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Posts Tagged ‘short stories’

Updates: Kickstarter, tour, sale, SF Novelists, WisCon

Five updates make a post . . . .

1) The Chains and Memory Kickstarter is a bit over halfway to the first stretch goal. The pace of progress has (unsurprisingly) slowed down; I welcome any signal boosting, and/or suggestions for other things I could do to spread the word.

2) While Mary and I were on tour earlier this month, Tor sent a camera crew to film our Portland event and interview us afterward. It was a fascinating experience; this wasn’t the “sit and have a conversation in front of the camera” kind of thing, but rather raw material for the following video:

If you’d like a sense of what our events were like, check it out!

3) Driftwood fans take note: I’ve sold the audio rights for “The Ascent of Unreason” to Podcastle.

4) My SF Novelists post for this month was “Pleaser Don’t Doed Thising”, in which I take aim at Bad Fantasy Latin, Bad Fantasy Japanese, and other such linguistic sins.

5) WisCon! I went. It was a thing.

Sorry, that’s just the tiredness talking. Going to WisCon was a good idea; going right after being on tour, less so. I feel like I didn’t take full advantage of the experience, partly because I was going easy on myself, partly because I’m new to the con’s culture and therefore didn’t know in advance about things like the Floomp. It was fun, though: lots of interesting people, some good panels (and some I really wish had dug further into their topics), some &@#$! awesome GoH speeches, etc. The good news is, now I know what to expect and can get more out of it in future years. Will I be back in 2015? Dunno; I’ll have to look at my schedule. But I do intend to be back eventually.

Goal! . . . and stretch goals!

(You have no idea how tempted I was to title this “Ni Presentas . . . Goal!” You have no idea mostly because I’m not sure whether anybody reading this blog even knows why the heck I would be tempted to say that in the first place.)

So, that Kickstarter I’m running? It made goal this morning. I woke up way earlier than I wanted to, because I had to drag myself to the airport for my Wiscon flight, and lo and behold: I found myself funded. In fact, we’re at $2060 right now.

Which is, in a word, refrackulawesome.

And if you’re familiar with Kickstarter, you know what that means: stretch goals! I have 25 days to go before this thing ends, so I might as well see how far we can go. If we hit $2500, I will share with all backers “The Music of Lies and Prophecy” — the track listing for the novel, with links to the songs (where possible) and notes on how and why I chose them. (I would share the soundtrack itself, but, um, copyright violations up the wazoo.) And if we hit $3000, I’ll write a short story in the setting!

If we go beyond that . . . well, you’ll just have to wait and see. πŸ™‚

So if those sound tempting, you can mosey on over and back the project yourself. Or if you’ve already done that, spread the word to some friends! The more, the merrier.

Various posts in alternate locations

“Keep Calm and Carry On” — my SF Novelists post for the month; a brief reflection on some of the recent trouble regarding gender and such.

Interview at SF Signal — in which they ask me about a variety of things, including photography.

“What Happens When Fantasy Novels Get Scientific?” — Me at io9, talking about the impulse to treat dragons scientifically.

Finally, not something you can read just yet, but: I’ve sold another story to Tor.com! “Daughter of Necessity,” which I read at FogCon after revising it half an hour before the reading. πŸ˜› It will be out some time in the fall, most likely.

Five Things Make a Post That Is Not About Supernatural

1) The funny thing about having a release date early in the month is that it sneaks up on you. After all, we’re still in February. That means The Tropic of Serpents won’t be out for a while yet, right? Wrong — it’s out next Tuesday, i.e. March 4th. (For those of you in the U.S. and Canada, at least. UK folks, your street date is the 20th of June. After that, Tor and Titan should be publishing more or less simultaneously, so you won’t have the added wait.)

Kirkus, by the way, not only gave Tropic a starred review; they listed it as one of their Best Bets for March. They even used the cover art as the top image for the post, which is yet another sign that Todd Lockwood and Irene Gallo are awesome.

2) If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area, you’ll have a chance to hear me read from The Tropic of Serpents at 7 p.m. on Sunday, March 9th, at Borderlands Books. It’s my intent to also publicly announce the title for the third book there, as an added treat for my hometown peeps. πŸ˜‰

3) Also for Bay Area types, I’m going to be at FOGcon weekend after next. I unfortunately had to back out of one of my panels because of a karate belt test on Friday night, but I’ll still be doing several things that weekend:

