Paranormal Romance, Anyone?

Anna Genoese of Tor (aka alg) announces here that she's looking to fill a couple of gaps in her lists for 2007 and 2008. If you write paranormal romance or Jewish-themed fantasy, you should rush straight to that post and see if you have what she's looking for.

So now I have a minor dilemma. I don't think I'll have it for long. Because writersweekend informed me that, in "Atlantis Cranks Need Not Apply," I had accidentally written a short paranormal romance, and because so many of my beta readers told me the story could be expanded into a novel, I am a little bit tempted to try to fill the contemporary paranormal romance gap with either an expansion of the novella or some other Rugosa story. Probably I'd do the latter, if I made the attempt at all. It just seems to me, though, that writing 25,000 words of paranormal romance by accident, when I was aiming for a comedy of epistemology, does not bode well for my being able to pull off a paranormal romance on purpose, given that I'm still romance-illiterate. Hitting the mark for 70,000 words really would call for a deeper acquaintance with that genre than I have.

At least producing 70K by July doesn't seem daunting anymore. Even if I get nothing else out of reading Anna's call for submissions, I got the satisfaction of looking at that number and saying, "Yeah, I could do that."

Well, I'll invite the universe to send me a story to fill the bill, and if one shows up, I'll write it. Meanwhile, there's plenty to keep me busy.

Too Good Not to Share

It first occurred to me that I was looking at the April Fool's Day issue of Publishers Weekly online when I saw the headline, "Author Wins Atheist in eBay Auction." The author, a Christian writer who has published a how-to book about evangelism, says he hopes he is "helping Christians not be jerks, or helping Christians be normal."

Only, that turned out to be one of the legitimate stories. Shows what I know.

This is a short excerpt from my favorite of the April Fool's articles, one in which Zondervan announces its plans to market The Purpose Driven Life on other planets, now that the market on Earth is saturated:

This is not the first time that Zondervan has attempted an aggressive outreach into previously untapped markets. However, earlier efforts to get a copy of The Purpose-Driven Pet into the paws of every animal on Earth did not meet with unqualified success, since distribution proved to be a nightmare. "Let's face it, animals just weren't coming in from the wild to shop in CBA stores," said a company insider, who preferred to remain anonymous. "The best we could really hope for was that middle-aged women, our core consumers, were bringing the book home for their cats to read." Animal outreach efforts are on hiatus at the moment as the company pursues the intergalactic trade.

Kirkstra does not expect distribution to be such a barrier with the Martian publishing world, which will be the first to receive shipments of PDL. Zondervan has struck a deal with cash-strapped NASA, using capital from the lucrative Christian publishing business to fund further space exploration if NASA will subcontract for the routing and shipping of product. Financial details of the arrangement were not disclosed, but are rumored to be in the nine-figure range.

"The real challenge will be getting the books to the unchurched alien, since there won't be churches on these planets to do a '40 Days of Purpose' campaign," said Kirkstra. "But that is a small hiccup. Really, there's no reason for us not to reach for the stars."