If you didn’t see my post on facebook or twitter, Dawn Vogel interviewed me for Mad Scientist Journal about my story Ludwig, which is forthcoming in the MSJ anthology I Didn’t Break The Lamp. I talk about felt presence, synaesthesia, and — of course! — imaginary friends.
Thanks to Dawn and Jeremy Zimmerman for letting me ramble on at length about some of my favourite topics.
I’m delighted to report the sale of my dark modern fantasy Pretty Little Vampires to Rooster Republic Press for their Not All Monsters anthology:
There are monsters in every woman’s life. And while maybe not ALL monsters are so bad, I want you to tell me about the dark and twisted ones.
PLV is a twisted but fun little tale of what happens when a woman, tired of her mundane office existence, gets rather more than she bargains for after believing something she reads on the internet. I’m really happy it has found a home with RRP. Expect this one out sometime in 2020.
I’m equally delighted to tell you that another story of mine, Ludwig, has sold to Mad Scientist Journal for their anthology I Didn’t Break the Lamp: Historical Accounts of Imaginary Acquaintances. This story is close to my heart: I was super excited by the open submissions call, and thrilled to bits to have made the cut. I’m sure Ludwig and Hedron would find lots to talk about, if they ever met.
Maybe one day they will.
This one is somewhat bittersweet, as MSJ has announced they are closing the journal. Especially with Jason Sizemore announcing that Apex Magazine is going on hiatus, it’s sad to be losing another source of stories to feed my incessant appetite. That said, with Jason focusing his prodigious editorial talents on books, and the DefCon One editorial team doing likewise, I’m sure I won’t run out of great things to read.
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Now both have launched, reviews of both Best of Apex Magazine Volume 1 and Clockwork Phoenix 5 are available. Here are a few links for the interested:
CP5 could use some reviews up at Amazon, so if you’ve read it please consider posting a review. Every one helps!
I’ve noticed that it’s the time of year for award eligibility, so here is what I’ve got in the running for 2016 awards.
This isn’t Skook, but it looks like him.
I had a slow year on the writing front, but She Gave Her Heart, He Took Her Marrow is eligible in the short story category and available to read for free (or you can listen to the podcast). Should you wish to cast some love in the direction of Hedron, Chancery and Skook, I could bathe in the warm fuzzies like a happy baby sea flap flap.
It also turns out this marks my first year of eligibility for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. My thanks to the moderators, especially David Walton, for helping me confirm that and getting my name up on the list.
Just being on there feels like an achievement!
I was delighted to receive my contributor copy of Clockwork Phoenix 5 a couple of days ago. It is a stunning book, and I’m not just saying that because I’m (more than slightly) biased. It arrived at work, and a couple of my colleagues were driven to remark on how nice it felt — the print quality is excellent. Although I’ve had an electronic copy for a while, I’ve been saving the other stories for when the physical copy turned up, and so far Jason Kimble‘s The Wind At His Back indicates a fantastic collection.
This book will be released on the 5th April, and can be pre-ordered direct here (same as first link above), or from Amazon US, Amazon UK, Barnes & Noble and a few other places. If you follow the first link in this post, you’ll find all the pre-order links.
A Clockwork Phoenix 5 launch reading will take place on April 5th at 19:30 in The Brooklyn Commons Cafe at 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, New York as part of the New York Review of Science Fiction/Hour of the Wolf Reading series. Mike Allen be there, and so will seven of the book’s 21 contributors: Rob Cameron, C. S. E. Cooney, Barbara Krasnoff, Carlos Hernandez, Sonya Taaffe, Shveta Thakrar, and A. C. Wise. All will read excerpts from their Clockwork Phoenix 5 stories. I can’t make it, owing to the presence of a large, wet, wobbly thing in which one finds fishes and whales and crabs and octopuses.
And, if you’re in book buying mood, Best of Apex Volume 1 is now in stock at Amazon UK, and presumably elsewhere. This book reprints my story from the December issue, She Gave Her Heart, He Took Her Marrow.
Haar is what we call the sea fog here in the north east of Scotland. There are other places that have similar banks of dense, white cloud rolling in from the sea, of course; the phenomenon is not limited to this part of the world. I’ve seen something similar in San Francisco.
It plays a big part in She Gave Her Heart, He Took Her Marrow, which will be published in Apex Magazine next month, and is as much a part of the land here as the ever-shifting dunes, the tank traps and pillboxes, and the extinct volcanoes.
