Tag: science fiction

A Visit to Oaxaca, Mexico

My husband and I had a marvelous trip to Oaxaca, which is nearly the southernmost state in Mexico (only Chiapas stretches farther south). We were there for a week with five days of touring and a couple days on our own. The scenery is stark (it’s very desert-like), but the city of Oaxaca and the Oaxaqueños who live there are wonderful.

I love murals and so many of the ones I saw were brilliant. These were indoors in a shopping area.

While we were there, the state of Oaxaca celebrated Dia de la Samaritana, or Good Samaritan’s Day, which falls on the fourth Friday of Lent. In addition to the decorations everywhere, people gave out “agua fresca” (fresh water), which is water flavored with fresh fruits, herbs, flowers and other ingredients. We had horchata that day. The “Papel Picado” (the paper decorations) were so lovely.

Another part of Oaxacan culture that I absolutely fell in love with were the alebrijes (ah-lay-bree-hiss). These are carved figurines made of wood that are painted bright colors in fantastical designs. The ones below are from a museum exhibit of the work of Manuel Jiménez. He popularized the wooden alebrijes.

I bought way too many alebrijes at the artisan markets. Some were for family, but most were just for me. This one with the cat family sitting on a bench is my favorite. <heart emoji>

I have a ton more pictures (like of the wedding parade we became impromptu members of), but it would take many more newsletters to show them off. I don’t want to put you all to sleep, lol. Suffice it to say, it was a fabulous trip.

Some of you reading this might remember my science fiction trilogy, Tankborn, Awakening, and Rebellion. I now have a new series planned that’s a spin-off of the world of the Tankborn books. The first book, Mishalla’s Courage, is published and the second book, Pheno’s Treachery, will be available later this year.

Click here to order Mishalla’s Courage as an eBook for the device of your choice. It’s also available at that link as an audio book and as a print book edition with color illustrations.

I’m planning five more novellas, all featuring new characters introduced in Mishalla’s Courage. So you’ll want to get started now with the first book.

August 6, 2025
When Fiction Becomes Future…or Present

Science fiction is a funny genre. There are those (like me) who devour it, who sometimes feel there’s something missing in a book that doesn’t include at least a little imagined science. Then there are those who just don’t get the genre, are completely alienated by it. To them, it’s weird and unreal.

Yet in the best science fiction, there’s nothing more real. It looks ahead to what might be and extrapolates not just the science, but how people adapt to the science. It can show how one change, small or large, completely transforms a people, a society.

The Green Movement in Iran and the more recent Arab Spring got me thinking about a Larry Niven story I read thirty or so years ago. “Flash Crowd” showed the impact of the transfer booth, an instantaneous, essentially free form of travel. You step into a transfer booth down on the corner near your house (like a way cooler bus stop) and in the next moment you’re downtown, or at the university or at the local mall.

What happens in the story is that folks start hearing about something interesting going on at Santa Monica mall (a stretch of several pedestrian-only open air blocks in Santa Monica, CA) and all those people jump into transfer booths. This near immediate influx of people on the mall leads to a riot, something that never could have happened if folks had to climb into their cars, negotiate Los Angeles freeway traffic, find a place to park, etc. Easy availability of transfer booths = riot.

Transfer booths haven’t been invented yet, but think about their virtual equivalent. The Internet. Facebook. Twitter. Texting. The demonstrators during the Arab Spring used those near instantaneous forms of communication to organize, to plan, to keep their compatriots and sympathizers and the outside world updated as to conditions on the ground. The protesters couldn’t instantaneously appear in the streets of Cairo or Damascus, but the Internet and cell phones have facilitated their movements.

What Larry Niven predicted when he published “Flash Crowd” in 1973 didn’t come literally true. We still haven’t figured out how to instantaneously transport matter from point A to point B. But that phenomenon of informing the world in an instant has come to pass and in the case of the Arab Spring (despite the current state of affairs in Syria), I think that can be a good thing.

