Cat Rambo's Blog, page 53

Catching Up, Plus An Excerpt From Hearts of Tabat

This Sunday’s online class is Literary Techniques in Genre Fiction. Come and pick up some new tools to use in your fiction!

Hello folks! January has been crazy, and I have been bad about blogging. One thing I’m going to be doing going forward is scattering in some food posts, because I’m cooking a lot this year as well as working with the SFWA Cookbook Project.

BEASTS OF TABAT is coming out on March 27, 2015, at Emerald City ComicCon, which is very exciting, but also blindingly fast. If you want to get news about the book and other projects, please sign up for my mailing list:

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Meanwhile, I’m working away on two book projects, one a YA novel, the other Book 2 of the Tabat Quartet, HEARTS OF TABAT. It picks up halfway through BEASTS OF TABAT and involves three of the secondary characters. Book 3, EXILES OF TABAT, will take up the characters from BEASTS OF TABAT again at the point where BEASTS leaves off. Book 4, GODS OF TABAT, is plotted but I’m still figuring out the viewpoint stuff.

One of the viewpoint characters of HEARTS OF TABAT is Adelina, Bella’s former lover and closest friend. I’ve been writing about her this morning:

Adelina knew that in producing only one child, Emiliana had replicated the structure of the family from which she’d come. She wondered sometimes if her mother ever had, like Adelina, wished for a sister. What would it be like to have another soul that knew all the peculiar circumstances of your family existence, the conglomeration of odd relatives and circumstances and situations but more than anything, knew all the little sore spots that the world insisted on imposing, like the way her mother could, with a single look, indicate so much disapproval of an outfit.

Adelina straightened her shoulders. This was the first time she’d appeared in front of her mother wearing the cut and device of a Publisher, the open pages of a book, edged in the gold lines that indicated she was the head of a house. There were only five people in Tabat qualified to wear that device, but Emiliana refused to see any distinction in that. A house that worked in paper was lower status than one that worked in metal, let allow the heights that a banking house like the Nettlepurses were at. In Emiliana’s eyes, Adelina had stripped herself of all that, had stepped down into what was for Emiliana the equivalent of a puddle of shit when compared to the rarefied heights she had been born into.

Adelina imagined a sister standing beside her, whispering in her ear, “It’s all right. She doesn’t understand what an advantage such an outlet could be to a banking house.” A sister would have been willing to take the reins of the Nettlepurses and work together with Spinner Press, taking advantage of all that the two could offer each other.

But that was the other part of Emiliana’s disappointment. There were others who could take Adelina’s role, certainly, but they were all of distant blood, rather than her child.

And while Adelina could argue the advantages of her having formed the publishing house over and over again, she couldn’t argue with that disappointment, the real reason that underlay the look Emiliana gave Adelina as she came into the breakfast room.

But Emiliana said nothing, only offered a sharp nod of greeting, and returned her attention to the newssheets in her hands, the accounts of the morning arrivals at the docks, which ships carrying what, traveling mainly from the Southern Isles or elsewhere on the coast, but sometimes from the Old Continent or even places like the Rose Kingdom or the Winterlands.

In other news, I’ll be speaking briefly at an animated short films presentation that’s part of the Seattle Asian-American Film Festival on February 14th. See the Supernatural Seattle blog for details, and follow it on Twitter in order to get news of events and posts as they appear.

The Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated Awards Process

This is a baby two-toed sloth. I figured it would be more appealing than an award logo.

Hugo nominations have opened and with that, an array of canvassing and promotion techniques have begun to be deployed, which will no doubt continue until the actual awards are awarded and everyone can briefly calm down before a new season begins.

The thing I’m not fond of, which has arisen in recent years, is the idea that one should vote according to one’s politics, and plunk down a vote for the “right” books without bothering to read them. Some people like to justify this by pointing to something that is undeniably true — the award is often less often the expression of the opinion of SF fans overall than that of a small subset of those fans and sometimes — perhaps even often — popularity, access to high-traffic websites, or other factors not related to quality of writing affects those results. In these cases, that’s usually used as a justification for throwing the votes in what’s perceived in the opposite direction.

And my reply is this: FFS, people, read stuff and vote for the stories you like, the stories which YOU find well-crafted and appealing. Go download the excellent Campbell sampler that Marc Blake has been putting together each year and take the time to read through it. Look at the ‘year’s best’ lists. Ask people what they liked that you might. Look at the five kerjillion “here’s what I have eligible this year” posts, particularly if you have a favorite author and want to make sure you don’t miss anything by them.

But read it and apply your standards to it and then vote for what you thought was the best story/novella/whatever. Anyone telling you to vote any other way, anyone offering their work and saying “you should vote for this because we belong to the same category” rather than “I hope you’ll vote for it if you like it” has an agenda that is not at all about quality of writing.

Yes, there are “taste-makers” — critics whose likes and dislikes are listened to, and often used for guidance. But those folks fall all over the spectrum and the answer, if you think there’s not someone representing your particular niche of opinion is to become one yourself, by putting your opinion out there articulately, clearly, and interestingly, which is the very same process by which those taste-makers got to that position.

