Tuesday News: Let’s Pretend it’s Monday!

JanetPublishing Newsadapting books / DRM / Ebooks / Game of Thrones / Kobo / obituaries / Roberta Gellis / writing diversity12 Comments

Sorry about the news yesterday, folks. I finished a two-year long work project (not exaggerating) on Friday and pretty much collapsed after that.

Roberta Gellis dies – Thank you to the DA reader who sent me a link to this obituary, because although I had heard of Gellis’s death, her obit isn’t burning up the Google rankings. Gellis, one of the great Historical Romance authors,  died on Friday at 89. Did you know that before she wrote Romance she worked as a research chemist and co-invented pink hair dye and “aerosolized shaving foam”?! What’s your favorite Gellis book?

Starting with Knight’s Honor in 1964, Roberta was the author of nearly fifty novels. These included more than twenty historical romances, including the Roselynde Chronicles and the Heiress Series, a number of medieval murder mysteries, and several historical fantasies. Other novels ranged from space opera to gothic romance to a mystery featuring the much-maligned Lucrezia Borgia as an amateur detective. She mostly wrote under her own name, but occasionally wrote as Max Daniels, Leah Jacobs, and Priscilla Hamilton. She won numerous awards for her writing, including a 1983 award from Romantic Times for Best Historical Series and a 1996 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Romance Writers of America. – mlive

Why ‘Game of Thrones’ Isn’t Actually Spoiling Many Future Book Plotlines – Paul Tassi analyzes some of the plot points in the TV show and the books that have already diverged, addressing the unusual circumstance in which the show has now moved forward past the books’ original material, leading some fans to see the show as spoiling the new books that haven’t yet been written (this has to have happened with other adaptations, right?).

 . . . I don’t think fans need to be quite as upset as they are. While Game of Thrones started out being surprisingly faithful to the source material, things have changed as time has gone on. Martin himself refers to this as the “butterfly effect.” Kill one character the book doesn’t, and three years down the line, they could be the focal point of a major plot turn.

Now, Game of Thrones has effectively become a butterfly swarm. The show has either killed off or cut many book characters completely, and they’ve altered so, so many storylines in significant ways, it’s hard to say for certain what is being spoiled at this point, and what isn’t. – Forbes

Debut Author lessons: Sensitivity readers and why I pulled a project. – An interesting post from Mary Robinette Kowal on writing outside the white person experience and her use of outside readers to check her portrayal. The comments are worth reading, too, and the whole discussion actually illustrates Kowal’s concerns about representing a diversity of cultures and identities, but not necessarily in the way she intended.

The controversy won’t hit just you. This was the one that was hardest for me to grasp. It’s easy to worry about “What if I get it wrong?!?!” and “What if people get angry at me!?!” What is harder goes back to bullet point #2. Culture is not a monolith. If you are writing about something that is outside your community and controversial, that controversy and the conversation surrounding it will hit all the people in that community. Worse than that, the things you got wrong are probably things that you inherited from a systemic system of oppression, which means that you are reinforcing that oppression in the public consciousness. And that doesn’t hit you. That hits only the community you’re writing about. – Mary Robinette Kowal

DRMed eBooks Vanish in Kobo Library Update – Apparently Kobo performed an upgrade and people are experiencing the disappearance of books, some of which were grandfathered in from the defunct Sony Store. Some readers at MobileRead report upwards of 400 books missing. Nate Hoffelder provides a possible workaround if your Kobo library is among those affected:

Fortunately the old library menu is still accessible at kobobooks.com/library/library.html, because vanished ebooks are just the beginning of the problems. “I am a little baffled on how the sorting works. How does N come before G?” one user wrote, before posting a screenshot. “The search function doesn’t work correctly as well. I search for a particular author and only 1 book shows up. I know I have 10+ books by the same author.” – The Digital Reader

Janet

isn't sure if she's an average Romance reader, or even an average reader, but a reader she is, enjoying everything from literary fiction to philosophy to history to poetry. Historical Romance was her first love within the genre, but she's fickle and easily seduced by the promise of a good read. She approaches every book with the same hope: that she will be filled from the inside out with something awesome that she didnʼt know, didnʼt think about, or didnʼt feel until that moment. And she's always looking for the next mind-blowing read, so feel free to share any suggestions!

→ Janet