Tuesday, August 25, 2020

Bury Your Tropes

 Good evening, blog people. Here is the video of the Bury Your Tropes panel I was on as part of the Renaissance Virtual Con.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRERk_O4-Idi6W5zO6wX6-g

And stay tuned, because I am part of a very exciting project that I'm going to officially announce as soon as we confirm the submission guidelines.

What's that? Do you think just because it has submission guidelines it must be an anthology or something? *Innocent whistling* i'm sure I don't know what you're talking about. You'll just have to wait and see.

Wednesday, August 19, 2020

Lord's Dome by EDE Bell


Greetings! Today I am honored to welcome author and editor EDE Bell to talk about her new book Lord's Dome, available now through Atthis Arts! (I've worked with her and her publisher several times – and she is one of our Space Opera Libretti author – and have nothing but good things to say.)



 Can you describe Lord’s Dome in one or two sentences?

 

Lord’s Dome is a short novel about a girl who decides to question what she’s been told and an older woman who must decide whether to help her. It’s a fantasy, but with a different style of world building and elements of many other genres, so I’m hoping it will appeal to non-fantasy readers as well.

 

What made you want to write this book? What made you want to self-publish it?

 

I wrote this book in 2018. As I discuss in the Preface, it was an experiment of mine during an editing break, to see if I could write a short novel. I don’t think I said this part in the Preface, but I wanted to see if I could write something a little more poppy. A shorter story with high excitement and flow. With all that’s happened this year, some of my memories are floating around in a bowl of water right now, but as I recall, I was thinking about power at the time. However 2020 has gone, 2018 held trials too. I actually had some interesting inspiration, but that gets into spoilers. Anyway: Power. Resistance. Truth. Things on my mind at the time.

 

Additionally, I now realize everything I’ve written to date has been heavily influenced by my own mental issues. This would be a long discussion, but in this case, there are definitely some psychological things going on in this book.

 

All of that said, the book flowed out quickly. First, a fairly simple outline, then a full story. I surprised myself how quickly it came together. Then I put it aside, as a project for another day. And look, it is another day!

 

As for self-publishing, I’ve self-published all of my books because I own the small press. I know there is a big price for this, but I just can’t imagine not having final creative say over the product. (And I’m extraordinary lucky having a life and business partner who can help do the rest. I know how fortunate I am for that.) However, this one is particularly so because we did all the edits and design on a short timeline and no budget. (More about that in your next question.) So it does absolutely have big self-pub energy. Huge.

 

2020 has been a rough year for a lot of us, myself included. What has it been like, trying to release books this year? How is it different than past years?

 

There is so much to this. First, I’ve been open about having some serious mental health issues, ones beyond the common 2020 issues, and also discoveries about my disabilities this year, after a near-total collapseThis involved periods of mental stateas well as medication that were difficult to work through. On top of that, because of the pandemic, a lot of our releases slipped—then all happened at once, and me seeing that those authors needing the joy of seeing their products released, and were relying on us to do that without further delay, so I wanted to make it all work. We’ve released or will be releasing an anthology, a fantasy novel, two graphic novels, and a novella fairy tale this year. On top of that, I was in the middle of my own fantasy serial with a three-month release schedule that I was determined to keep on track. (Diamondsong Part 10releases in October, and the entire print bundle is available now at edebell.com/diamondsong)

 

All of this involved edits, proofreading, sensitivity changes—it was a lot to work through, some during some rather intense personal issues. There was a lot going on, and it took all that I had (which was limited) to keep it all going. But I realized I needed to create as well, and so, I started working world building for my next big series. For me, world building is slow and careful work, and while it got me through some really hard days and was probably all I could have done at the time, it didn’t have the lift of a near-term goal. In the meantime, one of my friends had just read this manuscript, which as I’ve said, Id written in 2018. She really liked it, and encouraged me to try and release it as soon as possible. I thought, can I do that? Like, right now? But something about her enthusiasm, and then the enthusiasm of the others who beta read it really made me feel like I was going to make it through this. It gave me a reason to try and focus better, a reason to feel excitement; it even allowed me to change some of my medications in ways that made it easier for me to work the edits. I don’t know if I was ready yet to write a novel, but I found myself feeling ready to bring a short one to life, and it was a totally cyclical process, where the book gave me the energy I needed to have more energy for the book. While still taking care of myself, this time.

 

As for releasing all of these books this year, yeah, it’s been hard, even beyond the personal issues. Hard because it’s difficult to sell and get attention online. Sales have been…I’ll censor myself here and say the sales have not been where we needed them to be, even for books we felt sure would do better. But we are doing our best trying to make ads work, trying to find ways to be seen, and just hoping something breaks through.

