In my last post, I mentioned a very timely e-mail, reminding me of the world of publishing that has been running along on its own wheels without me these past months.
During last year’s busy convention schedule, I found myself crossing paths several times with NIWA, a group of independent authors who have been working hard to build a community and set of standards in the northwest. They are a talented and devoted bunch, so when I was invited to participate in the Load Local program, I couldn’t have been happier.
Load Local is basically an incentive to link independent authors with the brick and mortar bookstores that are so vital to our industry through e-book sales, a medium that can often bypass the local bookstore entirely. As part of the Load Local program, you’ll be able to purchase and download the electronic version of Yours Is The Earth at Jacobsen’s Books and More in Hillsboro, Oregon. If you’re local, I highly recommend you stop by and check the program out!
I’ll be heading down to do a reading and signing sometime in September – more details on date and time soon, but I hope some of you will stop in and say hello!
I’ve been working on this post in my head for a while now, trying to decide exactly what to share about the last few months of my life. Sharing information about my own inner workings is not really my strong suit (funny, since that’s pretty much what writing is all about, isn’t it?) Still, my personal relationships have grown quiet, my writing career has drawn to a screeching halt, and if I want to reclaim my life, I guess it has to start somewhere. This is as good a place as any.
While it’s important to me to keep my personal issues and my writing career separate to some degree, some personal issues overshadow your career, whether you decide to allow it or not. For me, starting last summer, (not coincidentally the time when I attended my last conventions) that’s what began to happen with me.
Every day, I felt a little more run down than the day before, and the headaches that I wrote off as eye strain began to eat away days of my life. Little symptoms quietly became not-so-little. Still, it didn’t occur to me to see a doctor, until my joints began to hurt.
By the time the doctor ran the blood work that set us on the right path to diagnosing what was going on, I could barely type, could hardly sit at the computer screen and couldn’t fathom summoning the energy to make my kids lunch, let alone create something new. A part of me felt as though perhaps my writing career had passed me by, and I didn’t even have the energy to grieve it.
We got the blood results back, and after several other tests that led us in all the wrong directions, this one was a little more conclusive, and it indicated an autoimmune disorder that I had never even heard of called Scleroderma, or Systemic Sclerosis.
I was terrified. Bad enough to face the fact that I was sick – not cold/flu sick, but seriously and undeniably sick. It’s easy to fool yourself, especially with symptoms so insidious and stealthy in their commandeering of your life. Now I had to face that I would forever continue to be sick. Always. Meds every day for the rest of my life kind of sick.
I know, the last thing we are supposed to do in this age of information surplus is google an illness – any illness. But what else to do when the doctors were saying unfamiliar words about my test results? You can trust me when I tell you that our friend google had some pretty scary things to say about Scleroderma.
My life began to feel like an ever shrinking window through which I could only watch everyone around me passing me by. For a heartbeat, in the scope of things, I was suddenly certain that the window would only continue to shrink until it disappeared altogether. It was a difficult road to walk.
Then, however, there were meds. And more appointments. And more meds. And studies. And more meds. And slowly, but steadily, the window began to grow larger again.
So. Here we are. A life, reclaimed, if a bit scratched and chipped, from the wreckage of a rough year. My daughter wrote me a note in which she referred to ‘The New and Improved Mom,’ and I am finding myself reminding my son more every day that he doesn’t need to be quite to careful of my health anymore. My husband, the stoic and ever-constant man-muse has rediscovered his smile. Suddenly, the house is clean again, without any concerted effort on my part, and I can walk to and from the elementary school without pause. For a while, while I waited for the meds to do their slow and careful work, it was enough.
But behind the closed door of my office, there was a moss green IBM Selectric 2 that gathered dust and waited patiently. Several times a day, I have paused at that doorway, and thought about entering before passing by, promising myself that one day soon I would be ready. That I would know when it was time.
In the same pattern that lost me my life, little things becoming big things, I think that the universe is telling me that it is time. Last night saw a long heartfelt discussion with the man-muse about which direction my ‘reboot’ might take. I’m packing up my first paperback sale in long months to mail off, and though it is not to a new reader, but instead to a dear friend, it reminds me nonetheless of where my heart is. This very morning, as I contemplated these things, a new opportunity came to me, unexpected though very welcome, for a new venue for my ebooks.
