Tropism (LJ Annex)

The Bananas of July

I don't update much, on account of I'm mostly over on the Twitter these days. Updating there pretty frequently. But for some longer-form thoughts...

Work on Bone Shop proceeds. Chapter 2 is pretty much done for next Monday. I'm starting in on chapter 3, figuring some stuff out. In the bath two days ago I figured out a character's motivation for doing something that seemed quite inexplicable. This morning I figured out where the snark and violence (both necessary ingredients in a Marla story) fit into chapter 3, which may be subtitled, "In which there are stabbings." It's nice to have a project for my mind to mull over.

Yesterday, our son ate five bananas, and I taught him to jump up and down, scratch under his armpits, and hoot and screech like a monkey. The whole family jumped around like monkeys for a while. Welcome to the monkey house, where everyone's bananas.

My friend Seanan McGuire, in her secret identity as Mira Grant, sold her zombies-vs.-bloggers trilogy, which is pretty awesome. Very SFnal zombies!

Nick Mamatas is offering sage free freelance writing advice: Part I, and Part II.

And I'm reading a crazy sex-and-comedy filled zombie novel written by a friend of mine, and enjoying it greatly. I said all I had to say about zombies in my novel Dead Reign, but I still like reading about them.

I finished reading all the extant Spenser novels by Robert B. Parker, and am now already nostalgic for them and figuring I'll wait a few years and re-read them. (How cool is it that my city library system had all but one of the 35 or so books in that series? I had to buy that one for $2 in paperback. No hardship.) I tried some of his other books and found them okay but less compulsively devourable.

I also read all the Parker and Dortmunder novels by Westlake. Got some recommendations for other crime/mystery series and have a big heap of books from the library, first books in various series, to audition, as it were.

Actually read a book in my own genre this week -- gasp! shock! Audrey's Door by Sarah Langan, which was pretty awesome. Weird literary horror, a haunted-building story made striking and individual by the level of detail and attention that went into creating the major characters.

Bone Shop: Chapter One

The first part of my reader-supported novella Bone Shop is online today: Chapter One: In which Marla converses with a pyromaniac, commits some minor crimes, and hears a curious proposition.

I've also indulged my love for afterwords and authorial blather, including some author notes on the chapter. There's a link at the bottom of the page linked above, if you're interested in such things.

Please read, and enjoy (I hope), and spread the word. The response and support from readers and the SF/F community has been really heartening so far.

Bone Shop: A Reader-Supported Novella

As I mentioned yesterday, my wife was laid off this week, and while we both hope she finds a new job soon (and that I sell some more novels, as far as that goes), we're in sudden need of money now. I could have just straight-out asked for financial help -- and for those who've offered that, thanks, it's appreciated -- but I'm a writer, and if there's one thing I have in ample quantity, it's stories to tell.

Specifically a story I've been wanting to write for a while, but couldn't find the right market for: a longish piece about the early adventures of my series character Marla Mason.

Bone Shop is a serialized, donation-funded urban fantasy novella, available for anyone to read for free. New chapters will go up every Monday. The Bone Shop website is here, though there's not a lot there at the moment. I'll post the first chapter on June 29.

Marla Mason is the chief sorcerer of Felport, a woman who's tangled with gods and monsters and come out on top (if a bit damaged in the process). But she wasn't always a formidable engine of brute force and pragmatism; she started out alone, in a strange city, without allies or any more power than the average teenage runaway on the street. Marla was always willing to do anything necessary to survive, and it didn't take long for her to stumble into a world of magic, danger... and even the occasional moment of grace.

Bone Shop tells the story of Marla's evolution from runaway to sorcerer's apprentice to mercenary magician and beyond. Fans of the urban fantasy series that began with Blood Engines will find surprising secrets revealed about Marla's past, and new readers can meet the character from the very beginning.

Your donations will help keep a roof over our heads, and pay our son's medical bills (he has congenital glaucoma, and requires regular visits with specialists to keep his eyesight from deteriorating). We appreciate whatever you can give. And I hope you enjoy the story!

