I know, I know. I’m the worst about updating (says almost every blogger ever). But quite a few of you followed me to WordPress from my LJ, and back in the heyday at LJ, when I was still posting book reviews, there was a little thing we created together called a book club, and that became quite the popular hang-out every month.
After I closed the book blog down, many of you expressed how much you missed the book club, and while time and circumstances have moved all of us into different stages of our lives, it occurs to me that some of you might jump for joy if that book club came back.
Well, it’s not back, not like it used to be (and not here). But over at Speculative Chic, which has been up and running for over a year now, we started a book club back in August. To date, we’ve read Seanan McGuire’s Down Among the Sticks and Bones, Carrie Vaughn’s Bannerless, and Jac Jemc’s The Grip of It. Currently, we’re reading Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, which we’ll start discussing starting on Black Friday, and in December, our handful of readers have selected Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather.
Right now, we’re voting on January’s read, which is built around the theme of First Contact. The selections are fantastic, and we’re stuck in a tie: Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, Elizabeth Moon’s Remnant Population, and Octavia Butler’s Dawn.
The book club is starting to find its groove, but it really needs to find more readers. As with we did over at Calico Reaction, participating didn’t mean you had to read every month, or that you had to have the book read by the date the discussion post goes live. It’s all very flexible, but we’d love to expand to include more readers, more opinions, and more interpretations of the books that are chosen. And you get to have a say in what we read!
So if you miss the old book club over at LJ’s Calico Reaction, would you please consider hopping over to Speculative Chic and participating as much as you can (even if it’s just for the polls; even if you’re just spreading the word)? Or if you never got to participate at the book club here, but are curious, please, come check us out. Let’s all create something amazing together!
I remember some overlap. I got to hear you read from Magic Study as your thesis defense, and I also remember seeing the very early pages in workshop that made up the opening chapter of Inside Out. But my favorite memory is this: attending my very first SHU class when you were handing out bookmarks promoting Poison Study. I saw the cover art and flipped out, because I’d drooled over the hardcover just weeks before in a Barnes & Noble! So tell me: what made you, a published author, apply for the SHU Writing Popular Fiction Masters Degree?
So yesterday, I posted 
It’s better than Martha Wells’ Empire and Rebellion: Razor’s Edge. Wells is a great writer, but I was rather ambivalent about the story and the characterization of that now “Legends” title.
Leia, I’ve found, is an incredibly difficult character to get right on the page. I’m not sure why. But I have yet to read a Leia-centric book where I think, NAILED IT. It may have a lot to do with the fact that we all see Leia a little bit differently, and while I think we can all read a description of who and what Leia is based on the movies, I think translating that to the books is different for everyone, and I realize I’m particularly picky.
I wonder if I’m going to be so picky about Rey’s voice, when it’s time for her to star in her own spin-off novels? I hated how Alan Dean Foster wrote her in the novelization for The Force Awakens (and I hated how he wrote Leia too). I know I was super-picky and protective of Jaina Solo back in the day, and to a point, Tenel-Ka Djo, Tahiri Veila, Mara Jade, Mirax Terrik Horn, and Winter Celchu. I’ve always been so protective of the women of Star Wars and how they come off on the page, and I don’t have enough fingers to count all of the times I felt the characters were written wrong, or badly, just to shoe-horn them into a plot that made no sense of their character (not that the guys are exempt from that kind of mishandling either). I’m still bitter about Jaina’s characterization in the Dark Nest trilogy, let alone how they treated her love life overall in the EU.
There’s a weird disconnect, reading this.
Am I an EU purist? Oh hell no. I’d fallen out of love with the EU long before Disney bought Star Wars, because I got tired of Luke, Han, Leia, and their families never getting peace, of never having a happy ending. I got tired of what felt like soap opera-esque machinations that took place in order for there to be GREAT CONFLICT. I was, in fact, relieved when Disney said they would ignore the EU and make that a Legends canon and start afresh. Star Wars, as a franchise, needed that do-over, and I applauded the decision whole-heartedly.
That doesn’t mean I won’t read the books about Han, Luke, and Leia, even if Bloodline taught me that I miss having the map of the galaxy in the front of the books, with planet names I’ve grown to know and recognize. I miss knowing what the universe feels like on the page, miss having a specific timeline to refer back to (oh, sure we have the START of a timeline in the new books, but it’s not very specific, not like the old one was). I miss knowing exactly where Han, Luke, and Leia were in their lives, even if I disagreed with a particular author’s take on their characters.
Calico Writes 