Well, it’s the same Driftwood, but in different format: Podcastle has just bought the audio rights to “A Heretic by Degrees.” (“Driftwood” itself has already been podcasted by the original publisher, Beneath Ceaseless Skies.)
I really should get cracking on more stories in that world.
This came in while I was on the road, so I didn’t post about it at the time, but: Talebones has bought “The Snow-White Heart,” another of my horror-tinged fairy tale retellings.
This is my third story with them, and I’m very pleased to be on their TOC once more.
It’s May 1st. Do you know what that means?
Time for me to start work on the sequel to In Ashes Lie.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the Onyx Court series will continue! I’m slated for two more books: one in the eighteenth century, one in the nineteenth. Technically they have working titles, but around the house, they’re known as “the comet book” and “the Victorian book.” (Exciting, I know.) The latter was first announced back in 2007 — the original plan was for me to write that one instead of In Ashes Lie, because I was going to do these things out of chronological order. The comet book goes in between: culminating in 1759, it mashes together Halley’s comet, Sir Isaac Newton (yes, I know he’s dead by then), alchemy, and the consequences of the Great Fire of London (coming in June to a bookshelf near you).
So, the series in order: an Elizabethan faerie spy fantasy, a Stuart faerie disaster fantasy, an Enlightenment faerie alchemical fantasy, and a Victorian faerie steampunk fantasy.
(And then maybe a Blitz book and a modern book, but I’d have to think up plots for those first.)
There’s a bit of a shakeup on the back end, though it won’t mean much for you the readers: the publisher for these next two will be Tor, not Orbit. No terribly exciting drama to tell you about; it’s just that Orbit wanted me to work on something new before returning to this series, but I was keen to keep going. The intent is for Tor to put out the comet book in 2010, and the Victorian book in 2011. Both will be trade paperbacks, with a possible later reissue as mass-market. And OMG I can’t wait to write these things.
I’ll in London again in early June, doing the research round. Look for Trip-Blogging Part Three then, and ongoing posts about my reading and wordcounts, which I will endeavour to make interesting. (In fact, stay tuned for revelations as to which recent questions on this journal have been secretly comet-related . . . .)
Eighteenth century, here I come!
I’m about to run off to Potlatch again, but: Paradox has purchased a flash piece from me, “Salt Feels No Pain.” This is the same editor who previously published “The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe,” so I’m very pleased to be working with him again.
But man, I really need to get some replacement pieces into my submission queue . . . .
Small bit first, since otherwise it will vanish next to the other news: Shroud Magazine has purchased my twisted fairy-tale retelling “Tower in Moonlight.” (This is part of the ongoing set that includes “The Wood, the Bridge, the House”, “Shadows’ Bride,”, and “Kiss of Life.”)
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Much bigger bits, relating to In Ashes Lie:
I actually meant to post this days ago, but it clean slipped my mind — the Science Fiction Book Club has picked it up as a main selection, as with Midnight Never Come, so those of you who got the last book in hardcover can do so with this one, too.
For the other bit, you’ll have to look behind the cut . . .
There’s a certain pleasure to breaking into a market that hasn’t bought anything from you before. But there’s also a pleasure, of a different flavor, to selling them a second story.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies, which previously published (and podcasted) my Nine Lands story “Kingspeaker,” has now purchased a Driftwood story titled (surprise!) “Driftwood.” (Thanks to the vagaries of the creative process, this was the first story I wrote for that setting, but it took longer to beat into publishable shape than “A Heretic by Degrees,” which came out more or less right in the first draft.) ninja_turbo, I think this means you’re officially allowed to be a Driftwood fanboy now.
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The Ell-Jays are going through another round of the discussion on Representing the Other, sparking some thoughts, but none really concrete enough for me to articulate them here. It does, however, remind me of a realization I had the other week, watching The House of Flying Daggers.
Driftwood being the kind of place it is, not everybody there is human-shaped, and the ones who are, aren’t necessarily human-colored. Because of that, there’s no actor who’s precisely my mental image of Last. But there’s no reason in this world or any other that he has to have European facial structure, and so it occurred to me that if you dyed Takeshi Kaneshiro the right colors, he’d be my casting for the part.
Turns out a lot of my short story sales recently have featured secondary-world characters of a chromatic nature. This is what we call “a start.” But I want to do better in this world, and also in novels.
