But! My other great news, somewhat related to that, is that I’ve got an agent now, the excellent Seth Fishman of the Gernert Company. He’s as excited about the novel as I am, and so I’ve been figuring out my rewrite roadmap and planning to devote March to that. Huzzah! Onward and forward.
This is the last day for getting the special deal on the Writing F&SF Story class or Editing Class! Sign up for one of those and you get a bonus class as well. Bonus class options include: the First Pages workshop, Flash Fiction workshop, Everything You Need to Know about E-Publishing, Literary Techniques in Speculative Fiction, Building an Online Presence for Writers, and Art of the Book Review.
Thanks Steve, I never thought about going to wdiepiika for a story. But the link they have for that story took me to an error page. From the description of his writing, I may have read some of his stories. I don’t always catch the name of the writer when I read short stories.
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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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Free Fiction: Stories Newly Enrolled in Kindle Unlimited
If you’re into short stories and have Kindle Unlimited, I made all of these free:
Aquila’s Ring: Aquila Nenyuk finds herself thrust into a world of scheming nobles and political power struggles. When she falls in love with Marius Tor, will he bring her happiness or heartbreak? Originally published in Shadows & Light II.
Karaluvian Fale: Impoverished noble Karaluvian Fale struggles to keep up appearances in the face of Allanaki society, which is all too ready to condemn her. When she has a chance to shape a city-wide festival, will she be able to turn the tables on the families that have mocked the Fales for so long?
Mirabai the Twice-lived: Mirabai is appointed the spiritual leader of her people, despite her extreme youth. She leads them through the decades only to be presented with an unexpected second chance in her later years.
Narrative of a Beast’s Life: Taken from his home village, the centaur Fino is enslaved and shipped to a new land, where he must learn to cope with the trainer determined to break him. This short story originally appeared in Realms of Fantasy.
Events at Fort Plentitude: An exiled soldier tries to wait out a winter in a fort beleaguered by fox-spirits and winter demons. Originally appeared in Weird Tales under editor Ann VanderMeer.
How Dogs Came to the New Continent is a short story pulled from the events of the novel Hearts of Tabat, told in the form of a meandering historical paper that teases out more behind the oppression of Beasts and their emerging political struggle.
Her Windowed Eyes, Her Chambered Heart is steampunk horror based on an episode of the old Wild Wild West TV series. Pinkerton agents Artemus West and Elspeth Sorehs have been chasing their prey across the country. When they finally catch up with him near the outskirts of the Cascades, though, they realize he’s gone to ground in a mysterious house that once belonged to his mother, a famous inventor. What secrets hidden in the house will they discover””and how will the house protect its returned son?
Grandmother is space opera with an older female protagonist. Space pirate Phoenix, now retired, finds herself facing an unlikely opponent. Will she and her lover Gareth be able to survive the deadly scheme set up to destroy them and the planet Phoenix rules?
Elsewhere, Within, Elsewhen: On a distant planet, David struggles to overcome his husband’s betrayal, only to encounter an unlikely sympathizer in the form of one of the planet’s native inhabitants. But are its intentions truly benign?
Like these and want me to make other stories available? Review these or drop me a line in the comments!
This is a baby two-toed sloth. I can't decide whether or not they're cuter than baby three-toed sloths. It's a toss up, really.
Down to our last week here! We leave next Thursday and head to Miami where we’ll spend a day and then (yay!) hop on a cruise ship to take advantage of a last-minute opportunity. I’ve never been on one, so I’ve been reading up on the experience and am looking forward to it. We’ll be spending seven days on the boat and seeing a little of the Caribbean (which I cannot envision without thinking of the Sid Meier Pirates! game, which consumed a great deal of my time at one point. After that we’re headed up to the NYC/PA area for early October, where I think I’ll be around the time of the SFWA reception there, but I’m still figuring that out.
