All posts tagged SFF

Sunday Surprise

And it’s another author of the Sci-fi July bundle! Yes, surprise! 🙂 I am honored to have an award-winning and bestselling author on this very humble blog. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Tracy Cooper-Posey!

Where do you live and write from?
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. I haven’t always been here—I was born in Perth, Western Australia and grew up in the country, running wild and barefoot. I miss the ocean. The Canadian Rockies are nice compensation, though.

Why do you write?
The answer to this has changed over the years. Right now, I write because it’s my profession. This is a particularly satisfying answer to me. For years I struggled to pay bills, ditch the day job, and do what I really wanted to do. Now I’m doing all that. I was singularly unsuited to day job work—I wasn’t qualified for anything. Now, I’m a professional writer. I earned my degree the hard way and it took twenty years.

When did you start writing?
I started writing, as in mucking around with stories and characters, when I was 14. I wrote the unofficial sequel to Star Wars. They didn’t call it fanfic then. I didn’t even know people wrote fanfic. I thought it was just me, being weird and strange. My English teacher caught me at it, told me to write something original and he would submit it for publication. I did, and he did. It didn’t go anywhere, of course (I don’t have those nine exercise books anymore, but I cringe to think what the writing was like)—but the seed was planted.
Fifteen years later, I started writing for publication. It took another four years to get published, then I sold two books in one week

What genre(s) do you write?
Space opera science fiction
Science Fiction Romance
Paranormal Romance
Time Travel Romance
Historical Romance
Romantic Suspense
Urban Fantasy Romance
Epic Norse Urban Fantasy Romance
Plus several varieties of mash-ups and oddities that really don’t fit anywhere, except that I wrote them, so there you have it.

What is your goal as a writer and what are you doing to achieve it?
To entertain readers for as long as my mental faculties hold together.
To pay the bills with my writing, which will let me entertain readers for as long as my mental faculties hold together.
What I’m doing to achieve it? I think I’m pretty much doing it already, by writing my knuckles off, every day I can. Reader reviews confirm I’m managing to entertain them, most of the time.

What is the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever been given?
Perfect writing technique doesn’t exist and even if you get close, if your story sucks you’ve still failed. Story rules.

Outliner or improviser? Fast or slow writer?
Oh, Outliner. To the max.
I’m considered kinda fast as a writer. I usuall do slightly more than one million words a year. Having said that, I know writers out there who have stockpiled 1.4M words for future publication. They make me feel very tortoise-like. It’s all subjective.

Tell us more about your book in the bundle
Faring Soul was my first attempt at juggling science fiction and romance in the 50/50 melding that the new science fiction romance sub-genre calls for. I think I pulled it off – the Galaxy Award it won seems to say I do. But it’s a tricky balancing act and not for the faint-of-heart.
Of course, now I love the stuff. I finished the series with three books, will probably start a spin off series in the near future, and have completed eight stories (so far) in another SFR series.

Tell us about your latest book (add link if published)
The very latest book, Soul of Sin, came out yesterday (as I write this). It’s historical romance and is getting some great reviews.
My latest SF or SFR to be released was the SFR novelette, Evangeliya, which came out a couple of weeks ago. It’s part of the eight books (so far) series I mentioned above – The Endurance series – and is set on a generational ship heading for a new home 1,000 years away from Earth.

Any other projects in the pipeline?
Do you have a few hours?😊
All my current series will have new books added by the end of the year, (here, for series information) and I’ll be adding a couple more series in 2018. Readers who would like to keep up should join my newsletter list. They can get a four-book starter library to sample my work and figure out if I do, indeed, entertain them.

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find Tracy online:

subscribe to her newsletter

Tracy Cooper-Posey is a #1 Best Selling Author. She writes science fiction and romance. She has published over 90 books since 1999, been nominated for five CAPAs including Favorite Author, and won the Emma Darcy Award.

She turned to indie publishing in 2011. Her indie titles have been nominated four times for Book Of The Year and Byzantine Heartbreak was a 2012 winner. Faring Soul won a SFR Galaxy Award in 2016 for “Most Intriguing Philosophical/Social Science Questions in Galaxybuilding” She has been a national magazine editor and for a decade she taught writing at MacEwan University.

