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.It’s that time of year when people are stepping up their reading for the various awards and their best of the year lists. I’m making my own, and if you’ve got something I should be paying attention to, please feel free to point me to it in the comments here or mail it to me at catrambo at gmail.com. I prefer .rtf for short stories, and .mobi for longer stuff. Please put “FOR AWARD CONSIDERATION” in the header so I can spot it more easily in the seething morass that is my inbox. I’m eligible to nominate for the Hugos, the Nebulas, and WFC.
If you are interested, I’ve got two pieces that I consider my best of the year, and I’m happy to send copies for your consideration. One is “Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain,” a short story which appeared in my collection, NEAR + FAR. I’m still pretty proud of the audience gasps that piece got when I read it at World Fantasy this year. It’s an odd piece, but I like it a lot. The other piece is a novella, A SEED ON THE WIND, which appeared in stand-alone form from Athans Associates.
Speaking as one of the people who gasped at your WFC reading, you *should* be proud. I haven’t read Near+Far yet, but I doubt that reading that story will provoke nearly the same impact as hearing it did.
Want access to a lively community of writers and readers, free writing classes, co-working sessions, special speakers, weekly writing games, random pictures and MORE for as little as $2? Check out Cat’s Patreon campaign.
Want to get some new fiction? Support my Patreon campaign.
"(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
You may also like...
Radio Silence
There's something enchanting about maps, about all the possibilities they represent. Certainly they're not the territory, but they promise so much about it. I'm looking forward to sharing the exploration with my favorite person in the world.I’ve been very absent from the blog of late, and I apologize for that. I’m actually in the process of radically trimming down our belongings, packing up Chez Rambo, moving us into temporary housing, and then getting this place ready to sell. Then Wayne and I are going to travel a bit while we figure out what we want to do. There will be plenty on that to come, but it’s why I won’t be teaching in the latter half of 2014 and will generally be unreceptive to anything other than requests for stories or reprints during that period as well. I do plan to write steadily while on the road, which should be a new and interesting experience. Advice from other road-warriors is welcome.
For people wondering how that’ll affect my tenure as SFWA’s vice president, which seems increasingly likely barring the eruption of a singularly well-organized write-in campaign: not too much. That’s one reason I’ve cut a lot of other responsibilities. As before, I’ll be stepping down as head moderator of the SFWA boards, which takes a good slice of stuff off my plate. I did commit to driving the third iteration of a SFWA cookbook (more on that to come as well), but I’ve got the capable Fran Wilde co-leading that effort as well as a nice long deadline, so all’s good there.
Various publishing news: Just turned in the last edits for “Rappacini’s Crow”, which will appear in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. There’s another story going through edits there right now, “Call and Answer, Plant and Harvest,” which features a city, Serendib, that I sense will become a working part of my mental universe as far as story production goes. “English Muffin, Devotion on the Side” will be popping up in Daily Science Fiction. “The Raiders” (formerly “In Andersonville”) will pillage in the pages of Fiction River’s Past Crimes issue, edited by Kristine Kathyrn Rusch and “Marvelous Contrivances of the Heart” will unfold in Fiction River’s Recycled Pulp issue, edited by John Helfers. “Elections at Villa Encantada” will appear in Unidentified Funny Objects 3.
Christy Varonfakis Johnson, aka Folly Blaine, will be narrating both of my collections and is currently working on Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight. PseudoPod will include “The Worm Within” in an upcoming podcast.
I will pick up the “You Should Read This” posts again soon! I’m finishing up a review of two new Jo Walton books for Cascadia Subduction Zone right now, but once that’s done, I’ve got a number of old as well as recent reads I want to talk about.
Well, the first of the mini-books is out, HALLOWEEN QUARTET. (Non-Kindlers, don’t despair. I’m working on the Smashwords version today.)
The description: A quartet of short horror stories by fabulist Cat Rambo. Follow the mystery of “Whose Face This Is, I Do Not Know,” weep with “Niobe in the Rain,” enjoy a spoof on reality TV with “So Glad We Had This Time Together,” and fear the ancient forces exposed in “Pumpkin Knight.”
If you check out the Amazon listing, feel free to click that Like button or agree with some tags…
Some thoughts and observations:
Because some of the content is available online, Amazon flagged it and made me write in to clarify that I had the right to publish it. It also meant I couldn’t enroll the book in the Select program. This is something I may want to take into consideration in future books, since that program has some advantages. If I want to be able to use the KDP Program, though, I’ll need to either only use stuff that isn’t available on the web or ask some sites to take stuff down (which I doubt I would do, that goes against the grain, somehow.)
The biggest pain in the butt? The cover. I’m going to look for someone who wants to swap cover design for story crits, because as you can tell, I’m not so hot at it. But it’s adequate.
I did the document in Word. Things like installing jumps from the ToC was pretty easy. In the future, I may indent less, since it ended up looking a little weird.
And, serendipitously, another e-book is out today. A SEED ON THE WIND is the first part of a two-part series set in the world of the Fathomless Abyss.
2 Responses
Speaking as one of the people who gasped at your WFC reading, you *should* be proud. I haven’t read Near+Far yet, but I doubt that reading that story will provoke nearly the same impact as hearing it did.
That’s a brilliant answer to an intteesring question