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Posts Tagged ‘short stories’

hahaha, you only *thought* my brain was helpful

I’m only one scene away from the end of “To Rise No More” (because I wrote the other remaining one last night, after I posted), so what do I do tonight? Do I settle in and finish that one?

No, of course not. I write two thousand words of the punk Tam Lin story instead.

Seriously, I don’t even know. I just work here, man. Now I have two half-finished short stories instead of one finished one and one barely-started one. Well, one is three-quarters done. Maybe if I go re-read the relevant period in Ada Lovelace’s letters, I can crank out that final bit tonight? It would be nice to be able to put paid to one of these things.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/585417.html. Comment here or there.

I don’t have to work on anything right now, so I’m procrastinating with a meme

Several of my fanfic-writing friends have been doing a meme wherein they post the first lines of their last twenty-one fics. Because I don’t feel like doing anything more mentally taxing right now than faffing around on the computer listening to music, and also because that’s a lie and Anthropologist Brain is having thinky thoughts but doesn’t mind listening to music while faffing around collating stuff, I’m going to do this twice: once with fanfic, and then once with my original short stories. I want to see how they compare.

Fanfic first!

poll results

I’m sort of fascinated by seeing how people have voted in the short story poll. (Which is still open, so if you want to go register your opinion, feel free!) I mean, ultimately I’m going to write whichever one(s) say “oooh oooh write me write me,” but it’s enlightening to see where other people’s interest goes.

Dead last is “A River Flowing Nowhere,” which surprises me because it’s a Driftwood story, and historically those have been something people really want me to write more of. Of course, all I said about it at the time was that it is a Driftwood story, so maybe it would have done better had I said something about the premise?

Next lowest is “An Enquiry into the Causes.” I’m tempted to make a new poll saying “Do you know what the Bow Street Runners were? Y/N” — because if you don’t know, then, well, there’s not much reason to vote for that one, apart from “it’s an Onyx Court story.”

Then we have a bunch in the middle, and then after that, two runaway favorites: “To Rise No More” and the punk Tam Lin. The former, I imagine, gets votes because a) I have a sizable part of it written already, b) I’ve been talking about it recently, and c) who doesn’t love Ada Lovelace? The latter . . . you all just want to watch the spectacle of me trying to write anything punk, don’t you. 😛

We’ll see what happens. Odds are that “To Rise No More” will be first, because it’s the closest to being done and also the freshest. After that, who knows. My brain keeps trying to say “The Unquiet Grave,” but until I figure out what the hell I’m doing with it (a straight-up narrative treatment of the song lyrics would be boring), it’s kind of hard to make it go anywhere.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/584203.html. Comment here or there.

1560 words

I’ve apparently figured out how to get myself to write short stories again: they just have to be the guilty pleasure I sneak in when I’m almost done with something that’s on a deadline, when I really shouldn’t spare the time and mental energy but dammit I feel like writing something new.

In related news, the Ada Lovelace Onyx Court story now has a title (“To Rise No More”) and 1641 words, all but 81 of which were written tonight.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/583602.html. Comment here or there.

news, posts, ets ceteras, I HAVE A TITLE

I’m drowning in revisions right now (due Monday; I’m almost done; I just need my brain to keep working a few days more), but I’m surfacing long enough to share a few things.

First: YOU GUYS YOU GUYS YOU GUYS I FINALLY HAVE A TITLE. The sequel to A Natural History of Dragons will be called The Tropic of Serpents.

(Now I just need to go put that phrase in the book somewhere.)

Next, story sale! To the charity anthology Neverland’s Library, which will be funded through Kickstarter, and 50% of whose profits will go to First Book. The story in question is “Centuries of Kings,” based on several Chinese and Japanese folktales.

Finally, I have a couple of posts up in different places, that I hadn’t yet linked here. One is over at Darkeva’s blog, talking about how I developed the habit of choosing music for a story while working on the original draft of Lies and Prophecy. The other is my biweekly post at BVC, talking about how folklore adds another later to the world around you.

Time for me to go work some more on revising The Tropic of Serpents. (I am going to be using the title incessantly for a little while, now that I have it to use.)

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/582815.html. Comment here or there.

Dear Brain, WTF.

The revised draft of this novel is due in to my editor in about a week and a half. Plus, due to problems with my financial institution, I’m going to have to do all my tax-related work in the same span of time.

So, naturally, my brain is trying to write three short stories at once.

Argh.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/581839.html. Comment here or there.

CP4 TOC

I still have to revise the book, of course — or I should say, finish revising; I’ve been working on that as I go along — but I have enough brain and breathing room now to catch up on a few things that slipped through the cracks while I was busy.

