Cat Rambo's Blog, page 45

What SFWA Membership Offers You

A chance to hang out with interesting people is one perk of SFWA membership.

I’m in the process of assembling a SFWA resource that lists what, exactly, SFWA provides its members, which to my mind is a pretty substantial list. I tried to break it down according to the SFWA Mission, “SFWA informs, supports, promotes, defends and advocates for its members.” That’s a broad umbrella but the organization’s been around for fifty years, and it lives up to that mission.

It seemed to me it’d be useful to have something that people can point to. I’ve added a couple of things suggested on the SFWA discussion forums, but I know I’m overlooking some. If you have suggestions, glad to hear them.

What SFWA Membership Offers

Informs you by:

Hosting the website and discussion forums
Distributing the Forum, SFWA’s members-only publication
Publishing The Bulletin, SFWA’s public publication
Providing model contracts and other useful information on the SFWA blog
Providing sample contracts for SFWA qualifying and other markets in the members-only section of the website
Maintaining the SFWA Member directory

Supports you by:

Administering the The Emergency Medical Fund
Providing networking opportunities, like the annual NY reception, events at conventions, and the Nebula Weekend
Working to support diversity and anti-harassment efforts
Supplying and stocking the SWFA suite at Worldcon
Providing a SFWA table or booth at events like the Baltimore Booth Festival where members can distribute promotional material, sell and sign books, and participate in programming
Letting you recommend, nominate, and vote for the Nebula and Norton Awards
Providing a community of fellow professional genre writers
Presenting an opportunity for interesting and useful volunteer work

Promotes you by:

Offering the Featured Author and Featured Book slots on the SFWA website, which has over 50,000 unique visitors each month
Providing the SFWA Authors Twitter feed, which can automatically tweet about your blog posts
Administering the SFWA Youtube channel, with playlists that include member’s book trailers
Allowing you to post your fiction for Nebula consideration on the private discussion forums
Publishing the SFWA New Release newsletter
Supplying access to members interested in co-promotion
Funding the various SFWA reading series
Curating a member Kickstarter page

Defends you by:

Providing Griefcom
Hosting Writer Beware
Making sure you are aware of potential issues
Supplying the opportunity to request advice/information from your peers
Administering the Estate Project
Organizing The Legal Fund

Advocates for you by:

Making recommendations to government on copyright and other publishing issues
Providing a presence at STEM events
Raising the profile of the genre with the yearly Nebula, Norton, Solstice, and Grandmaster Awards

Where I’ll Be: Cat’s Orycon Schedule (2015)

Friday, November 20

4:00:pm, Meadowlark

The Fine Art of Description

What makes purple prose purple? Are adjectives and adverbs really evil? How do pro writers describe something in vivid detail in the fewest words, and when can writers expand those descriptions?

Donna McMahon, Renee Stern, Cat Rambo, Richard A. Lovett, Sara A .Mueller

Saturday, November 21

3:00 pm, Salon G

Ethics, Morals, and Amorals

You got ethics in my morals!

(*)Grá Linnaea, K.C. Ball, Esther Jones, Tanya Huff, Cat Rambo

4:00 pm, Williamette

Speeding Up Your Output

Fast writing is not necessarily bad writing, and more words per day equals more stories for your readers. Discuss methods for upping your daily word count without sacrificing quality or your life.

Blythe Ayne, Peter Wacks, (*)Cat Rambo, Kristi Charish

5:30 pm, Hawthorne

Reading

Reading from novel, “Hearts of Tabat.”

6:00 pm (I am going to be SO ready to eat dinner afterward, that’s pretty much a four hour stint tho with a brief pause at 5:00.)

A Touch of Farmer, a Pinch of LeGuin

Panelists discuss their biggest influences and what books have changed the recent landscape in SF/F/H literature.

(*)Cat Rambo, Stoney Compton, Claude Lalumière, Liz Argall, James Patrick Kelly

Sunday, November 21

10:00 am, Meadowlark

SFWA Regional Business Meeting

SFWA President Cat Rambo will give a briefing on the latest in SFWA and the business, as well as answer questions.

11 am

Gardening in Fantasyland

Flora and fauna in the lands beyond – what works? what doesn’t? Who does it well?

