This is from Wayne's Wear a Wacky Hat to Work Day. Other days including Give Yourself a Mohawk Day, Office Chair Roller Rink Day, and Tiki Bar on the roof Day. They do have fun at Smilebox.
I’m listening to Lady Gaga’s Alejandro and pondering a foray through World of Warcraft with Brightweed the Tauren warrior, who is only a bubble away from leveling, but first I thought I’d catch up with recent news. I’ve got quite a few publications coming out next month, and there’s some that I’m really looking forward to seeing.
In video gaming, I’ve been (as noted) working on WoW. Wayne and I were talking about and agreed that the more we played, the more we were liking this new Cataclysm expansion. The goblin starting area is a ton of fun, even if a little sketchy and unfilled-out in places, archaeology has been not only fun but a clever way for Blizzard to encourage people to go back and explore changed areas, changes to lower level quests in terms of number of things slain quests are well thought out, and the journey from 80 to 85 has been pleasant. I will say that the financial rewards from the water area seems all out of whack compared with, say, the Twilight Highlands.
But enough of that! Here’s some writing-related news.
“Close Your Eyes” will appear in the February issue of Apex Magazine. Here’s the origin of the story: we watched “Paranormal Activity,” which was generally stupid, but did have a few genuinely scary moments. I went to bed and was thinking about how I would have rewritten the movie to make it scarier and managed to work myself up enough envisioning terror that I had to get up and go read Winnie the Pooh for a half hour to cleanse my mind. I finished getting it out of my head by writing this, and I’m glad to see it find a good home. I’ve liked many of the stories I’ve read in Apex, and I’m looking forward to appearing there for the first time.
That’s not February’s only notable publication: “Long Enough and Just So Long” will be appearing in Lightspeed Magazine, while “Karaluvian Fale,” which is an Armageddon story, will be published in Giganotasaurus. The first is near future sf, while the second is heroic fantasy.
At the same time, February’s Seattle Woman Magazine will run a piece I did on local female science fiction writers, which focused on L. Timmel Duchamp, Louise Marley, Vonda McIntyre, and Cherie Priest. I tried to list as many of the local sf illuminaries as possible, but there was limited space and they trimmed some stuff. But! I’m really pleased with the way it turned out and am looking forward to seeing the accompanying photos, which were taken at Seattle’s SF Museum.
I’ve continued writing reviews for HelloSeattle.com, and am working on some profiles for them, a new feature which allowed me a chance to swap e-mails with local figures Nancy Pearl and Greg Bear.
Tomorrow I’m headed into the city for a screen-writing class with Michael Cassutt at the Richard Hugo House. I’m looking forward to it – the Hugo House classes are usually great.
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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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2015 Publications in Retrospect
I haven’t written here yet. 2015 was a good year for publications, including a few nonfiction ones. Huzzah! Part of that was the Patreon campaign, another was the flurry of promotional pieces I released to accompany my first novel. 34 stories published in one year is a record for me, although many of them were flash pieces and/or self-published either as publicity for my novel or for my Patreon campaign. Here’s the month by month breakdown, with some stats and what’s coming up in 2016.
January
I wrote nonfiction column #PurpleSF for Clarkesworld Magazine and my short story “The Ghosteater” appeared in Thirteen: Tales of Transformation, edited by Mark Teppo. The story involves a traveler, Dr. Fantomas, and his companion, who are asked to investigate a haunted restaurant, and it takes place in Tabat.
February
I lounged about the house eating bonbons in February. Well, not really. But I didn’t get anything published.
March
My flash fiction “Bit Player” appeared in Daily Science Fiction, after I wrote it during one of my Flash Fiction Workshops. I went to Emerald City Comicon and had my first book release party there, plus sold it at the Wordfire booth, meeting all sorts of delightful people in the process.
