Grace note: the volcano scenes in Part II are based on the eruption of Oregon's Mount St. Helen's on Sunday, May 18,1980. (Fascinating research, by the way, if gorier than I expected.)
Attention, Regency lovers! Part I of this three-part book reads very much like a Regency novel. Try it, you just might like it.
The Crucible Kingdom
In a nutshell . . .
The king of The Crucible Kingdom orders a widowed duchess to marry a starship captain from a culture Crucibilians fled more than two hundred years earlier. Among several reasons for the marriage is the need to fight a curse that was laid on the kingdom by a very nasty native sorcerer. In Part II our hero and heroine battle the violence of the Curse, and in Part III, they go on the hunt for ways to stop it forever. Among the more romantic questions fitted around scenes of action and adventure: can an arrogant captain from the now-defeated Regulon Empire submit to being consort to a duchess? Can they work together well enough to destroy the Curse? Or will the Curse take one of them before they lower their pride enough to admit they love each other?
Grace notes: The Crucible Kingdom is a stand-alone book, not the start of a new series. Readers of the Blue Moon Rising series will, however, recognize several cross-over characters, including that ever-whimsical favorite, K'kadi Amund, sorcerer extraordinaire, the man who doesn't talk.
A Special Kind of SciFi
A number of years ago, when I began Rebel Princess, Book One of the Blue Moon Rising series, I thought I was writing the genre called "Futuristic"; i.e., fiction set in a future time but emphasizing romance rather than action/adventure. And yes, knowing I did not have the knowledge or interest to write the technical details required for Science Fiction, "Futuristic" seemed exactly right for me. Except . . . I soon discovered that Futuristic implied a level of hot sex I did not write. Oops!
So what to do? I was still searching for an answer as I uploaded Rebel Princess and went on to Book Two, The Sorcerer's Bride. I played with "SciFi/Paranomral," "SciFi/Paranormal/Romance." I attended a conference of Romance Writers of America, where a highly accomplished SciFi author emphasized that there were only two ways for romance authors to write novels of the future and register good sales: 1) Futuristics with plenty of sex scenes or 2) Serious SciFi with all the proper technical details. Oops again.
Clearly, I was writing a series that was neither "fish nor fowl nor rare roast beef."
But I forged on, enjoying the change from writing my better-known Regencies and hoping there were readers out there who would appreciate tales of adventure and romance set in a future time but without detailed sex scenes. Which brings me to a BIG THANK-YOU to those who have followed the Blue Moon series all the way through to The Bastard Prince and Royal Rebellion.
I have finally settled on a genre called "SciFi/Paranormal/Romance" or maybe "SciFi/Fantasy/Romance" or "SciFi/Adventure/Romance" or . . . You get the idea—as I write stories of Adventure and Romance set in a quadrant of our galaxy more than a thousand years in the future, I am skating a fine line between accepted genres. A line I'm hoping readers are willing to follow. I should also note that I'm writing primarily for a female audience. When I wrote Rebel Princess, it never even occurred to me that men might read it, until I saw a review complaining of "too much emotion" and knew instantly that particular reader was male. Sigh.
So, basically, I write stories of action and adventure, with strong emphasis on romance, and set in the world of the future. [As I recall, there were more than twenty romances over the course of the four Blue Moon books, including a few of the more unconventional kind (K'kadi Amund's, perhaps the most unusual of all).]
In summary, I write SciFi books for women who, in addition to enjoying the development of a romance, prefer a complex story with a plot that affects the welfare of a great many people. A book with interesting characters, a good deal of banter, an occasional quarrel, plenty of action and adventure, but without a dump of sexual details.
The Crucible Kingdom still has two chapters to be written, then at least two edits from top to bottom, but hopefully, it will be out near the end of the month. In addition to creating yet another world in my Blue Moon universe, I have thoroughly enjoyed the squabbles between the two main characters, which I suspect will continue long after the last page of the Epilogue.
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Thanks for stopping by,
"1) Futuristics with plenty of sex scenes or 2) Serious SciFi with all the proper technical details." People who would reject books because they don't fit either of these categories deserve what they get. I remember the first time I read C. S. Lewis's science fiction trilogy, I did not like it at all, and proclaimed that it simply wasn't science fiction, because it wasn't all about the science and technology.
ReplyDeleteFortunately, I persuaded myself to give them a second try at some point, and discovered how much good my prejudices had blinded me to.