It was particularly splendid this week, sitting a mile or so offshore and dull grey in shadow but bright, brilliant white in the sun. I tried to take a picture, but I have yet to manage to capture an image of the haar in its full glory.
The thick grey band across the horizon is the haar. It’s remarkably stable, and just sits there until conditions are right for it to come into shore.
Apex has announced a subscription drive, with a target of $5,000. As I write this, the funding rocket is showing less than $1,000.
You can find direct links to the subscription links here. It doesn’t cost much to subscribe. Most of the material is online for free anyway, but by subscribing you help make sure that there will be more great new stories from emerging and established authors. If you can’t subscribe, or can but want to do a bit more, you can always add some funds to the tip jar at the bottom of the subscription drive page.
This is me on a sea-kayaking trip last year with Frood at Portknockie, in which we were ably guided by Sam Weir of Kayak Scotland:
That grin on my face is a result of being encouraged into doing things I had no idea I was able to do with the experience I had, and coming out the other side with vastly increased confidence and a burning desire to get out there, do more and go further, and have even more fun in the process.
Now you have a good idea of what my face looked like when I found out that my story She Gave Her Heart, He Took Her Marrow has been selected by Jason Sizemore and Lesley Connor for Best of Apex Volume 1. There might have been some jumping around squealing, too.
Just a bit.
To help fund the project, the Apex team is holding a raffle for a place on Carrie Cuinn’s Editing for Writers workshop, worth $100. The course is 4 weeks long, and should be a goodie.
“Editing 101” – AKA “Editing for Writers”. Identifying parts of a story, tenses and perspectives, narrative arcs, and other elements that are potentially affected by the editing process. Definitions, editing marks, using (and creating) style sheets, important style manuals, levels of editing, and fact-checking. The basics of copyediting: concepts and skills necessary for line editing (also called copyediting), relying mainly on the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th ed; editing vs. proofreading; tips for spotting tricky errors. The basics of developmental editing: what it is and isn’t, including the specifics of developmental editing in fiction. We’ll also cover rates, and working with clients, including querying about edits, maintaining an author’s voice, and related services.
As you may already know, Carrie published my story What The Water Gave Her in the Dagan Books anthology Fish, which was a huge deal for me. Carrie is putting herself through school at the moment, supporting herself with her freelance author and editor work, while raising her young son. This is a great opportunity to buy a chance to take what promises to be a great course for the sum of $3, which is less than a pint of beer or a large coffee at Haymarket’s AMT. Apex will split what they get from the raffle 50/50 with Carrie. Buying a ticket will help support both Apex and Carrie, and put you in with a chance of winning the top prize. Other prizes on offer include print copies of Women and Other Constructs by Carrie Cuinn, Starve Better by Nick Mamatas, To Each Their Darkness by Gary A. Braunbeck, and For Exposure: The Life and Times of a Small Press Publisher by Jason Sizemore.
Go on. You know you want to.
The last couple of months have been HECTIC. Work has been super-busy, I’ve been struggling to find time for editing and writing, and we’re moving house. I’ve had almost no time for physical exercise, which always makes me cranky, and at times the effort of trying to deal with it all while remaining suitably optimistic when in company has been almost beyond this introvert.
I have a friend whose favourite method of reassurance when things are weighing me down is to say, “A lot can change in a couple of years.” He’s right of course. As if I needed proof, I received some amazing news last week.
My short story She Gave Her Heart, He Took Her Marrow was bought by Jason Sizemore for Apex Magazine. This piece means a lot to me, and it would be an understatement to say I’m chuffed to bits. Selling a story to Apex is like nine Christmases and birthdays all rolled into one.
I’d be remiss not to mention the various people whose stellar feedback helped along the way, including Cat Rambo and the other students on last year’s Advanced Workshop, my fellow Orbiter 6 members and, of course, that ragtag bunch of talented reprobates who form the Altered Symmetry crit group.
Yesterday, Frood and I went to the beach to say goodbye to the pillbox. I’ve been taking pictures of the pillbox every now and then since we moved here, recording the changing shape of the dune around and behind it. We’re moving south of the city at the end of the week, so it’s unlikely I will be a regular visitor from now on. I wanted to take one last look, and it was such a beautiful day.
Here’s my happy place. Standing on the beach, toes in the sand, dreaming of other worlds and the words I need to tell them.
Although I’ve been putting words on paper since I could hold a pen (I shall dig out some of my earliest journals sometime), I have written purely for myself, not with a view to submitting to market. I started doing that only recently, and I’m still finding out where my strengths and weaknesses lie when writing for others.
