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Posts Tagged ‘short stories’

two pieces of anthology news

Clockwork Phoenix 2! Is now available as an e-book (like the first one a while ago). You can buy it from Weightless Books, or from Amazon US or UK. (More information here.)

For those who may not recall, this one has my short story “Once a Goddess.”

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InterGalactic Awards Anthology Vol. I! Will be FREE this weekend on Amazon, from Saturday through Monday. Apart from some seriously awesome people like Peter Beagle and Aliette de Bodard (aliettedb), it also includes stories from me and a personal friend, Von Carr. Mine is “A Heretic by Degrees” (which is a Driftwood story), and hers has the fabulous title of “Sister Jasmine Brings the Pain” — the best post-apocalypses story about a combat nun I’ve ever read. ^_^

It can be yours this weekend!

observations from tonight’s round of letter-writing

1) I should have written Irrith’s letter after Delphia’s. She’s a terrible influence on my attempts at nice handwriting. πŸ™‚

2) Re-reading bits of the books to get myself back in the heads of the characters . . . and you know what? I still like them. Quite a lot.

3) Certain songs from the book soundtracks still get me right in the gut. (Particularly “The Monument,” from A Star Shall Fall. But others, too.)

4) I really, really need to write that short story about Edward Thorne. Though I should decide which I want more: for it to be from his point of view, or for it to be the Sir Peregrin and Dame Segraine Buddy-Cop Extravaganza. (The two are, alas, mutually exclusive.)

5) Ditto “This Living Hand,” aka the Story About the Willow Tree What Killed All the Romantic Poets.

6) Although I do love my new series, and my new protagonist . . . I miss the Onyx Court.

I’ve been sitting on this for a month

I’ve worked with Ekaterina Sedia (squirrel_monkey) twice before, on “Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics As Employed Against Lycanthropes” (in Running with the Pack) and “Coyotaje” (in Bewere the Night). Now that I have the go-ahead, I’m delighted to say that I have sold her a third story, this one without any shapeshifters in it whatsoever: “False Colours,” a novelette in her upcoming anthology of YA Victorian romance, Wilful Impropriety: 13 Tales of Society and Scandal.

You can read more about the anthology here. The table of contents looks pretty awesome:

  • THE DANCING MASTER by Genevieve Valentine
  • THE UNLADYLIKE EDUCATION OF AGATHA TREMAIN by Stephanie Burgis
  • AT WILL by Leanna Renee Hieber
  • STEEPED IN DEBT TO THE CHIMNEY POTS by Steve Berman
  • OUTSIDE THE ABSOLUTE by Seth Cadin
  • RESURRECTION by Tiffany Trent
  • MRS BEETON’S BOOK OF MAGICKAL MANAGEMENT by Karen Healey
  • THE GARDEN OF ENGLAND by Sandra McDonald
  • FALSE COLOURS by Marie Brennan
  • NUSSBAUM’S GOLDEN FORTUNE by M. K. Hobson
  • THE COLONEL’S DAUGHTER by Barbara Roden
  • MERCURY RETROGRADE by Mary Robinette Kowal
  • THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS by Caroline Stevermer

As for “False Colours”? Well, a select few among you may recall a certain character named Lt. Ravenswood . . . yeah, this is that story. The rest of you will have to wait and read it for yourself — I wouldn’t want to spoil anything!

I’ll post a release date when I have one.

a better (or rather, worse) metric

Remember how I mentioned before that I wanted to improve my story production this year? Well, I haven’t really made progress on that; I haven’t written anything new (yet). But I have sent something new out, that’s been sitting around waiting to be revised for a year or more.

When I went to add it to my submissions log, I noticed something . . . poor-ish.

Yes, the point (as I said in my previous post) is to sell things, not to submit them. But while the last three pieces I finished and sent out sold to the first place I submitted them — yay! — that isn’t the whole story. All three of those were basically written to order, under conditions where I more or less knew they were sold before I started working on them. The last time I sent out a story that wasn’t solicited and pre-sold?

Was April of 2010.

And it isn’t because editors have been beating down my door with invitations. Three such situations in nearly two years is nice, but not exactly the sort of thing the leads to some authors of my acquaintance saying “I’m going to have to start turning editors down; I’m already overcommitted.” More like, the only times I’ve been able to prod myself into actual short story productivity is when I know the only thing standing between me and an almost-guaranteed sale is my own lack of effort.