You may well not agree with a particular award’s results. Opinions are like…well, you probably know how that saying goes. There’s plenty of room in a world this size for a vast array of opinions. But when a piece you didn’t like wins an award, saying that it did so because of politics comes off as soreheaded sour grapes more than anything else. Let’s face it, a shitty, badly-written piece has an awfully steep (but again, admittedly not impossible) hill to climb before accumulating the avalanche of votes something needs to win one of the major awards. But assuming that because you don’t like something no one else is justified in liking it is narcissistic egotism.

Want to see the stuff that you like on the ballots? Nominate it, vote for it, spread word about it on social media, through reviews, and via blog posts or other writings. Work at that, not trying to handicap the other candidates just so yours can limp home. And read stuff and decide for yourself, don’t just take the slate of predigested candidates someone has prepared so you don’t have to read any of that nasty conservative/liberal/whatever prose and actually think for yourself. Read all over the spectrum, not just one color. You’re shortchanging yourself of some good stuff otherwise.

Recent Stuff: Book! More Book! I Like 2015 So Far!

Here I am with one of my personal heroes, Connie Willis. In Chez Rambo, we have a frequent saying: What would Connie do?

I’ve announced it on social media, But I haven’t blogged about it yet, so I wanted to pass along some terrific news.

As some of you know, I have a novel that is the first volume of a fantasy quartet that I’ve been shopping around for a while. It’s a great pleasure to be able to announce that BEASTS OF TABAT will appear this year from Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta’s stellar Wordfire Press. Now that I have some confidence that the books will appear, I’m finding that words on the second book, HEARTS OF TABAT, are flowing much much MUCH more easily, and that’s been my primary focus this week.

But! I have additional great news, which is that Hydra House will be publishing a second two-sided collection from me, this time full of fantasy stories. NEITHER HERE NOR THERE will also be appearing in 2015, which makes this a great year so far and we’re only halfway through month one.

Because I am insane and always taking on too many things, here’s a new one I’m involved with, a Seattle area event calendar/blog for speculative fiction, Supernatural Seattle. If you’re interested in helping out with that project, drop me a line.

I’ve also updated my About page with the appearances that I know of so far in 2015. I think I will be in Oklahoma in early May, but am still nailing that appearance down. In any case, it looks like it will be a fun year, and one thing that I’m particularly looking forward to are the Nebula Awards, which take place in early June in Chicago.

Reminder: this weekend I’ve got an online class coming up, Editing 101, that focuses on revision and rewriting. Sign up and learn how to make your sentences sing. If you can’t make it but want to make sure you get news of upcoming classes, sign up for my mailing list.

WIP: Ms. Liberty Splits Up the Superb Squadron

The WIP is a prequel to “Ms. Liberty Gets a Haircut.”

The meeting room had been storage area originally. Like everything else in the laboratory converted into headquarters, it was cramped, incredibly cramped, and more soon because of the outsized table someone had jammed into the middle. Chairs were crammed in around, an assortment of styles and shapes, as though everyone had elected to bring their own seating arrangement. In a corner was a small triangular table, holding a battered coffee pot and a perpetually empty plate.

They were the first to arrive, and Ms. Liberty took the opportunity to select, not the sturdiest chair (a hefty wooden bench) in the room, which the Unicorn would probably need, but the second sturdiest. Her augmented flesh was denser than that of most of the other team members, and she thought that breaking a chair would be a bad way to start off her first week with the team. The chair she picked was made of metal and was unyielding underneath her ans she sat down. She tried to relax into it, tried to assume the pose that would convey her attitude when others entered the room: not too eager but certainly on the alert.

Meanwhile, X wandered the corners of the room, extruded a long thin tentacle, which thoroughly explored the inner workings of the coffeepot, fingered the edges of the map of the world thumbtacked to the wall next to the nonfunctioning video screen. Over Antarctica, someone had scrawled in barely legible green pen, “Kilroy was here.” Air blew in through the vents, the only real source of sound in the room other than their breathing and the sounds of their movement.

The clock on the wall, which hung a little askew as though buffeted somehow in the past, clicked, and the hand clicked over to a minute before the hour. The door swung open and Dr. Raffy emerged, arms full of navy-blue folders stamped with the Squadron’s logo. He nodded at both of them and began to put a folder at each seat. X turned into a porcupine and waddled over to take the seat next to Ms. Liberty, a plain pine kitchen chair, its seat well-worn with use.

The Gladhander was the next to appear. “Ladies, gentleman…” He smirked as he slid into his chair, a leather Aeron that gave silently underneath him. The door opened again to show the Silver Juggler and Ballboy, both looking ill at ease and unhappy.

At the hour, Dr. Raffy began to speak, despite the lack of the Unicorn.

“If you’ll open the folders in front of you and turn to the first page, which is printed on cornflower blue paper, you’ll see our agenda.”

They all dutifully did so. The writer side of Ms. Liberty noted several spots where passive voice could be eliminated, a sentence whose parallel structure was insufficiently clear, and an out of place comma.

Dr. Raffy continued. “I’d like to welcome our new members officially, Ms. Liberty and X. While the circumstances that have opened new positions on our team have been sad, we are glad to have their new insights and experiences.” He smiled at Ms. Liberty and she smiled back, feeling genuinely welcome for the first time.

“Here, here,” the Silver Juggler said and led the room in a round of polite applause. X blushed purple appreciation.

“I know that you all read their backgrounds while undergoing the application process,” Dr. Raffy said, “so I won’t bother with recapping who they are. Their presence, unfortunately, brings us to agenda item number two: the smallness of our quarters.”

