Here I am, fresh back from Sobaeksan (writeup coming soon on the SOAO workshop, I promise!), and already I’m looking for more astronomy immersion. (Though, this time, in English, so I can understand more of it!) Launch Pad is, as of yesterday (well, to me, as it’s the 16th of February here and now) looking for applicants. Twelve lucky people — writers, whether of science, SF, film scripts, or other things — will be selected to get a crash course on astronomy out in Laramie, Wyoming. It’s an excellent opportunity. Find out more, and apply, at the Launch Pad website. …
Category: WRITING
Locus Recommended Reading List, Asimov’s Interzone Readers’ Awards Poll
UPDATED and republished: if you’ve seen this post before, skip to the last paragraph! Just now my friend Maura pointed out that the wonderful folks at Locus were kind enough to include two of my stories from last year on the Locus Recommended Reading List for fiction from 2008: the novelette, “Lester Young and the Jupiter’s Moons’ Blues” (from Asimov’s SF, July ’08) and the novella, “Wonjjang and the Madman of Pyongyang” (from Tesseracts Twelve). To see my name listed among so many I respect, and my stories among others that just blew me away this year, is a tremendous …
Cai Live!
As of today, my story, “Cai and Her Ten Thousand Husbands,” is now live at Apex Magazine. Check out the contents for the whole February 2009 issue here: there’s some great stuff, including SF Murphy’s “Tearing Down Tuesday” (which I saw in Interzone a while back, and really enjoyed at the time), a couple of things by Lavie Tidhar (this guy is everywhere!), and I got a particularly good kick out of a little nonfiction (I think) piece by Alethea Kontis titled “Monster in the Closet.” (Oh, the flashbacks from childhood!) In addition, Apex is launching a subscription PDF version …
Back to the Nose to the Grindstone
I’m finally back on the wagon in terms of writing: I put in 1000 words on “Moe Yuki Ona,” my J-fetishizing-expat-in-Japan horror story, and I spend an couple of hours slowly working my way through “A Killing in Burma,” a project I left by the wayside a while back to focus on other things, but which I want to get out of the way before I start anything new. If you search the latter title in my blog, you’ll see babblings about it going quite far back, and since I like the vaguely cartoon-like quality of the characters and story, …
Slow and Fast Shifts
Something I’ve been thinking about is that moment in certain Philip K. Dick novels (for me, UBIK and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said come to mind first for some reason) where reality just suddenly shifts, turns itself inside out, and you–the dear and much-blessed reader–follow along, feeling the “Woah!” and maybe some of the “Huh?” but not so much that you feel disoriented beyond the effect of, say, a few glasses of wine. Now, a lot of SF does this from page one, I know, and a lot of stories don’t necessarily involve any second-stage WTF?–though I think the …
Fiction News & Reviews
Well, while I was busy whittling away at a couple of stories in the past few days and weeks, a lot of stuff went on, including some reading and reviews of my own stories that have appeared here and there. I’ll group the links as logically as I can, and I hope I haven’t missed anything. Award Eligibility and Stuff: Robert J. Sawyer was kind and generous enough to mention on his blog that I am one of three Canadian authors eligible for a John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer this year. (That is, for 2009’s WorldCon.) The …
POV and Sins Worth Risking
So I mentioned recently having, er, “finished” work on my story “Ten Spikes and a Hammer.” Which is a story about a man, following two timelines in his life: one during his days towards the end of World War II, and another towards the end of his life. The interesting thing is that something, something, just wasn’t working with this story. I worked it, I worked it some more, I massaged, I fiddled, and somehow there was something wrong.
Asimov’s Readers’ Awards, 2008
The Asimov’s SF 2008 Reader’s Awards ballot is up. If you’ve read the magazine for the year, you can vote for which Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Poem, and Cover you liked best. I’m not saying you should necessarily vote for either of my pieces that appear on the list — there’s lots of good stuff to choose from — but if you did read all year, or read something in 2008 that really grabbed you and didn’t let go, then you should vote. You can even email it in until February 2nd!
Year’s Best… Who? Huh?
Gardner Dozois has posted the TOC for The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection, and if you check the list, you find my name beside my story “Lester Young and the Jupiter’s Moons’ Blues” which appeared in Asimov’s in July 2008. I’ve known for a few days now, and it is news I’m extremely happy to hear. But I figured I’d wait until the full table of contents was public before mentioning it. Looking at the TOC, there are so many names of people whose writing I’ve admired or adored for years and years, which only makes it an …
XY Column Installment Up.
A few weeks ago, I mentioned my column installment about the sociobiology of the Internet Troll a few weeks ago. The column was “inspired” (or at least, my thoughts about the problem of Troll scum on the Internet were inspired) by recent experience. It’s up now, and you can read it over at Cahoots.