A New Viking Amoeba Recruit from Paul Genesse
And another recruit! Many more to come, too… The Draekon’s Underling — Vannus Ebromia Strength 3; Intelligence 5 Special Ability: Whisper (In secret, add +3 to strength for one of your Viking Amoebas for one turn; write the target amoeba on a piece of paper and reveal it during combat) (The Secret Empire by Paul Genesse)
A New Viking Amoeba Recruit from Clay and Susan Griffith
I’ve been a bad host about getting these Viking Amoebas up in a timely manner. Expect a whole lot more in the future. But for now, here’s the newest recruit to the Army! The Consumer — Duchaosus Strength 5; Intelligence 1 Special Ability: Absorb (During combat, you may sacrifice one amoeba to permanently increase Duchaosus’ strength by that amoeba’s strength) (Vampire Empire: The Greyfriar by Clay and Susan Griffith)
Audible, Our Show, and Mad Libs!
If you haven’t noticed yet, we’ve partnered with Audible.com through their podcast affiliates program. And we’re as stoked about it as Voyager 6 at discovering human beings are the creator. In other words, we’re completely straight-faced, without any sense of emotion whatsoever, as if we’ve discovered everything there is to know and have nothing else to do but fulfill basic programming. Maybe that’s not such a great analogy… Anywho. The idea is pretty simple. You sign up for a trial membership with Audible.com, Audible hugs us with giant bear arms (just like in the 2nd Amendment), and everyone comes out on top — we get hugs, you get a free audiobook (and, we hope, a lifelong love of Audible’s services), and Audible realizes that it will only take a few more years before it can take over the world using its self-replicating spider robots… But here’s where things get really fun. To make things interesting, we’ve created a mad lib and want to solicit word suggestions from you, our dear listeners. Every week, we’ll record a new version of the mad lib using words chosen by all of you. Next season, we’ll write a whole new version and repeat the process. This will make it a lot more fun for us, and for you, because our little dialogue will always be filled with wacky nonsense! So, for our second mad lib Audible advertisement, we’d like to solicit word suggestions. Here’s what we need: 9 x Thing 4 x Adjective 3 x Verb 1 x Feeling 1 x Date 1 x Place The rules: 1) Nothing filthy. Mad libs tend to end up suggestive all on their own, but we don’t want to intentionally waltz into dirty territory. 2) Nothing with the obvious potential for offence (racial slurs, etc.). Start suggesting! You can suggest all at once, or just throw in some random things. We’ll pick from the lot.
Guest Post: “Writing Silver Moon and Menopausal Werewolves” by Catherine Lundoff
I would love to say that when I first thought of the premise for Silver Moon (middle-aged woman unexpectedly becomes a werewolf), I was engaged in some sort of deep and thorough analysis of the dearth of female werewolves and of middle-aged female protagonists in genre. In reality, I was watching Ginger Snaps, films 1 and 2, and the prequel. The Ginger Snaps movies, for those who haven’t discovered them yet, are a series of Canadian films that managedto successfully combine horror, feminism, satire and lycanthropy. In the first movie, teenage sisters Ginger and Brigitte are disaffected high school students contemplating either running away from home or dying by sixteen. Then, Ginger is attacked by a werewolf. She has, inevitably, just started her period. The plot escalates from there as Ginger revenges herself against their classmates and begins to lose her humanity while Brigitte tries desperately to cure her. The movies, apart from being entertaining, got me thinking about depictions of female werewolves in sf and f and horror. There aren’t a lot to choose from, particularly as main characters: Ginger Snaps; Suzy McKee Charnas’ protagonist in “Boobs;” Millar’s Lonely Werewolf Girl; the anthology Women Who Run with Werewolves and a few others. The best-known female werewolves in science fiction and fantasy and horror are young women, often teenagers or in their early twenties. And the women often transition to lycanthropy as the result of the onset of menses, which triggers a werewolf attack. While I was cogitating on this, editor JoSelle Vanderhooft contacted me about writing a story for an anthology of lesbian werewolf novellas that she was working on (now out as Bitten by Moonlight from Zumaya Press). So I started pulling my previous noodlings together into a story idea that went something along the lines of “If it can happen at one change in life, why not another?” Add to that the indisputable fact that there are very few middle-aged female protagonists in sf/f and put the two together, at least in my brain, and ta-da! Menopausal werewolves. I decided that I wanted to write about a middle-aged woman who turns into a werewolf as she entered menopause. And she wouldn’t know that it was going to happen, until it did (not unlike some aspects of going through menopause). This woman would have a community of some sort around her, as well as people who didn’t want her to change, because I wanted to write about those relationships. Once I got that far, I needed a rationale for why there would be more than one werewolf near my protagonist to support the story I wanted to tell. This was, as it turned out, closely connected to the question of how she or they became werewolves in the first place. One of the marvelous things about writing about werewolves is that there is such a wealth of interesting stories about how the change is brought about. My personal favorite, though