Insufficient Mating Material... Excerpt

I encourage anyone thinking of buying one of my books to read a free sample chapter from my website or barnes and noble.com, or just stand in the romance aisle of your favorite local bookstore and check out a few pages.

These might be some good pages to scope out for a fair idea of whether or not this book is your cup of tea.

Royal wedding: page 33
Sexually frustrated swearing: page 199
A fish bit my ... : page 244
Battle scene: page 253
Cover scene : page 264
Grievous explains "the trots" to an alien: page 273


Here is a short excerpt with genuine survival advice.
------
In this scene, the hero, Djetth (pronounced Jeth) and the squeamish fashionista Princess Martia-Djulia (Marsha-Julia) are marooned on a Costa-Rica-like island. They have been shot down, landed in the sea, and Martia's elaborate gown is wet, and she will not remove it.

She is embarrassed about the corset she wears underneath her preposterous Court dress. She doesn't know that Djetth has already seen her corset and more, before his plastic surgery, when he had a wild one-night-stand with her.

Djetth has decided that their first priority should be to get a fire going.

-----

"There are a lot of things we could do without for one night." Dinner came to mind. Sex… Djetth grunted and rose to his feet.

The most natural thing in the world would have been to hook an arm around Martia-Djulia's tightly cinched waist, and point to the campsite he'd chosen. Instead, he put his left hand on his hip and pointed with his right hand.

"You see that little stand of trees -- the ones with twisted trunks, which fork into three or four branches at about the height of my hip? Those two, there, will make good supports for the entrance to a shelter. I'll thrust a long, straight branch between their crotches as a ridgepole."

She looked doubtful, but Djetth was on good ground with his woodmanship.

"A 'crotch' is where a tree bifurcates," he explained, simply so she'd think about crotches, and long, straight objects being thrust into them. "They're a good choice because their canopies lean inland, away from what becomes the obvious spot to clear for a fire pit. Do you agree?"

He took her silence for consent.

"Right. I'll start by digging the fire pit. Do you think you could find something we can burn? There are three types of fuel needed for a fire. Tinder is the most important."

Chivalrously, he assigned the greatest importance to the easiest, lightest, most enjoyable, most feminine task.

"I can't start a fire without tinder," he added with strategic disregard for the fact that he was a Great Djinn in possession of three Rings of Imperial Authority, one of which was the laser-like Fire Stone.

"What is tinder?" she asked, sounding suspicious.

"Ahhhh," he drawled, overcome by a mischievous instinct. "Look here."

With his left hand he lifted his T-shirt, with his right forefinger and thumb he reached into his navel, confident that after eight weeks of hard exercise he had well defined abs and a very deep and attractive "inny" of a tummy button.

He withdrew lint.

"Oh, slurrid!" his squeamish Princess exclaimed, predictably, but she stared at his lower abdomen and perhaps at the bulge in his trunk briefs with flattering interest.

"This fluff--" He placed it in the palm of his left hand as reverently as a scientist explaining an important specimen, "is created from the action of hard work. Friction attracts filaments of fabric from my cotton T-shirt, and works them into a flat, fluffy mat."

He moved his cupped hand closer to her.

"Good tinder needs to have irregular edges, plenty of airspaces." He teased his tummy button fluff into a looser wad. "It must be dry. Would you like to touch it?"
----

Best wishes,

Rowena Cherry

PS
Some readers might be interested to recall that in one episode of Survivorman, Les Stroud plucked lint from his socks to use as tinder to start a fire. When I saw Les do that, I sensed that he and I shared a sense of humor, and that he would be the perfect "survival details" expert for Insufficient Mating Material.

Another tip... besides surprising things that are flammable, is that it is better to be naked and dry rather than clothed and wet.

Insufficient Mating Material --survivorman with sex... food allergies, assassins

When a Royal shotgun wedding goes wrong,
When the bride blasts the reluctant groom onto his butt...
What's a god-Prince to do?

