Off The Pink

at 8:16 PM

A couple of woo-hoos:

First off, Anne at Bantam has given the ok to the outline I submitted for Wolfbreed #2 (titles, I need titles.) which means that I can go ahead with it as soon as I get the next DAW book out of the way. Second off, we are retiring the Valentine's Night counter, since I've just wrapped up the first draft.

This is shaping up to be my most productive year writing since 1992, when I started doing this professionally. About exactly a year ago, I started writing Wolfbreed #1. I've since finished the novel, landed one helluva agent, found a new publisher, finished the first volume of the Apotheosis Trilogy for DAW, and now I've wrapped up the first draft of a third novel outside of any contractual commitments.

Busy as I seem to be, my goal of finishing volume 2 for both Wolfbreed and the Apotheosis Trilogy in the next 12 months doesn't seem particularly daunting. Yea me.

at 5:58 PM

Blogging is taking a back seat to the new novel (30K+ yea me!) And yes, I bumped up the total wordage of Valentine's Night, the spec novel I'm working on while waiting to hear back from Anne. Two reasons.

I have trouble writing short, and I don't feel I'm that close to the halfway point.

I can.

at 11:09 AM

Well my latest spec project is still rolling along quickly, quickly enough that if Anne continues being overworked at Bantam, I might get the whole thing done before I have to do any editorial revisions on Wolfbreed #1 (titles, I need titles). I started it a week and a half ago, and I have 23K words. The good news is, unlike Wolfbreed I do not anticipate going back and completely revising everything halfway in. (Of course, I just jinxed myself, as I didn't have any plans like that for Wolfbreed at this point.)

For those curious, I have returned to vampires. However this is going to be unrelated to the pair of Blood & Rust novels. I'm trying my hand at an intentional paranormal romance. One that kicks most of the late 20th Century's contribution to the vampire mythos to the curb. No blood-drinking cabals conspiring in the darkness, no angsty goth heroes, and no supernatural vampire hunters of whatever dynasty.

at 3:45 PM

So I finished and turned in the Prophets draft. My next project is Wolfbreed #2 (Still need titles for those) but I can't really start until Anne at Bantam gets back to me, approving the outline for the next book. Since I didn't want to jump into the next Apotheosis book and have to interrupt it, I was just taking a short break. . .

My Muse didn't like that. Like the attack that resulted in Wolfbreed #1, I was sitting, minding my own business, and my muse bitch-slapped me with an idea I just had to start on. As of right now, after about four days, I have nearly 10K words. It's deja vu all over again.

I even went and added a counter for it.

at 7:08 PM

In a manifestation of what I noted in an earlier post; that if your romantic paranormal fantasy is filed on the romance shelf you get a hunk on the cover, on the fantasy shelf you get a babe on the cover in short:

Fantasy:

Romance:

Now there's a blog post on the Juno Books blog that's warning of yet another subclassing of paranormal cover art-- The Butt Cover. Apparently, if you have an ass-kicking heroine in a paranormal urban fantasy, we need to see some ass. Consider yourself warned.

at 12:35 PM

John Ottinger has had some nice things to say about Fellowship Fantastic, the latest anthology by Martin H. Greenberg and Kerrie Hughes. He also had some very nice things to say about this humble author's contribution:

The best stories in this anthology were [Donald J. Bingle’s] "The Quest" and "The Enigma of the Serbian Scientist", which is odd, considering that neither is truly fantasy in the strictest sense. [...] "The Enigma of the Serbian Scientist" by S. Andrew Swann reintroduces the historical figures of Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison, in a murder mystery that can only be solved by an alternate Sherlock Holmes. The stories connection to fellowship is tenuous, as it builds on the readers’ prior knowledge of the relationship between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, renamed Helms and Wilson in this story, but it is still interesting to read and is an unusual choice for this collection. Therefore, if nothing else, it stands out for its distinctiveness as well as its craft. Buy the book already

at 12:09 PM

At least that’s how it’s looking. With help from my kick-ass agent, Eleanor, I’ve sold Wolfbreed and a subsequent novel to Anne Groell at Bantam/Spectra for an advance a bit more than three times what DAW was giving me. Contracts are being written as we speak, and by this time next month, I will be the newest author at Bantam. Or, at least one of me will be. We haven’t talked bylines yet, though Eleanor thinks that Wolfbreed may be an S. A. Swiniarski book.

