Swan Tower

11:40 am - July 1st things

The auction over at livelongnmarry is open for bidding now. Look in the tags for "mod note" to find instructions on what to do, and where to post when you've won an auction, so they can track totals. Offerings range from more customized fanfic than you can shake a slash at to cookies to personalized clothing advice for those whose bodies don't look like the fashion industry wants them to. And all the money goes toward charities for defending gay marriage rights.

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I'm a bad writer for putting that one first and this one second, but hey, priorities. Today also marks the official release for Clockwork Phoenix, the anthology in which you can see me attempting to make Mesoamerican fantasy work. Ordering info behind that link. I haven't read it yet myself -- I'm waiting for my contributor's copy, rather than trying to plow through it in the page-proof .pdf -- but the bits I've seen look fabulous. Enjoy!

11:35 am - other reviews

While I was out of town, reviews also appeared for a couple of the venues my short stories have been published in.

Sherwood Smith (sartorias) liked issue #12 of Paradox, which includes "The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe." The verdict on my story is that it's "a taut, lapidary triptych," and the verdict on me is that "Her scholarship is sure, her sense of pace impeccable." Yay! (Don't forget, you're eligible to win a copy of that story if you send me a photo of Midnight Never Come in a bookstore. Or in your hot little hands, or whatever. Proof that it's out in the world.)

Also, though I don't believe the anthology Clockwork Phoenix is available yet -- I think it's debuting at Readercon -- there have been a few advance reviews. Publishers Weekly says "all 19 stories have a strong and delicious taste of weird," and Charles Tan at Bibliophile Stalker found it a solid, enjoyable antho. I'll let you know when that one's actually out.

07:29 pm - Elizabethan extravaganza!

All you Kit Marlowe fanboys and fangirls out there may be interested to know that Issue #12 of Paradox Magazine is now available to order, and within its pages you may find my story "The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe". No relation to Midnight Never Come, despite that title coming from Marlowe, but I welcome speculation as to how the two might be made to connect. (I suppose the answer might be Ink and Steel.)

Also, C.E. Murphy's book The Queen's Bastard debuts today. I mention this because it will always hold a special place in my heart as the first book I blurbed. Yes, ladies and gents, somebody at her publisher decided that Marie Brennan was a name worth putting on the cover! Oddly enough, the letter I got with the review copy connected it to Warrior and Witch, but it's far more like Midnight Never Come, so that's the vein I will use to pitch it to you all here.

The Queen's Bastard, much like Michael Moorcock's Gloriana, takes place in a setting that is sixteenth-century Europe in almost everything but name. (Unlike Gloriana, at no point did I want to throw it across the room and light it on fire with the power of my rage.) It has espionage and magic and is way sexier than MNC, and it's the first book of a new series called The Inheritors' Cycle. Short-form synopsis is, Belinda Primrose is the unacknowledged bastard daughter of Elizabeth Lorraine, queen of England Aulun, and she's been trained by her father Robert Dudley Robert Drake in the art of international spying and assassination.

Belinda isn't an entirely likeable character; she takes several actions in the story that had my skin crawling. But that's clearly deliberate, and tied in with the growth of Belinda's powers; I suspect that when it's viewed in the larger context of the series, that will become an interesting facet of her character development. I'm certainly very curious to see the next book. This is clearly based on Reformation-era Europe, but taking it one step aside means Murphy can play with some elements of her own creation, and I'm looking forward to seeing where those go.

Finally, I'm hard at work on creating content for the dedicated Midnight Never Come website. (That's just the holding page, until the thing goes live.) The plans, they are glorious. I have no idea what this stuff will look like in execution, but the ideas have me hugely pleased.

10:11 am - International Pixel-Stained Technopeasantry Unite!

In Internet terms, this is ancient history, but I liked this the first time around, so I'm doing it again. (As are some other people.)

Short recap, for those born after the Hendrixonian period of the Cretaceous: the former vice-president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America railed about people posting fiction online for free. The response, as provoked by papersky (Jo Walton) -- after we were done making fun of him -- was a whole hell of a lot of people posting fiction online for free.