”I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I don’t mind the smallness of the rooms. Reminds me of when I was first enlisted serving on the submarine Helvetica,” the Silver Juggler said. Beside him Ballboy nodded enthusiastically.

“It’s no skin off my back,” Dr. Raffy pointed out. “I have my own quarters and there suitable for my needs. Should we postpone the item for further discussion in the next meeting?” He spoke quickly, as though rushing them through the item and Ms Liberty wondered what the hurry was.

The clock ticked to the ten after mark. The door opened and the Unicorn sidled in. “You better not be done talking about the living quarters, Raff,” he said without preamble. ”I got something to say about all that shit.”

Dr. Raffy sighed. “Your arrival is timely,” he said wryly. “We were just discussing that very item.”

Recent News

Huzzah! It’s my great pleasure to announce that WordFire Press will be publishing my novel, Beasts of Tabat. I’m tickled as can be, plus have a couple of other pieces of good news up my sleeve. So far 2015 isn’t too shabby!

Random Lists of January

Still working on 2015’s business plan

Things I have made so far this year:

Some words

A lot of ebooks

A loaf of bread

Quite a bit of yogurt

Danish pastry dough

Flaxseed crackers

Ricotta cheese

Cashew cheese

Several pots of coffee (seven to be be precise)

What I have written:

One blog post

One freelance piece

Several pieces of flash

Part of what looks like it might be a superhero novel

What I have read:

Lots of Internet articles

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin (reread)

The Broken Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin

The Kingdoms of the Gods by N.K. Jemisin

Newly Published on Amazon

“English Muffin, Devotion on the Side” is one of my personal favorites.

Part of this year’s resolutions is getting everything up on line. So far I’ve reformatted everything that I’d put up because it didn’t look as nice as it should and today added some more stories.

The new stories, which I’m working on putting up on Smashwords as well, are:

Amid the Words of War – (Twicefar Station) An exiled alien mourns for the race that will no longer accept it.
Can You Hear the Moon? – (The World Beside Us) A teenage girl in smalltown faces one of the most difficult challenges she’ll ever endure: upcoming adulthood. As she stands on the brink between innocence and experience, will magic be able to help her cope with what lies ahead?
English Muffin, Devotion on the Side – (Closer Than You Think) George leaves copies of himself to his friends and family when he dies. The problem is — what happens when you’re only a copy?
Flicka – (Closer Than You Think) Inhabitants of a small Idaho town have trouble adjusting to their new neighbors, a family of genetically modified humans who have chosen to become more equine than human.
I Come From the Dark Universe – (Twicefar Station) Life on tumultuous TwiceFar station is much the lonely existence same day to day for Bo. But when he comes upon a mysterious woman who claims to come from an alternate universe, he must face his strange attraction to her.
Love, Resurrected – (Tales of Tabat) General Aife Croffadottir is acknowledged one of the finest military minds of her time — which is why the sorcerer Balthus commands her to her service even after her death. How will she come to terms with her new existence?
Of Selkies, Disco Balls, and Anna Plane – Small-town Indiana in the 80s is an uncomfortable place for Arturo, who has a secret life at the local gay bar. When he introduces his best friend, Anna, to the place, he finds both of them swept up in a story of magical obsession and servitude.
So Glad We Had This Time Together – (The World Beside Us) Television executives come up with a reality series starring supernatural creatures — only to find it enjoying unnatural popularity.
TimeSnip – (TwiceFar Station) Plucked from the 19th century, Victoria finds employment negotiating with civilizations for the same technology that’s responsible for her existence. What happens when she’s dispatched to a civilization whose ways she finds oppressive in this story of the far future? Contains adult themes.

Chan Culture and Good-Faith Arguments

Getting ready for the New Year.

I wrote a piece, #PurpleSF, about feminism and SF for Clarkesworld. It was in part stirred up by the convulsions of the Gamergate controversy, which has continued to provide plenty of food for thought (and probably will continue to do so).

One of the many interesting (and sometimes positive) things that’s come out of that controversy has been a lot of examinations of Internet culture and many of its subsets. Before last year, I had only the vaguest idea what “chan culture” would be, so I found this piece really fascinating, particularly because questions about anonymity are (imo) going to continue to rear their heads whenever they bump into notions of transparency in coming years.

The full piece, How imageboard culture shaped Gamergate, appeared on BoingBoing. Its author has produced a lot of interesting pieces about Gamergate, usually composed as Storify pieces, such as these: Gamergate, Sexism, and Tribalism; Why I Oppose #Gamergate

The article is talking specifically about image boards, and here’s a chunk from it that describes the culture:

These anonymous imageboards have their own idiosyncratic culture, despite the lack of permanent identity. Posters call themselves anons, or occasionally channers. While anonymity is a core part of this identity, merely being anonymous does not make you an anon. Rather, it’s about identifying as a larger whole. Capital-A Anonymous, such as the Project Chanology protestors and the hacking/activist groups like @youranonnews, are anons, but most anons don’t think of themselves as part of Anonymous.

Without identity, every anon is whoever they want to be at the moment. It’s freeing! Anons exalt these imageboards as the only place people can truly be themselves, without being burdened by their identity or consequences. This includes genuinely awful or hateful opinions. Anons have a broad, often absolutist view of free speech, sometimes extending that so far as to include threats of violence or extreme pornography. Anons are extremely protective of their culture and this very broad view of free speech, because of both great faith in their ability to self-police argument and an unconscious, internal reliance on irony.

