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james_davis_nicoll
conulyrolanniIt is, by the way, snowing here in Central Maine.
From the mailbag: Why didn't you stop writing?
And the answer to that is -- you know this, surely? -- Steve.
Possibly missing fact: I was lead on the Fey books; Steve was writing the chapter-a-week for Fledgling and then Saltation.
Continuing the story of why I didn't quit writing:
I was in moderate hysterics, having come home from a bad day of secretarying, to find my mailbox full of mail hating on the Fey. Steve had hauled me to the kitchen table, poured the wine and said, "Tell me."
And I told him: I told him that I loved to write but I couldn't take the hate and the screaming and people telling me I was a pervert who wrote bad porn, and how dare I sully their eyes --
And he said. "So, are they bad books? Did you cheat? Did you deliberately write badly?"
And I kinda laughed right there and said, "Honestly? What bugs me the most about the porn comment is that it's bad porn. If I'm gonna write porn, it's going to be the best porn you ever read. And no, I didn't cheat. They were hard -- you know how hard they were -- but I did my best by them."
"OK," said Steve, "so what's bothering you is the hate mail. Don't read it."
"But we always answer mail from our readers."
"Forward it to me. I'll deal with it."
"OK..."
"Anything else?"
"Well . . . I'm afraid I won't be able to write anything, because I'll be afraid of being screamed at."
At this point, I believe the glasses were refreshed.
"We got into this because we wrote for each other," Steve said. "And we said we'd stop, if it wasn't fun any more. If it's not fun any more, tell me. We don't have to do this."
And I said, "Let me think about it."
We finished the bottle, as one does, and a couple days later, I started to write a story for the next SRM chapbook, and forwarded all my reader mail to Steve, who probably had written a script to send them immediately to trash-and-delete, and -- here we are.
alatefeline
ysabetwordsmithtorc87. It also fills the "Escape" square in my 4-1-26 card for the Flower Fest Bingo. This poem belongs to the series One God's Story of Mid-Life Crisis.
ysabetwordsmith ysabetwordsmithalatefeline offers this challenge:
james_davis_nicolllsandersonrolanniTuesday. Sunny and still cool. Trash and recycling are at the curb.
Today is Straighten Up The Office Day followed by an hour with the crafters at the library.
I am reading Crystal Soldier for the first time in 20 years and I am glued to the page. Good Ghod, what a great story! The characters are awesome! The world building is great and so far, at about the halfway point, I have no complaints at all.
I was thinking that I would skip the Crystal books, because so very many people have disliked them. Not nearly as many people as disliked the Fey Duology, and not approaching the level of vitriol, but still -- a lot of people really, really disliked these books, and they were not shy of saying so.
I go on record now as saying the critics are wrong.
Firefly is being keeping very close, and is taking every opportunity to climb on my lap to purr and knead and head butt. Her tail is back to normal, and I?
Need to go find breakfast.
How's everybody doing today?
#
A Brief History of the Fey Duology
Back in the early 2000s, Steve and I were writing Liaden books for Meisha Merlin and having a pretty good time, except that our paychecks were getting more irregular than we liked. We talked to our agent, who shared the Industry Wisdom that most writers did not put all of their eggs into one literary basket, but branched out, starting one, or even two, other series, under a (or several) pen names. They key was not to compete with yourself, because the intention of the secondary line was to smooth out the cashflow, not to supplant the primary work.
So, we brainstormed, we three, and we came up with an idea that was Nothing At All like Liad (saving a Regency-like setting for the human settlers), a Deeply Dark SF-grounded Fantasy which would be marketed under a pseudonym.
It was a good plan, and it might even have worked.
Except Other Events Overtook Meisha Merlin, and we were not only out of a job, but we were out a $ignificant amount of Back Royalties Owed. The sequel to The Tomorrow Log was a victim of this cataclysm. Fledgling-on-the-web was a benefit. Sharon re-entered the mundane world and took up the melant'i of departmental secretary at the local Little Ivy.
For a Period of Time, we didn't know if we would retain our rights in the Liaden Universe, or if they would become part of the assets of Meisha Merlin sold to satisfy its creditors.
Our agent therefore had one thing in hand to try to sell for us, so that our cats wouldn't have to go live under a bridge -- the proposal for two dark "fantasies."
And -- all honor to her -- she sold them. To Baen. Under the condition that they be published under the Lee and Miller byline.
Money talks. We took the deal. We shouldn't have taken the deal, but we were, frankly, afraid. I don't wish to paint Baen as a villain; in fact, they threw us a much-needed lifeline, and the fact that we've been publishing with them since 2008 tells its own tale.
But the Fey books -- written against, as you might say, the Liaden books -- the reaction to those books nearly finished me as a writer. Wow, did people hate those books, and they wrote to us, and they were Betrayed, and Horrified, and one woman said she had Thrown Away all of her Liaden books and -- my ghod, what a mess.
And I was still working as a secretary at the college. Not my finest hour.
But! A happy ending. Meisha Merlin returned the copyrights to all of its authors; we resold ours to Baen, who, as I mentioned above, we've been working with ever since.
And we never tried to establish a second series again.
duckprintspress
This Saturday at 8 a.m. we’ll be hosting our Patreon panel for April 2026: Writing Fanfiction, Writing Original Fiction: Similarities and Differences. We’ll be joined by a group of authors mostly located outside the US – Neo Scarlett, J. D. Rivers, Vee Sloane, Dei Walker, and MJ Kiwiana – to compare and contrast our experiences in writing fanfiction and original fiction!
Description: Views on how similar writing fanfiction is to writing original fiction vary widely, and form a spectrum ranging from peoplew who feel that writing fanfic and writing ofic are completely different exercises to whose who believe that writing each is identical. As with most continua, the reality of similarities and differences is more nuanced in the majority of cases, with how they are alike and how they differ depending on the writer, the style, the genre, and other variables. In this panel, we’ll look at these intersections to discuss where we fall personally in our views, how we find writing fanfic and ofic to be similar, how we find it to be different, what skills we’ve found portable across the two, and which we haven’t.
james_davis_nicoll
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ladybusinessPlease welcome our anonymous reviewer!
ysabetwordsmith ysabetwordsmith ysabetwordsmith hrjjames_davis_nicoll
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