Silvia Moreno-Garcia interviews me at Innsmouth Free Press on Servant, writing in other cultures and my pet history peeves.
The Shine competition has gone live: basically, guess the next sentence AND guess the story. See if you can spot the collab I did with Gareth L. Powell 🙂
And chapter 2 of Servant of the Underworld is now live at My Favourite Books.
So, first off, this is the result of having too much spare time the weekend before last and discovering the joys of imovie:
Yup, I made a book trailer. Go on, take a look, it’s only one minute long *grin*
Makes you want to read the book? Well, you can also drop here at My Favourite Books and read the first chapter. They’ll be posting the first five chapters of the book, one per day.
(while you’re at it, you can also head over to SFSignal, which is running similar excerpts from fellow AR author Lavie Tidhar’s steampunk fantasy The Bookman)
Should keep you busy until the book comes out in January 🙂
Meanwhile, I’ll go back to Harbinger, where a lot of innocent people are about to find out how dangerous Tenochtitlan can be on a bad day…
I’ve been sitting on this one for a loooong while, but I’ve finally been allowed to make it public: the collaboration I wrote with Gareth L. Powell, “The Church of Accelerated Redemption”, has sold to Jetse de Vries’ Shine Anthology, due out 2010 from Solaris.
This one was one heck of a hard one. Many many thanks to Marshall Payne and the BF for reading it at least two or three times, and to Jetse for having such awesome rewrite suggestions. And to Gareth for being such fun to work with.
No snippet, as Jetse has a competition planned. Watch the Shine anthology blog on Monday, 30th November for more details 🙂
I’ve just confirmed this with the SFWA Awards Rule Committee: Interzone and Black Static stories are eligible for the Nebulas, by virtue of their electronic publication through Fictionwise. So any magazine issue that was uploaded to Fictionwise during the nomination period is eligible.
So, if you’ve always wanted to nominate cool stuff like Sarah L. Edwards’ poignant “Lady of the White-Spired City” (IZ 222), Al Robertson’s beautiful “Fishermen” (IZ 221), or Jeff Spock’s hilarious “Everything that Matters” (IZ 219), now’s the time to go ahead and nominate!
I believe this makes issues 217 to 225 eligible for nominations.
I don’t often ask for this, but could y’all spread the word over the Internet? Obviously, it’s not widespread knowledge yet…
OK, I suck at that shameless self-promotion stuff, but I figure I’ll just follow the movement, and write down the stuff I published that’s eligible for the Nebulas–in case anyone is interested.
If you want to read any of the stories below that are not available online, feel free to contact me, and I’ll be glad to provide a copy (whether you’re a SFWA member or not).
Novelettes
Short Stories
FYI, if I had to pick favourites, they’d be “After the Fire”, “On Horizon’s Shores”, “Golden Lilies” and “The Dragon’s Tears” (which I’m still absurdly attached to even though I wrote the first draft of it about 3 years ago).
I’ll be off to take a look at my reading list and see what I can nominate myself.
EDIT: added categories…
My Servant of the Underworld proofs have just arrived, and I have a little over a week to check them. I think I’m going to be scarce on the internet this week…
But, OMG, it looks like a real book. It’s both elating and scary (as in, oh dear, I can’t hide behind other TOC-mates anymore).
The BF’s only complaint so far was a lack of cover art 🙂 (which should arrive sometime in the week, I’m told. Another reason to be freaking out…)
My story “After the Fire” is now up at Apex Magazine, as part of the special World SF issue edited by Lavie Tidhar. It’s, er, sort of a post-apocalypse story, set in a China where the Empire never fell. Well, sort of set in China…
In her dreams, Jiaotan saw Father: hands outstretched, the flesh of the fingers fraying away to reveal the yellowed, tapered shape of bones, the deep-set eyes bulging in their sockets, pleading, begging her to take him away.
“You’re dead,” she whispered. “Rest in peace, with the Ancestors–watch over us from Heaven.”
