Authors Who Write Love Among the Stars #scifi #romance

Hello, I'm Pippa Jay, author of SciFi and supernatural stories with a romantic soul. And this post is going to be a bit of a cheat. When this month's topic came up - talking about another author we love - I ran into a road block. How can I possibly pick just one?!
Another problem - the only UK author I read and love who writes romance is currently on a publishing hiatus, so quite a few of her books are unavailable or soon to be. What to do? Well, while I might not have a local author to talk about, I decided to go for authors who write in the same galaxy as me, even if one far, far away. :P At a push, I've managed to limit myself to five hopefully new to you authors in my favourite genre of SciFi romance, and who wrote some of my favourite books (I'm sorry - I'm biased!). But if I still can't convert you to SFR, that's not the only genre most of them write...

CE Kilgore:
An author without genre, dabbling in Romance, LGBTQ, Sci-Fi and beyond. Left my heart in Texas but found a home in West Virginia. GW2 Addict.
Why I love them: I adore the Corwint Central Agent Files series for being well written space opera with fully fleshed characters and lush with settings, descriptions, action and emotion. Plus she has androids - my favourite!
Favourite book: Promise the Stars (Corwint Central Agent Files #5).
Twitter  @ce_kilgore
Website cekilgore.com
Facebook C.E. Kilgore, author
Goodreads C.E. Kilgore

Erica Hayes:
Urban fantasy/paranormal/sci-fi author, reader, watcher. Author of the Shadowfae Chronicles, the Seven Signs, Dragonfly and the Sapphire City superhero series.
Why I love them: A gritty action packed superhero series with a conflicted superheroine, a super tense romance, and the darker side of having superpowers.
Favourite book: Scarred (Sapphire City #2)
Twitter @ericahayes
Website ericahayes.net
Facebook Erica Hayes
Goodreads Erica Hayes

Cathy Pegau
Author of the Charlotte Brody historical mystery series and award-winning #SFR. Well-behaved women seldom make history. Or the future. She/her.
Why I love them: Cathy writes SFR full of emotion, tension and conflict, and particularly f/f, a hard to find subgenre, with spirited go get 'em women. It also inspired me to try my own hand at f/f, though it isn't published yet.
Favourite book: Rulebreaker
Twitter @cathypegau
Website cathypegau.com
Facebook Cathy Pegau
Goodreads Cathy Pegau
(psst, get her f/f books for 25% off at Carina Press with code PRIDELUV at checkout this month).

Laurie A. Green
Sci-Fi Romance author repped by Amanda Luedeke of MacGregor Lit, 2016 Carolyn Readers Choice Award Winner, Aspen Gold finalist, 3X RWA Golden Heart® Finalist.
Why I love them: far future scifi romance with strong yet broken heroes and feisty heroines, full of adventure, conflict, spaceships, and smexiness.
Favourite book: Inherit the Stars (The Inherited Stars series #1)
Twitter @sfrlaurie
Website laurieagreen.com
Facebook Laurie A. Green
Goodreads Laurie A. Green

Liana Brooks
DECOHERENCE out now! Marine biologist, SF geek, parent, LDS, gypsy, guardian of free speech. Nevertheless, #ShePersisted
Why I love them: fast paced superhero stories with emotion, conflict, and a comedic twist that I will devour in a single sitting.
Favourite book: Even Villains Fall in Love (Heroes and Villains #1)
Twitter @lianabrooks
Website lianabrooks.com
Facebook Liana Brooks
Goodreads Liana Brooks







And if I've finally turned you to the Dark Side...I mean, convinced you to try some SFR, you could find some other suggestions on the SFR Brigade fanpage, in the Scifi Romance readers group, or at the SFR Station. Or from the 16th-19th of June, you can pick up 9 scifi romance titles for 99 cents each by going HERE.

Happy reading!

Out Of This World Holiday Romances #scifi #romance

Hi, I'm Pippa Jay, author of SciFi and supernatural stories to engage your emotions. Every year I struggle to come up with SciFi romances involving holidays. It's not a subgenre that seems to lend itself to holiday tales very easily. I suppose in the far future, changes in our culture and possibly the planets we might colonize with their differing time scales and climates might render many of our traditional holidays obsolete, or result in them being blended to deal with a truly multicultural society or adapted to fit other worlds. My own attempts to write holiday themed SFR has given me one finished but paranormal Halloween short, and two unfinished SFRs: one a semi-spoof Easter story about an alien called Ostara (an old name for Easter) and a winter solstice SF mystery with romantic elements. Somehow my muse rebels against the whole Christmas in spaaaaaace theme.
But fear not! Thanks to the SFR Brigade, I have found you some holiday themed scifi romance tales to warm your heart this winter:

Open With Care by Pauline Baird Jones and Genie Davis
Beware of aliens bearing gifts 
Christmas is coming and so is All I Got For Christmas. Inside you’ll get the evocative and haunting, ”Riding for Christmas,” and the offbeat and heartwarming, "Up on the Housetop.” 

Riding For Christmas:
A mesmerizing tale of interstellar time travel and romance!
Jane MacKenzie, visiting her grandfather’s abandoned ranch, discovers something in the snow. When she opens the ribbon-wrapped box, it mysteriously returns Sam Harrington, who “disappeared” in an 1885 blizzard. 
There’s nothing alien in this enduring tale of holiday homecomings and the hope of love that lasts a lifetime. 