EM Prazeman, Tanya Huff, (*)Cat Rambo, Renee Stern, Petrea Mitchell

WIP: Teaser From “In My Brain Were Stored a Thousand Pictures”

Life in the new place continues pleasant; this morning it is raining, but the construction workers across the way are slicker-clad and working away doggedly. I’ve been listening to Vienna Teng’s album, Aims. Here’s one of my favorites from it:

As I listen and witness the cars passing by on California Avenue – black egieb blue yarg etihw – I’ve been working on a bespoke near future SF piece where I get to play around a bit with ideas of body augmentation, virtual life, and the access to either of them afforded by economic class. Here’s some of this morning’s writing:

Malady could understand the concept of the artificial hand and how useful it could be in this life, but she didn’t understand why they put so much emphasis on it at first.

After two weeks at University, though, she did, because here they spent most of their time in meat life and very little in mind life, even in classes. And when they went into mind life, the things they got there were like the meat hand to Malanie – fripperies, seldom used.

Still, even here, plenty of other ways to do things presented themselves: rather than reach your hand for food, have it come to you in a floating dish or handed to you by a helper, probably mechanical but here they even had human helpers, which was truly deeply madly odd to her way of thinking.

She said as much to her roommate Michelle. Michelle was short and peppy and purple-haired today, with turquoise stars over her cat-pupiled eyes. While her appearance changed from time to time – she had full mods, the best old money could buy – she was invariably a combination of irritated and amused at her scholarship roommate’s oddities. She said, “For gosh sakes, Mal, surely you want to do things for yourself? That’s what humans do.”

“That’s what humans do,” was one of her more frequent expressions, along with “That’s just how it is” and “That’s how they always do it.” The latter two had figured plentifully in her orientation conversations with Malady, who’d spent her flight and taxi ride in her Memory Palace and had only fully come into meat when Melanie demanded it.

The New Place, and Other Recent News

Recently spotted in Value Village. I believe this is the god of pumpkin spice.

We are mostly unpacked and settling into West Seattle. The construction across the way continues, and they’re working frantically to get the place done before the rainy season sets in. I give them a 50/50% chance of making it.

The high ceilings here make the place feel enormous, as does the extra 300 square feet we’ve picked up. We’ve also got substantially more closet and cupboard space. The view from the kitchen window remains a thing of wonder; every night it gives me a beautiful sunset with sound and mountains. Yesterday there was sunlight coming in through the leaves and flickering on the cabinet so beautifully that I had to call Wayne to come and look. The cats like the new place, particularly the carpet in the study.

Downsides are small so far — we’ll definitely need to get a portable AC for at least one room next summer in order to survive. We certainly can hear the restaurant — but the hours are such that it’s hasn’t been bothersome at all and it means we never need to worry that our TV or music is too loud in turn. There are raccoons who like to come up the back stairs and trip the motion detector driven light. Garbage is much more complicated than it was in Redmond: here we have to separate out food waste and there’s no handy dumpster.

Taco says the sunlight is good here but the pillows are too small.

The best feature, for me at least, remains the location. A few dozen coffee shops are within my walking range. The library is a six minute walk away. If I wanted to, I could take the water taxi into Seattle. Also within walking distance: multiple thrift stores, several parks, an antique mall, four large grocery stores, a 24 hour Bartells Drug Store, two bookstores, an art supply store, a post office, a pet food store that carries the cans of gold that are the only thing Raven can eat, and some of the most beautiful views around. The Unitarian Church is a hour walk, but a ten minute drive isn’t too bad.

Saturday we finished up cleaning the condo. A friend just moved to the area, so we’re happy to be able to have him staying there and making sure no one sets up a meth lab or tiger breeding facility or something like that while we’re gone.

Recent writing news:

“Marvelous Contrivances of the Heart” just appeared in Fiction River: Recycled Pulp, edited by John Helfers.
I turned in my story, “The Curious Peregrinations of a Goat Herder,” for the Champions of Aeltalis book, and Marc Tassin liked it.
“He Knows When You’ve Been Sleeping” will appear in Naughty or Nice, edited by Jennifer Brozek. This is a humorous story that edges into R realms and is also the first Christmas story I’ve written, which is a slightly odd combo.
“Rappacini’s Crow” was rereleased in the Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Year Six.
Two collaborations are forthcoming: “The Mermaid Club” with Mike Resnick and novella “Haunted” with Bud Sparhawk.
A notable recent reprint is “Tortoiseshell Cats are Not Refundable”, which originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, and will be reprinted in The Best American Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Joe Hill with series editor John Joseph Adams.
Recent Patreon stories are Talking in the Night and Snakes on a Train.
Other upcoming stories include “Tongues of Moon Toad” in The Bestiary Anthology, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer; “Preferences” in Chasing Shadows, edited by David Brin; “Red in Tooth and Cog” in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; novelette “The Threadbare Magician” in Genius Loci, edited by Jaym Gates; “As the Crow Flies, So Does the Road” in Grendelsong, edited by Paul Jessup; and “Call and Answer, Plant and Harvest” in Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

The kitchen is airy and light; it makes a more compelling argument for buying fresh flowers than the old place.

