This news tidbit sent to me by DarkForgotten group member Loranthiana

A boatful of hunters from Wainwright, Alaska, discovered a large, fibrous blob floating in the Chukchi Sea. Dark and miles across, it was at first thought to be an oil spill. Or perhaps the world’s biggest Scrubby. Others thought perhaps a call to Agent Mulder was in order.

It was none of the above, but alarming in its own way. The article states:

“Test results released Thursday showed the blob wasn’t oil, but a plant - a massive bloom of algae. While that may seem less dangerous, a lot of people are still uneasy. It’s something the mostly Inupiat Eskimo residents along Alaska’s northern coast say they could never remember seeing before.”

(see whole article here)

Algae blooms can be problematic, especially where seafood is harvested. It’s also a huge indicator that things aren’t normal, sometimes for natural reasons, other times because humans have mucked something up.

My twisted imagination has the blob galumphing across the Arctic waste in search of human settlements to terrorize and possibly digest. Maybe a nice bunch of plump Aryan survivalists ready to save the great white north for great white hunters. Num, num.

I know some people think global warming, while messy and full of natural disasters, is an inconvenient process humankind will ride out like a bad storm. Then we’ll dust ourselves off and carry on, just with more sunscreen or warm socks as appropriate. I think they tend to forget everything else will adapt, too. They should read more science fiction.

I’ve noticed that in the romance market, series have become de rigeur. I suspect this has as much to do with marketing as anything else. As with movies, if one has good box office, make a sequel and cash in. Ditto books. The system works pretty well for authors because it gives us a chance to hook a readership in a way single efforts might not.

As an author, it affects how we think about plots. It’s nice if there’s an overarching idea to drive the series, but each book has to have its own logic. And what if your readers pick them up out of order? It’s a problem if there has to be pages of explanation to catch them up before the adventure even begins. In other words, we have to be clever little pumpkins to do a good job.

For this reason, SCORCHED can be read independently of RAVENOUS. They’re sequential and related, but by no means inextricable from each other. I think most authors aim for this kind of flexibility now, especially when bookstores aren’t always stocking all the titles in a series. If it’s too hard for a reader to pick up the story part-way through, the author loses the opportunity to bring more people on board.

Speaking as a reader, I love a series I can sink my teeth into. Characters become family. Places become like old friends. I start expecting to meet my favourite heroes on the street. The books become a reliable, comfortable haven—or at least a constant source of entertainment. I’m not sure I’d want to exactly hang out in Rachel Caine’s Morganville, even though I wait with bated breath for each new instalment.

Another series I’ve loved is CT Adams and Cathy Clamp’s Thrall series. It’s original and interesting and occasionally downright scary.

And then there’s C.H. Harris’s beautifully-written regency historical detective series (Sebastian St. Cyr mysteries.)

Those are just a few of my favourites–there’s no shortage of great series out there. Nevertheless, do you as a reader ever feel series exhaustion? Despite an author’s best efforts to make each book stand-alone, do you ever get tired of having to figure out which one to read first, or when you kind find the first one without ordering it on-line?

I was invited by Romance in the Back Seat to participate in a round robin short story called “White Wedding Nightmares.” My segment just went up today. Some of the other participants are: Angie Fox, Jacquelyn Frank, Michelle Rowan … just a huge list of really talented and fun writers! It’s essentially a story about a slayer who gives it all up to get married, but then all the paranormal hotties in her life show up to protest and the adventure begins.

Here’s our platitude for the day: Life is a series of “what if” propositions. What if I had done A instead of B? Made this choice instead of that one? “What if” isn’t just a plotting device; it’s the stuff our lives are made of. Unfortunately, most of the time it’s not a terribly useful line of thought.

Despite smacking my metaphorical self upside the head, I’ve been in the land of “what if” fairly regularly of late. Self-indulgent, because I don’t really have a lot to complain about. Short of having a fat trust fund or a sugar daddy, I’m in a pretty good situation for an author–a steady day job, a quiet space at home to write, and good organizational skills. You’d think juggling demands would be a snap. As advertised during my school years, there is no reason the modern superwoman can’t have whatever and as much as she wants.

