Joely Skye

I write gay romance under Joely Skye, and she’s been busy of late :)

• Feral was released in paperback and it has even been seen in the wilds in a bookstore.
• Lynx was released in ebook and got some nice reviews.
• Wolf Town is up on the coming soon pages, arriving June 15.
• I chatted about my Sony reader at the Samhain blog.

But right now I am hard at work on a new Jorrie Spencer project. It’s not my easiest project to date, some days the writing is like pulling teeth, other days the words just fly. (Well, fly for me, a slow writer.) But I hope to have this out this year or early next year. More details as they become available.

Recognition

Have you ever recognized yourself, or at least your process? In this, I recognize me.

Part of the puttery process is that it ensures that there is no such thing as a complete early draft. Because I also revise as I go, another no no, and something I tried not to do with Chill. Because of course, on ‘should’ finish the story and then go back and revise it, right, rather than endlessly fussing with stuff that’s already written?

Wrong.

I discovered that if I don’t go back and poke at that stuff and fiddle with it, I have no feel for the story or where it’s going, and no love for it, and i don’t inhabit its spaces or play in its fields. It’s empty and foreign, and I’m not at home there. LOSE.

Elizabeth Bear writes about her writing process (via Nephele Tempest).

For what it’s worth, I love deadlines, but I like them to be on the far horizon, not breathing down my neck. And I like to beat them with much time to spend.

21M

As I mentioned on Friday, I wrote about wolves at the Samhain blog. In particular, the Druid Peak pack in Yellowstone Park. Wolves were reintroduced to that park in the 1990s, and it’s been a great opportunity to watch wolves and their social dynamics. I posted the story of two sisters. I thought it interesting.

You might want to read that blog before you read further here, as this post will then make more sense. One thing I didn’t write much about was wolf 21M (21st wolf tagged, male). The biologists didn’t want to give them names (though obviously Cinderella—42F—was an exception). They felt numbers would allow them to be more objective observers.

So 21M started off with a brief liaison with 39F after she was kicked out of the pack by her daughter 40F*. However, when that same pack’s alpha male was shot illegally, 21M left 39F to take the helm of the pack and paired with 40F. That alpha couple lasted a number of years. However, during this time, 21M also may have been mating with beta females. I’m not entirely sure if this is unusual or not, or if this would have fueled 40F’s aggressiveness or not. (She killed other females’ pups.) Certainly I’ve read that only the alpha couple mate usually, although that might be when resources are more scarce than they were at Yellowstone Park.

After a while, the beta female 42F, 40F’s sister, rebelled at her pups being killed, and she rebelled in a big way—by killing 40F. 42F became alpha female of the pack, pairing with 21M**. I have to wonder what his perspective on this all was. There wasn’t much mention of him mourning 40F’s passing, although there is only so much observers can know about what goes on in a wolf’s heart.

Yet four years after 40F was killed, 42F was killed by wolves from another pack, and it seems that 21M’s behavior indicated he was seriously grieving. The pair of them, 42F and 21M, had apparently been inseparable. When Cinderalla aka 42F was killed:

“He howled his guts out,” Smith said. “People say they heard him howl more since she died than he did in the five years before that.”

Was 21 in mourning?

“I can’t say that wolves mourn,” Smith said. “I’m a scientist and that’s not a scientific thing to say. But I do know he acted differently than he ever did before. You can draw your own conclusions.”

21M died a number of months later, apparently while hunting.

*There was a 41F who lived just slightly longer than her sister 42F. She, too, was run out of the Druid Peak pack by her other sister 40F (many years ago, before the coup).
**After 40F was killed by 42F who took charge, all the pups were raised that year and the pack number increased dramatically.

Samhain blog

Over at the Samhain blog, I’ve written a post about the Druid Peak wolves at Yellowstone Park.

Links

Elsewhere, at Beyond the Veil, I wrote about writing speed. This inspired in part by Dear Author’s post. Since then I’ve seen that AAR has a discussion going, Are Authors Being Pushed to Write Too Much? and they refer to this agent post that says agents and editors want fast writers. All very interesting. Even today’s Romancing the Blog post, Freedom, by Jordan Summers references this issue, albeit briefly.