The atmosphere is that of a paradoxically jovial angry mob. Almost everyone sees their own point of view as the consensus, assuming that most people most people agree with them. Any possibly contentious statement is presumed to be ironic, told as a joke or to rile up people who disagree. Since everyone assumes that anyone who disagrees is arguing in bad faith and doesn’t mean what they’re saying, anyone who disagrees is a fair target for apparently hateful mockery. This basic assumption of bad faith applies even when arguments are long-lasting and well-known: for example, the console war arguments in /v/, 4chan’s video games sub-board. However, this mockery is defanged by anonymity and irony.

Everyone’s anonymous, so a poster can just join the winning side of an argument, cheerfully mocking their own older posts. One poster can even play both sides from the start. Every anon can choose whatever opinion they want to have on a post-by-post basis, so everything flows smoothly even as people hatefully attack each other for having the wrong opinion. Anons believe in this free marketplace of ideas: good ones survive the firestorm, while bad ones burn to ash as everyone dogpiles on mocking them.

Wayne and I were talking about this conception of discussion/argument today and I can at least partially understand how it’s shaped some of the conversation within Gamergate (the overall situation, not the group) and created many of the problems. (Anders Sandburg has an interesting piece about such culture clashes.) I think it’s important to look at the background people are coming from and the Internet etiquette norms that they’ve absorbed.

At the same time, bad faith arguments are something I don’t practice and I find trolls kinda appalling, because the idea of getting enjoyment from making other people angry, upset, or otherwise unhappy seems something only a retrograde would relish. I blogged about arguing on the Internet a while back and said I’d follow up and talk about bad faith argument, but I never have, because I find its habitual practitioners antithetical to the way I try to think.

Don’t get me wrong. I like debate, and life with Wayne is a lively series of conversations in which one or the other will often take the role of devil’s advocate just to see how sound or defensible an idea is. But that seems different to me than taking on the Internet identity of someone who believes something just to see if you can get other people riled up enough to waste time on composing eight page replies to your argument rather than something, I dunno, actually productive or enjoyable.

But, as Wayne can testify, I am painfully earnest about a number of things, including the idea that the human race should be advancing and that part of that advance is being fairer about our treatment of the people and world around us. The idea that love is both greater than and preferable to hate. That cruelty only creates more cruelty. That civility and an assumption of good faith should be the baseline, rather than the exception. And that we are fallible creatures who are nonetheless capable of learning from both experience as well as questioning ourselves.

Part of my plea in the Clarkesworld column is that we stop arguing in bad faith and lazy categories. It’s a Quixotic fight, but I’ll continue to carry its banner. And part of that banner is to argue in good faith, to ask questions and interrogate the world around me to see what blinders it’s imposing on me. That’s a vital part of making good art. And good conversation.

My Theories About Series and Self-Publishing

An exiled soldier tries to wait out a winter in a fort beleaguered by fox-spirits and winter demons.

Happy New Year, one and all! I thought I’d start the New Year talking about what I’m working on at the moment, putting individual stories up on Amazon and Smashwords. Between publications and backlog, I’ve got about 200 to play with, so it’s a pretty big task, given that I’d like to have almost all of them up by the end of the month. But if I consider that some are flash, which I’ll put up individually on QuarterReads and release in a compendium, it becomes less daunting.

I’m getting faster at the process as I go, and I’m also refining it, which unfortunately means I need to go back over some of the earlier releases, just to make them all look the same as far as prettiness and completeness goes.

Would it be better to space releasing the stories out over the course of a year? Probably. But I’d like to get this all set up and done so I can move onto other things. I have enough stories that will be added over the course of the year as I write them or their rights become available that there will be plenty of additions as is.

What I’ve done with the stories is split them up into series. This is an easy enough task because I’ve got plenty of clusters of stories where characters or locations repeat, as with Twicefar Station, which is the backdrop for “Amid the Words of War,” “Kallakak’s Cousins,” and “On TwiceFar Station, As the Ships Come and Go.” It’s also the same world as “TimeSnip,” whose main character appears in “On TwiceFar Station, As the Ships Come and Go.”

Why I’m doing this:

This allows me to provide readers who like a particular story with a way to find similar ones. If they read “Her Windowed Eyes, Her Chambered Heart,” for instance, and want to find other steampunk stories by me, they can look at the others in the Altered America series.
This lets me play with KDP in a meaningful way. If I make the first book Kindle only for at least the first year, I can use the Kindle Select promotional tools and get readers to sample a story by giving it to them free.

Here’s what I’ve got sorted of the series so far, with a description of each.

