In other, writing-related news: Kathleen Bellamy let me know that my story “Horus Ascending” was going to be part of the forthcoming IGMS anthology. Full TOC here, and some pretty awesome company.

So, I guess it’s official now: my story “Prayers of Forges and Furnaces” will be in Sean Wallace’s Mammoth Book of Steampunk. Kind of hard to describe that one–sort of Aztec meets the Wild West (I’ve always pictured it in some sort of post-Apocalyptic Mexico, in the northern deserts). It’s got the requisite mine, train network, and the lonely gunslinger (well, OK, not quite what you think, on any of those things). And robots, too, because they always make stories more fun! Set in the same universe as “Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders”.

Many many thanks to Marshall Payne and Rochita Loenen-Ruiz for helping me with this one. I’ve always been absurdly fond of this story, and I’m glad to see it find a good home.

Snippet:

The stranger came at dawn, walking out of the barren land like a mirage–gradually shimmering into existence beside the bronze line of the rails: a wide-brimmed hat, a long cloak, the glint that might have been a rifle or an obsidian-studded sword.

Xochipil, who had been scavenging for tech at the mouth of Mictlan’s Well, caught that glint in her eyes–and stopped, watching the stranger approach, a growing hollow in her stomach. Beneath her were the vibrations of the Well, like a calm, steady heartbeat running through the ground: the voice of the rails that coiled around the shaft of the Well, bearing their burden of copper and bronze ever downwards.

(and wow, will you look at that awesome TOC!)

I forgot to post about that last week because of being so busy, but Colin Harvey has accepted my short story “The Axle of Heaven” for his anthology Transtories, published by Aeon Press. It’s, er, more Chinese fantasy? Mostly inspired by a really late-night reading of Wolfram Eberhart Dictionary of Chinese Symbols.

Many many thanks to those who took a look at it (fairly limited set: my husband, followed by Carmelo Rafala).

So it would appear I’ve sold my short story “Exodus Tides” to Edmund Schubert at IGMS. Many thanks to everyone who took a look at it when it was still titled “Siren Song”: it went through VD6, and it was up on OWW for a while, where it was Editor’s choice [1]. People who helped include Pete Aldin, Larry Pinaire, Karen Meisner, Nancy Fulda, Sara Genge, Ruth Nestvold, Ralan Conley, and Stephen Gaskell. And many many thanks to Douglas Cohen, who took a look through my rewrite in record time; and to Edmund for the awesome suggestions.

Contrary to most of my fiction nowadays, it’s set in France, in a nameless Parisian suburb; and it’s got mermen, and the sea and the Abyss. Sort of urban post-apocalyptic fantasy, I guess, if you really want to pigeonhole it…

Mother never spoke about the sea.

She’d been very young at the time of the exodus, Aunt Albane said: a mere smolt, able to swim on her own but not yet ready to mate or bear offspring. Father had dragged her from the depths as the Dark King raged, and they fled together, ahead of twisted, shadowy shapes with harpoons and tridents–never stopping till they reached the safety of the seashore.

“But how did he swim?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine Father–small and portly with a shock of pale white skin, out of breath when he climbed the stairs–as someone who had ever been at ease in the sea-depths.

[1]This is going to be one of those embarrassing posts, because while I distinctly remember putting it up on OWW about a year ago, it appears I forgot to save the crit into a file, with the net result that I have no list of who contributed to improving the story. A thousand apologies if your name isn’t in the list–it reflects on my bad memory and screwy processes more than on anything else…

Well, not for me, but “The Shipmaker” is obviously getting some massive doses of love this year. It’s been picked up by Allan Kaster for his The Year’s Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction 3, which is going to be available as an audio book and as a ebook some time in April. Haven’t seen a TOC, but I believe it will include “The Things” by Peter Watts (also on the BSFA shortlist and in Dozois’ Year’s Best) and “Re-crossing the Styx” by Ian MacLeod (also in Dozois’ Year’s Best). Pretty good company so far.
(I’ve actually known this for a while, but clean forgot to post about it due to some RL stuff).

This post brought to you by the department of shameless self-promotion. See previous post if you want actual blog content.

Andy Cox just let me know (he actually let me know much earlier, but I was away from internet and didn’t twig to it) that he’s buying my short story “The Shipmaker” for a future issue of Interzone.

It’s the story I was talking about here. There’s a snippet, too (the beginning has changed a bt, but not drastically).

Many thanks to everyone who critted it on OWW: Ruth Nestvold, Pete Aldin, Christine Lucas, Cécile Cristofari, Georgina Bruce, L. K. Pinaire, and Mark Hunken. (and yup, I do still owe some crits to some of you guys. Apologies. The wedding threw things off schedule pretty drastically, and I’m still struggling to catch up with various stuff).

