What a way to start off 2023 . . . but my loyal New Worlds patrons voted for violent crime this month, so here we go! First up is abduction — including the variants where it wasn’t actually a kidnapping, or it was but the law is on the kidnapper’s side . . . comment over there.
I’ve been busy enough for . . . a while . . . that it took me longer than it should have to do this, but:
By which I mean, I have put together my own U.S. print edition, after years of ebook, U.K. edition, or used copies of the original version being the only way to get your hands on a physical volume. You can currently obtain it from Amazon if you want (note that I get a commission on that link), but it’s also available from Barnes and Noble and Book Depository, and may filter out to other retailers in time.
And yes, the others will follow. In Ashes Lie is on the way next, and then later this year I’ll be reissuing A Star Shall Fall and With Fate Conspire in joint ebook and print editions. For the first time in a decade, the whole Onyx Court series will be fully available again!
Quite a few of the books I read in December were either novellas or novels so short their actual word count might be in the novella range — in a few cases, even shorter than that . . . but even with that having been said, I read a metric ton last month. And bounced off nearly half as many books in their first fifty pages or so, which at least had the salutary effect of clearing out my wishlists a tiny bit. (This was made easier by library ebooks, especially while I was in Massachusetts for the holidays.) If I could keep this up, in a year my wishlists might be of a reasonable length!
. . . I am not going to be able to keep this up for an entire year.
BTW, a question for you all: the last few months I’ve been writing longer bits for each book. On the one hand, that seems good; on the other hand, I’m halfway to novelette territory with this post. Is it too much, do you think, or do you like the increased detail? Lemme know — I want these to be useful to other people as well as myself.
In 2020/2021, I think, I began saying to people “may next year be better than this one” or “may this year be better than the last” (depending on timing). That was absolutely driven by the pandemic and other woes, but honestly, isn’t it a worthwhile sentiment every time the calendar flips over?
So whether 2022 was good for you or bad, the best year yet or the worst year ever: may 2023 be better for you all. Happy New Year!
Every time I want to clean out a fountain pen and change inks, I swear, it takes forever. I have a bulb I use to flush water through the feed and the nib, but even after I’ve put through probably two hundred times as much water as there can possibly be ink remaining, it’s still coming out visibly colored. I have one of those sonic jewelry cleaners, too, but I feel like it just leaves the pens marinating in inky water (especially if I don’t clean them the other way first); I have to change it out enough times that I’m not sure it’s really faster or all that much less labor-intensive than flushing them by hand. Is there a faster way I’m just overlooking, or is this simply how it goes with fountain pens?
2022 and Year Six of the New Worlds Patreon are squeezing in one more fifth-Friday theory essay before the end! We’ve been talking about magic this year; here that means looking at the personal element that often distinguishes magic from science. Comment over there!
It’s generally been the pattern for the New Worlds Patreon that when we have an arts month, three of the essays are directly about art, and the fourth is about some adjacent topic. In this case, it’s patronage — comment over there!
And while we’re at it, this is a dandy time to remind you that New Worlds is indeed a Patreon, i.e. supported by the patronage of my readers. If you are not among their ranks already, it’s easy to join; members get a weekly photo, a monthly book review, and various other goodies at higher tiers, like voting rights in the topic polls and behind-the-scenes looks at how I build worlds for my own work. Even if you’re not able to support the Patreon directly, I’m grateful for any signal-boosting you can offer!
Publications-wise, that is. I never really know what to say about my personal life; it’s mostly a combination of uninteresting things, and stuff I don’t especially want to make public.
This was a weird year. For the first time since (I think) 2007 — which was the year after my first two books were published — I didn’t have a novel out. But since I had three in 2021 (The Mask of Mirrors, The Night Parade of 100 Demons, and The Liar’s Knot), and since I’ll have three again next year (The Game of 100 Candles, Labyrinth’s Heart, and The Waking of Angantyr), it’s not like I have much grounds to complain!
Meanwhile, on the short fiction front . . . this was a banner year, with no fewer than ten short stories published (beating out 2019, which had nine, but that was counting my fiction for Legend of the Five Rings, too). Speaking of L5R, this year also saw the publication of my first really significant game work: I’ve written micro-settings for Tiny d6, little branching adventures in 50-word chunks for Sea of Legends, RPG fluff and a few bits of mechanics for an earlier edition of L5R, but now I can lay claim to a full-bore adventure. And I’m really proud of how Imperfect Land turned out, in terms of its structure, its content, and the impact players can have on the larger world of their campaign. If any of you out there are reading for game awards and would like a review copy, just let me know!
