Drowning Nor Waving

I have from a few sources that Interzone #220 is on shelves now! It includes novelette "Miles to Isengard", which is about a boy, a nuke, and a cross-country drive to a volcano.

I can't tell if one can order individual issues from the website store, but it is purportedly stocked at Borders Books, or maybe just from your helpful UK-based friend. *g*

(If anyone else has purchasing information for North America, please share in comments.)

Other than that, this'll be the official post for throwing rocks or panties!

Announcements appear to be happening, so I will announce too:

"Six", which some of you will know as a story about gardening, roof-sheep, and the apocalypse, will appear in Clockwork Phoenix 2.

Since the other acceptances I've seen announced on the friendslist include swan_tower and maryrobinette (ETA: and experimeditor, ann_leckie, and handful_ofdust), consider me composed of chuffed with a side of pleased and some yay! to go.

Some reaction to "Kimberley Ann Duray Is Not Afraid" over the interwebs this week:

joannemerriam says it's "really excellent and thought-provoking", which is very nice.

It gets a "cool story" from Chaos Theory, whose author I cannot find on my brief inspection of said blog.

Lois Tilton at The Internet Review of Science Fiction appears to like it less, commenting:

This one pushes the balance between Story and Message pretty hard. The Story is one of an interracial marriage, the problems of making it work. But the marriage is also a medium for debating the issue of the Message.
[...]
References to the Black Panthers and Huey P. Newton are jarringly anachronistic; I thought at first that this was historical fiction, not future SF.

...which I have to admit was not on the list of things I thought might be issues for readers the day that story went live. Well, live and learn.

Finally, Free SF Reader gives it 4 out of 5.

September 28, 2008 Progress Notes:

Above

Pages today: 17.
Pages total: 79/264.

79 / 264 (29.9%)

Reason for stopping: End of chapter four.

Munchies: Blackberry yogourt.
Books in progress: Patricia McKillip, The Bell at Sealey Head.
The glamour: Word on the Street!

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Honourable Mentions from The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 2008 are starting to hit the internets, thanks to a very obliging Search Inside function on Amazon. I've received four this year:

"Bears" and "The Girl From Another World", both at Strange Horizons
"Fitcher's Third Wife" in Mythic Delirium #17
--and "Three Deaths", which was also nominated for a Rhysling, at Lone Star Stories.

There was also a mention in both summations, which is nice, and some good lovin' for the friends and Ideomancer. So all is well and all manner of things well.

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Spent a nice afternoon at Word on the Street today, nosing through the books (when I could get close enough) and chatting. Ran into handful_ofdust, Stephen, Cal, their friend Lena, moon_custafer, and Andrew after about 45 minutes of poking, and went for a late lunch with them at the Duke of York. The haul was pretty small: just a Spacing magazine, one book from Coach House, and a Wellesley Station button; everything else was either something I didn't care enough about, could get later, or an iUniverse book. Seriously. There were like seven booths of slightly frantic-eyed self-published people hawking their stuff.

(Best self-publish author sales pitch: "Do you like to read?" Yes, I do. Or I wouldn't be at a literary festival.)

I sort of wanted to shake them and go "why are you throwing your work away like this! Why!"

But I didn't. 'Cause really, it's none of my business. Even if it makes me sad.

Got home and it was cloudy and chilly, and have been working since. This chapter's shorter than the others, but it had a lot more work that needed doing to it, and took more time. I think the book's gained something like 1000 words at this point. I'm going to have to perform some snippy later on, if this keeps up.

Cake Chapter 5 tomorrow, or death!

Reposting on behalf of chibibluebird:

I bought a World Fantasy Convention membership last year when I lived in Calgary, but I've since moved away (on short notice) & don't really have money for the trip back.

I'm trying to sell it. It's $100.
My public email is green_alligator_2000@yahoo.ca

If you're looking to go and don't yet have your membership, drop her a line!

In other announcementy news! I took a look at Gardner Dozois's The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual at work on Friday, and "The Sorceress's Assistant", which showed up in the Fall 2007 issue of On Spec, has received an Honorable Mention.

I'm a little puzzled, as it's a fantasy story, but chuffed. :)

What had me more chuffed, though, is that three Ideomancer stories also got Honorable Mentions! Yoon Ha Lee's (yhlee's) "Screamers", Ted Kostmaka's "Deadnauts", and Ruth Nestvold's "Far Side of the Moon".

I could not tell you why it's a bigger thrill to see the stories you acquired as an editor do well than it is with the stories you wrote yourself. But it is. So yay to Yoon, Ted, and Ruth!

(no, not the river.)