This is the first published Xuya story that has Vietnamese main characters (and an alternative Vietnamese history, though I was forced to remove a lot of it to make the story comprehensible). It’s also a companion piece to “Shipbirth” (forthcoming in Asimov’s in Feb. 2011).

Ok, this is the bit where I jump up and down (and possibly throw some squeeing, too). This was the news I was sitting on last week, which was killing me (I’ve known for a while, but the signed contracts arrived last week, which made it even harder to wait).

My awesome agents at Zeno Agency have sold French rights to all three Obsidian and Blood books to Mathieu Saintout of Bibliothèque Interdite (the aptly named “Forbidden Library”). Bibliothèque Interdite is currently publishing Games Workshop books, but is planning to launch their new imprint at the end of the year.

I’m going to be translated in French. For French bookshops. This is going to be so weird. But so great.

This clearly calls for leaping Bubble Bobble dinosaurs:

Very literally, in this case….
My Aztec steampunk weird alt-hist “Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders” has sold to Interzone (with mechanical creepy man, imprisoned god, blood magic, and a mining town in the Old West). Many thanks to the VD6 crew, Nancy Fulda, Stephen Gaskell, Sara Genge and Ralan Conley, for the crits that helped me fix the ending of this.

And I would also seem to have sold my Aztecs-in-space SF story “Shipbirth”, part of the Xuya continuity, to Asimov’s (do you detect a trend in story themes? :=) ). Many thanks to everyone who took a look at it on OWW: Allison Starkweather, Cécile Cristofari, Terra LeMay, L.K. Pinaire, Christine Lucas, and Ilan Lerman. And an extra dose of thanks to Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, who read it in record time and helped me fix a very important plot point.

I will be going for a liedown and more novel brainstorming.

Because my life isn’t made only of ash-spitting volcanoes…

A long, long time ago, I wrote a novel, Phoenix Rising, about which the least said the better (oh, all right, if you really want to know: it was set in a pseudo-Andalucian world and involved a hierarchy of storytellers/bards taken from Ancient Ireland. It was also, very much, 200,000 words of me not being a very good writer. Better than the previous novel I’d written, which was 200,000 words of derivative Robert Jordan, but not by much).

When I started being a Real Writer^TM (defined as the time I started submitting the stuff I wrote in a timely manner), I tinkered with it for a while and then trunked it. However, while the novel itself might have had a lot of irretrievable flaws, I still liked the universe. I liked the Andalucian vibe, and I liked my poets, my minstrels, my housevoices and my loremasters and the world they were part of, and all the myths I made up while I was writing the novel. And I was really sad to let them go.

So I decided I was going to recycle bits and pieces. I abstracted a very small part of the novel’s mythos, an isolated incident that was only mentioned once–and wrote a short story around it.

It was a somewhat frustrating experience, because I ended up stripping far more of the context than I’d intended (the Andalucian vibe, in particular, sort of vanished somewhere into a black hole). But still, it was good to come back to this world, to walk the paths again with my characters and their idiosyncracies–and to see them deal with the weight of history and myth.

The result was “Silenced Songs”, a story about poetry and song, and about how people live in the wake of loss and grief and guilt.

I’m delighted the finished piece sold to the anthology “Music for Another World”, forthcoming from Mutation Press. Yay for old universes 🙂 (and many, many thanks to everyone from LH who critted either the novel or the short story).

PS: incidentally, I’m only part of the first batch of authors. The anthology still has slots open, with an April 30th deadline. If you feel musical…

John Klima let me know this afternoon that he was accepting “Heaven Under Earth”, a sort-of-Chinese SF novelette for Electric Velocipede. Yay! Very much thrilled to be in such a lovely magazine again.

This was very much a group project given the number of rewrites it went through… Many thanks to everyone who took a look at it: Justin Pilon, Marshall Payne, Patrick Weekes, Oliver Dale, Pam L. Wallace, and the VD gang: Ben Rosenbaum, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Floris Kleijne, Stephen Gaskell, Sara Genge, John Olsen, Jeff Spock, Ruth Nestvold, Chance Morrison, and Deanna Carlyle

Snippet:

Husband’s new spouse is brought home in a hovering palanquin decked with red lanterns, its curtains displaying images of mandarin ducks and kingfishers–the symbols of a happy marriage.

First Spouse Liang Pao has gathered the whole household by the high gate, from the stewards to the cooks, from the lower spouses to their valets. He’s standing slightly behind Husband, with his head held high, with pins of platinum holding his immaculate topknot in place–in spite of the fact that he’s been unable to sleep all night. The baby wouldn’t stop kicking within his womb, and the regulators in his blood disgorged a steady stream of yin-humours to calm him down. He’s slightly nauseous, as when he’s had too much rice wine to drink–and he wonders why they never get easier, these carryings.

With gender changes. And babies. Also, red kites.