And speaking of award nominations, if that’s your reason for looking at posts of this type, the piece I’d most like to bring to your attention is “Fate, Hope, Friendship, Foe” (3800 words, Uncanny Magazine; also available in their podcast). This is my “Atropos on a road trip through the Midwest” story, aka “the story it took me sixteen and a half years to write,” and I couldn’t be more delighted with how it turned out . . . even if for a long time there, I assumed it would never get written.
But as mentioned above, I have many other stories racked up from this year! Not all are available to read online, but:
* “Chrysalis” (5700 words, Beneath Ceaseless Skies) — a setting based on Mesoamerican folklore, where the main character is arguably a rock.
* “This Living Hand” (2900 words; Sunday Morning Transport but paywalled to subscribers) — dead Romantic poets and a willow tree that is up to no good.
* “Never to Behold Again” (440 words, Daily Science Fiction) — flash set in a world where beauty is eroded by people perceiving it.
* “The Me of Perfect Sight” (670 words, NewMyths) — Sumerian mythology about Inanna’s theft of the holy me.
* “And Ask No Leave of Thee” (7500 words, Neither Beginnings Nor Endings) — a modern retelling of “Tam Lin” that started with me figuring out how to do a non-magical version of the transformation sequence, then wound up as fantasy anyway.
* “Then Bide You There” (490 words, Dream of Shadows) — flash fiction born of me reaaaaally hating the folksong “The Two Magicians.”
* “Two for the Path” (1200 words, Shattering the Glass Slipper) — what if Snow White’s stepmother was actually trying to save her?
* “The Faces and the Masks” (340 words, Daily Science Fiction) — a meditative bit of fantasy-religious flash in the setting of the Rook and Rose series.
* “Crafting Chimera” (6700 words, ZNB Presents but paywalled to subscribers) — a psychologist tries to help a shapeshifter with identity issues.
Whoof, that’s a lot. But you know what? I already have seven stories racked up in the sold-but-not-published queue, all of which I’ve been at least tentatively told will be out in 2023. And I have two more for which I don’t have a date, but it might be in 2023. So with a few more sales — provided they’re to markets that aren’t already booked out so far, new acquisitions will be going into the 2024 schedule — I could theoretically surpass this record . . .
The New Worlds Patreon has finally gotten far enough into the topic of music to talk about the things that make most of the melodies, aka the strings and the winds! Comment over there.
It turns out that when I write a lot of short stories, I sell more than I do when I write like two stories a year. Who knew?
The most recent sale is “A Tale of Two Tarōs” to DreamForge Anvil. Check out that first link for the story behind the story . . .
The New Worlds Patreon continues its musical tour with something nearly as elemental as the voice: drums! Comment over there . . .
Alyc and I are celebrating the anniversary of The Liar’s Knot coming out by giving readers a peek at the “annotations” for the book, i.e. an entertaining selection of the comments we left on the doc for each other while drafting. Needless to say — but I’ll say it anyway — spoilers abound!
In November 2020, I randomly decided that I would try to prioritize reading Native American authors that month. This year, seeing the number of books by such authors that had piled up on my shelf and on my wishlists, I decided to go ahead and fully devote the month to that focus.
Now, there are flaws in this approach, and I know it. Why, for example, should I cordon such authors off in a specific month? The answer to that is (of course) not to cordon; this year I did actively choose to hold off on a couple of the books because I knew I was going to approach November this way, but in the future I’m not likely to do that. There are also merits to the approach, though: by taking in such fiction and non-fiction in a concentrated dose, I see patterns and themes and gaps in ways that would elude me if the material were more spread out. Case in point, I noticed that I have quite a lot of Anishinaabe authors here, with smaller clusters elsewhere, but there are whole swaths (like the Plains) that are relatively untouched.
So my verdict on the experiment as a whole is that I think it was interesting to do, but I don’t think I’d try to repeat it on a yearly basis. Unless, maybe, I wind up with such a backlog again that another focused push makes sense. 🙂
On to the books themselves!