not the one I used, is the legend that suggests that you can become were by drinking rainwater from a wolf’s paw print. You can also put on a belt made of wolf skin, apply magical ointment, or simply sleep outside under the full moon. Given the options, being bitten by a werewolf or just plain being born that way were pretty prosaic. I had already ruled out the option of her being born a werewolf if I wanted it to be unexpected. So that meant that either she had to get bitten by another werewolf or something else had to happen. I wanted to do something besides transmission by biting, in part because it would start her off with an antagonistic relationship with the other werewolves. I wanted to do something different, something that felt more in line with the tone of the story. But the rainwater from the paw print thing seemed a bit much. What I came up with instead was the idea of using place-based magic. This had to do with my desire to write a story that touched on ideas about community and activism. Why not a place that impacted some of its inhabitants in unusual ways? I bowed to tradition in keeping the lunar-based transformations, though these werewolves can break from that if they have enough control. Otherwise, the magic of the place picks and chooses who changes and when. The place in question is a town called “Wolf’s Point” in a valley in the American West (I opted not to put it in a specific state). Generations of Native Americans from different tribes and immigrants from different parts of the world combined elements of their various magical traditions to create a special place. It was one guarded first by the spirit of the wolves, then actual werewolves. And who better to call as guardians than healthy older women who’ve been written off as too old to be desirable or to bear children? My protagonist, Becca Thornton, is a fairly recent transplant to Wolf’s Point. She’s divorced and working in the local hardware store for Pete and Shelly Peterson. Shelly Peterson has a secret, one shared by several of Becca’s neighbors and some of the other women in the Wolf’s Point Women’s Club. Shortly after her fiftieth birthday, the valley’s magic calls Becca to join them in the local werewolf pack, comprised of women of a “certain age.” And she’s not wildly enthusiastic about it. In fact, Becca is pretty conflicted about a lot of things. She doesn’t want to be menopausal, or a werewolf, or have a crush on her neighbor, Pack Beta Erin Adams. She wants to be normal, at least some of the time. This is what leaves her open to the offer of a “cure” from a group of aspiring werewolf hunters who arrive in Wolf’s Point with an agenda of their own. My werewolf hunters are an odd bunch in and of themselves. Most of them are former military, and several of them are “ex-wolves” (the
Linda Nagata Reaches For Twenty Reviews: Can you help?
Nebula Award-winning author Linda Nagata wants to hit twenty reviews on Amazon.com for The Dread Hammer and Hepen the Watcher, the first two books in her Puzzle Lands series. From Nagata’s website: Author Stephen Harper Piziks, a fellow Book View Café member, says that: “Amazon makes recommendations based on the number of reader reviews a book gets. When a book reaches 20 reader reviews, Amazon’s computer starts recommending it. The content of the reviews doesn’t matter–only that the book got reviews.” To test Stephen’s theory, I’m following his example and launching a contest to encourage you to help me by writing an Amazon review of either The Dread Hammer or Hepen the Watcher, or if you’re really into it, of both! The review doesn’t have to be elaborate. A couple of sentences conveying your general opinion should do it, though of course longer coverage is fine too. To sweeten the pot, she’s going to give away free books to one international and one U.S. reviewer. All you have to do is leave a comment with a link to your review! In the pot: The selected USA commenter will receive EITHER a print copy of both Puzzle Lands books OR a print copy of any ONE of the Nanotech Succession books OR the Tor® hardcover of Memory. The selected non-USA commenter will get to select any two of Mythic Island Press LLC’s ebooks. Admit it. That sounds pretty awesome, right? You can find free samples here. Both books are available on Booktopia, Powell’s, Book View Cafe, Amazon and Barnes and Noble in print and/or ebook editions. You can find links to all these places here. The ebook is only $4.99! Have at it, folks!
Guest Post: “The Perils of the Past” by Michaele Jordan
If you’ve read my novel Mirror Maze, then you already know that I’m just a tad obsessive about accurate historical detail. I admit it: it just drives me nuts to read a supposed period piece only to discover that it is chock full of anachronisms and all the characters have a completely 21st century ‘tude. Perhaps my suspension of disbelief is more fragile than some, but that always knocks me right out of the story. So when I’m writing, I research. But. . . The thing about research is that you never know where it will lead you. Sometimes it won’t take you anywhere (or at least nowhere useful.) I had a character once who heard a loud bonging noise. I wanted to say that it sounded like Big Ben, but I figured I should check if Big Ben had been built in 1886. It seemed like a simple yes or no question. I discovered immediately that the tower for Big Ben was certainly in place. The clock was installed in plenty of time. But the bell was put in later. After four hours of research (during which I learned many interesting things about Victorian construction techniques, the sociological functions of large
