One of the most enjoyable things I get to do when writing sci-fi and fantasy…
Category: Huntress
Huntress of the Star Empire was a huge learning experience for me. I’m immensely proud of all the lessons I learned getting it out there in all its forms.
Space Opera!
Over-the-top settings, costumes, and adventures are on the menu! If you’re wondering where the lady with the Viking hat is, she’s on a spaceship! Welcome to Week One of the Science Fiction Romance Brigade’s Summer Cafe. If you’re new to the genre, this is your map to the stars!
I’m six episodes into the run of “Huntress” and the series has reached its midpoint. The schedule I’ve set for myself is a bit of an aggressive one, with one release each week, and even though I’ve written the bulk of the season ahead of time, some pretty heavy creative work still goes into each episode in terms of continuity checking, sideplots, timeline management, worldbuilding, advertising copy for the book description page, and of course, “cliffhanger management.” I figure it’s probably time for a mid-season “pulse-check.”
Fifteen thousand words is plenty manageable to revise and produce in a week, under certain conditions. For those of you operating via page-counts, that’s somewhere right around fifty pages. I have plenty of time to revise and get things to edits and betas and back, but no time for the self-doubts that every writer has to catch up with me. This is incredibly liberating, and surprised the hell out of me as a person who knows myself and my deep-seated, unconscious rebellion against schedule (I grew up overscheduled and have resisted it in my adult life). The saying goes that you don’t eat a bear in one bite, you eat a bear one bite at a time. For me, these episodes seem to be “bite-sized” as it were.
I had one real New Year’s Resolution I made for 2015 (not counting the usual ones about getting in shape and eating better and finally taking down that evil monkey in the closet…). And that was to put out more books in 2015 than I did in 2014. I figured anything north of 1 would be a win. Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered some backlist writing in an entirely new light, and found out I had not just one new thing, but a whole new series.
“Huntress of the Star Empire” begins a new (ad)venture in storytelling for me. “Huntress” is Science Fiction Romance – a lesser-known, but persistently plucky subgenre that blends the adventure and technology of science fiction with the character-driven emotional payoff of romance. Huntress is also written as an episodic series.