And this time around I mean literal adventures!
Well, one adventure, anyway. A while back I was contacted by the Edge Studios, the company now handling the Legend of the Five Rings RPG, asking if I’d like to create a pre-written scenario for the game that would pick up and run with a strand of the plot that was planned for the official storyline, but which never happened due to that storyline getting wrapped up earlier than intended.
So of course I said yes. Then I had to figure out how to make an RPG adventure out of a premise that amounts to “a bunch of religious figures get together to Do Politics,” heh. Also, it was my first time attempting to do something like this: I’d written microsettings for Tiny d6 several times before this, but those pack fluff text, a proposed setting, and several adventure hooks into 1500 words. This time around they wanted more like 15,000 words, all developing a single plot in a well-established world.
But in all honesty, I’m super pleased with how it turned out. Because there are no pre-generated characters and no way for me to know what types of people the players would bring to the game, I couldn’t just make it all be about theology and such (which probably would have been of limited interest anyway); I had to figure out structures that would let players engage usefully with the plot via a wide variety of skills. There’s a section where PCs can influence the religious conclave via anything from meditation to calligraphy to a sparring match to their ability to hold their booze! The necessity of providing that flexibility was actually a good thing, because it meant figuring out multiple types of conflict, which gave the adventure as a whole a much wider dynamic range.
Imperfect Land is out now, if you happen to be interested in the L5R RPG. I’ve gotten some good early reactions already, but of course the real question will be what happens when the rubber of what I wrote meets the road of people actually playing it. I hope they have fun!
And as long as I’m here announcing L5R-related news, I should add that I’ve officially sold a third and final novel in my series to Aconyte Books: The Market of 100 Fortunes, which will be out some time in early 2024, about a year after The Game of 100 Candles. First, though, I gotta write it . . .
A new month; a new topic for for the New Worlds Patreon! This time around, my loyal patrons have voted for music. And so we start where music itself probably did — with the human voice . . . Comment over there!
I’m sneaking a couple more short fiction publications in before the end of the year, and the first of those is “Crafting Chimera”! It came out today in the online magazine ZNB Presents; as you’ll see if you follow that link, they’re running on Patreon, so the story is available only to ZNBP patrons. Joshua Palmatier and his company have a long track record of putting out great themed anthologies, though, so the magazine is definitely worth checking out!
As it happens, this story also comes with a funky bit of background. To learn how it made my protagonist immortal, head on over to my site . . .
So my higher-tier New Worlds patrons have the chance to vote in polls on what the topic for a given month will be, right?
Well, right now I’m running the polls well in advance, because getting the yearly collection ready for publication not too long after the year ends (the Patreon year, that is; the project started at the beginning of March 2017, and the books usually come out in April) means I have to write the final few months of essays ahead of time. I’ve been in crunch mode on that for a while now, with only the February essays left to go, but I need to write all of those and then reorganize and revise the whole manuscript before sending it off to my BVC beta reader on December 9th. Not a lot of time, and it’s very common for the polls to be semi-tied among a few options, with a winner not emerging until I remind people to vote a few days later — if then. I woke up this morning with a plan for how to do as much work as I could sans the February essays if there was no clear leader yet in the poll that went up today.
Y’all, one of the topics has a massive lead over the entire rest of the field. Possibly the biggest margin of victory I’ve yet seen in several years of doing these polls.
So I guess my patrons heard my silent prayer for a decisive early vote! There’s zero chance that anything else is going to overtake the leader, which means I can get right to work on writing those essays and revising the manuscript, no delay required. If you’ll pardon me, I should get back to that . . .
“Ideological stuff we rarely stop to think about” month at the New Worlds Patreon draws to a close with the question of personal privacy — several different levels thereof. Comment over there!
[I encountered this text in Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Potawatomi) earlier this month. I quote her comment there:
Living as a neightbor to the Haudenosaunee, I have heard the Thanksgiving Address in many forms, spoken by many different voices, and I raise my heart to it like raising my face to the rain. But I am not a Haudenosaunee citizen or scholar — just a respectful neighbor and a listener. Because I feared overstepping my boundaries in sharing what I have been told, I asked permission to write about it and how it has influenced my own thinking. Over and over, I was told that these words are a gift of the Haudenosaunee to the world. When I asked Onondaga Faithkeeper Oren Lyons about it, he gave his signature slightly bemused smile and said, “Of course you should write about it. It’s supposed to be shared, otherwise how can it work? We’ve been waiting five hundred years for people to listen. If they’d understood the Thanksgiving then, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
In that same spirit, I share here the most common version of the address, the same one Kimmerer uses in her book.]