 

As for releasing this book, I simply can’t pretend it wasn’t a 2020 thing and I don’t even want to. People are like: don’t tell people you did this on no dollars, and I’m like whoop I put it in the Preface! : D But to me, this is a total triumph. This book is made out of friendship and hope and we-exist and who-we-are-is-good and we-are-going-to-make-it more even than paper and words. Friends encouraged me to do it, friends went through extra efforts to beta and read and help review. We made our NO DOLLARS COVER on our computer, and we put this book out there with every tiny drop of 2020 “I did this and I like it just how it is” that I had in me.

 

I feel like I haven’t even scratched the surface of this question. 2020 is so much. Like, there’s so much more I could say.

 

On that note, if people do like this story, please let other readersknow. Reviews, ratings, recommendations - any success of this book will depend entirely on that.

 

Being way too honest (a thing I do), we need to get to a point where Chris and I can take a break. A real break. But for now,surviving and books with all the heart and hope of our beings pressed into their pages is what I’ve got.

 

And to everyone out there also having a hard time of any type, I’m sending love. Let’s feel it together, and feel that power.

 

What can you tell me about your writing style for this book? Are most of your stories written with a Great Lakes dialect, or is this one different?

 

In general, I have learned not to stifle my voice in my writing. Early on, an editor told me that even if I was from Michigan, my characters and readers weren’t, and strongly encouraged me to phrase things in more “standard" ways, which at the time I did. Yet this really started to bother me. First, if I were writing representations of different backgrounds on Earth, that might be a more relevant discussion. Next, the more I learned about how writers of regional and cultural backgrounds are commonly demanded to write to other people’s speech patterns, it really made me passionate in general about honoring our authentic voices, whenever and however we choose to express them. Next, it’s fiction. It’s art! As I’ve said many times, strict standards may be necessary for the Mars Landing Manual, but they are not necessary for a slipstream fantasy novel about people in a magic mine.

 

As for this story, because it was an experiment when I wrote it, I decided to be even more colloquial. I just let the words flow, and the characters speak, and had such a wonderful time writing this back in 2018. When I revisited it in 2020, with all the 2020 emotion, I was set and determined not to write those qualitiesout of it. So even for me, this book has an informal, rules-annoy-me tone, and given a whole bunch of things about this story (characters, world building, the world itself, plot flow, plot, themes…), I really think it worked.

 

Who’s your favorite character?

 

I couldn’t pick between the two main characters. The story is told equally between a young teenager and an older mentor / supervisor. As I’ve learned that a lot of my own difficulties go back to my youth, again, I am now certain this comes from a very personal and psychological place. (Other themes in my writing have become apparent!) So let’s leave Gu Non and Vo Jie alone, as I truly love both of these characters. They are earnest, flawed, and I hope vibrant on the page.

 

So I’m going to pick our kindly old priest, Ny Auv. He is sweet, he is passionate, and in a very difficult life, he has used his relative privilege for his own best quiet resistance, without ever knowing what it might do. I hope this is one resonance of the story: the power of doing something, even when more feels out of reach. To remember that the power of hope often comes from our believing in it.

 

Pretend your favorite character lives in our modern world. What kind of music is on their playlist?

 

This is a strangely hard question for me to answer, just for this story. For other stories, I could tell you what specific songs a character would totally rock. But again, the worldbuilding of this story leaves a lot on the periphery, so a lot of the details are quite open for interpretation.

 

First a side note: One thing that I noticed when I was editing the book was there was a specific lack of music in the story. For me, fantasy is music, so I always include at least one gratuitous fantasy song, more if I can—it’s my tribute to classic fantasy (along with mentioning embroidery when I can). But I realized this year while editing that there was no singing, no music, no dancing. Now, people in hardship often turn to music, but part of this worldbuilding style is that you only see what you see.Because of that, also my desire to preserve the 2018 story, which was written with a lot of natural flow, I didn’t try to edit any in.The reader can provide the music.

 

So let’s talk about our priest, Ny Auv. I imagine he’s been even more stifled on music, probably only Temple-permitted music, I mean, let’s hope he had that. He comes across to me as someone who might enjoy 70s music: some folk with guitar influence, and some soul and R&B. Yet part of me thinks I am totally stereotyping him, and if he made it here, he’d quietly become a huge Metal fan. I’m going with that.

