Over at the Super-Sekrit Clubhouse, Marshall Payne interviews Vylar Kaftan, about writing, life in California, and her short story “Break the Vessel”:
Interview with Vylar Kaftan

The easiest part [of crafting a story] is characters. They just appear on the page and flesh themselves out like magic. Possibly because I’ve been people-watching forever. The hardest part is letting go of my own ridiculously high standards and accepting that things are always, always lost in translation from imagination to words—and that’s just the nature of the beast.

(and while you’re at it, check out the rest of the Super-Sekrit clubhouse: fun cartoons, birthday posts, and more neat interviews)

Over at his blog The Willpower Engine, Codex founder Luc Reid interviews Nancy Fulda, creator of AnthologyBuilder, the do-it-yourself anthology website (and writer, editor, and awesome Villa Diodati member). There’s some fascinating stuff about balancing work and family, as well as behind-the-scenes on the creation and maintenance of the website.

Entrepreneurial Motivation and Creating a Business from Scratch: An Interview with Nancy Fulda.

Strange Horizons is having their annual fund drive, raising money to support the magazine. Thanks to John Scalzi‘s prompting, they have already raised a whooping $12,000, but if you want to donate, there’s still time. Lots of nifty prizes (including signed books), and you’ll support a very good magazine.
If you need more convincing, might I suggest heading over and read one of the following fine stories?

• “The Spider in You” by Sean E. Markey
  • We kept our god under the sink, in an old aquarium, so it wouldn’t spill its web all over the house. We didn’t tell you because you were so curious. Our daughter: you are like an otter, or a hummingbird. How would you stand against such a monster as our god?
• “Nira and I” by Shweta Narayan
  • Nira and I are with Hemal on the day she dies. She is teaching us a clapping song game, a remembering game. She is winning.
• “Another End of the Empire” by Tim Pratt
  • He sighed. “So I’m expected to send my Fell Rangers to the mountains, raze the village, leave no stone upon a stone, enslave the women, and kill all the younglings to stop this dire prophecy from coming to pass.”

You can donate here.

My friend and critique partner Janice Hardy, whose wonderfully dark YA novel The Shifter is coming out in October, has a contest on her blog to win an ARC:

If you’ve been to my website, you’ve noticed I love chickens. I can’t say why, I just find them hysterically adorable. So for the next ten days, send me your very best chicken jokes. The joke that makes me snarf something out my nose from laughing so hard wins a signed ARC (advance reading copy) of The Shifter.

To enter, put your entry at the bottom of Janice’s post.
(and if you don’t win, I highly recommend pre-ordering the book on amazon. It’s the pulse-racing story of a girl who can shift pain into people, and who is desperately trying to keep her head low–but finds herself faced with a dilemma when her ability turns out to be the only thing that might help her save her sister)

I was planning to put up a worldcon post today, but I’ve clogged the blog enough as it is. Tomorrow it is, then.

Lazy lazy Saturday (except for the ironing, the dishwashing and the cleaning, ouch).

I managed to find a copy of the Year’s Best Science Fiction in one of Paris’s English bookshops; and boy, did it feel weird seeing my name in the table of contents. It’s now on my desk, to remind me I need to write more ambitious short stories (not that “Butterfly, Falling at Dawn” really falls into the ambitious category, but several of the stories in there do).

Flipping through the HMs, I noted several names I noticed: in particular, the Villa Diodati crew is taking over the world: Sara Genge has two (“The Gong” in Weird Tales, “Prayers for an Egg” in Asimov’s), Steve Gaskell one (“Micro Expressions” in Cosmos Online), Jeff Spock one (“Everything that Matters” in Interzone), Benjamin Rosembaum one (“True Names” in Fast Forward 2, cowritten with Cory Doctorow), and Benevolent Dictator Ruth Nestvold a whooping four (“Troy and the Aliens” in Abyss and Apex, “An Act of Conviction” in Helix, “Mars: A Traveller’s Guide” in F&SF, and “The Rivers of Eden” in Futurismic, co-written with Jay Lake).
Lots of other familiar names as well: TL. Morganfield (“Night Bird Soaring”, the same one that’s nominated for the Sidewise Awards), Ken Scholes, Mary Robinette Kowal, Vaughan Stanger, Tony Pi, Gord Sellar…

Woohoo!

As usual, trying to do four or five things at the same time: specifically, edit a new Xuya short “The Jaguar House, in Shadow”, plan a new one (aka Aztecs in space), fill in a form, and return crits. Everything’s going well for the moment, though it’s only a matter of time until some balls drop…

From James Maxey:

Followers of my blogs, and the readers who read the acknowledgement pages of my books, will know that I lost my partner Laura Herrmann to breast cancer in May 2005. I’ve been interested in cancer research since then and have privately made contributions to cancer related charities, but I’ve never put out any sort of appeal on my blogs to solicit for this cause, until now.

