I got my very first piece of fan mail about one of my stories earlier this month. After my immediate reaction, which was to do a very undignified happy dance, it prompted me to think about the whole question of the relationship between readers and authors.

I was inordinately pleased to receive the letter. As an author, I write something and send it out into the world with no real idea who's going to see it, or indeed if anyone is going to look at it. I know the editor who bought it liked it, and presumably thinks other people will like it, but I have no way of knowing if they're right. Eventually, if it's going somewhere that pays royalties rather than a one time payment, I'll get some feedback, at least in terms of how many copies of it have sold. That doesn't tell me if the people who bought it liked it when they read it though.

So I'm sitting here with a piece of genuine, unsolicited feedback, thinking how wonderful it is to know that at least one person really like my story. Then it hit me. I've read dozens, maybe hundreds of things that really touched me, that spoke to me in ways that made me read them over and over again. But it never once occurred to me to pick up pen and paper, or in more recent years, email, and write to tell the author that.

I always felt that authors were terribly important people, who would never have time to read my letter, or care than some fan had written to them. After all they were famous and undoubtedly very busy. They wouldn't care that a fan had written to them. It would probably just get thrown out by some secretary. (And all the authors who are reading this are probably now either laughing or wondering what planet I grew up on.)

Now it suddenly dawns on me that I'm, at least in theory, now one of those important busy people. And all kinds of things I thought about what it's like to be an author were completely wrong. I haven't suddenly become too busy and important to care what my readers might think. In fact, it means quite a lot to know what that what I wrote worked for someone, and maybe made their day a little brighter. I'm learning now that even established authors have days when they question the value of their work.

I find myself thinking now that perhaps if I had written to some of those authors whose work really touched me, it would have brightened their day just as much as the letter I received did for me. I wish I'd realized that. Who knows, maybe one or two of them would even have written back.

So if something someone writes touches you, don't be shy. Write the author and tell them so (assuming you can locate an address). As long as you don't overdo the number of letters to someone, the worst thing that will happen is they ignore it. On the plus side, your letter may be a bright spot on a day when they really needed one, and maybe you'll make a friend.

Sheridan passed on about midnight last night. It all happened very quickly. He'd been a little less hungry than usual Wed. night, and ate still less yesterday morning. We thought that might be another sign he was slipping. We'd decided when we first got the diagnosis that his kidneys were failing back in August that when he stopped being willing to eat that would be time to let him go.

Beth tried to tempt him yesterday afternoon with some baby food, but he only ate half a jar before he lost interest. At that point we were thinking about planning to bring him in to the vet on Monday. I tried to offer him more food around 8 last night, and he wouldn't touch it at all. At that point we decided waiting for Monday probably wasn't realistic, and we'd call the vet first thing this morning.

He spent the rest of the evening draped over my lap. I'm not really sure he was conscious any more when we went up to be around 10. His eyes were open, but he wasn't really responding to anything. We thought about whether we should take him to the emergency clinic instead of waiting for the regular vet in the morning, but he didn't seem to be in any distress, so we just made him comfortable for the night. About midnight we woke up and realized he wasn't breathing any more.

He was often not the sharpest tool in the shed, but he was sweet and loving. Tonight is the first time in weeks that I've sat at my computer without him curled in my lap. I've uploaded a few more snapshots to flickr, for any of his friends who want to remember him. ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/24368866@N02/sets/72157622845085192/ ). Sadly I don't have a photo of the image I'm remembering him by with the most pleasure: a backyard cookout in early September where he came trotting proudly up to us with a live, squirming frog from the fishpond in his mouth.

I walked into my local gaming store last week, and there sitting on the shelf was the shiny, new 6th edition of the Hero Rules System. One of my gaming buddies who knew I played a lot of Champions pointed it out and asked if I thought I'd buy it. So I went over and took a look at it, and then told him, no, I didn't think I'd be buying it.

This wasn't a simple decision. I was introduced to Champions back in the mid 1980s, when it was in its third edition - 3 paperbacks, which sold for 9.99 each. the first one was the basic rules set, and the other two were expansion and additions. We had a lot of fun with those rules. They included some sample characters, and there were supplements. One of the guys I played with even contributed to a couple of the supplements. But we never felt we had to buy them, and mostly we didn't. We wrote our own.

