I haven't even seen the April/May 2008 issue of Asimov's, but a friend who subscribes has already seen it.
And there's this review at As If... Uhm. The positive part of the review is "satisfying." Yay! That's the second review I've gotten in my lifetime that claims that I satisfy. I am... satisfied with that.
And I promised myself I wasn't going to look for reviews...
A wonderful event in my life has occurred, one that I have alluded to but not celebrated, and it starts with the fact that about thirteen years ago or so, someone built a connector between my current library and my old library. (I remember the construction. I was a sophomore in college, and there were bats. The End.) And about a week ago, someone else opened a coffee shop in my old library. So now, the sun can blaze and the winter can... winter, and I can get chai tea and almond croissants and Greek salad and tempeh sandwiches whenever I want without going outside. Just two floors up and three floors down....
Yeah, so, I almost burned down the coffee shop yesterday, but that's a different story. (Croissant? Meet bagel toaster. Bagel toaster, why won't you let the croissant pass through? Argh! Stop billowing smoke and shooting flames at me! Awk! My croissant! Oh, phew, the barrristas saved the day and gave me a new croissant. The End.) But for the most part, it is deeply awesome to have a place to eat in my building. Ish. It's a deep source of happiness, regardless of the fact that it's not quite IN my building.
I finally may have caught on to this focus thing. Possibly, just possibly, forcing myself to open the same files over and over may have helped. I don't know. That's not all of it. That's probably not even the biggest part of it. But it's something.
In any case, novel is clipping along, short story is short storying along, and I'm dealing with only working on two projects and the SAME two projects rather well. However, I'm probably two or three weeks behind where I wanted to be on those, because I've spent a LOT of my time psyching myself out and up on this one. But I think, finally, it has caught. And that's all I'll say...
It's on its way!
Edited to add this whole next bit
Sharp-eyed co-Codexian David W. Goldman caught that I (and a couple other Codexians, including my fellow Milford 2005 alum, Ian Creasey) are mentioned in Sheila Williams's editorial.
Sheila says:
It might seem as though it could be easy to become complacent about buying stories for Asimov’s and rely solely on the work of the established professional.
And (or rather, "but"):
New writers are the lifeblood of the magazine. Rarely does an issue go by that doesn’t include at least one person’s first sale to Asimov’s. There are cases (such as Edward M. Lerner, a long-standing Analog author, whose first story for us appeared in our last issue), where I’m already familiar with the work of the author from his or her previous sales to other SF outlets. Others (such as Merrie Haskell and Nick Wolven, whose stories are appearing in our next issue) will be authors whose work is completely unknown to me. In each instance, though, these stories caught my attention and held it all the way through. They were tales that I enjoyed and believed you would find rewarding as well.
Yay! I really like Sheila's ways of thinking as expressed in her editorials, but I REALLY like that paragraph. :)
Anyway, it's an interesting editorial, about how much she publishes of new writers, and she really has something to say about the "odds." "The odds can be very discouraging, but writing a story and sending it in to a science fiction magazine is not the same thing as buying a lottery ticket." Check it out!
Got the good word from Nancy Fulda that you can find "Huntswoman" on Anthology Builder henceforth.
If you haven't heard about Anthology Builder, it's the new custom anthology option that takes advantage of print-on-demand technology, but with a capable editor screening the incoming stories (which tend to be reprints from reputable magazines, anyway, so they're doubly screened). You pick stories, you pick the order of the stories, you choose cover art (from some really AWESOME cover art choices, including stuff from the legendary Frank Wu), you name it, you pay a minimal fee (the cost of a trade paperback or so)... and then it gets printed and shipped to you.
VERY fancy.
As both a writer and a burgeoning librarian, I totally love the concept. (The only thing I can think of adding to the process--and this would be purely to match my own tastes for organization of information--is to include tagging for the stories.)
So, anyway.
Buy. And buy often. And did you know you can totally get my story and put it right next to Dave Klecha's story? Yep. So you can pretend, I dunno, that you're sitting at the bar at Confusion with us. Yeah. That's the ticket.