Friday, August 14, 2020

Iris, Like The Song

How to tell if you are reading a story by Jennifer Lee Rossman, a quick and easy checklist:

* it was based on a song, and keeps shoving references to the song in your face lest you forget
(check! Iris, by the Goo Goo Dolls, and also the Sixpence None The Richer song Kiss Me)

* the story was untitled until right before it was submitted, and you can tell because the title is a little bit silly
(check! Iris, Like The Song.)

* the concept can best be summarized by putting two words together that should not go together
(Time Pirates! Pirates, but time!)

* the main character is queer and adorkable and probably autistic
(Um excuse you, it's called writing what you know)

* there is no reason to quote Jurassic Park, and yet…
(there is always a reason to quote Jurassic Park)

* specifically a quote from Dr. Ian Malcolm
(wait, are you suggesting other characters in that movie say things?)

* there is also no reason to bring up the feud between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla…
(LISTEN. Thomas Edison was an asshole and the world needs to know)

* random Tesla fangirling
(are you referring to the incredibly accurate statement about Tesla being a sexy bad boy of science because HOW DARE)

* it is abundantly clear that the author grew up in the 90s
(if you play a spot the 90s references drinking game, you will absolutely be drunk by page 2)

* a twist ending
(what like you didn't watch Twilight Zone marathons every holiday for your entire childhood until the zeitgeist of the show was absorbed into your soul and became an integral part of your very being? Loser)

* the author made a point of mentioning complicated physics concepts to prove she knows her stuff, but throws it all away in the very next paragraph because plausible science ruins the fun
(no comment)

* the author did way too much research for one sentence but no one except her will ever appreciate all that hard work
(that's like… every sentence, dude, you need to be more specific)


So… Yeah. If you want to read possibly the most on brand Jennifer Lee Rossman story I've ever written, you might want to check out Iris, Like The Song, part of Tales From The Pirate's Cove

Tuesday, August 11, 2020

The Courtship Dance: free reprint story

 OK, a little bit of business and promotion to get out of the way first. Outland Entertainment is currently funding APEX on Kickstarter. It's an anthology about dinosaurs, and my story Joan of Archaeopteryx is in it!

Check it out here: https://t.co/FNopmlKGAU 

To celebrate reaching $5000, I said I would post a free reprint story on my blog, a story that has not been available for free anywhere else. I think all of my dinosaur stories are available online, so I went with The Courtship Dance.

Originally published in The Tangled Web https://www.purpleturkeypress.com/thetangledweb in 2018, The Courtship Dance is a classic example of Jennifer Lee Rossman stories: dorks in space, too many 80s references, loooove (ew), and weird science facts.

I chose this one because even though my story is about spiders, I don't think it should trigger anybody's arachnophobia; the cover of the anthology, however, and some of the other stories… they might. And I want people to be able to enjoy my story without having to purchase a book that might bother them.

Which is not to say there is anything wrong with the book. I quite liked a lot of the stories. But anyway. Please enjoy.


The Courtship Dance

By Jennifer Lee Rossman


Outer space was, to use a highly technical astrophysics term, absolutely freaking awesome.

There were many reasons humanity had reached for the stars, ranging from exploration and mining to the very real possibility that humanity would one day render Earth totally unable to support life. But mostly, Judith decided as she watched Jupiter swirling outside her bedroom window like a giant creamy candy, it was the awesomeness factor.

Space made everything graceful. You couldn't fall, you couldn't drop things. Everyone became a ballerina in zero-G, twirling weightless and unencumbered.

Even her body, clumsy and chubby and with its atrophied muscles that couldn't bear their own weight back home, worked like everyone else's. Just a simple push off the wall, and off she went, gliding free until she encountered an object with more inertia.

Judith spent every spare moment doing just that, trying to move faster, fling herself farther each time. She'd come to space to work on the ship's engineering deck, but now that she was there, she wanted to dance.

Not the ballet and classic waltzes Arabella taught in the exercise classes down on Deck Seven. No. Judith wanted disco, modern, jazz. The kind of wild, exciting moves where dancers flung their limbs like trees in a hurricane, flouncy dresses spinning and billowing.

You know. Dance.

Her favorite Prince song rocked from her speakers, shaking the steel walls of her quarters and reverberating through the spiderwebs in the corner. No one else on the ship enjoyed her centuries-old music, but Judith couldn't get enough of the era of day-glo and side ponytails.

She pressed her back to the wall, tensing every muscle while she waited for the chorus, then flung her limbs back to propel herself forward with as much strength as she could muster.