Last year I posted "Calling into Silence," my Asimov Award story from 2003. This year it's a piece that might have the best ratio of length-to-pride of anything I've written -- which is to say, there are things I've written that I'm prouder of, but they're also substantially longer. "Silence, Before the Horn" is just a flash piece, but I like it all out of proportion to its length.

Both stories are available through Anthology Builder, where you can put together an anthology of your own design and have it printed and shipped to your door.

06:48 pm - If I'm to be a sugar momma, I'd better act like one

It's always pleasing when I sell a second story to a given market -- proof that the first sale wasn't a fluke. In this case, the folks buying another piece from me are the Intergalactic Medicine Show (who previously published "Lost Soul"), and the story they have purchased is "A Heretic by Degrees".

For those who have been playing along at home: yes, that's a Driftwood story, and the first one to sell. May many more follow in its wake!

12:35 pm - The Battle of Comma Hill

Man, the last time I was having aneurysms like this over a copy-edit, it was because somebody was going after my semicolons. Now it's my commas, which I sprinkle liberally throughout my writing, in defiance of the rules of grammar but service to the flow and pacing of a sentence.

I'm literally having bargaining sessions with myself. "If you let him delete the comma in that sentence, you can fight back for the pair in this one. Come on. It's okay. Do you know how many of your readers will notice the presence or lack of a comma there? NONE."

But I'm a reader! And I notice! the little voice cries back.

Step away from the commas, honey. Save your energy for dying upon the hill of I Want Those To Be A Compound Sentence, Dammit, Not Two Separate Sentences.

It's pathetic but true: writers do spend their time and energy obsessing about such things.

05:25 pm - for the curious

The Intergalactic Medicine Show has a blog, "Side Show Freaks," where they regularly post short essays by their writers, about the stories published in the magazine. My piece about "Lost Soul" is up there right now, if you're curious.

01:55 pm - a short fiction debate

That is, a debate about short fiction, not a short debate about fiction.

Jay Lake linked today to a "Mind Meld" up at SF Signal, where they had a number of people weigh in on the purpose of short fiction. The responses were thought provoking, both in the "yes, what she said" and "what crack are you smoking?" kind of way.

It starts with Gardner Dozois, whose answer reminds me of nothing so much as the "interviews" football players give after games, where they spout off the standard talking points: just focused on the game, gave 110%, couldn't have done it without the rest of the team, etc. I've seen his answer again and again -- but I've also seen things calling into question the validity of that answer, on a small or large scale. "[Short fiction is] still where the majority of readers find new writers whose work they enjoy" -- really? Then why aren't the subscription numbers higher? Or to put it differently, how are all those thousands of people who don't read short fiction finding all the new authors busting out today -- especially when many of those new authors don't write short fiction in the first place? "For writers, short fiction is still the easiest way to break into print" -- I've seen this one debated all over the place. Break into print, sure, given the many semi-pro and for-the-love markets out there, but there's been evidence to suggest you have better odds of selling your first novel than getting a story into, say, Asimov's. Ultimately it's an apples-to-oranges comparison, and finding equivalent metrics for both is harder than you think. "Even today, the best way to break in and establish a professional reputation is to write and sell lots of strong short fiction" -- best? According to what measurement? It isn't best if short fiction isn't your natural forte, and one solid novel will establish your professional reputation pretty quickly. Sure, editors may offer novel contracts to really well-known short story writers, but they also offer them on a regular basis to people who have never sold a short story in their lives. The days when "build a rep with short fiction, then try a novel" was the standard path to a career are gone, by most evaluations I've seen.

Ellen Datlow repeats some of the same points, but usually with a phrasing that makes the fallacies more obvious: "Publishing short fiction is still the quickest way to recognition for a terrific short story writer." That's very nearly a tautology: be awesome, and people will recognize your awesomeness. Publishing a novel is the quickest way to recognition for a terrific novelist, too. She also brings up the one that always annoyed me, before I learned to write short stories: "short fiction remains the best breeding ground for new writers because the form provides a smaller canvas with which to perfect their craft." Sure -- if a smaller canvas is your thing. But if it isn't, then you'll be stunting your chances of development by trying to force yourself into a smaller box. And writing short fiction won't teach you to write a novel; at their best, the two forms influence each other, teaching lessons to carry across the divide, but as Jane Yolen pithily puts it down-page: "First, what short fiction is NOT. It's not training-wheel fiction. Authors don't practice on short fiction, nor do readers. It is a singular writing and reading experience." (Mike Resnick hits the same point.) I think the standard advice does a disservice to those who are naturally inclined toward longer lengths -- as I myself was, for many years.

