this list, I'm sure it will be overwhelming and probably more than I'll realistically be able to complete in two weeks. I'm not going to plot out a timetable for all these activities either. After all, my productivity is going to depend in part on whether my son is home (and yes, I have activities with him on the list too). It may be a very informal way to manage my tasks, but as long as I complete a good amount of them, that's all I need.

How do you organize your tasks? Do you create to-do lists, or do you use another method? Do you use paper, apps, or a combination of them? Feel free to share your method (or madness, if you prefer) in the comments.

Goodreads Reading Challenge Update

I don't have much to talk about today, so I thought I'd give you a quick update on my 2016 Goodreads Reading Challenge. I wanted to read 200 books this year, and I've currently read 180, which puts me eight books behind schedule. In addition to the books I have on my Currently Reading shelf, I also have two others that I'm working on. It'll be a tough pace to finish 20 books before the end of the year, especially if they're not short. Good thing I have the last two weeks of the year off. We'll see how close I get to 200.

Science of the Week, 12/9/16

Here are some of the most interesting science news articles I read this week:

Study suggests possible new target for treating and preventing Alzheimer's

Portions of the brain fall asleep and wake back up all the time

Parkinson's Disease linked to microbiome 

Protecting our food system in a changing climate

Marine microbes could help clean up environmental pollutants

Engineers develop first-ever capsule to treat hemophilia

Smart plants show ability thought reserved for animals

No safe level of smoking: even low-intensity smokers are at increased risk of early death

Are there tsunamis in the Great Lakes?

"Spooky" sightings in crystal point to extremely rare quantum spin liquid

The secret slimming effect of sweet potato waste

Blood products unaffected by drone trips

Images of faraway galaxies shed new light on dark matter

IWSG: An Indie Author's Five-Year Plan

Welcome to the final Insecure Writer's Support Group post of 2016! Today's co-hosts include Jennifer Hawes, Jen Chandler, Nick Wilford, Juneta Key, JH Moncrieff, Diane Burton, and MJ Fifield.

This month, we've been given the question: In terms of your writing career, where do you see yourself five years from now, and what's your plan to get there?

I have two goals in mind for the next five years:

1. Publish at least two works a year, even if they're not full-length novels (though I ought to be able to manage at least one novel a year). For example, in 2017 I plan to publish Young Seasons, a short story collection about the Season Avatars, and Summon the Seasons, the final book in the Season Avatars series. I plan to write the first book (tentatively titled Dryads to Discover) in a new urban fantasy series next year, but it might not be ready until 2018. There will be at least two other books in the urban fantasy series, plus I want to develop a spin-off series called Selathen Avatars that takes place after Summon the Seasons. At some point, I'd like to return to the Catalyst Chronicles series (I'm struggling with a short story called "The Unnumbered World," which is told from a minor character's POV. Since Julia is half-Navajo, writing from her perspective is a challenge.) I'm sure there will be even more ideas down the line--the trick is keeping up with them all and giving myself sufficient lead time from first draft to publication.

2. Grow my mailing list to at least 1,000 subscribers. Thanks to a highly promoted giveaway on Instafreebie, over 300 people signed on to my mailing list in exchange for a free copy of Scattered Seasons. I intend to keep the giveaway running for a while; perhaps as my backlist expands, I'll be able to switch out the books I offer for free. The key will be keeping my current subscribers even as I add others.

If you're an author, do you have a five-year plan? Feel free to describe it in the comments.

Guest Post by Aviva Rothschild

  My friend Aviva Rothschild recently published a sequel to her Beatles/gaming novel With Strings Attached. It's called The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World. She's here to discuss some of the themes in Keys. Take it away, Aviva!

            Many thanks to Sandra for giving me this space today!

            Almost six years ago I finished what turned out to be a 29-year project: the Beatles fanfic fantasy novel, With Strings Attached, or The Big Pink Job. I'd always had sequels in mind, and I had gotten started on the first one while finishing up Strings. It went through several name changes (not to mention plot changes), but I settled on The Keys Stand Alone. Because it's turning out to be longer than Strings, I decided to split it into two volumes; hence, the first volume is now The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World. (The second volume will be Keys: The Hard World.) It is currently available in a Kindle version on Amazon, and I intend to have the hard copy version done within a few days.

            Strings followed our heroes in 1980, when they suddenly found themselves thrown together on a planet called C'hou, sixteen years younger and terrified out of their minds. One thing led to another, and by the end of the book they'd been considerably empowered and had accomplished a universe-spanning quest to remove a curse from a continent... though their actions resulted in even greater changes to the entirety of C'hou, as well as changes to themselves and their peace of mind. Changes that they would confront ten weeks later in Keys, after having been sent back to Earth in their original bodies. While those days had been slipping by here, C'hou saw almost six years go by, and our heroes quickly discover that now nearly everything is different, including the landscape and the inhabitants.

            Not to mention the war that had broken out in the interim between the newly established White and Black Towers. And the huge swarm of outworlders who had been imported by the enfeebled White Tower gods to fight for them, but who tended to fight one another more than the Black Tower and its minions.

            So here come our peace-minded heroes, more powerful than nearly everyone else but absolutely opposed to the violence around them. Imagine their horror when they're told by the gods that they must help one of the outworlder Power Groups defeat the Black Tower, or they'll never get home!

             Strings touched upon a lot of the themes in Keys, but with more time to mull everything over, I did my best to more fully examine certain problems inherent in both the situation and in the kind of empowerment that our heroes experienced. For example, what is good? What is evil? How contextual are they? What happens when people, especially powerful people rubbing up against one another, have very different definitions of good and evil? Is pacifism always good, or are there times when it could be considered evil?  I do not and cannot provide answers, but hopefully I convey how complicated such questions are, and how seeing things in simple black-and-white terms is fairly useless in real-world situations.

            Keys is also sort of a parallel to the middle part of the Beatles experience, in that what they once found fun and exciting in Strings has now become much more toxic, if not outright deadly. Again, the toxicity is both internal and external to them. Not only must they deal with magic that can be dangerously unreliable—or worse, dangerously seductive—but they find that nearly everyone wants something from them. And quite often, what people want is not something that our heroes want to give....

            At least, though, they have each other. At least they can trust one another. If Keys does nothing else, it reestablishes what a tight unit the four can be, and had been at their peak. It reminds readers that whatever their differences, the four loved one another deeply and shared something that no one else can really fully comprehend.

The Kindle edition of The Keys Stand Alone is here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MROVWSZ

Curious about With Strings Attached, or want to buy a copy in one of several different formats? http://www.rationalmagic.com/Strings/Strings.html

 

The Facebook page for Strings, which includes some artwork not in the book or on the website: https://www.facebook.com/With-Strings-Attached-Fan-Page-111118925586155/

Aviva's Bio: Aviva Rothschild is the world's most overeducated fanfic writer. In the past she worked as a book editor, technical writer, and (briefly) website designer. Currently she writes, makes soap, and sells stuff on eBay in the store “Gatsby's Great Stuff.” Besides her Beatles writing, she's known for having written the very first bibliography of graphic novels, Graphic Novels: A Bibliographic Guide to Book-Length Comics. Naturally, she collects graphic novels. She also collects musical theatre recordings on CDs and other musical formats.