Then the 4th edition came along. That was a good update, for the most part. It was handy to have all the rules from the 3 books in one volume, and the price was pretty comparable to what we'd been paying for the 3 books together. I never had much use for the sourcebook or the campaign book sections, but I can see their value for novice players. I never bought a version with the software included, so all I can say about that is that I was glad they offered versions without it, so I wasn't buying something I didn't want and wouldn't use.

I was less enthusiastic about the 5th edition. We were perfectly happy with the way things went in 4th edition. I finally broke down and bought it when I joined a game where the GM wanted to use it. It was still only a little more expensive than the original set ($39.95). It looks like a bigger book but I just did a page count, and it's actually shorter than the 4th edition set (371 pp vs. 384 pp). I guess the additional 1/4 that makes it look like a bigger book must be thicker paper. It doesn't have a ton of rules changes, but enough that I felt I needed to have it if I was going to play in a game that used it.

Now I'm looking at the 6th edition. It's suddenly grown to something on the order of 800 pp., in two hardcover volumes. With glossy paper and color illustrations. And if I buy it, it's going to set me back a minimum of $70 if I buy them as a package from the publisher, $80 if I buy it at my local gaming store, which I'd generally like to support so it stays around.

But I'm looking at this new edition, and asking myself why I should spend that kind of money on something which replaces a product I'm already happy with. I'm just not seeing a benefit to it any more. A quick skim through the books doesn't suggest that they've made drastic changes. To be sure, there are changes - a character statistic has been dropped, there are a few new powers, some old powers are gone, and so forth. But are those benefits really worth investing $70-$80 in?

It seems to me that most of the changes are in production values, which aren't really important to me, and just enough mechanics changes to force me to buy it if I want to play in a game using it, because the old rules details won't be close enough to get by. This is starting to feel to me like some gaming publishers (not just Hero) are taking a page from the textbook publishing industry, and creating a new edition ever other year or so, whether there are really changes which call for it, just to keep people buying new books.

Personally, at this point, the one thing I'd like to be able to buy is the 4th edition in PDF format. But that won't happen because they want to sell the new, 6th edition.

I just sent off another submission to Torquere, this one for their holiday story line. If accepted, it should be out some time in December.

This one is called "Private Performance". It's my first attempt at historical fiction. It's set in Dublin, Ireland in 1904. The characters in it are entirely new - Jason Goldsmith, a young actor, and Neil FitzHenry, a dock worker. This tells the tale of their first meeting, and their first Christmas Eve together. Jason has the notion that he will dress up in women's clothes, and they can spend the night on the town like any other courting couple. After all, he plays women's parts on the stage. But can he pull it off?

Leap of Faith, my contribution to the Torquere Press 2009 Charity Blitz, benefiting the Matthew Shepherd Foundation, has been reviews by Teresa at Rainbow Reviews. She as kind enough to give it four out of five stars. You can read the review here:

http://www.rainbow-reviews.com/?p=2003

The story is available here:

http://www.torquerebooks.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&manufacturers_id=272&products_id=2203

For those who may be uncomfortable with the subject material, please be aware that it contains both explicit homoerotic scenes, and BDSM scenes.

I've just heard back from my publisher, Torquere Press (http://www.torquerepress.com) that they would like to publish my story "Winter King" in an anthology that will be coming out some time in October. I'll post more details when I have them.

This is very exciting because this will be my first publication in print. All my other stories have been published as e-books only. This anthology will be issued simultaneously in both print and electronically.

This is also a little different from my previous works. It's part of the same setting, and features the same main character from Embracing the Dragon and Lessons, but instead of being M/M, it includes his wife, in a threesome with his liege lord, King Aran.

Today I'm hosting the Torquere Press Community on Live Journal (http://community.livejournal.com/torquere_social/). Come on over and check it out. I'm posting snippets from the new story, and will be trying my hand at writing a short bit of fiction based on prompts from the community members.

I'm happy to say Torquere Press (http://www.torquerepress.com) has accepted my latest submission, "A Leap of Faith", as part of it's "Changing Lives" series of short stories, with proceeds going to benefit the Matthew Shepard Foundation (http://www.matthewshepard.org).

It will be available some time next month as a download. I'll have a link here as soon as it's issued.

I've just sent off another story submission. This one is going to Torquere Press's annual charity benefit:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.torquerepress.com/submissions/anthologies.html

Anniversary Charity Sip Blitz - Changing Lives

In 2008, Torquere Press decided to use its September anniversary and its Sip short story line for a little good work. Dedicating the month to supporting the fight for equal rights in marriage, Torquere and our
authors published gay and lesbian wedding themed stories, with the profits going to charities such as the Lambda Legal Fund. To date, more than $5000.00 has been donated to the selected charity.

