Angels and Hell and Grass and Excrement

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.