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If you’re not familiar with the story, it appears here on the excellent online publication Beneath Ceaseless Skies, or you can buy an e-copy on Amazon or Smashwords. If you’re too impatient, here are some of the pertinent details: steampunk world, asylum for those injured by the war, nurse with a secret, doctor with an evil crow, wacky hijinks ensure.
The story takes place in a dystopian steampunk setting that I’d wandered around the edges of previously in “Clockwork Fairies” and “Rare Pears and Greengages”. This story got me far enough into that territory that it spurred others: “Her Windowed Eyes, Her Chambered Heart,” “Snakes on a Train,” and “Laurel Finch, Laurel Finch, Where Do You Wander?” I’ve been calling the series Altered America, and you can see some of the images I’ve used for inspiration here.
And the amount of effort involved in writing the protagonist that appeared to me scared me. Transgendered, Native American, poor, and disabled. How could I write that other without offending someone? Better folks than I have battered themselves against that question. But you can’t do something without trying, so I gave it a shot. I strove to do my best by my protagonist: to explain his background, his history, the way he thought, and his relationship with Jesus. Which is another way my character is unlike me: he is struggling with his Christianity, while I’m Unitarian, a faith that has taught me a great deal, and which I embrace, but which draws on, rather than consists wholly of, Christianity.
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Most of the last couple of months has been focused on one of several things: finishing the beta draft of Hearts of Tabat, finishing up the second edition of Creating an Online Presence for Writers, sorting through details for the release of Altered America: Steampunk Stories, or SFWA’s Nebulas Conference, which took place midmonth in Chicago, and which I blogged about last week.
So here’s some highlights of my summer schedulee.
Tomorrow I’ll post the list of classes for June and July, which includes a round of the Writing F&SF Stories workshop (Wednesday evenings) as well as the Advanced Workshop (Tuesday evenings). I’m not 100% sure, but I think that’s the last round of classes for 2016, aside from a workshop I am doing for Clarion West this fall and maybe a co-taught one every once in a while. I’ve got a lot of travel coming up in the latter half of the year and I’d like to be able to focus on writing and SFWA as well. Whether or not I decide to run for office again next year depends in part on how much I can manage to get done this year.
In answer to several people asking about the difference between the two multi-session workshops — I created the Advanced one for people who took the first F&SF one and wanted more. If you haven’t taken the first, you should do that rather than the Advanced Workshop, regardless of skill level, because it lays out my theories of storytelling in a coherent way while the second ranges wildly all over the place.
June 10 is the release of Altered America, which is a compilation of all my steampunk stories. Patreon supporters at the $5 level and above will get a free electronic copy ten days in advance. This has ten stories in it altogether, a number of which were published on Patreon. I hope to do a similar mini-collection of near-future SF by the end of the year, which will also go to Patreon supporters beforehand.
June also sees the release of a Storybundle of writing books organized by Kris Rusch that includes the 2nd edition of Creating an Online Presence, which is why I spent part of last month frantically getting that updated in time.
Bud Sparhawk and I wrote a novelette together, “Haunted,” that should appear in July’s Abyss and Apex. It’s space fantasy. I think. We had a lot of fun with it,but it’s definitely not a comedy.
July 5th will feature the release of both the class and book version of Moving from Idea to Draft. You’ll see several other classes appearing in the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, including classes from Rachel Swirsky, Juliette Wade, and a couple of other folks.
Summer conventions include the Locus Awards weekend, Westercon, GenCon, Worldcon, and Dragoncon. After that I am off to Beijing for the Chinese Nebulas and will spend several weeks in China. Following that, Griffcon in Indiana, the Surrey Writers Conference, Orycon, and maybe WFC. (I’m not sure about that last. It’s been a travel-heavy year, and WFC isn’t my favorite convention. It always feels very anxious and unwelcoming, no matter what city I experience it in.)
Writing wise, I am completing the currently half-drafted YA novel based on “Circus in the Bloodwarm Rain,” which is currently laboring under the working titleConflagration and starting to flesh out the outline for the next Tabat book, Exiles of Tabat, which is the third of the quartet.
