"You can't do that."

Firstly, forget about the all the political implications of the words ‘liberal'or ‘conservative'. After a lifetime of looking at it I have concluded that in political terms they are nearly as accurate in conveying true meaning as the words "People's Liberation Army". Anyway, I am not talking about politics, I am talking about books and writing.

To define my terms: Conservative = like to keep the status quo. Liberal = free = think the status quo sucks. Want change. To avoid the political implications let us call them xenophiles. Most people have some aspects of both. It's only the percentages that vary. Neither is ‘right'(or left) any more than red leaves are right and green leaves must therefore be wrong (under certain circumstances red leaves are better for a plant. Under other others green is).

Taking 51% desire to ‘keep as is' as the cut-off to call people conservative or xenophile: Around 98% of the world is in fact conservative -- even when it is obvious to the dispassionate observer that really change would make them better off, happier and longer lived. It's hardwired into us: stick to the known - even when forced to make big changes, only change what is absolutely unavoidable. Ergo: British settlers in Australia - and South Africa, continued to wear clothes that simply were a bad idea for the climate for generations. And to eat hot fatty meals on Christmas day... when it's hot enough to boil a monkey's bum, and the weather suits salad and ice-cream. Likewise - or even more so - with settlers from failed countries bringing their culture/clothing/etc etc with them now. Following the herd, or rather, staying within the troop is survival central to most simians, let alone humans. It's easily confused by terminology: to explain - Teen rebellion - growing your hair, gelling your hair, free love, screaming death to the establishment -- is conservative behavior if a large number of teens are doing this. That is the status quo, they want to be part of it. Wearing Birkenstocks and going on support the Free Palestine marches is arch-conservative if that is what all your peers do (see why I said to forget the political labels). Following the fashion (dress or behavior) of your peer group is a classic example of conservatism.

Of course it is also hardwired into us - or at least some of us - to be curious. To experiment. To be xenophiles and try things precisely because everyone else in their peer group isn't. I thumbsuck the extreme end of that behavior as being about 2% -- who run left when the group (whatever group, be it the Hitlerjugend or the Gay Liberation Front) runs right, just because that's different. Well, some because they think about it, some because they're contrarian. This little group is also genetically very useful to a species, because every so often circumstances change and it means they survive, and the bunch who went right die. They're why humans are spread across the globe and not long extinct in a dry valley somewhere in Africa, because they move things forward. And of course there is a little bit of this in all of us, just very often it is over-run by a fear of being out of the troop.

So how does this affect writers? Well, actually it shapes everything -- both our interaction and acceptability with readers, and our ability to get publishers (who are, if anything, more conservative in their peer group than most. Ergo the hard time they give Baen because Baen runs left when they run right - and yet Baen is also, in its peer group of authors and fans, moderately conservative. Quite funny, really.) It's even odder because Science Fiction per se was a 2% ‘xenophile' in literature. Within its peer group of publishers and editors course it has gradually (as the genre ages, because liking your status quo is very much a feature of getting older) as conservative as the arch-conservative modern literature and trending back toward being the same as that. That's their status quo, it's safe.
There are two down sides to this of course: while readers of sf do want some ‘status quo' features - for example more Miles Vorkosgian books - returns to favorite universes, they are also drawn to sf by xenophilia. It's a balancing act. I've been repeatedly amazed at just how conservative editors appear to be on the science side alone. RATS, BATS & VATS for example has its genesis in a major short story market editor telling Eric that there was no way rats or bats could be uplifted to sentience. ‘You can't do that.' There are large numbers of terraforming Mars books... But when I suggested that actually it was a worse target than Venus I got the automatic ‘you can't do that', from a couple of editors (despite Landis having suggested some good ideas for how to do it) Sigh. Actually, no I can't. Not this week, I'm busy. But I can see at least three ways of making Venus habitable... Some of them you do not want to try in the comfort of your own universe, let alone solar system.