Last week, I received several cases of my latest book Dragonseed. One of the ongoing themes of Dragonseed is the idea of healing, both from physical and spiritual wounds. Within the book there’s a miraculous object called a dragonseed: Eat the seed, and all your injuries will be healed. Even your oldest scars will vanish.

I have some science fiction hoodoo underlying the dragonseed. The technology to create a pill that will both diagnose and cure any illness is pretty far out in our future, if it exists at all. But, the part of this that isn’t science fiction or hoodoo is that I believe that technology has the power to work miracles. We have MRI and PET scans that can look into a human body and see it working in minute detail. We have developed surgical tools and techniques that can remove diseased tissues from a human body without doing undo damage to healthy tissues. My father had a heart attack recently, and the doctors had to place stents in his arteries. The incision to perform the operation was small enough to cover with a band-aid. And, right now, there are researchers who are taking apart cancer cells molecule by molecule to understand the genetic engines that drive them to a degree unimaginable only a few decades ago.

We live in an age of miracles because we live in an age of knowledge. Modern computers are finally powerful enough to process all the complex data contained within a human cell. The only barriers remaining between our present understanding a cure for any disease you can name are time and money.

These are not insignificant barriers. New technologies are always expensive. And, to be blunt, the world has a limited supply of really smart people, and a nearly unlimited supply of problems for them to solve. For better or worse, money is one of the most important driving forces of where the smart people focus their energies. In the sixties, it was decided we would put a man on the moon. We threw money at the problem, and produced a glut of rocket scientists. In the eighties and nineties, computer technology was fed enormous sums of money by the stock market, and smart people focused their energies on designing hardware and software, and with the result that today my cell phone has more memory than I do. There is a lot of money today flowing into health care, but only a fraction of this money goes to research of any given disease. I’d like to invite you to increase the fraction going to breast cancer research, both due to my personal connection to the cause, and because I think that this is the right moment in history to truly make a difference. I firmly believe this is a disease than can be cured within our lifetime. I don’t know if one day we will simply swallow a magic pill and be healed, but I do know that the day will come when we will be able to profile any cancer cell and match it with the appropriate drug to wipe it out.

To help bring this day closer, if only by a minute or two, I’d like to announce my “Books for Breasts” promotion. Anyone who contributes to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation through the “Team Dragon” fundraising page will get a free signed copy of Dragonseed.

You can contribute to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer foundation by clicking here. This will take you to my personal fundraising page; just click the button that says “support James.” Then, to get your signed copy of Dragonseed, just email me your mailing address to nobodynovelwriter@yahoo.com. I’ve set aside 50 copies for this cause; if I give them all away by the end of July, I’m pretty sure I can get my hands on another 50.

I’ve set up a modest goal of raising $300 through this promotion. This means I need to average contributions of $6, which is less than you’d pay for the book on Amazon. However, I’ll send you a book for a contribution in any amount, even if it’s just a buck. Spend a buck, get a book, save some breasts. Who’s with me?

• Scott H. Andrews’s zine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, has now started taking tax-deductible donations. BCS publishes fiction I always enjoy: strong characters and beautiful language in a variety of secondary-world settings (Western frontier, Arabian, Japanese). It’s been a runner-up for the Million Writers Awards for Best New Online Magazine, and deservedly so. If you want to support, go here.
  (I am somewhat biased as they’re publishing some of my fiction, but I do enjoy the mag consistently, which is rare)
• Fellow VDer Rochita Loenen-Ruiz has just arrived in Clarion West: she’ll post regular updates of her experience on her LJ: her first post can be found here. She’s also got a post over at Fantasy, “In Anticipation of Clarion West”. Finally, her interview of writer Marshall Payne is up at Mindflights.
• Over at the Shine Anthology blog, guest contributor Jacques Barcia provides an article on Optimistic SF in Brazil

Huge congrats to T.L. Morganfield, whose story “Night Bird Soaring” is a finalist for the Sidewise Awards !!!
 

On his sixth birthday, Totyoalli’s parents took him to the holy city to see the Emperor Cuauhtemoc, but the plane ride proved the most exciting part. He kept his nose to the window, taking in the vast lands of the One World, from the snow-capped mountains of his home in the northern provinces to the open plains of Teotihuacan. He marveled at the miniature cities and cars passing below. All his life he’d dreamt of flying, ever since the first time he’d seen a bird gliding through the air.

From the airport, they took a cab to the royal palace on Lake Texcoco. Tenochtitlan, the single largest city in the world, sprawled around it for miles. The cab buzzed across one of the royal causeways, the water blue and shimmering in the hot sun. Inside the walled royal complex stood the Great Temple, meticulously maintained by a crew of thousands, its sacred Sun Stone keeping watch over the visiting crowds.

Read more on GUD’s website.