Juno Books

Ever hear of that line from Burton Rascoe…? “What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he’s staring out of the window.” (The man was born in 1892, so don’t leap on the sexism.) Makes sense. Writing is creative process. A writer has to think…

Editors don’t look out windows. They fall into computer screens and get lost.

Yesterday I had my head totally into a first edit on a manuscript. For me, when I’m in that groove, I go into sort of a time trance or something. My head is completely into what I’m doing. I looked at the time in the upper right-hand corner of the trusty iMac: 6:08 PM. Thought to myself that I’d knock off about 6:30 for a break. Next time my eyes tracked the inch or so from Word to the time…it was 7:47 pm.

Whoa. I was expecting it to be maybe 6:30.

And I hadn’t progressed all that much. Nothing dire with the book I was working on, just considering this and that and if this was clear and it that was correct and, hey, did she mention such-and-such before? and…

Plus it must have been nap time for my staff interns, aka, the cats, none of whom had invaded the office during the period.

Or maybe the aliens had taken me, wiped my mind of the incident, and returned me to my chair…

I really wanted to do some announcing by now of our spring line-up (Feb-Mar-April-May 2010), but the contracts are not back yet on all four of the books, so I guess I can’t. I can say (since their agent announced it) that Stacia Kane’s DEMON POSSESSED, the third book in her Megan Chase series, is slated for March and Maria Lima’s untitled fourth book in her Bloodlines series, will be published later in 2010.

I can hint broadly that the May title is a sequel and that the February and April titles are from new authors. Ms. February is previously published, but not in fantasy, and Ms. April will be making her debut as a novelist.

January 2010’s release is HALLOWED CIRCLE, Linda Robertson’s second in the Circle series; the third, DEAD CIRCLE, is tentatively scheduled for July 2010.

Our August Release:

An article in The Telegraph reports on a survey that found women are more avid readers of books than men. According to the survey “almost half of women are ‘page turners’ who finish a book soon after starting it compared to only 26% of men….The survey of 2,000 adults also found those who take a long time to read books and only managed one or two a year were twice as likely to be male than female….Men are also more likely to have shelves full of books that have never been opened.”

This is “Doc.” She is the newest addition to the family. My son Andrew’s girlfriend Katie adopted her last week. She’s a mix of beagle (like Snoopy) and Cavalier King Charles Spaniel and was the runt of her litter.

The cats here are putting up with her visits with considerable patience as she wants to play, play, play…and they don’t. She is very beagle-ish when it comes to following her nose and exploring and thus finds a great many fascinating things she should not eat on the floor.

Right now she’s tiny. They were saying they expected her to eventually weigh maybe 25 lbs, but I’m thinking she’s going to be smallish.

Beagle (l) + Cav (r) = Doc

The 2009 Hugo Award nominations have been announced and Lillian Stewart Carl is nominated for editing the non-fiction “The Vorkosigan Companion: The Universe of Lois McMaster Bujold” along with her co-editor John Helfers.

Other “family members” nominated are “Weird Tales” edited by Ann VanderMeer & Stephen H. Segal (Stephen is the one to thank for all those terrific Juno cover designs and Wildside publishes WT) and “Clarkesworld Magazine” edited by Neil Clarke, Nick Mamatas & Sean Wallace. (Sean, of Prime Books, handled the business end of Juno). Both magazines are up for Best Semiprozine

A special shout-out to novelette nominee Elizabeth Bear (“Shoggoths in Bloom”, Asimov’s Mar 2008) who was in one of the early Juno “year’s best” anthos and Cheryl Morgan (Best Fan Writer), who has always been supportive of Juno.

Mention might also be made of Ginjer Buchanan’s nomination (Best Editor, Long Form) simply because there would BE no not-exactly-named-but-heck…call it paranormal/urban fantasy…genre today if not for Ms. Buchanan.

Hey, note the terrific Tanya Huff quote. Ms. Huff was kind enough to read the manuscript and comment

Supernatural creatures, fictional though they may be, are often controlled or heavily influenced by natural forces. Werewolves usually “turn” at the full moon. Most vampires must avoid sunlight. Some forms of magic are related to moon phases. Waning and waxing gibbous moons are more than poetic descriptions, they have exact meanings. The number of daylight hours available often factor in a plot and more than one author has forgotten that romantic moonlight may not be present at the time the characters need it…and so on.