I don’t do stomach bugs. No, really. The last time I had one like this, I was five or so. Ergo, being laid out flat today by such a thing is both deeply unpleasant and highly annoying, since it means no karate for me.
But! Nothing like some good news to perk me up a bit.
Mike Allen, the excellent gentleman behind Clockwork Phoenix and my story therein, “A Mask of Flesh,” has just purchased another story for Clockwork Phoenix 2!
This is “Once a Goddess,” which long-time readers of this journal have heard me mention before. It is the current (and hopefully future) champion of the “longest stretch from idea to draft” contest, as I came up with the seed for it in the summer of 2001, and only shoved it through to completion because I was bound and determined to submit it to the anthology this fall. But now it also holds the title for “shortest stretch from draft to sale” — in fact, it is the first story I have ever sold right out of the gate. So it took its own sweet time coming out of my head, but the result was worth the wait.
The opening line, as cited before in that “first line of unfinished stories” meme:
For eleven years Hathirekhmet was a goddess, and then they sent her home.
This story goes out to all the real-world girls who have been Kumari, and then had to find their way in life as ordinary women.
I went to bed last night with that conversation rolling around in my head; I woke up to discover that Abyss and Apex has decided to buy the most ridiculously-titled short story I have ever written, “Letter Found in a Chest Belonging to the Marquis de Montseraille Following the Death of That Worthy Individual.”
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So, you all know I like doing recommendations for good books I’ve read lately. Unfortunately, I don’t have as much time to read as I would like, which means that the recommendations lag way behind all the cool stuff I see coming out. To that end, I’m going to start putting up the occasional plug for books I think look cool and am putting on my own TBR list.
First up is Elizabeth Bear’s All the Windwracked Stars. It’s a steampunky cyberpunky post-Ragnarok Norse fantasy-type-thing, and the sample had my Norse-geeky self squirming in glee. It just came out this week, I believe, and while I don’t have my copy yet, that’s more attributable to the fact that I haven’t left the house than anything else.
The other pre-rec for now is Diana Pharaoh Francis’s The Black Ship, second (but mostly stand-alone) installment in her Crosspointe series. I confess to a bit of jealousy here; the setting resembles the Changing Sea, home to a sailing-fantasy novel I want to write someday. But jealousy also translates to interest, so here’s a brief interview with Diana:
Some short story sales make you happier than others.
Back in (I think) 2006 — maybe 2005 — a friend of mine named Crystal Black presented a paper at ICFA on the visual representation of Peter Pan, specifically with regards to his apparent age. She made some comment during the course of her talk that had nothing to do with that topic, but got my brain spinning on the ending of the story, where Peter comes back and takes Wendy’s daughter Jane to the Neverland, and then after Jane gets too old he takes Margaret.
The hindbrain, source of all truly good ideas, coughed out the phrase “The Last Wendy,” and left me to play.
I got maybe a thousand words in and stalled. Normally I start at the beginning, go on until I reach the end, and then stop, making it all up as I go. In this case, I knew where I was trying to go, but I just couldn’t see how to get there. One late-night Christmas conversation with kurayami_hime prodded at the unmoving mass of stuff in my head, and a couple of weeks later I called her up to say, “hey, I think I’m trying to make this be the wrong story. What if it was this instead?”
Her response, as I recall, was something along the lines of “That’s horrible. You have to do it.”
The result is one of my favorite stories . . . which came equipped with a little problem. See, the U.S. copyright status of Peter Pan and all his related materials is a tangled, bleeding mess. I’m pretty positive my story is in the clear, but not all magazine editors see it the same way. The solution? I mailed it to Canada. On Spec, the lovely magazine that published “Nine Sketches, in Charcoal and Blood” (one of my other favorite stories), has just agreed to buy it. You won’t get to see the story in print terribly soon, due to constraints on the number of U.S. authors they can publish, but it’ll be there eventually, and I don’t mind waiting. I think that’s a great home for it, and Peter Pan is firmly out of copyright in that country, so everybody wins.
But copyright or no copyright, I’d like to state publicly that I intend to donate my check from this sale to the Great Ormond Street Hospital, which controls the weird quasi-perpetual-but-not-really rights to J.M. Barrie’s works. They do good work, and I didn’t write this story for the money. I wrote it because my hindbrain latched onto some problematic points in the original and would not rest until it thrashed through them in narrative form. Secondary to that was the hope that the result could find an audience. Now that I have that, I’m happy.
