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I had 20 original stories come out. Here’s the list, if you want to look for some of them.
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One of the things I’ve decided to do over the next six months is release a number of my stories in small mini-collections in electronic form. Each of these will consist of 2-3 already published stories, with 1-2 ones original to the collection. The first is Halloween Quartet, which contains “Whose Face This Is I Do Not Know” (appeared originally in Clarkesworld), “Niobe in the Rain” (appeared originally in Serpentarius), “So Glad We Had This Time Together” (appeared originally in Apex Digest), and “Pumpkin Knight,” which is original to the collection.
The next one will be Desert Quartet, which will contain “Aquila’s Ring,” (originally appeared in Light and Shadow II), “Karaluvian Fale” (appeared originally in Giganotasaurus), “Her Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight” (the title story from my second collection), and “Mirabai the Twice-Lived,” which is original to that collection. It’ll also contain an essay about the world in which all of those stories are set, that of Armageddon MUD, and my experience working with it.
Other e-projects in the works: a mini-collection of flash, a mini-collection of superhero stories, and something collecting blog musings about fiction.
Why do this? Because I do think electronic publishing is clearly the way the industry is going. I’m curious about the power to sell one’s work that it promises the author and I’d like to get in on what seems to be at least the first or second, if not ground, floor of the movement.
I’m lucky in that I have a little bit of a name, acquired through publishing short stories. I don’t know that this would work for someone with no already established platform. And I don’t expect to make a vast sum of money from them. But I do expect there to be a slow trickle. At least – that’s my hope.
How will I spread the word of them? I’ve learned a little from publicizing Near + Far, but I’m not sure how relentless I want to be about pushing these. I’ll certainly talk about the experience of putting them together on here, and will be mentioning them on social networks as well as on my mailing list. Suggestions are welcome, as always 😉
If you want to sign up for that mailing list, by the way, which will come no more than once a month and mention new publications and classes, fill it out here:
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But words are imprecise things, and so I’m a-gonna do what we used to call “unpacking” back in grad school and even provide some useful examples.
What did Connie say? She said, “Good fiction teaches us what it means to be human.” As good f&sf writers, I would argue that we might change “human” to “self-aware being,” but that is picking nits.
So what does that mean? It means we’re all faced with this common problem: life. And we want to know what we’re supposed to do, and what we can get away with, and what to do about all that hardcoded primate behavior that keeps popping up from time to time, and stuff like that. Sometimes the message features a universal human, sometimes it is a human shaped by particular circumstances, such as race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, etc. It’s why we like to read fiction. It’s why we like gossip. We want to know what other human beings do.
And here’s why this is important: Sometimes thinking about what a story is trying to say is a good way to complete, rewrite, or sharpen it. Doing this at one of those stages can move a story from good to excellent. Do I start a story knowing the message? Hell no. It emerges (hopefully). Sometimes I have to coax it out of its hiding place in the prose. Sometimes I have to go in with a club.
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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.
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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."
(fantasy, flash fiction) We were waiting on the platform when the investigating mime, our only hope, arrived. He stepped off the train, blinking in the bright sunlight. The brass band went through the motions of a welcome march; a few of us threw our hats up in the air, opening and closing our mouths like gasping fish.
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