I was reminded by SFWA that members have until Tuesday to finalise their nominations for the Awards. Mostly, I was all but done–I wished I’d had time to read more novels, but, alas, most of what I read last year wasn’t published in 2010.

I had more time this year for short fiction, and thanks to the bebook, managed to read more than last year, by downloading stuff which looked cool from the SFWA forums (and there was plenty of it). Voting for the Nebulas is the biggest honour and privilege I derive from being a member of SFWA (most of the rest being really focused on the US), and I fully intend to make the most of it 🙂

Meanwhile, if you’re a member of SFWA and unsure what to vote for, may I suggest:
-“Alternate Girl’s Expatriate Life”, by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz (Short Story): a great story of immigration, alienation and man vs. machine. Available on the SFWA forums.
-“Flying in the Face of God” by Nina Allan (Novelette): about space explorations, its cost and its impact on those who are left behind. Available here as a PDF from the TTA press website.
-“The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers from Beneath the Queen’s Window” by Rachel Swirsky (Novella): a tale of a woman summoned again and again from beyond death to practise magic–dealing with loss, prejudice and the evolution of cultures and countries, and a great reversal on the “summoning demons” trope. Available here from Subterranean.

(my own stuff is here if you feel like trying it out: “The Jaguar House in Shadow”, an Aztec alt-hist novelette on friendship, betrayal and honour, has already garnered favorable reviews from Locus, and at least one nomination; and of course I’d be pleased as punch if you deemed it worthy)

So…

Apparently, Harbinger of the Storm should be out in the US–and on all good electronic platforms (Kindle, Nook, etc.) as well.

You can read an excerpt here. Basically: murder and mayhem in the imperial palace. Mihmatini and Teomitl get into trouble. Oh, and star-demons, which is always good for sheer terror.

Go forth, buy, read, and so on, and so on. Meanwhile, tonight is Thai restaurant night.

Writer friend T.L. Morganfield has just revamped her website with fabulous illustrations of Aztec characters from her novel–go check them out!

Congrats to fellow T-Party member Gaie Sebold, who sold her fantasy novel Babylon Steel plus two sequels to Solaris (it’s set in a brothel, which should make for a nice change).
And I see Patty Jansen has won WOTF for this quarter, which is awesome.

(on the not-so-great front, I also see ROF is dead. Blech. There goes a good market and a great source of fiction. Darn economic climate).

The awesome Scott H. Andrews has reminded me that tomorrow marks the second anniversary of Beneath Ceaseless Skies‘ launch.
I always have a soft spot for BCS: not only did they publish a fair amount of my fiction, they also fill in the hole between plot-driven fantasy and more serious stuff. The prose is pretty, but it doesn’t get in the way of the story. And I’ve yet to find a bad story in there. Scott publishes a great variety of stuff, from Old West to Eighteenth-Century Paris, from China to Medieval London–and there’s bound to be something you enjoy in there.
If you’re just dipping in, may I suggest checking out “The Isthmus Variation” by Kris Millering (creepy as heck, perfectly paced in its reveals), or Yoon Ha Lee’s “The Territorialist” (awesome world building and beautiful prose), among the more recent offerings?
And, of course, there’s the anniversary double issue, which boasts Richard Parks and Tony Pi in its table of contents.

Books read recently:
–Unseen Academicals: the latest Terry Pratchett about the wizards of UU playing football. A lot of the pleasures of the Pratchett books currently is the reccurrence of the main players such as Lady Margoletta, Sam Vimes, Rincewind and the witches, and this one is mostly the same. There’s a couple of hilarious set pieces (the chicken-powered computer is awesome), and the new characters are nice, though not all are memorable (I loved Glenda, wasn’t such a big fan of Juliet, who’s too good to be true, though I got it was the point).
–The Sea Thy Mistress: Elizabeth Bear was kind enough to provide me with an ARC of this one, and I leapt at the chance. The Edda of Burdens is one of my absolute favourite series out there: All the Windwracked Stars had this awesome meld of technology, magic and post-apocalypse, and By the Mountain Bound has all the gravitas and sense of impending doom of the Norse epics. The prose is always a pleasure to read, and there’s a couple of really strong characters (the wolf Mingan, and Muire, the least of the waelcyrge, who learns that she can grow and come into her own). Short, non-spoilery version: the book is made of awesome, and you should go read it and its predecessors. It’s available for pre-orders now; I think it’s not out until Jan 2011.
(more spoilery discussion under the cut)
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-The very first Angry Robot podcast: set to be a monthly affair featuring AR and genre-related stuff. The inaugural episode features Marc Gascoigne and Lee Harris (who are apparently having loads of fun with this), speaking among others about their new releases and the future of publishing. You can subscribe here (itunes subscriptions forthcoming).
-Many congratulations to Gareth L. Powell, SF writer, occasional co-author and great all-around guy, for signing up with Solaris for his novel The Recollection. Congratulate him here.
-Interesting post over at I09 on “Is avoiding tropes the same thing as telling fresh stories?”
-Janice Hardy has a contest to win an ARC of Blue Fire, second book in her (MG) Healing Wars trilogy. Also, if you’re interested in different approaches, you can see the covers of the US, UK and German editions of books 1 and 2 here.
-Jeff Spock writes about stories for casual games. Fascinating stuff about why cliché and archetypes are good for you.

