Another Teaser From the Glitter & Mayhem Story

It’s the last week of 2011, a year that has, like most of them, had its good and bad moments. I remain hopeful about the future, and glad to be in this world, and I look forward to seeing what happens in 2012. I plan to fill it with writing, editing, and teaching. (And a certain amount of reading and playing video games and that sort of thing.)

Speaking of the productive part of those goals, I just sent off the last batch of feedback to someone on their NanoWriMo novel. I’ll remind folks that this is the last week to do so if you want to take advantage of my editing offer for NaNoWriMo novels mentioned here: http://www.kittywumpus.net/blog/2011/12/06/nanowrimo-what-now/

A couple of people have asked about my doing an edit of their stories for workshops like Clarion West or Clarion. I am willing to do a look over of the developmental edit type, where I suggest to you what needs to be amplified, eliminated, or otherwise changed, but I won’t do a sentence by sentence one, since you need to be getting in on your own merits, in my opinion.

Next week I’ll be announcing the next round of classes – stay tuned for some cool possibilities (in my opinion!)

I loved Kris Dikeman’s Silent, Still and Cold in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. It has a high fantasy sensibility mixed with zombies, which always seems like a win-win to me. Also in this month’s issue is Jesse Bullington’s The Adventures of Ernst, Who Began a Man, Became a Cyclops, and Finished A Hero. Both stories have great titles, which is one of the things that’s been obsessing me lately.

Abyss & Apex has a slew of interesting stories in this issue, including J. Kathleen Cheney’s steampunky Of Ambergris, Blood and Brandy, C. J. Cherryh’s The Last Tower and Vylar Kaftan’s Mind-Diver.

Part I and Part II of Gavin Grant’s Widows in the World, published at Strange Horizons, are both full of interest and awesome. JoSelle Vanderhooft’s Mythpunk Roundtable is also full of sparkling, interesting thoughts from some smart people: Amal El-Mohtar, Rose Lemberg, Alex Dally McFarlane, Shweta Narayan and, of course, Vanderhooft.

Over at Daily Science Fiction, Peter M. Ball’s The Birdcage Heart displayed Ball’s poetic sensibility, which evokes but never enforces a trembling, exquisite realization for the reader. Lurvely. I also really liked Memory Bugs by Alter S. Reiss and Colum Paget’s chilling Imaginary Enemies. Lots of interesting near-future science.

Recent favorites on Tor.com include Kij Johnson’s Ponies and Ken Scholes’s monkey-riffic Making My Entrance Again With My Usual Flair

Crossed Genres included Therese Arkenburg’s The Halcyon in Flight, Corinne Duyvis’s The Rule of Three, and a story from fellow Clarion West 2005 class member, Ada Milenkovic Brown, Nadirah Sends Her Love, which I first heard at Wiscon a couple of years back.

Redstone Science Fiction’s Like a Hawk in its Gyre by Philip Brewer features one of the best bicycle characters I’ve had the pleasure of encountering.

I loved seeing a Tanith Lee story in Lightspeed Magazine. She’s one of my favorite writers, and Black Fire didn’t disappoint. Even though I tend to think of her as a fantasy writer, when she does sf, she does it extraordinarily well (The Silver Metal Lover, for example, and Drinking Sapphire Wine, neither of which are available on the Kindle and one of which is out of print, for the love of God.)