Wrapping this new fact into the fabric of my life is not easy. This illness is a part of me now, and though the meds have made it far more manageable, I will never again be able to stop managing this disease process, tugging and squeezing at my life in order to make it fit the shape that the disease dictates. I don’t like it. But I can do it.
Writing, after all, has never been an easy thing to fit into the shape of any life. Having kids, a marriage, a job, school – there are always shapes in our lives that writing has to move to accommodate, and as I find my stride in the new skin I am wearing, I know that this is no different. I will make it fit, because I cannot do otherwise.
So today, before I sleep (even if after the laundry and the dishes) I will power up the Selectric, and hear its weighty hum, the warm breath of ink and moving parts soft against my face, and I will commit words to page, for the first time in six months. They probably won’t be good ones, but they will be the first to be written by this new me, and that carries a beauty all its own. For today, it is enough.
Once upon a time, in the long long ago, I used to love writing exercises. When I had a newborn baby (both times) and couldn’t quite devote my whole mind to writing, and again later when my back surgery put me in too much pain and on too many heavy-duty meds to feel like I could write anything of substance, I kept myself moving forward by pulling out my various prompt books and throwing together 500 – 1000 word flights of fancy.
However, as I grew as a writer, I couldn’t help but feel like I sort of grew out of the kinds of exercises I enjoyed the most. See, I have this little blue book, a wonderful book called The 3 a.m. Epiphany, by Brian Kiteley. It is full of fantastic exercises that force you to push your own boundaries (for example, one of my favorite resulting pieces was from an exercise called ‘The Reluctant I,’ in which you have to write a piece, in the first person, but only use two first person pronouns (I,me,my,etc)). They’re a lot of fun, the only problem is that trying to accomplish such a specific result, in a short piece and a short period of time didn’t really leave me a lot of room for the world-building that is such an important component of the speculative fiction that I really love to write. All of my results wound up firmly set in the mundane world. A fight between lovers, a mother watching her children playing in the yard, a high school girl who didn’t fit in. Bleh. I started to realize that the exercises, and their resulting flash pieces, were boring me out of my mind.
Eventually, the book went back on to the shelf, I found other ways to warm up my brain. But I missed the challenge that those exercises presented, and I always promised myself I’d find a way to make them more fun again.
Flash forward to this past Sunday afternoon. It was a glorious sunny afternoon, a swingset in the yard and a brand new, face-meltingly cute puppy scampering around looking for someone to throw her a ball so of course, the children were bored. I was using my most dulcet and loving of motherly tones to urge them to stop interrupting my precious video game time with their whining, when I remembered a blog post I had seen earlier.
Over at terribleminds, the funny and scarily talented Chuck Wendig has been playing with a new way to toy with the written word – it involves lists of topics to be mashed up and a d20. Go, check it out real quick, I’ll wait – The Epic Game of Aspects Redux
See? Cool, right? And, before he saved my little blue book, Chuck saved my video game time (a regular knight in shining armor!) because I had the children each roll a ginormous d20 that sits in the living room, and told them to go outside to play their mashups. After a handful of re-rolls (I know, I know, I’m much too easy a DM) they rushed outside to play games involving poisonous snakes, post-apocalyptic landscapes, and ‘sins of the father.’ (As a side note, I found it terribly amusing to try to explain that concept to my 7 year old, and then somewhat shaming when he finally caught on with the words, “Like Global Warming?” I suppose that’s one way to interpret it…)
Anyway. They had so much fun rolling and re-rolling and mashing up concepts, that I decided that perhaps I would give it a shot after all. I sat down at my writing desk (only after a well deserved Sunday afternoon of Dragon’s Dogma, which is slightly meh, but I’ll take what I can get until the magical and far off day when Skyrim DLC comes to PS3) and spied my sad, neglected little exercise book, and finally had my way to make the exercises in it meld into the kind of writing that is fun (and thus productive) for me to do.
So. What’s the takeaway here? I suppose first and foremost, is that if your writing exercises aren’t entertaining, you should ask yourself why, and look for ways to remedy that. Writing isn’t always fun. There are long patches of trekking through the desert, where it feels like you have to drag every word out of the aether against its will, where you hate all of your characters and all of your plotlines and you want to invent a particularly evil villain to just blow the whole thing to pieces. Exercises, warm-ups, whatever you want to call the writing that helps you to prime the pump, are awesome because they let you jump from the honeymoon ‘this-story-is-awesome’ phase, straight to the ‘hell-yeah-bitches-I-finished-something’ phase, with none of the confusion and self loathing of the desert in the middle.
