Thursday Tag Party for 10/14/10!

Did you know there are ice tsunamis in Saturn's rings? (National Geo: Daily News) Yep. Titan's gravitational pull does it. Physics is beautiful.

OK, done my space geek moment for the day. On to the Tag Party, where smaller gravitational forces are at work, but their cumulative effect can make huge waves. (Yeah, bad pun time, sorry.)

Today we have member requests (hooray!)

A bit of instruction for anyone who hasn't been out there to catch the tagging wave yet:

• Go to the Amazon buy page (I've included the links below)

• Scroll down to the Tags Customers Associate with this Product header

• Look for these tags: SFR, Scifi Romance, SF Romance, Science Fiction Romance and Paranormal Romance - please feel free to add any extra tags you feel are appropriate to the work (i.e. Space Opera, Military SF, etc.)

• If the tags are already there, just click on them to add your 'vote'

• If not, type them into the 'your tags' box to add them (no need to save the page, just type and add)

For a list of past Tag Party books, come on over to the Book Launch and Tag Party Books page. Tagging is always welcome.

And now, on to this week's selections!

Enemy Within by Marcella Burnard

Romenel: Obligations of Blood (Anchorage Book 3) by Sandra C. Stixrude

Secrets, Vol 22: Dark Whispers featuring Ellie Marvel

Do you have a book out on Amazon, old or new, that we haven't featured yet? Know an SFRB member who does? Have the inside scoop on what really was going on between Kirk and Spock? Send me a message at ravenesperanza@yahoo.com and I'll add you to the schedule.

REMINDER: HOAF news!

Send me your new releases, blog news, cool links, book trailers, sales news, book reviews, book covers, contest results etc. etc. etc., folks!

Email it to - kyliegriffin@clearmail.com.au

Perilous Pauline Talks Steampunk with Ginger!

I stopped by Ginger Simpson's blog to explain steampunk to her readers. 


"As the release month (Dec. 2010) approaches for my Steampunk/Science Fiction romance novella, Tangled in Time, I’ve been fielding a lot of questions that are variations of: what is this Steampunk?" 


To read the rest of the blog, click here. 


Ginger reciprocated by visiting my blog to talk about critique groups.  If you get a chance, please stop by and leave a comment one or both places. :-)
Perilously yours,
Pauline

Is Telling Better Than Showing in Your Writing?

The awesome site io9.com had an article by Charlie Jane Anders I found fascinating (and the pictures rocked, too).Writers have been told the Holy Grail of writerly excellence is 'show, don't tell'. Who would've thunk it that this could be turned on its head? Wait, we're talking about sci-fi, where turning the norm on its head is de rigueur!

One piece of writing advice gets held up as more sacred than any other: Show, don't tell. But this maxim can ruin your story-telling, if you treat it like a law. Here are five situations where telling is actually better.
Like most rules of thumb, "Show don't tell" is excellent advice most of the time — but people often apply it too broadly, or in situations where it hurts more than it helps. You have to be aware of the spirit, as well as the letter, of this particular law. Writers have a tendency to lecture readers — and this goes double for science fiction and fantasy writers, who have a lot of worldbuildy stuff to get out of the way. It's definitely never a good idea to bludgeon your readers with information.
(And then as soon as you say something like that, people can bring up any one of a number of classics that do in fact bludgeon the reader with information, from Moby Dick to Infinite Jest. Again with the fact that no rule is ever absolute.)
But in a discussion like this one, it's easy to get bogged down in abstractions and axioms. So here are five concrete examples of situations where you really may be better off telling rather than showing — and when showing may make your readers groan with exasperation.

Read the rest of this article here.