• “The smartest historical sci-fi adventure-romance story ever written by a science Ph.D. with a background in scripting 'Scrooge McDuck' comics.”—Salon.com
  • A time-hopping, continent-spanning salmagundi of genres.”
    —ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
  • “These books have to be word-of-mouth books because they're too weird to describe to anybody.”
    —Jackie Cantor, Diana's first editor

Tag Archive for ‘Historical Novel Society’ rss

Historical Novel Society Conference this weekend

I’ll be at the Historical Novel Society conference this weekend in St. Petersburg, Fl.–where I will, among other things, be Mistress of Ceremonies at the Saturday Late-Night Sex-Scene Readings. [g] Now, in previous years, we had only a half-dozen or so hardy souls willing to get up and read their naughty scenes in front of the banquet audience…but _this_ year, we had more than forty volunteers! (Must be the influence of the Fifty Shades books, I suppose. Suddenly it’s fine to read pornography in public, so why not scenes of literary merit with sexual content, hey?) I could only take a few of the willing applicants, because you really can’t expect people to sit through more than an hour of sex scenes, no matter how well written…but how to choose? Well, basically, I took the two men who volunteered, because it’s hard to find men who will do that –and then I kind of drew straws for the other slots. This left quite a number of talented sex-scene writers, though, […]

Historical Sex Scenes

Historical Sex Scenes Now, don’t start hyperventilating. This isn’t about how to write historical sex scenes (though I might show you a sort-of one, in a bit*). It’s a solicitation. {g} I was going to start out by saying that I have no idea how this happened, except that I do. I just don’t remember who to blame for it. What did happen was that six(ish) years ago, the Historical Novel Society (of which I am a member) held its biannual conference in Albany. It was the first conference of the HNS that I’d attended, and in my usual amiable way, I’d told the organizers that I’d be happy to do whatever they liked, in the way of panels, etc. So they put me on three or four panels, and one of those was a panel on writing sex scenes. There were six people assigned to the panel—which is kind of a lot, really; you get a great variety of input, but with such a large number, it’s hard to […]