It might take lots of hits and misses to find what your pump-priming method looks like, and it’s likely a moving target, that will change from year to year, from week to week or even mood to mood, but when you find the perfect magic ritual that helps you unlock the fun of writing, even when your book is making you want to smash your head into your keyboard, it is an awesome and powerful thing.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to ramble for 700 words in the subgenre of Magic Realism, with a conflict involving a Quest for Someone and the element of Flying Monkeys. The goal (from the blue book) is to write about ghosts exploring their existence in and outside of time. Try to get bored writing that.
As usual, it has been much too long between posts. This summer has disappeared in a flurry of family visits, camping trips and other glorious slacking off. Most recently, we have been focused on the search for the newest member of the Sturgeon clan. (More on that with pictures of face melting cuteness when Zoe comes home next week)
In official news, there has been little over the summer, but there have been a few tidbits of note:
Geek Girl Con – Geek Girl is one of my favorite cons, and though I neglected to blog right away about my weekend (like the terrible blogger that I am) it was a fantastic con for me. I met lots of great people (including Sidekick Quests creator James Stowe, who graciously agreed to join my family gaming panel, and Halo Engine Programmer Corrinne Yu, with whom I spent a lovely hour at the media signing table.) My panel went remarkably well, and I sold enough books to help offset my Westercon losses. The kids had a blast, in the game room as well as at several panels, and C, in particular, made a fixture of herself in the dealer’s room, charming free samples out of so many unsuspecting vendors that she had to prevail upon the people in the EA room to give her a reusable bag to carry her spoils. She came away with more swag that she knew what to do with, including a couple of new video games, a bunch of night lights, way too much candy, roughly a year’s worth of handmade tea, and all kinds of other stuff that now keeps her room cluttered as befits her pre-adolescent stature. All in all, a great con (probably C and G’s favorite for kid friendly-ness) and, just like last year, I left already looking forward to next year.
It also bears some brief discussion that Geek Girl in particular has achieved so many of its goals as a con. I watched young girl after young girl stop to ask Corrinne Yu for advice about their educations and career choices, saw lots of little girls strutting their cosplay with pride (including my own), and lots of guys too who didn’t eschew the con as beneath them for being too girly. But perhaps the most meaningful way that this con has achieved its goal is this: The community has been alight lately with talk of harassment at cons; women who are touched inappropriately or made to feel like objects for daring to enter a world that is not theirs. Those of us who frequent lots of cons usually just sigh at these discussions, knowing that it is true, because *all of us* have experienced it. I am no exception, and I have my own set of stories, both of being made to feel unwelcome at a con because of my gender, and of being made to feel as though taking liberties with me was purchased along with membership fees (though I want to stress that the perpetrators are always a vast minority, and I encounter so many more people who are earnest and kind and in the words of the oft-quoted Wil Wheaton, not dicks at all.) I won’t recount those stories here, and I will admit to never having felt overly traumatized by my own adventures in creeper-land. (Buy me a beer sometime, and I will spill them all.) Anyway, all that being said, Geek Girl is the one con where that behavior has been completely absent. No one (in my humble experience) gets quizzed to prove that they are ‘true geeks’ and no one gets cornered or groped. Not only that, security is everywhere. You can’t look down an aisle without seeing a yellow shirt, or a helpful storm trooper (I know, ironic, right?) In fact, Rain City Superheroes acted as honorary security as well, looking out for con-goers and even staying late to patrol the dealer’s floor. And while I won’t go as far as to say that I have ever felt unsafe at any Seattle con (my experience in that vein has been pretty good) I will say that I felt better about letting C wander as she would, knowing that she was under the continual watchful eye of those security teams and an extremely supportive and helpful community. And that’s all I’ll say about that. (Ever notice how shitty I am at doing ‘brief’?)
Future Cons – After my experiences through the summer, I have come to another important decision. I have loved my time spent in the dealer’s rooms, meeting lots of the people who read science fiction, and even, most recently, people who read my own work. I love signing every book that goes out, and have perfected the art of answering the inevitable “What’s it about?” However, I think it may be time for a change. Because I also love cons. I love panel programming, and parties, and hearing the guests of honor speak and standing in line to get my ratty paperbacks signed, and while I have been behind my booth, I have missed all of that (My well loved copy of David Brin’s Glory season left sadly unsigned when a Saturday line was too long to leave the booth unmanned). So, I’m hoping to find my way to the best of both worlds, by participating in more panel programming, and moving away from the dealer’s room. My books will still be available for purchase, both on the website and at various booksellers’ booths wherever I am speaking (I’ll make sure to post the locations before any cons I visit), and even at the media signing tables where I’ll still be doing scheduled signings.