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This blog is mirrored in a few places – over to LiveJournal, MySpace, and then fed through to Facebook. Up until now, I’ve been handling this mostly through a cut and paste process that took some time due to logging in, logging out, toggling between pages, blah blah. As a consequence, I’ve often skipped posting because I didn’t have the time to go through the whole process.

I’ve now had Digital Dragon, mage queen of technostuff, outfit this patch of cyberspace with feeds to everywhere. I blog once, and I’m done. So nice. I think this will make it easier to put something up more often because it’s not going to be such a big deal.

The one hiccup is MySpace. It doesn’t accept a full mirror of Wordpress right to the blog page, so there is now a widget on the main page with the feed. It’s a nifty, pretty little thing.

Just seeing if the feeds work

My characters tend to show up full-grown. They walk into my head, sit down, and start trying to boss me around. Usually they come with their names, as well as annoying habits, a fashion statement (or lack thereof), and attitude.

Occasionally, though, you get the one-name guy. Historical writers will be familiar with this phenomenon—they’ll be “Buckingham” or “Fitzcarruthers” and evidently popped into the universe with no first name and, if they’re aristocracy, only a title. It takes me months of prodding before they finally confess to being “Steve” or “Bob”. Captain Reynard (you’ll meet him in SCORCHED) didn’t have a first name until I slapped one his forehead and said “live with it.” He’s still pouting even though I’ve explained REPEATEDLY that a hero with his own book has to make SOME sacrifices. Yeesh. I’m still writing book three, so he’d better mind his manners or I’ll have my revenge.

However, it’s not safe to assume a werecougar or a hellhound or even a witch will have the same naming traditions as a human. Witches take their surnames from their mothers, not their fathers. This had me really confused until I figured out that the blood relationships between my various characters would only work if the society was matrilineal. Suddenly a complex family tree problem was solved. Yup, the author is sometimes the last to know.

Hellhounds, as far as I can figure, only have one name. Lore is just Lore, although there’s no “just” about him. What do you say about a guy who risks death daily to save just one more of his people?

Another upcoming character is Errata Jones, an announcer/journalist/werecougar and a good friend of Perry Baker’s (the werewolf professor in RAVENOUS). An errata is a list of corrections, so she’s obviously playing a joke. I wonder about her real name but, y’know, cats have secrets. She hasn’t given me hers yet.

There are a lot of complexities in naming characters, and I’ve always found that it never pays to force it. If I sit down with a book of names and try to choose one, it won’t stick. It kind of makes me wonder about our parents picking baby names before we’re even born. How many of us feel like we truly fit the name we got?

Apparently, in Latvia—the EU nation worst hit by economic crisis—there’s no need to provide more than a first name to get a bank loan. No knuckle-draggers will show up at three a.m. to collect the debt, either. The catch? All you need to do is to put up your soul as collateral.

The article reads: Such a deal is being offered by the Kontora loan company, whose public face is Viktor Mirosiichenko, 34. Clients have to sign a contract, with the words “Agreement” in bold letters at the top. The client agrees to the collateral, “that is, my immortal soul.”

It’s enough to make me eyeball my Visa bill with suspicion. Sure, we’ve become a society that likes to play fast and loose with our credit rating, but what’s with the Brothers Grimm lending terms? Maybe we crave the certainty of a time when our word was our bond and breaking it was unthinkable? Or perhaps we’re blasé enough to scoff at dealing with the devil?

What I do find interesting is the number of people willing to sign on the dotted line. He’s got roughly 200 takers in the last two months.

Just wanted to share this great read by Kim Lenox, one of my fellow Silk and Shadows crew.

I read it and loved it. Lots of atmosphere, great characters, great worldbuilding. Late Victorian England with immortals and seriously nasty supernatural killers. Some fun archeological bits. Here’s the back copy:

Marcus Helios was a member of the Shadow Guard until one reckless act changed it all, bringing him to the edge of madness. His hope for salvation lies in a cryptic message contained within two cryptic scrolls he believes to be in the possession of an enigmatic beauty named Mina. And Mina is not about to hand over the scrolls’ secrets to a total stranger.

But someone else has designs on the mysterious relics, and on Mark: Jack the Ripper’s jilted bride. Her malevolent embrace will trap everyone within reach, and her dark plans will challenge the powers of all she is destined to destroy.