As always, plenty of stories are flowing and currently floating around in forms ranging from inchoate to semi-final draft. Right now I’m completing the Wizards of West Seattle story and realizing the concept’s going to end up becoming an ongoing series that probably will go out once a month or so on Patreon. I’m also thinking about a RPG supplement based on the copious notes I’ve been accumulating.
In SFWA areas, I’m focusing on a new committee that I’ll be working with, the Membership Retention Committee, whose job will be to look at the new member experience for SFWA members as well as how to keep the organization useful for members. (If you’re interested in volunteering with that, feel free to drop me a line.) Other efforts include a) working with SFWA fundraising, b) a small musical endeavor that I just prodded someone about and which involves Tom Lehrer (yes, that Tom Lehrer), and c) helping out where I can with some of M.C.A. Hogarth’s amazing efforts, such as this mysterious thing here lurking under a tarp that I am not at liberty to discuss. *mouths the words “SFWA University” then is dragged away by the SFWA honey badgers while shouting something about a guidebook*
Three other important SFWA things:
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Enjoy this sample of Cat’s writing and want more of it on a weekly basis, along with insights into process, recipes, photos of Taco Cat, chances to ask Cat (or Taco) questions, discounts on and news of new classes, and more? Support her on Patreon.
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This is the short story that I read from at Norwescon this year; many thank yous to the people who turned out to listen on the last day of the con when many of us were tired and hungover and ready to go home and gorge on Easter candy.
This is part of the Altered America steampunk series, even though it takes place on the European continent. If you’re curious about the others in the series they fall in this chronological order:
Clockwork Fairies
Laurel Finch, Laurel Finch, Where Do You Wander?
Her Windowed Eyes, Her Chambered Heart
Snakes on a Train
Rappacini’s Crow
Rare Pears and Greengages (contained in Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight)
There will be more; I’m finishing up another Artemus and Elspeth story, this time set in Matamoros, Mexico, which should go up next month. I’m also collecting these in an ebook that will go out free to Patreon subscribers within the next two months.
As always, I’m releasing this for free due to the support of my Patreon followers; please check out Patreon if you want to help fund creators doing what they (and you) love best.
So here you are:
Web of Blood and Iron
The Hotel Gevaudan put manservants and maids up in their own rooms, one attic below the hotel staff: housekeepers, valets, clerks, kitchen help. The manager lived on-site as well, his family taking up half the floor below that. I’d heard his children more than once playing blind man’s bluff and squeak piggy squeak in the back stairwells.
I wouldn’t have minded a room to myself, but instead I had a cot in his Lordship’s suite, down on the third floor. I was lying there enjoying the Cannes sounds of birds and street bustle and funeral rumble of the trains and reading when I heard the door fumbled open and Lord Albert lurch in.
Alive for another day.
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Other pieces of this world are shown in Rappacini’s Crow, Her Windowed Eyes, Her Chambered Heart, and Snakes on a Train. At some point this will become a novel — you may notice characters are converging on Seattle, where most of the action will take place, and I’ve got some stories in the works, most notably a novella, “Blue Train Blues,” about a high stakes race between car and train across a landscape plagued with vampires.
This is a Patreon post, funded by the generous patrons listed here. If you’d like to see more of these stories, consider becoming a patron.
Laurel Finch, Laurel Finch, Where Do You Wander?
Jemina noticed the Very Small Person the moment the little girl entered the train. The child paused in the doorway to survey the car before glancing down at her ticket and then at the other half of the hard wooden bench, high-backed, its shellac peeling, that Jemina sat on. Jemina tucked the macrame bag beside her in with her elbow.
The child was one of the last passengers on, which was why Jemina had been hoping against hope to have the bench to herself, at least for part of the two day trip to Kansas City. The train began to roll forward, a hoot of steam from the engine, a bell clang from the caboose at the back of the train, the rumble underfoot making the little blonde girl pick her way with extra caution, balancing the small black suitcase in one hand against the pillowy cloth bag in the other.
She arrived mid-car beside Jemina and nodded at her as she struggled briefly to hoist her suitcase up before the elderly man across the aisle did it for her. She plumped the cloth bag in the corner between sidearm and back and sat down with a little noise of delight as she looked around. Catching herself at the noise, she blushed, fixed her gaze sternly forward as she folded her hands in her lap, and peeped at Jemina sidelong.