New stuff – As I edge away from the dealer’s booths, I find that I’m throwing my effort back into my more serious work, and I’m planning on shifting even further in that direction in the coming months. There are inevitable gaps that come in the writing of a bigger work, weeks where I let a new idea or a major character change breathe and back-burner a bit. Over the last year, these gaps have been where my self-published work was born. The short stories that comprise ‘Yours is the Earth,’ the novella that helped me flesh out back story on a novel, the musings that came together into the gaming guide; they were all breathers, and rather than create any more, for the moment at least, I am going to target the publishing world. There are so many amazing magazines out there, large and small, and so it is my goal to finish a few short stories this fall, and rather than gathering them for a collection of short work, toss them into the stream of the publishing world and see what comes of it. I’ll keep you updated on where to look!
New Blog Content? – I really want to blog more often. However, a day-in-the-life blog style doesn’t always lend to having lots to say. So much of the time, the only news on the writing front looks like: “Head down, slogging through the word count. Yay for progress.” Which is all great, but not very interesting. I read lots of blogs. Some are journal-like, like marysturgeon.net, only with more frequent announcements of note, some have themes, like how to be a better writer (Love love love terribleminds.com for that), I could even follow the sales of my gaming guide, and blog about how to make mini-gamers of your kids. However, a new kind of bloggery has recently drawn my attention – the re-read/watch/whatever. ST:TNG, Dr. Who, Wheel of Time, Ice and Fire; there are tons of beloved sci fi/fantasy series that I loved and can’t re-experience as often as I’d like. By reading a ‘re-experience’ type blog, I get to appreciate the series all over again, remember all the details that I loved the first time around, and generally (in the best incarnations) also get the perspective of the blogger. The eye-rolling at the flaws and camp, the awe of what has been done well, and the general collective squee-ing that fans do when we get together. As a blogger, it’s a great way to have lots to discuss, it would push me – both to blog, and to re-read an old favorite, and it would give me a chance to throw some love out into the interwebs for a series that meant a lot to me. For a while though, I struggled with what I might choose, for my re-read. I thought about Firefly (too short!), or Dune (too long?) – I thought about Dr. Who, but it’s being done everywhere, and I am ashamed to admit that I’m still working through my first watch of that geek mainstay, and to write a re-watch, it really should be a *re*watch. Then, as I reorganized bookshelves, I realized that I needed a massive amount of shelf space for one collection, a collection that was well worth the space, Katharine Kerr’s Deverry Cycle. Idly, I thought, I would *really* like to re-read that, if I only had the time. So. I will *make* the time to pick up Daggerspell and throw myself back into the adventures of Jill, Rhodry and Nevyn, and then muse about it here. If you read them, and loved them, we can dish together. If you haven’t read them, hopefully what you read here will convince you to go and pick them up, because they are a lot of fun.
So. With that, I will get back to work. Look for another post in the near future though. News in the works includes: Bookstores soon to be carrying my titles, panel programming by yours truly, and of course, the arrival of Zoe!
No time for a proper post this morning, but I wanted to post a quick notice that I’m going to be at Geek Girl Con all weekend. Mostly, you’ll be able to find me in the Dealer’s Room, at the Perihelion Press table. I’m also moderating a panel at 2:30 on gaming with kids, and I’ll be doing a signing at 3:45. See you there!
I wasn’t going to blog today. In the midst of a week of days that were too full for me to steal any writing time, I saw an opening, and I took it. I started writing this morning, and I was not planning on blogging/tweeting/any of the other ways I manage to spend my writing time that does not equate to any increase in word count.
Unfortunately, the day had other plans for me. Following in the footsteps of all of my writing heroes, I spend these early days of my career writing on a dinosaur. My laptop is bigger, heavier and less convenient in every way than the man-muse’s work-sponsored modern day machine. And it has quirks.
It is missing 3 keys, thanks to the early days of my curious children, and they cannot be easily replaced, so I have to plug in my usb keyboard in order to type (unless I don’t need an 8, a v, or you know, an e – a.k.a. the most common vowel in the English language…)
Various ports don’t work, the battery does not hold a charge, and even if the battery could be convinced to allow for ten minutes of work time, it wouldn’t matter since the original cord was lost ages ago, and the replacement is not a perfect match and thus will only power the computer, but not charge the battery.