May
“The Subtler Art,” a story set in relatively new locale Serendib, appeared in Blackguards: Tales of Assassins, Mercenaries, and Rogues, featuring retired assassin The Dark and her spouse the wizard-alchemist Tericatus in a game of marital oneupmanship. Also appearing that month was The Haunted Snail, a flash piece (yup, written during one of my classes) in DAILY SCIENCE FICTION, and two Patreon stories, a horror piece titled “Reality Storage” and a story set in the same world as the Blackguards piece, “The Owlkit, the Candymaker, the Beekeeper, and the Brewer”.
And Ad Astra: the SFWA 50th Anniversary Cookbook, which I co-edited with Fran Wilde, appeared, and was a thing of joy and wonder, mostly due to Fran’s effort, as well as those of Sean Wallace. I will remind you all that the cookbook is eligible for a nomination for Best Related Work when Hugo nominations come around, mainly because I love that little book and think it deserves a nod.
June
Patreon story 2611, a horror story set in the apartment complex we have been trying to move out of for several years, appeared. I wrote this last year while we were living in a horrible temporary apartment and trying to get everything packed up and ready to go; most of the events are based in reality.
July
I went on retreat down to southern California and got some work done on Beasts’ sequel, Hearts of Tabat. “California Ghosts” appeared on my blog for Patreon as I switched the campaign over to publicly viewable.
August
Steampunk story “Snakes on a Train” appeared on my blog as part of the Patreon campaign. During the same month I attended Sasquan in Spokane, which was a lot of fun, and read “The Owlkit, the Candymaker, the Beekeeper, and the Brewer” there.
September Talking in the Night, a literary flash piece appeared on my blog for the Patreon campaign. At the same time, “Marvelous Contrivances of the Heart” appeared in Recycled Pulp, edited by John Helfers. That story owes much to the old Twilight Zone episodes and I hope it manages to evocatively tell the story of an unlikely artist and the consequences of the pieces he creates.
And we moved into Seattle proper, or rather West Seattle, which is AWESOME, and involves an apartment with multiple great writing spaces, including a kitchen table that looks out towards the sound and the mountains.
October
My first on-demand class, Literary Techniques for Speculative Fiction Writers, went up. I took 1500 words of notes for the live workshop, which is based on one I developed for Clarion West and which is one of my most popular classes, and ended up expanding them to 15,000, so I think counting this as a non-fiction publication is quite valid. I still need to go back and reformat and clean this one up somewhat since I’ve learned so much about formatting and setup since then; that’s on the list for January.
At the end of the month, flash piece “As the Crow Flies, So Does the Road” appeared in Grendel Song, newly revived by Paul Jessup.
November
I put up steampunk story, “Laurel Finch, Laurel Finch, Where Do You Wander?” on my website as part of the Patreon campaign. Also “Reflections from Mirror World 57,” a story made up of superhero flash pieces for Outliers.
Two more on-demand classes went up, the Character Building Workshop and Reading to an Audience. As I worked on the former, my ideas about how to shape these classes continued to refine themselves; I’m looking forward to using a lot of what I learned in doing these in classes for 2016.
One piece of past experience that’s been useful in assembling them is a stint of work I did writing study guides for college textbooks, for a range of classes that included economics, retail marketing, and terrorism. I used the software’s capacity to create mini-quizzes with the Character Building Workshop, in a way that led to my only complaint, someone who thought the quizzes were silly.
They are silly — mainly because they’re intended as an amusing interlude that nonetheless gives you a chance to review the core concepts of the material just presented. I’d be curious to hear other takes on them from people who’ve looked at the classes. Should I cut those?
December
December publications included my take on Mrs. Claus in “He Knows When You’re Awake” for Jenn Brozek’s Naughty or Nice holiday anthology, and forthcoming “Dark Shadows on the Earth”.
I also finished up with another nonfiction essay for Clarkesworld Magazine, this time On Reading the Classics and an essay on what I hope for SFWA in 2016 for this blog.
I hope to have one last writing class, Moving from Idea to Draft, done by the end of the year and am working on that, but these classes tend to get more complicated as I write them and this is no exception.