Recent teaching news:

I have just finished up converting the Character Building Workshop class to the on-demand form for Fedora and I am very pleased and proud with how this one turned out and how my little online writing school is growing. Once I’m done converting them all, I will go back and update the first one, based on a lot of the lessons I learned working with this particular class.
I’m finishing a third and final installment of my How to Teach Workshops series for the SFWA Bulletin; you can find installment one and installment two in the Bulletin, the most recent of which is available on Amazon.
Upcoming live classes include: Flash Fiction Workshop (October 16), Literary Techniques for Genre Fiction I and II (October 17 and 24), the Reading Aloud Workshop, and the First Pages Workshop with Caren Gussoff.

That’s all for now! Looking forward to an October spent exploring this new space and finally finishing up this goddamn book.

Character Building Workshop (Plus Win a Free Class)

Come try out my new Character Building Workshop for Genre Writers!

The last couple of days I’ve been working at converting the live version of the Character Building Workshop to an on-demand class, in order to add that to the roster for my online on-demand school. It grew from an initial 2,000 words of notes to close to 10,000, and includes review quizzes as well as a considerably expanded list of exercises that writers can work through at their own pace.

To celebrate, I’ll be giving away some coupons for free classes – share this post and comment with the link to the post on social media and you’ll be in the drawing to get one of the following free: Literary Techniques for Genre Writers, Reading to An Audience Workshop, and Character Building Workshop for Genre Writers. I’ll mail the winners at 10 AM Eastern Time on Wednesday, October 7.

Here’s a sample from the section on point of view:

I used second person in another flash piece that appeared in Daily Science Fiction,“ You Have Always Lived in the Castle.”

Your home is a world, a place, a Castle.

It’s full of aliens, their sad eyes watching as they serve. They come from elsewhere, the castle draws them in. They come in through fog and unexpected doorways and now none of them can go home, even the new girl, the one with hair like strawberries in sunshine.

You find her weeping and you try to comfort her. This is your home now, you sign, and it has its beauties, but she hasn’t learned how to signtalk yet and all she does is push you away.

Things to notice about this second person passage:

Second person feels odd and uncomfortable. If you read the piece in its entirety, you’ll see why the weird feeling of displacement that can result from second person was appropriate to this piece.
Part of the key of second person is cuing the reader in to differences between themself and the “you” of the fiction as soon as possible. If there may be a wide variance, let them know that’s a possibility as soon as you can.
Second person is in my opinion a little gimmicky and best suited to short pieces.

Third person can be formal and almost photorealistic, while still firmly attached, as in Andy Duncan’s “Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse,” which can be found in Eclipse One, edited by Jonathan Strahan:

Father Leggett stood on the sidewalk and looked up at the three narrow stories of gray brick that was 207 East Charlton Street. Compared to the other edifices on Lafayette Square — the Colonial Dames fountain, the Low house, the Turner mansion, the cathedral of course — this house was decidedly ordinary, a reminder that even Savannah had buildings that did only what they needed to do, and nothing more.

He looked again at the note the secretary at St. John the Baptist had left on his desk. Wreathed in cigarette smoke, Miss Ingrid fielded dozens of telephone calls in an eight-hour day, none of which were for her, and while she always managed to correctly record addresses and phone numbers on her nicotine-colored note paper, the rest of the message always emerged from her smudged No. 1 pencils as four or five words that seemed relevant at the time but had no apparent grammatical connection, so that reading a stack of Miss Ingrid’s messages back to back gave one a deepening sense of mystery and alarm, like intercepted signal fragments from a trawler during a hurricane.

Things to notice about this third person attached passage:

It is more remote feeling than previous passages.
It is in past tense, which is a natural fit for this POV.
Careful details, like the names and address, create a sense of realism and objectivity.
At the same time, we are clearly in Father Leggett’s POV; note the of course after cathedral.

You Should Read This: 6 Enjoyable Steampunk Titles

If you”re interested in my own steampunk writing, try “Her Windowed Eyes, Her Chambered Heart”.

