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Posts Tagged ‘short stories’

Best of Talebones semi-TOC

I’m calling this a semi-TOC because unless Patrick intends to organize the stories alphabetically by their authors’ last names, this is not the order the anthology will have in the end. But if you’re curious to know what’s going in the Best of Talebones collection, here’s the list:

Barth Anderson, “Landlocked”
Jennifer Rachel Baumer, “The Forever Sleep”
Marie Brennan, “The Twa Corbies”
Mike Brotherton, “Jack in the Box”
Jack Cady, “The Parable of Satan’s Adversary”
Stephen Couch, “The Dandelion Clock”
Aliette de Bodard, “Safe, Child, Safe”
Eric Del Carlo, “Nothing But Fear”
Alan DeNiro, “Comachrome”
Charles Coleman Finlay, “Hail Conductor”
James C. Glass, “Robbie”
Anne Harris, “Still Life with Boobs”
Barb Hendee , “The Winds of Brennan Marcher”
Nina Kiriki Hoffman, “Snow on Snow”
Kay Kenyon, “The Acid Test”
Mary Robinette Kowal, “Death Comes But Twice”
Jay Lake, “Tall Spirits, Blocking the Night”
Catherine Macleod, “Seepage”
Nick Mamatas, “Your Life, Fifteen Minutes from Now”
Louise Marley, “Night Shift”
Sandra McDonald, “Bluebeard by the Sea”
Terry McGarry, “God of Exile”
Paul Melko, “Ten Sigmas”
William Mingin, “From Sunset to the White Sea”
Devon Monk, ” Sugar ‘n’ Spice”
William F. Nolan, “Wolf Song”
Patrick O’Leary, ” 23 Skidoo”
Tom Piccirilli, “Caucasus”
John A. Pitts, “Three Chords and the Truth”
Sarah Prineas, “The Dog Prince”
Ken Rand, “Song of Mother Jungle”
Mark Rich, “Zothique Mi Amor”
Uncle River, “Love of the True God”
Patricia Russo, “Swoop”
James Sallis, “Roofs and Forgiveness in the Early Dawn”
Ken Scholes, “Edward Bear and the Very Long Walk”
Jack Skillingstead, “Two”
Bruce Taylor, “Spiders”
Steve Rasnic Tem, “Cats, Dogs, and Other Creatures”
James Van Pelt, “The Yard God”
Carrie Vaughn, “The Girl with the Pre-Raphaelite Hair”
Ray Vukcevich, “The Next Best Thing”

I’m very flattered to be in the company of some of those authors. Congrats to all, and especially to Patrick Swenson, who is making this happen!

miscellaneous bits of news

Proof I have gotten way too pale: I managed to pick up a bit of a tan in freaking London.

Anyway, onto actual news, of the writing-related sort. Various bits and pieces accumulated while I was gone, so in no particular order . . .

1) I’ve sold an audio reprint of “Kingspeaker” to Podcastle.

2) Go here for another chance to win an ARC of A Star Shall Fall (scroll down for details). Author Stephanie Burgis is, with permission, re-gifting the copy I sent her.

3) Clockwork Phoenix 3 has gotten a starred review from Publishers Weekly, with this to say about my own contribution: “Marie Brennan sets the bar high with ‘The Gospel of Nachash,’ a fine reinterpretation of the Adam and Eve legend from a fresh perspective.” Also, finalized cover art.

4) An interesting post about “Remembering Light” and Driftwood more generally. I remain faintly boggled by how strongly people react to the setting — boggled, and flattered. I really do need to get more Driftwood stories written.

5) My remaining bit of news will get its own post in a bit, so instead I’ll use this spot to mention that I’m still seeking a title for the Victorian book. For those not aware or in need of a refresher, my requirements are here and here; you can leave suggestions on one of those posts, in the comments to this post, or send them to my e-mail (marie dot brennan at gmail dot com).

Best of Talebones

For those who enjoyed my story “The Twa Corbies” (audio here), you’ll be pleased to know it’s going to be included in Patrick Swenson’s upcoming Best of Talebones anthology. I’ll announce the full ToC when he sends it out; given the great fiction the magazine published in its fourteen-year run, I expect there will be a lot of awesome names included.

