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Patreon Post: The Mage’s Gift

You can find “The Subtler Art,” featuring The Dark and Tericatus, in Blackguards: Tales of Assassins, Rogues, and Mercenaries.

The is the fourth Serendib story I’ve done. The others are: “The Subtler Art,” also featuring The Dark and Tericatus, which appeared in Blackguards: Tales of Assassins, Mercenaries and Thieves ; “Call and Answer, Plant and Harvest,” which should appear in the science fantasy issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies tomorrow; and “The Owlkit, the Beekeeper, the Brewer, and the Candymaker,” which appears in forthcoming collection, Neither Here Nor There.

Sign up here to support my Patreon campaign and help me put out a story or two each month for public consumption.

The Mage’s Gift

This is a story of Serendib, the origami city where dimensions intersect and where you step between worlds as easily as turning down a new street to hear the stars singing overhead or the clanging steps of automata on patrol or centaur hoofs clattering over concrete. Everyone that comes to Serendib has a story, and sometimes those stories continue well after they’ve come to stay.

Once she’d hopped the glass-edged wall using gloves made of fish-leather from the deepest deeps, it had been easy enough to defeat the bloodsucking ivy and the centipede hounds contained in the first set of barriers. After that, she paused to change gloves to a new set, this time made of technology stolen from ancient Atlantis, made of ebon clay and silver circuitry.

The Dark rarely stooped to thievery nowadays but it was how she had started her professional life, long ago in a city whose name she had deliberately forgotten.

There she had been a child born to both privilege and indifference. At fifteen, she had left the school where her parents had deposited her and sauntered off to make her own living. This took the form of burglarizing her parents’ friends, at least those whose estates and townhouses she’d had occasion to reconnoiter in earlier years.

This was not as novel a revolt as it might have been, for that city accepts its criminals to the point of licensing them. The true revolt manifested in flouting paperwork until she came of age at sixteen.

Nimble, fearless, and adept in unexpected strategy, she did quite well by this. Well enough that she was able to spread the largesse to many of those less comfortable than her victims, and in doing so, became known as “The Dark Angel.”

When, thirteen months later, the infamous guild of assassins that had noted her exploits came to recruit her, they demanded she rename herself (for licensing purposes, since murder was as strictly regulated as theft), which she did by truncating the former name to the alias she had gone by several decades now.

She had kept that knowledge to herself as, over the course of those decades, she’d met any number of unusual characters, including her spouse for two of those decades, Tericatus the alchemist-mage; her sometime-enemy, sometime-friend Chig the Rat God; and quite a few fellow thieves and assassins who often failed to live up to the high standards she held when it came to both of her professions.

Of that group, only Chig knew of her thiefly beginnings. The Dark had kept meaning to tell Tericatus, but he did not come from a city where burglary or murder were government-sanctioned and so held a number of different opinions on such matters. In her secret heart, The Dark found her spouse a trifle sanctimonious at times and preferred not to give him license to pontificate.

She had retired from assassinations – aside from the occasional wager-related killing – some time ago. And now she returned to thievery not so much for entertainment but also because she was impelled by the yearly conundrum of a suitable anniversary present for a man who could, literally, conjure almost anything his heart could imagine.

The next wall was made of fricklebrick, which sounds amusing but involves a number of razor-sharp edges shifting frequently and somewhat randomly in their orientation.

She held her hands near the wall, palms in parallel to let the gloves sense the vibrations of the bricks and adjust themselves to countershift accordingly in a gentle grinding born of magic and machinery.

Casting a glance upward to make sure none of Serendib’s possible moons hung too high in the sky, she thought about Tericatus’ imagination and – not the for the first time – contemplated her luck in a mate who had long ago grown blasé with outer appearances and preferred inner qualities of fierceness and determined loyalty.

She wriggled upwards, features smeared with coalblack to match the midnight shadows around her, a silver box bumping on her hip. This year, she planned to snare something lovely that could not be bought. Her philosophy of presents was that such things were far better assembled when by effort than by coin.

This garden, located on one of the great terraces built along the mountain slope bordering the city to the north, belonged to a recent arrival to Serendib, a merchant/scientist whose name The Dark kept having tremendous difficulty remembering. This spoke of certain magics laid upon the name to avoid notice, and that was intriguing. More intriguing yet were the rumors of the contents of the innermost garden, center of three sets of walls, which held a worthy anniversary gift.

Not quite atop the wall, she used a mirror-tipped steel strand to survey the territory. She frowned. She had expected to deal with golems, their lips lined with acid spitters, armored in Tesla coils, but they lay scattered about. Someone had preceded her.

Her lips firmed in an uncharacteristic surge of temper. She had throttled back anger since, as a young thief, she had first accidentally-on purpose knifed someone as they grappled.

Not a death she regretted more than any other. The young man (he and his twin sister had been her schoolmates) had followed her to blackmail her. His death had been very painless, very swift. She prided herself that every subsequent kill had also fallen in that category.

But still – she had learned not to give way to impulse.

And it was not as though she had been able to lay claim to this place. Serendib has no organized institutions of thieves. Indeed, it is one of the few forbidden things, and so there was no established way of marking a place as being the target of someone very dangerous to cross.

Sparks from the farthest golem’s body still smoldered, sending up bitter smoke, from the felted leaves, which meant that her predecessor had beaten her by moments. She moved across the space with assurance, still clinging to the shadows, careful of the snarls of razor-edged grass, ornamental and deadly, lining the pathway.