Published this year: 2 stories, but one made it twice...
"One Million Years B.F.E.: Diary of an Anthropologist in Exile." The Town Drunk. (November 16, 2006)"Dead Languages." Farthing. (September 2006)
"One Million Years B.F.E.: Diary of an Anthropologist in Exile." Escape Pod. (February 2006)
Accepted this year: 6 stories
Two "One Million Years B.F.E."; "Dead Languages" (formerly "Bound by Spells"); an entry in The Field Guide to Surreal Botany; "The Roman and the Regency"; a reprint of "Huntswoman"
Total submissions this year: 40 (made the last one about three minutes ago) 41; Postscripts would like to see "The Library Seed" (thanks for the tip, Vaughan!)
Other notable moments this year: honorable mention in Year's Best Fantasy and Horror
Upcoming publications: stories in Quantum Kiss, Aoife's Kiss (sensing a theme?), and The Field Guide to Surreal Botany.
Goals this year? No short story writing goals; my efforts are meant to be directed towards the novels right now. As for publishing goals, everything in my inventory will circulate until it finds a home or dies trying.
Right, so! The Town Drunk today has published my short story "One Million Years B.F.E.: Diary of an Anthropologist in Exile".
You can also still download the podcast version of my story at Escape Pod. You could even listen and read simultaneously.
This would actually be an excellent time to come up with a kooky contest... So I shall. To the person who identifies the most dissimilarities between Escape Pod and Town Drunk versions of "One Million Years B.F.E" before the end of the year, I'll send a free copy of Farthing number 4
My first contest! I wonder if there will be any entrants!
If anyone local to me wants a copy of Farthing number 4, featuring my short story "Dead Languages," I have ordered a few extra. You may purchase one off of me for $5. Or ask for one for Christmas--I'm feeling broke and yet self-pimpery, so either way.
Other recent good news includes the fact that I've cleared the decks and all stories that should be out are out. I have reached 36 submissions for the year, which is the total I hit last year. Freakily, I also have an identical acceptance rate for each year, though I might point out that 5 out of 6 of those acceptances all showed up in the 2006 calendar year, rendering 2005 ugly in my memory for all that it is statistically identical to this year.
I don't know if any other writers admit to this sort of thing, but I play little games with my submissions list and make bargains with God... "God, if you just give me a sale on story X, I won't take the next form rejection so personally." Ah, bargaining: not just a stage of grief anymore.
I find that the time of sending stories out the door is a time of boundless optimism for me. I just feel better right after sending them off. "Surely, this time they will find love," I think to myself. It's a nice counterbalance to all the submissions turning red on Duotrope's submission tracker (indicating that responses are long overdue). I don't have to do the little pre-query dance of checking every single site that tracks market times to figure out if mine is such an outlier that the submission was surely lost in the mail and now I've wasted one hundred and forty-three days... Argh.
Anyway. Having the decks cleared creates a daily check mark on my Joe's Goals account. Much like "eat 1 vegetable, ANY vegetable, damn you" (yesterday I got three checks for that, and finished every vegetable that wasn't iceberg lettuce in the house).
Okay. I've things to do. Dayjobs to get over. Books to read, cats to wax....
"Huntswoman" was honorably mentioned in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror.
I had sort of figured that someone would tell me if that were the case, so rather than risk disappointment, I had put off taking a look. Today, I had nowhere to be after work, so I buzzed the local Barnes & Noble (right on my way home), marched upstairs to Science Fiction and Fantasy, and walked up and down the aisle six times before finding it. (Shelved under D for Ellen Datlow with all the other D books. Yes, Borders does this better--anthologies are on their own shelf.)
And on page 467, it was there.
