Note: Originally published on Substack.
How many Science Fiction authors grew up reading Anne McCaffrey?
My guess is all of them, or nearly so, just as most SciFi authors have read Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Herbert, Le Guin, and the host of other authors whose works have fallen into the realm of The Classics.
A couple of years ago, I attended an Indie Capstone writers retreat held in Fairbanks, Alaska. These capstones are organized and presented by indie author powerhouse Craig Martelle, a well-known figure even among traditionally published authors. Outside of his readership, he’s best known for his work with 20Booksto50K, an author group he began alongside another indie author powerhouse, Michael Anderle, author of the Kutherian Gambit Series and founder of LMBPN Publishing. Craig is a fantastic guy and has done more to help indie authors than nearly anyone else in the industry.
Anyway, during one of the capstone sessions, Craig said something about his own writing that I’ll never forget: “I want to write books like Anne McCaffrey.”
Immediately, I thought, Yes! Me, too!
After all, McCaffrey’s books are now classic SciFi Adventures featuring larger than life heroes who planet-hop or dragon-ride their way through saving the universe. While she’s best known for the Dragonriders of Pern Series, my favorite is her Crystal Singer Series.
Imagine my delight when I stumbled across the cover art for Killashandra, the second Crystal Singer novel on Substack!
One of my favorite aspects of McCaffrey’s books is the romantic thread woven throughout each one (or each one I’ve read, anyway). I don’t know when the earliest SciFi Romance was published (not the old pulp Planetary Romances, but modern Romances), but many of McCaffrey’s stories qualify.
Central love story? Check.
Happy Ever After or Happy for Now? Check.
And there you have it, the sum total of requirements for a story to qualify as a Romance.
McCaffrey’s books have become comfort reads for me, and since attending that capstone, I often remember Craig’s goal. I want to write books like Anne McCaffrey. There’s a certain nostalgic yearning in that statement, a desire to recreate the same adventurous spirit and hopeful buoyancy that are the hallmark of McCaffrey’s many story worlds.
As I embarked upon this new pen name, I pondered what kind of stories to write. It’s very likely that I’ll settle on more philosophical ones, similar to Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (which also contains a central love story, of a sort without being a Romance). That doesn’t mean I’ll completely eschew writing stories similar to McCaffrey’s fun adventures.
In fact, I wrote and published one way back in the Golden Days of self-publishing.
Well, not as good as Anne McCaffrey’s stories; not many reach that level of ooey goodness. But I certainly got the fun, adventure, SciFi, and Romance elements in there.
A little obligatory back story to set the stage: I wrote my first novel, a Contemporary Fantasy Romance, in November and December of 2013, and published it in February 2014. Later that year, one of my early novels from that same series was selected as a finalist in the Maggie Award for Excellence, sponsored by the Georgia Romance Writers, a branch of the Romance Writers of America. The competition was stiff, as it always is in Romancelandia, and I remembered feeling so honored to have had a book competing against more well-known authors.
Around that time, I happened to pick up a new indie SciFi Romance, Mercenary Instinct by Ruby Lionsdrake, a pen name of SciFi and Fantasy author Lindsay Buroker. I distinctly remember finishing that novel. We were at a local high school basketball game (my sister’s the coach). During halftime, I pulled out my Kindle and finished reading Mercenary Instinct. When I was done, I slapped my Kindle shut and said, “I can do that.”
That was confidence speaking, not spite. Buroker did a good job with that series, and I do recommend it.
By the end of the game, however, I had gone from idea to concept to the beginnings of an outline. I wrote the first draft in my spare time around writing other stories, finished it in April 2015, slapped a truly awful homemade cover on it, and put it up for preorder at $.99.
![The Choosing (The Pruxnae, Book 1) by Lucy Varna [affiliate link]](https://martinaanders.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/The-Choosing-ebook-Copy.jpg "The Choosing")
To my shock, readers liked my little SFR. Like, five figures in six weeks liked it.[1] I will not bore you with the details of what happened next. Just suffice it to say that from the point of putting the book up for preorder onward, I made every mistake a writer can make where that book and series was concerned.
Eventually, I stopped writing SFR and moved to another genre and pen name, but the follow up story, the one readers really wanted, remained on my hard drive gathering dust. Every once in a while, I’ll brush it off and work on it again, until I remind myself that Romance readers don’t like my writing; I don’t write Romance anymore; seriously, dudette, focus on the straight SciFi why don’tcha!
And the reason I can’t is because…Anne McCaffrey. Because part of me longs to drop into a wildly fun, planet-hopping adventure, and there’s no better way to do that than to write one. McCaffrey wove an irresistible siren song every time she sat down to write, then generously lured readers to her story island. I want to do that, too. I think every writer does.
So I will keep dusting off that old SFR, even though I should be working on the non-romantic stuff. And I will keep writing down the ideas for other SFRs rumbling around in my brain. I just can’t quit, and I thank Anne McCaffrey for that.
- On the ebook alone. Turns out Science Fiction Romance was an underserved niche. This was when I knew I could make a living as a writer. While other books of mine have more or nearly as many reviews and a higher aggregate rating, none has matched this one in sales momentum.