Up on the House Top:
Will her Christmas be ho, ho, ho? Or oh no, no, no?
Gini knew Christmas in Wyoming would be challenging as she headed over the frozen crick and through the woods to the family cabin. The lights are going out in her mom’s attic, the guy who broke her heart is on the porch…and there are aliens on the roof.
According to her mom, it’s going to be the best Christmas ever.
194 pages, $3.99 ($2.99 until the end of December!)
Amazon, Kobo, Nook

Baby It's Cold In Space, a multi-author set of holiday/winter themed SFR titles

Travel off-planet for the holidays. Set thrusters to max with these steamy science fiction romance stories by eight exciting authors. Each SFR novella in this anthology delivers the perfect holiday gift--love--to warm readers during the coldest season of the year.

Limited time offer from New York Times and USA Today bestselling and award-winning authors of fast-paced science fiction romance!
Pre-order at Amazon for $0.99

Batteries Not Required by Christine D'Abo (Christmas themed and erotic)

Love Transcends Circuits

Zoe is all alone on an outpost monitoring a lonely quadrant of space. It’s nearly Christmas and all she has for company is her computer AI, Rupert. She isn’t expecting a present from Xion Corporation to help pass the time, but when she opens the box to find a sex bot, a whole world of steamy entertainment possibilities come to mind.

When Zoe activates Sam she doesn’t realize the trouble she’s in for. Sam takes Zoe to sexy new heights and Rupert does a stellar impersonation of a jealous boyfriend. Zoe struggles to ground herself in reality despite her growing lust, but it’s becoming more and more obvious she’s falling in love. But with who—Sam or Rupert?

When a computer virus is unleashed on the outpost, Zoe must choose—or risk losing them both.
128 pages, $2.99
Amazon, Kobo

Collaboration is not a dirty word

Hello! I'm Pippa Jay, author of scifi and the supernatural with a romantic soul. How are you?

One thing I've learnt over the last five years as I've ventured into publishing is that collaboration and networking is key. There's nothing more awesome than working with your peers, whether on an anthology, co-authoring, writing communities, or a bunch of solid, supportive beta readers, critique partners, book bloggers and editors, or other creatives such as cover artists. In the publishing world as it is today, sometimes it's the only thing that stops you drowning.

WEBSITE | GOODREADS
Available for FREE from...
 Amazon US | Amazon UK | ARe
 Smashwords |  B&N | Kobo

Last year I had the privilege of becoming part of a science fiction romance anthology - Tales from the SFR Brigade - produced by the Science Fiction Romance Brigade, a community of authors, readers and fans dedicated to the genre. (I'm very proud to be a part of the community and one of their admins.) To me, an anthology provides readers with the opportunity to meet new authors they might not have seen or tried before, who perhaps picked up the book because one of their favourite authors had a story in it (I've done that myself). It also means that, in these days of authors pretty much having to do all their promotion, at least you can share the time, effort and energy to promote between you. At a later stage I even got to help with putting the anthology up on Amazon and tweaking a few of the format errors - great experience in terms of learning the ins and outs of self publishing. It was yet another learning curve, but with the benefit of having fellow authors and editors who each knew something I didn't about the process and were all willing to pitch in, make suggestions, or fix problems. It's a project I'm so proud to have been a part of, and a huge team effort.

But those people I love the most are my critique partners (sorry, I'm a bit biased!). I have a large group, each with their own particular skills in picking up plot holes or ferreting out issues, and not all stories go to all of the group depending on the genre and heat levels. These are the people brave enough to look at some of my, er, shall we say 'less polished' projects, and spend some time helping me slap them into something coherent. The ones not afraid to say 'this sucks, fix it', often confirming my own thoughts on a scene but that I've tried to avoid facing. Just lately most of my book dedications have been to these courageous souls who have taken the time to help me turn chaotic primordial soup into a story.

My current upcoming release probably went to the most critical of them, especially as I wanted to put the opening into The Rebecca, a RWA contest run by LERA that provides amazing feedback on your story as part of the competition (well worth doing even if you don't place. Which sadly, I've yet to do. Three so close but not quite there attempts so far, lol). The interesting thing with putting something through critique and beta readers is that they are just as likely to give you contradictory feedback as to agree. If they're agreeing, then you can be fairly certain their concerns need to be addressed. But when they contradict? What do you do then?

I've had the same situation with The Rebecca feedback. Two saying the world building was good, one saying it was confusing. Two disliking a particular phrase, one liking it. One saying the story was too slow, one too hurried, and one asking for more detail. In those situations, it can be hard to decide what you actually need to fix, or if it even *should* be changed. Sometimes I look at the qualifications of the judge or the experience of the critique partner. In the case of the contest, you might have published and unpublished authors, editors, publishers. You might think that perhaps an unpublished author would not give as good a level of critique as one published, but there's no way to tell how much critiquing they might have done, how much experience they have, how new they are to critiquing or judging. And even if you consider they might be too inexperienced as an author to judge, perhaps consider that they might be looking at it more as a reader than a writer, so therefore it still has value. Although all authors are readers, I think sometimes we can forget to look at a story simply as a reader and judge it by our experiences and expertise purely as an author, or even as an editor. So I like to send my work to a mixture where possible, and several to give the best possible range of responses. All of them hated your heroine? Might need looking at. Same phrase being questions by everyone? Might need reworking. Only one had an issue with calling the hero Gavin? Might get away with that one. :P

But at the end of the day, you really have to rely on your own judgement. If the reactions are pretty mixed, my solution is to go with the version that *I'm* happy with. Because if you can't be happy with your own story, what's the point?

So, to finish, here's my upcoming release for the 25th July, and my last Rebecca entry. Can't wait to here what the reviewers think after all the critiquing it went through!

EXCERPT |  GOODREADS
Available at... Breathless Press |
Smashwords | ARe | Bookstrand

What has your experience been with critique partners?