You might think, given all of these charms, that I would be continually aware of my computer’s ‘over-loved’ status at all times, that I might not forget its biggest inconvenience while using it. You would be wrong.
You see, today the temperature, in its pleasantly meandering, Seattle-y way, has dared to rise above 70. Which triggers the last lovely quirk of my writing machine. The fan will randomly stop working. It hasn’t happened this year yet, so I was blissfully unaware that it hadn’t kicked on until some hours into serious word-racking time, it died. Unapologetically, with no warnings, no blue screens, nothing. It just kicked off, and refused to turn back on. Only after trying 3 times to revive it did I slap myself dramatically on the forehead and remember that right, it does that.
After consoling myself with some chocolate for the lost words, I set to searching the house to rig up a cooling system, and now I have my beast of a laptop up on a piece of wire shelving, propped on a couple of plastic ikea bins for better air circulation and a wind tunnel fan, sitting on a chair and aimed directly at the computer (and me. So much for a lovely, warm afternoon. Now I need a parka.)
I know. Nice, right? Ideal work circumstances.
Which leads to this blog post, born out of the necessity to use the computer for a few minutes and make sure that it doesn’t overheat and die again while I chip away at the WIP. Because if I lose any more of *those* words today, I will die. So far so good (see, how I dare fate? Better now than later…)
Which leads me to finally, in my long and wordy way, to get to the real point of this post, referenced in the title. The Honeymoon Phase. Thank the writing gods for the honeymoon phase.
If I were at the end of a draft, running down that ramp to finally-finished-and-thank-the-gods-because-my-eyes-nearly-don’t-work-anymore-and-my-kitchen-is-wrecked-and-my-kids-have-forgotten-I-exist, and I lost an afternoon’s work, I would crawl underneath my bed, I think, and cry into the carpet, which is probably pretty dusty and gross and likely smells a bit like golden retriever hair, and it would be days before I could bring myself to try to make up my lost ground.
If I were in the desert that is the middle of a draft, putting one foot stolidly in front of the other, moving methodically and stoically toward the point where the ending starts and the second wind sets in, and I lost an afternoon’s work, I would likely stomp my feet, perhaps throw a couple of heavy things, and if it was an unlucky day, or a hard-to-recreate set of words, it would take all of my carefully gathered determination, not to just let the project die a sad and lonely death, floating around dejectedly inside the cavernous depths of this too-big-and-heavy for its 80 Gig capacity hard drive.
Luckily for me, though, this is a shiny new project, with tantalizing bits of science-y goodness, still not quite perfectly sussed out, and mysterious characters with depths that are still waiting for the events of the story to map their dark unknown places, and a story that I have not yet spent so much time telling that it feels like I’ve told it a thousand times. The Honeymoon Phase.
And a loss of an afternoon during the Honeymoon Phase still stings, but it is a driving sting, a pinch that is just enough to propel. I mean, after I write a thousand-word blog post, reminding myself exactly why the loss was not, in fact, so bad.
The fan seems to be doing the trick, and the euphoric effects of my consolation chocolate are kicking in, and I can remember a phrasing I liked from that first scene, and a bit of dialogue that I can write better this time in the third, and it’s back to the races I go.
Thank the muses and the writing gods for the Honeymoon Phase. Is all.
As I recover from Westercon, I am just now realizing that I have not posted to this blog a single time since our big move to the city in April.
In all fairness, there has been much work in getting the kids acclimated to the new house, schoolroom and neighborhood. Moving can be a big challenge for homeschoolers, as public school kids just start going to the new school, and they get socially entrenched pretty quickly. For us, it’s my job to build that network that comes so easily to kids who go to school, and I’ve been working hard at it.
Now, though, we are well situated at the local homeschool co-op (with me already being drafted as the co-op’s writer-in-residence), enrolled in karate (which I remind the children on a daily basis *not* to use on one another) and our school room and new school schedule are all firmly established.
All of which means that I can give them a couple of weeks off for mindless video game summer vacation time, while I catch up on my sadly neglected writing life.
