How to Create the Book Club You Always Wanted to Find

If you’ve been searching for a book club but can’t find one, why not start your own?

Photo by Alejandro Barba on Unsplash 

The way I see it, there are two ways to go:

1.    Create a book club with the exact specs you have always wanted, and look for members who share your vision

2.    Gather literary-minded members together, and group-think guidelines into existence.

 

Number One: The Solo Approach

This is the way to get exactly what you want. But even if you’re the only one deciding, it might be good to take your eventual members into consideration. Some questions you might ask yourself are, Do I want to keep the genre wide open, or narrow it down to my favorites? The pros and cons of each approach are pretty self-explanatory. If you narrow down the genre to just your favorites, you’ll probably have fewer options for members, a downside of opening it up to everything is there might be a few months that go by when you yourself—the group founder—don’t really care for the selections.

The lure of an ample spread of decadent refreshments is both the catalyst and bane of a good book club: refreshments will keep people coming, but may push the actual purpose of the meeting into the background.

Another question to ask yourself is, Will this group be primarily social, with in-home meetings and lots of refreshments, or do I prefer a bottled-water-and-notepad approach? The lure of an ample spread of decadent refreshments is both the catalyst and bane of a good book club: refreshments will keep people coming, but may be so enticing that they will push the actual purpose of the meeting—the book itself—into the background. Limiting refreshments to non-alcoholic beverages only might keep the focus on the written word. (Of course, if the meeting is online-only, no need to stress about this question. More on that below.)

 

A big question is Who will decide the books we read? If, as the founder, you have a backlog of outstanding-to-you books you’ve always wanted to discuss, then you might have your answer right there. However, soliciting different members to select a book for each meeting is always a great way to generate ownership in the group. You might take a hybrid approach, and tell your new members not to stress about having to pick a book for the first six meetings, as you have it covered. Then you can get through your backlog of favorites before you open it up to a one-meeting each rolling pick, and have some time before your turn comes along again to create more new favorites.

 

You might also ask yourself, Am I going to keep this group invitation-only, or solicit open membership? This is a big one. Invitation-only is great if you already have many like-minded friends and acquaintances that you’d be happy to sit down with to dissect some prose. But if you live in a less-populated place or there don’t seem to be many literary-minded people amongst your acquaintance, you might want to gather people from your entire community.

Local builds or even taps into an existing sense of community. The global approach is great for expanding the horizons of all members.

Lastly, there’s the even wider question: Am I going to keep the group local, or go global? Each option has great potential. Local builds or even taps into an existing sense of community. If you go this route, you are going to be well-served by social media, library bulletin boards (if they even exist anymore at your local library!) and local bookstores. A Facebook, Discord, Reddit, Twitter or Instagram post might bring you dozens of people that live around you and are just as excited as you to belong to a book club. The global approach is great for expanding the horizons of all members. If people who live literally around the globe can get excited about the same book, then we are building a global sense of community. And if you live in a remote area or are having trouble finding people with your niche literary taste in your neighborhood, there are thousands out there who are waiting for the same book club you are creating. In this case, social media posts are probably your biggest friend.

 

Number Two: The Group-Think

If you’d rather gather your literary-minded cohort and then create the group guidelines, you’re starting a process that may stray from your original vision. However, the fact that the other participants are helping to craft the direction of the club will probably help them to feel a sense of ownership, pride, and dedication.

 

If you choose this path, the questions above will be perfect to jump-start your group conversation. But instead of a solo decision, you’ll be putting it to everyone. It’s probably best to go with a poll for each topic. Having a planning meeting be your first book club meeting is a great way to go.

 

Instant poll sites are fun and only require people to have a smartphone with them. Direct Poll and Google Surveys are two option. You can always hold a show-of-hands vote or, if you’re meeting in person (more on that next), you can go with a slip-of-paper vote.

 

Number Three: Where to Meet

The last question is, Will we meet in person inside, in person outside, or online? Time of year is one big deciding factor, as it’s much more enticing to meet in a sunny park in the summer than try to huddle around a propane heater in someone’s backyard in December. So once again a hybrid approach might be best for some, by meeting in person during the temperate part of the year, and online the rest of the time.

