Part of the party decor for the Pink + Blue party at WorldCon. Flamingos are always appropriate.I’m prepping for next week and the official release of the book. I’ll be doing some blog posts about the interior art over the next few days as well as trying to tie up a lot of loose ends. (And I’m prepping for the next round of classes – plenty of time to sign up still if you’re interested.) And at the end of the month, I’m off to Baltimore for a few days for the Baltimore Book Festival, yay!
The party at WorldCon was so! great! And it helps to have such a nifty book to show off. So I wanted to enthuse a bit more about it and why I’m so happy with it.
It’s the old Ace double format. I used to love those whenever I found them in the used bookstores.
Vicki Saunders did an amazing job with the book design, including using elements from the interior art to create printer’s ornaments to denote section breaks. In a move I consider above and beyond, they differ between the two books.
I have been admiring Mark Tripp’s art for over a decade now. He’s a good friend and I can’t begin to say how much it means to me to use his art, so we’ve got a collaboration other than the game we’ve both worked on for a bajillion years, Armageddon MUD.
I found out I had more than enough SF for a collection. In fact, we had to cut some of it. A surprising amount.
A favorite editor from Microsoft, Jo Molnar, agreed to do the copy-editing. I’d worked with Jo before and knew he was meticulous and careful, and that he’d bravely face the demands of a spec fic collection, including questions like how one formats telepathic communications.
I got plenty of input in how the book looked, the order, the editing and so forth. It’s more than just a collection of my work, it’s an expression of my philosophy regarding books.
Publisher and friend Tod McCoy has become one of my favorite people to work with. He solved problem after problem, came up with clever ideas, and was always enthusiastic, knowledgeable and supportive. And fun as hell.
The awesome blurbs, including a somehow very Norman-ish note from Norman Spinrad and an unconventional list for an unconventional book by Karen Joy Fowler.
Getting to throw a book launch party at WorldCon, the biggest of the SF conventions.
It’s appearing in time for World Fantasy Convention, and I know Tod will make sure there’s copies there so I may actually sign more than a couple books at the con.
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
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WIP: The Mage's Gift
You can find “The Subtler Art,” featuring The Dark and Tericatus, in Blackguards: Tales of Assassins, Rogues, and Mercenaries.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.
I’ve been following the controversy with Galaktika with particular interest because there are a number of SFWA members involved. My thanks to A. G. Carpenter for graciously sharing what they found out. In the process of talking to people, I dropped Istvan Burger a mail because I had these questions:
Would all writers be paid, preferably without their having to contact Galaktika?
Would all translators be paid? (my understanding was that the same lack of payment has happened with them.)
For any online stories, would authors be able to request that the story be taken down?
Would a process be put in place to ensure this never happens again?
Here’s the reply:
Dear Cat,
I’m writing on behalf of Istvan Burger, editor in chief of Galaktika.
We’d like to ask authors to contact us directly to agree on compensation methods. You can give my email address to the members. mund.katalin@gmail.com
The short stories were published in a monthly magazine, which was sold for two months, so these prints are not available any more. So Authors don’t need to withdraw their works. As we wrote in our statement, there is no problem with novels, as all the rights of novels were paid by us in time.
Also let me emphasise again that all the translators were paid all the time!
You can quote my reply. Thank you for your help!
Best regards,
Katalin Mund,
Manager of Galaktika Magazine
Next week SFWA will be sending Galaktika a list of affected SFWA members who need to be compensated. If you’re a member whose work was published in Galaktika and want to make sure you’re on the list, please drop me an e-mail, message me, or leave a comment here.
Later addendum: I requested clarification about the magazine not being available for longer than two months since there seem to be digital editions for sale on the website, which would seem to contradict that statement. I was told that authors will be able to withdraw their stories from the electronic editions if they so desire.
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Go go go!