This isn’t a self-esteem thing. Obviously I know I can sell stories, if I bother to write them. And it isn’t a lack of inspiration thing, either; one look at my (growing) list of unwritten story ideas would cure any notion of that. I’m not sure what kind of thing it is, really. It may be part and parcel of the fatigue issue I think I’ve mentioned in passing here; writing novels has been harder, too, for at least as long as I’ve been such a short-story slacker, and while I can’t prove that has anything to do with the way I faceplant for a nap almost every day (which is a more recent development), I’m hoping that fixing the latter will lead to miraculous improvements in the former.

Anyway. Mostly I want to pat myself on the back for finally sending out “Mad Maudlin,” after way too much time spent sitting on it. I have another story in similar circumstances (which probably would have been revised and sent out yonks ago, if I could just come up with a title for the damn thing), and I’m going to push myself to get some new things written. This, at least, is a start.

Things I want to improve: production in the new year

I didn’t publish a whole lot last year, in comparison with the previous five or so. With Fate Conspire, Dancing the Warrior (the doppelganger novella), and three short stories (“Two Pretenders,” “Love, Cayce,” and “Coyotaje”). The forecast isn’t good for this year, either, because I didn’t write a whole lot, either: A Natural History of Dragons, Dancing the Warrior, “Coyotaje,” and a novelette I can’t tell you about yet, but which has already been sold. In other words, everything I wrote vanished from the pipeline pretty much as soon as I finished it.

I’ve posted about that latter bit before, reminding myself that selling stories is the goal, not submitting them. Still, I have only four things in the submission queue right now, and one or more of those probably ought to be retired. Even if I sold all four of them right now, and all four saw print this year — both of which are unlikely — that’s not a lot of new publications compared to some past years, and it leaves me with nothing for next year.

Okay. So I need to write more short fiction. I’ve vowed this before, and met with moderate success; let’s try that again. Simple to say, not so simple to do, but putting it here where the internets can see it should help.

Clockwork Phoenix is now an ebook!

Mike Allen (time_shark) has done yeoman work, converting the first volume of the Clockwork Phoenix anthology series to ebook format. This is, you may recall, the home of “A Mask of Flesh,” which I keep wanting to call “one of my Mesoamerican fantasy stories” until I remember that I haven’t actually gotten any of the other ones in shape to submit anywhere, let alone publish.

The rest of the series (CP, not those stories — though maybe them, too) will follow in time, but for now you can get the first volume on the Kindle. If you prefer pixels to dead trees, head on over and take a look!

Three reviews and two anthologies

Three recent reviews of With Fate Conspire:

Chris at The King of Elfland’s Second Cousin has some very interesting things to say about the structure of the book.

Julia at All Things Urban Fantasy liked it enough to run out and buy the rest of the series, which is always encouraging. πŸ™‚

And a snippet from Faren Miller at Locus: “For more tales of a London based on history as well as sheer invention, try With Fate Conspire and its predecessors. Instead of the old-style fantasy of quests through green fields and dark domains, Brennan makes the most of one extraordinary city.”

Also, BCS has released The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Year Two, which includes my Driftwood story “Remembering Light.” You can download it in your choice of ebook format, from a whole variety of sources.

And it isn’t available yet, but you can preorder the Intergalactic Awards Anthology, Vol. 1, which includes another Driftwood story, “A Heretic by Degrees.” That one’s print, and will ship in mid-December.

In which I pretend to be a statistician

Since there’s recently been another round of discussion about gender balance (or imbalance) in SF/F, I thought it might be a nice time to collate a bit of data I’ve been wondering about for a while.

Generally people tend to perceive a particular group as being gender-balanced when it’s about 25% female, and if you get up to 40%, they think it’s dominated by women. So it’s useful to ask myself: if my instinct is that a short story market — in this case, Beneath Ceaseless Skies — publishes a lot of women, am I right?

Cut to spare you lots and lots of numbers.

brain bunnies

So last night I write a little over 2300 words on A Natural History of Dragons, and then it’s Very Late, so I go to bed, and lie there for a little while, and then get up and go back to the computer and type in this:

I’m one of those people who, soon as you tell me not to do something, I turn around and do it. Because fuck you, even if you are a friend. And Tia wasn’t that much of a friend.

So I’m talking about how I’m bored with the Meltdown and there’s this old club over on Hall I might check out, and she says I shouldn’t, and we argue about it a bit until she says — only half-joking — “J, I forbid you to go,” and that’s it: to hell with her. Which I say. So she storms off, and I pin up my favorite skirt with some giant safety pins, braid gold LEDs into my hair, and go off to see what this old club is like. Because fuck Tia, and anybody else who tells me what to do.