I have via time_shark this morning that Amazon has made Clockwork Phoenix available early -- it's not yet the official release date, but nonetheless, anthology! So it is available for your breathless acquisition right this minute, and I recommend breathless acquisition, as it contains stories by Catherynne Valente (yuki_onna), Cat Rambo (catrambo), Laird Barron, Ekaterina Sedia (squirrel_monkey), Cat Sparks, Tanith Lee, Marie Brennan (swan_tower), Jennifer Crow (kythiaranos), Vandana Singh, John C. Wright, Erin Hoffman, (zhai), and yet more after that. I quail to be surrounded by such awesome.

Incidental to this, Amazon appears to have created a community to talk about me since my name is one of the tags on the Clockwork Phoenix sale entry. This disconcerts me greatly, especially the "Leah Bobet" Customer Images section. I went and tagged the rest of the anthologies I have stories and poetry in, like a good little self-promoter, so it's actually a pretty decent list of the Amazon-purchasable stuff. Keep that in mind while you're talking about how I eat worms and wear silly suspenders on the Leah Bobet forum. *g*

I got my contributor's copy of The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy this morning. Let's have a look at this:

Andy Duncan, Orson Scott Card, Peter Crowther, me, Howard Waldrop, Liz Williams, David D. Levine, Jonathan Lethem, Jeff Ford, William Hope Hodgson, Michael Moorcock, Tim Pratt, Christopher Priest, Michael Swanwick, Ted Chiang, Paul di Filippo...

I am examining the possibility that if I roll around a lot I can convince some cool people cooties to stick to me. I am the newest, greenest kid in this book. Honest. I checked the bio blurbs.

So yes.

1) Daaaaamn.

2) This looks like it'll be one hell of a good read.

Now I go to work.

I've done some pretty hardcore reorganization on the website tonight -- yes, I'm procrastinating, I know. And yes, I'm posting about this at midnight on a weeknight, I know. *g*

Basically it's just a finalized convention schedule and a resorting of the Bibliography to make it tidier and easier to sort, but I've also put up blurbs for Above (the novel in progress) and the two completed novels I still plan to shop. Blurbs for novels in the queue will go up as soon as, well, I have enough of them together to write a blurb for.

So if you're curious about Above or a fan of people's webpages, hop over and check it out.

February 25, 2008 Progress Notes:

Above

Words today: 4000.
Words total: 24,000 MS Word.
Reason for stopping: That took five hours, my brain is exhausted, and I need real food before I run myself into the ground trying for more more more.
Liquid Refreshment: Water.
Munchies: Double gloucester with stilton and tangerines.
Exercise: N/A.
Mail: Nomail.

Darling du Jour: "How young?" she asks. Her wings are pushing at my belly, stiff and brittle. They hum weakly; moving to keep alive. It feels like her breath against my neck.
Awake and listening. I knew she was.
"Doctor Marybeth don't know," I tell her. "Could be as many years as Atticus." I pause. "Could be less."
It doesn't make me cry anymore. All I feel is shadow cold.
"Matthew?" she whispers, edgeless, soft, sad. "Touch them?"
I touch her wings. Stiff, living.
They feel like Sanctuary.



Tyop du Jour: N/A
Words MS Word Doesn't Know: aswirl. I may have made that up.

Mean Things: About to blow a gasket in front of your abuse-victim runner girlfriend. And you can't. But she's so wrong, and there's nothing to do but yell at the trees because she'll never see the difference between wrong deed and being wrong herself. Old wounds people won't talk about. Being attacked by shadows. Fire.
Research Roundup: fish anatomy, hybrid characteristics, heterosis and outbreeding. I finally figured out Matthew's Curse.
Books in progress: Marie Brennan, Midnight Never Come; textbooks.

The glamour: I ignored a pile of work to do this today, thinking it'd only be three pages or so and then time for other stuff. And then the dam broke and shoved me along in its wake. Oh, this is gonna be bad tomorrow.

---

The first chapter is workshopped, and I've put up the second. Workshopping the first has let me figure out how I'm botching the action in the first quarter or third of the second, but it's probably more productive to keep writing now and fix the botchery later.

I missed this. I missed the immediate feedback, the people picking up where they think you're going and then putting that together, laying out how you can get the most mileage out of the set pieces you've constructed, and where they're weak. Doing this to the book before it's set in your head. And the way that gets you running to make more until it's like a hand on your back, pushing, and you can't stop making more until you hit a point of pure exhaustion, because the plot just unrolls in front of you like ribbon.

Oh, words. Words words words.

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Also, "Fitcher's Third Wife" has earned an Honourable Mention in the next Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, according to Ellen Datlow. I am chuffed and pleased and chuffed.