Different topic: visited the bookstore today and saw Bound by Shadow by Anna Windsor. This series has piqued my interest. Anyone read it or even read a review of one of these books with warrior princesses?

But hey, maybe I should just pick the book up on a whim. I realize I rarely do that anymore!

Linkage

There’s been a lot of interesting posts and comments around the blogosphere of late.

Jane talks about Urban Fantasy.

Since I have become more fully immersed in the urban fantasy and cross over books, I find myself becoming increasingly impatient with books directed toward the romance reader that are really fantasy-lite.

Great comments there too. In fact, one comment by Janine was so wonderful I wanted to quote it:

Here are my thoughts on world-building. While I think consistent rules are certainly more helpful to suspending disbelief than inconsistencies in the world-building, I also don’t think it’s the explanations for the superpowers or the mythology that makes a world more convincing — to me as one reader, at least. You can poke holes in any world’s mythology and any character’s parnormal abilities, including Shakespeare’s.

So I think it’s the use of detail, and the mixing of realism amidst the fantasy. For example, in Ursula K. Le Guin’s YA fantasy novel, A Wizard of Earthsea, which I love to bits, she creates a seafaring world. And for me, it was the little details of the physical labor of sailing, the physical strain of the main character’s muscles, the sweat that formed on his skin, that made me believe in that world as much as anything.

In today’s Romancing the Blog, Angela T. discusses the hero-centric romances and heroine-centric urban fantasies. It’s an interesting post and gives one possible reason for the rise in popularity of UF. Certainly many covers code for this, with romances displaying male chests and urban fantasies showing tattooed women. All that said, I felt that the last romance I read, The Spymaster’s Lady, was heroine-centric although the hero did hold the balance of power–which doesn’t happen so much in UF, I think.

Oyceter’s Alpha Males post touches on some of the above issues, i.e. hero- and heroine-centric books. She also discusses alpha heroines.

My issues with the alpha male and with the romance genre as feminist lie in the prevalence of the alpha male and the lack of other types of fantasy…. I have no set conclusions, except that someone needs to write me a romance with an actual alpha female and a hero in distress, in which all the codings of a traditional alpha male romance are followed, only gender-reversed.

And the comments remind me that I am getting all excited about so many good historical romances coming out. Loretta Chase’s Your Scandalous Ways sounds awesome. I also have to pick up Private Arrangements by Sherry Thomas (all that good buzz), The Duke of Shadows by Meredith Duran (because, if I understand correctly, India and part-Indian hero), another Joanna Bourne novel, My Lord and Spymaster, comes out in the summer, and, hey, I still have If His Kiss is Wicked to look forward to. Plus, in fantasy romance, must read Lord of the Fading Lands. Too much to read! Too little time!

Note to self:

If you will only complete this book, then you can write the next book. I know you don’t like writing endings, but you love writing beginnings and middles.

So. FINISH.

(No, you cannot write another blog post until you revise the next chapter.)

Two on the go

So I’m motoring along with the wip, Puma. I write 1000-2000 words today, unless I’ve hit the end of a rolling draft and need to back up. This is positively speedy for me, so, yay me!

The oddest thing is, while I’m writing this, I got hit by another story out of nowhere. Yes, a cat-shifter story—obviously they’re on my mind. So half my brain is figuring out what happens next in Puma and the other half keeps getting these scenes from another story. I don’t want to lose it. Therefore yesterday, I wrote 1000 words on that story too. I never work on two stories at once. But I think I’ll keep poking away at story #2. Maybe even get a partial together. (Though there’s a story in between, also. Hmmm.)

Anyway, two-at-once feels very strange!

Now if I just had time to read.

More chapters achieved

Okay, I’m not producing a chapter a day, more like a chapter every two days. But that is fine and good. Today was a particularly good day at 2200 words, yesterday a no-go. But I just need steady production. If I average 1000 words a day, I’ll have a novel by March break and that is what I want.

And I have news, but I’m going to wait until it’s a little more official!

Chapter achieved

I wrote a complete chapter today! 7-8 pages. This is very good word count for me!

Must try to do the same tomorrow.

I know I’m behind the curve. Sven just ended. It’s January, not November. But I seem to fall of the wagon about two days into one of these group endeavors. So this’ll just have to be about me.

My reward: reading.