all the news that’s fit to announce

I have several things for y’all today!

The big one is that Stage Two of my Onyx Court re-publication quest is complete, with a print edition of In Ashes Lie now available. (Stage One was, of course, Midnight Never Come; several more retailers links have been added to that page since its release, if you haven’t yet acquired it.) Stage Three (A Star Shall Fall) and Stage Four (With Fate Conspire) will follow in March and May, respectively, with a break in the middle there for New Worlds, Year Six, and then I’ll finally stop having eighteen balls in the air at once.

cover art for In Ashes Lie, showing a ring of fire with an inset painting of Newgate in London burning in the Great Fire

I’m also very happy to announce that my creepy folkloric story “Silver Necklace, Golden Ring” is now available to read for free on the Uncanny Magazine website. This is the piece that started off as a retelling of a particular folktale and wound up being a mishmash of five different influences headed in a direction I didn’t foresee until it happened.

And then finally, I also have a story out in Lightspeed! You can buy the issue (or subscribe to the magazine) to read “Guidelines for Using the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library,”, which I believe is my first ever listicle-style flash story, and is definitely a nerdy love letter to the quirks and weirdnesses that library used to have.

Books read, January 2023

Much of this month’s reading was All Japan, All the Time, as I got started on the draft of The Market of 100 Fortunes (my third Legend of the Five Rings novel). Some of that was direct research; some was just me getting my head back into the correct cultural gear; some was me figuring, well, I’ve got a bunch of Japan-related books that have been piling up on my lists, so why not use this as an impetus to read some of them.

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New Worlds: Illicit Goods

Sometimes the organization of the New Worlds Patreon doesn’t work out as tidily as I might like. Since I’ve said my bit on violent crimes (sexual assault having been covered previously), instead we’re wrapping up the month with something that more belongs back with the theft essays from the start of this Patreon year: smuggling! Comment over there.

Geraldine Harris’ Seven Citadels

Yoon Ha Lee has mentioned this quartet of books several times over the years, reminding me that I loved them as a kid and prompting me to re-acquire the series to see if it holds up. (The four volumes are Prince of the Godborn, Children of the Wind, The Dead Kingdom, and The Seventh Gate.) My recollection, at a distance of nearly thirty years, was that it had amazing worldbuilding and an ending that kid!me had kind of a “Jesus, Grandpa, what did you read me this thing for?” reaction to, but which I suspected was actually kind of amazing in ways I didn’t properly appreciate at the time.

Reader, I did not misremember.

Plot summary first: the declining empire of Galkis is under threat from without and from within, and their only hope is for someone to go on a quest to free their prophecied Savior from a prison whose seven keys are in the keeping of seven sorcerers (well, five sorcerers and two sorceresses). This is 100% unabashed Plot Coupon territory, a reason for Prince Kerish-lo-Taan, his half-brother Forollkin, and the companions they pick up along the way to roam through nearly the entire map collecting inventory items until they have the full set . . . but two things significantly mitigate the cheesiness and predictability of that plot. The first is just what it means in practice for them to be obtaining those keys, and the second is how it all resolves in the end, which is not at all what you might expect (hence kid!me’s reaction).

Before I get to that, though, the worldbuilding. When I bought copies of the books, they were shockingly short; the longest is still less than 250 pages. How much setting richness, I wondered, could possibly be squeezed into such a small space?

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In which I go Full Metal Folklore

We interrupt my drafting of The Market of 100 Fortunes (and also my edit letter for The Waking of Angantyr just arrived (plus the copy-edits of Labyrinth’s Heart will be here Real Soon Now (welcome to my January))) to announce that my story “Constant Ivan and Clever Natalya” is up at Beneath Ceaseless Skies! If those names look familiar, it’s because they’re folkloric figures referenced in the Rook and Rose series; having referenced them, I felt inspired to turn around and actually write this story. Which means, yes, that this is me going Full Metal Folklore, in a tale of a challenge set for a year and a day, horses of the dawn and the dusk and the mountains and the sea, a trickster heroine and a good-hearted hero, and also some prophetic turtles. I hope you enjoy it!

Back in black! Because the back cover is black!

I’ve been busy enough for . . . a while . . . that it took me longer than it should have to do this, but:

Midnight Never Come is officially back in print!

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!

cover art for Midnight Never Come, showing an ornate astrological clock, with a shadowed image of the Tower of London inset

Books read, December 2022

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.

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Happy New Year!

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!

Is there a faster way to clean fountain pen nibs?

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?

New Worlds: Patron of the Arts

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!

2022 in review

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 . . .