Bad News and Crazy Ideas

My wife was laid off from her job yesterday. She's looking for a new one, and for freelance work. She's been a catalog and website copywriter, and a buyer, for the past eight years; she also has office manager/admin experience, and can write pretty much any kind of copy. If anybody knows of good paying gigs, drop me a note. Ideally in the SF Bay Area, for go-into-an-office jobs, though we'd be willing to entertain suitably juicy options farther afield. We have enough savings to get us through a couple of months, but if something doesn't turn up by then, things will get extremely difficult.

Many people have suggested I do a direct-appeal-to-the-people sort of thing. I'm considering it. I've been toying with the idea of writing a Marla Mason prequel novella/short novel, about her early days as a sorcerer. Would any of you be interested in a donation-driven serial approach, with me posting a chapter a week free online, and soliciting whatever people want to pay? And possibly selling a hard copy/e-book through Lulu.com or something when it's done?

Keeping a roof over our heads is priority #1. Keeping up with our 19-month-old son's medical bills is priority #2, since he has an ongoing chronic medical condition that requires examinations under anesthesia by a specialist, and occasionally surgery, at least a couple of times a year. Not to mention the constellation of pre- and post-operation visits. So I'm exploring my financial options. Comment or e-mail to let me know if you'd be willing to contribute to such a thing. If there seems to be interest, it could be a good option for me -- I've been eager to write this story, anyway. It would be weird and heartbreaking and full of punching.

Babies, Tigers, Boats

I'm home today with my sick toddler, so no officebaby adventures on twitter this time. He was sicker yesterday, when he just lay around on the couch like a moping teenager, emitting occasional moans, refusing to eat, being feverish, wheezing, and falling asleep on the floor (which he never does). He's still wheezing today, but he ate with actual appetite at lunch time, so I think he's on the mend.

My beloved editor for Rangergirl and the Marla Mason novels, Juliet Ulman, is interviewed and featured in the Omnivoracious Blog at Amazon.com today. Jeff VanderMeer put it together, and has more cool stuff about her at his own blog. Juliet rocks. She's freelance now, and you could hardly do better if you have editing needs. Her company is called Paper Tyger.

Catherynne M. Valente (another of Juliet's clients, coincidentally -- observe my segue!), Tiptree winner and novelist and poet (as seen in Flytrap), is in pretty dire financial straits, and is publishing a YA novel (The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making) in installments, and asking for donations, to keep her ship afloat. Get the details here, and help if you can.

There but for the grace of, you know, whatever, go I. Or any of us. Not so long ago my wife and I were looking into selling our plasma for grocery money; if some foreign book sale money hadn't arrived (and if I hadn't sold a bunch of author copies of my books), we'd be in a position as bad as Cat's. Let's hope the internet can help save her. Sometimes it can.

Half the Year Gone

I'm going camping, and I'm gonna take a...

Actually, we already went camping! We were supposed to leave on Friday morning, but the night before we ordered pizza because we were too busy packing to cook our own dinner... and we got food poisoning. Heather and I woke up Friday horrendously ill. (Fortunately, the baby ate no pizza, and was fine.) We spent the day in misery, and only managed to survive thanks to the help of Heather's sister, who took River out, fed him lunch, and brought him back asleep in his stroller, allowing Heather and I to rest and gradually rehydrate in the afternoon. We slept more than we were awake that day...

By Saturday morning we were feeling mostly human again, able to eat without revulsion, and so on. We finished loading up the car and headed down to Butano State Park. A lovely drive, the last bit along the coast road Highway 1, finishing up among the redwood trees. We had a walk-in campsite not far from our parking spot, and got the tent and all set up in short order. Our friends Scott and Lynne and their baby boy (a year younger than River) were in the adjacent campsite, so we spent the afternoon together. We hiked, and saw banana slugs (which River thought were bananas... until he touched one), and cooked vast quantities of barbecued food, and drank honey vodka in apple cider, and saw a bold raccoon in the night, and River made friends with hipster twentysomethings and small children alike. Really a nice time.