*checks off another milestone with a small squee*
The Strange Horizons Reader's Choice Poll is up. Vote for me... or don't... or vote for Peg (or Peg and me), or Leah (or Leah and me), or Ms. Williams (or Liz and me), or Ms. Burgis (or Stephanie and me) or Ms. Burgis' husband (hi, Patrick) (or Patrick and me)... or whomever (and me). There. Was that subliminal enough? (There was a lot of great stuff (and me) in Strange Horizons last year, and I really have barely touched the surface of it. And did I mention I had a story there, too? It was Huntswoman, just in case you forgot.)
Since I'm not competing in, oh, most of the categories on said reader's poll, I don't mind pointing out a few of my favorite links in said non-competing categories. I loved Marie Brennan's "Bull-Leaping in Bronze Age Crete"; Yoon Ha Lee's "The Dangerous Duckling: Images of Beauty and Illusion in The Perilous Gard"; and David M. Higgins's "The Western Genre Fled Across the Desert, and Stephen King Followed", among others.
And there was a lot of good poetry this year. I feel a bit guilty naming favorites here, but I do have to give the shout-out to Peg Duthie, in part because the poem in question is awesome, and in part 'cause she's Peg.
Alright, it's too hard to choose anything else to highlight. I'm going to stop there.
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Other links of note:
Ian Creasey updated the Milford website. I realized I really should write up something about my adventures at a British workshop or something.
A coworker pointed out archive.org to me--very cool.
Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Novels has a LOT to say about bad romance covers. (link courtesy my dear Julie Winningham)
Julie also pointed out to me what she termed A Librarian Smackdown....
AND Julie pointed out to me a review of one of my favorite books. Cofax's Review of Beacon at Alexandria. My one and only point of contention with the review is where it points out that the love story seems inadequate to the rest of the book (my paraphrase); I agree in part, because writing satisfying love stories does seem to be Bradshaw's weakness. (I've read everything she's published. I state this with a reader's authority.) However, I love Beacon so much (and it's also the best of her romantic relationships, IMnotsohumbleO) that I do have to defend it (lightly) by saying that since sex/marriage is the central trauma that spurs Charis/Chariton to leave home (she basically refuses to marry Festinus because of his cruelty, and part of his cruelty inlcudes a rather abusive getting-to-second-base with her, beyond what he does to her father's slaves), I totally buy it that Charis will romantically idealize Alaric--a man who at first seems cruel but later proves kind, a man who rescues her, a man who respects her, a man who seems completely non-threatening to Charis (one can almost see Sebastianus being up for having Chariton in bed; Alaric, on the other hand, possesses an unswerving heterosexuality).
Oh, it all works in my head. I swear.
And finally... I heart my president. No, not that president. The one who defends the future of books, not the one who wants to know which books you're reading.
And finally, from my aunt, the Age Guage, which is interesting because I honestly couldn't remember how old I was when some of those things happened.
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Late-breaking news: just queried to find that I'd gotten a rejection on "Subletter of my Subletter." I'm tentatively retiring that story due to the fact that it keeps getting rejected with the same message about the speculative element, over and over. I think it could be a good/saleable story with a solid rewrite (including an A plot), but I'm not entirely sure it's worth it, regardless. There are bigger and better fish to fry. It might be a nice scene in a really weird novel someday.
Thank goodness Stephanie Burgis knows what's going on. If it wasn't for her, I wouldn't know about half the reviews I've gotten because our two (separate) January Strange Horizons short stories have been thematically linked in people's minds or something. It appears that if someone mentions "Huntswoman" in one breath, Stephanie's "In the Tower" has been mentioned in the previous one.
Case in point, Rich Horton's 2005 Strange Horizons Review Wrap-up.
Thanks, Stephanie, for knowing what's going on in your own career! :)
Hugemongous congratulations to Daveamongus! Yes, Dave Klecha, the big brother of one of my three psychic brain twins (er, triplets?) (who shall remain nameless to protect them from the shame of being my psychic brain twin (quadruplet?))... er, anyway, Dave has sold a story to Scalzi's issue of Subterranean Mag's special SF cliché issue.
This is fantastic on so many levels--first sale being one of them!--but also because Dave finished this story at writer's retreat. I knew we were being more productive than it appeared.