Posts tagged with "huzzah" - Faerye Net

"Long Night on Redrock" is the cover story for the July Asimov's!

2012-04-24T12:43:52+00:00

Remember my novelette, “Long Night on Redrock”, which will be appearing in the July 2012 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction? It is the cover story for that issue!

I discovered last week that science fiction and fantasy illustrator Tomislav Tikulin had done a painting titled “Long Night on Redrock” which was clearly an illustration of my story, and yesterday I received confirmation in the form of contributor copies in my mailbox.

If you’d like to see the full painting, take a look on Mr. Tikulin’s website here — it’s pretty gorgeous.

I’ve never had my name on the cover of a magazine before, let alone had my story named and illustrated on the cover. I’m over the moon! If not over the titular desert planet of Redrock. Which is in that painting. Along with my main characters. And certain other story elements. On the cover of Asimov’s. Sorry, still getting used to this!

The issue should be arriving in subscribers’ mailboxes or on their Kindles soon, and it’ll be on newsstands May 8. I’m really excited about this story, which is again a little different from most I’ve had published. Read the teaser in my original post and look for it in the July issue! On the cover!

"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.”

These are a few of my favorite words, Part XVIII

2011-09-22T16:31:12+00:00

Deuxième Edition Française!

In rewatching Amélie recently, one of my two favorite films of all time, I was struck afresh by the word ‘accabler’. It’s one, like our old friend bouleverser, that I reach for in English conversation and whose lack stymies me utterly.

It means ‘weighed down’ or ‘borne down’, but it’s often used figuratively: in Amélie, the heroine imagines Paris “accablé de chagrin” (crushed by woe) at her funeral. The same Greek root, taken as spoils of war by the Romans, gives rise to the French word ‘câble’ (for once, exactly what you think it is, English speaker). I always imagine the burdens not just weighing someone down, but as impossible to escape — connected to them with chains, like the tail of Marley’s ghost. The closest I’ve come in English is ‘encumbered’. Not just crushed but hampered and bound. How many things are figuratively fixed to us in just such a way!

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!

"Perfect" needn't be an enemy

2011-03-25T20:29:14+00:00

I have had, and thoroughly enjoyed, two semesters of formal training in Latin. (In addition to a few private lessons from my retired Latin teacher grandma when I was ten.) This is just enough Latin to be dangerous: enough to, say, puzzle out the odd inscription or be confused by the differences between liturgical and classical. Enough Latin to see the bones lying under the skin of our own language.

I am also a perfectionist. A perfectionist of a particularly pernicious persuasion: a procrastinating one. This is often a problem for me, but in the most important sphere of my life, the writing one, I think I’ve made my peace with it. Writing can never be perfect, only as good as we can make it with the vision and skill we have available to us. Someday our vision or skill may be better, but now we have to surrender and give up our offering to the world, imperfect.

Or is it? We are so accustomed to thinking of perfect in its English sense, (OED definition 1a: “Of, marked, or characterized by supreme moral or spiritual excellence or virtue; righteous, holy; immaculate; spiritually pure or blameless”) but I prefer its Latin origins: per, through or throughout; and the past participle of facere, to do or make.

That which is perfect has been gone through; that which is perfect is thoroughly made. That, the shape of the word which I feel through the flesh of use and connotation when I heft it, I celebrate and do not fear. Perfection doesn’t have to be an impossible, theoretical absolute. All of us, perfectionists or not, can aspire to produce something that is rigorously, mindfully conceived and carried through with care: something that is thoroughly made.

"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!

Huge news: my first Nebula Nomination!

2011-02-22T07:03:25+00:00

I am overjoyed to be able to announce that “Conditional Love” has been nominated for a 2010 Nebula Award in the short story category!

This is an immense honor. I’ve daydreamed about being up for a Nebula, but I hadn’t expected to get there so soon. Now I get to daydream about celebrating and meeting people at the Nebula Awards Banquet in May, which is a very near future. Much nearer than flying cars!

“Conditional Love” was first published by Asimov’s Science Fiction and will soon be available as a free pdf from their website. ~~I’ll post again when that is up,~~ [I have posted my story on my author site in several formats! -FAS, 3/3/11] but if you’d like to listen to the story, narrated by Mur Lafferty, on Escape Pod, that is already available!

The Short Story category is a big one this year, with seven nominees (there are five in each Nebula category unless there are ties in the number of nominations):

“Arvies” by Adam-Troy Castro (Lightspeed, 8/10)
“How Interesting: A Tiny Man” by Harlan Ellison (Realms of Fantasy, 2/10)
“Ponies” by Kij Johnson (Tor.com, 1/17/10)
“I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno” by Vylar Kaftan (Lightspeed, 6/10)
“The Green Book” by Amal El-Mohtar (Apex, 11/10)
“Ghosts of New York” by Jennifer Pelland (Dark Faith (anthology))
“Conditional Love” by Felicity Shoulders (Asimov’s, 1/10)

To the best of my knowledge, this is the first nomination for Amal El-Mohtar and Vylar Kaftan as well as for me!

I hope you’ll take a look at the full list of nominees. Congratulations to all the nominees, including my fellow Portland-area writers Mary Robinette Kowal, M.K. Hobson (both nominated for their first novels!)

I am so happy that it’s been very hard to keep the news under wraps until the press release. I’ve been running through huge numbers of exclamation marks — don’t be surprised if there’s a regional shortage — and smiling, even early in the morning, for days. A marvelous surprise, and, with apologies to the replica pulse rifle, the best birthday present ever. Who could mind turning 30 when she knew about this?

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.

A timely reminder: this is what we do

2010-12-03T13:28:18+00:00

I love reading James Gurney’s blog, Gurney Journey. (I think Steve tipped me to it originally? If so, thanks, Steve.) I love Gurney’s work, and I love learning about art and how it works and has worked. Also, I find a lot of cross-disciplinary pollination in the things he talks about. Sometimes it’s hard to explain how the stuff he says about painting or drawing seems very apt for writing. Sometimes it’s not.

Here’s Thursday’s blog post, “Mutter and Growl”, about perennial Shoulders family favorite John Singer Sargent. It’s about his making a lot of noise as he worked, but here’s the part that really struck me:

Another observer noted that he talked to himself: “This is impossible,” Mr. Sargent muttered. “You can’t do it. Why do you try these things? You know it’s hopeless. It can’t be done.”

Then: “Yes, it can, yes, it can, it can be done—my God, I’ve done it.”

I always feel so grateful when I find that cycle of despondency and triumph in master artists, or hear writers whose work I really admire confess to it. It’s not schadenfreude, it’s recognition: oh, this is fundamental.

When you’re in it, you feel like the only one. Whether it’s a small cycle during one session of painting or a big long-form up-and-down, you feel trapped in the solipsistic agony of it. But you’re not alone. We’re all down there, toiling our parallel ways out of our oubliettes to stand heedless and triumphant in the light.