The stones of the inner wall were cemented with soul stuff, and she had never been good with that magic, so she relied on a wholly technological approach, letting a wand of phlogistonic radions spill its lavender light out along the pink-veined surface, soothing it, till she could climb without complaint.

She saw no sign of the intruder as she came into the garden’s inner heart. That was a very good thing, because it was such a pretty place that it stunned her momentarily, a phenomenon that rarely happened to the phlegmatic and sometimes a little cynical woman.

Here in the lambent center, lit by living lanterns, a thousand flowers swelled and bloomed, silky petals dappled and daubed with iridescence, each sending out great invisible clouts of perfume, each different, dizzying with its intensity: cinnamon and carnation, musk and mossrose, vanilla and vetiver.

Mechanical dragonflies and bumblebees, hummingbirds and hovering moths, flitted from one great head-sized blossom to another, posing for seconds in the scented depths as the biomagnetic fields recharged its visitor, letting them continue to dart about on patrol.

Crouched at the wall’s foot, The Dark lost no time setting the contraption she had carried at her belt on the ground and touching an ivory dial on its side. It unfolded spindly legs and began to totter about, looking like a walking cage made of silver wire and light, staggering towards a flowering bush circled by whistling bees.

She ignored it and looked for tracks, searching over the soft earth. As she moved, flying creatures sensed her and veered, but as each neared with tiny laser-lit eyes flashing and razor sharp mandibles and stings at the ready, it swung away, disoriented and warded off by the complicated magnetic field of The Dark’s earrings, fashioned of rare and subtle earth magics by her husband for their last anniversary, who had intended his gift protection rather than pilfering.

The Dark knew how to read subtle signs: a bent leaf, a displaced butterfly, a flower turned to an unnatural alignment. Whoever it was, they were of a certain height, and a certain weight, and wore a robe that flickered out just so…A frown grew on her face, and each time the moonlight licked her mouth, her lips were turned further down.

By the time she found the intruder, standing to watch carp seethe beneath the surface of a tiny pond, she knew enough to say, her tone irritated, “But I was getting a present for you.” And then, “You always have said thievery is a base form of art.”

“Well, that is true enough,” her husband said in a mild tone intended to smooth the rasp from hers. “But you must admit that you are very hard to find presents for.”

“Hrmph,” she said. “Well, enough, let us collect what we haVE come for and return home to exchange gifts a trifle early.”

He inclined his head.

But when they reunited some moments later in the garden’s center, The Dark held her walking cage, twisted and rent asunder by some force, and Tericatus had scraps of similarly shredded mist, smelling of ozone, clinging to a handful of glowing threads. The Dark eyed that device curiously, for it was not a spell that had occurred to her, but she said only, “Someone else is here, and they do not mean us good.”

“Two thieves for the price of one,” a voice fluted, “but I am only interested in the one. Man, you may go now, if you leave swiftly and without interference.”

The figure that stepped from the shadows was hard to see, for the mechanical insects whirled and fluttered around the slim form, not as though to attack, but to protect. It was a face that the Dark had forgotten, but she realized now she had remembered it all her life, for it was that of the young man who had been her first kill.

Then another step forward and she realized – not him, but his sister, who the Dark had known but little, and last remembered seeing at the very uncomfortable funeral.

“Alas,” Tericatus said, and his tone was still mild, but this time steel flowed beneath it. “I do not choose to leave my wife behind.”

“Your wife!” the lady exclaimed. The Dark remembered her curls as dark as her own, but now silver threads outmatched the ebon ones, vanquishing, and age and disapproval thinned the once-plump lips. “Not just a thief, but a killer, and a noted one, fattened on her murders over the years. I see that crime treats you well enough.”

“In all things,” the Dark said, “I have always acted within the boundaries of the law.” She glanced at Tericatus.

“That does not matter,” the sister, whose name The Dark still could not quite recall – Elissa? Alyssa? Elison? Whoever she was, she thrust her clenched fist out, tight knuckles upward, and let her fingers fly open as she slapped downward a few inches, releasing an alarming number of gnarly black tentacles that plunged for seconds then writhed upward with a swordblade’s swiftness, flashing up at the pair.

By mutual accord, they separated, stepping simultaneously in opposite directions. The Dark vanished into the shadows beneath a tree’s outgrasping branches while Tericatus thumbed three vials open with practiced swiftness, vapors from the first two combining to solidify around him while the third released a thimbleful of glittering motes that swarmed to halo his head.

But the tentacles moved unerringly only for The Dark, altering course and somehow picking up speed in the process, perhaps assisted by the mother of pearl moths, their wings edged with perilously sharp flakes of crystal, orbiting her head in paths that curved in to slash at her cheek, then shoulder.

Tericatus stepped forward, striking the tentacles with a lacy golden blade that shimmered with sunlight, but they ignored him.

“They only judge those who are truly guilty!” The noblewoman laughed, the sound high-pitched, relief achieved after decades.

Tericatus said, “My wife is not guilty. She tells the world she stepped down from her path for love of me, but I know it was because things weighed on her too heavily. She has worked to atone, and anyhow who are you to judge her and pronounce her fate?”

He moved between the Dark and the tentacles as he spoke, and they fell away from him as the sparkling motes danced over them, becoming more and more sparks in the process.

“I have been told of her misdeeds, over the years,” the woman said, and glittering beetles danced in time with her words, fever-quick. “She learned nothing from killing my brother, has gone on to kill again and again. I have spoken to her comrades, her companions of the blade.”

“Perhaps you had a particular informant,” The Dark said, coldness counterbalancing the fire. “Perhaps they were narrow of face and dark of hair.”