Maroon the politically embarrassing couple in a secret location?
Shower them often with rain laced with aphrodisiacs?
Keep them wild and wet until they come together!

But what if they are not alone on their island?
What if someone very powerful is determined to kill them?

Insufficient Mating Material

I apologize for our silence since Thursday.
Blogger forced us to change to new accounts, and I --at least-- have had some difficulty with the technology.
Normal service will resume as soon as possible.

Meantime, please watch my book promo!

Best wishes,

Rowena Cherry

Time Wasting, The Twin Paradox (and SFWA and MySpace)

I need to start with this humble caveat:

I got a B grade in Biology Ordinary Level examinations --which was a pretty good grade in my day--, but the chemistry teacher competed with the music teacher to dump me (ie. both encouraged me to elect to study with the other).

The chemistry teacher lost out, in that I elected to inflict my youthful self upon her class for another year. She had what might now be described as a "snarky" streak, and I enjoyed her barbed wit, even when it was directed at me, more than I enjoyed sitting in the front row of the music class watching the music mistress's bare toes jerk in time with Beethoven's Fifth.

As you may infer, I've been a "Manwatcher" most of my life.

I write futuristic romance with a strongish bias towards character (over events, ideas, milieu). I've got my own under-the-stairs research library with fabulous resources such as The Physics of Star Trek, The Science of Star Wars, NASA handbooks about mining on the Moon, about a dozen Writers' Digest reference books on aliens, classes of stars, and worldbuilding...

In Insufficient Mating Material (out January 30th 2007) there's plenty of biology --after all, a significant portion of the story takes place on a deserted island-- and only a few NASA-inspired tidbits.

Shameful though it is to admit, I have a hard time with some aspects of science, like relativity. It doesn't help that "what is known" changes from time to time. Occasionally scientific theorists are discredited... or reinstated. It's not easy for layperson to keep up!

Actually, I occasionally have trouble with the deeper meaning of putting clocks forward and back, and the small examples of time travel in our everyday lives.

Last week, I did a bit of TimeWasting.

I googled NASA and Ask An Astronaut, to see what I could find out. What a wealth of fascinating insights, including definitive proof that projectile-firing weapons are not currently smiled upon in spaceships! (Great news for those who find sabers cool!)

My Search skills may be lacking. I had difficulty honing my search and only reading facts of immediate relevance to an alien hero revisiting Earth, who needs to know if his childhood friends will still be "the same age" as he is. I should have gone straight for The Twin Paradox (only I didn't know what it was called) or Einstein's Theory of Relativity.

That could be a useful tip, if anyone else at the moment is contemplating their own fictional heroes and heroines leaving Earth at light speed or faster, and coming home again after some time has elapsed.

I happen to be a member of SFWA -- www.sfwa.org -- and I should have asked a question on their message boards first. In fact, I asked on the MySpace Bulletin boards.

"...as the traveler approaches the speed of light, according to Einstein's theory of relativity, time would begin to slow until stopping soon after reaching the speed of light."

Helpful links that were suggested to me:

http://www.npl.co.uk/publications/metromnia/issue18/#article2

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/22mar_telomeres.htm

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/hotsciencetwin/

where you'll find a "game" to plug in the velocities and so on to find
out how much a traveler would age compared to his/her twin on earth.

After all this research, I may end up giving my hero a Swiss bank account!

Best wishes,

Rowena Cherry

Grandmothers and Insufficient Mating Material

It wouldn't be true to say that I cannot imagine a world without grandmothers.
I can. However, a world without grandmothers doesn't interest me, and it has been done before.

How dysfunctional were the "futuristic" societies of the sort of fiction we studied as "The Moderns" in the 1960's? I remember a rather bleak world view, when infants were incubated outside their mothers' wombs, and brought up in institutions, and segregated according to where on a Greek alphabetical scale their were judged to be in intelligence, physical ability, and career potential.

A bit like ants, really!

I like grandmothers, and family trees, and primogeniture because I think those are great ingredients for a good story, even if it is set in an alien world. When building a new world, I heartily recommend spending the time to draw up a family tree at least going back as far as the great-grandparents.

