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Posts Tagged ‘short stories’

things I have a profound disagreement with

But before I get to the disagreeing: I’ve been so brain-deep in finishing A Star Shall Fall, I overlooked the fact that Podcastle’s audio of “A Heretic by Degrees” has gone live. So go, listen, enjoy.

***

Right, so, the disagreeing.

I find it interesting that Dean Wesley Smith begins this post with the assertion that “No writer is the same” — and then proceeds to make his point (on the topic of rewriting) with such vehemence and absolutism that it could easily be mistaken for divine, universal law. Which is a pity, because I think he has a good point to make; but the force behind it drives the point way deeper than I think it deserves to go, and as a result, people who find themselves disagreeing with the full version may miss the value of the reduced version.

I think he’s right that rewriting can hurt a story. It can polish the fire out, like focus-testing a product until it’s bland pablum that doesn’t offend anybody, but doesn’t interest them, either. Sometimes you get it right the first time.

But. He seems to be arguing (with the force of an evangelical preacher) that your critical brain will never be useful to you as a writer. This works because a particular rhetorical trick:

(more…)

more on free fiction

Reminder: you have until September 1st to toss your name into the hat to win a free magazine.

Since this has come up in e-mail, let me add that I’ll do what I can to match winners with appropriate magazines. If you already own one of those issues and have no need of a second copy, or there’s a story you reallyreallyreally want to read, let me know, and I’ll try to accommodate that as much as is feasible.

(Also — though no one has asked this directly — the thing you post doesn’t have to be gushing fansquee. You’re perfectly welcome to argue with my writing, too.)

Back to the salt mines I go.

Free fiction! Mine and other people’s.

One thing you get from being published in print magazines, that you don’t get from the online ones: author copies.

Sometimes, more than you need.

I’ve got a stack here of random magazine issues, each one of them with a story of mine in it, above and beyond the copies I’m keeping for posterity. I’d like to get rid of them, to good homes — but how to arrange that? With a contest, of course!

It consists of three easy steps:

1) Blog in some fashion about the Onyx Court series. It can cover any piece of the series: Midnight Never Come, In Ashes Lie, Deeds of Men, one of the upcoming books. Your post can be anything you want: a review, historical nitpicking, speculation about what’s coming, fanfiction/fanart, pictures of your cat dressed in a homemade Invidiana costume — whatever.

2) E-mail me a link to your blog post. Send it to marie {dot} brennan {at} gmail {dot} com.

3) Profit! Or at least be entered for a chance to do so.

The items up for grabs are as follows:

That’s eleven potential winners, all told. You’ve got until September 1st to post something and notify me of it — which is plenty of time to sew that costume for your cat, so get cracking!

poll time! but not here.

Over on FFF, I’m polling people about side stories — pieces of short fiction an author writes that are connected to a novel series. (Like, say, Deeds of Men.) If you’ve got any experience with those, as a writer or a reader, go over and vote.

And feel free to spread this elsewhere, if your LJ readership is interested in this kind of thing. The more data, the merrier!

point to Gardner Dozois

In the most recent issue of Locus (requiescas in pace, Charles Brown), Gardner Dozois reviewed Clockwork Phoenix 2 and had this to say about me:

[. . .] Marie Brennan’s “Once a Goddess” (sort of a fantasy version of Ian McDonald’s “The Little Goddess”) is also good [. . .]

Which I bring up because that made me go poking around online, which led me to discover that the aforementioned story is available full-text online. So of course I read it, and it turns out that Dozois is precisely right, perhaps even more than he realized; McDonald’s story is based on the same Nepalese religious tradition, the Kumari Devi, that inspired my own piece.