The kid was WAY too excited to take an afternoon nap, but Heather worked her exceptional mom-fu and got him to bed around his usual time, cuddled up in a kid-sized sleeping bag we borrowed. The grown-ups spent the evening chatting around the fire until the darkness got very dark. I slept well (better than Heather, who had a rolling toddler next to her all night), and we feasted on oatmeal and cereal bars and such in the morning. After breaking down camp we went to Pescadero for an enormous lunch at Duarte's Tavern. Afterward River danced around to a band playing across the street. I've seldom seen that kid have so much fun, and he's a fun-loving kid. We took lots of pictures, and will post some soon.

Hideous interval of illness aside, it was a great end to my vacation week!

No News Is...

The lack of a novel to write -- the lack of movement on the various novels and proposals I have out to editors, really -- is driving me slowly insane. I cope pretty well with bad news, and am a great fan of good news, but uncertainty just eats at me, spoils my concentration, and generally makes me grumpy. Working on my anthologies distracts me to some extent, but I need to be making stuff up -- yet two attempts to start new spec novels have stalled out, and I've written all the short stories that feel ripe to be written already this year.

Fortunately, I do have a creative project at the moment, for a possible freelance gig, and it's nice to have something for the gear-teeth of my mind to engage with again. I suspect I've been slightly easier to live with these past couple of days, though I'm pacing and muttering to myself as I always do when I'm working out plot/character/etc. stuff. It's fun. I hope it works out. I hope something works out.

The first few chapters of Greg van Eekhout's first novel Norse Code are online to be read for free -- that link will take you to the first chapter, and a link at the bottom of that will take you to the second. It's an awesome fun book, one of my favorites in recent years.

The not-writing-much does leave a lot of time for reading. I've read more books already this year than I read in the whole of last year. Lately I'm reading a lot of Parker's Spenser novels, and the occasional Jennifer Crusie. Love and crime, love and crime.

Divers Alarums

My epic fantasy infidelity story "Over There" is online at the Intergalactic Medicine Show! If you like adulterous English professors and supernatural weirdness, give it a try.

The past couple of days have been, shall we say, eventful. The PrattShaw household suffered a sudden economic setback (reduction of work hours) that led to conversations like "So, should we pay rent next month, or eat food next month? Because we cannot afford to do both." Much frantic scrambling for freelance work to cover the shortfall ensued, with both Heather and I reaching out to most everyone we know for advice -- and many, many thanks to everyone who sent us leads and, in one case, hooked us up with an immediate paying job! We'll be pursuing various possibilities.

I wrote my agent to see if she could expedite any of my pending payments, and she shook some trees (with help from some wonderful associates in Germany and Switzerland) and got in touch yesterday morning to tell me the signing payment for my recent sales to Germany will be in my mailbox by month's end. That money will keep us afloat for a few months, and, with luck, our circumstances will be improved by the time that money runs out.

Alas, we can't really justify the expense of going to Wiscon now, so we must with great sadness cancel that trip. We haven't missed a Wiscon since we first started going in 2001, and we hate to start now, but needs must. If anyone wants to buy our memberships, drop us a note.

Sympathy for the Devil

I'm editing a reprint anthology of stories about the devil for Night Shade Books, called Sympathy for the Devil. (How awesome is this? Answer: very awesome.)

I've got about 210,000 words to fill, and though I had a lot of old favorites in mind when I pitched this project, I've only filled about 160,000 words so far. That's where you come in: recommend stories to me.

I'm happy to look at Deal-with-the-Devil stories, but I'm not limited to those -- any story where the devil appears (even if in disguise, as long as it's strongly implied that it's the devil, a la "Young Goodman Brown") is fair game. I'm interested in various devilish aspects -- suave trickster Mephistopheles, brooding Lucifer, terrifying monstrous Satan, and maybe even a few cosmic adversaries who behave in devilish ways (so Shaitan and Ahriman count too), and weirder stuff too. When recommending, err on the side of inclusiveness. Classic stuff, old stuff, new stuff, whatever.