I’ve not gotten much writing this week, but for good reasons. First we visited the Sloth Sanctuary here and spent the night in the Buttercup Room of their B&B. We got to go for an early morning canoe ride along a placid salt-water river, seeing bats, birds, and beautiful vegetation, then spent a couple of hours touring and seeing sloths, including the babies, which are the essence of cuteness. Here’s a video from the baby sloth nursery.
They have a lot of adult sloths as well – close to 150 sloths there total. Sometimes the babies are removed from the mother in order to help both their chances. The morning we were there, for example, a mother sloth and baby had come in that had been mauled by a dog, and they were separated because the mother was severely dehydrated and hurt and couldn’t nurse the baby. They take good care of them. We would have loved to pet them, for example, but it’s so much better for the babies if that doesn’t happen, so it was all hands off.
Some of them were rescued or found by people, others taken away from stupid people who thought they would make a good pet. There were an awful lot of sad, sad stories. But the sanctuary works hard to get them rehabilitated and back out into the wild if they’ll survive there. The ones that stay permanently are ones like Gwendolyn, whose arms and legs got broken by HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE people, or another sloth (whose name I forget, unfortunately), who was paraplegic.
Sloths are amazingly docile creatures. And they are lovely and awesome. But they belong in the wild, if at all possible. I was really impressed by the sanctuary and the work they’re doing. Good people. There’s an Animal Planet series about it, called “Meet the Sloths,” if you want to see more about it.
We had rented a car and drove to the sanctuary, which is on the other side of Costa Rica, so the day after we got back, we used the last day to drive down to Marino Ballenas and a whale watching trip. Unfortunately, I have no video because I’d forgotten to bring a plastic bag to keep my phone dry, but we saw humpbacks jumping, including a mother and baby, which was freaking SPECTACULAR. Also an extremely surprised sea turtle. It was amazing.
I did get a little writing in, and a bit more yesterday and this morning, on two projects, the first being novella/novel Seed & Cavern, and the second a modern horror story about tourism, set on Jaco Beach. Heh. Here’s a teaser from the latter, which has the working title “Jaco Tours”:
Joshua had not meant to offend the American lady. Or her companion, for that matter, although the companion seemed less offended than amused by the whole thing.
At the time, though, everything had seemed fine. He was out in front of the tour offices, handing out flyers and coaxing tourists into coming in to see what marvelous outings Jaco Tours (the finest in Costa Rica!) could offer them.
It wasn’t quite rainy season, but it was edging up on it, and already most of the tourists had gone, unwilling to face the rains that came in every evening, full of thunder and lightning. In the full season, you didn’t have to go looking for tourists ““ there were plenty of them, all down in Jaco and ready to spend money on learning to surf or visiting Manuel Antonio Park or going out sportfishing. But this time of year, you grabbed them while you could, because soon enough you’d be settling down to wait out the rainy days, living on whatever you’d managed to put away while the putting was good.
So there they were, the American couple. She looked like the kind who’d like the monkey tour, so he’d stopped them, described how they would give them fruit, how the monkeys would come and eat from their hands, and he’d seen her eyes light up the way some people’s did at the thought of monkeys. They had no monkeys in America, he knew, and there was something about them that made Americans crazy about them, at least the ones who hadn’t learned better, like going to Manuel Antonio and leaving their lunch on the beach while they swam, only to come back and find the monkeys and raccoons had gone through all their belongings.
Her companion was slender, narrow-hipped. A handsome man. The woman was older, surely, and Joshua gave her a smile. She was hooked. Now to persuade the man to buy the tour to please her.
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Well, as you may know, Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain made it onto the Nebula ballot. I can’t express how much that means to me. The Nebulas are voted on by members of SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, all of whom are writers in their own right, and so this feels very much like recognition and validation from my peers. Wow. That’s all I can say about that.
2 Responses
Congrats on the nomination, Cat!
Thanks Steve, I never thought about going to wdiepiika for a story. But the link they have for that story took me to an error page. From the description of his writing, I may have read some of his stories. I don’t always catch the name of the writer when I read short stories.