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[awards|repost] Obligatory story pimpage

I didn’t publish much short fiction last year, due to the effects of my cancer journey on both my productivity at the keyboard and on my focus on marketing. Such writing time as I’ve had has remained focused on my novels. Nonetheless, a few things have squeaked out into the marketplace.

For my own part, I think the best of these is my Sunspin novelette, “A Long Walk Home”, which has been selected for Year’s Best Science Fiction volume 29. If you’re a Hugo or Nebula voter, I hope you’ll give it consideration.

Anyway, here’s the list.

Novels
Endurance (Green, volume 2), Tor Books

Novelettes
“A Long Walk Home“, Subterranean Online
“The Decaying Mansions of Memory”, Untold Adventures

Short Fiction

“The Blade of His Plow”, Human for a Day, ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Jennifer Brozek
“A Critical Examination of Stigmata’s Print Taking the Rats to Riga” The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities: Exhibits, Oddities, Images, and Stories from Top Authors and Artists, ed. Jeff and Anne VanderMeer
“‘Hello,’ Said the Gun“, Daily Science Fiction
“A Place to Come Home To” (with Shannon Page), When the Hero Comes Home, ed. Gabrielle Harbowy and Ed Greenwood
“They Are Forgotten Until They Come Again”, River, ed. Alma Alexander
“Unchambered Heart”, ChiZine
“You Know What Hunts You“, The Edge of Propinquity

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Posted: 6:38 am Mon February 06 2012 | Comments(0) |

[awards|repost] Obligatory story pimpage

I haven’t published much short fiction this year, due to the effects of my cancer journey on both my productivity at the keyboard and on my focus on marketing. Such writing time as I’ve had has remained focused on my novels. Nonetheless, a few things have squeaked out into the marketplace.

For my own part, I think the best of these is my Sunspin novelette, “A Long Walk Home”, which has been selected for Year’s Best Science Fiction volume 29. If you’re a Hugo or Nebula voter, I hope you’ll give it consideration.

Anyway, here’s the list.

Novels
Endurance (Green, volume 2), Tor Books

Novelettes
“A Long Walk Home“, Subterranean Online
“The Decaying Mansions of Memory”, Untold Adventures

Short Fiction
“The Blade of His Plow”, Human for a Day, ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Jennifer Brozek
“A Critical Examination of Stigmata’s Print Taking the Rats to Riga”, The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities: Exhibits, Oddities, Images, and Stories from Top Authors and Artists, ed. Jeff and Ann VanderMeer
“‘Hello,’ Said the Gun“, Daily Science Fiction
“A Place to Come Home To” (with Shannon Page), When the Hero Comes Home, ed. Gabrielle Harbowy and Ed Greenwood
“Unchambered Heart”, ChiZine
“You Know What Hunts You“, The Edge of Propinquity

ETA: I suppose I’m also eligible for Best Fan Writer, if you happen to like this blog a lot.

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Posted: 5:29 am Wed January 11 2012 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad reports in from Omaha

[info]jimhines is funny about award nominations

Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt — Claude Lalumière makes it into Language Log.

Anne Lamott on writing and reading

Giant tortoise ‘extinct’ for 150 years found on remote island

Newly discovered carnivorous plant devours underground worms — I for one welcome our new vegetable overlords.

Is 2012 the year to hang up the phone?

Greenland’s Ice Is Growing Darker — More of those pesky, liberally biased facts. To the Rushmobile!

The Myth of Japan’s Failure

Five things we learned from back-to-back debates — The effort in this article to spin Santorum as somehow supportive of the LGBTQ community is just painful. Your Liberal Media, reporting the facts as the GOP makes ‘em up.

South Carolina test: How GOP rivals could derail a Romney coronation — There’s little suspense in New Hampshire about who will win the primary there. The answer is Mitt Romney. South Carolina, meanwhile, could decide the tenor of the rest of the race.

Santorum Reminds Everyone Why He Can’t Win — Senator Frothy Mix is still at it.

?otd: Traveller time a you are?

1/10/2012
Writing time yesterday: 1.0 hours (1,500 first draft words on a novelette)
Body movement: 30 minute suburban walk
Hours slept: 9.0 (fitful)
Weight: n/a
Currently reading: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu

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Posted: 5:54 am Tue January 10 2012 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad is logy

Conversations About Bigotry, Literature, and the World Fantasy Award

Novels and Short Stories… — [info]kenscholes with more on this topic.

I’ll be Holmes for Christmas, or Sherlock Holmes and the case of the missing holiday

The iPhone’s Many Narratives — A thousand pictures are worth how many words?

Inexplicable Particle: Why Even I’m a Higgs Bozo

Autism hidden in plain sight — As more children are diagnosed with autism, researchers are trying to find unrecognized cases of the disorder in adults. The search for the missing millions is just beginning.