 

But there is no reason why having an online book club is inferior to in-person. Lots of book clubs that were once in-person have made the switch to online meetings temporarily or even permanently. Zoom, Google, FaceTime, Skype and Discord are all good platforms for holding your meetings. To work out the bugs, you could gather a few of your new book club members beforehand to try out the software and make sure you’re comfortable with it.

There are always more people out there that think exactly like you do, and are just waiting for someone else to ask them to join.

Just Do It

Now that you’re armed with the above guidelines, the only thing you now have to do is sit down and do it! Don’t be shy. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that if you want something to happen, there are always more people out there that think exactly like you do, and are just waiting for someone else to ask them to join. In this case, tag, you’re it!

Inspiring Women: Sharon Shinn, Sleight of Hand

 This is a post in the series, Inspiring Women

The second installment in this blog series is about another of my favorite authors, Sharon Shinn.

Sharon Shinn, how do I love thee… let me count the ways: Elemental Blessings, Twelve Houses, Summers at Castle Auburn.

 

If you love fantasy with a meticulously crafted world and tangible characters, give Sharon Shinn’s fiction a try.

 

My first exposure to her writing was Mystic and Rider in her Twelve Houses series. Firstly, I love the title. Secondly, Senneth is such a great character. I don’t know if I want to be her, or her best friend. My favorite novel in that series is Reader and Raelynx. It felt very satisfying to read it after all that had happened in the series already. And who doesn't love a raelynx?

 

After the Twelve Houses series, I read Elemental Blessings. Although I enjoyed the subsequent novels in that series, my favorite by far is Troubled Waters. I felt as if I’d truly stepped into Chialto, and would be able to walk out my door and down the street to a temple to pick up my own blessing coin. I still think of that novel years later and can’t recommend it enough.

 

It takes a tremendous amount of fearlessness to craft such meticulous worlds, and then invite thousands of others to view them. The more well-wrought a created world, in my opinion, the more it comes from deep inside the author’s psyche. And Sharon Shinn invites us deep inside her own. Not only does she invite us in, but she makes us believe that its creation was effortless, like sleight of hand instead of hours of hard work.

 

A rare illustration of Sharon Shinn performing her authorial sleight of hand.

Sharon Shinn maintains a stunning output, all while working at a full-time job. From her official bio:

I mostly write my fiction in the evenings and on weekends. It requires a pretty obsessive-compulsive personality to be as prolific as I’ve been in the past twenty years and hold down a full-time job. –Sharon Shinn

It also takes a measure of fearless to make such a commitment to her craft. Ms. Shinn is a role model, from her output to her imagination to her dedication. Her willingness to invite everyone into her worlds has always inspired me to be expansive in crafting my own fictional worlds.

 

To find some excellent fiction, make sure to visit Sharon Shinn at her website and her Facebook page.

Sharon Shinn, author

Writing vs Everything Else

When does writing take over and everything else fall by the wayside?

My Latest Bout of Creativity-Induced Hermitobia*

For me, it happens when I am utterly inspired by my writing. The latest bout of intense creativity began around mid-October, and lasted until this very week when I finished the second draft of my latest novel.

For the past three months, I've done little to no online socializing or blog posting. In fact, I feel as if I am coming up out of a deep well. This well is perpetually replenished by a font of creativity, but it also blocks my view of the outer world unless I peer straight up at the sky.

Wow! What a pretty place I've been stuck inside!
Well by Sally.
Licensed under CC by 2.0.

Emerging From the Well

So what does it feel like to emerge from this well?

Well, life has gone on up above me, and I have to catch up. Did I know the primaries were beginning? No. Did I keep up with other writers, bloggers, artists and photographers I normally follow? Other than a few exceptions, no. Did I even read many books during the past three months? No!

However, I emerged, soaked from well-water, with a second draft of my newest novel (thankfully I have a waterproof laptop... all right, enough with this metaphor!). So my sojourn was worth it and more. I feel contented, and pleased, and ready to take on some new challenges while my beta readers have at it.

What does the future hold? I'll be working on my next novel, while at the same time doing a lot of interior painting and redecorating, hiking more, and gearing up for springtime.

Springtime Brings Yet Another Chance to Create

Springtime flowers already bloom in the desert of Arizona,
where we are staying now.

I feel like saying how I always greet the morning, "Hello, world!" And I'll add, "It's nice to be back among the real world for a while, until I hop back inside my deep well!"