But the responses further along contained some thoughts I found very apt. First of all, as several people pointed out -- Jonathan Strahan, Andrew Hedgecock, Rich Horton -- the question of vitality or lack thereof needs to be split into two parts, artistic and economic. The short story market is not thriving financially. But artistically? Absolutely. I think there's no question that our genre has matured a great deal, to the point where we're now positioned to try all kinds of boundary-pushing experiments. And that is a way in which short fiction can be like training wheels: I wholeheartedly agree with the many people who said that it's the perfect venue for trying out something new, whether it's a different genre, a new setting, or an unusual voice. (Case in point: "A Mask of Flesh." I can get away with a Mesoamerican short story much more easily than a Mesoamerican novel.)

Short fiction has a valorized position in our field, especially in SF (as opposed to fantasy). I don't think that's a bad thing, but it gets up my nose when people then take that too far. It's the difference between John Klima's response and Gardner Dozois'; John presents it as "here's what I like about it," from which I can generalize that other people share his opinion, whereas Gardner presents it more as some kind of universal truth. But it's not a truth for me, or for many of the writers I know, who didn't follow the Standard Path to Success -- which suggests it's not half so standard as advertised.

Regardless, though -- an interesting set of answers, and worth reading through if you're at all involved in the field.

06:31 pm - oh. em. gee., part two

And then the editor suggests one last line to go after the one you thought was the last line, and you say "yes, that's it exactly," and after the most ridiculously niggly revision process I've ever been through -- a revision process possibly more niggly than all my other story revisions put together -- I've sold "A Mask of Flesh" to Clockwork Phoenix.

Let it be known to all the world that Mike Allen is a saint among editors, for putting up with me. He made the ending of the story much better, however much I occasionally wanted to light the last page on fire.

Anyway, those of you from the Changeling game may be interested to know that this is the use to which I put all that research I did into Central American folklore, back in the day. My odd little quest to publish some Mayan/Aztec fantasy has begun.

05:51 pm - oh. em. gee.

There is nothing more irritating to me, in the writing life, than beating my head against the final line of a story over and over again, arranging and rearranging the most insignificant details in an attempt to get it in tune. "A" or "the"? "Ghosted" or "ghosting"? Comma or no comma?

At least I figured out fairly quickly that the reason I didn't like any of my ending lines was because I'd passed the right one already. Now I just need to get it to sing.

07:33 pm - old-skool sale

In the days of old, back when writers used typewriters and typesetters lost fingers to their hot-lead monstrosities, story acceptances used to be sent by post.

That was not the intent of Christopher Cevasco, editor of Paradox, but since his e-mail appears to have vanished into the ether, the first I knew of my sale there was when the contract showed up in my mailbox today. The arrival of an envelope from them had me sighing in disappointment, thinking I'd been rejected, but as I felt the heft of the thing, I was reminded of the old maxim that bad news comes in fat envelopes, good news in skinny ones. I had a fat envelope, but then again, we're long past the days when writers asked for their manuscripts to be sent back to them, so it just might be a contract inside . . . .

And so it was. Yay!

So good news for all you Kit Marlowe fan-boys and fan-girls; "The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe" will be in Issue Twelve of Paradox, which is slated for April. I'm exceedingly glad to see it find a home there, since it's more a historical fiction story than a speculative one, and Paradox is explicitly a historical fiction mag with an interest in historically-related spec fic. This was pretty much the best matchup I could imagine for this particular story.


Edited to add: Hah. Five minutes after posting this, a rejection for a different story arrives in my inbox. Good ol' Gmail, keeping my ego in check . . . .

01:02 am - I should also have a Mesoamerican icon . . . .

I love the fact that I have trained my memory decently well to hold onto ideas I have while falling asleep.

Because last night I came up with a short story that, if I can pull it off, might just be brilliant. Not just my usual, fairly plot-driven fare, but something much deeper, and more unusual in its structure. And it has an awesome title. (Though you have to know the story to know why it's awesome.)