With the help of John Joseph Adams (who's given me tons of great advice already), I set up a recommendations database with a simple form to make this easy, so please do use my Devil Story Database to make suggestions. I won't be able to use everything, but I'll try to put together a "recommended reading" list too.

To see the recommendations that have already been made:

Devil Story Recommendations

Nineteen Is Not the Age of Reason

I can't believe I went so long without an update (though I've been twittering and blogging most weeks at The Magic District). Attempting to reconstruct the past, uh, 19 days would be foolhardy, so I'll hit the highlights...

I missed the ninth anniversary of this journal, back on April 20th. (It was a very busy day at work.) But, happy belated ninth, Tropism!

I finally signed the contracts, so it can be told -- Blood Engines and Poison Sleep will be published in Germany! In German, no less! (And if they do well, the others in the series may follow) Get ready for Blut Maschinen and Gift Schlaf (or whatever they end up being called over there). These are my first foreign novel sales. May many more follow.

The Big Book Sale was a huge success -- I made enough money to pay the kid's medical bills for the month and throw some money at the government for quarterly taxes and otherwise keep the wolf from the door; we even get to keep cable TV for at least another month! (Books are still available, too; the only one that's sold out is Poison Sleep, though I'm running low on some of the others.)

I sold "Captain Fantasy and the Secret Masters" to fantasy podcast Podcastle. It's a superhero novelette for one of their giant-sized podcasts. Should be cool. Also have an essay, "Accidental Urban Fantasist", in the upcoming May issue of Locus, which has a special section on urban fantasy (partly preoccupied with trying to pin down what exactly "urban fantasy" actually is.) I may use the money from those sales to buy new glasses, because the writer's life, it is glamorous.

We went down to Santa Cruz last Sunday for a big party at our friends Scott & Lynne's, where we got to see their giant adorable baby, whom we hadn't seen since he was mere weeks old. River ran around like a crazy thing and had a fine time, and there was much eating and drinking and chatting. Got to meet one of Scott's old friends who has a poetry MFA and is interested in science fiction poetry, so that was an unexpectedly awesome opportunity for conversation.

I've been reading vast quantities of crime novels, working my way through the Parker novels by Westlake under his "Richard Stark" pseudonym and also reading all his Dortmunder novels I can get my hands on -- only The Bank Shot eludes me, with crazy expensive used copies online and nothing in the Oakland library system. I'm reading them at the rate of about five per week, but there are a lot of them, so I've got tons of good books still ahead of me. Yay!

Not doing much fiction writing. Still waiting to hear back from editors on several different projects. Plinking away a little at a romance novel, but not building up much steam yet. But it's okay. I'm enjoying life.

Big Book Sale

We don't have a ton of space in this apartment, and my piles of author copies are beginning to totter and threaten to crush us all, plus we need some cash for baby hospital bills, so I'm going to sell 'em.

You can get signed and/or inscribed copies for cover price (I'll round up to destroy any stray pennies), plus $4 shipping per book for mass market paperbacks and $6 each for trade paperbacks. (It's a little more than shipping costs alone, but I gotta buy envelopes and spend time packaging things and give paypal their cut and all that, so it seems fair.) For overseas, call it $10 shipping.

Drop me a note to tim@tropismpress.com or post in the comments here saying what you want and telling me if you want them just signed or also personalized, and I'll do math and tell you what you owe me and where to send the Paypal money. First come first served and all that, which is why you should comment or e-mail instead of just sending me money -- I don't want you to pay for something I ran out of.

Here's what's available:

Mass-market paperback of Blood Engines, $7.

~~Mass-market paperback of Poison Sleep, $7~~ Sold out!

Mass-market paperback of Dead Reign, $7

Mass-market paperback of Spell Games, $7.

~~(While supplies last I'll sell a set of all four for $25 plus $12 shipping if you want to be economical about it.)~~ Sorry, I'm out of Poison Sleep, so no more sets!