*Hermitobia: Hermit-like behavior periodically exhibited by a person so intent upon her or his chosen task that the rest of the world falls by the wayside.

The Quays of Lac-Carge: Steampunk and Gaslamp Intersect

How Can One Explain a Novel? I'm Not Sure One Can!

My latest opus, in all its glory!

How To Pigeonhole Classify Quays

I wrote Quays 5 years ago. It was when Steampunk and Gaslamp fantasy (the two genres which I waffle between classifying it as... Steampunk usually wins out) were much more fringe than they are now.

It was also when self-publishing was not as common as it is now.

Thematic Veins Running Through the Narrative

Commonalities

This novel features themes and tropes common to other pieces of my fiction: parents missing or dead; a childless main character; a personal goal or vendetta intersecting with a grand, world-shattering event; a totem or animal choosing the main character, and a sense that things don't always progress linearly in life.

Differences

A Male Main Character

Quays has differences, though. It is the only one of my novels with a male main character. I don't know why I wanted to write about him, but I just did. I felt like this character was male. In other words, there wasn't anything I could do about it after he first strolled into my head.

Science Fiction? Fantasy? Why Not Both!

Also, there is an intersection of science fiction and fantasy. My other works fall more into one side or the other. That is just how it came about. To be strict Steampunk, I believe many readers would say that a piece of fiction should not contain any fantasy. However, I have never been much for following rules (especially in my fiction), and so the novel contains elements of both genres.

Winter: A Character Unto Itself

A third thing that this novel contains is winter. It's a winter that has nothing to do with spells or evil Winter Witches, but it adds a plot element that becomes almost a character unto itself. Winter, for anyone that has lived in a cold climate, certainly can be just as deadly as a mortal enemy.

Compressed Timeframe

A fourth thing is that the novel takes place in just a few weeks, aside from the epilogue. My other novels tend to have much more of a grand sweep. The passage of time takes the place of winter in these other novels, again, until time itself becomes another character.

Humor and Light

Given the constraint of genre and time, plus the added stranglehold of bitter cold, Quays is filled with moments of true friendship, adventure, delight, beauty and love. It also has humor, a time or two almost as much as I could stand to give it without turning a scene into a farce. The dark, despairing, disgusting and desperate parts of this novel cried out for laughter to balance them out.

A Denouement and a Treatise on Friendship

I love Quays. Of course I would love it, I hope, having written it and published it.... And yet I can attest that some of the moments in this novel feature the kindest hearts and truest friendships I have ever written about. The main characters would die for each other, but would of course all much rather go on living together instead. This great-heartedness is a central point of the novel, and the characters' friendships go beyond family or master-servant, or even that of lovers, or any other easily classified relationship.

When a character saves the life of the person who has wronged him almost to death... well, that is the epitome of great-heartedness.

Thoughts on Holidays and Their Meaning in My Fiction

It's the beginning of the holiday season!

My calendar is stuffed at this time of year by holidays. My husband's early October birthday, Canadian Thanksgiving (due to my Quebecoise heritage and the fact that every year should contain at least two Thanksgivings), Halloween, American Thanksgiving, Winter Solstice, Christmas and New Year's Eve/Day. Whew! Festivals are squished in there at the end of the calendar for us.

First of all, end-of-year sounds either correct or ridiculous weather-wise, depending upon where in the world you are. I grew up in Maine, where there's about 1.5 months of hot weather. The rest of the time it's either cool or downright frigid.

In my 20's, I moved to Southern California, where—to my shock—I found out that even Thanksgiving Day is not immune to 90F heat and blazing sunshine.

This put a big dampener in my excitement over the holiday season for the first few years after my move. A Thanksgiving without sweaters? A Christmas without a blizzard? Wha—

And then I thought of other people the world over. Things like Christmas or Hanukkah are date dependent, meaning that if people celebrate these days, they'll have totally different experiences if they live in, say, Sao Paulo or Adelaide than they would in Portland, ME or Reykjavik.

Now, this bias of my childhood was reinforced by the TV/film media, who always portray the holiday season as full of hot chocolate and mittens. This realization would probably not have taken someone living in Palm Beach so long, haha.

Then, as I became more intrigued by different celebrations, I learned that many cultures start their calendars in different seasons. Spring is a popular time to start the new year, as everything is renewing itself.

