Teaser: First Excerpt from A New Board is Elected at Villa Encantada

Here’s a snippet from what I’ve been working on today. Peeps who attended the Plotting class yesterday (which was AWESOME) – this is the steampunk horror story that I showed you the initial notes for.

A frenzy of fretwork adorned the house’s facade, but it was splintery, paint peeling in long shaggy spirals that fuzzed the puzzled outlines. The left side drooped like the face of a stroke victim, windows staring blindly out, cataracted with the dusty remnants of curtains.

Marshall Artemus Smith thought that it would have given a human man the chills. He glanced back at Elspeth to see how she was taking, but her face was chiseled and resolute as a fireman’s axe.

“You all right?”

She swabbed at her forehead with a bare forearm, leaving streaks of dark wet dirt. “Thank your lucky stars you don’t feel the heat,” she rasped.

Hot indeed if enough to irritate her into mentioning that. He chose to ignore it.

The house sagged amid slumping cottonwoods, clusters of low-lying groves, their leaves indifferent ovals of green and pale brown. Three stories, and above that, two cupolas thrust upward into the sky, imploring, the left one tilted at an angle.

His spurs jingled as he clanked up the front steps. His eyes ratcheted over the scene for clues, but it was clear that their fugitive had entered by the front door, which hung a few inches ajar.

Wood creaked under Elspeth’s slower treads. “This was his mother’s house,” she said.

She’d gone over the files meticulously as always, then summed up the details for him as they’d ridden along. He ticked through them in his head.
“The scientist?”

“Angeline Pinkney, yes. She helped discover how to harness phlogiston. They had her working on the war effort till she was dying of rotlung. Then she retired out here and lasted another two years.”

Phlogiston, the most precious material in the world, capable of fueling marvelous machines like himself. He carried a scraping of it, small as a fingernail clipping, deep in his midsection. Once a year, it was replaced, but it was valuable enough that he’d had people try to kill him for it before.

So far none had succeeded.

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Amal El-Mohtar has a great blog post up right now about writers and posts where they list what’s eligible for awards. I get as squicky about writing my own as anyone else, I’ve got to admit, and I thought this was a terrific reminder that it’s okay to toot your own horn a bit.

So in that light, if you’re reading for the Hugo, Locus, Nebula, Tiptree, or World Fantasy Award, here you go.

I had twenty original pieces published in 2013. Of those, I’m pushing two, one SF short story and one fantasy story. The first is “Elsewhere, Within, Elsewhen,” which originally appeared in BEYOND THE SUN, edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt, which I am happy to mail a copy of to people interested in considering it. The fantasy story is “Superhero Art,” which appeared in DAILY SCIENCE FICTION. If you’d like to see the full list of 2013 pieces with links to the online ones, you can find it in my 2013 wrap-up post.

I myself am reading for the Hugo, Locus and Nebula and am not sure yet about WFC. I am also on the Norton jury this year, so if you’ve got a YA or MG novel that came out in 2013, I’m very interested. Feel free to leave pointers in the comments on this piece; I pledge to make sure I read any listed there. If you want to mail me something, please send it in mobi or pdf format.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.