I’m not sure why my brain decided that 4:30 in the morning after 2300 words of novel was the ideal time to mug me with a framework and two opening paragraphs for a “Tam Lin” retelling that could possibly cruise all the way through without having any fantastical content whatsoever (only then where would I sell it?) . . . but that’s how it goes, sometimes.

The funny thing is, I’ve had the opening page and a half for a “Tam Lin” sequel story hanging out in my “unfinished” folder for years now. And now I’m wondering if what I need to do is throw out everything but the first line (“Faerie trouble never really goes away.”), splice a bit of fantastical content into the story up above, and then link these two together.

Well, no need to decide right away. I have several deadlines breathing down my neck which take first priority. But it’s a thought for the future.

okay, not ALL the links

Despite my efforts last night, I missed not one but two of the links I meant to post.

First, a bit belated, the usual link to my monthly SF Novelists post. This time, it’s Worldbuilding, from the ground up, as I talk about the interesting challenges I’m encountering as I work on A Natural History of Dragons. (Comment over there, not here; you don’t need to register, but there will be a slight delay while I fish the comments of newcomers out of the moderation queue.)

Second, Sideshow Freaks has a background post on how I came to write “Love, Cayce” (aka the “letters from a D&D adventurer’s kid” story).

. . . I think that’s it. But just you wait, I’m sure I’ll trip over more I forgot as soon as I turn around.

in which I post ALL the writing links!

Seriously, I’ve got a lot of these piled up.

First: genarti! Congratulations! You have won the “ARC and Desk Delivery Day” giveaway. Email me your address (marie dot brennan at gmail dot com), and I’ll get that on its way to you.

Second, you have a chance to win a complete set of the Onyx Court books by bidding in Brenda Novak’s 2011 Auction, raising money for diabetes research. That runs until the end of the month, so you have about twelve days left to bid. (The prize will ship in summer, when I receive my author copies of With Fate Conspire, or I can arrange to send the first three earlier if desired.) Also, there are lots of other awesome things on offer there, so go browse.

Third, you also have until the end of the month to buy one or more of my stories from AnthologyBuilder, and get a dollar off the cover price. (Fuller details here.)

Fourth, some of you may be interested in , a Yuletide-style fandom exchange for Asian fandoms (e.g. Japanese anime, Bollywood, Hong Kong action flicks, etc). Nominations are open until the 25th, and I’m vaguely tempted to participate; I had fun writing my K-20 story for Yuletide last year. I’m waiting to see how many of the nominated sources I know well enough to write, though, since a lot of the current ones are totally unknown to me.

Fifth, for the language wonks reading this, “Singular ‘they’ and the many reasons why it’s correct.” I am a big proponent of “they” as a gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun, largely because it’s one we’ve been using for that exact purpose for centuries now, and it’s a lot more graceful than “he or she” and similar constructions. Mind you, I do find it unsatisfactory for referring to a specific individual who doesn’t fit into standard gender categories; for whatever reason, in those cases my brain seizes up on the apparent plural meaning of the word. (And it’s politer anyway to use whatever pronoun such a person prefers, though that can be hard to do — and the pragmatist in me does wish we could settle on a single alternative, rather than the motley assortment currently in use.) But for sentences like “everyone took out their books,” or referring to somebody whose gender identification is unknown (frex, somebody you only know online), I like “they.” We’re already using it; I think grammar pedants should accept it.

That’s enough for now, I suppose. There may be other link salad-style posts in the future, though; Firefox’s new tab-grouping setup has really encouraged my tendency to hoard these things. :-/

In which I am Featured

So I just discovered that my biography there is painfully out of date, but I am a Featured Author this month at Anthology Builder.

It’s been a while since I mentioned them here, so for those just tuning in: AB is a sort of iTunes-style service for buying short stories. Their database includes a large (and continually growing) number of stories by a wide variety of authors, both current and classic; what you do is go through and pick out the pieces you want until you have somewhere between 50 and 350 pages, your own custom-designed anthology. AB prints it up for you and mails it off, the authors get a cut of the price, everybody wins.

(At present there is no e-book option, but they’re looking into implementing something along those lines.)