Steampunk continues to manifest as a genre, although it seems to me it’s not as relentless in its novelty as it used to be. Perhaps once you have reached the point of being parodied in a Key and Peale episode, you cannot claim to be cutting edge anymore? Not to mention that I’ve found steampunk jewelry making kits at the local craft store and the local Value Village flyers featured “How to Make a Steampunk Costume” along with Pirate, Vampire, Zombie, Superhero, and Sexy Barista.

I love the texture of steampunk and have been enjoying seeing continued riffs on a theme that has a long way to go before it’s played out. Here’s six that I’ve enjoyed in the past couple of years. It is by no means an exhaustive list, but each of these bring in aspects of other genres in a way that showcases how much life such a mixture can produce.

Clockwork Lives by Kevin J. Anderson and Neil Peart The book description had me at “steampunk Canterbury Tales” and it’s got some of that adventure’s flavor as it moves along following the adventures of Marinda Peake as she strives to make her life worthy of her father’s legacy. I picked up the lovely hardcover version of the book, which is very prettily put together, complete with facsimile marbled endpapers, high-grade paper, and nice illustrations.

City of the Saints: A Scientific Romance in Four Parts by D. J. Butler There’s a frenzied genius to Butler’s cast of characters, which includes Richard Burton, Samuel Clemens, and Edgar Allen Poe, all turned into intelligence agents vying with each other and the agents of the Kingdom of Deseret against a background of a Utah transmogrified by the steampunk filter into something rich and tangily textured. This book is fun not just for the quick-paced story but as an alternate history that plays with a number of known characters in ways that only add to their legendary nature.

The Emperor’s Edge by Lindsay Buroker. Buroker is a great example of what indie publishing can be. I came to her Emperor’s Edge series because she’d offered the first one free for the Kindle. Smart strategy on her part, because they’re fun fantasy romps that are addictive as crack, with a cast of characters that are entertaining and engaging, and a slow simmering love story that stretches out over the course of the series.

The Clockwork Dagger by Beth Cato. The Clockwork Dagger is the first of a series; the sequel appeared this June. Another strong romantic subplot, but the focus is the journey of Octavia Leander as she struggles to understand her growing healing powers. It’s an unexpectedly satisfying book, and I’ve got the sequel queued up and in my TBR pile.

Cold Magic by Kate Elliot. The first of a terrific trilogy, this combines epic adventure and steampunk as the orphaned Catherine Barahal travels through a pseudo-Victorian world caught up in the middle of social upheaval. One of the joys of big fat fantasy book series is knowing that you’re in for a good, long ride, and Elliott delivers that in spades. (And if you haven’t read her before, you’re welcome. She’s one of the underestimated fantasy writers, IMO.)

A Thousand Perfect Things by Kay Kenyon. Kenyon writes some of the best social science fiction around, and here she turns that skill to steampunk. The warring countries of Anglica and Bharata meet on a mystical bridge that spans the sea distance between them, and the description of that mode of travel continues to resonate in my head as one of the most interesting landscapes fantasy has to offer.

Crooked by Richard Pett. Imagine Lovecraftian steampunk, with machineries of flesh and rot, and mysterious elixirs of immortality, and you might come close to Crooked. Eerie and wonderful, it’s a marvelous and chilling read that shows how steampunk Cthulhu can becomes.

And here’s a bonus that I ran across while researching links for this post, and found a must-buy: The Diabolical Miss Hyde, by Viola Carr. The description made it irresistible. I love books that pay tribute to classics by reworking them in interesting ways, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a particular favorite of mine. I’ve saving this read for sometime when I want to curl up and lose myself for a while.

#sfwaauthors #sfwaauthor

Patreon Post: Talking in the Night

This is a quick little flash piece because I’m still mired in moving, and also one that stays on the literary side of things, not wandering into the speculative. Nonetheless, I like it, and what it has to say about connection and communication in relationships.

Talking in the Night

It started like this: Mona turned over in the bed, trying to find the cool edge of sleep. She let out a little groan of frustration and her husband patted her shoulder, caught half-awake, half-asleep himself. She whimpered as though she’d awoken from nightmare and he pulled her close, buried her in his overflowing warmth.

After that sometimes she tested him with that little noise. Sometimes he was too asleep but sometimes he held her, reassuring as the shore holding a wave, feeling it leave and return, leave and return, regular as his breathing.

“You make noises in your sleep,” he said at breakfast. “Are you having nightmares?”

“Every once in a while,” she said. She studied him. How would he react if he thought she were suffering nightmares, that life was stressing her, eroding her, creeping into sleep to make it as uneasy as a coffee-less morning? “Often.”

