Posts tagged with "publication news" - Faerye Net

"Small Towns" available to read online!

2013-01-30T07:56:54+00:00

Because I am not the sort of person who likes to hear half a story myself, I don’t like putting others in that situation. Therefore, when I chose to read my novelette “Small Towns” at the SFWA Northwest Readings this month, I decided to plop the full text online for everyone to finish reading, whether they made it to the event or not! It’s a very different sort of story from “Conditional Love”, the other story I’ve made available online, and I like the contrast quite a bit.

“Small Towns” is a historical fantasy novelette, first published in the January/February 2012 issue of F&SF. Thanks to the kind offices of my co-protagonist Ryan Grove, it’s available as a web page or you can download the PDF or ePub file.

Here’s the teaser for those who didn’t make it to the readings:

Small Towns
When Jacques Jaillet was a small boy, he brought home a pocketful of sand from the seaside and dribbled it slowly onto the floorboards of his little room. He made long avenues and cottage roofs, rows of shops, garden walls, a church with a fragment of shell for the tower. Then, for no reason he could later recall, he took a deep breath and blew it all away, the shapes and the order, the grains themselves skittering under the baseboard, gone forever.

When Jacques returned to his market town in 1918, past his middle years, it looked as if here, too, a monstrous child had finished playing and had blown the town, the streets, the houses and shops from the face of the Earth.

Go and read the rest!

"Long Night on Redrock" is on newsstands!

2012-05-09T23:49:54+00:00

The July 2012 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction is out on a real or virtual newsstand near you! My novelette “Long Night on Redrock” is the cover story, with art by Tomislav Tikulin!

Note: The table of contents mistakenly lists “Long Night on Redrock” as a short story — it’s a novelette, I promise. A very long one, at that!

“Long Night on Redrock” is different from my previously published science fiction in many respects: it’s by far my longest published work, and it’s set on a different planet in the far future, just for starters. It was an enjoyable challenge to write, and I’m really excited for readers to see it. Please, get out there and read it! Especially if you love space marines. (What am I talking about, everyone loves space marines!) You can read a short teaser in this earlier blog post! Or if I had you at “space marines”, go get a copy!

Getting a paper copy: Traditional newsstands often carry Asimov’s. Many Barnes & Noble locations carry it, but it’s best to call ahead if you’ve never seen it at that particular store before. You can’t miss it, it’s the one with the awesome lion roaring, and my name on it!

Getting a paper copy in Portland: If you’re local, you can shop local at Rich’s Cigar Store, which carries Asimov’s in their extensive magazine collection. The main store on SW Alder has the most copies. Also, the main store will ship magazines to out-of-town customers — just give them a call if you’re in a fix.

Getting a digital version: Asimov’s is available in kindle edition and several other formats — in case you, like my characters, live in the future.

"Small Towns" on shelves in January/February issue of F&SF!

2012-01-03T16:29:21+00:00

My first published novelette, first published fantasy, and first published historical fiction are all out on newsstands today and they are all the same thing: “Small Towns,” published in the January/February 2012 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction!

I hope all my stories have their own flavor, but this one is particularly idiosyncratic and I’m quite proud of it.

Here’s the beginning, to whet your appetite:

Small Towns
When Jacques Jaillet was a small boy, he brought home a pocketful of sand from the seaside and dribbled it slowly onto the floorboards of his little room. He made long avenues and cottage roofs, rows of shops, garden walls, a church with a fragment of shell for the tower. Then, for no reason he could later recall, he took a deep breath and blew it all away, the shapes and the order, the grains themselves skittering under the baseboard, gone forever.

When Jacques returned to his market town in 1918, past his middle years, it looked as if here, too, a monstrous child had finished playing and had blown the town, the streets, the houses and shops from the face of the Earth.

I hope you’ll go out and buy the magazine at your local newsstand or Barnes & Nobles. Portlanders, Rich’s Cigar Store has copies!

Edited 1/13/12: F&SF is available for Kindle, as well!

Novelette sold to Asimov's: "Long Night on Redrock"

2011-10-19T18:26:51+00:00

I am overjoyed to announce my second novelette sale! This one is far-future science fiction, and it will appear in Asimov’s Science Fiction.

Many thanks to my lovely readers! It wasn’t hard to find them for this piece, because it turns out everyone loves space marines. Even retired ones.

Here is a teaser of my novelette! You’ll know more about where to find the rest of it as soon as I do:

Long Night on Redrock
“If you’re exploring the town, you should stop walking,” Peder Finn called down from his porch. The stranger, a fair-haired man bent under a backpack, paused at the gate. Peder pegged him for an offworlder. A dozen telltales said as much; from his low-topped shoes, likely to let in sand, to his unshaded eyes, without tanned-in squint or sunglass marks. It was almost aynid harvest, a suspicious time for an offworlder to come visiting.

The man took in the dusty yard, where Peder’s children had lined and stacked rocks into an imaginary city and set a carved toy horse on an overturned bucket to reign. Finally his gaze settled on Peder, who had paused in carving another toy, a long strip of synthwood still hanging from his knife.

Peder produced a noncommittal smile. “Nothing that way you want to visit.”

Firsts! (In which I make another sale)

2011-07-14T19:26:06+00:00

It’s not easy opening a securely closed envelope while carrying the rest of the mail, a set of keys, and a plastic bag full of Chinese takeaway. But sometimes it’s worth it! Teasing open this particular envelope yielded me an acceptance letter from none other than The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, more commonly known as F&SF!