In 2009, our authors have chosen the Matthew Shepherd Foundation as the recipient of our anniversary Sip Blitz, with the theme of Changing Lives at the core of the stories.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

This one is called "Leap of Faith." It features a secondary character from Embracing the Dragon, Greg Taylor, Danny O'Riordan's personal attorney. It's set about a year before Embracing the Dragon, and tells the story of how Greg came to be working for Danny, and found the courage to come out of the closet.

Assuming they decide they want it, it will be available as a stand-alone item, and probably as part of a collection of all the stories submitted for the benefit.

Strictly speaking, the anthology Lessons appeared in has a review, and very good one at that. The reviewer took note of my story though, so I'm counting it as a review.

http://rainbow-reviews.com/?p=1607

The reviewer noted that it read more like the first chapter of a novel than a short. You'd think they knew how much blood I sweat to get it down under the 8K word mark for the collection. :-)

Edit: Actually, that's two reviews. A review has also been added to the publisher's sale page for the anthology:

http://www.torquerepress.com/fiction/cherry.html#review

My very first royalty check arrived today. Somehow that makes the whole writing thing even more real than the contract.

I'm going to scan it before I cash it so I can go back and look at it when I'm having a bad day. Tangible proof that at least one editor thinks I don't suck. :-)

I've been busy today.

Besides some last minute edits on the story I'm bringing to writing group on Saturday, I found time to write a bit more on the Aliyah (the Joe and Simon novel). 

Ending word count: 97,850.

I also had a productive day at work. I spent half the day poking through an access database application that I inherited. (I'm starting to use the author's name as a swear word. He's not a programmer. he just writes code. Badly.) The project manager didn't think the numbers he was seeing for risk factors looked right, when he looked at the raw data they derived from. So I dived into the code (for those of you who program, it's a lovely little thing - a form which invokes a VB event procedure, which calls a macro composed of 14 or so table-building queries, and then several reports which have more queries and conditional formatting embedded in them). I finally found the bug - a missing relation between two tables in one of the queries.

I spent part of this weekend at Readercon. I ended up staying home on Sunday because the cold I've been fighting caught up with me, which is disappointing. there were some things I'd like to have caught on Sunday.

I did catch an interesting panel on the intersections and cross fertilizations between SF and Spy fiction. The panel got rather side tracked by a discussion of whether there were any good female protagonists in spy fiction. A couple of panel members held out the opinion that most of the female protagonists people were able to cite as examples (Emma Peel was one, the others escape me) weren't really female characters - that if you changed the name and pronouns to something male, no one would notice anything wrong with them. It left me at a loss as to what they thought made those characters men in female disguise, as opposed to women. It occurs to me that I probably wouldn't like the answer if they'd explained it, so that may be just as well.

The more productive insight that came to me out of the panel is that perhaps contemporary science fiction and fantasy shouldn't be considered genres in the same sense as romance, mystery, spy fiction, etc.

Let's take romance as an example, since that's what I've been writing lately. The definition of the genre revolves around plot elements. If it's a romance, you're pretty much guaranteed to have two or more beings involved in an emotional relationship, likely to lead to sex, either within the book, or promised by the ending, depending on the level of heat in the story. You can put that plot element down in any setting - contemporary, historical, fantasy, SF, wild west, etc., and still reasonably file it under romance. It may end up in a specific sub-genre - historical romance, paranormal romance, etc. - but it still lands in the overall romance bin.

Sf, on the other hand, often seems to be more of a setting. You identify a story as Sf based on the inclusion of futuristic elements - technology that doesn't exist yet, a date defining the thing as happening in the far future, other planets, etc. Within that setting, any number of sorts of plot can happen. Romance, adventure, war, spies, mystery. They're all out there.

The same sort of argument applies to fantasy - add magic to the setting, and no matter what plot you have, it becomes a fantasy.  Within that you have romance, adventures, wars, even mysteries.

One might, I suppose, make a case for the older classic Sf being a genuine genre, since in many cases the technology was the plot, with some characters as window dressing to move it around. It becomes a genre because that absence of character-driven plot makes it fail to be classifiable as anything else.