So what is the author to do? Well you can either try peeing against the tide and remain unpublished, or you can go with the flow and write the ‘conservative' stuff the publishers want -- which is not the xenophilic stuff readers crave. Or... you can try and box clever. It's -- to the best of my limited ability -- what I have been trying to do for many books and years. It's a sort of Aikido approach - to use the opponent's strength against them. If I write about Venus... they'll say ‘you can't do that'. But fine if I write about the terraforming in another star system of a retrograde rotating planet which has a 243 day rotation and a very hot atmosphere... (probably not carbon dioxide - that might be pushing the envelope too close to the detection limit). And if I set the same in a space opera setting, or have this - a la Larry Niven - as an alien artifact, they don't have to take it seriously and that's just fine. And after a time - well, a few times anyway, that too has entered the status quo and is safe to write about (Which, for those of you who have read RATS BATS & VATS is exactly how we dealt with uplift in that. And for those of you who read SLOW TRAIN TO ARCTURUS was how we dealt with several more ‘you can't do that's')

Does it work? Well, yes and no. The honest truth is if you just want to get a book published, study your target editor/publisher and give them something that fits in perfectly with their views. They like their status quo, even if the evidence suggests their status quo and readers ideas of what they would like that status quo to be are not the same. You'll get push, and resultant sales. Doing it my way, you'll have to rely on readers... So is not what you should do, and the status quo in publishing suggests you will survive best by given them the status quo they want and never doing a ‘you can't do that'. But as I believe times are changing and there really is a hunger for new and different - not just the same miserable future in which there is a lot of angsty whining, odd sex and in the end the bad human (male, hetrosexual and white, ideally) crawls into a corner and dies of remorse for his awful destruction of (add editor's pet agenda here) or heroically (with lots of explosions) with FTL and spaceships bashing wicked space Muslims (or aliens who are oddly just like the current bete noir) into a grand military ruled empire, with odd sex... or whatever, blah blah fishpaste sameold sameold...

And if you get it right... well YOU might become the new status quo.

So: Rowena started us on good future we might have. Here are my "You can't do that" futures. They're not as nice.

It becomes possible to choose your skin color as easily as your shirt. It becomes as easy to choose your gender or physiognomy as your car. Will groups claim ‘ownership' to ‘genetic heritages' - say ‘black' or ‘female'?

It becomes possible to uplift (either cybernetically or biologically) almost anything - except for socio-political reasons - humans. So would a dog be allowed to farm or keep as pets subnormal humans? There are humans out there already with IQs below a bright Border Collie (which reach 3 year old human level).

While ‘who needs men?' was a politically correct sf concept, given VR and vat culturing of children - who needs real women? (Or men, but that one has been OK to think for 40 years). The computer generated VR image would fulfil any fantasy, even if that fantasy happened to be keeping house, taking the ‘man-of-the-house' word as law, and basically being a chattel (a situation that would please some people. I'm not one, but then I don't like boring). Given that sex selection is going to be possible, and many cultures who still consider women worthless/ lesser citizens, and these trends are slow to change, maybe women could become a very small minority (at least say in China or India) Of course they'd have VR men too.

Given that we should be able to store (and recreate, with mixtures and variations) the DNA of any and possibly every life form, and change them to fit a vast range of environments, and even imprint memories and personalities on them, do we have any need - or even desire to practice conservation?

Is there a real place for ‘apartheid' of uplifted species, to let intelligent dogs, for example, behave like dogs, without forcing our mores on them?

Superbowl Sunday

Finally! I woke to temperatures that didn't fall below freezing last night. There are only a few patches of ice and snow in the shadows instead of the solid sheet of one inch thick ice covered with several inches of snow. I can venture out to get my morning paper without fear of slipping and sliding straight to the emergency room. Most of all, the national media can quit -- hopefully -- their condemnation of the DFW area for being so poorly organized that we allowed bad weather to movein the week leading up to the Superbowl.

For those of you who might not be familiar with this part of the American football experience, the Superbowl is the final game of the season. The champs for the NFC and AFC meet in a game that will crown the best team of the year. Hopefully, it will be a good game but, all too often, it's a real sleeper. The best part of the game happens to be the commercials. As well they should be. Reports are that a 30 spot this year costs $3 million.

So, what does this have to do with writing, you ask? Good question. Now, let's see if I can come up with a good answer ;-p

Actually, I'll be honest, I'm riding high - or at least foggy -- on sinus meds today and spent much of yesterday sleeping. So I don't have a post ready and don't want to try to pull something together that won't make much sense. So, here's a question and a challenge for you.

Think of your favorite commercials -- from Superbowl Sunday or whatever. What makes them so good? How can you utilize that information or techniques in your writing?

Funday Celebrating books and friends!

Here we are, February 5th, my birthday and my day to do the Saturday MGC post!

