Holly, one of my readers, is a fabulous singer and dancer who just so happens to be working on a cruise ship for the next year. And here she is, in costume, with—wait, what’s that? An ARC of SOUL SONG? Fabulous!
![twilight](http://www.marjoriemliu.com/holly.jpg)
Over at Dear Author, the ladies are demystifying the bestseller lists:
The bestseller lists actually identify only the velocity of the sale of the book rather than cumulative overall sales. This is why lay down dates are so important to authors. If the authors can capture most of their sales in one week instead of two, the book has a better chance of achieving bestselling status even if another author outsells them overtime.
And here, from Maureen McHugh, an essay about the “anti Sci-Fi” novel:
So now I’m hot on the trail of another thing that bothers me about sf and fantasy. If you get a secret power or if you find an alien artifact or if you’re stuck in on the moon with matches and toothpicks, or whatever the set-up is, those things, those powers, always turn out to be exactly the things or powers you need.
I went to college, and I got a lot of skills. Like focusing a microscope. Not the big electron microscopes but those black ones that you find in High School and in the first couple of years of college. At one time I could prepare slides and focus a microscope like no one you knew. Other people called me over to their lab tables to focus their microscopes. At no point in my life since have I been called upon to focus a microscope, much less save the world with this amazing skill.
Finally, another old interview with the late and effortlessly lovely Octavia Butler:
Feminism is freedom. It’s the freedom to be who you are and not who someone else wants you to be. I’ve noticed that the media has been pronouncing feminism dead for years, but then they have been pronouncing the novel dead for years. And science fiction? People ask me “Why have you stuck with science fiction?” First of all I say I’m not sure I have�I go wherever my imagination leads me. But second, science fiction is wide open. You can go anywhere your imagination can go. Mainstream fiction isn’t like that.