But the Ancestors were bones and dried sinews, shambling upright from the wreck of their graves–anger shining in the hollows of their eye sockets as they walked past the devastated gardens, the withered trees, the dried-out waterfalls and rivers. And clouds marched across Heaven, a billowing mass of sickly grey spreading to cut the path of The Red Carp as it rose away from Earth…
The issue also includes Nir Yaniv and Aleksandar Žiljak, and an interview with Maylasian writer Tunku Halim (courtesy of the tireless Charles Tan)
I workshopped “After the Fire” (as “In Our Minds, In Our Hearts”) on OWW rather close to the deadline for handing it in–so many thanks to Mark HĂĽnken, Tom Crosshill, Sylvia Volk and Max Griffin for helping me whip this into shape. And thanks to Lavie for the editing and the title help, as well as giving me the opportunity to write in a genre and a length I don’t often try.
And don’t forget that The Apex Book of World SF has been released, giving you a chance to read “The Lost Xuyan Bride” on paper alongside many other tales from cool writers such as MĂ©lanie Fazi, Jetse de Vries and Kaaron Warren. You can read a sample of the book online, Aleksandar Ĺ˝iljak’s “An Evening In the City Coffeehouse, With Lydia On My Mind”–as Lavie puts it, a mixture of Boogie Nights and Men in Black.
So, now that I’ve got some decent sleep…
Spent the afternoon of yesterday at the BF’s PhD defence: he was working on quantum physics (entangled-photon sources, to be precise). I knew just enough quantum physics that the defence was somewhat familiar, but sadly not enough to actually understand most of what was going on. The question session lasted one hour (at which point they lost me completely), but in the end they awared him his PhD, with a Very Honorable Mention–which was pretty much the highest grade they could give him, so much happiness.
Then there was the cocktail, and the evening with drinks at Matthieu’s place–and I went to bed completely knackered. Slowly emerging now 🙂
-Sent revised version of Foreign Ghosts (the Xuya novel) to agent, and am now working on an appealing blurb they can use for marketing (and struggling a bit since this is multi-character in a weird setting).
-Updated the Servant of the Underworld page. I can haz blurbs!
-Got my synopsis for Book 2 of Servant of the Underworld approved by Angry Robot towers: it will tentatively be called Harbinger of the Storm. After much brainstorming, it looks like the series title has settled onto Obsidian and Blood.
Looks like book 2 of Obsidian and Blood is going to be the next project on my plate (right after I tackle the revisions for Servant of the Underworld).
Have I mentioned the bit where I feel perpetually swamped? I had some inkling that might be the lot of the novelist, but I didn’t think it would come quite that fast…
Finished off one short story this morning, temporary title “In Our Minds, In Our Hearts”. Another dark sf one, 2800 words. I did a first cutting pass, which I’ll probably need to take up again, but in the meantime I put it up on OWW for crits (it’s for a market the submission deadline of which is fast approaching, so I’m going to have to move a little faster on this one…).
Here’s a snippet:
In her dreams, Jiaotan saw Father–hands outstretched, the flesh of the fingers fraying away to reveal the yellowed, tapering shapes of bones, the deepset eyes bulging in their orbits, pleading, begging her to take him away.
“You’re dead,” she whispered. “Rest in peace, with the Ancestors–watch over us from Heaven.”
But the Ancestors were bones and dried sinews, shambling upright from the wreck of their graves–anger shining in the hollows of their eye-sockets as they walked past the devastated gardens, the withered trees, the dried-out waterfalls and rivers. And clouds marched across Heaven, a billowing mass of sickly grey–spreading to cut the path of The Golden Orchid as it rose away from Earth…
#
Jiaotan woke up with a start, instinctively bending over to cough out the fluid that blocked her lungs. But something held her–pressed against her as tightly as the embrace of Earth.
In other news, I finally got the website to display the navigation links below individual posts like this one, which involved some hacking of the php, accompanied by some forays into the WordPress documentation (in case you’re wondering what I’m talking about, it’s the small “Next Post/Previous Post” thingies below the frame of individual posts, which weren’t included in the standard free WordPress theme I based the website on).
Also updated the Servant of the Underworld page with information for preordering on Waterstone’s: this one felt weird, because Waterstone’s was the bookshop where I bought everything while in the UK, so being listed there is definitely peculiar…
I have no idea why Saturday mornings are the ones reserved for the website coding: you’d think that after coding all week I’d be bored with it, but apparently I’m a glutton for punishment…
Some tidbits about the writing of “On Horizon’s Shores” can be found here at Edmund Schubert’s blog. As usual, Edmund will also run tidbits on all the other stories, which are always interesting (and which, I, for one, am very much looking forward to reading).