In her mind, she was an explosion of movement and energy, striking a dramatic pose as the music hit its little red crescendo. In reality, however, she merely drifted across the room at a brisk pace, and with nothing to stop her forward momentum, her attempt at a dramatic pose tipped her upside down as she gently collided with the wall.

"Blast," she muttered, pouting as her spider hovered in front of her face on a gossamer filament.

In the silence between songs, Judith heard a steady rhythm outside her door that her brain first labeled as footsteps, but no one walked in space. More likely, it was the sound of someone pulling themselves along the handles installed in the hallway for just that purpose.

"Blast again."

She scrambled to shut off the music and smooth out her dress--a futile act in zero-G, but, like the title of the songfic she'd written in high school about John MacLean teaming up with an aging nun said, Old Habits Die Hard-- and opened the door as soon as he knocked.

"Hey," Ian said, turning himself upside down to match her current orientation. He was a pretty man, all long legs and floppy hair, with a smile that rivaled the stars in brightness. "You, ah... Do you know you have a spider in your hair?"

"Yes," Judith lied with confidence, never considering that it might be more odd to knowingly have a spider in your hair than it was to be unaware of it.

He reached out with his prosthetic hand--the same deep brown as his skin, but with rainbow glitter mixed into the plastic--and untangled the web from her curls. Though he did so gently, Judith's chest tightened and she intercepted the dangling spider, pulling her close out of fear of her tiny friend being squooshed.

"Her name's Anita," she said awkwardly, the floating spider tethered to her hand like an astronaut on a spacewalk. "She's an orb-weaver. Not sure what subspecies yet; I'm going to download a book next time we're near a satellite."

Ian nodded slowly. "Is she from the gardening deck?"

"Maybe."

...By which Judith meant definitely. That deck was the only one on the ship that had animal life. Insects, mostly, to pollinate the crops that sustained the hundred-and-some-odd people aboard, and some spiders and birds to keep the insect population in check. But she wasn't sure whether it would be frowned upon to steal a spider, so she didn't want to admit to anything.

If this fazed Ian, he didn't let it show. "Anyway, some of the senior crew are throwing a party to welcome the vyomanauts."

Derived from the Sanskrit word for "sky," a vyomanaut was the Indian equivalent of an astronaut or cosmonaut. The word had been used onboard a lot since the Indian Space Program announced they wanted to send some of their scientists to assist the Iktomi crew in building a better communications system.

"And you want me to make my famous fried jalebis?"

"No. Well." He reconsidered. "Yes. But mostly I want you to be my date."

Judith's heart went all fluttery for a second. "Me."

"You."

"Okay." She quickly closed the door in his face before he could reconsider, and twirled in excitement, Anita trailing on her web.

***

Everything Judith knew about courtship, she had learned from studying spiders. And from watching an old VHS of Dirty Dancing over and over and over until it wore out. But mostly it was the spiders.

The majority of the courtship was done by the male. Well, screw that. This was the future--she knew it was officially the future, because people lived in space--and she decided it was high time females took the lead.

Of course, it wouldn't all translate to human behavior. She doubted there would be a second date if she tried to eat him at the end of the first date, for example, but the rest of it seemed about right.

Step one: be larger than your competition. Judith hovered in front of her mirror, watching her voluptuous stomach and thighs jiggle long after she stopped moving. She gave Anita a thumbs-up, and imagined the little spider writing something encouraging and fat-positive in her web.

"I'm gorgeous?" She put her hand to her cheek in mock shyness. "Oh, Anita, you flatter me."

Step two: ornamentation. With a little help from the riveting machine she had Frankensteined into a bedazzler, she would have the flashiest dress on the ship. It would say "style," it would scream "sexy." Ideally, it would even yodel "my bright colors indicate that I am a healthy individual who has reached sexual maturity!"

So yeah. Step two, check.

Which just left step three: dance.

Orb-weavers like Anita had a more simple courtship, but Judith's favorite jumping spiders were born to boogie.

They had iridescent flaps on their abdomen, the colors varying by species but always looking like

something off the cover of a Lisa Frank notebook. The male flipped this flap up like a peacock fanning its tail, shook his little spider booty, and waved his fuzzy forelegs in the air like he just didn't care. And then, presumably, came much smooching and rubbing of spinnerets.

Judith felt herself blushing at the very thought. Back on Earth, she'd been too busy getting her engineering degree and training for this mission to pay attention to men. Or people of any gender, really. She was out of practice.

She looked at the web in the corner. "I got this, right?"

"Sure do!" she said in Anita's voice, which she decided was a Russian accent. "You are the prettiest girl on this ship, and he would be lucky to have you. So confident, too, and brilliant. All the other girls are going to be super jealous."

