Tim Pratt's Blog, page 9

Me at World Fantasy

World Fantasy! It's so soon! If you'll be there, and you want to see me read some things, that can be arranged:

I'll read a tiny bit at the ChiZine Publications party on Friday night, at 8 p.m. in the Lanai Suite.

I actually got a reading slot on the program (whee!). That's Saturday at 10 a.m. in Pacific 4/5. Drag your hungover bodies in there!

I'll also take part in the Fantasy Magazine group reading at 3 p.m. on Saturday, room TBD.

We're bringing our kid to the convention, so my wife and I will be splitting up childcare, which means I won't be in the bar as much as I might like — I imagine I'll be in the pool with my son more often than I'll be drinking with my colleagues. I am doing some other convention-related stuff — I'm doing an interview with an author for Locus, and have a couple of meals scheduled — and there are a couple of parties I hope to attend. I'll be around.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

Rangergirl In Your Ear

A while back my agent Ginger suggested trying to create an audiobook of my debut The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl. She wanted to try out this new program, ACX (audiobook creation exchange), where people who have books can connect with narrators and producers, with the resulting book offered for sale on Amazon, Audible.com, and iTunes. (The rightsholder can pay the narrator, or offer a split of any royalties from sales — as the latter requires no financial risk for me, I found it most appealing!) My agent did most of the heavy lifting in terms of setting up our account, and last week I tweeted about the situation and pointed people toward the audition script. We had three great auditions within a few hours, and since they were all from people I like and admire, I made my agent pick.

Rangergirl is going to be an audiobook — narrated by author and performer extraordinaire Mary Robinette Kowal. If all goes well, I expect the audiobook will be available for sale next spring. I'm crazy excited. Mary's a great reader, and I think she's a good fit for the material too. Yay!

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

Crawl Before You Can Walk

It is a cornerstone of my personality that I don't like to go places or do things. (This is not entirely true; I like going to brunch, and Hawaii, and I enjoy doing readings occasionally, but mostly, I'm hermitlike by nature and action.) So this was a very eventful weekend for me. On Saturday I did a mini-panel discussion with recent Clarion West grad Mark Pantoja at CIIS in San Francisco, talking to a class of writers and artists about Kickstarter (the professor has been talking to the class about "autonomous practices" for artists lately; basically now to succeed outside the existing publishing infrastructure, engage with readers directly, etc.). It was a good class with smart questions, and we had an hour and a half, so it was even possible to move beyond the very broadest strokes and get into nuances a bit.

After the class I came back home to give my wife a little childcare break. (She heroically took the kid to a farm/pumpkin patch for many hours in the morning.) The boy and I spent most of our time exploring the back yard, playing "archaeology" (burying toy dinosaurs and digging them back up again), looking at spiders, and so on. Four years old is a great age. (Well, he's actually still three, but only for three more weeks.)

In the evening I hopped on a train back to San Francisco to see a bit of LitCrawl. I hit Borderlands and saw Richard Kadrey, Thomas Roche, and Naamen Tilahun read (alas, Ray Garton was ill, and couldn't make it). The store was packed and hot as a blast furnace, but the readings were good. Afterward I headed next door to the Borderlands Cafe, which I had never seen before (see above re: not going places or doing things) — what a fantastic space! It's gorgeous. Specialty store + awesome cafe = Tim Pratt's Ideal of Heaven.

Best of all, the spot where we read had open windows, through which a cool breeze blew. No monster-heat! My fellow readers were Steve Boyett, Seanan McGuire, and Kirsten Imani Kasai, who all did wonderful work. By the implacable rigors of alphabetical order, I read last, and rather than subject the audience to a fragment of my new novel, I read a bunch of short pieces — "Scientific Romance," "Bacchanal," "My Night with Aphrodite," "Soul Searching," "Ghost" — lots of fun, and the audience seemed to like it. I'd vaguely intended to go to the afterparty, but ended up hanging out at the cafe talking to my friends Chris and Maggie for an hour instead. It was immensely pleasant, and probably the right choice, as the alternative would have almost certainly led to me being hungover Sunday morning.

Of course, all that socialing meant falling behind on my writing for the weekend. I did manage to do what I think is the last revision pass on the Christmas Carol/Ghost Finder mash-up story co-written with Heather Shaw, and responded to editorial queries on my new story "Ill Met in Ulthar", but I had to knuckle down and buckle down on Sunday to work on Grim Tides. My mad goal is to have a complete draft by Halloween, which means producing 30 to 40K words in the next two weeks. So, uh, that's what I'll be doing.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

LitCrawling

Busy times. My wife Heather Shaw and I are collaborating on a Christmas story, tentatively titled "The Curious Case of A Christmas Carol" — it's our "Christmas Carol/Ghost Finder" mash-up. (We couldn't actually use Hodgson's Carnacki the Ghost Finder as a character, since the events of A Christmas Carol take place too early, but we have a Carnacki-esque occultist). It's pretty much done — we just need to add a couple of scenes to the middle and tweak the ending a bit. The story was commissioned as an audio original, but I'll hold off on further details until it's turned in and accepted! Heather and I haven't collaborated in a few years, so it's fun to be working together on a project again.

