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 I'll be doing some giveaways in association with the release of Floodtide. There will be two random draws for book giveaways from my newsletter subscribers: one from pre-existing subscribers, one from new subscribers. (The winners can either choose an e-book of Floodtide--for themself or as a gift--or another of my books if they've already pre-ordered.)

If you aren't already a subscriber, you can sign up here via Mailchimp.

The newsletter gives you updates on my activities, background information about my worldbuilding, special excerpts, eventually there may be advance access to short fiction. It comes out once a month with the very rare special edition if there are time-sensitive sales or special announcements.

K.J. Charles has a really useful blog today about how to manage character introductions and call-backs in a "linked main characters" series of the type that is quite popular in romance these days. Just how do you feed the desire of continuing readers to recognize side characters who were main characters in a previous book without doing it in a clumsy and intrusive way? How do you make sure your call-backs and foreshadowing don't distract too much from the central characters of the current book.

I've encountered this aspect of reader expectation from the opposite side: what do you do when your readers enter the book with a "serial linked main characters" reading protocol, but that's not what your books are doing?

I was genuinely bewildered the first time I encountered a reader opinion that Margerit and Barbara should have "known their place" and stayed out of the spotlight in The Mystic Marriage. Like...I had somehow accidentally given them 50% of the point of view time when they should have known they were only minor side characters in the book. I suppose if you expect all books series to follow the rules of this particular mode of linked romance series, then my approach was a major error. Except that's not what I was doing.

The Alpennia series was never intended to be a set of independent romance novels in a loosely linked setting (which is a perfectly wonderful concept, and in fact I have an idea for doing a series like that at some point). From the very start (or at least, from the point when I realized it was going to be a series), it was planned as an accumulation of an ensemble cast, with each character being significant to the story, though perhaps moving in and out of prominence in different books. But how could I have signaled that more clearly to set up reader expectations?

Honestly, I'm not sure I could have. Just as all my efforts to warn people that Mother of Souls wasn't a capital-R Romance novel were in vain. And I'll predict that there will be readers who come out of Floodtide feeling betrayed that it, too, wasn't a romance novel. And no doubt readers who will greatly enjoy the more action-oriented thriller aspects of Mistress of Shadows will probably tell you that "Heather has finally hit her stride and figured out how to pace a book properly."

I like to think I'm doing something more interesting than the things those readers wanted me to have done. And I hope that when the series is complete, even they will look back and conclude that--whether or not it was to their taste--the result wasn't a mistake or poor technique on my part.

It isn't just that I'm not blogging here much -- I'm not "blogging" over at alpennia.com much at the moment. (Just posting the LHMP entries and getting caught up on some reviews.) It's mostly a time management thing. I'm solidly on schedule with the revisions for Floodtide, but that means prioritizing it first and then scrambling to make sure that I have the LHMP/podcast writing done on time.

Although Floodtide has needed a fair amount of cleaning up and filling in, it hasn't been as serious as I'd thought it was. (I think there are a few more places later in the story where past-me wrote an IOU to future me with regard to some key scenes.) The big revision item once I'm done with this pass will be to draw up some sort of "plot rhythm" diagram to make sure action and development is relatively evenly distributed.

One fun thing about Floodtide is writing Roz's first-person voice. I think I'm going to have to draw up some notes for the editor with regard to the linguistic structure of her voice. While I'm happy to have help ensuring consistency, there are some systematic things I'm doing that I'd hate to have to argue at every single point.

Still waiting (more patiently than I'd have predicted) on any response about the submission of "The Language of Roses". It's submitted through one of those online tracking systems and every once in a while I peek to see if it's moved in the queue. There was some initial movement up, then a long static period. Based on things other people have said, I think the initial movement was from all the obviously unsuitable submissions being sifted out, and the current movement would then be the "actual consideration" group starting to be processed. I think I'm going to try to avoid peeking from now on, because it's less stressful to pretend that I won't hear anything for months yet than to see it move to the top and be expecting to get a rejection at any moment.  Yes, I've set my expectations to "expect a rejection" because that way I can be delighted rather than disappointed. Right after submitting, I allowed myself to imagine being accepted but that was when I knew it was far to early to hear. I also allow myself to think, "Well, here's the other market it would be great for, once I'm free to send it." The tricks we play on ourselves. People loved the excerpt I read from it at Worldcon. I keep telling myself that's a reason for hope.

I've unexpectedly had a request to look at my one completed but not-yet-sold short story (and Arthurian piece inspired by the Romance of Silence), so who knows what might happen there. I don't tend to write much short fiction on spec--normally I have a specific market in mind, so I don't have a lot of stories floating around through the submission rounds. I'd written this one for a particular story call, tried it a couple other places after that, then put it away figuring I'd wait until there was an opportunity it could target fairly closely. Maybe some day I'll have enough writing time that I can do more shorts on a just-because basis and then toss them to the winds.