Illinois Sheriff: 5 Were Killed in Murder-Suicide and Couple Found Dead in Massachusetts Mansion Died From Gunshot Wounds — More proud American citizens using their Second Amendment rights in defense of their essential liberties. If you’re gun owner, how many deaths is your gun worth to you? For me, your gun rights don’t trump a single death.

Ancient Rome’s 99%

Newt Gingrich: 15 Things You Don’t Know About Him — I find Gringrich’s currently popularity with the GOP base inexplicable. He’s a serial adulator, the consummate Washington insider, a history professor and therefore one of the despised elites, and a Catholic, religion many evangelicals don’t even consider to be Christian. Beloved by the same people who despite elite professor and political insider Barack Obama, a man who’s still married to his first wife without a hint of scandal.

?otd: Have you ever eaten kimchi?

12/17/2011
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (chemo fatigue)
Body movement: 0.0 hours (chemo fatigue)
Hours slept: 12.25 (solid)
Weight: n/a
Currently (re)reading: Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey

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Posted: 10:25 am Sat December 17 2011 | Comments(1) |

[awards] Obligatory story pimpage

I haven’t published much short fiction this year, due to the effects of my cancer journey on both my productivity at the keyboard and on my focus on marketing. Such writing time as I’ve had has remained focused on my novels. Nonetheless, a few things have squeaked out into the marketplace.

For my own part, I think the best of these is my Sunspin novelette, “A Long Walk Home”, which has been selected for Year’s Best Science Fiction volume 29. If you’re a Hugo or Nebula voter, I hope you’ll give it consideration.

Anyway, here’s the list.

Novels
Endurance (Green, volume 2), Tor Books

Novelettes
“A Long Walk Home“, Subterranean Online
“The Decaying Mansions of Memory”, Untold Adventures

Short Fiction
“The Blade of His Plow”, Human for a Day, ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Jennifer Brozek
“A Critical Examination of Stigmata’s Print Taking the Rats to Riga”, The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities: Exhibits, Oddities, Images, and Stories from Top Authors and Artists, ed. Jeff and Ann VanderMeer
“‘Hello,’ Said the Gun“, Daily Science Fiction
“A Place to Come Home To” (with Shannon Page), When the Hero Comes Home, ed. Gabrielle Harbowy and Ed Greenwood
“Unchambered Heart”, ChiZine
“You Know What Hunts You“, The Edge of Propinquity

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Posted: 6:27 am Wed December 07 2011 | Comments(0) |

[sale] “A Long Walk Home” to YBSF29

I am pleased to say that Sunspin novelette, “A Long Walk Home”, has been accepted by the inestimable Gardner Dozois for reprint in Year’s Best Science Fiction 29. For those of you wondering where this piece fits with the novels-in-progress, it’s deep backstory, about the Mistake. So while it doesn’t directly inflect the plot, “A Long Walk Home” definitely carries some of the world-building and future history.

I’m particularly pleased about this because it means Sunspin continues to receive favorable attention in the field. That hopefully will help drive the future reach and success of the novels.

If you’d like to read it now, the original appearance of the novelette at Subterranean Online is here. I also note with some pride and optimism that Subterranean Online will soon be running a Sunspin novella, “The Weight of History, the Lightness of the Future”, which is in a sense chapter zero of the novels, and takes place immediately prior to the opening of the story in book one, Calamity of So Long a Life.

Further, I will make the observation that this novelette is probably my best candidate for Hugo or Nebula award consideration in the forthcoming award year. So if you’re an eligible voter, please consider having a look at the above link.

See also my Facebook thread of yesterday for a number of comments on the sale.

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Posted: 6:22 am Tue November 29 2011 | Comments(2) |

[movies] Hugo

Yesterday, Mother of the Child took me and [info]the_child to the cinema, where we saw Hugo [ imdb ].

My advice to you is that if you have any love whatsoever for movies, stop what you’re doing, go to the cinema, and see this pronto. I’m very afraid it won’t last long, given the broad tastes of the American film-going audience, and if I’m right, that will be a crime. Then come home and make notes for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form. I certainly plan to nominate Hugo for a Hugo Award.

This movie is a love letter from Martin Scorsese to the early history of cinema, and specifically the films of French director Georges Méliès. Méliès made some of the first science fiction and fantasy films, so it is topical to our field (and its award processes) in that sense. Furthermore, the movie itself while not a fantasy per se is decidedly inspired by the breath of the fantastic. It’s also got some glorious clockpunk, cool steam trains, Paris in the years between the wars, and a heart-rending story. I wept at the end.

Hugo is a visual feast, and also talks a lot about the creative process, both explicitly in the film’s narrative and implicitly in the way the film was made. I cannot recommend this highly enough, and I suspect the movie will need all the audience support it can get due to a lack of explosions, car chases, star destroyers and whatnot so beloved of holiday films. I very much I hope I am wrong about this last.

