…s this weekend and Eschacon in Amsterdam Nov 5-7. Come say hi if you’re around, I’ll be quite happy to chat and sign stuff. As Zen says , Eschacon is now associated with a great deal of sadness, as writer Rochita Loenen-Ruiz has lost her husband and the father of her children last week. The fundraiser we set up to help her through this time of need is still ongoing–we have got a lot of cool rewards and are aiming for stretch goals (which include t…

…ery grateful. However, we now need to ask for your patience. We are aware that GoFundMe recently took down the campaign sometime during October 28 and we are doing all we can to gather the reason and to get the campaign up and running again. Please do not worry, as we still have access to the funds and have records of the donors. We will keep the updates coming as we learn more. Again, thank you all very much for the outpouring of love and support…

…g. The French Imaginales Awards used to have a Plastic Puss-in-Boots trophy, which is kind of kitsch and cool (don’t know if it’s still the case because I haven’t gone in a number of years). Just saying 🙂 (comments closed, sorry, because I just have no time and very little in the way of energy)….

…follow these norms, you’re weird. That you’re other, alien, forever not welcome, your society used as inspiration to showcase the odd and fictional things people get around to on other planets, in other imagined pasts (with the attendant niggling feeling that you’ll be fine as long as you remain cool and fictional, as opposed to here, close, in your face, every day). And I know genre isn’t like that–that, at its best, it shows us wonderful and new…

…en-Silverstein). To whet your appetite, here are a few of the glyphs Jonathon designed for the cover of Servant of the Underworld……

…So… I’ve been sitting on this for a while and was told there was actually no problem in announcing it! Pleased to announce that The House of Shattered Wings will be published in French by Fleuve Editions, with a translation by Emmanuel Chastellière. More info when I have it. (and I’ll go back to feeling unaccountably nervous about it. There’s something very different to selling a book in your home country, eep)…

…h-carbon blades. The whetstones are waterstones, which means you have to moisten them with water (how depends on manufacturer’s instructions, the ones we had had to be completely immersed), and then keep wetting them to make sure your knife doesn’t bite into them (the coarser your stone, the more often you have to sprinkle water on top of it). You also have to semi-hemi regularly flatten them (he did this with a diamond stone in the shop, but advi…

…e’s certainly some amount of not really great or accented English going around–but because of the underlying stereotypes, having this in fiction contributes to a narrative that I’m not very happy with. [1] I make a difference between dialects and broken English: it’s a degree difference. Broken English is meant to be “not right”: it’s not gramatically correct, and it’s used almost solely to demonstrate that the speaker is not fluent in English. It…

…s is part of a series on French myths (which also includes “Melanie”, forthcoming in Realms of Fantasy): it features an unwanted pregnancy, a creepy goddess, and the drowned city of Ys in Brittany, which perished when its princess yielded to the Devil’s advances. Snippet: September, and the wind blows Françoise back to Quimper , to roam the cramped streets of the Old City amidst squalls of rain. She shops for clothes, planning the colours of the b…

…d Wings and my short story “Three Cups of Grief, by Starlight” have both been longlisted for the BSFA Award. Many thanks to those who nominated them, and here’s a link to the ballot if you feel like voting some more 🙂 Also, congratulations to a lot of friends I see on the longlist. 2015 was a great year for fiction and the company is an honour. (work continues apace on The House of Binding Thorns aka “that %%% sequel”. Thanks to a very sympathetic…