Have you read a book or a short story that has projected a possible future? Have you seen that projected future become now? Leave a comment. Include the title and author if you have it.

May 23, 2013
Social Media for the Genre-Conflicted, Part 1

In a previous post, I described how my husband and I designed my new website to encompass all three of the genres I’m published in–science fiction (YA), romance, and mystery. I have a great landing page that directs visitors to each of the three genres so they can further explore the books that interest them.

There’s another aspect to writing in multiple genres that has proven to be a challenge–social media. I’ve taken a varied approach to solving the social media puzzle, in some cases with multiple identities (Twitter) in others, designing my presence similarly to what I’ve done on my website (Facebook).

As I mentioned in the previous post, I’d moved from romances to YA thinking that would be a one-way street. I liked YA and was just as happy sticking with that market. So I did a total redesign of my website, turning it into the other-worldly SF site you see here. I created a new Twitter identity, @karensandlerYA, as well as one for the Tankborn trilogy, @tankborn. I created a Tankborn Facebook page, which my editor and the marketing department at Tu Books also administer. My focus was entirely on YA.

But then the opportunities for indie publishing opened up, giving me the courage to bring my romance backlist back to light. And then I sold two Janelle Watkins mystery novels, further complicating my identity. I had a decent number of followers on Twitter as @karensandlerYA, but it didn’t make sense to promote my non-YA books there.

So I had to create and build a new identity on Twitter, @karensandler, to promote my romances and mysteries. I also created two new Facebook pages, Karen Sandler Author and Janelle Watkins Mysteries. The Janelle Watkins page is still a work in progress, but the author page is set up similarly to my webpage, in that it promotes all three of the genres I write. There are tabs that will take you to pages where you can buy or pre-purchase any of my books.

Within this same time frame, I and ten other authors established an author co-op we’ve named OnFireFiction, which I described in this post. So I’m also participating in the social media related to OFF, on Facebook and Twitter. That makes four Twitter accounts to track, @karensandlerYA, @karensandler, @tankborn, and @onfirefiction. Then there are five Facebook accounts to follow, my Karen Sandler profile, my Karen Sandler Author page, my Janelle Watkins page, my Tankborn Series page, and our co-op page, OnFireFiction.

How in the world do I keep track of all this? That’s complex enough that it’s worthy of a second post. Keep an eye on my blog for part 2.

May 13, 2013
New Website! A Solution for the Genre-Conflicted

So what do you do to promote yourself when your published work spans three genres (romance, speculative fiction, mystery) and two markets (adult and young adult)? This wasn’t a huge issue when I initially sold my first YA science fiction book, Tankborn, to Lee and Low/Tu Books after publishing adult romances for a dozen years. At that point, I had changed my focus from romance to young adult, and didn’t feel obligated to heavily promo my ten Harlequin books.

But in addition to those Harlequin books, I had the rights back to seven romances and a middle-grade time travel. I finally decided to dip my toe into indie publishing and put the romances and MG book up on Amazon. At that point, I chose to use a pen name for my romances to keep them separate from my children’s books. It was slow going, but I finally had the middle grade book published under Karen Sandler and six of the seven romances up under the pen name Kayla Russo. The seventh book needed some re-write, so it hasn’t yet been published (although it will be soon).

But then something somewhat unexpected happened. I had an unsold mystery novel, Clean Burn, tucked away in my figurative drawer. I found out about a new mystery imprint (Exhibit A, a part of Angry Robot Books) and alerted my agents. Long story short, Clean Burn sold to Exhibit A and will be released August 27, 2013. A second Janelle Watkins mystery will greet the world in Summer 2014.

My predicament clarified in October 2012 during a Novelists, Inc. conference. I had my Karen Sandler Harlequin author identity,my Kayla Russo indie-pubbed romance author identity, I had my Karen Sandler YA author identity, and I was about to have my Karen Sandler mystery author identity. Keeping all those identities juggled, trying to appropriately promote all of them, was madness.