McDonald plays it closer to home: “A Little Goddess” takes place in near-future Nepal and India, whereas I ran off to a secondary world and an invented tradition only modeled on Kumari. Also, since he’s writing science fiction and I’m writing fantasy, we (unsurprisingly) have fundamentally different approaches to the divinity of the goddess’ avatar. But it was interesting for me to see the places where we intersect, the shared issues of life after divinity — blessings, marriage, and so on. And without giving spoilers, I’ll say that McDonald’s ending is the one I originally intended for “Once a Goddess,” before realizing that just wasn’t the kind of story mine wanted to be.

I definitely recommend his story. It was published June 2005 in Asimov’s, and nominated for a Hugo (in the novella category — it’s also a lot longer than mine). Follow that link above to read it on the magazine’s website, and if you’ve read my story, I’d be curious to know how you think the two compare.

minor neatness

The small neatness is that “A Mask of Flesh has apparently earned an Honorable Mention in the twenty-sixth Year’s Best Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois. (I had no idea he also recced fantasy; that story is definitely not science-y in its speculation.)

The much bigger neatness is that I’m one of NINE Clockwork Phoenix authors so honored — which, for an anthology with eighteen stories in it, is a damned impressive success rate. Congrats not only to my fellow authors, but most especially to Mike, for putting together such a great volume!

(Now might be a good time to mention that you can buy the second volume in the series . . . or the first, if you haven’t already. I’ve got stories in both.)

One door closes; another one opens.

Sadly, it appears that Talebones is closing. When I sold them “The Snow-White Heart,” I hoped that meant the magazine would continue on, but Patrick Swenson has decided to call an end, after thirty-nine issues. I hope the plan to perpetuate it as anthologies works out, though; I’ve enjoyed my dealings with Patrick, and the anthology market appears to be reviving after years in a moribund state, so that may actually be a viable course of action.

Let me segue from that bad news to some good news that arrived while I was on the road, hence not posting it until now. You may recognize the name of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, the biweekly online magazine that has brought you (among other things) my stories “Kingspeaker” and “Driftwood.” I’ve discussed them magazine before; they’re publishing good, strong narrative fantasy that happens to cover a broader range than usual of settings. In the nine months they’ve been running, I’ve seen Middle Eastern settings, African ones, Asian, Mesoamerican, frontier Western . . . Scott Andrews, the editor, has a real commitment to exactly the kind of experimentation I like.

I bring them up because Scott has recently completed arrangements for BCS to qualify as a non-profit, and that means he’s started seeking donations. (I don’t know for sure, but I think he was funding it out-of-pocket before.) He’s paying pro rates for a nice diversity of stories, both in print and podcast forms, and As You Know, Bob, the number of magazines doing that nowadays is shrinking steadily. I don’t know about you, but I want to see this one survive. It’s the only magazine I’ve ever encountered where I read every story (though not all of them work out for me), where I will in fact make the effort to go back and read issues I’ve missed, if I was busy or traveling when the new one(s) went live.

I can’t give it a stronger recommendation than that — without pretending it provides you with a free flying unicorn that shoots lasers and is a ninja whenever you read a story.

How much you donate, and on what schedule is up to you. You can give a lump sum now, or chip in fifty cents every time you read (or listen to) a story you like. Whatever. But check it out, and if you like what they’re doing, give a thought to supporting them. This isn’t charity; it’s a business model, and I hope it succeeds.

And that’s that

The last Deeds of Men winner has been chosen. Thanks to everyone who signed up for the newsletter — I’ll make it as interesting and news-ful as I can.

Don’t forget that you can still post comments or questions on the discussion thread (same goes for Midnight and Ashes, of course). And I do hope to have more Onyx Court short fiction for you guys in the future — not while I’m plugging away on this novel, probably, but maybe after it’s done I’ll get “And Blow Them at the Moon” or “Bow Street Runner” written.

But first, novel.

Deeds of Men giveaway

The plan is to give away one signed set of both Midnight Never Come and (in advance of publication) In Ashes Lie each week between now and the book release, and the first winner has been drawn. If you’ve already signed up, you’re still in the running; if you haven’t, head on over to the page for Deeds of Men and provide your e-mail address, and you too could get an early copy.