First up! I sold a story! To Mike Allen! For Clockwork Phoenix 4! (Maintaining my streak: Tanith Lee and I are the only ones with a story in every CP anthology to date.) You may remember this as a Kickstarter project a while ago; well, the project was a success, and now the anthology is underway. The finished TOC consists of:

  • Yves Meynard, “Our Lady of the Thylacines”
  • Ian McHugh, “The Canal Barge Magician’s Number Nine
  • Nicole Kornher-Stace, “On the Leitmotif of the Trickster Constellation in Northern Hemispheric Star Charts, Post-Apocalypse”
  • Richard Parks, “Beach Bum and the Drowned Girl”
  • Gemma Files, “Trap-Weed”
  • Yukimi Ogawa, “Icicle”
  • A.C. Wise, “Lesser Creek: A Love Story, A Ghost Story”
  • Marie Brennan, “What Still Abides”
  • Alisa Alering, “The Wanderer King”
  • Tanith Lee, “A Little of the Night”
  • Cat Rambo, “I Come from the Dark Universe”
  • Shira Lipkin, “Happy Hour at the Tooth and Claw”
  • Corinne Duyvis, “Lilo Is”
  • Kenneth Schneyer, “Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer”
  • Camille Alexa, “Three Times”
  • Benjanun Sriduangkaew, “The Bees Her Heart, the Hive Her Belly”
  • Patricia Russo, “The Old Woman with No Teeth”
  • Barbara Krasnoff, “The History of Soul 2065″

Mike Allen has more to say about it here. My story, “What Still Abides”, is the one I was complaining about before, saying that it was trying to kill me; well, it failed, and then it sold, so at least I got something for my suffering. 🙂

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/572678.html. Comment here or there.

wiktory.

OH MY GOD IT’S DEAD THE SHORT STORY THAT WAS TRYING TO KILL ME I KILLED IT INSTEAD HAHAHAHA okay now I have to revise it.

But at least I have a draft.

NaEverythingWriMo

My senior spring of college, I was taking three courses, one of which was my thesis tutorial. After I’d turned that beast in, I was down to two courses, one of which I was taking pass/fail. In other words: I wasn’t very busy. So — because that semester was also my last chance to write material for this award — I decided to see how much I could write in the final two months of college.

The answer ended up being “a novel and six short stories in seven weeks flat,” which is a total I don’t expect to equal again. But I spent most of November as a spinster hermit (kniedzw being in Poland for three weeks after I left), so I figured, as long as there was nobody around to look at me funny for working at all kinds of random hours and not having a social life, I might as well see how much I could write in the month of November.

As it turns out, I managed 59,144 words. (Which annoys me a little, since I thought I had hit 60K that final night. But apparently I did some math wrong in there.)

It isn’t NaNoWriMo. I will almost certainly never do NaNoWriMo; I don’t need the event to make myself write a novel (duh), and I know the pace would result in me writing a bad novel if I tried. Only 30,492 words of that is book, i.e. my standard working pace. The rest, the other 28,652, is a combination of other things: substantial blog posts (like the nearly 4K I wrote for my first ToM entry), promo stuff for A Natural History of Dragons, Yuletide material, progress on the short story that’s trying to kill me, the beginnings of a new Driftwood story, etc.

Even changing up my focus like that, 59K was a lot to churn out in thirty days flat. I’m not a slow writer, but I’m also not one of those people who can do 4K days for an extended period of time. It was, however, good to work on gear-shifting between projects — that’s something I’m not great at, and could benefit from improving. My short story production has fallen off substantially these last couple of years, because it’s hard for me to get my head out of whatever the current novel space is and find some kind of flow on a totally different setting and characters. There are more reasons for that than just gear-shifting, of course; it also has a lot to do with the increased investment my short story ideas are requiring, research and other things. But still and all: gear-shifting is a good thing to work on.

So that was my November. I still have two thirds of this book to go, so it’s going to stay busy around here for a while. But all in all, a nicely productive month.

I wasn’t kidding

No, seriously, this short story is trying to kill me. It has taken me two. hours. to write about five hundred words, and that’s with me saying “screw it, I’m going to let this turn into a synopsis, and then go back and flesh it out into an actual story later.” By my calculation, it is going to take at least two more multi-hour sessions before I have something resembling a draft.

Note to the wise: do not, repeat, DO NOT attempt to write a short story in Anglish. I kind of want to light this thing on fire.

more Driftwood!

My short story output has been dismal lately, but I did manage to complete and sell another Driftwood story: “The Ascent of Unreason,” now live at BCS (not to be confused with BVC, which is what I originally typed), both as text and as a podcast. (And if you check that last link, you’ll see that there are also e-reader versions available — pdf, mobi, epub, etc.)