The other class of book that might qualify for Sf as a genre rather than as a setting is the speculative/political story. I'm think of things like Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner. Those are clearly trying to be speculative/predictive/cautionary, rather than fitting a classic plot-based genre.

This leads me to think that about half the books found in the Sf section at the bookstore could just as well be filed elsewhere. Of course that would be poor marketing. I suspect there are a lot of people out there who will read Anne McCaffrey perfectly happily while she's filed under SF who wouldn't be caught dead near the romance shelves.

I've spent all last week fighting a cold, and woke up this morning feeling worse than I have since Tues. I meant to go back for the last day of Readercon today, but when the alarm went off it just didn't seem worth it. So we called Mike and told him to go without us and went back to bed. I finally got up around 1 this afternoon.

I've felt fairly crappy all day, and the way Beth is coughing I keep expecting to find stray bits of lung here and there. I haven't yet, but that may just be because the cats have eaten them all.

I had no ambition for any of the things I should have been doing, so I just sat down to write. I think I put in a solid six hours or so. I've gone back to working on Joe, and added another 5,595 words today. (No, that's not a typo - it was a really productive day.) Have to look at it tomorrow and see if it makes any sense.

I just posted some thoughts on this, prompted by some writing research I've been doing recently, on my writing blog: http://kathryn-scannell.dreamwidth.org/1349.html

I thought about simply reposting the entire thing here, but it seemed redundant, and would lead to comments in two different places. So if you're interested, go check it out. I've left anonymous commenting turned on, so you don't have to have a dreamwidth account to comment.

Lessons, my first story sale, released today! Go look at my dreamwidth page ( http://kathryn-scannell.dreamwidth.org ) for the details.

Yesterday being peragrine 's birthday, we went out to dinner. She'd seen a review in the Hippo of a new ethic restaurant in Concord and thought it would be fun to try:

Gamil's
26 Pleasant St,
Concord, NH 
603-226-0008
hours 11AM - 8pm Mon-Sat.

They specialize in Egyptian cuisine, which sounded unusual, and new to us. We were very pleased with the experiment.

It's a family-run small storefront restaurant. If you're looking for fine dining with linen, china and a wine cellar, this isn't for you. It's a very informal place - not a lot of atmosphere, but excellent food. Prices are quite reasonable. The most expensive menu item intended for just one person is $8.95. They offer the usual assortment of middle-eastern food - falafel, Baba Ghanouji, Hommous, Towahk, Keebee, Tabouli, and so forth. 

We split a platter of falafels with hommous and tabouli as an appetizer. THey were tasty, but not too spicy. And the hommous was actually good. (I don't usually like it).

I had a lamb kabob with megadara (a mix of rice, lentils, and seasonings, topped with just a bit of zesty tomato sauce). Beth had a meet sampler platter. Then we topped it off with dessert - baklava for Beth, and Katifee (like baklava, with shredded wheat instead of pastry) and Egyptian coffee for me. Absolutely heavenly. I'd go back just for the dessert.

They also have pizzas, which we didn't try.

Well worth a return visit.

I have some good news to share this morning. Back in March I submitted a story, which some of you have seen in draft called "Lessons", to Torquere Press (http://www.torquerepress.com/). They accepted it, and it will be in a forthcoming electronic anthology called Cherry under the pen name Kathryn Scannell.

This is my first paid publication, and I've been superstitiously not wanting to announce the acceptance, which I had via email back in April, until I had the contract in hand.

It's here, and now I can do the happy dance publicly.

The anthology is planned for July. I don't have an exact date, but I'll have a link here when it comes out.

A word of warning: Torquere specializes in "alternative romance", which in practice means that most of the fiction they publish is male-male romance, often with very explicit sex scenes. You probably shouldn't look at their web site from work.

Hi everyone,

I've just set up an account on Dreamwidth, courtesy of a free invite from gardenfey. Here's a link:

http://kathryn-scannell.dreamwidth.org/

This is the beginning of establishing an on-line presence purely for my writing. I've chosen Kathryn Scannell as a pseudonym, since there's already a currently successful author by the name of Kathryn Smith. The pseudonym isn't particularly secret - I just don't want there to be any appearance that I'm trying to capitolize on her success. So, by all means go check it out periodically. Right now there's just a quick introductory post to test drive the interface, but there will be more as there's writing-related news.

I'm not sure whether I should be amazed or frightened. I just realized that I've written 10K words on the novel in a little over a week.