Category: Writing

Various excitements lately. My story “Angel of the Ordinary” is up at this week’s Drabblecast. It’s only the second piece I ever published, way back in 1999, but I’m still very fond of it.

Also: I sold my story “Hell’s Lottery” to Bull Spec (and my wife Heather Shaw sold her hilarious flash piece “Excrement” to Daily Science Fiction. A good week!) My SF story “On a Blade of Grass” will be reprinted on Escape Pod, I think in text and audio form (whoo). Not many people have read that one; it appeared in the Subterranean Press e-mail newsletter, a couple of years ago.

I and various other, ahem, “Next Big Genre Stars,” did a Mind Meld feature at SF Signal about which of our stories new readers should seek out.

I’ve done lots of work in the past week — revised an outline for a work-for-hire project, and polished up “A Void Wrapped in a Smile” and created the edition-of-one chapbook for the donor who commissioned it, and am deep into revising the Snake novel. Zoom zoom zoom. And yet, I’m very nearly caught up on my work, which means I can start writing more short fiction soon!

We recently got a burr grinder for coffee, and it really does make a difference. The coffee is sooo much yummier in the mornings now. Small things like that make life better.

Chapter 6 of The Nex is up — introducing the Steam Colossus! Great fun. (You know, I read the whole book in one shot to do a final line-editing pass before I started uploading chapters, and at the risk of sounding ridiculous, I can’t believe nobody wanted to publish the thing. I think it’s easily as good as my other books. Ah, well. What do I know?)

Broken Mirrors and The Nex are now available for the iPad via the iBookstore, and Broken Mirrors is available at Barnes & Noble for the nook e-reader. (The Nex will be there soon, and I may get Bone Shop into those stores, too.) I continue to slowly conquer all.

Three things of note, including a piece of big news I’ve been dying to tell you about for a while, and some bad news:

1. I sold my contemporary fantasy novel Briarpatch to ChiZine Publications. (This is the book I have previously referred to as the Bridge novel and The Light of a Better World. Titles are hard.) It should appear in 2011 — currently scheduled for August. There will be a fancy, pricey, signed limited-edition hardcover (my first hardcover for a novel!) and an affordable trade paperback.
   

   I first published in their online magazine Chiaroscuro years ago, and have been really impressed by the stuff ChiZine has published since they started doing their book line — especially Gemma Files’s debut novel, the Robert J. Wiersema novella they did, and other good stuff. Thanks to publishers Brett and Sandra for taking the novel, and to my agent Ginger for negotiating the deal. I’m so excited. This book is hugely important to me. You’ll all finally get to read about Darrin and Bridget and Ismael and Orville Troll and the Wendigo and the Queen of Bears and and and… It’s a book about secrets, lies, betrayals, hidden worlds, bridges, magical thinking, suicidal ideation, the redemptive power of love, the failure of love to conquer all, the poisonous nature of nostalgia, the quest for purpose, and other things.
   

2. Chapter 5 of The Nex is live — only 13 more to go!
   

   If you just can’t wait to read the book, or prefer reading a whole novel in a gulp: The Nex is available as a Kindle e-book now too. (Here’s the link to the UK Kindle store for all you Brits.)
   

3. My wife Heather had her hours slashed in half at her day job, so our financial stability — never that stable to begin with — is now downright precarious. The timing’s bad, too. I got a chunk of money recently for the Marla Mason movie option and promptly used it to pay some taxes, pay off many outstanding bills, buy some long-delayed household necessities, and to have a lavish anniversary dinner. If I’d known we were going to take such a financial hit, I would have hoarded the money more. If you know of any freelance gigs she might like, let me know. Heather’s a great writer with experience doing general non-fiction, book reviews, catalogue copy… most kinds of commercial writing, really. And in the meantime, if you’ve been thinking of donating for The Nex, now’s a good time. This really sucks. We were feeling somewhat financially stable for the first time since she spent six months unemployed last year, and now the rug’s been jerked out from under us. I’ll just have to hustle harder and write more stories. Nothing motivates like panic.
   

(Clicky above to donate via PayPal.)

I’ve been distressingly low-energy lately, partly because I have the Family Cold, but also — I must admit — because my eating habits have deteriorated drastically in recent weeks, with too many meals (read: most) consisting of burgers, or sausages, or just chips and ice cream. Delicious, yes, but not energy-imparting. (I’ve been pretty good about getting better food into my kid, but not myself.)

