The first part of my novella “The Guild of Swordsmen” is up now at Silver Blade. Click here to read it for free! They’ll be publishing it as a serial over the next several weeks, so I’ll be sure to announce when each new part comes out.
“The Guild of Swordsmen” is a secondary world fantasy without magic. I guess you could call it sword-and-no-sorcery. It’s also obviously inspired by Alexandre Dumas’s classic novel The Three Musketeers. I hope you like it!
Okay, it seems to be available from all the American online booksellers now (links are here). Enjoy!
My story “The Kiss of the Blood-Red Pomegranate” is now out in Imaginarium 2012, an annual reprint anthology from ChiZine Publications and Tightrope Books featuring the previous year’s best Canadian speculative fiction (i.e., science fiction, fantasy, horror, magic realism, and whatever else the editors decide fits). The story came out last year in Aoife’s Kiss, a small print magazine, so it’s exciting for me that my story was chosen to appear in Imaginarium, and perhaps reach a wider audience.
Imaginarium is already available in Canada, either directly from the publisher, or from Amazon.ca or Chapters/Indigo, and you can get it in either trade paperback or e-book (all the major formats). I don’t know if it’s also available in brick-and-mortar bookstores. (You know, the old-fashioned kind, that you have to walk into.)
The publisher does make more money if you buy it from them instead of a third party, and that means they can then put more money back into the business, publishing more books and paying more authors. But of course, they (and I!) would be delighted if you choose to buy a copy, no matter where you buy it. There are 37 stories and poems, most of them by Canadian authors far more famous than I.
If you live in the United States, you can get it now from any of the aforementioned e-book retailers (or direct from ChiZine), but the trade paperback won’t be available from Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, or other online bookstores until at least the end of August (although you can pre-order). I’ll post here again once it is available. You could still order it from the publisher, but the shipping is another 165% on top of the cost of the book. (Please blame Canada Post for the outrageous price, not the publisher.)
If you don’t live in either Canada or the United States … well, I hope you like e-books! Although it’s interesting how our expectations have changed. 20 years ago, if a book I wanted came out from a small publisher in another country (especially if that country was not the United States), I would have taken for granted that it would be difficult and possibly expensive to obtain. Nowadays, I feel kind of miffed if I can’t get cheap 7-day shipping. But you may be a better person than I am. (I’m pretty sure ChiZine will ship the book to you anywhere in the world with a functional postal service, but they will have to charge you whatever it costs them.)
ChiZine Publications does appear at various science fiction conventions throughout Canada and around the world, often with a table of books for sale, if you’re a convention-goer you might also be able to purchase the book there. (They’ll be at Worldcon in Chicago, and World Fantasy in Toronto, among others.)
The table of contents is up, so it’s official: my story “The Kiss of the Blood-Red Pomegranate”, published last year in Aoife’s Kiss, is slated to appear in Imaginarium 2012: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing. Of course, I feel incredibly honored to have a story chosen for this, along with writers like Cory Doctorow, Geoff Ryman, and Peter Watts.
Imaginarium is a yearly anthology co-published by ChiZine Publications and Tightrope Books. It’s coming out in July, but you can already pre-order either the trade paperback or the e-book (Kindle, iBook, or Nook).
I’ll post another update once the book has been officially released, and probably another once I’ve had a chance to read all the other stories. This will be my first appearance in any Best of the Year anthology, so I’m pretty excited!
It’s been over a month since my story “Clear Skies in Pixieland” came out in new e-journal Nine, and I’ve finally (a) finished reading the entire issue, and (b) found time to blog about it. One of these days, maybe I’ll be more timely with these blog posts. But there’s been more travelling and less time for writing than usual in my life this past month, and I try not to spend time on blog posts unless I’m also spending a reasonable amount of time writing fiction, so….
The nine stories in Issue 1 are a nicely diverse set: contemporary fantasy (my story), science fiction, horror, magic realism, and historical fantasy all appear, ranging in length from flash fiction to novelette. While I found every story interesting and compelling in some way (which is not the case with every magazine I read), my favorite was Garrett Ashley’s “The Last Letter, I’m Sorry You’ll Live Forever”, a science fictional take on the story of a son whose mother is immortal.
The lineup for Issue 2 of Nine was just announced, though no official word yet on when they’ll be publishing it.
My story “Clear Skies in Pixieland” just came out in the first issue of Nine, a brand-new e-zine. If you’re interested, you can buy a copy of the magazine (or even a 3-month subscription) here. The authors will receive royalties if the magazine sells enough copies, so if you buy one, you’re helping out the authors as well as the publishers!
