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 . . .

Books read, November 2022

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!

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More adventures in L5R!

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 . . .

“Crafting Chimera”

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 . . .

Apparently they heard me

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 . . .