We will pause this blog post for an important message:
WAHOOO!!!!
We now return to your regularly scheduled blog.

We can add to this news the amusing wrinkle that will probably make a few friends of mine’s head ‘splode:

I’ve become a romance author.

Ok, it’s dark paranormal historical romance (and how deep can we subclass a genre?) but still. Now, from earlier posts you might have gathered that I was expecting this. I was. But I don’t think anyone else was. This includes Anne at Bantam who approached the subject of genre very gingerly; in her words “Some boys are scared by the label.” She obviously expected some resistance on my end. Frankly I am the last person to look down on anyone’s genre, and given the way SF has been treated historically, I think any SF writer that peers down his nose at romance writers is an arrogant twit.

at 12:23 PM

(Scalzi @ Whatever alerted me to this.)

Note to aspiring writers:

Don't submit stuff to Dragon Magazine, just don't. They are paying a whopping 3-6 cents a word for all rights.

ALL RIGHTS.

ALL!!!!

This means you can't re-sell it, you can't put it on your website, podcast or whatever. You can't translate it and publish it in Germany. You can't write a screenplay based on it. And they can probably sue your ass if you write anything in the same universe and sell it to someone else.

IMO anyone who submits there is too stupid to write publishable fiction.

at 11:30 PM

What the hell is going on here? J. K. Rowling makes an aside about the backstory of one of her characters-- something that's not mentioned, or even evident in the text of the book-- and people start freaking out.

Right now there are like 40+ comments on two separate posts on Whatever. There's nearly 150 comments on a post @ Making Light. It's making news at E!, Fox, Newsweek and the Washington Post.

What really annoys me is this quote from the AP story with the equally annoying headline "Dumbledore’s outing gives text new meaning"

“Jo Rowling calling any Harry Potter character gay would make wonderful strides in tolerance toward homosexuality,” Melissa Anelli, webmaster of the fan site The Leaky Cauldron, told The Associated Press. “By dubbing someone so respected, so talented and so kind, as someone who just happens to be also homosexual, she’s reinforcing the idea that a person’s gayness is not something of which they should be ashamed.”if it was part of the effing books

at 9:47 PM

Well J. K. Rowling has confirmed that Dumbledore was gay, and you know something is very strange when the sexual preference of a fictional character is a major story on CNN. I'm just saying. . .

I just hope things go well for the headmaster of Hogwarts. After all, we all know how badly things went for Tinky Winky when he was outed. I can only hope that we have grown a little more tolerant as a culture since then.

at 11:04 PM

Writing and trying to hawk Wolfbreed to agents (news coming on that score, stay tuned) has made me more aware of the growing genre of paranormal romance. I'm seeing it everywhere now, and I noticed something on my last trip to Borders. Now, as you'd expect, if the sexy undead werewolf-hunter novel has the word "Romance" on the spine it will be shelved under romance, if it has the word "Fantasy" there instead, it ends up in SF/F. But even if you don't see what's stamped on the spine, I've noticed a certain more significant difference on the covers found between the two sets of shelves. . .

Let's peruse the Fantasy shelf. . .

Now the Romance Shelf. . .

Notice anything?

at 8:22 PM

I just got my copy of the anthology where my story "Fealty" appears, 'Places to be, People to Kill.' So it's out, buy it. And while the Klausner review drops my name, it would be nice if some actual people reviewed it on Amazon.

Off The Pink

This is not the blog you're looking for

I have moved, and you can find new entries, comments etc. at www.sandrewswann.com come over and check it out.

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Unrepentant self-satisfaction

Friday, February 22, 2008

Moving the Goalposts

Monday, February 18, 2008

We just keep rolling along

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Attack of the muse: redux

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Butt Glut

Friday, January 04, 2008

Now I feel all warm and fuzzy inside

Thursday, December 06, 2007

Successfully Clawing My Way Up From the Bottom of the Midlist

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Stupid for Sale, 3 cents a word

Monday, October 22, 2007

Ok, I Think Everyone Needs to Get a Grip

Sunday, October 21, 2007

J. K. Rowling Throws the Slashfic Writers a Bone

Friday, June 22, 2007

Book (un)Covers

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Places to Be, People To Kill

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