She is addicted to Irish Breakfast tea and chocolate, sometimes taken together. In her spare time she enjoys history, Sherlock Holmes, reading science fiction and ignoring her treadmill. An Australian Canadian, she lives in Edmonton, Canada with her husband, a former professional wrestler, where she moved in 1996 after meeting him on-line.

by Barb on 02/07/2017 • Permalink

Posted in Guest Post

Tagged romance, sci-fi bundle, SFF, writers on writing, writing

Posted by Barb on 02/07/2017

https://creativebarbwire.wordpress.com/2017/07/02/sunday-surprise-178/

Writer Wednesday

While on the train to Milan I had plenty of time to think (and to read, but that’s a topic for another post) and tried to express how my way of writing changed in the 21st century. So here goes:

Before 2015: first drafts (or Draft Zero like I called them) were written longhand with almost no corrections by the seat of my pants. I did the research (ex. for historical novels) and then wrote. Then I typed everything in the computer, rewriting as needed so that I’d have a clean draft. I type with 10 fingers, so that wasn’t the hard part. There were no hard parts, since I’ve been a one-draft writer for the whole 20th century and started redrafting only after reading that I was supposed to do that. Wordcount was available only after publication at that point.

After 2015: I started typing Draft Zero and cycling through the first draft. I had a writing netbook with internet access and could stop and Google anything from a translation, a word check to anything else needed. Then I synched with Laptop through Dropbox. I was then able to figure out how much I wrote every year in real time. Like I said in previous posts, I wrote 450K in 2015 and 470K in 2016.

Now Netbook is dead, so the same applies to Laptop. Except it has considerably slowed me down, especially with contemporary or historical works, because I’d stop and fact-check for almost every scene. What might have been quick with SFF became a longer process, mostly because I can’t read on screen and need to print out and highlight manually.

I love ebooks, but not for non-fiction/research. So I might be less productive this year, but hopefully I’ve reached the upper lever of storytelling. Sometimes I wonder if that happened because I switched languages and stopped rewriting old stuff. And I don’t want to turn off the internet while I write because I use Google translator a lot – and all that research helped me expand my English vocabulary.

When I translate books into Italian, things I wrote even two years ago (when I abused of online generators… ahem…), I cringe. Hopefully when I start translating the latest works, I won’t cringe anymore. And I hope the change it’s not too obvious in series like Vampires Through the Centuries (even though all the books are standalone so far)!

What I mean is – you need to find what works for you, and it might change through the years. I have learned a lot since I joined the indie world and will keep learning. Whether it’s the new language or simply that I started learning again (I will freely admit that I was pretty static in Italian, but in English I had to find my voice, and it’s not exactly the same as it used to be – at least from one of my Italian first reader’s perspective).

I won’t take Dean’s challenge because I already have too many stories to write this year on my list – going “pick me! Pick me!” – and I don’t think they’re all short stories. I mean, I know I can write 30 stories in 30 or 60 days if I put my mind to it, but now is not the right time. I am already prolific, I don’t need this to write more! 😉

I’m leaving you with some writerly links – Chuck Wendig’s advice after 5 years and 20 books: 25 lessons (special mention #1 and #5, the latter being what I discussed above). David Farlands tips – One Impossibility (to keep in mind when writing SFF, haha!). 14 sites for book cover design @Digital Reader. And more business advice from Kris Rusch.

Oh, and I found a neat marketing blog for indie authors that has both podcasts and written posts! Studied the written parts (podcasts don’t hold my attention, unfortunately) and will try to apply some to that ugly beast called Marketing… Take this post on why FB needs to do something with those darn pages! Until a few years ago, FB gave the option of choosing if one wanted to be herself or the author.

This no longer applies. I was able to attend a FB party a couple of years ago *waves at Joleene* because I simply switched to the author ID. This year it was a nightmare and my private profile showed up a couple of times. Also, this year I’ve seen an option to create groups from the page. But the page still can’t join groups except the one she/it creates…

More coming bundles: Writers bundle @Storybundle and Faery Summer bundle coming soon @Bundle Rabbit. Now I’m heading back to my writing cave to ponder the next bundle and write the next story… Have a great week! 🙂

by Barb on 26/04/2017 • Permalink

Posted in real world inspiration, struggles to get through

Tagged bundles, indie publishing, marketing, SFF, writing

Posted by Barb on 26/04/2017

https://creativebarbwire.wordpress.com/2017/04/26/writer-wednesday-263/

Random Friday

And it’s the reading year! 😉

Ahem! In spite of the above, I have read 49 books, including 2 collections, a book bundle (the sci-fi mayday you can still find at the usual retailers) and two manuscripts. Only 5 were non-fiction (will have to catch up with the research next year for the vampires through the centuries…), and only 2 were paper books, both re-reading.

Actually one of the two is a trilogy that I hadn’t read in 25 years and that I’m currently finishing and makes me want to go back and re-read the other trilogy in the series, except I have it in Italian only, while this one I have in English. It was one of the first English books that I bought way back in the nineties… and since it’s still a 5stars, here it is:

Dragonlance Legends Trilogy by Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman!