Altered America (steampunk)

Her Windowed Eyes, Her Chambered Heart

Rappacini’s Crow

Closer Than You Think (near future SF)

All the Pretty Little Mermaids

Tortoiseshell Cats Are Not Refundable

Zeppelin Follies

English Muffin, Devotion on the Side

Memories of Moments, Bright as Falling Stars

Therapy Buddha

Farther Than Tomorrow (slipstream & space opera)

Bus Ride to Mars

Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain

Grandmother

Elsewhen, Within, Elsewhen

Superlives (superheroes)

Ms. Liberty Gets a Haircut

Acquainted with the Night

Tales of Tabat (secondary world fantasy)

Narrative of a Beast’s Life

How Dogs Came to the New Continent

Events at Fort Plentitude

Sugar

Love, Resurrected

In the Lesser Southern Isles

Twicefar Station (far future SF)

Kallakak’s Cousins

On TwiceFar Station, As the Ships Come and Go

Amid the Words of War

I Come From the Dark Universe

Villa Encantada (urban fantasy/horror)

Eagle-haunted Lake Sammammish

Villa Encantada

Crowned with Antlers Comes the King

Women of Zalanthas (secondary world fantasy)

Aquila’s Ring

Mirabai the Twice-lived

Karaluvian Fale

The World Beside Us (urban fantasy/horror)

Jaco Tours

Magnificent Pigs

Heart in a Box

Can You Hear the Moon?

Of Selkies, Disco Balls, and Anna Plane

So far, after approximately a month of getting stuff up there, I’m seeing some small sales, but also a tiny uptick in my collections that could be due to something else entirely. (Self-publishing is such a mysterious process!) So over the course of the year, I’ll be tracking the results.

2014 in Review

January: The Year Begins in the San Juans

We’ve been going up to the San Juans the past few years for New Years, though this year we’re skipping that. Here’s the early evening view from the front porch out over the water.

2014 was a great year and I want to thank the wonderful friends and family that helped make it so.

I started the year out in the San Juan Islands with Wayne, Mom, and Mark. We watched Sherlock (Mom hadn’t learned about Benedict Cumberbatch yet), read, and did a lot of walking and bird watching, as well as throwing a ball for the dog living on the front porch of the rental place. There was a great fireplace, and plenty of room to sit around and talk or play games. Lunch at the Love Dog Cafe was a worthy meal, although I still miss Bilbo’s.

That was the same month my story, “All the Pretty Little Mermaids,” which appeared in the March issue of Asimov’s SF, made it onto the shelf, so I was able to spot it in the wild. At the same time, “Summer Night in Durham” came out in the anthology Stamps, Vamps, and Tramps, edited by Shannon Robinson.

February: Adventures in Lincoln City

Sandra and I stayed in the Ester Lee motel while in Lincoln City. It was a short walk down to the beach and a wealth of fabulous sunrises and sunsets.

In February I got to hear Jeff VanderMeer read from the first volume of his Southern Reach series. It was my first visit to Elliott Bay Books, assuredly not my last. My story, “Tortoiseshell Cats Are Not Refundable,” appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine.

That same month Sandra Odell and I drove down to Lincoln City, Oregon to participate in Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith’s anthology workshop. We’d each written six stories in advance for the workshop. Mine were: The Raiders (published in Fiction River: Past Crimes); Call and Answer, Plant and Harvest (forthcoming in Beneath Ceaseless Skies); Circus in the Bloodwarm Rain (appeared in Fantasy Scroll Magazine); Snakes on a Train (currently in circulation); Buying Trouble (in circulation) and “Marvelous Contrivances of the Heart” (forthcoming in Recycled Pulp). It was a good time, and I made some new friends, which was awesome, and got some good writing and learning done while I was there.

March: The Scheme Begins

Caren Gussoff and I, working the Clarion West booth at Emerald City ComicCon.

It was around the same time that I declared I’d be running for the position of Vice President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Yikes! I went to Emerald City Comicon at the end of March and had a swell time helping out at the Clarion West booth as well as participating in a panel with Kevin J. Anderson and David Farland. It was the first time I’d ever been to a ComicCon. The scale and discipline with which it was organized was impressive and a little daunting, but the day that I spent there was a lot of fun and I hope to repeat the experience in 2015.

But more important than any of this, we started planning the grand road trip that would occupy the second half of the year around this point. Before anything else? We had to get the condo in which we’ve lived for twelve years ready to sell, work that included replacing two sets of shower doors, putting new linoleum down in a bathroom and the kitchen, putting Pergo down in the bedroom, replacing the blinds and patio shade, swapping out a lot of hardware and light fixtures, and putting tile around the wood burning stove’s platform. In the course of all of that, I’d learn to love my Dremel with the fury of a thousand suns. It can do anything, an experience I’d draw on much later in the year when writing “Red in Tooth and Cog.”

April: A Storm of Strawberries

In 2013, I put these plants in, then spent a summer pinching back runners in order to encourage them to work on root systems instead. That paid off in spades — and the fresh strawberries were amazing.

Spring in Redmond is always full of rainbows, and we saw a double one this year. The strawberry bed I’d planted for Mom last year went crazy, and we had strawberries galore. Eating one straight from the plant, still a little warm from the sun — delicious!

Mid April, I attended Norwescon, a longtime favorite local convention held down near the Seatac airport. A high point was hearing BFF Caren Gussoff read from her novel, The Birthday Problem, whose release was only a few months off as well as hearing the inimitable Randy Henderson read from upcoming Finn Fancy Necromancy. Around the same time, “Can You Hear the Moon?” appeared in Superficial Flesh, edited by Lauren Dixon.

I began carrying unshelled peanuts in my pockets to woo local crows and had some success making friends. Meanwhile we moved to another apartment here in Villa Marina while continuing to work on the apartment, aided by friend Dallas Taylor, who is a man of many talents.