Jemina tried to imagine how she might appear. She knew herself thin but nicely dressed and pale-skinned. The lace at her throat was Bruges, the cross around her neck gold, the gloves on her hands white and clean. She looked like a school-teacher, she imagined, but not a particularly nice one. She felt her lips thin further at the thought.
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This story is a prequel to Her Windowed Eyes, Her Chambered Heart; I’m working on a third involving Elspeth and Artemus. Other stories in this world include Rappacini’s Crow and Clockwork Fairies.
Snakes on a Train
Elspeth folded her hands in her lap, trying to keep her brows from knitting. She hated trains.
They were dirty, with bits of smut and coal blown back from the massive brass and aluminum steam engine pulling them along, and engrimed by successions of previous passengers.
They were noisy, from the engine’s howl to the screech of the never-sufficiently-greased axles as they rocketed along the steel rails with their steady pocketa-pocketa-pocketa chug seeping up through the swaying floor.
And they were oppressively full of people, all thinking things, all pressing down on her Sensitive’s mind, making her shrink down into the hard wooden seat as though the haze of thoughts hung like coal-smoke in the air and if she sank low enough, she’d avoid it.
She glanced over at her fellow Pinkerton agent, who returned her look with his own slightly quizzical if impersonal gaze. All of the curiosity of their fellow passengers was directed at him, perhaps the first mechanical being they’d ever seen, with silver and brass skin and curly hair, eyebrows, and moustache of gilded wire.
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I’m getting faster at the process as I go, and I’m also refining it, which unfortunately means I need to go back over some of the earlier releases, just to make them all look the same as far as prettiness and completeness goes.
Would it be better to space releasing the stories out over the course of a year? Probably. But I’d like to get this all set up and done so I can move onto other things. I have enough stories that will be added over the course of the year as I write them or their rights become available that there will be plenty of additions as is.
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Working on a dieselpunkish piece, tentatively entitled “The Blue Train.” People may notice I tend to skip around a bit on project. By my guess, I think I’ve got about a dozen pots boiling at any given time, and at least two of those, right now at least, are longer works. I think this one will end up a reasonable length of around 5k, though.
By six PM, his lordship was up and ready to be shaved and dressed. I had sandwiches sent up, something to tide him over till he went out. His haggard eyes were pouched and heavy as though he hadn’t slept.
“Where to tonight?” I asked as I stirred the lather, smelling of bay rum, and spread it over the black shadows on his jawline.
“Jenkins,” he said. “He’s set up some sort of game in his car on the train. Says it will be novel.”
“Novel” is not a word one likes to hear from an older vampire. So often their ideas of novelty involve pain.
“Have the front desk call me a taxi.” He studied his lapels, fingering the wide black expanse, before he held out an arm and I placed his watch, freshly wound, on his wrist. Gold, not silver. A showy piece, but one vampires would appreciate. They like gaudy on other people.
He looked at me. “Do you want to come?”
He hadn’t asked me that before. It wouldn’t be anything new to have me there waiting on him while he gambled, but previously I’d avoided the vampires. They like nonhuman blood more than human and they’re not hesitant about feeding on servants. Would his presence keep me safe?
But there were tired blue shadows under his eyes. He needed backup. He needed a friend there.
His servant would have to do.
It’s been fun, but lots of research in an era I haven’t done much with. Otoh, the point of divergence from our own is almost a century earlier so lots of leeway.
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I just posted the first story from the Patreon campaign over there as well as mailing it out. It’s a story set in Altered America, a steampunk version of 19th century America that I’ve been working in recently. If you read Raapacini’s Crow, which appeared on Beneath Ceaseless Skies this month, it’s the same world.
19th century America is one of my favorite historical periods, and I’m looking forward to bringing in some of my favorite figures as characters, such as Lucy Stone, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Victoria Woodhull. You’ll find a somewhat altered Abraham Lincoln as well, who has made a terrifying choice in order to win the Civil War, one that will affect the country for decades, possibly centuries, to come.
The story is inspired by the television show, Wild Wild West, which was steampunk back before anyone knew the term. The pair of Pinkerton agents in the story have already appeared in one other story, and I suspect there’s plenty more of their adventures lurking in the wings.