Something I appear to have missed

I had it firmly fixed in my head that Running With the Pack was coming out in May. Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered it’s been on sale since some time in April.

So if you were interested in reading “Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics as Employed Against Lycanthropes” (the Fake Werewolf Paper), or generally like stories about werewolves, you’re in luck! The anthology is out. I’ve linked to Powell’s, but it’s available from other fine bookselling establishments, at least of the online sort; I don’t know for sure about physical bookstores. Anyway, enjoy!

Three!

Fans of Driftwood, rejoice: I finally got around to writing and revising and submitting a third story, which are usually the prerequisite steps to selling anything. Which is to say, Beneath Ceaseless Skies has bought “Remembering Light.”

That’s three, which means Driftwood officially gets its own category in my site organization. I hope to have quite a few more than that in the long run, though.

BCS anthology

One of the victims of me falling behind on e-mail has been this announcement: Scott Andrews, editor of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, has released an anthology of the magazine!

The Best of BCS, Year One features such authors as Marie Brennan, Richard Parks, and 2009 Campbell Award finalists Tony Pi and Aliette de Bodard. It includes “Thieves of Silence” by Holly Phillips, named to Locus’s 2009 Recommended Reading List, and “Father’s Kill” by Christopher Green, winner of the Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Short Story of 2009.

(My contribution is “Driftwood,” for those who are fans.)

If you’ve been meaning to sample the magazine, this is a good way to do it: a $2.99 ebook available in five different formats. Proceeds get funneled back into keeping the magazine going — and since BCS is that semi-rarity, a magazine that pays its authors more than a token amount, I’m all in favor of that! Table of contents and other details here.

Okay, I’ve got one.

I found something new to post, that didn’t require much jinking to make it web-ready: “But Who Shall Lead the Dance?”

This originally came out in Talebones, whose fourteen-year run came to an end last fall, much to my sadness. Patrick Swenson published three of my stories in total: this, “The Twa Corbies,” and “The Snow-White Heart,” which was in their final issue. (You can still buy back issues here.)

. . . you know, posting this has reminded me of something I forgot. Namely, that this story tried to turn into a ballad as I was writing it. You can see that in the style — this was the first real stylistic experiment I ever tried writing — the rhythm of the “But who shall lead the dance?” suggested the end of a ballad stanza to me, and everything else followed from there.

Maybe I’ll revisit that, and actually try to write it as lyrics, just for fun. No doubt I’ll fall on my nose; poetry and related forms are not something I’m good at. But hey, it’ll be good exercise. And the silly thing’s halfway there already.

GOT YOU.

Okay, fine, I was totally wrong about the remaining wordcount; you’re 7,410 words and obviously want to be a novelette since I know I rushed the ending. FINE. You can be a novelette.

You can be a novelette later, once I’ve mustered the will to revise you. But for now, “Mad Maudlin,” you are DONE. And that’s all I care about.

I go fall down now.

so. close.

Gaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh I am thisclose to being able to finish “Mad Maudlin” (no, I didn’t get it done last month) and the end of it is driving me batty. (Which is a funny joke, given the subject matter.) I just need to figure out what message Maud gives Peter, and then how to make the next bit happen in a dramatic way, and somewhere work in Peter doing that thing he shouldn’t do (moreso than he’s done already), and then it’ll be the tag scene and I’m done. We’re at 5,698 words, and there can’t be more than a thousand left, and WHY IS THIS STORY NOT DONE ALREADY.

Because I haven’t threaded my way through the last few twists yet, that’s why. Come on, brain, help me out on this one, and then we can sack out and watch Dexter. But until you do, we’re not going anywhere other than this chair, except maybe the bed to roll around and stare at the ceiling and try to figure things out. Work with me, here. We’re almost done.

Updated with revelation: Duh. You promised yourself this was a hack draft. This is you getting the framework down on the page, so you can go back and have experts help you make it better. So all that crap you’re worrying about is stuff you can fiddle with later. You’ll run it by three or four people to get the research stuff right, and then once you have that you can apply writer-brain and make it more exciting, and then you can have your crit group look at it and tell you where it still needs improvement. Obsessing over the finer points now may even prove to be a waste of time, as your clever ideas might get cut on account of being Wrong.