Then I went to sleep and forgot about it.

But partway through today, while I was thinking about other things, my brain tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Oh yeah, don't forget about this."

I have it down in notes now, and who knows? I may try to write some of it this weekend. I wrote "Nine Sketches" half at VeriCon, and I'm damned proud of that one; maybe this one can get in on some of that mojo.

So, yeah. "Chrysalis." Might be my next story, if I can hold onto Mesoamerica and teen-angst urban fantasy at the same time.


Update: Well, now I know what all the people in the story are called. (Or at least most of them. Depends on whether I only name the pov characters, or whether folks like Konil's daughter will get named, too.)

07:27 pm - new story up!

I know a lot of you don't necessarily go out and buy an issue of a magazine just because I have a story in it, but in this case, it's very easy. "Lost Soul" is posted now at the Intergalactic Medicine Show, which means it's online. You can access the whole issue for only $2.50, and it provides quite a substantial amount of content for that price.

My backlog of sold-but-not-yet-published stories is finally shrinking back down to a reasonable size. Mind you, that means I should sell more stories. Which means I should submit more. Which means I should write more.

Maybe tonight. First, I'm going to go have dinner and watch some TV.

05:42 pm - here we go; there we went

Today, I officially stop dinking around with this YA project, and start working seriously on it.

Let's hope it doesn't blow up in my face.

It's hard for me to do the end-of-year writer-meme, because I don't track exactly how much I'm writing all the time. The best I can do is to say that I wrote about 160K of novel last year -- Midnight Never Come, plus about 33K of ANHoD (a back-burner project) and not quite 15K of this YA thing. But that doesn't count bits and pieces of other things. And I can't check my short story output because that file isn't available to me at the moment. And then there's nonfiction and formal blogging (i.e. things like SF Novelists posts, rather than random crap here), and so on.

I had five short stories hit print ("Execution Morning," "A Thousand Souls," "But Who Shall Lead the Dance?," "Selection," and "Nine Sketches, in Charcoal and Blood"). I sold three. Note for 2008: try to increase short story output. (While also writing more novels? Yes, I recognize the problem here.)

The sad lack is no novel out, since Warrior and Witch got put out so soon after Doppelganger, and settling on Midnight Never Come took so long. But I'll make up for that: MNC this year, plus a reissue for that first pair.

Anyway. That's an informal roundup of last year's writerliness. But rather than dwell on it more, I'm going to go work on the YA.

12:58 pm

We interrupt this holiday to bring you two pieces of updatery.

The first is that there's a new service in town, folks: Anthology Builder. So far it's still in beta, but here's the general idea: authors upload stories, which you can then purchase, iTunes-style, and assemble into a print-on-demand customized anthology which gets shipped to your door soon afterward. I'm not sure how well it will fly, but I really like the idea, and so far have uploaded "Calling into Silence". That's the same story I made available online for IPSTP Day, so you can read it for free, but consider it me dipping my toes in the water of Anthology Builder. My hope is that the site prospers (or something like it does), and in the long term I can use it as a way to make all of my published short fiction available for custom reprinting. Otherwise it tends to sink without a trace, and short story collections are hard to sell via traditional commercial publishing.

The second update is that I've made a big push to atone for my suckage since July. What suckage is that, you ask? Why, the suckage of not having posted any book recommendations. I've taken advantage of my enforced free time, and thrown up all the rest of them in one fell swoop. The two remaining folklore recommendations are for the Prose Edda and the Volsunga saga; the three novels are Avalon High by Meg Cabot, The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, and The Homeward Bounders by Diana Wynne Jones.

Stay tuned for a later post, wherein I will discuss the future of those recommendations. You can probably guess, based on that huge gap, that I'm thinking of making some changes.

06:04 pm

One downside to my decreased short story production this year has been a corollary decrease in short story sales.

So it is with great pleasure that I announce Shroud Publishing has bought my horrific fairy tale "Kiss of Life" for their upcoming anthology Beneath the Surface. The blurb over on their site says there will be thirteen stories in the antho, so it's especially flattering to be one of such a small number.