Trade paperback of debut novel The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, $12.

Trade paperback of collection Hart & Boot & Other Stories, $15.

(All those above are first editions.)

Trade paperback of collection Little Gods, $15. (This is the newer offset edition, which doesn't include the poems that were in the original print-on-demand edition -- I don't have copies of the first edition to spare, alas.)

I'll keep the sale open until I sell everything or until I get sick of addressing envelopes, but it'll be open for a couple of weeks at least.

We've got a filing cabinet and another cabinet full of Flytraps and chapbooks I'd love to get rid of too -- buy some chapbooks or purchase back issues of the 'zine.

They make great, uh, late Easter gifts.

The Cruellest Month

Blog Every Day In April sounds like something I'd enjoy, but April is a third over and I didn't notice people were doing that until today, so, uh, oh well. But maybe I'll try to blog a little more, how about that?

This has been a week of disappointment -- well, a disappointment. I got invited to one of my favorite go-somewhere-pretty-with-a-bunch-of-other-writers workshops, but I can't go. Usually I can't go because the dates of such things invariably conflict with the production schedule at A Certain Magazine, but this year the dates are actually fantastic. The problem is money. We're stone broke, mostly because of a horrible perfect storm of taxes and hospital bills (lord, the hospital bills -- having a kid with glaucoma ain't cheap), on top of our usual credit card debt.

We're pretty much going to remain stone broke until I sell a novel or some other windfall lands on us. So I can't justify spending ~$800 or ~$1,000 on a workshop to critique a story I might subsequently sell for a few hundred bucks. It just doesn't make sense. But I'm disappointed. I'd love to go.

(We are still going to Wiscon, because the plane tickets are already bought and non-refundable, and at least it's a business expense for this year's taxes.)

Alas, even if the money fairy (or short story sale fairy, more likely) dropped a grand on me, I'd have to be responsible and pay down debt instead of zipping off to a delicious workshop. Being responsible sucks. But, alas, I didn't sell any novels last year (I'd really thought I would), so we've got to live within our means. I canceled my gym membership and we're giving up our cable TV and lots of other discretionary income type things to save cash. Avoiding restaurants. (My one great weakness.) Using the library a lot. Selling the castle in Bavaria, stuff like that.

I mean, we're still making rent. Hell, we're still keeping our Netflix subscription (much cheaper than cable TV). Not going to restaurants means I'm cooking more, and life on gumbo and slow-cooked chicken curry and turkey & white bean soup and chicken marsala isn't so bad. As long as our jobs remain steady, we should be okay, even if we don't have any disposable income left. And if I sell a novel or two (I have two books and two proposals out now!) and can squish some big debts in one fell swoop, things will ease up. So, you know, keep hoping.

I'll probably put up a post offering to sell some of my signed author copies in the next day or two, both because we need the money and because tottering piles of books make babyproofing difficult... So if that sounds like something you might be into, stay tuned. And if you want to buy some chapbooks or purchase back issues of Flytrap, don't hesitate!

Beastly

Lovely weekend, apart from the bit where I paid the equivalent of about two months' day job salary to the government for taxes. Sigh. But the good parts:

Went up to Berkeley with the kid, where we ran around the park for a while (he's becoming a pro at going up and down steps on his own). Then he shared a dish of stracciatella gelato with me, making the most adorable "Mmmm" noises with each bite. (He fed himself with his own spoon with minimal spillage, too.)

The whole family went to the farmer's market, and with the deliciousness acquired there I cooked chicken marsala for the second time in as many weeks. I could drink that sauce, really I could. I shouldn't, but I could.

I wrote a Marla Mason short story -- "Little Better than a Beast" -- about 6,000 words. I think it came out really well. (It's the Marla vs. the Beast of Felport story.) It's one of three Marla stories I've been meaning to write for ages, set during the space between the novels Poison Sleep and Dead Reign. Now I just need to write "Marla vs. the Interdimensional Hedonists" (AKA "Marla vs. the Faeries"), and "Marla vs. the Crazy Woman Who Thinks She's a Superhero".