My first step toward simplification was to drop my Kayla Russo identity. My original rationale for creating the pen name had been to separate my sexy adult romances from my teen-safe YA books. But that was silly because there were still those ten sexy Harlequin books for sale with Karen Sandler squarely on their covers. So I killed Kayla Russo off (so to speak) like the next murder victim in a Janelle Watkins mystery novel.

With the same name on all my books, I decided that the variety of genres/markets I offered were a feature, not a bug. Instead of keeping the genres separate, I would promote them side-by-side. Instead of seeing my multi-genre approach as a problem, I used it to brand myself. I am now proudly Genre-Conflicted on my blog, two Twitter identities, and Facebook.

In fact Facebook is where I started this process, with a Karen Sandler Author page. The banner for the page prominently displays book covers from each of the three genres, romance, science fiction, and mystery. Book tabs take the reader to pages where they can purchase any and all of my books at the click of a button.

My webmaster (i.e., husband) and I took the same approach with my website. The landing page features the same three choices–explore my YA SF books, my romances, or my mysteries. The same buy links are available on the book pages for each genre.

There are still a few tweaks needed on the website, but I really like the solution. It’s still a challenge to promote to three different audiences, but having that one-stop-shop takes some of the load off. So for both the focused genre reader and the more omnivorous book lovers who enjoy a variety of story types, I like to think my work offers something for nearly every taste.

May 6, 2013
Stick to One Genre, Or, Ignoring Perfectly Good Writing Advice

Back when I was starting out as a novelist and I was flitting around from genre to genre, I was told to pick one and stick to it. I was told I shouldn’t write one book that’s romance, another that’s science fiction, or God forbid, a romance science fiction novel (which, sigh, I did write). I found that advice irritating because I wanted to write all over the place. In fact, I wanted to write not only novels, but also screenplays and the occasional article and short story.

Eventually I did settle on romance novels, and then narrowed that down even more to category romances. I still wrote the occasional screenplay in between book contracts, but those scripts didn’t go anywhere (the movie business is really, really hard to break into), so I felt I could really only call myself a romance novelist.

After 17 romance novels, I got kind of burnt out. I decided to try my hand at young adult fiction. Since I’m not one to waste good material, I decided to take one of my screenplays (a sci-fi thriller) and adapt the story into a YA novel. This eventually became the Tankborn trilogy (I got a lot of mileage out of that one script).

This is all fine and dandy, you’re probably thinking. I wrote in one genre for a while (romance), then switched to another (YA science fiction).

Well, yes, except…I got the rights back to 7 of my romance novels. And with the brave new world of indie publishing, I started re-releasing my romances as e-books, under the pen name, Kayla Russo.

This all worked fairly well. My sexy romances were published as Kayla Russo books, and the YA as Karen Sandler books. There was a squidge of confusion there, what with my Harlequin books still published under Karen Sandler. But since I’m letting Harlequin do the work of promoting those, I didn’t worry my pretty little writer head about it.

Then I sold Clean Burn to Exhibit A Books. Clean Burn is not a romance and not a YA SF. It’s an adult mystery. It’s–ack!–a third genre. So how was I supposed to market three genres worth of books?

First, I dropped the pen name. That’s the miracle of indie publishing for you. I had my cover artist revamp the covers with Karen Sandler as author, touched up the files and re-published them. I created another Twitter identity, @karensandler, for the adult stuff and continued using @karensandlerYA for my YA stuff. I am now in the process of splitting out my website (which currently only promotes my YA books) into three choices–YA, Romance, Mystery.

So, do I regret ignoring the “Stick to One Genre” advice? No. I really wanted to write all the books I’ve written, genre be damned. I do wish it wasn’t so hard to keep all those balls (books?) in the air at one time. I wish every reader loved reading all three genres I’m published in (side note: I recently found out it’s okay to end a sentence with a preposition).

So, what about you? If you’re a writer, are you doing the genre-flit like me? If you’re a reader, to you love reading a multitude of genres? If you do, thank you from the bottom of my genre-confused heart. You are my kind of reader.

February 24, 2013