I've got a couple others I'm keeping my fingers crossed for. We may end this drought with a small flood, if I'm lucky.

11:04 pm - hello, brain, my old friend

We're up to 442 words on "How Heroes Fall" (its other possible title). Which doesn't sound like a lot, but since this will consist of a bunch of vignettes around a theme, it's a decent amount; it's two vignettes out of some unknown total -- maybe eight or ten.

This is, without a doubt, the most artsy-fartsy piece of crap I've ever written. My one hope is to make it good enough to remove "crap" from that equation. (Ain't nothing gonna redeem it from artsy-fartsy-hood.)

I had all three of my e-mail accounts down to thirty e-mails or less when I went to bed last night; they've bounced up a bit since then, but not much. The fact that ninety unanswered e-mails counts as brag-worthy progress tells you what state they were in before.

I'm in a weird state right now. Not enough motivation to get anything done, but enough brain to want to get something done. Can't figure out what to do with myself. Answer e-mails? Grade? Those would be useful. Write? Read? Watch something? Those would be entertaining. Clean up the house? I really ought to. But I can't settle down to anything, it seems.

Meh. Stupid temperature dropping like a rock. We skipped right over the first two stages of fall, it looks like, and went straight to grey and dismal.

01:42 am - I'm back. (What's left of me.)

So, I got married. And then I went to Vegas. (With a pause in there to teach two more days of class; I couldn't just cancel a whole week.) Now I'm home.

Very, very glad to be home.

I'm trying to recover enough brain to deal with the backlog of e-mail that has built up over the last month or more. Most of the truly crucial stuff has been dealt with as it happened -- I hope -- but there's a lot of non-crucial stuff owing. If any of that stuff involves you, Dear Readers, then please bear with me as I try to wade through it. Cerberus (my collection of three e-mail accounts) has grown a fine new set of teeth on all of its heads; dealing with those will take a little while.

In the meantime, I'm enjoying my return from the land of Flashing! Lights! and Brightly! Colored! Things! and did we mention the Obnoxious! Noises! The shows we saw (Penn & Teller, and Cirque du Soleil's Kà and Mystere) were fabulous, but right about now, I'm taking deep pleasure in reading unmoving black text on a white page. And even writing a bit of my own; one of the flash vignettes that will make up the story "How They Fall" (if that ends up being its title) got scribbled down during my office hours today. I have hope this signals the return of my brain. It's been missing for several weeks now; I'd love to see it again.

02:50 am - just great . . . .

They didn't call John in until the bullets had finished flying, until everybody who was going to surrender had surrendered and everybody who was going to die had died. By that point, of course, she was long gone.

08:57 pm - good news, of a minor sort

In the first part of this year, I did a good job of writing new stories and getting fresh material out the door, but I should have foreseen that the novel would kind of destroy any prospect of keeping that up all year long, as I originally intended. Anyway, between the death of that plan, a coincidence of assorted delays at places I've sold stories to (meaning nothing's actually appearing any time soon), and a general lack of sales in the last few months, I've had no short story news to report.

So, like a TV program broadcasting random "human interest" stories when news is slow, I'll mention that "Kingspeaker," one of this year's accomplishments, has been passed along to the senior editors at Baen's Universe. It now stands a still small but non-trivial chance of selling, which is cool.

And I'm not just saying that because they pay well, either. <g> I made an impulse decision to subscribe a month or so ago, said impulse being driven by reading the first part of Elizabeth Bear's "Cryptic Coloration" and wanting to read the rest. (matociquala, I blame you. It was the vividness of Matthew's description that hooked me in -- that, and the subsequent classroom scene.) Anyway, I'm patchy about subscribing to things, because I have yet to find a magazine I like consistently enough to stick with for more than one subscription. Baen's hasn't hurdled that bar by any means; in fact, most of the SF I read for a scene or two and then gave up on. But the nice thing is, they publish a lot of both SF and F every issue, plus articles and the like, and don't cost much at all relative to what you get; six bucks for an issue, thirty for a year, and every issue is about the length of a Robert Jordan novel, with far more happening in it.

I liked enough out of this current issue that I'd say it's worth the price of a subscription. We'll see what I think of future issues. But it would definitely be an awesome market to appear in.