Open Book Thread: Deeds of Men

If you have any questions or comments about Deeds of Men, this is the place for them. No LJ account required to post.

It is obviously a Spoiler-Rich Zone for the novella, but may (depending on what people have to say) contain spoilers for Midnight Never Come as well.

IAL teaser: Deeds of Men

London, 1625. A young man lies dead in a Coldharbour alley. Before his death, he uncovered secrets that could threaten the mortal world above and the faerie world below. Now, to find the murderer and protect both realms, Sir Michael Deven will need the help of a man with reason to hate the fae of the Onyx Court — the victim’s own brother.

*** *** ***

In between the novels, there are other stories.

Deeds of Men is a free Onyx Court novella, taking place between Midnight Never Come and In Ashes Lie. You can download it from my website in your choice of formats (HTML, PDF, or ePub), or order a bound copy via AnthologyBuilder.

This is what I spent February working on, what I was researching Buckingham for, what I needed copy-edited in British style. You don’t need to have read either novel first (though it does contain some spoilers for Midnight), and you don’t need to read it to enjoy Ashes, but it covers some of the events between the two books, like a DVD extra. I hope to do more Onyx Court stories in the future, too: there’s lots of fun bits of history that fall outside the scope of my novels, and lots of chances to explore side characters.

(Confidential to matociquala — it has dead Spaniard in it just for you.)

In a little while I’ll post a Spoiler Zone thread for people to discuss the story or ask questions. In the meantime, enjoy!

FYI

The free stories I posted for International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day are now all available on AnthologyBuilder. In fact, there’s enough of my fiction up there now that you theoretically could put together your very own collection of Marie Brennan stories, since the minimum for an antho purchase is 50 pages of material. But I recommend finding a couple of other authors you like and making a bigger book, since $14.95 is kind of a lot to pay for nine stories, several of which are flash.

I really like the idea of AnthologyBuilder, and I hope it succeeds. This strikes me as the ideal approach to making an author’s short fiction backlist available, without depending on bookstore support for a collection.

gngggh

There’s something exhausting about the type of revision that involves radically expanding your first draft. It’s like being on a treadmill: you run and run and don’t get anywhere. I’m four thousand words into a story that was four thousand words long, and I still have two thousand to go.

It’s a lot better now, mind you, and I’m enjoying parts of the process. But tiring. And I’m on a deadline, too, because I want to submit this to a place that’s about to close its reading period. Gngggh.

audio time!

If you have more time for listening to stories than reading them — or if you just want to know how all those random names in “Driftwood” are pronounced* — you can now download the podcast. I haven’t had a chance to listen to it myself yet, but I was fairly pleased with “Kingspeaker,” so I expect this one turned out equally well.

*You should see the e-mails between me and the editor on this topic. I answered several of his queries with “uh, good luck?” There’s a downside to making up foreign words that maybe aren’t even supposed to be pronounceable by human tongues.

A mixed wiktory

“Remembering Light”

Man, I finish this thing before game, only to find out game’s been canceled. Curse you, zunger! <shakes fist>

Oh well. Thanks to that deadline, I managed to get a fourth story completed before the end of April (if only just barely). It’s a flailing mess in places, because I kept changing my mind on certain details, like how Noirin’s world is falling apart and what exactly Last was trying to get out of all of this, but that is, as we say, what revision’s for.

I now have four Driftwood stories, of which two have been published; the other is a little flash piece that doesn’t mean much unless you’re already familiar with Driftwood, hence not something I’m every going to try to sell. But that’s enough for me to legitimately feel like this constitutes a set — especially once I find the time to revise this thing and get it on the market.

But right now, we’re going to go put something on the Magic Picture Box and drool on ourselves for a while. Because cramming three thousand words of this thing out of my head and onto the screen in a couple of hours has left me more than a little brain-dead.