  • Friday, 3-4:15 p.m. Narnia, Hogwarts, and Oz, Oh My!
    What are our favorite secret worlds? What do we love about them? Why is a secret world so useful for storytelling? What can we learn from the ways used to access these places? What about worlds which exclude some people from accessing them, such as adults or non-magical people–are these worlds problematic or necessary? Or somewhere between the two?
    M: Tim Susman. Marie Brennan, Valerie Estelle Frankel, Naamen Gobert Tilahun
  • Saturday, 10:30-11:45 Secret History and Alternate History; their similarities, differences, and how to write them
    Tim Powers, in books like Declare and The Drawing of the Dark, has brought us into the realm of secret history — the events that really took place around known historical facts. Harry Turtledove, Philip K. Dick, and many others have brought us into the realm of alternate history — the what-if-things-had-been-different. (Indeed, one could argue that Mary Gentle’s Ash is secret alternate history!) What about these works fascinates us, and how do we put them together?
    M: Bradford Lyau. Marie Brennan, Tim Powers, Tim Susman
  • Saturday, 4:30-5:45 Reading
    Marie Brennan, Alyc Helms, Michael R. Underwood

4) In non-Tropic-related news, I participated in the Book of Apex blog tour over at Books Without Any Pictures. There’s a review of my story “Waiting for Beauty,” a brief interview, and a guest post wherein I talk about how writing historical fiction helped me become better at worldbuilding in general.

5) And Now For Something Completely Different: I really love both of these art sets, one of Disney princess in historically accurate costumes (the last image is the best!), and one of celebrities cosplaying as Disney characters.

Mad Maudlin goes on dirty toes / For to save her shoes from gravel

“Mad Maudlin” is live on Tor.com! And the artwork for it is as beautiful as it was the first time I saw it. πŸ™‚

You know what else is live? This audio excerpt from The Tropic of Serpents. There is also a sweepstakes, if you want to win a copy of the book.

Also live: a Con or Bust auction with a pair of ARCs up for grabs. It’s your chance to get signed copies of both A Natural History of Dragons and The Tropic of Serpents, while benefiting a good cause!

Not live yet: the Kirkus review. I think that goes up tomorrow.

Live and ongoing: Letters from Lady Trent. Write! Receive! Don’t make me walk aaaaaaaaall the way to the post office for nothing! (It’s a whole ten minutes away. I could die of exhaustion, y’all. But finding letters gives me the strength to soldier on.)

catching up on the (fiction-related) news

It’s taken me about a week to regenerate much brain, with most of what I could spare going to working on the next of the Memoirs. But I have some now, and so you get a news batch!

First of all, A Natural History of Dragons is in the semifinal round for Best Fantasy of 2013 over on Goodreads. I’m not saying you should go vote for it or anything. I’m just, y’know, mentioning.

you should totally go vote for it

Next up, Book View Café has a fun new anthology out: Mad Science Café. This debuted while I was out of the country, so I’m a bit behind the curve in announcing it, but it’s pretty much what the title would lead you to expect, i.e. lots of stories about Science Gone Wrong (Or Very, Very Right). It reprints my story “Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics As Employed Against Lycanthropes,” aka the Werewolf Fake Academic Paper story, so if you missed it when it first came out in Ekaterina Sedia’s Running with the Pack, here’s your chance!

I’m also in another anthology! Apex Magazine has put out The Book of Apex: Volume 4, which collects fifteen issues’ worth of the magazine, including my own “Waiting for Beauty.” That one’s available in print as well as electronic formats.

Speaking of anthologies (no, we’re not done yet), there’s an excerpt from “Centuries of Kings” up at Bookworm Blues. Because I was out of the country when that went up, the Kickstarter linked is over and done with (after successfully raising its target and more). But still, you can get a taster of the story, which will be in Neverland’s Library.

And finally, not about me: Mike Allen ([profile] time_shark), editor, poet, and fiction writer, has a novel out! The Black Fire Concerto, about which people have said many good things. It has a blurb from Tanith Lee! “A prize for the multitude of fans who relish strong Grand Guignol with their sword and sorcery.” Mike is, of course, the fellow who has brought you all four Clockwork Phoenix anthologies, not to mention Mythic Delirium and other such projects. If you dig horror, you should definitely check this out.

. . . did I mention that A Natural History of Dragons is up for a vote? ^_^

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short stories and my brain

My father is the kind of guy who makes charts and graphs of everything that doesn’t run away fast enough. I am not that bad . . . but I, er, may have inherited some of the tendency.

Longtime readers of this journal know that I have lamented repeatedly over the years my failure to write more short stories. I’ve done four this year, and have ambitions for more, which on the one hand feels like a lot and on the other feels like very little at all: even if I make it up to six, that’s not very many, right? Obviously not that many compared to my friends who are Short Story Writers in the more active sense, but also not very many compared to my own efforts in ye olden days.

But I was curious. So I sat down and I graphed how many stories I’ve had published in each year, and how many I’ve written. And then I did some math.

My average short story production, since the year I figured out how to write short stories, has been slightly more than 5.