On a matter tangential to Eight Against Reality, the publisher, Panverse, is having a kickstarter funding appeal, where you can win copies of their books–and more importantly support the awesome Dario Ciriello in putting a novella market into orbit. Check it out!

–Rochita Loenen-Ruiz has a great story in the new issue of Interzone, “Alternate Girl’s Expatriate Life”, about exiles from Metal Town and the expatriate life of a woman unlike any others. I read two versions of this, and it kept getting stronger. I have no doubt the final version is going to kick some serious ass.

-Friend Christopher Kastensmidt gets interviewed by MG Ellington over at the Apex Blog about his fantasy series set in colonial Brazil, The Elephant and Macaw Banner.

-Many friends get HMs in Gardner Dozois’s Year’s Best Science Fiction (the HM section is visible on amazon.com). Notably Rochita Loenen-Ruiz for her horror SF “59 Beads”, T.L. Morganfield for her alt-hist “The Happiest Place on Earth”, Sara Genge for her much-noted gender exploration “As Women Fight”, Juliette Wade for her first professional sale “Cold Words”, Stephanie Burgis for her quiet frontier fantasy “True Names”, J. Kathleen Cheney for her family Chinese fantasy “Early Winter, Jenli Village”, Marshall Payne for his gonzo SF “Sausages”, and the unstoppable Mary Robinette Kowal for basically every short story she published in 2009. And others, too (my eyes started to cross after a while)–and many other familiar names. Slowly and inexorably, my f-list is taking over the world.
(I have mentions too, but I’ll save them for another post, the point of this one being shameless plugging of awesome people I know).

Writing is by nature a solitary activity; and writing in a language that’s not your own in a country where it’s barely spoken is pretty much as solitary as it gets. Living in Paris, writing in English, I knew I wasn’t going to have a face-to-face workshop (no critical mass), and I speedily turned online, to big places like Hatrack, Critters and OWW. The trouble is that people outgrow them, move on, and that after a year or so your crit partners might have radically changed (assuming you ever had them in the first place). I was lucky to find some awesome people there (rcloenen-ruiz, to mention only one), but they never had the tightness and cohesiveness I was looking for.

Then I got an invitation from writing buddy T.L. Morganfield to join Written in Blood, a new group with the avowed aim to keep its members together and committed through thick and thin. Three years later, we’re still here, still going strong. We have critted a dozen novels and a host of short stories. Members have had pro sales, been nominated for awards, published novels–and even, in founder Dario’s case, started up a small press, Panverse Publishing. We figured it was time to celebrate our achievements, and to do what writers do, which is put some of our fiction out there. Accordingly, here is our first anthology, Eight Against Reality:

Stories run the gamut from humorous SF to mythical fantasy. Some have been published in pro and semi-pro markets; some are all-new, but they’re all fantastic.

If you like the excerpts below, you can order a copy here. Or… you can win one.

Dario very kindly provided us with two contributors’ copies, and, like fellow WIB Janice Hardy, I’m throwing it into the pot. Leave a comment here, at my website or on LJ (anything that’s clearly not spam will do, like “I want a copy” :D), and you can get a copy (signed and personalised if you feel like it). The offer is good wherever you live in the world; you have a week from now (until the 6th of July). [*]

Afterwards, I’ll put together my best impersonation of a pseudo-random algorithm and pick a name out of the metaphorical hat.

And here are the shiny excerpts:
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