What does it mean that I’m a Featured Author? It means that for the month of May, if you order an anthology with one of my stories in it, you get a dollar off the price. I’ve got twenty-one stories in their database — pretty much all my short fiction from 2008 or earlier, including Deeds of Men — which adds up to enough for a collection of my work, or you can mix one or more of my pieces with stuff by other authors. They have stories by Tobias Buckell, Aliette de Bodard, Marissa Lingen, Ruth Nestvold, Tony Pi, Cat Rambo, Janni Lee Simner, Martha Wells, and a whole lot of others; those are just a few of the names I recognized in a quick scan of the list. So there’s plenty to choose from. I’ve used the service a couple of times myself, and quite like it, so wander over and take a look for yourself.

Happy International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day!

Once again, I celebrate the holiday founded by papersky, International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, wherein writers are invited to share bits of fiction for free online, and thereby prove that this does not cause the sky to fall.

This year I’ve decided to post one of my favorite stories: “Nine Sketches, in Charcoal and Blood.” It’s a favorite because as I was on my way to VeriCon one year these characters wandered into my head and immediately struck up a conversation that hinted at but never said outright all kinds of fascinating things about who they were and how they knew each other and why they had come together again after a long absence. Never have I had such a strong feeling of uncovering a story that was already there, rather than making one up — and hell, I still wonder what some of the things are that they never got around to telling me.

This year, I’d like to make it interactive, too. Leave a comment telling me about free, online fiction you’ve really enjoyed lately, whether a specific story or a particular market or whatever. I read Beneath Ceaseless Skies regularly, but I’d love to gather a bunch of other recommendations, and maybe find some new authors or markets to read. So share the love in the comments, and happy Sant Jodi/Shakespeare’s birthday/Thumb Your Nose at Howard Hendrix Day.

Tune in for the thrilling conclusion!

The second half of Dancing the Warrior has gone live.

If you missed the first half, it’s here. If you missed the post about what this story is, that’s over here. If you want to know the story behind the story — i.e. where this thing came from — that’s up on my website. And if you’re interested in winning a signed copy of both doppelganger novels, but haven’t yet chimed in on the comment thread with your Hunter name, never fear; there will be a second drawing two weeks from now.

Enjoy!

Signal Boost: Vera Nazarian

Details are here, but the short form is that Vera Nazarian (of Norilana Books) has lost her multi-year battle to keep her house, and is having to move across the country with her sick mother and four pets.

Norilana is the publisher that puts out the Clockwork Phoenix anthologies, all three of which include stories from yours truly. (“A Mask of Flesh,”, “Once a Goddess,”, and “The Gospel of Nachash.”) I’ve read all three of them, and think they’re quite excellent volumes, quite apart from my personal investment. Norilana has also done a number of other books, including the continuation of the Sword & Sorceress anthology series, a few classic novels, some fantasy, some science fiction — check out Vera’s post for a whole lot more. She could use the business right now, and Norilana’s got some great stuff, so if you’re inclined to pick up new reading material, head over and take a look.

more short story!

Pretty much everything I’ve sold lately is coming out this month. Dancing the Warrior, “Love, Cayce,” and now “Coyotaje,” in Ekaterina Sedia’s new anthology Bewere the Night. The TOC includes people like Cherie Priest, Holly Black, Elizabeth Hand, Genevieve Valentine, Marissa Lingen . . . I could keep going, but you can see the whole list for yourself. I don’t have my author copy yet, so I haven’t read it, but I’m pretty excited about this one.

Also, don’t forget about the giveaway for Dancing the Warrior. All you have to do is let me know what your Hunter name would be, and you’ll be entered to win a signed pair of the doppelganger novels.

And now, back to the page proof mines.

some Friday fun

I almost used a writing icon for this, then realized it really ought to be the Roman d20.

For your Friday delectation, issue #22 of the Intergalactic Medicine Show has gone live, containing my story “Love, Cayce.”

Dear Mom and Dad,

The good news is, nobody’s dead anymore.

Yeah, this would be one of the goofier stories I’ve ever written. Letters to home from what amounts to the kid of some D&D adventurers, giving her parents a series of heart attacks as they find out what their wayward offpsring has been up to.

I’ve got to say, props to Dean Spencer, who appears to have done the art: this story got slotted into the issue’s lineup on very short notice, which means he must have put together that painting on even shorter notice, and yet it matches the story quite precisely. Once you orient yourself — the dragon is up and the elf is down — that becomes the scene where Shariel is falling off a thousand-foot cliff, pursued by a dragon, and casting the spell I wasn’t allowed to call “Feather Fall” because it would have been a copyright violation. πŸ™‚ Nice work!

The rest of the TOC includes stories from Aliette de Bodard, Tony Pi, Brad Torgersen, George Lippert, and David Lubar, along with other goodies. Aliette’s story in particular got some gorgeous art. Check it out!