He left before she did and when she went out through the frosty parking lot, she found he’d scraped the ice off her car for her.

Sometimes she woke and spoke words into the night, hoping he’d decipher them. “No” and “yes” and “please please please.” He slid his arms around her, stroked her back, but never replied. Sometimes later he slipped from bed and went to watch TV, sitting on the couch in his robe, lost and unknowable while the sports channel buzzed facts and figures while she lay in the other room wondering what he was thinking.

One night, she said, “Yes” and he repeated it, giving it a question’s inflection. She held her breath, didn’t answer and they both lay there, listening to each other pretend to dream.

He spoke first, the next night, and said, “Please.” It was her turn to repeat it, pitch it upward, trying to elicit the next word. This time it was his turn not to answer.

It could have laid quiet after that forever. She could have abandoned the night speech, he could have chosen in turn not to pick it up. Their horizons could have been sleepless and silent.

But the next night he spoke and told her about the time his father had taken him fishing and the hook had ripped into his thumb and his father had said men don’t cry. The story went out into the blackness and coiled near the ceiling, peering down at them as though they were dolls in a bed, plastic and supine.

She answered.

She answered with a story half-remembered of cigar ash and a grandfather and they went on telling memories they’d never spoken before to anyone, the things that they would have dreamed if they were sleeping.

And so they didn’t sleep. And so they talked till dawn and the day that was theirs as it had never been before.

If you’re not a Patreon supporter but would like to be, here’s the page where you can find out more about that.

If you’re interested in my online writing classes, you can find out more about the live ones here or the new on-demand content here.

In recent news, Rappacini’s Crow as well as All the Pretty Little Mermaids both made Ellen Datlow’s longlist for the year’s best horror and my collaboration with Mike Resnick, The Mermaid Club, will be appearing in Conspiracy. Other upcoming work includes appearances in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Abyss & Apex, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

If you’re in Baltimore at the Baltimore Book Festival this weekend, please stop by the SFWA booth and say hi!

WIP: Teaser from Poppy and Letitia

I finished up a story I’ve been wrestling with for the past week this afternoon. It’s for a game world, and it’s a fun one. I’m not sure why I had so much trouble with this one, but I rewrote the beginning four or five times, which is unprecedented for me.

Anyhow, here’s a chunk:

The book supplied a hand-colored map of the coastline. Letitita had not seen that many maps in her lifetime but she thought that this one might have some shortcomings. For one thing, the area they were heading into was a spot colored a vague green which turned out to be towering pines and cedars, shaly hills, and tiny streams inevitably at the bottom of steep-walled gullies full of blackberry brambles. It was lettered, the amount of lettering sparse in comparison to the amount of blank space provided, “Unexplored Forest,”

They were three days into changing that into “Partially Explored Forest” when they heard the screaming.

It called from off the road, among the trees, unseen but close from the volume, the sound of a horse crying out, and then a second echoing noise, like the harsh squeal of an enormous machine wheel. Poppy’s bow was out and in her hand, the other one pulling an arrow from its quiver, as she sprinted towards it; Letitia followed, pulling daggers from her belt as she went, but moving more cautiously than her mistress and therefore slower.

She arrived in time to see Poppy’s first arrow strike the monstrosity towering over the fallen unicorn, a mass of black fur and teeth and more than one head, protruding at awkward angles from around the main one with its ferocious canine grin. Every eye in the multitude it boasted burned bright as fire, red as madness.

The arrow extinguished one of that pair burning brightest and largest. The beast threw its head back, and the sound of that tortured clash came again, so loud that it throbbed in Letitia’s ears.

Daggers sang from her hands, thrown almost without thinking, thunk thunking into that glistening black snout. Annoying wounds at best, but another of Poppy’s arrows flew straight and true – had she really merely said she’d been “all right with the bow” when a girl? – putting out the other mad red glare, and as it died so did all the tinier ones, heads slumping awkward as it toppled, halfway over its fallen prey.

They circled it warily as they came up. The unicorn let out a tortured breath. Poppy made a hurt sound in her throat and started to step closer, but Letitia tugged her back.

“You can’t help it, boss,” she said. Her eyes welled with tears, obscuring the gaping belly wound, the entrails fanned out from a savage bite. “It’s hurt too bad.”

“I can put it out of its misery at least,” Poppy said. She tugged one of Letitia’s daggers free from the monster’s corpse, and moved towards the unicorn, speaking softly, calmingly, an ostler’s murmur, soothing and nonsensical, theretheremylove, theretheremypretty.