Okay, that number is skewed. I’ve been less productive lately, after all. On the other hand, I might as well say it’s skewed in the other direction: there were three years (2001, 2002, and 2004) where I wrote way more. Ten stories, nine stories, sixteen stories.

All stories are not created equal. Of those sixteen, six were flash. Two others barely cleared a thousand words. A couple of the actual short stories weren’t good enough to be published; one wasn’t even good enough to submit anywhere. Compare with 2011, where I only wrote three pieces of short fiction, but one was a novelette, one was a novella, and all three of them have been published.

I am not a sixteen-story-a-year writer. 2004 is the true outlier. Unit uantity may have declined since then, but quality has increased. I’d still like to get my rate up, of course; it would be nice if my average were six stories a year. But six would not be me slacking off. Six would be a good, solid rate of production.

***

Which is as good a time as any to say that I’m trying to finish either “A River Flowing Nowhere” or “Fate, Hope, Friendship, Foe,” or (the dark-horse candidate) “The Unquiet Grave.” So what does my brain hand me? Ideas for the untitled ghost-princes story, of course, and also the weird Snow White retelling.

Brains. I tell ya.

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Signal-boosting for various things

SF Signal is giving away two copies of Clockwork Phoenix 4 (which, you may recall, includes my Anglish story “What Still Abides”). Trade paperbacks, and all you have to do is send in an e-mail to enter.

Daily Science Fiction is running a fundraising drive via Kickstarter, to cover a year and a half of publication costs. They’re two-thirds of the way there, with eleven days to go; take a look, both at the project and the site itself, and if you like what you see, give ’em a bit of love.

Laura Anne Gilman has a new book out, Heart of Briar, which is loosely based on “Tam Lin.” And you know how I loves me some “Tam Lin” retellings . . . .

And finally, just for grins, “The Devil Came Up to Boston.”

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Four! It’s a miracle.

Wow. This may be the ugliest first draft I’ve produced in ages . . . but it’s a draft, and a draft is fixable. Much more so than a story that doesn’t actually exist.

No title. It’s the Catherine Rochester story, for the tiny number of people who know who Catherine Rochester was. Though about all it has in common with the original character by that name is, well, the name, plus shapeshifting, undercover work, and the world’s worst identity crisis. (I made it much worse this time around. In fact, that’s the core of what the story is about.)

Four short stories in the last four months. It’s like I’m an actual short story writer again.

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a belated announcement re: Mythic Delirium

I thought I had posted about this before, but apparently it’s on the list of things that have slipped through the cracks of my brain lately.

Mythic Delirium — long known as an excellent magazine of SF/F poetry — is reinventing itself as an online title, publishing both poetry and short stories. Its “zero issue” will contain my story “The Wives of Paris;” I’m looking forward to seeing that one out in the world.

But that’s not the point of this post! No, the point is to tell you all about the Mythic Delirium Kickstarter project, now in its last two days. It has reached its funding goal, and also the first stretch goal, meaning that there will be a print anthology of the first year. If they can make it up to $4K total, there will also be an anthology of the second year. This is all being run by Mike Allen, the same guy bringing you the excellent Clockwork Phoenix anthologies, so you know the result is gonna be good — quite apart from the nifty stuff you get for being a backer.

Head on over and check it out!

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two in one month?

I’m on my way home from North Carolina, but the timing of my ride to the airport meant I had five hours to kill here.

I was almost very lazy. There’s free wifi here, and I was tempted to just watch Doctor Who on my tablet. But the wifi is slow — slow enough that Netflix would play about five seconds of video, then stop to re-buffer. And so I thought, okay, it’s a message from the gods, and they’re saying: stop being so lazy!

Two hours later, I have a finished draft of the Penelope story, which I think was inspired by a passing comment in Diana Wynne Jones’ Reflections. It doesn’t have a title yet, but I wrote the entirety of it during this trip. Combine that with the 5K or so I wrote on “The Rose” during my first two weeks here, plus bits and pieces on some other things, and I’m reasonably pleased with myself: that’s two short stories in one month! I haven’t done that in ages. And during a month where I had very little spare energy or brain, to boot.

Now I think it’s time to find some food. I only have an hour or so layover in Chicago, so assuming I’ll have time to get dinner there strikes me as a very foolish move.

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this is how I spend my Saturday night

I’m still in North Carolina, and extremely busy (teaching six hours a day: not easy!), but today I had only a half day, and what do I do with my time off?

I finish the punk Tam Lin retelling, is what I do. Provisional title is “The Rose,” and it’s 7400 words long, of which 3K+ got written today. It’s entirely possible this thing will be a novelette by the time I’m done revising. But it makes kind of a good companion to “Mad Maudlin,” which is of similar length, and if I’m lucky, maybe I can sell it to the same place. πŸ˜‰

Now I’m wondering if this Penelope idea my brain is noodling around with could possibly get knocked off before I’m done here. That would be nice.

