Look! Mats Minnhagen has finished the cover for A SEED ON THE WIND, the Fathomless Abyss novella I’ve got covering out this October. The scene’s one that occurs early in the book and gets referenced again and again throughout, so this cover, which comes so close to what was in my head, delights me with the way it conveys the space of the story.
If you don’t know what the Fathomless Abyss is, it’s a shared world project created by Philip Athans involving myself, Jay Lake, Joe McDermott, Mel Odom, Mike Resnick, and Brad Torgersen. Books out in the series already include Philip Athans’ DEVILS OF THE ENDLESS DEEP and J.M. McDermott’s NIRVANA GATES. I had a lot of fun writing “A Querulous Flute of Bone” for the TALES FROM THE FATHOMLESS ABYSS anthology and just as much fun writing this novella, which is the first half of a pair, to be finished in A CAVERN RIPE WITH DREAMS. Charles A. Tan recently talked with me about it for S.F. Signal.
Tiny things floated through the air all around him. He stretched out his palm and kept it motionless long enough that one drifted to be trapped in his palm. A seed, a brown seed. Attached to one end a tuft of hairs, fine and feathery, to carry it along. Carefully he raised his hand, examined it more closely. So small. As it neared his eye, it became no longer brown, ridges and swirls marked its surface in grays and greens and reds that somehow blended together to create the impression of brown from just a few inches farther away.
Here’s something from the first chapter:
One morning his father woke him from a nightmare. He was still young, perhaps six or eight. His father squatted on his heels besides Bill’s bedroll and shook his shoulder. When he woke, shuddering and gasping from dreams of strangle-fingered demons, feeling his breath still in jeopardy, his father didn’t say anything, just beckoned to him.
He followed at his father’s heels, towards the world and the great tube that the village of Poit clung to. At the end of each tunnel the space widened considerably, leaving places where shelves and ladders and catwalks could be stretched. And beyond them all you could see the abyss itself, stretching downward and upward into darkness.
The air was full of something. What was it?
Bill moved to the railing to see what was happening. His father said, “Sometimes the world opens and things fall in. This far down, we rarely see them. This is something you will remember all your life.”
Tiny things floated through the air all around him. He stretched out his palm and kept it motionless long enough that one drifted to be trapped in his palm. A seed, a brown seed. Attached to one end a tuft of hairs, fine and feathery, to carry it along. Carefully he raised his hand, examined it more closely. So small. As it neared his eye, it became no longer brown, ridges and swirls marked its surface in grays and greens and reds that somehow blended together to create the impression of brown from just a few inches farther away.
He closed his fingers around it, meaning to keep it. But it was so small that it wafted away even as his fingers moved.
He’d only seen things fall into the abyss. But these, so light, sometimes moved upward or downward, sometimes tugged sideways as though snatched by invisible hands. Thousands and thousands, swirling through the air.
He picked several from the ground around his feet. Gingerly, he put one between his teeth, crunching down.
The seed gave way, falling into woody shreds, tasting like nothing he’d ever tasted, a sweet roundness mixed with sharper, angrier notes. Not unpleasant, but awake. He swallowed the fragments, feeling them rough in his throat.
He gathered a painstaking handful, picking them from crevices. Other people were doing the same. How often did you get something like that without cost, like a gift from the universe?
He and his father stood for hours on the platform, hands resting on the stone balustrade, watching it. Almost everyone in the city came to see the phenomenon, even if their children had to carry them. People did not speak much, simply watched, as though storing it up.
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Being Epic
I’m getting ready to head off to the Nebulas in about an hour. Ten years ago at this time, I was getting ready to go off to Clarion West for six weeks. I’d quit my job at Microsoft and my husband had agreed to shoulder the mortgage solo for a while so I could follow my dream.
Now it’s a decade later. A lot of stuff has happened. I’ve had some stories published. I got to read in New York at the KGB bar with Chip Delany. I got nominated for awards a few times. I edited some cool stuff. I ran for Vice President of SFWA and won, and now I’m coming up on being President. And I published a novel.