So just write the end, and let it suck, and worry about it later.

new pleasures in reading

I’ve said before that I’ve never been a regular subscriber to any magazines — “regular” in the sense of keeping up my subscription for more than a year. (I might have done for Paradox, but they folded.) That’s changed a bit lately, though. First via podcasting: a good deal of my short fiction consumption now comes in via my ears, as I listen to Podcastle (for fantasy) and Escape Pod (for SF), and I strongly suspect the addition of a narrator’s voice has led me to enjoy stories I might have skipped past on the page. Second, as I’ve mentioned before, Beneath Ceaseless Skies has turned out sit squarely in the middle of What I Like when it comes to fantasy, with the result that I’ve become a regular reader.

As a result, I’m discovering heretofore unknown pleasures, that come when you’re a dedicated follower of a particular magazine. It’s like the reverse of Cheers: rather than everybody knowing my name, I know theirs. Certain authors, whose work sits squarely in the middle of What The Editors Like, keep showing up, and so BCS becomes (among other things) “the place that brings me Aliette de Bodard’s stuff.” Since I very much like her work, I bounce a bit in glee when I see a new piece show up there. Sometimes it goes even further, not just an author but an author’s series: Escape Pod has Jeffrey R. DeRego’s Union Dues superhero stories, and BCS has so far published two of Richard Parks’ Heian-period Japanese fantasies, featuring the duo of Yamada and Kenji, the reprobate priest, with a third one on the way. Carried too far, this sort of thing can make a magazine stale — you get the feeling they only ever publish the same dozen people, over and over, and the assurance of a sale makes those dozen lazy in their work — but so far it’s been a source of familiarity and satisfaction for me.

Since I started this by talking about subscriptions, I should mention that both the podcasts and BCS are supported via donations; if you want to toss a few bucks their way, to help ensure they keep putting these stories out, the relevant places to do so are: Podcastle (right-hand sidebar), Escape Pod (ditto), and BCS. (I noted when catching up on stories this weekend that BCS has also added itself to the Kindle Store, in addition to the pdf, mobi, and epub formats of before, if you’re an e-reader type.)

Let’s close with a question: for those of you who are dedicated subscribers to one or more short story sources (print, web, or audio), are there particular authors or story series that are, for you, part of the appeal of that magazine? Conversely, are there any who show up a lot that you skip over automatically, because you know from past experience that they just aren’t your kind of thing?

sort of needed, sort of . . . NOT

“I want to make a map of Driftwood.”

Making Last cough up his wine wasn’t the only reason Tolyat said it, but he had to admit that was part of the appeal.

On the one hand, more Driftwood stories = good, since the most common response to either “Driftwood” or “A Heretic by Degrees” is “You should write more in this setting!” (I’m working on it.)

Also, this appears to be that desperately-needed creature, a lighthearted Driftwood story. Given the inherently nihilistic nature of the setting, if I’m ever going to do a collection (which I would, I confess, like to do someday), then it would be good to leaven it with stories like this, where Last has an actual friend and they do something that’s just fun.

On the other hand . . . I did not need to start a new story right now. Seriously, Brain, we’re trying to clear things OFF the slate here, not add to them!

But this, uh, may be what I’m doing today. Depending on how much the brain decides to cough up. It would be just like it to hand me an opening and then quit, but maybe we can prod it into actually being useful . . . .

Not sure how long I can keep this up . . . .

. . . but it’s good while it lasts. I’ve spent a couple of weeks now bouncing between more narrative projects than I would have thought possible: the Victorian book, a Sekrit Projekt I can’t talk about, “Mad Maudlin” (not done; so close), the revision of “Remembering Light,” and my Scion game. It’s been a pleasant surprise, how much I’ve been able to gear-shift from one to another, but I feel like I’m nearing my limit: the brain can only be flexible for so long. Fortunately, the Sekrit Projekt thing pretty much just needs one more push from me, so if I can knock that and “Remembering Light” off the list I might have enough brainpower for “Mad Maudlin,” and then I’ll be down to two, the Victorian book and the Scion game.

