baltimore book festival

This is a quick little flash piece because I’m still mired in moving, and also one that stays on the literary side of things, not wandering into the speculative. Nonetheless, I like it, and what it has to say about connection and communication in relationships.

Talking in the Night

It started like this: Mona turned over in the bed, trying to find the cool edge of sleep. She let out a little groan of frustration and her husband patted her shoulder, caught half-awake, half-asleep himself. She whimpered as though she’d awoken from nightmare and he pulled her close, buried her in his overflowing warmth.

After that sometimes she tested him with that little noise. Sometimes he was too asleep but sometimes he held her, reassuring as the shore holding a wave, feeling it leave and return, leave and return, regular as his breathing.

“You make noises in your sleep,” he said at breakfast. “Are you having nightmares?”

“Every once in a while,” she said. She studied him. How would he react if he thought she were suffering nightmares, that life was stressing her, eroding her, creeping into sleep to make it as uneasy as a coffee-less morning? “Often.”

He left before she did and when she went out through the frosty parking lot, she found he’d scraped the ice off her car for her.

Sometimes she woke and spoke words into the night, hoping he’d decipher them. “No” and “yes” and “please please please.” He slid his arms around her, stroked her back, but never replied. Sometimes later he slipped from bed and went to watch TV, sitting on the couch in his robe, lost and unknowable while the sports channel buzzed facts and figures while she lay in the other room wondering what he was thinking.

One night, she said, “Yes” and he repeated it, giving it a question’s inflection. She held her breath, didn’t answer and they both lay there, listening to each other pretend to dream.

He spoke first, the next night, and said, “Please.” It was her turn to repeat it, pitch it upward, trying to elicit the next word. This time it was his turn not to answer.

It could have laid quiet after that forever. She could have abandoned the night speech, he could have chosen in turn not to pick it up. Their horizons could have been sleepless and silent.

But the next night he spoke and told her about the time his father had taken him fishing and the hook had ripped into his thumb and his father had said men don’t cry. The story went out into the blackness and coiled near the ceiling, peering down at them as though they were dolls in a bed, plastic and supine.

She answered.

She answered with a story half-remembered of cigar ash and a grandfather and they went on telling memories they’d never spoken before to anyone, the things that they would have dreamed if they were sleeping.

And so they didn’t sleep. And so they talked till dawn and the day that was theirs as it had never been before.

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If you’re interested in my online writing classes, you can find out more about the live ones here or the new on-demand content here.

In recent news, Rappacini’s Crow as well as All the Pretty Little Mermaids both made Ellen Datlow’s longlist for the year’s best horror and my collaboration with Mike Resnick, The Mermaid Club, will be appearing in Conspiracy. Other upcoming work includes appearances in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Abyss & Apex, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

If you’re in Baltimore at the Baltimore Book Festival this weekend, please stop by the SFWA booth and say hi!

As you may know from the five bajillion posts and tweets and updates and god know what all else, I just had a book come out. I tried to have a somewhat coherent, or at least well-documented, promotion battle plan. Some stuff worked, some things worked better than others, and some stuff I dropped the ball on.

Things I did included:

• Making jewelry: Anyone following the blog has seen the jewelry based on the interior art that Mark W. Tripp and I put together. They turned out beautifully and were a lot of fun to make. I’ve used those pieces as giveaways at the book launch post, as well as various web giveaways, and people seem to like them. I’ve been able to post some pictures of people wearing those, and that’s been fun as well. I made sure the pieces I handed out at WorldCon had chains with them, so people could put them on immediately and many did. I also made special versions for blurbers and other people involved with the book design.
• Sending out an email: I sent out an email listing what people could do to promote Near + Far. I sent it to friends, fans, fellow writers, anyone I thought might be interested, and tried not to be too spammy about it, including a way they could remove themselves from my mailing list.
• Contacting book bloggers and reviewers: I contacted a number of people, making my list simply by poking around on popular spec fic sites to look at their blogrolls. I’d intended to set up a blog tour, but didn’t get my act together on that, so there was no organized effort along those lines, but I did do a number of interviews.
• Getting stories out there in both audio and print form: Figuring that samples of my work were one of the best ways to intrigue people, I sent out a lot of stories, including a number of audio reprints. I made sure that in the bio statements for each of these I mentioned the new book.
• Goodreads giveaway: I set up a Goodreads giveaway, following the excellent suggestions Emily Chand laid out in How to Run a Goodreads Giveaway with Maximal Results. The giveaway is currently on its last day, with 752 people requesting it, which seems like a good result, particularly since a third to half of them have added it to their to-read list.
• Blog giveaway: I gave away three pieces of jewelry on the blog, and had about a hundred entries all together. In retrospect, I might follow the poilicy mentioned in the Goodreads piece and just distribute one thing at a time, but next week I’ll be doing a sticker giveaway with stickers from the interior art.