Posts tagged with "short story" - Faerye Net

"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.

Projected issue for "Apocalypse Daily"

2010-12-07T17:10:11+00:00

My story “Apocalypse Daily”, whose sale to Asimov’s I trumpeted in an earlier blog post, has an ETA! It is slated to appear in the June issue of Asimov’s. I will post again when I know the exact newsstand date, but I believe it will be in April.

Click through to the original announcement if you would like to read a teaser from the beginning of this story. I’m excited for it to make its debut!

Obligatory Self-Promotion 2010: Nebula Nominations

2010-11-30T15:13:10+00:00

It’s that time of year again, when SFWA Members Active and Associate can help to form the short list for the Nebula Awards.

I had two short stories of my very own published this year, and I’ve posted them on the SFWA Members-only fora here:

“Conditional Love” from the January 2010 issue of Asimov’s.
“The Termite Queen of Tallulah County” from the October/November issue of Asimov’s.

Members can only nominate five pieces in each category, but they can comment on/recommend as many posted stories as they like!

We now return you to your regularly scheduled stuff and nonsense.

"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!

"The Termite Queen of Tallulah County" is on shelves!

2010-08-31T17:22:58+00:00

The October/November double issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction has been out to subscribers for a few weeks, and now it is available at bookstores and newsstands around the United States! My story “The Termite Queen of Tallulah County” appears in this issue, as well as ten other stories, novelettes and novellas from authors listed here.

Getting a paper copy: Traditional newsstands often carry Asimov’s. Many Barnes & Noble and Borders locations carry Asimov’s, but it’s best to call ahead if you’ve not seen it at that particular store before.

Portlanders allergic to big-box 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!

Getting a digital copy: This issue is available digitally from Barnes & Noble and Amazon. I’ll update this post when it comes out from Fictionwise and the Sony eBook store!

Many thanks to all who’ve expressed interest in this story, and to my early readers who helped it take form. Also, thanks to my grandma, for having termite trouble!

Update, 9/12/2010: The Sony eBook store now has October/November’s issue available.

Update, 9/17/2010: Fictionwise has October/November available in several digital formats as well.

Story sold to Asimov's: "Apocalypse Daily"

2010-08-25T10:20:33+00:00

I am so very pleased to announce that I have sold another story to Asimov’s Science Fiction! Asimov’s has been dear to my heart for many years, and I am incredibly proud to have had four stories accepted there.

This story is called “Apocalypse Daily”. Many thanks to those who gave it a read, and to my cousin Sylvia who helped me with some vocab.

I was thinking, since of course I can’t offer you anything so concrete as a date of release or an issue, that I’d emulate Mary Robinette Kowal and offer you a teaser from the beginning of the story instead.

Apocalypse Daily
“How shall I end the world today?” Katrina Vang asked the ceiling. The ceiling didn’t respond, and her cat offered only a petulant mew.

“What kind of question is that to ask a poor dumb animal?” Natalie said from the doorway, and Katrina blinked to make sure she was actually awake. Right, her sister was supposed to be there. Sleeping on the couch due to a sudden lack of job and apartment.

“Traddles woke me up by sticking his paw in my eye socket. He owes me.”

“Still, you can’t ask the cat to do your job for you. End the world yourself.”

Discomfort zones

2010-06-26T21:57:47+00:00

Last night I finished a story which I started writing in March. I’m not the most linear person in the world, and I often let stories in progress lie fallow while I work on something else. But in theory this story has been my main compositional task all this time. In theory, I was going to turn it in to my critique group for comments in April, and May, and June.

Now sure, it ended up longer than I’d thought, and I had some structural doubts in the middle that had to be solved with six colors of whiteboard marker and some diagrams, but all that happened after I really got into writing it. It took me months just to feel sure of the person, tone and voice; to stop writing beginnings and scratching them out; to get beyond the second scene.

I’m pretty sure I know what was going on here. This story was way out of my comfort zones. For one thing, it was set in an uncomfortable time period: what you might call the middle future. The next few decades? Fairly easy to write. Turn the tech we have now to eleven, add a few things currently in R&D, a startling new discovery if you need it for the plot. You extrapolate the current social trends and cultural trappings. Far future? You just go hog-wild. The middle future — say, a century from now — is pesky. You can barely start to extrapolate how we’ll get there from here, and yet you can’t exactly press “up and out” on the space elevator of your mind.

Folks who don’t write science fiction are unlikely to come against the time frame problem. Writers of historical fiction may, though: there’s that desire to set a story in a period and the feeling that you just don’t know it well enough yet. It’s easy to spend months researching just to get confident enough to write. For fantasy, the need to map out a new and alien second world and its history before setting pen to paper might be similar.

One comfort problem I think any fictionist might encounter was the other main obstacle for this story: distance from the character. My protagonist is an athlete. I, anyone who knows me well may attest, am only an athlete if you adhere to marketing feel-good messages about everyone being one. (If everyone’s an athlete, no one is?) It was kind of a ridiculous thing to get hung up on, since I’ve written moms, monsters and teenage boys, but still, I felt intimidated by the distance between her experience and my own. Thank goodness I chose a sport for her that I actually love, or I might still be trying to write that third scene and failing.

I’m not sure how well this story turned out, yet. If the proof is in the pudding, stories take a while to get to pudding stage. But I can be pretty sure that working through this and pushing past my comfort zones is a good thing. For one thing, I feel a stronger sense of accomplishment than I would if it had been easy. (Isn’t that part of why I’m a writer in the first place? Because it’s deliciously hard?) For another, it may be good for me, my stories and my skills. Ron Carlson, a versatile short story writer, told Quick Fiction, “I also think that if you write stories for years, you do develop or sense a rhythm, and when I sensed that my stories were all rounding the corner at about four thousand words, I changed that rhythm.”

Is comfort the enemy of art? Does changing things around keep you fruitfully off-balance? (My oboe teacher went to a master class for all sorts of instrumentalists once where they stood on a little platform which they had to balance as they played. In each case, the musician’s performance improved.) It may be a good thing to do the same thing Ron’s discussing with genre (or subgenre), type of protagonist, first versus third person, anything else that becomes too easy. Maybe discomfort is good for us as writers, working out different muscles, finding new things to say and convincing ourselves we can accomplish unfamiliar tasks. The first part of being a writer, after all, is having the confidence to speak.

Get out there and be uncomfortable! From this side of the experience, it feels pretty good.