“That could describe many,” the noblewoman said.

“Much like myself, they dressed in blacks and greys, with the occasional touch of silver.”

The noblewoman shrugged. “That is a style, like any other.”

“And possibly from time to time, when you glimpsed them from the corner of your eye, they appeared to have… whiskers.”

The woman wavered. “That,” she said, “is both idiosyncratic and true.”

“Chig,” The Dark said without intonation, but her husband muttered it under his breath in a very different tone.

“You are a pawn,” Tericatus said and glanced at his wife, “in a game that has been playing for a very long time, and which I thought was over.”

“If so,” The Dark returned, “and I am neither confirming nor denying such things, I would have anticipated such a contingency but would, as welcome your sage advice on the subject of my imprisonment.”

“Given my knowledge of magic, I would suspect that the things holding you might be dispelled by truths.”

“Or magic of one variety or another,” The Dark suggested, feeling the tentacles tighten around her.

But as he sighed and readied two new vials, she said, “My dear, the truth of it is that I began my working life as a thief, and I have never told you that because I thought you would think the less of me.”

Tentacles withered and fell. The woman gaped, and somewhere from the deepest shadows came a murmured curse, the slither of a great tail and a plomph of displaced air that might signify a rat god vanishing.

“I personally would count that truth a gift, but perhaps you might remove one of the flowers and several of its attendant insects for our garden, as I had intended, as a token for our trouble. Take your present, my dear, and go ahead,” The Dark said. “I’ll be along in a little while.” She eyed the woman.

When she caught up with Tericatus at the outermost wall, he said, “An assassin who had repented might stay their hand from killing someone who they thought might pose a future danger sometime.”

“That is true,” The Dark said, cleaning some substance from a silver stiletto. “And it is also true that even such a one might think it best to avoid future trouble if it might affect others that one cared for.”

“That is indeed another truth,” Tericatus said and reflected, not for the first time, on the value of growing blasé with outer appearance and preferring inner qualities of fierceness and determined loyalty in a mate.

-THE END-

Let me know what you thought! Shall I keep writing Serendib pieces, go back to Tabat, or venture elsewhere?

WIP: The Mage’s Gift

You can find “The Subtler Art,” featuring The Dark and Tericatus, in Blackguards: Tales of Assassins, Rogues, and Mercenaries.

I’ve got a new Patreon story brewing, that I hope to finish up today and let sit for a few days before posting. I recently finished up a bespoke story, title still TBD, and that’s sitting in the mental fridge drawer chillaxing before I go back to its rewrite and polish.

So for Patreon, another Serendib story, and a return to The Dark and Tericatus. Here’s some from yesterday:

After she’d hopped the wall, it had been easy enough to defeat the bloodsucking ivy and the centipede hounds contained in the first set of walls. After that, it got more interesting.

The Dark rarely stooped to thievery nowadays but, the truth be told, it was how she had started her professional life, long ago in a city whose name she had deliberately forgotten. She had been a child born to both privilege and indifference. At fifteen, she had left the school where her parents had stored her in order to make a living from burglarizing the friends of those parents, at least those whose estates and townhouses she’d had occasion to reconnoiter in her adolescent years.

She had done quite well by this, well enough that she spread the largesse to those less comfortable, and in doing so, became known as “The Dark Angel.” When, sixteen months later, the unnamed order of assassins that had noted her exploits came to recruit her, they demanded she remained herself, which she did by truncating the former name to the form she had gone by several decades now.

She had kept that knowledge to herself as, over the course of those decades, she’d met any number of unusual characters, including her spouse for two of those decades, Tericatus the alchemist-mage, Chig the Rat God, and quite a few fellow assassins who failed to live up to the high standards she held when it came to both of her professions.

She had retired from assassinations – aside from the occasional hobbyist or wager-related killing – some time ago, but now to thievery not so much for entertainment but also because she was impelled by the yearly conundrum of a suitable anniversary present for a man who could, literally, conjure almost anything his heart could imagine.

The next wall was made of fricklebrick, which sounds amusing but involves a number of razor-sharp edges shifting frequently and somewhat randomly in their orientation.

As she paused, letting the gloves covering her hands sense the vibrations of the bricks and adjust themselves to countershift accordingly in a gentle grinding born of magic and machinery, she thought about his imagination and – not the for the first time – contemalted her luck in a mate who had long ago grown blasé with such things and preferred inner qualities of fierceness and determined loyalty.

She wriggled upwards, her features smeared with coalblack to match the midnight shadows around her. This year, she planned to snare something lovely that could not be bought – her philosophy of presents was that such things were better assembled by than by coin.

This garden, located on one of the great terraces built along the mountain slope bordering the city to the north, belonged to a recent arrival to the city, a merchant/scientist whose name the Dark kept having tremendous difficulty remembering. This spoke of certain magics laid upon the name to avoid notice, and that was intriguing, and more intriguing yet were the rumors of the contents of the innermost garden, center of three sets of walls, which held a worthy gift.

This weekend I’m teaching Creating An Online Presence for Writers and the Flash Fiction Workshop – there’s still a few slots open if you’re interested!

#sfwapro

Patreon Post: Seven Clockwork Angels

If you enjoyed this piece, you might also enjoy “Clockwork Fairies.”

This is a children’s steampunk retelling of Sleeping Beauty; I originally wrote it for the Fairypunk project, but I wanted to get it out here and figured there’s plenty of other fairy tales I can tackle when it’s time.

