Response Times and Professional Magazines

I just got back from a trip that included a couple long plane rides. I’m a very fast reader and finding a long, well-crafted series immersive enough to make me forget that my back is aching, the kid behind me keeps kicking the seat, and all the other discomforts of travel. Airport bookstores are usually full of stuff I’ve already read, so I try to load my e-reader with an abundance beforehand. Here’s a few that have stood me in good stead in the past few months.

Most recently, Kate Elliott’s The Novels of the Jaran (Jaran, An Earthly Crown, His Conquering Sword, and The Law of Becoming), which come as a single ebook bundle that Immensely satisfying space opera mixed with nomadic life with the Jaran on their unexpectedly pivotal planet. Elliott has become one of my goto writers (another favorite is Walter Jon Williams) – I know anything I pick up by her will be a satisfying and sustaining read.

Martha Wells’ The Books of the Raksura is fantasy, following the adventures of one of the Raksura, Moon, as he finds a new home and family, only to have to defend them. Moon is a character who shines; you desperately want him to be happy, and his path towards that is deeply engaging. And the most recent book, The Harbors of the Sun, is out now!

Max Gladstone’s The Craft Sequence. I had read the first three of these, but another nicely-priced ebook bundle let me pick them up all together and read them that way, which I highly recommend. They connect in a interesting and convoluted way that makes the series do what a series should – create a whole that is greater than the sum of the individual books. Awesome fantasy with a modern flavor and a delightfully careful attention paid to economics.

Kristine Smith’s The Jani Kilian Chronicles is military-flavored space opera with a strong and engaging protagonist, games with linguistics, and plenty of action. A protagonist who is flawed, fearless, and feisty, and a romantic life that adds to the book but is certainly not the focus. Not quite military SF but close, I guess – I’m never sure where space opera ends and military SF begins.

Short stories are not something I would normally take on a vacation – they’re candy, not sustaining rations. But there’s a lovely series collecting all of Theodore Sturgeon’s work that I’ve been picking up book by book, using them as rewards. I’m up to Volume Five of those, The Perfect Host. And yay! All of them seem to be available on the Kindle. If you’re an F&SF short story writer, Sturgeon is one of the people you should read, in my opinion, to see how brilliantly and beautifully he does things.

I’ve got a new Patreon story brewing, that I hope to finish up today and let sit for a few days before posting. I recently finished up a bespoke story, title still TBD, and that’s sitting in the mental fridge drawer chillaxing before I go back to its rewrite and polish.

So for Patreon, another Serendib story, and a return to The Dark and Tericatus. Here’s some from yesterday:

After she’d hopped the wall, it had been easy enough to defeat the bloodsucking ivy and the centipede hounds contained in the first set of walls. After that, it got more interesting.

The Dark rarely stooped to thievery nowadays but, the truth be told, it was how she had started her professional life, long ago in a city whose name she had deliberately forgotten. She had been a child born to both privilege and indifference. At fifteen, she had left the school where her parents had stored her in order to make a living from burglarizing the friends of those parents, at least those whose estates and townhouses she’d had occasion to reconnoiter in her adolescent years.

She had done quite well by this, well enough that she spread the largesse to those less comfortable, and in doing so, became known as “The Dark Angel.” When, sixteen months later, the unnamed order of assassins that had noted her exploits came to recruit her, they demanded she remained herself, which she did by truncating the former name to the form she had gone by several decades now.

She had kept that knowledge to herself as, over the course of those decades, she’d met any number of unusual characters, including her spouse for two of those decades, Tericatus the alchemist-mage, Chig the Rat God, and quite a few fellow assassins who failed to live up to the high standards she held when it came to both of her professions.

She had retired from assassinations ““ aside from the occasional hobbyist or wager-related killing ““ some time ago, but now to thievery not so much for entertainment but also because she was impelled by the yearly conundrum of a suitable anniversary present for a man who could, literally, conjure almost anything his heart could imagine.

The next wall was made of fricklebrick, which sounds amusing but involves a number of razor-sharp edges shifting frequently and somewhat randomly in their orientation.

As she paused, letting the gloves covering her hands sense the vibrations of the bricks and adjust themselves to countershift accordingly in a gentle grinding born of magic and machinery, she thought about his imagination and ““ not the for the first time ““ contemalted her luck in a mate who had long ago grown blasé with such things and preferred inner qualities of fierceness and determined loyalty.
She wriggled upwards, her features smeared with coalblack to match the midnight shadows around her. This year, she planned to snare something lovely that could not be bought ““ her philosophy of presents was that such things were better assembled by than by coin.

This garden, located on one of the great terraces built along the mountain slope bordering the city to the north, belonged to a recent arrival to the city, a merchant/scientist whose name the Dark kept having tremendous difficulty remembering. This spoke of certain magics laid upon the name to avoid notice, and that was intriguing, and more intriguing yet were the rumors of the contents of the innermost garden, center of three sets of walls, which held a worthy gift.

This weekend I’m teaching Creating An Online Presence for Writers and the Flash Fiction Workshop – there’s still a few slots open if you’re interested!

#sfwapro
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