May is Uneventful, But June Less So

In May, Wayne and I went off to the Nebulas in San Jose, where we got to see some awesome people win in what was a terrific ballot. I attended the SFWA board meeting there, having been elected VP (not terribly impressive, since I ran uncontested) and participated on a writing panel with Eileen Gunn.

Here I am with Dr. Cat, who I know from high school days. You may know him from Furcadia (www.furcadia.com).

In June, my story “English Muffin, Devotion on the Side” appeared in Daily Science Fiction. Early in the month, we left off remodeling temporarily, dropped our cat Taco off with Keffy Kehrli, who swore to immortalize her on the Internet and set off to California to take our other cat Raven to stay with An Owomoyela.

We drove down in two days, finding out in the process that Raven was a remarkably relaxed traveler who was perfectly happy to sit in the back window and watch the road. We stayed for a few days in the San Francisco area, seeing lots of friends, including getting a chance to see Devin Crain, Rachel Doe and Laura Wren’s new digs, driving in Bethanye and Stephen Blount’s Tesla, and grabbing a meal with a friend from high school days, Dr. Cat.

In San Francisco, we stayed in a great place near the water, and had a fabulous view of the Bay Bridge’s scintillating lights. The hotel had a series of terraces up on the roof, and we took up glasses of wine one night and enjoyed the sunset, with the whole place to ourselves. I I made Wayne visit the Winchester Mystery House with me and it was just as fabulous as I’d remembered. We did the behind-the-scenes tour, and got to see a lot of the engineering innovations Sarah Winchester had come up with.

Some San Francisco moments:

Art installation on Fisherman’s Wharf, Chris Bell’s “Swarm”:

Sea lions on Fisherman’s Wharf:

Wild parrots in the park:

In a decade and a half here in Seattle, I’d always meant to go up in the Space Needle but never had. So Wayne, Mark and I ventured in one Sunday, not realizing it was Pride Day, which made it even more awesome.

Coming back up, we drove along the Pacific Coast Highway, stopping to see sea lion caves and pet baby tigers, as well as staying one night with the mayor of Toledo, Oregon, and his charming wife.

July and Farewells

Then back to the grind of re-modeling as we worked away towards our July 15 deadline. We did take a break every once in a while, including a trip into Seattle on Pride Day for brunch at the Space Needle, and well as celebrating “Rappacinni’s Crow” appearing in Beneath Ceaseless Skies and “A Brooch of Bone, A Hint of Tooth” in By Faerie Light 2, edited by Scott Gable. I read at the book launch at the Wayward Coffeehouse, one of my favorite Seattle venues. Amidst all this, I set up a Patreon campaign in order to kick myself in the butt to keep writing while on the road. I’m still deciding whether to continue that into 2015, but I feel as though it’s been generally successful.

We tried to get pictures with the people we visited and here early on in the trip, we were pretty good about it. Here we are with Grandma Rambo and her amazing smile.

We discarded most of our worldly possessions and packed the rest up into two storage pods, making our deadline just in time. We spent last night in Redmond at my mother’s house, and then hit the road towards Idaho. There we visited Wayne’s non-crazy aunt Nona (hi Nona), his grandmother, and his mother in Post Falls. We spent a few days with Nona and did a lot of reminiscing as well as playing with her cat, Abby(normal). We watched the moonflowers in her garden bloom one night, which was amazing and drank coffee with Carl and Lyndall.

Finally saying goodbye to Post Falls, we headed down through Spokane, and then through rolling hills, bright with green grass and wildflowers, towards the southern edge of the state and Lewiston, Idaho to visit Wayne’s cousins Pete, Petey, and Patty and their dogs and drone.

Petey’s drone accompanied us on a walk through the park:

From Lewiston we continued southward, heading towards Yellowstone, where we were amazed by both the hot springs and the vistas.

Yellowstone was full of beautiful and sometimes eerily wonderful sights.

After crossing through the park, we started towards Denver, we were graciously hosted by David Boop, his girlfriend Rose, and his son Dylan. For David’s birthday, we made a mass trip out for pizza with a terrific group of people. We also got a chance to visit Buffalo Bill’s grave there, atop Lookout Mountain, where he asked to be buried.

After Denver, we hit Western Kansas, stopping at various roadside attractions along the way, like Prairie Dog Town, which also yielded the first story of the trip, titled after the attraction. It went out to Patreon followers and will be self-published next year. There we visited my cousins Jeff and Faith in Garden City, where we stayed in the same hotel that Truman Capote stayed in while researching In Cold Blood.

Swinging through Mullinville, we stopped to admire some of the sculptures of family friend and M.T. Liggett, which line a substantial stretch of highway near Mullinville. If you go through Kansas, this is well worth a stop. Plan on spending some time walking to look at the sculptures, many of which are political/satirical in nature.

A couple of M.T.’s wind-powered sculptures:

Driving straight across the state, we got to Lawrence and visited more cousins, Alex and Matt as well as Jeremy Tolbert, who came out for an over-the-top and thoroughly delicious breakfast. From there we swung up to St. Louis and another breakfast, this time with Ann Leckie.

This is the Cahokia dragon. At the nearby fuel store, you can buy tokens to use to make it breath flame.

In leaving St. Louis, we went to the Cahokia Mounds and walked around there, then headed to Bloomington, Indiana. There, we saw some of my friends from college, including Nels Boerner, who now owns a restaurant there and poet-librarian Anne Haines.