Seven Clockwork Angels, All Dancing on a Pin

If a clock has ticked, it must tock, and thus time moves along. And in every tick and tock, there’s a story, and sometimes more than one.

Once upon a tick and tock, there was a great Lord and a greater Lady, who were Patrons of the Arts and Sciences. They endowed libraries and laboratories, and commissioned portraits and poems and marvelous machines that could play chess or spin a silk thread so fine you could barely see it or that could even build their own, tinier machines to make tinier machines in turn, and so on and so on, until they produced the head of a pin inhabited by seven clockwork angels, all dancing.

The Lord and Lady loved the works they commissioned, but they yearned to produce something of their own. And one day it came to pass that the Lady announced to her Lord that they had collaborated very well indeed, and that she would soon produce an heir.

Their daughter was fine and fair. They named her Aurora, after the Aurora Borealis, and to celebrate her christening, they invited all the scientists and artists and musicians and philosophers and inventors they had helped.

The day of the christening, Aurora was given amazing gifts: a pair of spectacles that could see everything from the smallest cell to the farthest star; a flowering garden whose trees produced avocado pears and pineapples, cherries and peaches, all from the same branch; a clock that could tell her the time on the moon and predict the next three days’ weather with reasonable accuracy; a talking parasol that recited cheerful limericks in the morning to amuse her and long, languorous epics in the evening to lull her to sleep; and sundry other delightful devices and contraptions, each more cunning than the last.

But the Lord and Lady had neglected to invite one guest, a scientist named Artemus Scuttlepinch (who might have been omitted on purpose, for he was very bad at dinner conversation) and he stepped forward at the end.

“I have a gift as well!” he announced. “Behold the Cabinet of Dreadful Fates!” He whisked his dinner cape aside with a flourish, revealing a squat box painted a malignant black. Brass dials and switches covered its face.

Scuttlepinch steepled his fingers as though preparing a classroom lecture. “I have harnessed various eldritch and magnetic energies,” he said. “Whatever fate the machine pronounces for an individual, will come true, with 98% accuracy. And…” He sneered here, and would have twirled his moustache if it had been long enough. “The fates are never pleasant ones.”

Before anyone could stop him, he said, “This is for Aurora!” He pressed a switch.

The machine clicked and clattered ominously, and then clicked some more, finally producing a slip of paper. Scuttlepinch snatched it up and read it aloud. “On her eighteenth birthday, Aurora will prick her finger on a spindle and die!”

“Poppycock!” shouted the Lady. “No one ever died of a pin prick!”

“Preposterous!” shouted the Lord. “The spindle is an obsolete technology!”

He signaled for the guards, who took the cackling Scuttlepinch by the arms. Another seized the machine and raising it overhead, dashed it on the ground, where it shattered, revealing a series of gleaming tubes and poisonous green lubricant, which roiled like drops of mercury on the floor. Scuttlepinch only laughed the harder; the sound sent shivers down the spines of the witnesses.

But another scientist, Miss Mariah Fleetthought, spotting Scuttlepinch, had lingered in the back of the crowd, fearing just such an occurrence. She now stepped forward, clearing her throat with a diffident manner.

“Here,” she said, “perhaps this will help. My own research has led in a similar direction. This is the Good Luck Gizmo, instilled with the computational power of a Babbage engine and possessing its own chemistry of droplets distilled from wishing wells, the sap of seven leaf clovers, and another liquid whose origin I cannot disclose. It cannot avert dreadful fates, but it may alleviate them.”

She set the box she held on the floor, and it unfolded into a clockwork kitten, which picked its way through the shards and droplets to leap nimbly into Aurora’s crib and curl there, its green eyes glittering watchfully despite its position of repose.

After that, the Lord and Lady took comfort in the raising of their daughter and avoided thinking of her possible fate, although they were instrumental in passing a bill that banned spindles outright. She was a bright and sunny child, and their delight in her outweighed all other considerations, until the marvelous machines produced under their patronage were bundled into a cellar to sit unused and dusty.

Aurora was talented and well-tutored, and had all the social graces as well. Her only flaw, which no scientist counted an actual weakness, was a driving curiosity and a craving to know how things worked, which led to her taking many things apart before she learned how to put them back together.

In all of this, she was companioned by the clockwork cat, which haunted her footsteps and watched with wise green eyes as she dismantled things. They came to call it Gizmo, and sometimes forgot that it was not a living creature, for it seemed as cat-like as any cat, despite its devotion to the child.

On her eighteenth birthday, they held a party for Aurora, and invited many young people of her age. But she found them boring, preferring to talk to the scientists about her own discoveries and eventually, bored, she slipped away, trailed by Gizmo.

She made her way down to the cellar, where she was in the process of taking apart a particularly marvelous lace-making machine, because she was curious about the patterns it produced. Gizmo did not approve of this particular machine, which was curious, and today, as she continued to explore its inner workings, the cat grew increasingly agitated, swatting at her with a paw and meowing in its tinny voice, till she pushed it aside more roughly than she meant to.

As she did so, her balance slipped a little and her hand pushed farther into the machine, where it met a certain inner part that spun thread, something that any seamstress might have called a spindle.

She withdrew her hand with a cry of pain, looking at the drop of blood on it. Dizziness overcame her and she sat back on her heels. Darkness pressed in on her vision, but she could hear Gizmo nearby, its head pushing hard against her, purring. Her heart faltered, but the rhythm of the purrs soothed it, made it slip into a slower but still existing rhythm as she fell asleep.