Here’s the first few paragraphs:
Frenzies of gingerbread adorned the house’s facade, but it was splintery, paint peeling in long shaggy spirals that fuzzed the fretwork’s outlines. The left side of the house drooped like the face of a stroke victim, windows staring blindly out, cataracted with the dusty remnants of curtains.
Agent Artemus West thought that it would have given a human man the chills. He glanced back at Elspeth to see how she was taking it, 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’re mechanical and 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 trees, their leaves 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. The wind whistled through the fretwork, a shifting, hollow sound, like a jug’s mouth being blown across. There had once been a flower garden towards the back. Weeds had claimed most of it, but the papery red heads of poppies blazed among the tangle. The sky stretched high and blue and hollow overhead.
If you’d like to read the rest, you can! Make a pledge as small as $1 per story, and you’ll get two original, unpublished stories each month from me, along with commentary. The next story, appearing in two weeks, will be contemporary horror.
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She was awake. She jolted upright, disturbing Laurel, who said something drowsily. Jemina stroked her hair with her right hand, settled the child back into her lap. Her heart still hammered uncomfortably.
She looked out the window into the darkness and could see only the reflection of the car’s interior for a moment. Then as her eyes picked out detail, she saw the stars hanging far overhead, the blaze of the Milky Way, a curdle of starlight spilling over the plains that rolled out as far as the eye could see.
Chuggadrum, chuggadrum, the sound of the wheels underfoot, the everpresent vibration working its way through her body as they hurtled through the night towards Seattle.
They’d promised her a laboratory of her own. A budget. Assistants.
Things she could do without interference. That was worth a lot, for a woman in a field that held so few other of her sex.
“I have nightmares sometimes too,” Laurel said.
Jemina’s hand sleeked over the curve of Laurel’s skull, cloth sliding over glossy hair.
“We all do.”“What are yours about?”
“The war. What about yours?”
Laurel lay silent so long that Jemina thought she had gone back to sleep. But finally she said, “How my parents died.”
Jemina’s fingers stilled as though frozen. She waited.
“We were in the house and they came,” Laurel said. “My uncle said they were supposed to stay on the battlefield and no one knew they went the wrong way.”
Her voice was subdued, thoughtful.
“It would have been all right, but papa heard them at the door and he went and opened it. That was how they got in.”
Jemina saw in her mind’s eye, despite her attempt to force it away, the scene: the man mowed down, devoured with that frightening completeness that zombies had, before they moved on to the rest of the house…
“How did you get away?” she asked.
“I jumped out the window and ran away. I tried to get my brother first, but it was too late, so I ran.”
“Your brother?”
“He was just a baby. He couldn’t run.” Laurel moved her head in slow negation. “Too late.”
Jemina closed her eyes, feeling the story wrenching at her heart.
These things happened in war. They were sad, yes, but unavoidable.
The wheels screeched as the train unexpectedly slowed. Both of them sat up to look out the window.
“Whose are those men?” Laurel asked.
“I don’t know.” But she suspected the worst, given the fact that the group had their bandanas tugged up around their faces, that many had pistols or Springfield rifles in their hands.
“They’re bandits!” Laurel’s voice was excited.
“Yes,” Jemina admitted.
They waited. Around them, everyone was abuzz, but stayed in their seats.
The front door of the car swung open and two men entered, both holding pistols, red cloth masking everything except their eyes. Both were hatless, their stringy hair matted with dust and sweat.
“We’re looking for a fellow name of J. Iarainn,” one called to the car at large. “You here, Mr. Iarainn? If not, I’m going to start shooting people one by one, cause according to the manifest, you’re in this car.”
Jeminia held up a hand. “I am Jemina Iarainn.”
Her gender astonished them. They squinted at her before exchanging glances.
“You’re headed to Seattle and the War Institute to work? Some kinda necromancery?”
“Yes to Seattle, yes to the War Institute. No to necromancy. I hold joint degrees in medicine and engineering, specializing in artificial limbs.”
Exasperation kept her calm. Why should these dunces not believe a female scientist could exist? And necromancy — she was, by far, tired of that label. She worked with devices for the products of such technology, but she wielded the forces of science, of steam and electricity and phlogiston.
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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."
(science fiction, story) When he realized how upset his wife was, George wondered if he might have miscalculated. Normally a quiet and loving partner, she was unpacking the dishwasher with a great deal of clattering and muttering.
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