I have work I really ought to be doing today, work with deadlines attached . . . but I sort of feel like writing a short story. I may poke at my various seedlings and see if any of them are ready to sprout.

last call for Clockwork Phoenix 4; also, a short story

There’s just under a day left on the Clockwork Phoenix 4 Kickstarter. If you wanted to pre-order a copy, this is a way to do it. 🙂

Also, the latest issue of Apex Magazine is live, containing my (very) short story “Waiting for Beauty.” (This is one of my darker fairy tale retellings, though less Lovecraftian than most in that set.) I haven’t yet had a chance to read the rest of the issue, but it looks absolutely smashing, with stories from Genevieve Valentine, Kat Howard, and Nir Yaniv, as well as nonfiction from Lynne M. Thomas and jimhines, and an interview with Genevieve.

The Best of BCS, Year Three

Scott Andrews at Beneath Ceaseless Skies is running a poll to choose the final story for the third-year “Best of” anthology. I’m in the running, with “Two Pretenders” (which is peripherally an Onyx Court story); I am, however, up against some stiff competition. BCS publishes good stuff!

You can vote in the poll until midnight Friday, Pacific time — I’m not sure if that means eleven and a half hours from now, or thirty-five and a half. Vote now, vote often! Wait, no. Vote once. In this round, anyway. Then vote again in the run-off. (I’ll post a heads-up when that happens.)

In other short-story related news, Clockwork Phoenix 4 will be paying pro rates! Many thanks to everyone who contributed. There’s still time to get in on the game, too, and one more stretch goal to aim for.

Clockwork Phoenix 4 . . . ?

I’d like to take a break from fielding comments on my last post to announce something very exciting:

Clockwork Phoenix 4.

Or rather, a Kickstarter campaign for it. You may recall the first three Clockwork Phoenix anthologies, all three of which I was very pleased to have a story in. The anthologies did quite well, in terms of both recognition and sales . . . but Norilana Books, the publisher, has fallen on hard times due to non-business-related issues, and can’t do a fourth. Since the small press is a very precarious world — and anthologies are even more precarious — Kickstarter is the best way to go about continuing the series.

As you can tell by the fact that I’ve been in all three books so far, I really like the CP anthologies, and would love to see them continue. (Full disclosure: yes, of course I intend to submit something. And given my track record so far, I have high hopes of success.) So take a look at the project page, and if you see anything you like in the rewards, pledge a few bucks. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that we can make this happen.

Happy International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day!

I’ve had friends in town for the past several days, and sightseeing with them almost made me forget what today was. Thankfully, several posts on my friends-list reminded me: it’s International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day!

I’ve been celebrating this holiday since it started in 2007. (You can see the relevant posts, including some history, under the tag.) A little earlier this year, a reader informed me that the changes over at Abyss & Apex meant my story “Letter Found in a Chest Belonging to the Marquis de Montseraille Following the Death of That Worthy Individual” was no longer available for free in the archive; I have therefore chosen that as this year’s contribution. And if you want more, you can always browse the free fiction on my site!

And now, I go collapse. Who knew sightseeing was so tiring?

The Urban Tarot — now with bonus content!

I mentioned before that a friend of mine is doing a Kickstarter project to raise the funds needed to complete his Urban Tarot Deck, right?

Well, I got to chatting with him. And after a bit of behind-the-scenes scheming, I have a bit of news for you all.

If the project gets funded, the guidebook for the deck will include a short piece of introductory fiction, written by yours truly.

But wait — there’s more!

There is also a new reward level: the Marie Brennan Package. One first-edition numbered deck, the tarot guidebook signed by both me and Robert Scott (the artist), AND — specific to this package only — a signed hardcover copy of With Fate Conspire. (This is, after all, an urban tarot deck, and that is decidedly the most urban of my novels.)

I’m really stoked to be a part of this project. As I said before, I’ve been hoping for years to see this finished; well, as of me posting this, Rob is halfway to his goal, and there are still three weeks to go. If you already have With Fate Conspire, check out the other reward packages; you can get the guidebook (and therefore the fiction) at practically any level of backing, or splurge and enjoy the talents of one of the deck models. Alas, Chris Hall’s guided tour of the American Museum of Natural History has already been claimed, but I can personally vouch for the awesomeness of Jessica Hammer’s knowledge of game design, and the deliciousness of the food at Tse Wei Lim’s restaurant. (In fact, if you live in the Boston area, you should go to Journeyman at some point regardless.)

Head on over and take a look. And if you’ll be at FOGcon this weekend, I’ll be bringing some flyers with me, to spread the word far and wide.

Wilful Impropriety cover

I keep being totally inconsistent as to whether I use the American spelling of the title (as seen below) or the UK spelling. But anyway! Remember that anthology I sold “False Colours” to?

I’m told the cover for the UK version will be the same, bar spelling. Anyway, this is due out in September, it sounds like. I am very much looking forward to my copy!