And now that novel is here in a big wonderful bundle of fantasy, curated by Kevin J. Anderson. Here’s a picture of all that epic goodness:
StoryBundle lets you adjust your own price to get a whole bunch of epic and excellent titles. A minimum bid of $5 gets you the basic set of six books: The Magic Touch, by Jody Lynn Nye; Gamearth, by Kevin J. Anderson, The Crown and the Dragon, by John Payne, One Horn to Rule Them All, edited by Lisa Mangum, Invisible Moon, by James A. Owen, and Beasts of Tabat. Make that $15 and it includes A Stranger to Command, by Sherwood Smith, Hard Times in Dragon City, by Matt Forbeck, The Alchemist, by Paolo Baciagalupi, The Executioness, by Tobias Buckell, The Ghosts of the Conquered, by Matthew Caine, and Glamour of the God-Touched, by Ron Collins. There’s also a bonus story by Kevin J. Anderson and Neil Peart from Rush, “The Bookseller’s tale.”
Want it? I’ve got five bundles to give away and I’m trying to a Rafflecopter giveaway. Spread the word and you can win!
I haven’t written here yet. 2015 was a good year for publications, including a few nonfiction ones. Huzzah! Part of that was the Patreon campaign, another was the flurry of promotional pieces I released to accompany my first novel. 34 stories published in one year is a record for me, although many of them were flash pieces and/or self-published either as publicity for my novel or for my Patreon campaign. Here’s the month by month breakdown, with some stats and what’s coming up in 2016.
January
I wrote nonfiction column #PurpleSF for Clarkesworld Magazine and my short story “The Ghosteater” appeared in Thirteen: Tales of Transformation, edited by Mark Teppo. The story involves a traveler, Dr. Fantomas, and his companion, who are asked to investigate a haunted restaurant, and it takes place in Tabat.
February
I lounged about the house eating bonbons in February. Well, not really. But I didn’t get anything published.
March
My flash fiction “Bit Player” appeared in Daily Science Fiction, after I wrote it during one of my Flash Fiction Workshops. I went to Emerald City Comicon and had my first book release party there, plus sold it at the Wordfire booth, meeting all sorts of delightful people in the process.
May
“The Subtler Art,” a story set in relatively new locale Serendib, appeared in Blackguards: Tales of Assassins, Mercenaries, and Rogues, featuring retired assassin The Dark and her spouse the wizard-alchemist Tericatus in a game of marital oneupmanship. Also appearing that month was The Haunted Snail, a flash piece (yup, written during one of my classes) in DAILY SCIENCE FICTION, and two Patreon stories, a horror piece titled “Reality Storage” and a story set in the same world as the Blackguards piece, “The Owlkit, the Candymaker, the Beekeeper, and the Brewer”.
And Ad Astra: the SFWA 50th Anniversary Cookbook, which I co-edited with Fran Wilde, appeared, and was a thing of joy and wonder, mostly due to Fran’s effort, as well as those of Sean Wallace. I will remind you all that the cookbook is eligible for a nomination for Best Related Work when Hugo nominations come around, mainly because I love that little book and think it deserves a nod.
June
Patreon story 2611, a horror story set in the apartment complex we have been trying to move out of for several years, appeared. I wrote this last year while we were living in a horrible temporary apartment and trying to get everything packed up and ready to go; most of the events are based in reality.
July
I went on retreat down to southern California and got some work done on Beasts’ sequel, Hearts of Tabat. “California Ghosts” appeared on my blog for Patreon as I switched the campaign over to publicly viewable.
August
Steampunk story “Snakes on a Train” appeared on my blog as part of the Patreon campaign. During the same month I attended Sasquan in Spokane, which was a lot of fun, and read “The Owlkit, the Candymaker, the Beekeeper, and the Brewer” there.
September Talking in the Night, a literary flash piece appeared on my blog for the Patreon campaign. At the same time, “Marvelous Contrivances of the Heart” appeared in Recycled Pulp, edited by John Helfers. That story owes much to the old Twilight Zone episodes and I hope it manages to evocatively tell the story of an unlikely artist and the consequences of the pieces he creates.
And we moved into Seattle proper, or rather West Seattle, which is AWESOME, and involves an apartment with multiple great writing spaces, including a kitchen table that looks out towards the sound and the mountains.