This sale marks several firsts for me. It’s my first fantasy sale ever, and my first novelette sale! (For those of you not up on our obscure lingo, that means it’s longer than my previous short fiction sales — over 7500 words.) It’s also my first sale to this excellent magazine.

The novelette in question is called “Small Towns”, and it’s set just after World War I in Europe. So I suppose it will be my first published historical fiction, as well! I am proud and excited — thanks to everybody who read this story and believed in it, especially my critique group and Ryan!

As soon as I know more about when this story is coming out, I’ll pass it on here. À la prochaine!

"Apocalypse Daily" is on shelves!

2011-04-05T21:26:15+00:00

My latest story in Asimov’s Science Fiction, “Apocalypse Daily”, is on shelves in the June 2011 issue! (Click the name of the story to read the first few paragraphs!)

This is what it looks like:

As you can see, the headlining novella is from Portland’s own Mary Robinette Kowal, Nebula-nominated novelist! Two Portland people! Don’t you just need a copy?

Getting a paper copy: Traditional newsstands often carry Asimov’s. Many Barnes & Noble locations carry it, but it’s best to call ahead if you’ve never spied it out at that particular store before.

Portlanders allergic to big chain stores can head down to Rich’s Cigar Store, which carries Asimov’s in their extensive magazine collection. The main store on SW Alder has the most copies. Also, the main store will ship magazines to out-of-town customers — call them up!

Digital versions will be available soon at Amazon, B&N, Sony, Fictionwise, et c. I will update this post as I discover these editions are available.

"Conditional Love" available free online!

2011-03-03T22:24:25+00:00

Spurred on by more experienced nominees, I have posted my Nebula-nominated short story “Conditional Love” on my author site. You can read it online here or download it in PDF or ePub file format to read on the screen (or printout) of your choice. Many thanks to my co-protagonist Ryan for making this happen quickly and beautifully!

My story is by far the latest of the nominated short stories to appear online, so please pass the link on!

I hope you enjoy my story. Here’s how it starts:

Conditional Love
The new patient was five or six years old, male, Caucasian, John Doe as usual. Grace checked the vitals his bed sensors were feeding her board and concluded he was asleep. She eased the door of 408 open and stepped in.

The boy’s head was tilted on his pillow, brown curls cluttering his forehead. Sleep had flushed his cheeks so he looked younger than the estimate. He seemed healthy, with no visible deformities, and if he had been opted for looks, it had worked—Grace would have described him as “cherubic.” He wouldn’t have been dumped if nothing was wrong, so Grace found herself stepping softly, unwilling to disturb him and discover psychological conditions.

“Don’t worry about waking him, he sleeps pretty deep.”

…Read the rest!

Love for "Conditional Love": Escape Pod and Locus List

2011-02-11T21:24:29+00:00

So! I had some lovely news earlier this week, and a nice surprise this morning, but I never claimed to be consistently chronological: last things first.

“Conditional Love” on Escape Pod
As I announced in September, my story “Conditional Love” was accepted for publication by the one and only Escape Pod, the fabulous science fiction podcast. Its episode, #279, went live today! My story is read by Mur Lafferty, the host and editor of the podcast, and I’m pretty thrilled with it! (As you can tell by my running through today’s quota of exclamation marks in the first two paragraphs of this post. Damn, how will I finish the post now? With an illusion of decorum, I wager.)

Escape Pod is free: you can download Episode #279 or stream it from the show’s website here. It will also be available on iTunes (still free!) in the near future, and of course if you subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, the new episode will turn up in due course.

This is a big first for me. It’s an exciting, yet embarrassing gratification to hear my words read back from my laptop in Mur’s assured tones. Go, listen! Make my ears even redder!

“Conditional Love” on the 2010 Locus Recommended Reading List
Locus Magazine published their 2010 Recommended Reading List last week, and “Conditional Love” is among the recommended short stories. (Must…not…use…exclamation points.) The list is full of really splendid pieces of short fiction that I enjoyed this year (as well as novels that I intend to enjoy at some point in the future) and seeing my story in that company is dizzying.

The Locus List is, of course, also the initial ballot for the 2010 Locus Awards.

Rumors of my tossing my dinner aside in order to rip open the February 2011 issue of Locus and see this list again on paper are surely exaggerated. After all, that dinner contained fried okra. And I have decorum. I managed to delete all the extra exclamation points from this post, didn’t I? Oh, except those two. Damn.

"Conditional Love" to appear in Escape Pod podcast!

2010-09-22T02:15:13+00:00

If you missed “Conditional Love” when it appeared in January’s Asimov’s Science Fiction, you will have another chance! I found out today that Escape Pod bought my story!

I’ve been listening to Escape Pod for a while (although my reluctance to take walks whilst the daystar is holding its cruel summer sway has led to a podcast backlog) and it is a consistently excellent podcast. I am extremely glad to have my story there, and I look forward to hearing what they do with it!

How do you say "Conditional Love" in Polish?

2010-09-15T16:31:45+00:00

I should find out in December, when my story will be reprinted in Poland’s anthology Kroki w nieznane (Steps Into the Unknown), edited by Mirosław Obarski.

This will be my second translation overall, and the first time one of my stories has been invited to a reprint anthology in any language. I’m very pleased, especially because the anthology has an interesting background and a history of very high-powered authors in its pages.

I’m so happy to see my stories travel around the world!