You’re better off reading the war of the lance first, but this is good too! 😉

As for the other 5 stars (in order of reading):

The Red Wraith

Veiled Alliances

The Silver Metal Lover (another re-reading – I got the Kindle edition because the paperback has become too hard to read, sigh… small print…)

Heaven Painted as a Cop Car

Blaster Squad #1 Terror on the Moon

Fangs and Fun

The Battles of Hastings

Dead Money

Now here’s to hoping I’ll read 50 books next year – 50 fiction books and 10 non-fiction (that’s about the number of books I have to read for the vampires research, haha!)!

So, if you still have some gifts to make, buy some books! There are stories for every reader above… fantasy, sci-fi, thriller, humor… take your pick! Happy reading! 🙂

by Barb on 23/12/2016 • Permalink

Posted in reading

Tagged humor, reading, SFF

Posted by Barb on 23/12/2016

https://creativebarbwire.wordpress.com/2016/12/23/random-friday-bis/

Year in Reading

Since Friday was Christmas and I don’t have anything for Sunday anyway, I thought I’d do a spurious post about my reading year. I don’t think many people will wander on blogs on Christmas Day, and even today is risky, but well… wouldn’t let you 4 days without posts, LOL!

I have read 39 books (might be 40 if I manage one last title this last week of the year) including 7 manuscripts and 12 non-fiction books (which means I’m halfway through the non-fiction bundle I’ve bought in two separate bundles between end 2014 and beginning 2015).

I read also 2 anthologies/short story collections – When the lights go out and Fairy Tales Slashed. The latter I loved in spite of the bad formatting, typos and missing words everywhere, so it’s a recommended reading if you like that genre (m/m).

I had also bought 2 bundles of SFF with the non-fiction bundles, and I think I’m halfway through those too. I’m still trudging through a Campbell Anthology (I think from 2014), and I’m skipping all the novel excerpts! 😦

I did not finish a couple of books (one non-fiction and one fiction) – the first because I don’t have that problem so I’d rather read other stuff before getting to that topic and the second because it really didn’t drag me in.

Of those almost-40 books, only 5 were paper books… (and the manuscripts were printed, of course, I just can’t read on a computer screen). I prefer reading non-fiction for research purposes on paper, but if it’s books on writing, my Kindle is just fine! 😉

Now, the recommended FICTION reading list by Barb!

A walk across the Sun (contemporary story set all over the world – India, Europe, US…)

Ivory (science fiction)

Alien Influences (you can guess from the title – SF)

and the above Fairy Tales Slashed. For the NON-FICTION (all books on writing)

The pursuit of Perfection: and How it Harms Writers

Million $ Productivity

The Write Attitude

Now for next year I hope to read 50 books, if possible 30 fiction and 20 non-fiction (I still have some of those bundle books and I need to study business and publishing in Italy, I already have one book I bought last year, I really should start it, LOL!).

That might take down my TBR list a little, and then I can tackle the Smashwords wishlist or the Goodreads want-to-read list! 🙂 Happy reading!

by Barb on 26/12/2015 • Permalink

Posted in reading, real world inspiration, the Human being

Tagged fiction, non-fiction, SFF

Posted by Barb on 26/12/2015

https://creativebarbwire.wordpress.com/2015/12/26/year-in-reading/

Random Friday

The artists responses to the Paris shooting or 23 Heartbreaking Cartoons From Artists Responding To The Charlie Hebdo Shooting to which I would like to add two more from DeviantART – my once cover artist Elephant Wendigo and cartoonist David Ayala. Their drawings say it all, so no more words.

I’m currently wondering which would be best for research purposes for my next experiment, although I know the answers: the lazy way is watching related movies (such as Moon and Sunshine), the real way is to read books in the similar vein to try to write in that genre.

I have both classics such as Ray Bradbury or Rendez Vous With Rama, but also two SFF bundles still on my Kindle… so I will probably try those instead. Just to get in the mood. It’s not completely out of my reach, but a little out of my comfort zone yes. I think it’s called Hard SF and I’m bad with science and technology.

Even if I get in the mood, I know I’ll have to do research on a few basic things. And I wanted to do Astronomy at university! 😉 Except I soon realized it was all maths, and I’m not a maths person, so I gave up even before I finished high school. I wanted to write Hard SF like Asimov and ended up writing fantasy so I could make up stuff without bothering with being realistic, LOL!

So while I ponder which is the next step and wait for betas on Star Minds Next Generation Diaries and re-read Star Minds Next Generation (one last pass before sending it to editor) and keep reassessing this year’s goals… I’ll just wish you a wonderful weekend! 😉 Maybe next Friday I’ll have something to show for this weekend’s work and it might be the first Art Friday of the new year…