A nice balance of food and fun and family and fiction, all in all.

Some linkages:

Here's an Interesting essay by Nick Mamatas on finding (or failing to find, or still looking for) your niche as a writer: "A Career In Thrashing Around All Night".

(That reminds me, Nick and I are doing a reading together at Borderlands Books in San Francisco, Saturday April 11, at 3 o'clock. Be there or miss the majesty and wonder of our combined majestic wondrousness.)

My story "Her Voice in a Bottle" from Subterranean is reviewed at the latest Internet Review of Science Fiction. Lois Tilton says:

This is a very fine story, told in clear and luminous prose, about the effect that a woman of magic has on a man's life, about the fragile region of the mind where perception, memory and invention meet. The fantastic element is unambiguous, even if the narrator sometimes doubts it.

and declares it "highly recommended." This makes me happy, as it's one of the most honest, personal stories I've ever written. (And has one of my favorite endings I've ever written; and as longtime readers know, I think good endings are the hardest thing.)

Get with the Program

No April Fooling this year; I'm sure you found enough elsewhere online to keep you entertained.

My story "A Programmatic Approach to Perfect Happiness" -- AKA "the kinky robot story" -- is now online at Futurismic. Go, read, marvel at the robotic kinkiness.

The lingering illness of lingering ickiness persists. The baby's pinkeye is all cleared up, and mine is much improved, but there was still some gunk in my lashes when I woke up this morning. More annoying is the dry persistent cough I developed two days ago, which makes sleeping a bit of a trial. And as of right now my uvula is inflamed and feels roughly the size of a hot air balloon, which is unpleasant; I keep thinking I'm going to swallow it. (This has happened to me before; it usually gets better in a day or two.) I'm a bit tired of being a viral punching bag, frankly. I missed two days of work last week (one to stay home with sick baby, one because I was sick myself), and don't feel inclined to miss more this week.

Apart from feeling generally yucky it's a fairly pleasant spring so far. The weather has been beautiful. Maybe by this weekend I'll be feeling well enough to go out and enjoy it.

The Dudes Who Collected Award Nominations

Well, let's see. Nick Mamatas and I are among the Stoker Award finalists for our story "The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft", so if you're in the HWA, I hope you'll read the story and, if you find it worthy, vote for us. I stand by my prior promise to stage a photo of my Ultraman Hugo trophy menacing the Stoker haunted house trophy if I win this. It's Nick's third Stoker nom, and my first.

My friend Brian Auton, who was my housemate for who even remembers how many years back in college (and immediately post-college), is in town for the game developer's conference this week, so I convinced him to leave glamorous San Francisco and come over to Oakland for a few hours yesterday. We chatted, strolled around, got lunch, got gelato, and generally caught up and kibitzed into the afternoon.

So that part of yesterday was lovely, but my increasingly sick baby was not so lovely -- he was cheerful, but his eyes started oozing goop and it was pretty clear he was developing pinkeye. Heather braved the myriad horrors of the hospital today and got him examined and diagnosed and prescribed some antibiotic eye drops. It'll be a sick day at home for him tomorrow -- I can't bring a walking contagion like him into work, so no officebaby this week. (My own eyes are itchy today, I hope merely psychosomatically -- I tried to be good about washing my hands constantly.)

Ickiness aside, though, life has been good. Reading a lot of Westlake novels, working on my anthology projects, hanging out with my wife, chasing pigeons off the balcony, playing with my kid, enjoying the springtime weather. Saying la la la. Cooking good food. Drinking good booze. That sort of thing.

A Green Day

On March 17, 2001, a mere eight years ago (eight whole years ago!) I first met my wife, Heather Shaw, when I went to a brunch at her house, invited by a mutual friend. Heather and I call this day our Meet-a-versary. (Everyone wears green in honor of our love!) Tonight to celebrate we drank a very delicious wine we'd been saving (a Rex Goliath Pinot Noir, yum).