(But, don't publish dates!)

As it happens, my alien Empire is a little bit dysfunctional... and I can account for that if I wish, by claiming it is because all the protagonists' grandmothers seem to be exiles or fugitives or else they were not emotionally cut out to be our ideal of motherly when motherhood or grandmotherhood was thrust upon them.

When FORCED MATE came out, some readers were uncomfortable with Grandmama Helispeta's formal --ever so formal!-- speech. She never used contractions or abbreviations, and she always addressed other people, even her grandchildren, by their proper given names.


One of my grandmothers used to have a kind way of calling a halt to my childish dramatic, poetic, or vocal performances.

"I think that you have delighted us sufficiently..." she would say.

Another grandmother used similar phraseology to announce that we had eaten enough of her expensive Sunday roast.

"We have had an adequate sufficiency..."

That probably influenced my "Voice" when I attempted to bring Grandmama Helispeta to life. MATING NET was the story of the biggest mistake of her youthful life. It was a short story. One day, maybe there'll be another chapter. Her role is much expanded in Insufficient Mating Material, as she considers it her duty to interfere in her grandson's life.


Have a good week.

Rowena Cherry

New Year's Eve - Time... ticking away

Timing-wise, I really lucked out this year, if having (alien romance) blogging rights to Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve counts as luck. My wrist watch also stopped for Christmas, which is an inconvenience.

When I was a virgin (there's superstition for you), I used to stop watches regularly. I had to wear them pinned to my breast, like a matron (in the medical sense). Now, it's probably a matter of battery life!

Happy New Year!

I don't consider myself an astronomical heavyweight, intellectually speaking.

My natural, romantic bent is to consider Pink Floyd rather than Cepheid Variables,
a man's reaction to the passing of his life (Time) rather than the fact that a light year is a measure of distance (nearly six trillion miles). The coolness and romance of the idea of The Dark Side of the Moon rather than the possibility of habitable worlds (moons) in tidal lock around a Gas Giant.

Not so long ago, I was seated at a dinner party next to a member of the Pink Floyd, and --naturally-- I asked about the thinking behind The Dark Side of the Moon, which is why I feel free to mention coolness and romance.

Time is rather interesting as part of world building. How would a civilization tell time if they spent generations aboard a space ark? What method would remain relevant? I chose the female reproductive cycle when writing Forced Mate... No doubt it had something to do with my inconvenient effect on wearable timepieces when I was younger.

Looking back, I'm immensely amused by the spoilsports who all said that we all celebrated Y2K on the wrong date (wrong year). I must have spent at least twelve hours watching televised celebrations from around the world: rock stars and sopranos atop magnificent buildings, paper lanterns rising into the sky like miniature hot air balloons, ballet on beaches, fireworks along major rivers...

Obvious as it is to say, tonight, different nations --and different states-- will mark the arrival of 2007 at different times. I'm especially aware of this for a really silly reason. Not because my mother lives in England and will be celebrating five or six hours earlier than I will, but because my publisher's forums are on Central time and I'm on Eastern, and I'm determined to log in at midnight, and help break an attendance record. (forums@dorchesterpub.com, midnight Central).

Greenwich Mean Time is very useful, but we don't all set our clocks by that. Not everyone follows the same calendar. Take the Chinese New Year.

Suppose there were an Antichthon

Would that world measure time in the same way that we do? Would Antichthon have a moon? How likely is that?

Too complicated for me, this morning, is the idea that someone leaving Earth, traveling into outer space, and returning years later would experience the passage of time differently, and may return as a time traveller (not the same age as the friends and colleagues who remained on Earth). It is an issue I must look into before I get much further with my next book, though.

The Sparrow was interesting on time. I know Star Trek measured time in Star Dates, but I don't know how that was calculated. I never noticed time being measured in Star Wars...

Any astronomers want to help me?

Happy New Year.

Rowena Cherry