October
My first on-demand class, Literary Techniques for Speculative Fiction Writers, went up. I took 1500 words of notes for the live workshop, which is based on one I developed for Clarion West and which is one of my most popular classes, and ended up expanding them to 15,000, so I think counting this as a non-fiction publication is quite valid. I still need to go back and reformat and clean this one up somewhat since I’ve learned so much about formatting and setup since then; that’s on the list for January.
At the end of the month, flash piece “As the Crow Flies, So Does the Road” appeared in Grendel Song, newly revived by Paul Jessup.
November
I put up steampunk story, “Laurel Finch, Laurel Finch, Where Do You Wander?” on my website as part of the Patreon campaign. Also “Reflections from Mirror World 57,” a story made up of superhero flash pieces for Outliers.
Two more on-demand classes went up, the Character Building Workshop and Reading to an Audience. As I worked on the former, my ideas about how to shape these classes continued to refine themselves; I’m looking forward to using a lot of what I learned in doing these in classes for 2016.
One piece of past experience that’s been useful in assembling them is a stint of work I did writing study guides for college textbooks, for a range of classes that included economics, retail marketing, and terrorism. I used the software’s capacity to create mini-quizzes with the Character Building Workshop, in a way that led to my only complaint, someone who thought the quizzes were silly.
They are silly — mainly because they’re intended as an amusing interlude that nonetheless gives you a chance to review the core concepts of the material just presented. I’d be curious to hear other takes on them from people who’ve looked at the classes. Should I cut those?
December
December publications included my take on Mrs. Claus in “He Knows When You’re Awake” for Jenn Brozek’s Naughty or Nice holiday anthology, and forthcoming “Dark Shadows on the Earth”.
I also finished up with another nonfiction essay for Clarkesworld Magazine, this time On Reading the Classics and an essay on what I hope for SFWA in 2016 for this blog.
I hope to have one last writing class, Moving from Idea to Draft, done by the end of the year and am working on that, but these classes tend to get more complicated as I write them and this is no exception.
2016
Stories coming out in 2016 include “Red in Tooth and Cog” in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (booyah, that is a longtime goal and I am still so tickled to have hit it; “The Mermaid Club,” a conspiracy tale about underground feminists, co-written with Mike Resnick; science fantasy, “Haunted,” co-written with Bud Sparhawk; “Call and Answer, Plant and Harvest,” set in the same city as the owlkit and Blackguards stories, which will appear in in Beneath Ceaseless Skies; “Tongues of Moon Toad” in The Bestiary; Preferences in Chasing Shadows (edited by David Brin) and The Threadbare Magician in Genius Loci, among others.
Status of Current Projects
I need to finish up Hearts of Tabat, and that book was the main casualty of a year whose events included cancer on one side of the family, dementia on another, and a death among my favorite in-laws. I have about 115k words on it and need to make them all make sense and flow nicely into each other. I know the main action of the two books after that. I have some other stuff I’d like to write.
Collaborations coming up include a couple with Rachel Swirsky, one with David Boop, a stroy with Emily Skaftun and Randy henderson that we need to finish up, and one with Tod McCoy.
Upcoming on-demand classes include Creating an Online Presence for Writers, Flash Fiction, Revising and Rewriting, Linguistics for Speculative Fiction Writers with Juliette Wade, Creating Your E-book with Tod McCoy and quite a bit more. And there’s another round of live workshops coming up in January-March.
Books coming out include:
Neither Here Nor There, another two-sided collection, this time with a focus on fantasy (Hydra House)
Hearts of Tabat (Wordfire Press) and (maybe) Exiles of Tabat
Creating an Online Presence for Writers, 2nd edition
Some Overall Stats:
Stories published in 2015: 33, including flash pieces
Novels published: 1
Nonfiction books published: 1
Number of on-demand classes published: 4
Large writers organizations on which I served on the board: 1
Number of books read: bunches and bunches
Number of blog posts written: I will fill in this number when I have more time.
Happy holidays to all my readers. I hope your end of the year ruminations leave you feeling happy with what you’ve brought to the world over the last twelve months, and that you’re moving forward into productivity and joy in 2016.
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2 Responses
Beautiful! How wonderful to have your work envisioned like this.
I love the cover