Celebrate Romance, Celebrating Wins!

A mish-mash of a blog today. No writing tips. Lots of BSP (blatant self promotion). If you wonder where Colby Hodge disappeared to, she was at Celebrate Romance, a small but wonderful author/reader conference, as was I. And about 70 others. This year it was in Columbia SC (you can probably figure my mindset when my flight landed in Charlotte and the pilot annouced it was 37-degrees out. I'm from Florida...). It was at the Inn at USC, a totally lovely historic hotel on the edge of the USC campus.

Author Isabo Kelly (solo below) and I, along with reader Robin Greene, arrived by limo from the airport:

Hey, life's short. Eat dessert first and take a limo when you can.

And here's Colby Hodge (R-standing) with author Elizabeth Hoyt (seated) at the CR signing at Books A Million Saturday night:

More photos can be found here at the moment, on the Publisher's Weekly blog. I'll post them all by week's end on my site in News.

Okay, BSP time. I found out late Friday night that Games of Command won the PEARL award for Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Romance, and The Down Home Zombie Blues took an Honorable Mention. Here's the full list of winners and HMs:

Anthology
Honorable Mention -
MY BIG FAT SUPERNATURAL HONEYMOON by Jim Butcher, P. N. Elrod, Marjorie M.Liu, Kelly Armstrong, Rachel Caine, Katie MacAlister, Lilith Saintcrow, RondaThompson, Caitlin Kittredge
WILD THING by Maggie Shayne, Alyssa Day, Marjorie M. Liu, Meljean Brook

Winner -
ON THE PROWL by Sunny, Karen Chance, Patricia Briggs, Eileen Wilks

Fantasy
Honorable Mention - ATLANTIS RISING by Alyssa Day
Winner - DEVIL MAY CRY by Sherrilyn Kenyon

Futuristic
Honorable Mention - THE DOWN HOME ZOMBIE BLUES by Linnea Sinclair
Winner – SILVER MASTER by Jayne Castle

Best New Author
Winner – C. L. Wilson

Best Novella
Winner – Alpha and Omega by Patricia Briggs / ON THE PROWL ANTHOLOGY

Best Overall
HM – FOR A FEW DEMONS MORE by Kim Harrison
Winner – Devil May Cry by Sherrilyn Kenyon

Best Science Fiction & Fantasy
HM – BLOOD BOUND by Patricia Briggs
Winner – GAMES OF COMMAND by Linnea Sinclair

Best Shapeshifter
HM – CARESSED BY ICE by Nalini Singh
Winner – BLOOD LINES by Eileen Wilks

Best Time Travel
HM – PARALLEL DESIRE by Deidre Knight
Winner – WHEN I FALL IN LOVE by Lynn Kurland

Best Vampire
HM – LOVER REVEALED by J. R. Ward
Winner – DARK POSSESION by Christine Feehan

More BSP: In the prestigious 12th annual AAR Reader Poll, Games of Command took Best SFF & Futuristic!

So this has been an extremely exciting February and March for me. Plus, oh, yeah, we hatched another duckling. Meet Thumperduck the wonder duck, typing away on my Vaio under the watchful eye of Daq cat who is my laptop's wallpaper kitty:

Hugs all, ~Linnea

http://www.linneasinclair.com/

Are We Boldly Going...?

I'm absolutely pleased ::Linnea points to previous BSP post on the upcoming workshop:: that the genre(s) of SFRomance and Futuristics are getting some coverage as of late. There was also a lengthy article on paranormals--including SFR--at All About Romance last month. Now, one could chalk this up to the fact that this is the Halloween season, so things that go bump or boo or boom in the night get attention.

I'm hoping it's something more than that. I'm hoping that Science Fiction Romance (and Futuristics and RSF, for those of you who break things down thusly) is finally being recognized as a valid (sub)genre. Worthy of coverage. Worthy of attention. Worthy of question.

This is something the lovely and delightful Susan Grant and I bemoan...oops! I mean discuss from time to time. Okay, we've been bitching a lot about it lately. Sue's one of the Grande Dames of the romance end of the genre (and that does not mean she's older--she's quite the young thing) and as she knows, I respect her journey tremendously and, as well, the avenues she's opened for the rest of us. On the SF end, we have Catherine Asaro and our own wonderful Jacqueline Lichtenberg who developed the romance, the "intimate adventure" side of the story over in the SF aisles.

Many authors have followed. But many have moved on to other genres (Carole Nelson-Douglas and CJ Barry come immediately to mind) and in speaking with them they've admitted that SFR/Futuristics genre just doesn't have the numbers. That is, the readership, the following, the sales. Both CJ (now writing as Samantha Graves) and Carole jumped over to mystery/romantic suspense.

Part of the problem--and this is something Sue's keyed on rightly in her emails with me--is that SFR has an identity crisis. Neither fish nor fowl, not quite comfortable in the romance aisles and not quite sure if it belongs in the SF aisles, SFR sometimes plays the part of the rabble-rouser (it is known for its kick-butt heroines) and sometimes the unwanted guest (read the reviews where the romance reviewer says there's too much tech stuff and the SF reviewer says there's too much mush). We're lumped in with paranormals (vampires, werewolves, shapeshifters, dark angels and sorceressess) but I'm not sure we belong there. That's like lumping space-opera science fiction books in with police procedurals because, well, they both involve weapons and people die.

We also tend to throw the cover art departments of publishing houses into apoplexy. Too many spaceships on the cover and the romance contingent won't read us. But a muscles chest or a couple kissing scares off the SFers. I recently went through severe cover art issues with my books at Bantam when a series of covers was presented that were totally gorgeous and totally, absolutely, undeniably wrong for my books. They'd have been perfect for Laurell K Hamilton or some edgy, erotic, urban fantasy novel. They were frighteningly wrong for mine--frightening in that they delivered a message; no. They promised a kind of read I don't deliver. I feared a huge "reader disconnect" if they had been used.

Sue Grant ran into a similar problem but from a different end. Her covers have tended to the lighter romancey end, totally ignoring the deeper and yes, SF elements in her stories. While not fully chick-lit in design they did substantially play down the SF parts. Granted, Sue writes terrific humor, especially in her most recent SFR series, "Otherworldly Men". But there's a lot of humorous SF out there with

covers that don't ignore the SF factor.

So it's not just readers and reviewers who are confused. Publishers and their marketing departments are, too.

Which brings me to my title for this blog: are we boldly going where SFR needs to go? Or are we riding the coattails of paranormals and finding ourselves tossed about in the wake, so to speak (yeah, no one mixes metaphors like I do)? Does SFR need to push harder for its own unique identity? If so, what would that be?

With each passing year I watch our society become more and more technologically oriented. From iPods to iPhones to Tivos to Roombas to a car that freakin' parks itself... the lives we live have much more in common with the characters in an SFR novel than ones in a 14th century historical. Yet there is still a palpable resistance to SFR. Booksellers don't know where to shelve us. Art departments are confused over cover art. And fans of vampire, dark angel and high-tech hard SF novels wonder what in hell we're doing in their TBR piles.

I don't know if there've been any case studies done on the emergence of vampire romance novels, like those of Christine Feehan and Sherrilyn Kenyon. But there must have been a point, early on, where publishers and readers tried to stick the books with the "horror" label, and wrongly so. Feehan and others like her essentially created the paranormal romance genre.

I think it's time SFR created an equally bold and powerful name for itself in its own right.

I just haven't a clue how to do that.

~Linnea

http://www.linneasinclair.com/