So I'm going to have some fun. Did a yoga workout at the gym. Then my daughter took me for a pedicure. (Never had one before. At one point it tickled so much I nearly fell off the chair!). And tonight my DH is taking me to dinner and a movie. Yay!

So I thought I'd share some fun stuff with you.


My friend AA Bell has a new book out, 'Diamond Eyes', so she commission my DH Daryl to do a book trailer and David 'Meshow' to write the music. Here's the link to the music. And here's the link to the actual book trailer. She's really pleased with the number of hits this has generated.
And my friend Marianne de Pierres has a new YA fantasy series out. Book one, Burn Bright has just been released into the wild. With a book trailer! My DH didn't do this one, but there is a similarity with Diamond Eyes because Marianne commissioned a song by the musician Yunu.

It's interesting to see the cross fertilisation of ideas between music and story, and visuals to create these book trailers.


And then this morning I came across This. It's delightful. No dialogue, strong visuals, good use of music and great characterisation. The child actor does a wonderful job of conveying emotion through body language.

What's interesting about this, is that there is no need for an explanation. It relies on the viewer knowing that the child is trying to use 'the force' on objects and animals. When Star Wars came out in 1978 anything to do with speculative fiction was way out in left field. Now it is so mainstream it doesn't need an explanation.

In fact, the stuff of fiction has become ordinary. We have phones that take pictures and videos and can send these images to our friends, who watch them on their own phones. Eat your heart out, George Jetson!

So what's left for SF writers to write about? Well, here is an analysis of some predictions for 2030 on the Singularity Hub. Did you know that the Babel Fish is almost here?

So there you have it. Some fun, some frivolous fun and some fun staring into a crystal ball!
What did you think of the predictions?

Breaking News. Hachette Australia has You Tube Channel to promote books!

What's In a Name?

Plotting a new novel recently I have come across a familiar phenomenon. I'm working away on the plot, then move on to fleshing out a particular character, or describing that particular character's backstory or role in the plot.

Slam. Dead stop.

I need the name.

If I cannot get a name that works for me for that character I am completely stumped. It is part stubbornness, part determination, part - well I don't know what. But I have an instinct for what name is right. It's like the core of the character starts as a seed of emotion, and I know that thing intimately. I know that I need to find the right name to unlock it, as though that unique combination of letters and sounds is itself a key.

Once I have the name, everything starts flowing. I can describe the character, I can move on with the plot. Suddenly I know what happened when they were seven, how they feel about their mother and what colour their hair is.

So what is it about names? Do other people find it the same when they are fleshing out a new book?

The idea of changing character names after the book has been written makes me shiver like a ghost just walked on my grave.

In fact, come to think about it. I can't even start plotting a book until I get the title of the book.

So what is it? What's in a name?

The Allure of Evil

(This is the first of a three-part set of posts. Tomorrow part 2 will be posted at The Naked Truth blog, and part 3 will be posted at my site on Saturday. Blame Amanda. She asked me to write about Impaler and why I wrote it, and this is what happened.)

Have you ever desperately wanted to do something you knew was wrong? Have you ever done it, and then thought up all manner of justifications why it wasn't really wrong in the first place? No, don't answer. I'm not who needs to know.

If you answered "no" to either question, you've either successfully convinced yourself, or you've been lying to yourself. Humans are good at that - at both "that"s, really.

Now, one of the things I find terribly unsatisfying about a lot of fantasy and SF is that the evil is so often hollow, unconvincing. You look at it and - if you're me, which fortunately is a rare phenomenon - you wonder why anyone would want it. For instance, in Lord of the Rings, the evil side is uniformly deformed and twisted - there's no reason the average orc would want to stay there, and they can't all be fallen from elf-ness. Admittedly, Tolkien was writing what he thought was mythology, which has a different flow and needs than fiction.

Thing is, coming off 100 years packed solid with examples of populist and/or popular evil - they had to appeal to enough people to get into and consolidate power. After that it wasn't such a big thing - your standard ugly, repulsive evil just doesn't cut it, at least for me.

I'm prepared to admit that I might be a tad on the strange side here (when am I not?), but I've been fascinated by the nature of evil for as long as I can remember, so unconvincing evil irritates me. Evil is attractive: it's supposed to be.

At a more basic level, evil involves letting our least human aspects (i.e., the animal nature) run free. Not being stuck with all those stupid rules and getting a good solid boost over those (insert your epithet of choice here) who make your life miserable... you bet your sweet ass that's attractive. When it's wrapped in a charismatic package, it's very attractive. The idea is to seduce people from what they know is right, after all. And, Rule 34 notwithstanding, orcs and seduction just do not go.

