The past week or so has been good on the writing front, or at least in the publishing front. I finally received my copy of Volume 2 of The Best Science Fiction of the Year, edited by Neil Clarke:
What a handsome cover! My contributor copy apparently was sitting in the department office, and nobody told me. I happened to stop by and discovered it by chance… and who knows how long it’d been there? (I check my mailbox there, but this was a package so it didn’t fit the cubby and was sitting on a shelf below, where I’ll admit I never look.)
Want a copy of this handsome book? You can buy it from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, Amazon.es, Amazon.jp, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, Indiebound, Kobo, or Powells, and it has a lot of wonderful stories from authors I’m flattered to be published alongside, so you totally should go get a copy.
Also, this morning I was informed that “Prodigal” has been published in Czech translation (by Ľudovít Plata), in the June issue of the venerable Czech SF magazine XB-1.
It’s very exciting to see “Prodigal” out there in yet another language, accessible to whole new group of people. I’m grateful to Jaroslav Olsa, Jr., the well-known Czech ambassador to the SF world, and not just for tipping me off about the publication: it was he who patiently urged me to send something, ultimately making this possible.
(Interestingly, this issue of XB-1 also apparently published Ian R. MacLeod‘s “A Visitor from Taured”—the first story in the Neil Clarke collection above! It’s always just a little more exciting to see my work published alongside one of my long-ago teachers from Clarion West, a little more than a decade ago.)
Beyond that, I finished reviewing revisions for a story of mine that will be appearing in Broken Eye Books’ Kickstarter-backed Ride the Star Wind anthology, which collects original Lovecraftian space opera, and I also (mostly) finished edits on another short story.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get much done on the novel I’m writing, but I managed about 11,000 words on the weekend—a mix of new material and stuff from a previous draft that was reworked to fit the new version of the story. That’s not bad, all things considered, and I have to credit the outline I hammered together a few months ago, after a long time struggling while trying to write this thing by the seat of my pants—something that I just couldn’t seem to do with the number of P.O.V. characters I’m working with. I think we can call this the third or fourth draft, and it hopefully will be the one that sticks.
It’s a big book. The next one will have to be one of those short novels like DAW and ACE used to publish in the good old days when 175 pages was still considered a novel.