From Bloomington, up and up till we hit South Bend, Indiana, where we spent a few days with my brother Lowell and his wife Sherri. While there, I got a chance to visit with my other brother, his partner, and nephew Mason as well as spend some time at the Griffon Bookstore, where I worked at all through high school and college.

Then to Pennsylvania, where we spent time with godkids, and a trip up to Knoebbel’s amusement park. We managed to get in some sidevisits to friends like Michael Swanwick and Marianne Wilson and my SFWA Cookbook co-editor Fran Wilde.

Finally we headed to New York for a few days, where I saw another friend from high school, Arturo Garcia-Costas, and one from my days with RSA, Yehuda Hyman. Alex Shvartsman took us out for a highly memorable meal, Bob Howe went for a drinking session full of scurrilous and highly entertaining chatter, and Kris Dikeman showed us her favorite mermaid.

August and September: Costa Rica, Baby

By now we’d hit August, and my story “Eggs of Stone” appeared in Three-lobed Burning Eye. Stories continued to flourish for the Patreon campaign as well.

Wayne relaxing at Taco Bar, a great place for a cheap, good breakfast or lunch in Jaco Beach.

Then to Costa Rica! We spent a fabulous month there in Jaco Beach (story “Jaco Tours” was inspired here), making some side trips to places like Manuel Antonio Park, Marina Ballenas Park, Neo Fauna Wildlife refuge, and a sloth sanctuary on the eastern coast of the country. Costa Rica was full of marvelous things: drinking coconut juice from a coconut that had just been sliced open while watching a bankful of iguanas doing their iguana-thang by the river; walking along the beach finding pieces of white coral; seeing humpback whales from our balcony; baby sloths, which make my inner child go EEEEEEE uncontrollably every time I think of them; eating half-price sushi at Tsunami Sushi while watching the nightlife start to come alive in the street down below; a beach almond tree full of scarlet macaws chattering away while shelling nuts and throwing them down below; eating grilled mahi tacos with a sprinkling of mint at the Taco Bar in sizzling heat while watching an endless parade of surfers headed towards the beach; lizards and crabs and hermit crabs so tiny you could barely see them scuttling along; climbing over lava ridges amid the spray of crashing waves and seeing the distant blue flutter of a butterfly in the jungle.

While we were there, Daily Science Fiction published “The Moon and the Mouse,” which I’d written earlier in the year during a flash fiction class.

Some moments from Costa Rica:

Rainy season. We ducked into a bar into order to wait for this to die down.

Baby sloths.

More baby sloths.

The Hemingway house was hosting 56 cats at the time we visited. This one was thoroughly asleep in the sun.

Sadly, time to come back to the United States mid September, but we were lucky enough to get an opportunity at a week-long Caribbean cruise on the Carnival Glory. We hopped on that in Miami and visited Grand Turk, Puerto Rico, and St. Thomas, including one halcyon afternoon where we swam in turquoise water with stingrays flitting over the white white sand all around us.

Wayne liked Puerto Rico the best, but for me the stingrays were the most amazing moment. They let us hold them, and the underside of a stingray is softer than soft. A swarm of them appeared, knowing that they’d be fed, and each of us took a turn giving them fish and feeling them pull it into their mouth. Some people went and snorkeled, but Wayne and I stayed where we were, floating chest-high in the warm salt water, watching the rays swim back and forth.

Here’s a moment from the cruise, from Wayne’s participation in a game show one night. For the rest of the trip, people kept recognizing him as “the pretzel guy”.

Back in Miami, we rented a convertible and spent a day driving down Highway 1, swooping along through blue sky, blue water as we went over the multitude of long bridges between the keys, all the way down to Ernest Hemingway’s house on the farthest key, Key West. I soaked in the Hemingway aura a bit and we petted some of the 56 polydactyl cats living there. Coming back up, we stopped for conch fritters and key lime pie at a roadside stand full of gaudy painted wooden furniture and shark sculptures. The bit of fossilized coral I picked up there is sitting on a shelf near me as I write this, summoning up memories of hot sunlight and vast stretches of road over vaster expanses of water, as beautiful as could be. We returned to Miami under a flamboyant sunset and chilled for a couple of days downtown in more sunny, beautiful weather before heading back into the skies.

While waiting for a friend to arrive, I amused myself taking pictures of the passing shadows in Madison Square Park.

It was a short trip to NYC, where we stayed with Kris Dikeman (and her cat Lucy), and went to the annual SFWA reception there. For me a highlight was the serving of two recipes from the upcoming SFWA Cookbook: momos from Jay Lake and the Honey Badger cocktail created by Andrew Penn Romine.

I spent a day that was both productive and enjoyable conferring with fellow board members and SFWA staff and we got a chance to spend time with friends, including a lovely fall afternoon in Madison Square Park with a friend from Armageddon, Davey, and a terrific reading by Laird Barron, Laura Anne Gilman and Nick Parisi down in Brooklyn, followed by a wide spread of Polish food nearby with Kris. A final dinner with Arturo let me taste Indian food again after several months, a welcome return to some familiar flavors.

October and November: Always Coming Home

When the first person I saw at MileHiCon was Connie Willis, I knew it’d be a delightful convention.

More godkid time in Pennsylvania included a visit to a corn maze, and then to Durham, North Carolina with our Armageddon friend Mark, and time with some of his family. My Clarion West classmate Ada Milenkovic Brown and her husband Frank both came out for breakfast.