So I’m going to work on fixing that. I’d love to get back to our tradition of having salad for dinner a couple of times a week, and other reasonably healthy meals the other nights, with bratwursts-filled-with-cheddar returned to the status of an occasional treat rather than a mealtime staple. I’m in the mood to start making soups and stews and such anyway, now that the weather’s turning colder and more damp (in theory, anyway — yesterday was 70 degrees and sunny).

Despite feeling pretty drag-ass, I’ve been writing, steadily if not quickly. The current novel project — I’ll call it the Snake book, just so I can call it something publicly — is growing by the rate of 1200 or so words per day. I expect to get more done on my weekend days, so it wouldn’t shock me to hit 50,000 words by next Monday, and I may even manage a draft by October 1. That would give me a month to do revisions before it’s due to the editor.

My kid’s been a lot of fun lately, though his sleep habits have been odd. He came to our bed to sleep with us a few days ago — no big deal, as he’d clearly had a bad dream or something. Then the next day he came to our bed again, a little earlier. Then again, even earlier. He always went back to sleep, in our bed, with only moderate parent-kicking and other demands, so it wasn’t terrible, but it was a bad trend.

Last night he came to bed at 1 am. So he got stuck back in his own bed with some brief snuggling and reassurances. We were prepared for a middle-of-the-night installment of Toddler Tantrum 2010: The Tantruming, but he settled down after some pro-forma squawking and didn’t rise again until 6:30. Let’s hope we’ve broken the cycle. Snuggling with him is awesome, and he won’t be this little and snuggly forever, I know, but it was starting to prove detrimental to his mother’s health, as she’s a light sleeper who has insomnia problems anyway. (I sleep like a rock, myself, and I’m also willing to relocate to the couch if the bed gets overcrowded, so it’s easier on me.)

We’re watching season one of Lie to Me, and enjoying it, though only the clinical psychologist interests me at all as a character — otherwise they all strike me as very thinly characterized, with identifying tics and gimmicks tacked onto cardboard cutouts of people. (Maybe the clinical psychologist is the same way, and I just like her tics and gimmicks more — or maybe it’s just that she’s the most likable character on the show). I do also like the guy who adheres to Radical Honesty, since that’s a cute gimmick that’s even somewhat justified by the show’s premise, but I think he’s been underutilized, pretty much just used as comic relief so far. I’ll keep watching it, though, because I like stories where people lie and get called out as liars constantly.

What with the exigencies of parenting and having a day job and everything, I haven’t been producing fresh wordage at the prodigious rate I did while I was in Los Angeles. I haven’t slacked off entirely, though. I did a thousand-word essay on Wednesday, which will appear under a byline not my own to serve as publicity/extra material for a novel that also doesn’t bear my name. (I thought, being pseudonymous, that I wouldn’t have to do any publicity for this particular project. But, alas.)

Last night I did another 1200 words on the novel-in-progress, which I also can’t tell you about (yet), but which will, in fact, have my name on it. I think. I actually just this very morning signed and sent off the contracts for that book, which means I may be able to announce it in the next few weeks. (It’s one of three books eventually coming out from me — under my name! — that I can’t announce yet, and the need for discretion is eating me like a hungry hungry monkey.)

Speaking of books by other people: I read an old Lawrence Block paperback, Grifter’s Game (AKA Mona), which I loved, though the “hey daddy-o” old-school hipster lingo rather dated it. Nice con man/killer story though. Also enjoyed Enge’s World Fantasy nominee Blood of Ambrose. He does some wonderfully weird sword-and-sorcery. Tried a James Ellroy novel and bounced off it because the narrator was so aggressively unpleasant — and I like aggressively unpleasant narrators, usually! Not really reading anything just at the moment, therefore, though I dipped into Kessel’s Corrupting Dr. Nice a bit, prompted to browse through it after recommending it to a friend recently. Time to hit the library again. Maybe I’ll read the Dexter novels by Jeff Lindsay — love the show, so it’d be nice to see what inspired it.

In story news — I still sometimes read stories — I loved Rachel Swirsky’s “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window”. It’s got a wonderful structure and cool weird magic. Also liked K.J. Parker’s “Amor Vincit Omnia” in the same publication. It’s got all that good K.J. Parker stuff — but with actual magic!

In poetry news: My poem “Ghost” is up at Cast Macabre for your listening pleasure.