All of this is one heck of an introduction to how I came to write Impaler, and why - trust me, it's relevant. See, my guilty sideline in my reading habits is history. Specifically, the history of such charming topics as torture, of regimes like Nazi Germany, Communist Russia, Pol Pot's Cambodia, the Mongolian Hordes, and other equally delightful regimes. I joke that I have a hotline to Evil Bastard Central in my head, but whether it's the subconscious processing of my unclean fascination or springs from some other dark corner of my subconscious is something I don't know and prefer not to investigate too closely. I might find the answer...

Enter serendipity, in the form of (I think) a 1980s documentary. At that point, I had what you might call the pop-culture image of Dracula: the pale dude with fangs who wore old-fashioned evening dress and a high-necked cloak. Discovering that there had been real man named Dracula, and that he made even your nastier-than-average vampire look like a wuss, hit me like a hammer on speed.

Naturally I started reading vampire fiction as well as the history of the vampire mythos. Of course, I read Bram Stoker's Dracula. Most of the fiction that mentioned Dracula stuck with the Stoker image, although some (Jeanne Kalogridis (Diaries of the Family Dracul) and Dan Simmons (Children of the Night) come to mind) incorporated the history of Prince Vlad Dracula with the vampire myth. Vlad - of course - was always evil, and usually chewing-the-furniture insane as well.

Eventually I managed to get my claws on the books that are still the gold standard for Vlad: the McNally and Florescu Dracula books (In Search of Dracula, Prince of Many Faces, and assorted others). Fascination turned borderline obsessive: there were (and are) gaping holes in the history, and massive inconsistencies in the narrative. This was a man who was revered by his people (and to some extent still is). How could that reconcile with the standard "perverted mass murderer" narrative?

My first - and thankfully long-buried - attempt to write Vlad's story from his perspective started around then. I wasn't a good enough writer to do it. Besides, I didn't have the resources or the research material I needed. Yes, this was before the Internet.

The situation and idea nagged at me during the following years, generating a crude outline for an alternate history - which is recognizably Impaler, although the resemblance is like an artist's sketch beside the final painting. Over the same time period, my writing kept cycling back to the theme of someone who - for whatever the reason - does evil in the service of good. Not evil rationalized into faux-good, but actually in service to good.

In Impaler, I made the analogy between what a ruler like Vlad has to do, and a gardener pruning diseased branches so the whole plant doesn't die. It's not the only time I explicitly called out that what Vlad is doing is evil by most standard but is in service to a much greater need. Vlad doesn't - usually - excuse his actions on these grounds. He mentally adds them to the long list of sins he'll ultimately be punished for.

This dichotomy between action and goal, between cruelty now to prevent worse later, is a topic I find endlessly fascinating, and I'll be exploring that and the circumstances of Vlad's life - the things that shaped him into the man who dominates Impaler - tomorrow at The Naked Truth.

Update: Post 2: The Kindness of Cruelty is available.

Updated Update: Post 3: The Man Behind the Monster is now posted.

Teaching and Learning

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about education, something that is eventually going to find its way to my blog, though probably not at Mad Genius.

I was thinking how for the first time I disagreed with Terry Pratchett’s “overt nudge” at the end of I Shall Wear Midnight. Oh, not on the idea that the formation of schools is a good thing – in general, assuming schools that actually function – but the idea that the important thing is to “teach people to think.”

Over the last few years I’ve become convinced this doesn’t work. I don’t know if it’s possible to teach people to think. It is an unpleasant activity that most humans would prefer not to engage. In fact, most humans are far more willing to die than to engage their brains. (Examples would stray into demagoguery, because to support all of them would take months of posts. But if you look around you, you’ll find examples aplenty.) Because no one knows how to teach it, it quickly becomes “teaching how to think” which we do know how to do. It’s called indoctrination.

So what can you do, instead? Isn’t it essential to have a citizenry who can think? And, to get to the main point of this post, isn’t it essential to have writers who can write and engage the reading public – at least if we want to continue the writing of fiction as a viable career?

Yeah. Both of those are essential. So, what do you do?