So. Westercon. For some reason I was expecting a bigger affair than Norwescon, since Norwescon is just the northwest, and Westercon is the whole west coast. However, I was sadly mistaken. Perhaps it was the whole ‘Fourth of July’ week deal, maybe it was that we have had our first warm and sunny weekend of the year, or maybe it was a flaw of programming planning, as some attendees suggested (wouldn’t know since I was stuck behind the booth all weekend) but this was the s-l-o-w-e-s-t dealer’s room I have ever attended. For a good deal of the time, there was just no one there. Just a bunch of dealers, looking at each other across empty aisles. In my neck of the woods, we were all hoping the costuming vendor across from me might make good on his promise to put on one of his coin-skirts and shake it for dollars.
If you were one of the attendees who vowed to come back to my booth on Sunday, and passed by to find me gone, I apologize profusely. My boy turned 7 on Sunday, and though I promised myself I would be a hard-ass and fall back on the ‘Mommy has to work’ line, I looked at his little face Sunday morning, asking me to stay home and play Dungeons and Dragons with him on his birthday, and just couldn’t tell him no. Especially not with attendance at Westercon so low.
There is good news, though. You can come by and see me at Geek Girl Con this August, and I’ll be moderating a panel on gaming with kids with the fantastic artist and creator of the amazing Sidekick Quests comic/kids’ rpg, James Stowe. Come by, say hello, and pick up an autographed book there! (Or if you can’t wait for August, you can always click on the ‘Buy’ link above!)
I will try to update more often from here on out! Now, to brew some really strong coffee, turn up the music, and see how many words I can crank out in my similarly neglected WIP. And… go.
Okay, I know, it’s been quiet around here. I’ve been finishing up the new books, orchestrating a move (one week before the con, no less) and because the universe decided that I didn’t have quite enough to keep me busy, I’ve been recovering from a bout of pneumonia too.
Still – the antibiotics are slowly working their magic, the moving truck will be here tomorrow, and best news of all, I got to see the first proof copies of the books, and they are beautiful!
I’ll be at Norwescon (I’m not contagious, I promise!) introducing them to the world. If you’re local, I really hope you can come by and say hello!
And, because the good news always comes when you are too busy to properly appreciate it, I got official word of another exciting announcement that I will be making very soon.
Also, look for my story, ‘The Touch Parlor,’ in the Westwind, coming out sometime after Norwescon (I’ll update with the actual date as soon as I get it!)
Somehow, impossibly, through much squinting at the screen and neglecting of children, I have managed to make my impossible deadlines with one. day. to spare. *phew*
That means that there are very few words left in my brain at the moment (in the last four days alone I have racked up something in the vicinity of 30,000 words!) but it was time for a blog update, so here it is.
The first exodus novella, Gift of the Dathuri, is finished and will release at Norwescon! I am really excited about this set of novellas, and this one in particular is very close to my heart. I kind of love origin stories, and writing one of my own was a lot of fun. I can’t wait to get this one out in the world and see what you all think of it!
The Guide to Gaming with Kids is also finally finished! This guide is something I had considered writing for a really long time, and in fact, I started writing it before GeekGirlCon, back in October. I was prompted to pull it back out and finish it when requests started trickling in from some of you, and I think Norwescon is a really great time to get this one out and into your hands!
Lots of other big things going on – it looks like the Sturgeon clan has finally found our new home, but that means lots of packing and other general busy work in the coming weeks, and of course, it just so happens that moving day is going to fall directly into Norwescon’s lap.
All in all though, I am excited about all things April, and I hope to see a lot of you at Norwescon this year!
I know, I know, it has been quiet around here!
The good news is that the lack of time I have for blog posts is due to the massive amount of new stuff I’m trying to finish before Norwescon!
So, what’s going on in my writing world? (Aside, of course, from the move I’m orchestrating and the redesign of the kids’ curriculum)
1. Artwork. I am working on finding an artist to put together some awesome cover work for one of my projects. It’s the first time I have done this, but it’s been a fun process so far!
2. Clarion. Yes, it’s true. I have applied for Clarion West 2012. I am up against really tough competition, and have no reason to expect that I will actually be going, but George R.R. Martin is an instructor this year, and when you have a chance to learn from your hero, you do what you can!
3. Novellas. Instead of the planned collection of short stories, I am going to release a set of 3 novellas instead, all of them built in the universe of my novel on sub. The first will come out at Norwescon, if I can make the stars align just so.
I think that covers most of the important stuff. I promise to be more entertaining when I get a little closer to caught up on the month of impossible deadlines!
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