From there, we finally started home, cutting diagonally across the country in a leg that included fried okra in Mississippi, Cathedral Caverns in Alabama, and a glimpse of Graceland before we were back in Denver, where I swung through MileHighCon in order to see some favorite peeps, including Daniel Abraham, James Sutter, Michael Swanwick, and Connie Willis. From there we went to Aspen for a couple of days before launching anew in a leg that included the Craters of the Moon in Idaho, more Nona-time, and then, finally, Redmond, anew. We’d hoped that our condo would have sold in our absence, but it hadn’t. but we began moving back in there.

While at World Fantasy Convention, Wayne compared beards with Scott Andrews of Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

That process was briefly interrupted by a trip to Washington D.C. in early November for World Fantasy Convention, where I had another terrific SFWA board member as well as a chance to talk to a BAJILLION people, too many to safely try to list without offending someone, so I will only call out highlights: chats with Scott Andrews, Melanie Meadors, Kat Richardson; a terrific Ethiopian time that included Steven Gould and new friend Jeremy Zerfoss; a great panel on R.A. Lafferty led by Andy Duncan, where two of Lafferty’s neighbors showing up to share stories of him; pizza with SFWA forum moderators Jim Johnson and Django Wexler; lunch with Andy and Sydney Duncan; a terrific SFWA meeting; lots of time with always-entertaining Bud Sparhawk; and breakfast with Rebekah Brockway.

November stories came out as well: “Hoofsore and Weary” in Shattered Shields from Baen Books, edited by Jennifer Brozek and Bryan Thomas Schmidt and “Elections at Villa Encantada” in Unidentified Flying Objects 3.

But most importantly, I got to see Women Destroy Fantasy finally appear, with copies of it waiting for me among the slew of mail. The editorial I wrote for Women Destroy Fantasy took me a long time and was, I think, among the most significant nonfiction pieces I wrote during 2014.

What four months of mail looks like when you retrieve it. Plenty of pleasing contributor’s copies, including Women Destroy Fantasy1

From DC, back to Seattle, where I heard friends Django Wexler and Curtis Chen read as part of the SFWA reading series the following day. Towards the end of the month, I cooked us all Thanksgiving dinner, and then came down with a terrible cold. Wayne bravely ventured forth to reclaim Raven and by the beginning of the second week, we were all re-united, Wayne, Raven, Taco, and I, at which point I went off for a week-long writing retreat in Port Townsend, in which I finished up “Red in Tooth and Cog,” “Carpe Glitter,” and several flash pieces. I had two last publications, referring back to that Lincoln City workshop early in the year: “Circus in the Bloodwarm Rain” in Fantasy Scroll Magazine and “Raiders” produced at the beginning of the year, appeared in Fiction River: Past Crimes, edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith. I got a chance to dip back into teaching with a plotting workshop and a flash fiction workshop; in the latter I wrote a piece, “You Have Always Lived in the Castle,” and sent it off that night for a 48-hour sale to Daily Science Fiction.

December: Winding Things Down

We’ve finished the year with the usual Chinese dinner on Christmas eve, Christmas morning cinnamon rolls and unwrapping gifts, and then a feast of ham, turkey, and sundry wonders that left Mom, Wayne, visitors Audrey, Beth, and Emma, all groaning and ready to go supine. Wayne gave me programmable Christmas lights for Christmas. They’re set up in the study now, flashing blue green purple teal lavender. I’ve just finished up the edits for what will be the first publication of 2015: a nonfiction essay for Clarkesworld Magazine, entitled #PurpleSF, kicking off what I suspect will be a major part of 2015, the ongoing discussion about feminism/diversity in F&SF.

Rainy Redmond weather may make for moss and gloom, but also plenty of rainbows. Here’s to many more.

So here’s to 2014, which had its up and downs, and to 2015, which will no doubt have more of the same.

Some friends were lost this year: Eugie Foster, Graham Joyce and Jay Lake, among others. I wrote a lot of stories and sold/published many of them. I started publishing individual stories on Amazon and Smashwords and look forward to finishing up getting that backlog online as well as putting out a flash compendium and an updated version of Creating an Online Presence. I’m working on a post-apocalyptic YA based on a story I wrote in January, “Circus in the Bloodwarm Rain,” which I am enjoying. I have plenty on my plate with SFWA, and look forward to continuing to work with it in the coming year as well. I’m anticipating some conventions highly: I’m doing ICFA in March, Norwescon in April, the Nebulas in June, GenCon and Worldcon in August — all of those for sure, with some other possibilities lurking in the wings.

Here’s to new and old friends, new experiences and sights, and above all, new words, new stories, new conversations. Here’s to coming kindnesses and to the moments of delight the Universe will present to each of us, individually, at times throughout the year, each moment crafted for you and you alone by this marvelous world you inhabit: the sky from a particular angle in which the clouds are swallowing the moon, a double rainbow, an idea you’ve never thought of before, the taste of oranges or chocolate, your child’s kiss on your cheek, your friend’s embrace, your lover’s hand on your skin. Here’s to candid conversations and honest communication, to learning together and alone, to being vulnerable to change, to being willing to create, to love, to live.

My good wishes for you all.

Cat

(For those of you who follow me on Facebook, you can find many more of the trip pictures there. You can also find Keffy Kehrli’s photos of Taco while he hosted her here.)