Well, when I posted a general rumble of dissatisfaction in a comment one of my co-bloggers at Classical Values said he’d been collecting McGuffey (for those not in the US those were the prevalent readers a hundred years ago) readers and that he favored educating kids for the nineteenth century. I got to thinking about it in that light. What those readers taught was skills with which to acquire knowledge: reading, writing, solid vocabulary, and maybe a few generally immutable facts around the world (if giraffes stop being quadrupedes or Antarctic moves, then we have a problem.) And then it left the procuring of information to the pupil that is armed that way. Because you can’t teach or force thinking, you can only give someone the tools with which to do it, then leave them alone to find their own way.

(Instead, in the US at least, we’re making our kids into Tantalus – amid a river of information from which their lack of preparedness or worse their indoctrination [not at Mad Genius, but I’ll provide links to this at later posts at my blog and CV] prevents them from slaking their thirst.)

I think the same issue pertains to teaching writing. You can’t teach writing – no one can – but you can learn it.

First let me start from where I started. I started with the idea of “immanent writing”. There was this thing called “talent” and either you had it or you didn’t. If you didn’t, you might struggle your whole life and never, ever, ever be a good writer.

I find this idea is not unusual and it is best reflected in the raw beginner who comes to me clutching a few pages and hoping I can tell him if he’s “got” it.

An agent who shall remain nameless sent me a rejection slip... fifteen years ago saying the problem was that I lacked a sense of timing and unfortunately timing was something that couldn’t be taught or learned, but inherent to the person. So it was his sad duty to tell me I’d never be published.

The truly odd thing is that looking back at that particular novel, it had problems out the wazoo (a place in OZ, Kate assures me.) Timing problems, though, it didn’t have. My first published set of books arguably had it – partly because I was trying to fix a problem that didn’t exist – but that one, no way.

The bad news is that I can’t tell you talent doesn’t exist. It does. Though in all my years of teaching writing I’ve only found one person who had almost all the skills needed to write a novel “for free” without practicing for years. Note the *almost*. That person hasn’t finished his first novel – which is not unusual. In fact, I’ve found over time that the closer you are to having it all given to you for free, the most likely you’ll never acquire the rest. And it’s not a matter of being a slacker, either, or lacking drive. It’s because, never having had to work for it, you don’t know how to do it.

(And please, trust me, I know of what I speak. Take me for instance, I got characters for free. I can engage you with a character in three lines. The problem is that after that I just had my characters meander around aimlessly because I had clue zero how to plot – or how to learn to plot. As near as three years ago, a professional colleague and friend mistook the discrepancy between my character creation skill and my plotting skill as a lack of interest in what I was writing. And he made it clear it wasn’t that anything was, by itself, bad, but that one was so much better than the other. And I think I’m now at more than average plotting skill – I hope, I worked hard enough for it – but there’s still a gulf between it and character creation ability.)

The GOOD news is that you don’t need talent – not a drop, smidgen or particle of it – to learn to write. How good your final product is might depend on how talented you are, but that is highly subjective. What I consider literary ambrosia is another person’s dog’s meat. What hits the bestseller’s list is often neither but that vast mushy middle that just happens to have a hook that attracts the – mostly non-reading – public.

The bad news again is that no one can teach you to write. Those who try end up doing what those who try to teach you to think do – they end up trying to teach you WHAT to write. (We’ve all heard of writing workshops that range from consciousness-raising sessions that make you feel your opinions are unacceptable to doctrinaire indoctrination about the "one way to write.", and do I TRULY need to recount all the internet gurus who have forbidden whole classes of grammatical parts: adjectives, adverbs and, in one mind-blowing instance, articles?)

The one set of workshops I attended (I’m going to blow the name, I usually do – Oregon Professional Writers Workshop? – taught by Kris Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith concentrated on process, which is as close as you can get to teaching writing. What do I mean by that? Well, they concentrated on making you write and write again, under various kinds of pressure, and what you wrote MOSTLY got critiqued on “it grabs” or “it doesn’t.”

They kept telling us to trust the process and, of course, I had no idea how to, because I THOUGHT that everything was set in this mysterious “talent.” But reading, writing, looking at things others had written in a critical light, did turn out to be a process that allowed me to learn to write without being taught. Not that I’m done yet, not by miles.

I’ve since tried to teach many people, some more overtly than others. (Some people are very resistant to being taught and you have to go around their defenses for them to learn anything.) Results are mixed. Three components seem to be essential to be able to learn to write.