All this doesn't even touch on the fact that there are also many cultures that have completely different calendars, some going by the lunar calendar. My fantasy WIP main character comes from such a culture, and she has trouble with the solar calendar because of this.

This entire holiday realization didn't end there. Although I had been a storyteller and writer my entire life, it wasn't until my 20's that I truly became serious at my craft. All my research on holidays began to percolate in my brain, and what came out was a realization about the festival need in all cultures. Even the most stoic people need some sort of gathering, sharing, food-centric festival. This need seems to cross all borders. Any civilization or world I made up would need to include that human trait in it, or the world itself would feel hollow.

The fact is, though, that those calendar-centric holidays like American Thanksgiving and New Year's Day are artificial when transported to different locations. The real celebrations germinate from what the actual climate, food sources, religious affiliations and temperament of the culture are at the place where the holiday is being celebrated.

I love to make my own worlds as natural and as believable as they can be. One of the biggest ways is to invest them with their own natural rhythms. This is, to me, one of the best ways of sharing my own love of the strange, wonderful and expansive SF/F world with my readers.

Inspiring Women: Martha Wells, Fearless Author

This is a post in the series, Inspiring Women.

To kick off my new blog series, I've chosen someone who is and has been a big influence on my writing: Martha Wells.

Ms. Wells writes Science Fiction and Fantasy. Her first published novel, The Element of Fire, is a total immersion into a new world and a kingdom called Ile-Rien. Her second novel, Death of the Necromancer (which was nominated for a Nebula) is set a few hundred years after her first novel.

These novels are brilliant in ways that I admire. Not only is Ms. Wells willing to relegate the characters of her first novel to mere murky figures of the past in her second novel, she is also willing to make difficult choices about the city, a-la Godzilla running rampant through your beautiful Sim City creation. In Death of the Necromancer, Ile-Rien is a mixture of new technology and stagnation. Not to mention a few of the characters who are odes to Sherlock Holmes characters, but I don't want to give too much away.

To round out the Ile-Rien saga, Ms. Wells wrote a trilogy that takes place several years after Death of the Necromancer. Talk about fearless, Ms. Wells is willing to bomb the city relentlessly and use it as a backdrop for a war that spans not just continents, but worlds. This trilogy is aptly named The Fall of Ile-Rien.

A rare still shot of the carnage the fearless Martha Wells wreaks in her fiction.

In between the Ile-Rien novels, Ms. Wells has written many stand-alone novels, all excellent, especially City of Bones.

In her newest series, Ms. Wells is fearless once again. She has created another new world, and one species in particular named the Raksura (the series is eponymous). It takes a masterful touch to write about a species so different from humans, and yet so compelling and relatable. Once again, I dislike giving too much away about any creative endeavor, so just let me say that one of the joys associated with reading about the Raksura is to see what customs they have that are wildly different than human customs. The Raksura are fascinatingly and satisfyingly alien, yet within that difference is a kernel of similarity.

Ms. Wells has a blog, and a website. She also tweets and her handle is @marthawells1.

As a fearless writer of Speculative Fiction, Ms. Wells' fiction is difficult to resist. Her style has inspired me to be more fearless in my own writing.

Author Martha Wells
Website
Blog
Twitter

My New Novel: The Quays of Lac-Carge

My new novel is now available!

I'm thrilled with the cover. It conveys the feeling of the world I've built;
a gaslamp/steampunk era where magic still lives.

Lac-Carge is the capital of a nation on the brink of a new age. Gaslamps light the city streets, and sandusk pellets propel motorboats and the fledgeling balloon industry. Yet underneath this shiny new technology, magic still lives.

This is a world where Alexander was born into privilege and great wealth, only to have it stripped away by an insatiable queen. Four years later, he's conspiring with the quay workers at Lac-Carge's busy shipping port. Their goal? To wrest control of the quays back from the queen.

Yet no one realizes the depths to which the queen will sink. Not only is she intent upon keeping the property she stole from Alexander, she is also scheming against her own daughter, the heir to the throne.

Enter Alexander's old flame, now a daring aviatrix; and his boyhood schoolmate, a receded thaumaturge whose powers may not have receded as much as he claims. Together, they must save Lac-Carge and its princess from the queen's army of walking dead.

Join Alexander, Chloe and Hugh as they battle against everything the queen and her thaumaturgical allies can muster.

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