(Actually, now I need to figure out some way to make my even-more-problematic Narnia story happen. I wonder if that’s out of copyright in Canada?)
Other writing-related news:
While in Dallas, I sold “Kingspeaker” to a new magazine called Beneath Ceaseless Skies. I’m really pleased by this one; I quite like that story, and am glad to see it find such a pretty home.
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This month’s post at SF Novelists is about characterization — specifically, how being an introvert affects the way I write characters, and therefore the way people read them. (i.e not everybody will interpret the tightening of a character’s fingers on her wine-cup as a sign of growing anger.)
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More reviews of MNC lately, but most of them are saved to my desktop, which is on a truck right now. Several negative ones, though. There may be a faint logic to seeing the negative reviews now; people who read and liked my previous work probably make up a greater percentage of those buying the new book right when it comes out, and those readers are more likely to give it a thumbs-up. Strangers to my work may come across it later, and with them it’s a toss-up as to whether they’ll like it or not.
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I have all kinds of other writing-related program activities I want to do, but the truth is, AAL is consuming pretty much all of my spare processing cycles. So until that’s done, it’ll be pretty quiet on other fronts.
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!
This just in: the Science Fiction Book Club has picked up Midnight Never Come as a “Main Selection” for June! (Er, I assume that’s June of this year. But checking the e-mail, it actually says “a June catelog,” so who knows — maybe it’s June 3185.)
A peek behind the business curtain: the money from this gets funneled through my publisher (since they’re the ones who licensed that sub-right). Which means I’m suddenly a leap closer to earning out the advance for MNC . . . and the book isn’t even out yet! My pie-in-the-sky dream is to earn out by the end of the first royalty accounting period, but since it hits the shelves June 9th and the period ends June 30th, that pie is pretty far up there. This sale just brought it down by a couple thousand feet. I may just make it after all . . . .
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.
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 . . . .
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.
I just sold a story to Orson Scott Card’s online magazine Intergalactic Medicine Show.
Squeak!
A while back, I wrote a 2000-word second-person present-tense story about filling out an
application form. Having done so, I stared at it and wondered where the hell I would ever
sell it.
The answer, it turns out, is Electric
Velocipede, a quirky and well-respected magazine edited by John Klima. Glancing at
their fiction, I can see a story by Scott William Carter that’s in the second person and
present tense, so maybe it’s not much of a surprise, eh? I’m very happy to see it placed so
well — oh, let’s admit it; I’m happy to see it placed at all. It’s a weird enough story that
I had very few ideas about where to send it that wouldn’t just be a random shot in the
dark.
I will, as always, give people a heads-up when it actually goes into print.
Woke up to the delightful news that Luebbe, a German publisher, has made an offer for both
Doppelganger and Warrior and Witch. I’ve always been tickled by the idea of a
German translation of Doppelganger — all they have to do is slap an umlaut back on the
title and it’s good to go! (The title is, anyway. The rest of the book would need some
actual translation.)
This also highlights two interesting facts about the Life of the Writer. First, foreign
sales are your friends, because then people give you more money without you having to write
more books. It isn’t much, but by such things do writers make their livings. Second, this is
why one acquires an agent. Every so often you get new writers kvetching over the way agents
take a cut off the money their clients earn, but they absolutely deserve it; I wouldn’t have
the first clue how to start marketing translation rights to my novels. (Let alone all the
other useful things an agent does.)
So, life is pretty good.
Now back to work, I suppose.
As a writer, of course, I love all my children equally, but I love some more equally than
others. One of the special ones found a home this morning: “Nine Sketches in Charcoal and
Blood,” the story that ambushed me out of nowhere a little less than two years ago, wrote half
of itself in no time at all, spent months not writing the other half of itself (and not
letting me do it, either), grew an ending, went out into the world, went to the Canadian
magazine On Spec back in March, and sold to them just now. I’m very pleased by this,
as I like it a great deal. (Which is not to say I don’t love my other children, too. The
ones I don’t love get buried in the backyard and never seen again.) It’ll be out some
time in 2007.
‘Twas on a Tuesday last month that Talebones bought “But Who Shall Lead the Dance?” from me, and behold: ’tis on another Tuesday, four weeks later, that Aberrant Dreams (who just published “Such as Dreams Are Made Of”) writes to me saying they’d like to buy “A Thousand Souls.” And both are me making a repeat sale to a market, which I take as an indicator of success.
I’m glad that story has found a home. I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for it.