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Posted: 8:47 am Sun November 27 2011 | Comments(3) |

[awards] Hosting the Hugos

My thoughts are still somewhat muddled by exhaustion, and the process of picking back up my real life, but I wanted to post a bit about my experience of co-hosting the Hugos with the mighty [info]kenscholes.

In a word, it was an awesome experience. Draining, difficult, amusing, wonderful, and many other suitably bipolar adjectives.

We’d been working on the script off and on for well over a month, interrupted by my liver resecting in mid-July. We had read-throughs and rehearsals Thursday and Saturday at Renovation. We had a magnificent tech crew supporting us across the board on site, with able leadership from Sharon Sbarsky and John Maizels. But when it came down to the moment, it was still me and Ken walking out on stage in front of 1,500 2,500 people and a handful of video cameras.

Things went wrong. Somehow we started on page two of the script. No one seemed to notice. Somehow we lost the last four pages of the script mid-show. (This included the entire Best Novel segment.) I scrambled on the dark stage during the clips of Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form to locate the missing pages, which I found in the pile of discarded pages from earlier in the show. Yet it all worked.

I know the scripting was obvious from the audience. I wish we could have done the whole thing more naturally, ad lib — that’s how I do my best work — but there were way too many details and checkpoints and hard cues to leave to a set of bullet points and our wit for two hours. Plus the need to coordinate between the two of us. When I hosted the World Fantasy Awards a few years ago, I worked without a script, but I was hosting solo with a ceremony where I only had to provide the main introduction, not manage the timings between award segements. (It’s a much less technical show than the Hugos.)

A real treat for me was that much of my family came to see the show, including my dad and (step)mom, my sister and her boyfriend, [info]the_child and her mother. Most of them had never been to a convention before, so they experienced Worldcon Saturday, then the Hugos. And dressed for the occasion, too. It’s the first time in my life I can recall seeing my dad in an aloha shirt, while my sister and [info]the_child were all steampunked out. Everyone looked very elegant, and it meant a lot to me that they were there.

I’ve also learned that while I’m emotionally bulletproof about bad reviews of my fiction, I’m only mildly bullet-resistant about bad reviews of my live performance. It’s an interesting distinction, doubly so because live performance is such a relatively small part of what I do.

This was so much fun. I’d do it again in a heartbeat. Plus if I’m ever invited to host the Nebula awards, I’ll have made a trifecta of hosting the major awards in our field.

I want to thank Renovation, and especially Patty Wells and Sharon Sbarsky, for inviting Ken and I to do this. I want to thank John Maizels and the tech crew for making the show possible and making us look good. I want to thank [info]kenscholes for doing this with me. And most of all I want to thank everyone who attended, or watched remotely, for being part of the event.

It was a blast.

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Posted: 5:32 am Tue August 23 2011 | Comments(6) |

[links] Link salad believes in rock and roll

A funny photo of me and Ken Scholes hosting the Hugos — (Thanks to Irene Gallo.)

…this report of my death was an exaggeration. — Making Light on the state of publishing.

On Habitable Worlds and Their Moons

Aurora Over Greenland — Another awesome APOD image.

Lego Milling Machine Creates Amazing 3D Sculptures — It is to boggle. (Via David Goldman.)

Animal’s genetic code redesigned — Researchers say they have created the first ever animal with artificial information in its genetic code. (Thanks to [info]lillypond.)

Study Shows Animals Starting to Move to Higher Latitudes, Elevations — There goes that liberal bias in reality again. Actually, it’s just a reality bias, but I repeat myself.

In defense of the low road — The reality of mocking Christianist fundamentalism. (Snurched from Slackivist.)

Comic’s PAC Is More Than a Gag — Stephen Colbert continues to hack the US political scene. (Via my Dad.)

Maxine Waters to tea party: Go to Hell — A prominent tea party group shot back with a statement calling on Obama to check the members of his party and to condemn the rough talk. I love it when conservatives whine about Democrats playing rough. Typical right wing hypocrisy. GOPAC memo, anyone?

?otD: Can music save your mortal soul?

8/23/2011
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (convention exhaustion)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 7.5 hours (interrupted)
Weight: 229.6 (yikes!)
Currently reading: The Magician King by Lev Grossman

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Posted: 5:00 am Tue August 23 2011 | Comments(0) |

[personal] Home, home again

I am home. Thanks to various issues, did not get back til 1 am, which is my current state of health is very destructive. I have taken part of the morning off work, though I am now picking that up again.

The Hugos were awesome. My wonderful family made the trip from Portland to see me onstage, along with 1,500 of you guys. I’ll have more to say later when I have had a chance to pull my thoughts together, but for now I just want to thank everyone for all the love and support and good wishes, which were an overflowing abundance.

Also, thank you for laughing at the right places during the ceremony.

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Posted: 10:26 am Mon August 22 2011 | Comments(5) |

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