“Clear Skies in Pixieland” is a contemporary fantasy loosely connected to “The Kiss of the Blood-Red Pomegranate”, which appeared in the December issue of Aoife’s Kiss. The shadowy villain mentioned in TKotBP actually shows up in this one.
This is an important story for me, because it’s the first one I finished after deciding that I wanted to make a serious attempt at writing and publishing short fiction. Before that, I’d mostly worked on novels. I’d written a handful of short stories, even submitted a couple to magazines, but I’d give up after they were rejected two or three times (with those earlier stories, giving up was probably a good idea). This was the first story I wrote after deciding that I was going to write short stories, and I was going to keep submitting them until they were accepted. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the version that you can read now in Nine doesn’t bear much resemblance to that first version that I started sending around. The basic premise is the same, but it’s been almost completely rewritten. Twice. As I learned more about writing, I would take another look at that old story, and realize that I could probably do better. So I did.
There are eight other stories in this issue of Nine (hence the name), one by Hugo- and Nebula-nominated author Ken Liu, who is also, coincidentally, one of my husband’s coworkers. I haven’t read his story in Nine yet, but I really liked the story he had in last October’s Clarkesworld, “Staying Behind”.
So, check out Nine! Tell your friends.
My story “The Observation Deck” came out not too long ago in On Spec, “the Canadian magazine of the fantastic”, and I recently finished reading the issue that has my story in it (Fall 2011, though I didn’t receive it until 2012). My favorite story in the magazine was Megan Fennell’s “Hexenhaus”, which picks up the story of Hansel and Gretel after they’ve defeated the witch. I also liked a story by Scott H. Andrews (the editor of Beneath Ceaseless Skies), “The Halberdier, by Moonlight”.
The cover is very pretty, a sort of Asian-inspired steampunk illustration by featured artist James Ng. There’s more of Ng’s art inside, also very cool, especially “Imperial Sheriff”. Though I wondered if the originals of the interior pictures, reproduced in the magazine in black and white, are actually color paintings (like the cover), as they seemed quite dark, and often lacking in contrast.
On Spec tends to publish a pretty diverse selection of fiction: this issue had more fantasy, but 3 of the 9 stories (including mine) could be considered science fiction (two futuristic, one steampunk). The fantasy stories ranged from magic realism to high fantasy to historical fantasy.
The only negative note: although they did get it right inside the magazine, my name is spelled wrong on the cover.
My science fiction story “Looking-Glass Milk” is now available to read on your Kindle or Kindle app. This originally came out in 2009 from Scribblers & Ink Spillers as part of the Crystal Codices collection, but it’s out of print now, and I thought I’d re-issue it.
The goal right now is to make sure that people are able to read all my published stories. I probably won’t re-issue stories that are still available to read for free on the internet, since I want to encourage you to visit e-zines that have supported me by buying my fiction. But for stories that came out in print, in magazines that are difficult and/or expensive to obtain, re-publishing old stories with Amazon seemed like a good way to make them more readily available.
My hard sf flash fiction story “The Observation Deck” is out in the latest issue of On Spec. On Spec is probably the best known Canadian science fiction magazine, so it’s pretty easy to find if you live in Canada. If you live elsewhere and are interested in reading the story, you can purchase a one-year subscription to the magazine in either print or electronic format, or buy an e-book version of just the one issue.
I wrote this one at Clarion West, initially as a writing exercise. But, with a bit of tinkering, I figured it worked okay as an actual story, too. Thanks to everyone who read the initial draft and offered suggestions for improvement!
I just published my literary fiction story “Woman Moving to the Country” on the Kindle platform. This story originally came out about a year ago in Prairie Fire, a Canadian literary journal. But Prairie Fire can be difficult to get your hands on outside of Canada, and since several issues of the journal have now come and gone, I figured it might be worthwhile to re-release the story. If you have a Kindle or a device with the Kindle app, you can buy the story here for only 99 cents. (You don’t need to buy a Kindle to read Kindle books; you can get a free Kindle app for pretty much any computer, tablet or smart phone here.)
It doesn’t have a cover yet, because I figure that only people who know me personally are likely to buy it right now, and they probably won’t be swayed one way or the other by whether I invest a few hours teaching myself how to use Microsoft Publisher so I can cobble together a pretty cover image. But I’ll try to add one eventually. You know, for when I’m famous.
This story contains no fantasy or science fiction content whatsoever. Just so you aren’t disappointed when you get to the end and realize that there was not a single elf (not one!) appearing anywhere within the story. (I am aware that for some, this is a plus, not a minus. Haters!)