Crouched beside her, the cat opened its jaws and glittering motes flew out. Anyone wearing Aurora’s spectacles might have seen them: tiny clockwork angels with shining spindles, setting to work.

Bit by bit the angels spun, and the air became glass. First filling the room, suspending the sleeping Aurora, then spreading outward from the cellar, catching the mansion’s inhabitants till they were suspended as well, unmoving, but still in the attitudes of life in which they had been captured: the Lord and Lady holding hands as they walked in the garden among the partygoers, looking for their daughter; the cook putting the final layer of icing on the seven-layer cake intended to cap the evening; the butler tending the enormous furnace that heated the hot-water, even the flames, all caught in glass.

Scientists came from all over to study the enormous lump of glass in the middle of the city. They tried drills of diamond and moon metal, and acids that would burn through almost anything, and certain frequencies of sound, but the glass stayed, obdurate and unyielding. Some set up camp in order to study the phenomenon; after a few decades an open-air university sprang up there, devoted to unlocking the science behind the glass’s appearance. In time, everyone forgot what lay inside the glass as its surface dulled and clouded with years.

Till one day, a new scholar appeared at the University, which by now had been built so far that it completely encased the block of glass. He was a young man of modest garb and humble demeanor, but he brought with him a black leather satchel of the kind doctors often carry.

When questioned, he indicated that he wished to study the glass at the University’s heart. The other students derided him. By now they had forgotten about the glass, since no study of it had ever yielded the slightest result, and it was regarded a fruitless and outmoded subject. But he persisted, and eventually they took him to the corridor that led to the glass enclosing the mansion’s front door.

All he did there was open his satchel. Nothing came from it at all, but after it had been opened for a moment, he smiled and closed it again, before inviting them to go drinking with him.

He and his fellows drank all through the night. And while they did, the tiny clockwork butterflies, too small for the eye to see, that had risen from his suitcase, clung to the glass and slowly ate away at it.

In the morning, the students that had been drinking heard a great crash. The center of the University, an immense airy structure used to study the movements of the stars, had fallen in, lacking the glass upon which its slender struts had once rested.

They rushed to the corridor and found the glass gone. Pressing inside, they found the building, the confused partygoers wandering about among the wreckage covering the garden, the Lord and Lady among them, dressed in antiquated clothes and speaking in accents that had not been heard in a century.

Some pushed on, into the still intact mansion, and wandered its hallways in turn, until they came to a cellar door guarded by a clockwork cat. Inside, the new student sat watching the sleeping Aurora, patiently waiting for her to stir.

Which of course she did. But that story must wait for another tick of the clock, when the angels dance again.

-The End-

If you enjoyed this piece and want to support the creation of others like it, please consider supporting me on Patreon, buying a book, or passing along word of my work.

To Eligibility Post or Not to Eligibility Post?

In my position as SFWA President, sometimes I have to confer with fictional characters.

Let us begin by acknowledging that this is a rancorous period, full of clashing agendas, bewildered onlookers, and all too many innocents caught in the crossfire (although it is not the first time we’ve seen these storms, nor will it be the last.). And that right now making an eligibility post particularly mentioning Hugo Award categories like Related Work is something that some of us are circling and wondering about.

And my answer is yes. Yes, you should. Why?

Because it helps people discover the work that you’re proud of. You know what you wrote. You know what you want to make sure they see. It’s okay to say, “Hey, if you’re looking to read something by me, I would try this.”

Because it helps people read widely. Every writer in F&SF should — well, I don’t want to make it seem mandatory so I won’t say that you must do this, but you should at least feel free to make eligibility posts. So when someone’s poking around, they can find your stuff and read it.

Because you shouldn’t self-censor out of modesty when talking about your work. You are its best champion. Go ahead and help people find the best examples of it. Be humble and lovable in some other way. (Thank you to Erin M. Hartshorn for the link to the piece of self-effacement.)

And so, I’ve finally been prodded by a Twitter conversation into doing my own in part because I want to say to you, no matter where you are sited in the bizarre and incredibly wordy conflicts, that you should do it. Let’s have lots of wonderful reading lists, the more the merrier, and part of creating those is making readers aware of what you (and others, sure) have done. Please feel free to post a link if you’ve made an eligibility post. Yup, even if you think you’re not welcome. You are.

I published a bunch in 2015. You can find the full list elsewhere, but here are my best of recommendations:

Related work: I co-edited Ad Astra: The SFWA 50th Anniversary Cookbook with Fran Wilde. (Hard copies are available here.) I remain inordinately proud of the work, which contains recipes like Charles Brown’s Turkey Turkey Turkey and Octavia Butler’s Pineapple Fried Rice. (I think these two essays #PurpleSF and On Reading the Classics are also eligible.
Novel: Kevin J. Anderson’s excellent Wordfire Press published my first novel, Beasts of Tabat, the first in a fantasy quartet. SFWA members can find a copy of it up in the 2015 Fiction forum. There have been some nice Amazon reviews, but I know the book isn’t everyone’s cup of tea and there’s been some awesome awesome novels published in 2015. *goes back to read that self-deprecating piece again and quickly moves on*
Novella: Nothing this year, but wait till you see the one Bud Sparhawk and I have coming up in Abyss & Apex!
Novelette: Also nothing this year.
Short story: As always, plenty of stuff here. The pieces that I am proudest of are Primaflora’s Journey, which appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, “The Subtler Art”, which appeared in Blackguards: Tales of Assassin,s Mercenaries, and Rogues, edited by J.M. Martin, and “Marvelous Contrivances of the Heart,” which appeared in Fiction River: Recycled Pulp, edited by John Helfers. I am glad to send a copy of the latter two to any requester.