*
This Thanksgiving address has been used by the six nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) to open and close major gatherings or meetings. The prayer is also sometimes used individually at the beginning or end of the day.
The People
Today we have gathered and we see that the cycles of life continue. We have been given the duty to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things. So now, we bring our minds together as one as we give greetings and thanks to each other as people.
Now our minds are one.
The Earth Mother
We are all thankful to our Mother, the Earth, for she gives us all that we need for life. She supports our feet as we walk about upon her. It gives us joy that she continues to care for us as she has from the beginning of time. To our mother, we send greetings and thanks.
Now our minds are one.
The Waters
We give thanks to all the waters of the world for quenching our thirst and providing us with strength. Water is life. We know its power in many forms — waterfalls and rain, mists and streams, rivers and oceans. With one mind, we send greetings and thanks to the spirit of Water.
Now our minds are one.
The Fish
We turn our minds to the all the Fish life in the water. They were instructed to cleanse and purify the water. They also give themselves to us as food. We are grateful that we can still find pure water. So, we turn now to the Fish and send our greetings and thanks.
Now our minds are one.
The Plants
Now we turn toward the vast fields of Plant life. As far as the eye can see, the Plants grow, working many wonders. They sustain many life forms. With our minds gathered together, we give thanks and look forward to seeing Plant life for many generations to come.
Now our minds are one.
The Food Plants
With one mind, we turn to honor and thank all the Food Plants we harvest from the garden. Since the beginning of time, the grains, vegetables, beans and berries have helped the people survive. Many other living things draw strength from them too. We gather all the Plant Foods together as one and send them a greeting of thanks.
Now our minds are one.
The Medicine Herbs
Now we turn to all the Medicine herbs of the world. From the beginning they were instructed to take away sickness. They are always waiting and ready to heal us. We are happy there are still among us those special few who remember how to use these plants for healing. With one mind, we send greetings and thanks to the Medicines and to the keepers of the Medicines.
Now our minds are one.
The Animals
We gather our minds together to send greetings and thanks to all the Animal life in the world. They have many things to teach us as people. We are honored by them when they give up their lives so we may use their bodies as food for our people. We see them near our homes and in the deep forests. We are glad they are still here and we hope that it will always be so.
Now our minds are one.
The Trees
We now turn our thoughts to the Trees. The Earth has many families of Trees who have their own instructions and uses. Some provide us with shelter and shade, others with fruit, beauty and other useful things. Many people of the world use a Tree as a symbol of peace and strength. With one mind, we greet and thank the Tree life.
Now our minds are one.
The Birds
We put our minds together as one and thank all the Birds who move and fly about over our heads. The Creator gave them beautiful songs. Each day they remind us to enjoy and appreciate life. The Eagle was chosen to be their leader. To all the Birds — from the smallest to the largest — we send our joyful greetings and thanks.
Now our minds are one.
The Four Winds
We are all thankful to the powers we know as the Four Winds. We hear their voices in the moving air as they refresh us and purify the air we breathe. They help us to bring the change of seasons. From the four directions they come, bringing us messages and giving us strength. With one mind, we send our greetings and thanks to the Four Winds.
Now our minds are one.
Closing Words
We have now arrived at the place where we end our words. Of all the things we have named, it was not our intention to leave anything out. If something was forgotten, we leave it to each individual to send such greetings and thanks in their own way.
Now our minds are one.
Thanksgiving Address: Greetings to the Natural World English version: John Stokes and Kanawahienton (David Benedict, Turtle Clan/Mohawk) Mohawk version: Rokwaho (Dan Thompson, Wolf Clan/Mohawk) Original inspiration: Tekaronianekon (Jake Swamp, Wolf Clan/Mohawk).
Something I did not expect on a Sunday afternoon, but was delighted to receive: an email letting me know that Uncanny Magazine is buying another story from me! A piece called “Silver Necklace, Golden Ring,” which is a chilly fairytale-style piece resulting from about five different inspirations smashing into one another; you can read the full background on my site.