So today was a nice day. Got a lot of work done, spent a lot of time with the kid, running around a couple of parks and reading books in the living room and scaring pigeons off the balcony. Immensely pleasant. And the world's getting that good springtime feeling.

I wrote a story last week -- the cloud-silver-mining story -- called "Silver Linings." First story I've written since January. Nice to get back into fiction. I think it turned out well; we'll see what editors think.

My superhero story "Origin Story" is online at Escape Pod for your listening pleasure, and exists nowhere else. I wrote it as a monologue and thought it would work well in audio and offered it to Steve Eley as an audio original. (If any editors out there want to pay me to publish the text version, my e-mail door is always open.) It's nice to see some comments and reviews (like this one) that show people are getting the central conceit/joke/form of the story (basically my attempt to recreate in microcosm the entire development of superhero comics from the Golden Age to the Modern Age, encompassed by a single character). Anyway, I like the story, and I'm glad it's out there.

I've been reading David Foster Wallace and Jennifer Crusie lately, and enjoying both (with admittedly different parts of my brain.) I've also been reading tons and tons of stories (and sending tons and tons of e-mails) for a reprint anthology I'm editing, which I'll talk about in more detail soon (contracts should be signed and such shortly). It is shall we say exciting times.

And finally some linky type things, feel free to ignore them: Rich Horton reviews Dead Reign and Spell Games and Thomas M. Wagner reviews Dead Reign.

Just to say:

Because some people are taking silence on RaceFail '09 to mean complicity, let me say:

Attempting to silence people by intimidating them is a shitty thing to do.

The ability to suck it up and admit you made a mistake and will try to do better in the future is a skill in sadly short decline.

I try to write about all kinds of people in my fiction, though for whatever reason I tend to confront issues of sexuality and gender more head-on than I do those of race -- but I confess that I surely screw up a lot when I'm writing people of genders and sexual orientations other than my own. I do my best to pay attention and be respectful when I'm trying to model how the world might look inside someone else's head, regardless of the details of that character. When I make mistakes, I try to do better in the future.

I hope you don't feel unwelcome in fandom; "fandom" is not a big monolithic thing anyway. It's a bunch of various kinds of people lumped under an umbrella term of dubious usefulness. (I'm a writer, sure, but have never meaningfully felt like part of "fandom," personally.) When under that umbrella, all you can do is find the people you like, and avoid the ones who piss you off.

I can't comment with more depth and specificity because there's a multi-volume-fantasy-epic's worth of wordage out there on this subject, and I haven't read it all, have barely skimmed some of the round-ups; the demands of parenthood, full-time day job, freelance writing, my own fiction writing, and other such things limit the time I can devote to the subject, so I know I haven't seen all sides of every argument. But I didn't want my silence, because I feel too uninformed to comment meaningfully, to be taken as complicity in things I'm not complicit with.

Also, you know, as a white guy, it doesn't really seem my place to step in and make pronouncements about this subject. There was something on RadioLab a while back, about how when black and white people take intelligence tests, white people do better -- unless the test-giver says beforehand that the test isn't actually meant to measure intelligence, in which case, whites and blacks do equally well. That really drove home for me that there are things I just don't get, deep unconscious damaging assumptions at work, things I'm totally unaware of, things that are simply invisible to me because of my background. All I can do is try to be more aware. I'm trying.

Blood Engines for Free

Hey! My book Blood Engines is being given away as a free PDF as part of the Suvudu Free Library -- a new promotion by Random House giving away the first books in various series by me, Robin Hobb, Harry Turtledove, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Naomi Novik. (One of these things is not like the other, but I'm happy to be put in vastly more famous company!)

The book is also available totally free for the Kindle reader from Amazon... and as of this writing, my book is the #25 bestselling title for the Kindle. As Heather says, "Only 23 less than the bible!" It's #1 in "contemporary fantasy" for the Kindle, #8 for "genre fiction." Whoa. (The sales ranks for the print editions aren't too shabby, either, and two of the books Random is giving away jumped into the top 5 on Amazon's SF/Fantasy bestseller list. So this experiment is demonstrably working.)