Please feel free to comment and include a link to your own eligibility post. In this coming week, I’ll also be posting a list of my favorites from 2015, but there are so many it may take a while, plus I’m still reading a few.

Peace out,

Cat

P.S. Here are some additional eligibility posts. I’ll add more as I get them.

John Joseph Adams

Mike Allen

Helena Bell

Brooke Bolander

A.C. Buchanan

Nino Cipri

Gwendolyn Clare

Clarkesworld

Fred Coppersmith

A.M.Dellamonica

Seth Dickinson

Scott Edelman

A.J. Fitzwater

T. Frohock

Nin Harris

Maria Dahvana Headley

Kate Heartfield

Jim C. Hines

M.C.A. Hogarth

Annalee Flower Horne

Alexis A. Hunter

Heather Rose Jones

Mur Lafferty

Rose Lemberg

Natalie Luhrs

J.M. McDermott

Seanan McGuire

Sunny Moraine

Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Linda Nagata

Mari Ness

Daniel José Older

Carrie Patel

Andrea Phillips

Sarah Pinsker

Adam Rakunas

Jessica Reisman

Kelly Robson

Sean R. Robinson

Merc Rustad

Shimmer

David Steffen

Bogi Takacs

E. Catherine Tobler

Tor.com

Uncanny Magazine

Unlikely Story

Ursula Vernon

M. Darusha Wehm

Martha Wells

Fran Wilde

A.C. Wise

Alyssa Wong

Isabel Yap

Caroline M. Yoachim

Class Excerpt: On Story Basics and Ways into Stories

Freytag’s pyramid

I’m finishing up the Moving from Idea to Draft class, or rather finishing up the writing phase and still need to shoot a couple dozen little videos, ugh. But I wanted to share this from the introduction to the class because I thought it might be useful for some people plus maybe tantalize a few into trying one of my on-demand or live classes.

I begin with some basics of story mechanics. Quite probably much of it will be familiar — feel free to skim if you feel like you’ve heard all of this before.

A basic part of a story is its arc. The arc, graphed out, is a roughly slanted triangle, with the slope on the lefthand side usually significantly longer. I’ve provided a diagram of it, also called Freytag’s pyramid, or sometimes his triangle.

The X axis of that diagram is story tension; the Y axis is the story over time. As the storyline progresses, while there may be momentary lulls or dips in tension, the movement is upward. Tension is increased by things like complications, reversals, and raising the stakes.

But more than that, something in the story must change. The problem must be resolved in some fashion, even if it’s only to show that there is no resolution. The change provides the resolution; without it, we have only a scene or static moment, which is generally an unsatisfying thing for a reader. Often (I might go so far as to say usually) there are two changes, an internal one inside the protagonist and the external one taking place around the protagonist.

The change can, in some circumstances, take place outside the story by occurring in the reader’s understanding of the story. What seems innocent (or vile) at the outset turns out to be the opposite. This sort of subtle change can be beautiful when it works. If you look at Rachel Swirsky’s “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love” for example, you can see this sort of shift at work as we learn more about the circumstances behind the story and move from light-hearted to deeply sad in a story whose emotional core is — for me at least — the power of fantasy as a temporary escape, but only a temporary one. This sort of change, taken as far as it can go, is a twist ending and is best suited to flash fiction, but it can and does work at greater length, as with Ian Banks’ The Wasp Factory (I don’t want to spoil the ending, but urge you to find the book and read it if you haven’t.)

Do you need to understand what will change before you begin to write the story? No. But some story origins will have signs and clues leading to the change, while others will require you step back and consider it in various ways before moving on.

There are multiple forms in which an idea for a story can present itself to a writer. What I’ve done is try to present each, along with examples drawn from my own and other authors’ writings, with some tips and tricks for expanding them into a complete story.

Ways into a story are separated into structures, fragments, and directives. I’ve split them into these groups for the purpose of talking about them more easily, but each group has similarities of approach and possible issues that may make it useful to, after finishing an overall group, spend some time thinking about the material and trying to apply it to one or more stories before moving on.

Structures include plot, technique, stealing from other writers, culturally determined structure, and conceits/devices. These are the paint-by-numbers kits of the writing world, or at least they are ways to start a story that give you a great deal to work with.
Fragments may yield considerably less information. They include characters, dialogue, setting, scene, beginning, ending, title, images, or objects.
Directives give you little information but are more about the form in which you will shape the story: its flavor or flair, if you will. They include narrators, point of view, historical moments, concepts/issues, emotion, imitation or tribute, theme anthology, research, genre, and collaboration.

No matter what your starting point, at some point in the process of writing, you will need to think about the emotional core of your story, its heart. You can think of this as the “message” of the story overall, what it (not you) is trying to say about the art of being a self-aware, autonomous creature. That can vary, but examples are:

Life is complicated
You can’t always get what you want (but if you try real hard you can get what you need.)
It’s important not to lie (or insert the ethic of your choice).
Economics affects circumstances.
Karma is a bitch.
Etc.

You may not know this core going into the story, you may not know it in the middle of the writing or even at the very end. But before the story can be called finished, you need to figure it out.

The point at which you figure it out will affect your writing process. You may even use it as your starting point. I can only think of one time I’ve done this, which was the story “Elsewhere, Within, Elsewhen”, which I wrote for the anthology Beyond the Sun. I had been thinking about the idea that people accumulated grudges and slights and that sometimes those got in the way of communication and even healthy living. I took that idea and literalized the metaphor by creating creatures who consisted of such layers and turned out to have entirely different entities at their heart.