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livin’ la vida monastica

I’m in North Carolina now, for the TIP course I mentioned before. Ahhhh, dorm life: I’m living in a cinderblock box that normally houses two undergrads, and boy, do I pity them. This is not what you would call a spacious room.

It’s funny to watch myself fall back into a mode I’ve lived in before, which I tend to think of as “monk-like.” With so few possessions, I become very organized about putting them all away in their places. (You would think that’s a more necessary trait when you have lots of stuff, and you would be right. But I’m better about it when my life is spartan.) I’ll have a very organized schedule, too, including a much earlier bedtime than is my wont. This is how I lived on digs, and much like how I live when I travel, too. It’s a stripped-down existence, with my attention almost entirely focused on what I’m here to do.

Of course, since what I’m here to do is “teach creative writing,” there’s a certain overlap with my normal life. On the way out here, for no apparent reason, one of the short stories I thought I would never actually write stepped up and spat out nearly four hundred words. “Fate, Hope, Friendship, Foe,” the seedlet that for the last nine years has consisted of a set of signs I saw while driving from Dallas up to Bloomington, and the fact that I had a life-sized statue of Atropos in my backseat at the time. Will it turn into a complete story? Who knows. And I have a new idea, too. I don’t know if preparing to teach creative writing flipped a switch in my brain, or if this is the same switch that’s been flipped since early this year, when I found myself itching to write half a dozen short stories instead of the novel I needed to finish.

Anyway, blogging will likely be scarce around here for a while, as I am going to be very busy. But if there’s any cool news to report, I’ll be sure to let you all know.

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Neverland’s Library

As I mentioned a while ago, my short story “Centuries of Kings” is going to be in the charity anthology Neverland’s Library, whose sales will benefit the literacy charity First Book.

Before it can do that, though, the anthology has to be funded. You can find them over at Indiegogo — note that this is a “flexible funding” campaign, which means all pledges will be honored, even if the project doesn’t make its goal. You can also see updates over there, with shiny things like the cover art (which is really, really lovely). If you scroll down the project page, you can also find a list of the contributing authors — the ones accepted so far, that is, as submissions are still open.

So click around, and if you like what you see, lend them (us) your support. You get good stories and a good cause out of it. πŸ™‚

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various bits of news

1) Sure, I’ll be kind and put the big one first. I’ve sold a story to Tor.com! “Mad Maudlin,” a novelette based on the folksong variously known as “Bedlam Boys” and “Tom o’Bedlam.” It won’t be published until late this year or early next, but I’m extremely pleased nonetheless.

2) One straggler from the ANHoD blog tour: an interview with me at LibraryThing, wherein (among other things) I divulge how [profile] kniedzw and I approached the most important question one must consider upon moving in together: whether to combine libraries or not.

3) Latest post at BVC is on superstitions.

Edited to add:
4) A Natural History of Dragons is #8 on the Locus bestseller list for May. Go, little book, go!

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story!

It took me substantially longer than expected (the last scene was an absolute bear to write), but I just finished “To Rise No More.”

Needs revision, of course, but right now, that doesn’t matter. What matters is that I’ve managed to write a short story! And not even one that was spoken for before I wrote it. The last seven things I wrote sold on their first trip out the door, because they were either solicited by editors or very nearly so, i.e. I knew that if I wrote them, then so-and-so was extremely likely to buy the result. Which isn’t a bad position to be in, of course — but it’s less good when you have to use that as a motivation to actually get the thing done. This one, I wrote because I wanted to.

Hopefully somebody will buy the result. πŸ™‚

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two (three) good causes

The Indiegogo campaign for Neverland’s Library has started up. You may recall me mentioning this before; it’s the anthology to which I sold “Centuries of Kings.”

If you contribute, you’re actually helping two things happen: first, the anthology itself, which includes such authors as Mark Lawrence, William Meikle, R.S. Belcher, Jeffrey J. Mariotte and Marcy Rockwell, Peter Rawlik, Jeff Salyards, Kenny Soward, and Tad Williams. (Plus others — the TOC isn’t entirely filled yet. Submissions remain open until June 20th, and I especially encourage women to submit, as I’d like to see a more balanced final TOC.)

Second, your donation is helping to support the literacy charity First Book, since 50% of the profits from the anthology will be going directly to them. First Book is a good organization, so I’m in favor of a project that both helps them out and produces a cool book.

Also, the Public Domain Review is running a small fundraising campaign, which is almost over; there are six days to go, and they’re 96.39% of the way to their goal as of me posting this entry. It isn’t a Kickstarter/Indiegogo-type thing, with all the reward levels, but if you donate $40 or more you do get a tote bag.

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