Some of them are obvious, such as the struggle I face balancing too much exposition with confusing prose, when part of what I want to do is conjure ambiguous worlds where nothing is definite. My crit groups are invaluable for dealing with these kinds of problems.
Other problems are harder to pin down. My short stories often grow metaphorical arms and legs and tentacles, before ignoring the limitations of limbs and sprouting hyphae all over the place. I end up trapped in something like a web built by a swarm of caffeine-fuelled spiders in a memory palace the size of Hannibal Lecter’s.
If I were writing long form, this would be more useful. Is it, therefore, a good thing or a bad thing? I’m still undecided, but am going to treat it as a good thing for the time being. At the moment, I would rather be in the position of having to cut than to add, except where my crit buddies suggest I can have clarification without straying into wordiness.
A short story I started with a nominal project target of 5,000 words has reached almost 10,000 words with no sign of stopping. It has pages of research and its own Scapple folder. I came back to this piece after several months away from writing, and opened it with a notional inclination towards abandonment. I read what I’d done, and I liked it too much to give up. There’s a story here I want to tell, and whether it ends up as 15k words I cut back to 7k, or 20k I work up to a full length novel, finishing the story at whatever length it turns out to be is something I have to do.
I’ve heard it said that a story ends up the length it needs to be. We’ll call this an experiment.
It’s only a couple of weeks until BristolCon, where I’ll be helping to launch Looking Landwards, the NewCon Press anthology containing my story When Shepherds Dream of Electric Sheep. As I’m still in the early days of my writing career, when every sale feels like a miracle, I’m a little over-excited. There aren’t many conventions in the UK compared to the busy American schedule, and I live so far north I’ve only been to one thus far.
Here’s the official publicity for the book. I’m sharing a ToC with some amazing people. Last week — despite a possibly fractured, and definitely painful wrist — I signed a ridiculous number of sheets of paper for the limited edition hardcover. I can’t wait to see this book and read the other stories.
With the impending crises of climate change, scarcity of water, dwindling energy reserves and spiraling global populations, the effective management of our land and the food it produces has never been more relevant. Established in 1938 by a small group of far-seeing and enthusiastic engineers and agriculturalists, the Institution of Agricultural Engineers provides a professional nexus for the scientists, technologists, engineers, and managers working in the many and varied forms of land-based industry.
In 1988 the IAgrE marked its 50th anniversary with a publication that considered the changing face of farming and agricultural engineering over the previous half century. In 2013, to mark their 75th anniversary, they have chosen to commission a book that looks forward at what the future might hold. To help them achieve this, they approached NewCon Press.
Looking Landwards represents NewCon Press’ first ever open submissions anthology. We have been overwhelmed by the response, receiving submissions not only from within the UK but also from the USA, Australia, mainland Europe, Africa, and Asia; from professional writers and would-be writers, from scientists and engineers who are actively involved in dealing with the book’s themes to people who have simply been inspired by them. Looking Landwards features the very best of these stories. Twenty-three works of science fiction and speculation that dare to look to the future and examine what lies ahead for farming, for agricultural engineering and for all of us.
Contents:
- Introduction by Andy Newbold and Chris Whetnall of the IAgrE
- The Blossom Project – M Frost
- Contraband – Terry Martin
- When Shepherds Dream of Electric Sheep – Sam Fleming
- Inversion Centre – Darren Goossens
- Ode to an Earthworm – Gareth D Jones
- A Touch of Frost – Renee Stern
- The World Coyote Made – Jetse de Vries
- Earthen – Alicia Cole
- Soul Food – Kim Lakin-Smith
- Charlie’s Ant – Adrian Tchaikovsky
- Cellular Level – J E Bryant
- My Oasis Tower – Holly Ice
- Throw Back – Gill Shutt
- Mary on the Edge – Steven Pirie
- Landward – Den Patrick
- Long Indeed Do We Live… – Storm Constantine
- Tractor Time – Kate Wilson
- Veggie Moon – Neal Wooten
- Wheat – Kevin Burke
- Blight – Dev Agarwal
- Black Shuck – Henry Gee
- A Season – Rebecca J. Payne
- The Last Star – Nigel Edwards
- About the Authors
Released 28th October 2013, Looking Landwards will be published as:
A5 paperback (ISBN 978-1-907069-59-8) Price: £11.99 (UK), $20.99 (USA)
A numbered, limited edition hardback, each copy signed by all the contributing authors(ISBN: 978-1-907069-58-1) Price: £29.99To find out more about the Institution of Agricultural Engineers and their work, visit them at: http://www.iagre.org/about/about.