Judith decided to believe the spider, and went to work bedazzling.


 ***

She just couldn't move fast enough. Weightlessness stole the drama from her dramatic sleeve swishing, and turned her rapid spins into graceful twirls no matter how she tried to speed them up.

She flopped on her bed--which was a feat in and of itself, what with all the straps needed to keep her from floating off--and she sulked.

Logically, Judith knew Ian would feel however he was going to feel regardless of how she danced, but logic had absolutely no place in hormones. She wanted to dance for him. That was the best way she knew to show him how she felt.

Anita hovered unhelpfully in the corner, like Jennifer Grey before Patrick Swayze showed up.

"Oh, right," Judith said, digging around in her pocket. "I got you a snack." She held up a fly--dead, but still nice and juicy. She closed one eye, lining up the shot, and flicked the treat toward the spider.

It tumbled through the air and plinked off the wall. Anita scurried to the edge of her web, but the fly was out of her reach. She scuttled back and forth a bit, as if judging the distance, and leapt.

The spider sailed through the air, swimming in a graceful doggy-paddle, and latched onto the fly with all eight legs. Momentum carried them both farther from the web, floating all the way to the opposite wall and leading to the tricky task of getting her snack back home.

Judith expected Anita would carry her fly around the perimeter of the room. But as she watched, Anita angled herself to face the web, and produced a silky thread from her spinnerets.

In Earth's gravity, such an action would have had little effect on Anita's momentum. But in zero-G, Newton's second law reigned supreme, and the action of expelling the silk from her back end had the equal and opposite reaction of propelling Anita gently toward her web.

Across the room she went, angling her posterior ever so slightly to adjust her course as she left a nearly invisible trail of silk behind her.

Judith sat upright in bed. Tried to, anyway--she forgot about the straps holding her in. "Anita," she said, "you're a genius."

***

A distinctly Bollywood vibe pulsed from the recreation deck as the crew welcomed the vyomanauts, sitar and harmonia music mingling with the aromas of spices and Judith's fried dough jalebis. People danced gracefully, some in colorful saris and some in their everyday silver space clothes.

Judith stood on the periphery, the billowy sleeves and folds of her dress tucked around her in a deliberate way that hid the most vibrant colors inside the pleats. She chatted with some of the newcomers, but most of her attention was on the doorway.

When Ian entered, his arm glittering in the lights, she sucked in a breath. This was it, her big moment. She put a hand to her necklace, a clear plastic sphere dotted with air holes. Inside, Anita's pedipalps quivered in anticipation.

"Here we go," Judith whispered, and glided forward.

The crowd parted, or maybe she only imagined it did, and she locked eyes with Ian from the center of the dancefloor as the band began an instrumental rendition of "(I've Had) The Time of My Life."

She slowly extended a leg, revealing a flash of pink and the merest twinkle of rhinestones beneath the dull gray of her dress, and tapped the ground with her foot like a spider. Thus began the courtship ritual.

She swayed with a rhythmic purpose, watching as Ian's expression went from confusion to amusement. She had to keep her eyes on him, for if she let herself remember all the other eyes around her, she would be too embarrassed to continue.

The song ramped up, the energetic dance break fast approaching. Judith did a little twirl, her skirts rising gently around her legs. When the music exploded into its frenetic chorus, the part so toe-tapping-irific that not even John Lithgow's character from Footloose could resist, Judith flicked her wrists and legs to unfurl the full brilliance of her dress.

Yards upon yards of fabric in every color of the rainbow, suspended weightlessly around her as if floating in water, with sparkles that traced her full figure and trailed like strands of spider silk down her limbs.

She soaked up the oohs and aahs from the crowd, but it was the awe in Ian's eyes that gave Judith the courage to engage the CO2 canisters strapped to her wrists.

Newton would have been proud of this application of his second law, as the equal and opposite reactions spun Judith faster and faster, until she became little more than a blur of color and motion. She turned off the canisters, gave the floor a gentle kick, and rose up, up, up, still spinning, still moving, never wanting to stop.

But all songs had to end, and she wasn't about to miss her cue.

As the very last note rang out, she altered her arm position and gave a short burst of CO2, countering her spin and giving her the opportunity to strike that dramatic pose.

As people applauded, Judith pushed off the ceiling and descended with Anita, like a spider on her silk, into Ian's waiting arms in the most perfect Dirty Dancing lift ever executed.

And it was, to use a highly technical astrophysics term, absolutely freaking awesome.