One – you must be willing to read other works, and not just with a reader’s eye, but with a critical eye as well. Absent that and absent a solid habit of reading (or listening, or otherwise absorbing story) for pleasure, chances are you can’t teach yourself to write.

Two – you must be willing to write and write and write again. Not the same piece, but many pieces. Depending on how far you have to go, more or less concentrated effort might be needed.

Three – you must be able to both critique yourself and understand how others will perceive your work. A good way of putting this is “you must learn to play chess with yourself.” You must never lose touch of either what you’re trying to convey or how other people will perceive it. (Take that novel above. It did NOT have timing issues, but it was set in a proto-Greek civilization and the main character was the body-slave of the home owner who was Not portrayed unsympathetically. I was so far up my own historical feed tube that I didn’t realize other people would go “pedophilia, ick,” until a couple of years ago – this despite my having run into the same issue with my short story Thirst. And no, it’s no use at all arguing that maturity rates of the ancient world were different and that a fourteen year old then might have the mental maturity of a thirty year old today. I’d already hit the “pedophilia, ick” switch and lost the reader.)

Number three is the one most often lacking, (number two the next most likely, and number one exists too, yes.) It is a difficult skill. When you read your own work, you see all sorts of emotions and nuances that you forgot to put down. Also, the reverse – you’ll miss how a turn of phrase or a scene you threw in because it sounded cool, will be interpreted by a reader who doesn’t know that world/place/people as you do. (In the novel above, again, I described the home-owner and domain-holder as brutal looking, because in my head, he was. He was also a gentle and nurturing personality. SURELY you’ve met people like that? I have. But I started by describing his features. And by page eight I got back critiques saying “why is the villain being so nice?” Yeah, there are ways of doing this and I know them now, but back then I didn’t even know there WAS an issue.) The tendency of most writers, when told there is something lacking or something misleading is to circle the wagons and go into “they called my baby ugly and said I dressed it funny.” Yes, most writers. Though some of us have learned to be almost too far the other way because we’re afraid of dismissing valid criticism out of hand. Learning to evaluate criticism is part of learning to play chess with yourself.

For most people taking a break from the story will do. For me, it comes in two modes. Either I’m hyper aware of the story every second I’m writing OR if it’s something so close to my blind spots (but it’s historical! Being probably my main one) that it’s completely invisible, letting SEVERAL YEARS pass. As you can tell, it’s better to have the first than the last, but again I don’t know how to teach it – As with thinking, you only have to learn it. And as with thinking, it IS a painful process most people would rather avoid altogether.

So, what ways have you devised to learn to play chess with yourself? Did you ever believe that talent was all? Do you know of anyone who is successful on “talent alone”?

*crossposted at Classical Values and According To Hoyt*

Don't judge a book by its cover, but we do!

I've been thinking a lot about covers recently. For one thing The King's Bastard (cover art by Clint Langley) is up for a Ravenheart Award. (See here). YAY!


For another, I've had to prepare a resonance file for Solaris who are getting Clint to do the covers for The Outcast Chronicles. (Have seen a cover rough which I can't flash around yet. Very exciting! Go Clint!).

And then I came across these two posts. Malinda Lo talks about books and characters of colour and whether the covers reflect this. She says:

'A lot of commentary laments the low percentage of books with people of color on the covers (and yes, it is low), especially in comparison to the huge number of YA novels (fantasy and otherwise) featuring slim, attractive white girls.'

Did you follow the ruckus last year about Justine Larbalestier's YA book Liar's cover? The protagonist was coloured and they put a white girl on the cover. The book was re-released with a cover that reflected the character more honestly.

Melinda Lo goes on to say: 'Even if a book cover doesn’t echo the diversity within the book, that doesn’t erase the diversity. It hides it a little, yes, but the cover is not the story. The cover is an advertisement. (And in most cases, it’s removable.)'

And over at the Enchanted Inkpot they do a summing up of winter YA covers, analysing what is appearing from close-ups of pretty girls to iconic images. But these are all YA covers, I hear you say. What about fantasy covers?

Here we have the Orbit 2008 Vs 2009 cover trends. Swords are still big, but I suspect hoods will have made big gains. (I can't find anything for 2009-2010). And here's the Urban Fantasy analysis. Apparently Stilettos are out. LOL

So there you have it. Next time you go into a bookstore, take a look at the covers and see if you can spot the trends. Does it annoy you if the protagonist is coloured but on the cover they appear to be white?