The panels I'd really like to attend...

There's a writer's workshop to which I've been invited, and I have to say that I'm intrigued by the offerings on hand but I'm reluctant to blow the $65 it takes just to listen to the kinds of things I often get as part of the package at NorWesCon or any other writer's convention. The track I'm most interested in contains the following panels: "Plot and Structure", "The Short Fiction Toolbox", "All the Good Advice I Wish I'd Gotten Way Back When", and "How Natural History can Enliven Your Prose."

I think those are all fine panels, but there are a few panels I'd love to see. Most writing groups aren't interested in supported the mass-market producer or the serial writer. But why aren't there panels like "Episode 300: How To Avoid Repeating Yourself Yet Again"? Or "Twenty Years of Avoiding the Brain-eater"? Or "Trust Me: Your Current Works In Progress Aren't Merely Pale Shadows Of The Stuff You Wrote Ten Years Ago"?

Because I could probably use a couple of those.

Books Review

So, I'm about 10% of the way into The Algebraist and... I don't know. It just drags. It feels like Banks, but farmed out: all the tropes are there, the cosmic ideas and notions, all of them in service to something so pedestrian that I'm unmoved. So far, I haven't found a plot worth caring about.

But that's not what I'm writing about. I'm here to write about Ellora's Cave, a romance/erotica publishing house that specializes in SF/Fantasy/Supernatural romance, usually using all the "right" words to describe the sex scenes. I've read a few things from EC and the quality is, well, uneven. The best story I was a contemporary were-jaguar story with lots of sex; the worst was a skiffy ("scifi") thing where functional neurophysiology is tantamount to mind control.

I decided to give them a fresh try with a story called Nyssa's Guardian, by "Gaby Reese." Yes, I was attracted to the name first, given that the fem protagonist shares it with one of my main characters.

Oh, my, this is a silly book. The SF is sub-Star Trek. The dialogue is terrible. The premise about as ridiculous as you can imagine. Our heroine is a "fem", she lives in a bisexual polymorphously perverse culture she shares with egalitarian (ne' emasculated) "mems" ("sensitive, caring males who understand my female equality"), and her world only persists because of its warrior class, the "Primales" ("Primales were all like this: Insanely confident, duty-bound to the point of obsession, sickeningly, tediously brave-- and totally fucking gorgeous. Super all over. Hugely endowed with incredible endurance. And a surprisingly keen ability to tune in to the female body for the purpose of delivering slow, maddening pleasure culminating in mind-blowing orgasm.") whom Nyssa is not allowed to get near because, due to their ubermasculine nature they become absolutely monogamously committed to the first woman they fuck, which would be unfair to both her and him. For Primales, there is an underclass of women, the "obedients," who are wired to monogamy the way Primales are.

Nyssa has been secretly bred to lead the world to a more "natural" state, the Council of Elders™ having decided that its current condition is too decadent, and by her exceptional nature she overwhelms the Sensitive New Age People all around her. She is unaware of this breeding program. She has made enemies (apparently even SNAPs will contemplate murder when challenged) and a Primale is assigned to be her bodyguard. Both of them find this intolerable: she thinks he's a sexist barbarian pig who she secretly wishes she could fuck senseless while not being "cursed" to be his sole mate, and he, well: "Never had he witnessed such insolent behavior. Never had he seen such utter disregard for propriety. Never had he viewed...such an ass. So maddeningly pert, so perfectly shaped, designed for no other purpose than to inflame the blood of a man."

I'm sorry. "Gaby" is a man. I don't believe a woman would write that. Hell, I wouldn't write like that. I'd be embarassed to write that.

Then again, maybe that's my problem.