I must admit to bookmarking Lane some time ago! Yes, his work certainly is impressive and caught my eye.

Beautiful work. Is the Zenobia novel going to be a single or part of a series? I'm really looking forward to a Zenobia novel!

It's looking like it will turn out to be a single novel, but I won't know for sure until I really start getting into it. Right now it's just a detailed outline. I start work on it in earnest on August 3rd! I'm excited!! Lots of adventure, lots of clashing personalities...it'll be a nice change after working on Tidewater for so long, which was so introspective and heavy. And currently I'm finishing up two paranormal romance novellas for a different pen name -- very, very fun to write, but obviously a completely different thing from the historical fiction I love doing!

Oh, wow, I guess I just assumed you were working on it for months etc. You really turn them out quickly once you get focused on it eh? Well I will wish you luck then! It is an awesome topic, although I have to yet to read an HF on it. I also didn't realize you did anything paranormal, which pen name is it? I'll have to check it out. I have no doubt it is fun to write and very different, I can't imagine an author being any different than a reader....well, myself at least, I have too many interests to focus on just one.

Yep, I write pretty freaking fast. It's a trait that comes in handy with indie publishing. :) It helps a lot that I'm writing full-time now, so I can spend 6 - 10 hours per day writing (and on one totally insane day, 15.5 hours! Never doing that again, dear lord.)

There is one novel about Zenobia that I'm aware of: The Rise of Zenobia I've got it on my Kindle but haven't started it yet. I know it's a fairly new release, so there may not be much commentary on it yet. There must be a few more out there, but I haven't found them yet. Seems so strange -- she's one of those historical figures that really captures the imagination.

The paranormal stuff is brand-new! I haven't released the first book yet, but I will soon (maybe as soon as tomorrow, if edits go quickly.) If you're on my mailing list, I'll announce it there and point people toward the web site and mailing list for *that* pen name -- since I'm sure most people who read my historical fiction probably won't be into paranormal romance.

I've never actually been that interested in romance, but I really wanted to branch into it because it can be a ridiculously lucrative genre if you do it well. I thought about several different approaches I could take to romance that would appeal to me, and then I hit on GHOSTS! I love ghost stories!! Wooohooo!!! So I planned a little series that revolves around a team of ghost hunters. :)

I cruised through the first one really fast, and it was soooo much fun to write. I wasn't expecting that. So now that I've had a little taste of writing romance, I might (eventually) try some other subgenres, like historical and... I don't know, something else. It was just way too much fun to write, so I'll definitely keep it in my rotation!

Sci-fi historical. Hah, and I don't mean the old "aliens built the pyramids" nonsense. You could set it in space, on other worlds, but have it be about a team of xenoarchaeologists investigating some mysterious historical monument. :p Or maybe that's silly and overdone and an absurd subgenre and I'm talking rubbish here. Or fantasy historical, along the same lines as the sci-fi I would guess but in a fantastical setting rather than a sci-fi one. OR, how's about this, take a historical story and just set it in space/fantasy. Like you see "modern retellings" of Shakespeare and Greek tragedies all the time nowadays - do that, take a historical story and set it in a sci-fi.

That all sounds awesome! This is one of the (many) things I love so much about being a writer right now. With the ability to publish independently and to reach a large audience, you can cross genres however you want and not have to worry about convincing an entire panel of acquisitions editors sitting in some Manhattan skyscraper that the idea will sell. It's a renaissance!

I am actually going to be participating in a project in the spring with about 12 other authors. We're all writing in the same sci-fi world, but we're constructing the boundaries of the world so that we can do a lot of varying things with it. One of the things we will be able to do is inject some elements of historical fiction, since a lot of the participating authors do HF as their primary genre. It should be a really fun project, so look for an announcement about a weird sci-fi novella sometime around April. :) We're going to publish all our novellas on the same day, so an entire series of books will launch at the same time.

I still don't know if I'm going to play it straight sci-fi or do some kind of cross-genre thing with HF.

Oh boy, 15.5 hours in one day?? How much of that were you able to keep? I can imagine your mind and fingers were tired after that day.

Nice, I'm going to have to get that one you recommended. Her other work sounds good too, Tristan and Iseult. I almost recommended The Eagle and the Raven but then realized it is about Boudica, I often confuse the two!

Okay, I am on your mailing list so I'll wait for info there. I wonder how many people love both paranormal and historical? I am always surprised when I see reviews such as "I don't usually read HF" or "I don't like HF so I don't know why I read this" and honestly, I'm totally baffled. How can you not love history? It is just not something my brain can come to terms with haha

Nice, ghosts! I don't think it is as heavily done as other paranormal elements either, especially not with PNR. One I can think of is the Darkhouse series, which has some rather frustrating elements to it, including a terrible love interest.

I've never been much into romance either unless I needed a quick read to relax after too many bio/chem labs or something in college. haha I find myself rolling my eyes more than not and so often wishing the rest of the elements were stronger rather than having such a strong focus on sex etc.

All those ideas from Isis sound interesting, just please, if you do a Cleopatra novel don't add magical realism or fantasy elements etc....that is the only thing I ask. I don't know why so many people do that with Cleopatra. *sigh*