There's other exciting news. Negotiations are still ongoing, but it looks like I'll probably be editing another anthology, for a different publisher. I am become an anthologist! Details when things are final.

Sexbots and Bottles

Two notes of, um, note:

My metafictional maybe-fantasy "Her Voice in a Bottle" is online at Subterranean, along with some other awesome fiction, in the Winter 2009 issue. Go, read, enjoy. I think it's one of the best -- certainly most honest -- stories I've written, and I believe it even has a good ending. (Endings are hard.)

The other thing is, I'm going to be editing the stories for a mixed fiction/non-fiction/art anthology called The Naked Singularity, coming sometime (in 2010 probably) from the good people at Fugu Press. It's not an erotica anthology, per se, though it will have some erotic content. Stories will address the question, "What happens when we can build an acceptable artificial sex partner?" We're interested in explorations of the impact on society, human relationships, issues of consent, etc. I'm not going to have an open reading period, alas -- space is too limited, and I'm going to easily fill it with solicited stories, I suspect -- but if you feel you absolutely must submit, drop me a note.

Rumble with the Gang Debs
Because I'm too tired for real content:

1. Put your iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc. on shuffle.

2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer.

3. YOU MUST WRITE THAT SONG NAME DOWN NO MATTER HOW SILLY IT SOUNDS.

4&5. Blah blah tag people no.

6. Have Fun!

IF SOMEONE SAYS 'ARE YOU OKAY' YOU SAY?

"What You Waiting For," Gwen Stefani

That's right. Stop waiting and FIX ME.

HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOURSELF

"Derelict," Beck

Well, yes, sometimes.

WHAT DO YOU LIKE IN A GUY/GIRL?

"Rider," Juliana Hatfield

Okay, these are weirdly sensical.

HOW DO YOU FEEL TODAY?

"Cello Girl," Caitlin Cary

Oddly, I'm not reminiscing about the pretty girl who played the cello a long time ago.

WHAT IS YOUR LIFE'S PURPOSE?

"Melt Show," The Old 97s

You hear that, show? You better watch out. My purpose is to melt you.

WHAT'S YOUR MOTTO?

"Fuck Her Gently," Tenacious D.

That's less a motto and more just well-meaning advice.

WHAT DO YOUR FRIENDS THINK OF YOU?

"A Distorted Reality Is a Necessity to Be Free," Elliott Smith

I should be so lucky!

WHAT DO YOUR PARENTS THINK OF YOU?

"Sanctify," Blake Babies

I can't think of any way this is funny or comprehensible.

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT VERY OFTEN?

"Heresy," Nine Inch Nails

I am notoriously heretical.

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR BEST FRIEND?

"Untenable," Weezer

Ha ha ha

WHAT IS YOUR LIFE STORY?

"Crowded in the Wings," The Jayhawks

Story of my life, man. Story of my life.

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP?

"Clark Gable," The Postal Service.

This is like peering into the chasm of my MIND.

WHAT WILL THEY PLAY AT YOUR FUNERAL?

"I Don't Wanna Leave You on the Farm," Ween

Too bad! I bought the farm! It's done been bought!

WHAT IS YOUR HOBBY/INTEREST?

"Tubthumping," Chumbawumba

You can't stop me from thumping tubs.

WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST FEAR?

"Try Not to Breathe," R.E.M.

So, suffocation? Or... not being allowed to suffocate? I'm confused.

WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST SECRET?

"Estranged," Guns N' Roses

Yes, my biggest secret is, actually, that I have some Guns N' Roses in my iTunes

WHAT DO YOU WANT RIGHT NOW?

"Whiskey Bottle," Uncle Tupelo

Ha! Good idea!

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR FRIENDS?

"I Stay Away," Alice in Chains

Well not by choice. They just mostly live far away!

WHAT WILL YOU POST THIS AS?

"Rumble with the Gang Debs," Tullycraft

Probably not a title I would've used otherwise, I must admit.

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