The point at which you realize the emotional core is the point at which it will begin helping you organize the story. It often happens to me that I do not reach the stage at which I think about this until after the first draft is done. In that case, this is part of the rewrite process, and involves my going back and reading the story in order to try to figure this out.

These are often the stories that are the most self-revelatory, because the moment we as author understand the message of a story, we begin constructing plausible deniability. Stories that are raw and full of emotion are rarely understood until after the fact of their construction, in my experience, unless you are deliberately sitting down to write about a painful experience in order to process and/or explore it.

Once you know the heart of a story, though, you know what to remove or add, because you can tell what’s getting in the way of the heart of things, and where it is not getting communicated sufficiently clearly.

A crucial point about this is that sometimes it can take time, and it’s very hard to force it. Usually you should let it steep a while. It’s my belief that your unconscious mind takes some time to turn it around and consider it from a few angles before delivering up something worthwhile. You can force it through focused timed writings, sitting down and just writing within constraints, but you will do a lot of thrashing around creating superfluous verbiage that you cannot use in the final version of the story.

Intrigued and want to know more? Check out one of my classes or sign up for my newsletter below. This weekend I have Writing Your Way Into Your Novel Saturday morning and Revising and Rewriting on Sunday morning. Live classes are limited to eight students; cost is $99 or $79 if you’ve taken a live or online class (convention workshops count!) with me before.

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P.S. Peeps attending Kevin J. Anderson’s Superstars seminars in a couple of weeks, I’m looking forward to meeting you!

Fare Thee Well, Fellow Traveller

I heard the news about David Hartwell’s accident last night; it makes me inexpressibly sad to see one of the people who have shaped the speculative fiction landscape for so long pass. Others will tell you of all his wonderful accomplishments; I want to celebrate his life by recounting a few moments of it that I was privileged enough to share.

I first met David at the Locus Awards in 2006. I was incredibly nervous and introduced him to someone else as “David Hartman,” an error I would perpetuate for several conventions because I’d be so nervous about doing it again that I inevitably would. He was gracious about it every time.

He had an exhaustive knowledge of not just speculative fiction, but popular media in general. Connie Willis sent me to him at some point when I was researching screwball comedies, and we had a wonderful half hour session in the bar with me frantically scribbling titles down on napkins. He was always a pleasure to talk with, and full of interesting nuggets of information.

His dress style was inimitable; I wish more of our editors followed his example. I’m going to miss glancing over a convention crowd and being able to instantly spot him. He was one of the things I could count on at certain conventions.

January has brought some sad passings, including Bowie and Rickman. It breaks my heart to see David added to that list. He was definitely one of the influencers, and the publishing world will be changed by his passing.

Update: Locus says the obit was released prematurely. Keep an eye there for updates.

SFWA Effort to Support Crowdfunding

We just launched a very cool new effort. Here’s the release:

Crowdfunded self-publishing has emerged as a viable and increasingly popular path to creative and financial success for writers, and we continue to develop new initiatives to assist our members in their crowdfunding efforts. Now we are looking to expand our outreach beyond our own membership, to support the field at large.

Beginning in January, SFWA will be making small, targeted pledges to worthy Kickstarter projects projects by non-members, designating them a “SFWA Star Project.” Projects will be selected by the Self Publishing Committee, coordinated by volunteer Rob Balder. Selections will be based on the project’s resonance with SFWA’s exempt purposes, and special preference will be given to book-publishing projects in the appropriate genres.

Funds for these pledges will come from the SFWA Givers Fund, from a $1000 pool approved by the Grants Committee in December. When a pledge results in receiving a donor reward such as a signed book, these items will be auctioned off at fundraising events, to help replenish the Givers Fund.

The first two Star Projects are: Shakespeare Vs Cthulhu by Jonathan Green, and Blacktastic: A Podcast of Black Scifi and Fantasy Stories.

As the landscape continues to change, we face the organizational challenge of finding new ways to inform, support, promote and defend writers of fantasy and science fiction. We hope that this kind of outreach and recognition will not only benefit writers, but also help raise awareness of SFWA’s core mission among independent professionals and their readers.

Over the past few years, I’ve been helping with the effort to open SFWA doors to professional writers publishing outside the traditional structure, to the point where we are the only writers organization (I believe) to accept crowdfunded publications as membership qualifying material. The Star Project effort ties in nicely with that and it’s gratifying to see SFWA continue to expand to match the changing needs of professional F&SF writers.

Rob Balder, who initially proposed the project, has been very patient with the way the wheels at SFWA grind exceedingly and tiresomely slowly at times. Speaking of which, I just got the mail this morning confirming our NetGalley account — we’ll be making that available to members who want to use the NetGalley system to put up books for review. That’s also been in the works a while and part of the slowdown has been my own chaotic inbox and a couple of pieces of mail getting lost in there.

Towards the end of next month, you’ll see yet another very cool project unveiled and available to SFWA members. (I am terrible with secrets and throttling back the urge to spill the beans, but I want it to have maximum impact. But so cool, and so far above the original vision that I have HUZZAH written multiple times in my notes for the demo. Are you intrigued?

On Clarion and Privilege and the Internets

Neil Gaiman has been catching a lot of flack for this tweet.

People are, understandably, saying that the equation clarion + student = pro writer is not the only way you can reach that particular sum, and they are absolutely correct, although the drama is — as is often the case on the Internet — a bit hyperbolic.