The gleaming ivory horn raised an inch from the ground as though in challenge, but was too weak to move further. She stroked her hand along the broad neck. Letitia held her breath.

“Move no further,” a voice said from behind them.

In other news, Rappacini’s Crow and All the Pretty Little Mermaids both made Ellen’s Datlow recommended list for Best Horror. Hurray!

WIP: Poppy and Letitia

I finished up a story I’ve been wrestling with for the past week this afternoon. It’s for a game world, and it’s a fun one. I’m not sure why I had so much trouble with this one, but I rewrote the beginning four or five times, which is unprecedented for me.

Anyhow, here’s a chunk:

The book supplied a hand-colored map of the coastline. Letitita had not seen that many maps in her lifetime but she thought that this one might have some shortcomings. For one thing, the area they were heading into was a spot colored a vague green which turned out to be towering pines and cedars, shaly hills, and tiny streams inevitably at the bottom of steep-walled gullies full of blackberry brambles. It was lettered, the amount of lettering sparse in comparison to the amount of blank space provided, “Unexplored Forest,”

They were three days into changing that into “Partially Explored Forest” when they heard the screaming.

It called from off the road, among the trees, unseen but close from the volume, the sound of a horse crying out, and then a second echoing noise, like the harsh squeal of an enormous machine wheel. Poppy’s bow was out and in her hand, the other one pulling an arrow from its quiver, as she sprinted towards it; Letitia followed, pulling daggers from her belt as she went, but moving more cautiously than her mistress and therefore slower.

She arrived in time to see Poppy’s first arrow strike the monstrosity towering over the fallen unicorn, a mass of black fur and teeth and more than one head, protruding at awkward angles from around the main one with its ferocious canine grin. Every eye in the multitude it boasted burned bright as fire, red as madness.

The arrow extinguished one of that pair burning brightest and largest. The beast threw its head back, and the sound of that tortured clash came again, so loud that it throbbed in Letitia’s ears.

Daggers sang from her hands, thrown almost without thinking, thunk thunking into that glistening black snout. Annoying wounds at best, but another of Poppy’s arrows flew straight and true – had she really merely said she’d been “all right with the bow” when a girl? – putting out the other mad red glare, and as it died so did all the tinier ones, heads slumping awkward as it toppled, halfway over its fallen prey.

They circled it warily as they came up. The unicorn let out a tortured breath. Poppy made a hurt sound in her throat and started to step closer, but Letitia tugged her back.

“You can’t help it, boss,” she said. Her eyes welled with tears, obscuring the gaping belly wound, the entrails fanned out from a savage bite. “It’s hurt too bad.”

“I can put it out of its misery at least,” Poppy said. She tugged one of Letitia’s daggers free from the monster’s corpse, and moved towards the unicorn, speaking softly, calmingly, an ostler’s murmur, soothing and nonsensical, theretheremylove, theretheremypretty.

The gleaming ivory horn raised an inch from the ground as though in challenge, but was too weak to move further. She stroked her hand along the broad neck. Letitia held her breath.

“Move no further,” a voice said from behind them.

In other news, Rappacini’s Crow and All the Pretty Little Mermaids both made Ellen’s Datlow recommended list for Best Horror. Hurray!

Preparing to Move

We are preparing to move and in some ways are inadequately prepared, while in others we are more than ahead. I hadn’t unpacked a good couple of dozen boxes from the study, so those can pretty much just go straight back out (this time we’re hiring movers rather than doing it ourselves).

It’s weird prepping to move again, to hope that this time we’ll manage to achieve escape velocity. We’ve got a renter for this place, and a year’s lease on the new one, so we’ll see. Today I’ll go through cupboards, try to sort out some stuff to pitch rather than take with us, take advantage of the opportunity to declutter and cull some old and faded spices, discard dingy rags, ditch old magazines, etc.

I have tried not to overburden us in preparation, to jettison instead, but there will be some things we’ll need to pick up once there: an ironing board and iron, a table for the sewing machine, a second bath mat, more towels, etc. Instead I’ve been mostly picking up bits for a Halloween costume this year; trying to do something worthy of a SFWA president. I did also breakdown and buy the sourdough its own crock, but that was because Value Village was having 50 percent off day.

I finished one collaboration last week and am picking away at finishing up a bespoke story right now, then more on the novel, because I am so ready for that to be done. I’m also working on the updated Creating an Online Presence for Writers as well as adapting the Character Building and Editing 101 classes for the Fedora platform to go with the shiny new on-demand version of Literary techniques for Genre Writers.