Musings

My wonderful and amazing publicist at Tor, Dot Lin, emailed me a review. Since it was in the body of the email I couldn’t avoid reading it, and I’m glad I did. I got a rave review from Romantic Times, and I’m really pleased. Now, why, I hear you ask would an S.F./Fantasy writer be glad for a good review from the Romantic Times?

First, the romance reading population is huge and they buy a lot of books. Second, it showed that sometimes treating this very much as a business can pay off. (Or at least I hope it will pay off.) When I sat down to write this book I was inspired by my frustration of a country that’s still arguing about whether to teach the science of evolution or the fairy tale of creationism. But once I’d made the decision to tell this story, I wanted to give the book every chance to succeed so I took into account a number of factors.

George R.R. had told me that a significant percentage of all books are purchased by women — I don’t remember the exact number but it was like 60 or 70 percent. I next began to think about what made certain characters just resonate for women — characters like Spock, or Data or Angel. I realized that what attracts us are suffering males who offer a challenge, and the secret sense that “I will be the woman who can comfort him.” Finally, I read a few of Diana Gabaldon’s time travel/romance books. I know when she sent in her first book she thought she was going to be a S.F./Fantasy writer. Instead she became an enormously successful romance author.

So, armed with all of this information I tried to write and, I hope, write well a complicated, emotionally charged protagonist. I don’t want people to think that this was just calculation. I like characters like that. I know I couldn’t write the straight up jock very well. I’m not particularly interested in that character, but give me neurosis and I’m all good.

I hope the review is good for a few sales. The review also said there was “food for thought”. Maybe a few people will ask a few more questions about comfortable assumptions.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 12:24 pm and is filed under writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.