So many things… My new online serial novel The Nex started this week, and will continue for 18 weeks total, with a new chapter every Monday. I love this book, so I hope you’ll read it, and donate if you like what you see. (There aren’t as many fundraiser prizes — not even close — as I had for Broken Mirrors, alas. It’s easier to generate goodies for a series than a standalone…)

I went to LA for five wonderful days, starting last Friday. The weather was such a change from the rather cold and dreary summer in the Bay Area — it was 104 degrees the first couple of days I was there, and sunny every day but Tuesday. I stayed with my dear friends Jenn and Chris, who set me up in their spare room, which was cozy and wonderful. The bulk of each day was spent writing — I got about 27,000 words written on a new novel during the trip — but we also had fantastic meals and took some walks and watched TV and went to see a movie (Scott Pilgrim, which I quite enjoyed) and shopped and even went to a party inhabited by Hollywood people, with an invite courtesy of my producer friend Anne. I got to see one of my favorite film/TV actors play shuffleboard, discovered that screenwriters are oddly impressed by people who write books, and had some great talks (and ate much great food). A successful trip in every respect, though I did miss my wife and kid dearly.

Just before I left for LA, I sent out the first batch of donor prizes for Broken Mirrors — just the bookmarks so far. I’ll send out the rest as soon as I’m able. I expect to get the chapbook printed within the next week or so, and hope to have the hard copies of the novel by month’s end, and the postcards will go out around then, and the comic will be printed, and artist Dan Dos Santos is going to send me posters and prints (though it takes a little while to get those made)…. I still expect all prizes to go out by year’s end, most sooner!

Now I begin my reintegration into Real Life. Alas, vacation, I hardly knew you.

Last weekend I wrote a story — I think only the third one I’ve written this year — called “Shark’s Teeth”. It’s a fundraiser prize for people who donated forty bucks or more to Broken Mirrors. The story is set shortly after the events of Broken Mirrors, and might end up as chapter one of the sixth Marla novel (though some alterations would be required to make that work).

On my day off yesterday, since I had the wonder of Grandma babysitting, I got a lot more work done, revising an outline for a novel project, doing some research, working on “A Void Wrapped In a Smile”, laying out the chapbook for “Shark’s Teeth”, etc.

I hadn’t written much at all for the past two or three weeks, focusing instead on my TV watching, ice cream eating, watergun fighting, book reading, and playing with my kid skillsets instead. So it’s nice to be back into the literary groove. I’m gearing up for my little writing retreat this weekend, when I’ll flee to LA to stay in my friend Jenn’s spare room for a few days and produce copious quantities of wordage for a novel I still can’t tell you about because the contract isn’t signed and final. Almost, almost… (There will also, I’m sure, be nice meals and other diversions, but I plan to spend many hours per day writing. A rare treat, though I’ll miss my wife and kid.)

My wife’s been gone on a trip since Tuesday night, and though I’ve had heroic babysitting help from my mother-in-law the past couple of days, it’s still been an exhausting week. Partly because I’ve been staying up late puttering around my empty house until well after midnight, even though the boy has been getting up at 6 or 6:30. As a result I’ve been tired, distracted, cranky, and generally out of sorts. (Which led to me being cranky in the comments threads of blogs, something I rarely do when in my right mind.)

So last night I forced myself to go to bed around 10, and though I was awake in bed for a while, that was okay, because my mind turned toward the Marla Mason story I need to write (for the chapbook donor prize from the Broken Mirrors serial). I knew vaguely what it was about, but didn’t have any, you know, scenes, or characters, and now I have both. All that remains is the actual writing.

Which I won’t do for a while yet, as the boy and I are off to the Eat Real festival later today. Should be fun! And filling.

I hope all of you are out enjoying a wonderful weekend day, but if you happen to be looking at your computer instead, let me note: this is the last day to donate to my online serial Broken Mirrors if you want to get fundraiser prizes. You have until midnight Pacific time — so about 13 hours from now — to get goodies, or to have your name listed in the acknowledgments of the book.

In two weeks I start posting my SF adventure novel The Nex, which will run for 18 weeks. And if you head over there now, you can read my novelette “Dream Engine”, which is set earlier in the same world, and shares some characters with the novel (though the main character, and narrator, of The Nex doesn’t appear).

My amazing, wonderful, beautiful, goddess-like wife took the kid out with her this morning and let me sleep in as late as I wanted. I have apparently lost the ability to sleep past 10 am. Or even 9:45, really. Still: incredible decadence. Hope you’re all having a similarly fine time.