Spelinking

December 4

I have many a link this entry! First, Realms of Fantasy, the first paper prozine with the wisdom to publish my fiction, finally has a website! And if you go to their Current Issue page, you can see the cover of the February 2003 issue, now available, featuring my story "Fable from a Cage" -- and my name is on the cover! Right there in living pixels!

There's also a website for Say..., hosted by the good people at Small Beer Press, here. Whoo!

And a review of Say... by Rich Horton here on Sfsite, saying good things about my story, and Greg's story, and Chris's story, and others -- hell, the important bit is when he says there are no bad stories in this issue! (Thanks to Jon for pointing me to the review. As if he hasn't done enough for me lately. Jon's birthday is two days before mine. Mine is the 12th. The math is left as an exercise for the reader.)

Michael Kelly, who edited Songs from Dead Singers, and who is a fine writer and nice person, too, has an online journal now. We just got a nice one-page-folded chapbook from Mike, with a spiffy color cover, as a Christmas card, including his sad, lyrical story "Sunday, in the City." Very nice.

Speaking of holiday chapbooks (look at the man segue!), we got the final illustrations for Floodwater yesterday, and they are absolutely marvelous. Richard Doyle's a great guy, and Heather's been telling me what a good artist he is, but I'm blown away -- he created four awesome illustrations for our chapbook, a cover image (reproduced on the above-linked Floodwater page) and one illo for each of the stories contained therein. Yum-lovely. We put in the pictures and did a final proof yesterday, and took everything to the printer last night. We're going tomorrow to pick up the finished copies (we decided to do a run of 150 signed, numbered copies this year), and assuming the printer doesn't put pages in upside-down or something, they'll be available for sale in a few days. We'll be sending them to family and friends, of course -- the whole point is that these are holiday gifts -- but, as we did last year, we'll have extra copies to sell. We'll be selling them for $4 plus $1 shipping, probably, but it's such a lovely little chapbook, we think it's worth it.

Hmm. What else is happening? We're going to the Good Vibes 25th Anniversary Party tomorrow night. Heather assures me there will be strippers and probably booze, so I'm tentatively looking forward, even though it's a school night. I'm reading Robin McKinley's Beauty, and it's good. Will likely read Rose Daughter next. Picked up Kushner's & Sherman's The Fall of the Kings, stand-alone sequel to Swordspoint today, and I'm looking forward to reading that.

I've been e-corresponding with the artist who's illustrating "Captain Fantasy and the Secret Masters", and he sent me the finished artwork yesterday, because I'd wanted to see it without having to wait until February -- man, it's good! It looks like the cover of a freaking comic book! The Captain looks like a big brawling Irishman, just like he should! I have a line in the story about surveillance cameras turning to follow the narrator's progress "like the heads of jackals," and Joel actually painted these sleek, futuristic, somewhat jackal-like cameras! So cool! I'm happier than the proverbial pig in poop.

Heather gave me an early birthday present -- she framed the illustration from "The Witch's Bicycle". The plan is to frame all three of my Realms illustrations and hang them in a triangle on a bare patch of wall, and now the apex of the triangle is there. La and la and la again.

I've been doing this crazy strange collaborative project with Greg, and I think it's actually coming out very well. I like his description of it -- it's like playing air hockey, except when it's like playing chess. It's never like being a blind guy arguing with a deaf guy, which is sorta the worst-case scenario for any collab, I guess...

Speaking of collabs, the first part of Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross's crazy cool novella "Jury Service" is up at Sci Fiction now. Go read!

I don't think I have much else to report... I've been reading journals, trying to catch up on e-mail, sending out my novel to first readers, failing to clean my room, waiting for my pregnant housemate/ sister-in-law-to-be to give birth (today's her due-date, actually, though we don't expect the kid to actually make an appearance for a few more days at least), and otherwise trying to enjoy this warm, rainless winter...

Words written since February 1, 2002: 188,200

Words written since last entry:
0. But I'm thinking about new fiction projects. Yum.

Well, my birthday is coming, and I do wish I had...

Tim Pratt
P.O. Box 13222
Berkeley, CA 94712-4222

Buy a chapbook! $2.75! It's a perfect gift! Inscribed to order! And watch this space for imminent future Tropism Press offerings...