The handiest place I’ve found to check up on such things are the Astronomy Calculators at Timeanddate.com. There’s a Sun Calculator (calculate sunrise, sunset, twilight and more for any date), Moon Calculator (moonrise, moonset and moon phase) and Moon Phase Calculator (moon phases for any year). You can select locations from Afganistan to Zimbabwe

So, yesterday I checked emailed about 8:30 AM and then had to go chat with my doctor and run a few errands. Came home and the cable service was out. I pay big bucks for “small business class” service and the tech support is great. (That’s why I pay the the big bucks. For home service you get: “We can have someone out in 4-5 days.” The serviceman gets here and they you have to explain to him how to fix it.) Unfortunately the problem was an area outage and they were working on it.

Now, the irony here is that I made it through one of the worst winter’s weatherwise here I can recall…and never lost service. Yesterday was the first really substantially spring day so far — 70 degrees, sunny, a cloudless sky, ecstatic birdsong, etc.

Go figure.

Anyway, they got things fixed by the time the Cavs’ game came on at 7 PM, so I can’t complain too much. I mean: as soon as I had cable restored, I immediately got right back to work! Ahem.

At least the snowdrops have been up for awhile.

Chris has the complete book in PDF and HTML for downloading and reading: http://www.saltwaterwitch.com/freeseaborn.php

You don’t have to, but if you feel like paying someone back, please consider donating to one (or both!) of his favorite organizations: Monterey Bay Aquarium or Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Both do wonderful ocean research.

You can read more about SEABORN here

According to Reuters, An Italian anthropologist believes he has found the remains of a female “vampire” in Venice, buried with a brick jammed between her jaws to prevent her feeding on victims of a plague which swept the city in the 16th century. Matteo Borrini, an anthropologist from the University of Florence, said the discovery supported the medieval belief that vampires were behind the spread of plagues like the Black Death.

The skeleton was unearthed in a mass grave from the Venetian plague of 1576 on Lazzaretto Nuovo, a small island in the Venice Lagoon which lies around two miles northeast of Venice. The island was used as a sanitorium for plague victims. During the era– between 1300 and 1700 — when plagues ravaged Europe, decomposition of corpses was not well understood. According to Borrini, gravediggers reopening mass graves would sometimes come across bodies bloated by gas, with hair that still appeared to be growing, and blood seeping from their mouths. Shrouds used to cover the faces of the dead were often decayed by bacteria in the mouth, revealing the corpse’s teeth. Thought to be vampires, they became known as “shroud-eaters.” These “undead” were believed to spread pestilence in order to suck the remaining life from corpses.

“To kill the vampire you had to remove the shroud from its mouth, which was its food like the milk of a child, and put something uneatable in there,” said Borrini. “It’s possible that other corpses have been found with bricks in their mouths, but this is the first time the ritual has been recognized.”

In a press release on 2008 Full-Year Results, Lagardere updated their figures for Stephenie Meyer’s sales in 2008, showing she sold 29.7 million copies in the US in 2008 (and another 2.3 million copies this year so far.) Hachette UK sold another 3.7 million and Hachette in France sold 830,000 copies of her work in 2008. The US breakouts are 10.07 million copies for Twilight; 6.95 million copies for New Moon; 5.03 million copies for Eclipse; 1.46 million copies for The Host; and 6.23 million copies of Breaking Dawn. Publishers Lunch newsletter Publishers Lunch Deluxe estimates Meyer’s sales at approximately $260 million, or about 9 percent of the company’s annual revenues based on end-of-year exchange rates. Hachette “declines to break out individual authors’ contribution to sales as a matter of policy,” but “has indicated it disagrees with” that estimate.

Publishers Lunch also notes Lagardere released “real” ebook sales reporting that ebook sales in the US rose 5.5 times during 2008 with the company declaring revenues of $4.7 million on such. (Few actual figures of ebook sales are released.) The trade newsletter speculates that even with US sales for the year increasing that much, ebooks comprised less than 0.75 percent of sales for Hachette, conforming with Penguin USA’s recent declaration to them that, “while they too experienced a nearly five-fold increase in ebook sales, it has yet to comprise one percent of revenue.”