2016
Stories coming out in 2016 include “Red in Tooth and Cog” in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (booyah, that is a longtime goal and I am still so tickled to have hit it; “The Mermaid Club,” a conspiracy tale about underground feminists, co-written with Mike Resnick; science fantasy, “Haunted,” co-written with Bud Sparhawk; “Call and Answer, Plant and Harvest,” set in the same city as the owlkit and Blackguards stories, which will appear in in Beneath Ceaseless Skies; “Tongues of Moon Toad” in The Bestiary; Preferences in Chasing Shadows (edited by David Brin) and The Threadbare Magician in Genius Loci, among others.
Status of Current Projects
I need to finish up Hearts of Tabat, and that book was the main casualty of a year whose events included cancer on one side of the family, dementia on another, and a death among my favorite in-laws. I have about 115k words on it and need to make them all make sense and flow nicely into each other. I know the main action of the two books after that. I have some other stuff I’d like to write.
Collaborations coming up include a couple with Rachel Swirsky, one with David Boop, a stroy with Emily Skaftun and Randy henderson that we need to finish up, and one with Tod McCoy.
Upcoming on-demand classes include Creating an Online Presence for Writers, Flash Fiction, Revising and Rewriting, Linguistics for Speculative Fiction Writers with Juliette Wade, Creating Your E-book with Tod McCoy and quite a bit more. And there’s another round of live workshops coming up in January-March.
Books coming out include:
Neither Here Nor There, another two-sided collection, this time with a focus on fantasy (Hydra House)
Hearts of Tabat (Wordfire Press) and (maybe) Exiles of Tabat
Creating an Online Presence for Writers, 2nd edition
Some Overall Stats:
Stories published in 2015: 33, including flash pieces
Novels published: 1
Nonfiction books published: 1
Number of on-demand classes published: 4
Large writers organizations on which I served on the board: 1
Number of books read: bunches and bunches
Number of blog posts written: I will fill in this number when I have more time.
Happy holidays to all my readers. I hope your end of the year ruminations leave you feeling happy with what you’ve brought to the world over the last twelve months, and that you’re moving forward into productivity and joy in 2016.
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This has been in the works for a bit, but I’d like to officially announce that Hydra House, run by Tod McCoy, will be putting out my two volume set of science fiction stories, NEAR and FAR. I’m excited about Samala Coffey, the artist who will be doing the covers and will have more on that once she and I have everything worked out.
Each volume will be 60-70 thousand words of stories, including some unpublished ones, and notes about them. The two books are split up into near future and far future stuff. Hence, the name. 🙂 Story order is still a work in progress.
Among the stories contained in NEAR will be:
10 New Metaphors for Cyberspace (Abyss & Apex); Fists Like Mountains (previously unpublished); Flicka (Subversions); Legends of the Gone (Talebones); Long Enough and Just So Long (Lightspeed); A Man and His Parasite (previously unpublished); The Mermaids Singing, Each To Each (Clarkesworld); Memories of Moments, Bright as Passing Stars (Talebones); Not Waving, Drowning (Redstone); Peaches of Immortality (appeared in Fantasy Magazine under the title “The Immortality Game); Raven (Twisted Cat Tales); RealFur (Serpentarius); Therapy Buddha (2020 Visions)
Among the stories contained in FAR will be:
Amid the Words of War (Lightspeed); Angry Rose’s Lament (Abyss & Apex); Bots d’Amor (Abyss & Apex); Kallakak’s Cousins (Asimov’s); Fire on the Water’s Heart (M*Brane); Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain (previously unpublished); Fungus, Soy, and Beans (previously unpublished); Grandmother (will appear in upcoming anthology); I Come From the Dark Universe (previously unpublished); Mother’s World (Aeon); Seeking Nothing (Daily Science Fiction); Space Elevator Music (previously unpublished); Surrogates (Clockwork Phoenix 3); TimeSnip (Basement Stories); Zeppelin Follies (Crossed Genres)
I’ve tried to be a bit of a completist about this, and include everything Sfnal that’s appeared so far. I think it ends up letting some stories resonate against each other, particularly the five in FAR that involve the same space station.