This is the fact of F&SF (and any other genre) writing — there are writers disadvantaged by gender, or race, or sexuality or other physical circumstances. But there’s also a big group — which contains a disproportionate number of those differing physically — affected by economic issues.

Here are two simple facts:

If you have the economic means to attend a workshop like Clarion West, Clarion, Kevin J. Anderson’s Superstars, the workshops given by Kris Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith, etc, it can give you a career advantage, primarily in terms of forming a support network of peers, although there are a number of other plusses. The degree of advantage depends on both luck and how willing you are to make the most of the time at the workshop.
If you have the economics means to attend a convention, it can give you a career advantage, primarily in terms of industry contacts. The degree of advantage depends on both luck and how willing you are to make the most of the time at the convention.

But there is nothing being taught at a workshop that you cannot pick up by yourself, given time, though it is true that workshop teaching can often be inspirational, effective, and sometimes entirely life-changing.

Being able to attend a convention or workshop is not just a matter of being able to pay the substantial fee. It’s being able to travel and most importantly — it’s being able to take time away from both work and family. That’s an incredible privilege.

I came through Clarion West in 2005. My instructors were (in chronological order) Octavia Butler, Andy Duncan, L. Timmel DuChamp, Connie Willis, Gordon Van Gelder, and Michael Swanwick. I am a pretty convivial person, and remain close friends with the majority of my instructors. I also was part of a talented class that included E.C. Myers (winner of the Andre Norton Award for his book Fair Coin), Rachel Swirsky (frequent nominee and winner of things) and goddamn Ann Leckie, whose Ancillary series has set the bar for success so high the rest of us are just going, “Yeah right.”

I was able to do this because I had a partner willing to let me quit my job and try writing for a while. A decade later, I have yet to make half of what my Microsoft salary was through writing; I continue to persevere. If I had a family to support, it would have been incredibly difficult to do it — perhaps simply impossible. It gave me an advantage, and it also kicked me in the ass to be productive, because I was intensely aware of just how lucky I was.

Neil is — obviously — not saying you can’t be a writer without such a workshop. Note that Gaiman himself did not go to such a workshop, as far as I know. He is, though, enthused about the workshop (as befits a former instructor) and aware of what a big advantage it can prove.

But it also depends on what you make of it. In any class there will be those who persevere and those who fall by the wayside. Of the people in my writing workshop from decades ago at Hopkins, only a handful are still writing. Ten years later, a few members of my Clarion West class seem to have dropped off the face of the planet.

You have to want it hard enough to work for it, no matter what. You have to be willing to make time for writing words down and thinking about the order and what happens when you rearrange them. You have to have a hide hard enough to survive the day when there’s three rejections plus a nice fan letter whose writer is confused and thinks you’re someone else with a similar name. You have to be willing to trim away some bullshit activities and substitute stuff that lets you work at your craft, like reading or taking online classes or whatever. That’s the part you need.

A while back, I read someone saying that we all have someone who gives us permission to call ourselves a writer. For me, it was John Barth: sitting in his sunlit Hopkins office, a bookcase framing his smiling, balding head talking about my stories and a fellowship he wanted me to apply for is something I will always remember. But that is less important than giving yourself permission to call yourself a writer. It’s harder — it requires a certain amount of adamant ego and determination — but that permission can — and must — come from inside as well as externally. That’s the most important component, and you can do it with or without the aid of a workshop.

TL;DR version? Ain’t nothing going to substitute for hard work. Why aren’t you writing?

Later addendum: Most of the workshops do offer some scholarships; if there’s one you’re interested in, I do suggest asking about what financial aid is available.

Changes to My Newsletter

I’ve made some changes to my monthly newsletter, most importantly that it’s going to a more frequent mailing rate but adding some stuff to compensate.

I’m moving to a weekly format that will cover:

Upcoming classes
News of and pointers to new fiction, including links to the free Patreon stories I publish each month
Info on upcoming live and online appearances
A special give-away each month including signed copies, electronic and audio books, classes, and other surprises
A 2-5 minute video covering tips and what I’ve learned about writing recently

The letter will go out on each Monday, starting January 25, 2016. This month’s giveaway is available only to newsletter subscribers; it’ll be mentioned in the January 25th one and has a January 31st deadline.

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Coming Up This Weekend: How to Avoid Infodumps and WTF Do I Do Now?

Because a picture of a bunny is always good.

At least, those are my mental tags for the two classes. The first is Description and Delivering Information, and it’s how to get what you need on the page while avoiding big clumps of information and as-you-know-Bob that make a reader stumble and fall right out of the story.

The second is Moving From Idea to Finished Draft and I will be curious to see what all the work I’ve been doing on the on-demand version will end up doing as far as enriching the class goes. In the class, I talk about all the different possible ways a story can start to form in your head (like a scene, a character, a concept, a form, etc), and strategies for how to flesh each of them out and make them into complete stories. The on-demand version is currently at 11k words and I think it’ll be closer to 20-25k when it’s done, but I’m learning huge amounts in the process of writing because it’s making me sort out a lot of thoughts in an organized fashion.

Next weekend is A Kick in the Ass (Writing Your Way into Your Novel) and Editing 101 (Revising and Rewriting).

In other updates, I just added the We Are All SF! convention in Ocean Shores in November to my 2016 roster (ugh, I need to update that page). I also believe that in the weird way of magazines, I should be seeing the March issue of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction with my story “Red in Tooth and Cog” in it, which still makes me squee and explode in interior confetti.