Publishers Lunch wisel points out:

Hachette has dominated the recently-published Kindle bestseller charts with books from Stephenie Meyer (who has been published successfully for the mobile platform, too) as well as titles from Malcolm Gladwell, James Patterson and Willam P. Young, so it seems safe to presume that they are performing as well as or better than any of their peers in this area right now.

We appreciate having an actual fact to reaffirm our continuing contention that mainstream media and Wall Street analysts alike have vastly overcovered and over-responded to the near-term impact of the Kindle and other consumer ereading devices and platforms. The growth rates are quite high and clearly the expansion of players and consumer options will fuel this market further, but it is currently tiny.

Yet another revision in the guidelines. This time I’ve tried to make it clearer that we are not looking for.

Truth is, if you read “this kind of book” then you KNOW what we want. And we want it to be original, imaginative, and well-written with three dimensional characters and a plausible “world”. Admittedly not all the books being published as “this kind of book” are such.

Romance Junkies:

BRIMSTONE KISS is a brilliant follow-up to Ms. Douglas’ first novel. There are so many different story lines in this second installment of Delilah’s story that I got a little baffled at first, but it all pulls together in the end to create another masterpiece… The story leaves you hanging with more to come, like who her sister Lillith is and what kind of paranormal creature is the rock-star Snow? I would strongly suggest if anyone would like to read this novel, to start off with her earlier novel and continue with BRIMSTONE KISS. (Blue Ribbon Rating: 4)

According to a press release from Barnes & Noble the bookseller has purchased the e-book retailer Fictionwise for $15.7 million in cash. The e-book company operates two websites, Fictionwise.com and eReader.com. Both will remain functioning after the sale. Founders/owners Steve and Scott Pendergrast will continue to operate Fictionwise as a separate business unit of B&N.

Teleread has an analysis.

Barnes & Noble said it plans to use Fictionwise as part of its overall digital strategy, which includes the launch of an e-Bookstore later this year.

Earlier this week, Amazon announced it will begin selling its Kindle e-books for reading on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Starting yesterday, the Kindle for iPhone and iPod Touch app could be downloaded from Apple’s App Store.

Random House’s Suvudu.com now offers a free library designed “to introduce new readers to popular and acclaimed science fiction and fantasy series Readers can access free digital copies of the first book in a series. The program launches with access to the following novels:
His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik
Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb
Settling Accounts: Return Engagement by Harry Turtledove
Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
Blood Engines by T.A. Pratt

The books are also available on other content services, including Scribd.com and the Stanza ebook reader application for the iPhone.

New titles will be added on a regular basis. Terry Brooks’s “Magic Kingdom for Sale—Sold!” and Elizabeth Moon’s “Trading in Danger” are among those scheduled.

Fresh Fiction Review:

…This book grabs you from the start and keeps you turning pages until you solve the mystery. Keira’s interactions with Adam, Tucker, and the people in the small town are so real you feel you are watching it unfold. I certainly will be watching for more books by Maria Lima.

SFSite Review:

…Matters of the Blood has a fast pace that never lags, suspense to keep the reader turning pages, paranormal beings including shape shifters and vampires and a personality of its own….It’s a complex plot with the requisite twists and turns of a mystery, the passion of a paranormal romance and the unearthly elements of urban fantasy. All in all, Matters of the Blood is a wonderful start to Blood Lines. I look forward to reading Blood Bargain, the next book in Lima’s Series.

at World in a Satin Bag. Chris is also up to about 80 pages on his graphic novel Saltwater Witch.

The word passion, like the word patience, is derived from the Latin verb pati–”to suffer, to endure.” When passion entered the English language around 1175, it was used only as a Christian theological term for the events (as related in the New Testament) leading up to and the crucifixion of Jesus. (It is still used, usually with a capital P, in this context.)

A couple of centuries later, passion had also come to mean strong emotion of some kind. It took another two hundred years or so to acquire the sexual connotation. By 1638, passion took on the “boundless enthusiasm” meaning.

True devotion to any pursuit requires patience, endurance, and, yes, even suffering. If you are passionate about writing — or anything — you stick with it even though it is not always a pleasant experience. You keep at it when there’s more sorrow than joy involved in the process. You persevere.
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I’ve been writing a monthly newsletter for Writers.com for many years. I used a modified version of the above for the February issue.