Which is good, because both need a little more attention than I’ve been able to give them. I do want to get moving on another short story once “Mad Maudlin” is done, but I think it’s going to be a new draft of “On the Feast of the Firewife,” which will take less brainpower than a full-blown new story. I’ve figure out what I want to do with it; now it just wants doing.

GOOD morning!

One of the downsides to not writing short stories for a while was that I had nothing to sell to Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Well, now I’ve fixed that: about three minutes after I woke up this morning, I got an e-mail saying they’re buying “And Blow Them at the Moon,” my Onyx Court Gunpowder Plot story.

Which is also, I should mention, a novelette. In the space of the last couple of weeks, I’ve sold both of the novelettes I’ve ever written — not counting that thing I did back in fifth grade, which might be of roughly that length but will never see the light of day. Since there are a lot fewer potential homes for stories nine thousand words long, I’m very pleased to see both of them happily settled. Especially since Onyx Court stories, with their historical context, are probably never going to run short. 🙂

The only downside is that my list of stories in submission keeps shrinking. For all the right reasons, mind you — but it’s something to try and fix anyway. 🙂 (Ironically, I’m pretty sure the “revision of short story” mentioned at the end of that post refers to this story, which sold on its first trip out the door.)

a few fictive things

First, I’ve been given the go-ahead to announce the sale of my novelette “La Molejera” to Paraspheres 2. Yay!

Second, I neglected to mention the other week that Newton Compton will be publishing Warror and Witch in Italian. Also yay!

Third, and unrelated to my own writing, Janni Lee Simner is running a really cool contest for her upcoming book Thief Eyes, based on the Icelandic Njal’s Saga. I thought it was nifty enough to demand a signal boost. 🙂 Janni read part of this at World Fantasy, and it sounds like it will be a great book.

Running with the Pack ARC giveaway

Like werewolves? Want an anthology full of ’em? Over at calico_reaction‘s LJ, Ekaterina Sedia, editor of the upcoming Running with the Pack (table of contents here) is giving away an advance copy. This is, for those who are interested, the home of my Fake Werewolf Paper, aka “Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics as Employed Against Lycanthropes;” the rest of the contributors include some of the biggest names in the field of People What Grow Fur Under the Full Moon, Comma, Fiction Concerning. Should be a great antho, and this is your chance to snag a copy before anyone else.

I have three days left

Goal for today: finish “Mad Maudlin.”

In order to do this, I have to remind myself that this is a hack draft. Not the same thing as a bad draft, which is what I have of “Chrysalis”; the problem here is not suckage. It’s that the story needs to be run past several layers of expert consultants, who can tell me how to make the technical aspects go, and only when that’s done will I be able to address the matter of story craft. In theory it would be more efficient to get expert advice first, then write the story, but in practice that hasn’t worked; first I have to nail down my ideas in a form other people can understand. Otherwise my questions are all too vague and hypothetical, which makes getting useful answers hard. So I’m hacking out the general shape of the story, and once I have that I can get my experts to tell me where I’ve gotten their respective fields wrong. Their answers may well change the path the story takes to its destination, but by then I’ll have a firmer handle on what that destination is.

That’s the theory, anyway, and it’s gotten me farther through the draft than my original approach did. And if this works, there’s hope yet for Catherine’s unwritten story. It would be nice to get a few of these things off my list of unfinished ideas.

Department of Things I Didn’t Need

Dear Brain,

I recognize that you’re trying to be helpful and all, and I appreciate it. But it would be lovely if you could offer help with “Mad Maudlin” (which I’m trying to finish) or the Victorian book (which I’m about to start) or That Thing We Can’t Talk About (which I need to do), rather than the opening line for a sequel to a short story I haven’t sold yet.

Just saying.

Having said that, it is a pretty fun opening line.

Dear Cayce,

I know you’re tired of receiving Well-Intentioned Parental Advice, but there are a few things every young woman should know before she goes to Hell.

Back to the things we should be doing . . . .

Love,
Your Writer