I'm doing the LitCrawl portion of LitQuake this Saturday night, so come to the Borderlands Cafe at 8:30 to hear me read, along with other exciting people like Seanan McGuire (in her Mira Grant guise) and Steven Boyett and Kirsten Imani Kasai. I'll probably be there early, to hear the previous batch of readers next door in the bookstore itself. (And earlier that afternoon I'll be on a panel talking about crowdfunding to a group of graduate students just a few blocks away. It will be a busy Saturday.)

I'm told Briarpatch is on front tables at at least some Barnes & Noble locations this month (whoo!), though I haven't been to the local B&N yet to see for myself. Very nice to see the publisher getting behind the title with that kind of promotion, though. If you haven't bought it yet, please do! It has a magical car and a weird ghost and a chrome shotgun and philosophical underpinnings and a guy who is magically granted a sense of smell! Also bears.

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Order from Amazon, or from Barnes and Noble, or from Powell's

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

The Iron Wood

Life is quiet and good.

As I may have mentioned, my wife and I recently had our sixth wedding anniversary! (On October 1.) I got her this necklace, and she got me a very cool natural lodestone. (The sixth anniversary gifts are, traditionally, iron, sugar, or wood. We usually do variations on the traditional themes, because we think it's fun, and we figured "metal" and "magnet" were close enough.) The real gift is this weekend, though — we've got an overnight babysitter for the kid, so we'll go out on Friday and have a wonderful dinner and an evening all to ourselves. Should be delightful.

We've been trying to eat better lately (that is: not order so much take out), and have made some really yummy meals lately. Wilted arugula with balsamic fried eggs; marinated ahi with roasted tomatoes; green salad with peaches, grilled chicken, almonds, and blue cheese; omelets with good bacon and fresh tomatoes; and so on. Simple, quick stuff we can make after work, mostly, but when you start throwing around phrases like "balsamic reduction" it feels nice and fancy.

Otherwise, I've just been writing, and reading, and watching TV. Books lately include some of Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol comics, and The Death Ray by Daniel Clowes, Matt Ruff's next novel The Mirage, and assorted short stories. We recently watched the first season of Boardwalk Empire, and now that fall is here, the Tivo is full of new things every night. (We have a 3-year-old; we mostly can't go out at night; TV is our entertainment mode of choice, apart from books.) We're watching Ringer, mostly out of residual affection for Sarah Michelle Gellar. Persons of Interest is potentially interesting. We have that dinosaur time travel show saved but haven't watched it, and mostly we hear bad things, so I dunno if we will. And there are various returning shows we watch, too. I'm sad that House won't be set entirely in a prison this season (so many potential bad puns! The Jail House! The Big House!) but you can't have everything.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

I'm Writing a Lot About Beaches Lately

My story "The Secret Beach" is up at Fantasy Magazine. There's also an author spotlight interview with me. I was feeling especially deterministic that day when I answered their questions about destiny; don't mind me. Most of the time I bop along happily, acting as if I have free will. (As if I have any choice, he said darkly.)

So! Over the weekend I revised the existing 30,000 words of Grim Tides, making it more like 35,000 words in the process. It's much tighter now, and I'm even beginning to discern a theme; I hope you won't hold that against me. I'm probably about 40% of the way through (the Marla books tend to run in the 85-95K range). I may not get a complete draft done by the end of October (when I have to stop for a while to focus on another project), but I bet I'll come close. And, anyway, the first ten chapters or so are ready, so even if I fell into a terrible non-writing funk right now, I'd have enough for two and a half months of serializing. It's a nice feeling.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

A Moon-Colored Bridge

One of the central images in my new novel Briarpatch is a bridge silver as the moon, glimpsed at various times by various characters. So imagine my delight when I took the dustjacket off the limited edition hardcover and saw this:

A silver bridge embossed on the boards!

The endpapers, designed by Samantha Beiko, are gorgeous too:

The limited edition was only offered for pre-orders, so unless you already ordered one, you're probably out of luck. Behold what you're missing! This is the first novel I've ever had in hardcover, and it's so pretty. I'm a happy writer.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

Reasons To Be Generous

Some of you gave to my Kickstarter. Isn't kickstartering addictive? Here are some interesting projects by wonderful people you might consider supporting:

North Carolina-based SF magazine Bull Spec has just three days left in their fundraiser to pay for their third year. (I've published work there, and hope to again!) They do great work, and are worthy of your support.

Tobias S. Buckell is doing a Kickstarter for The Apocalypse Ocean, latest novel in his Xenowealth series. Toby's in kind of the same situation I was — he had a series from a major publisher, and though that publisher has declined to do further books, he still has stories to tell set in that universe, and fans who want to read them. He's got 22 days to go.

Mary Anne Mohanraj is running a Kickstarter for Demi-Monde, an erotic SF story suite, which has a couple of weeks to go. Mary Anne's a legend, writer of one of the first blogs on the 'net (back when they were called online journals or diaries), author of SF and erotica and literary fiction, and founder of more magazines and literary organizations than you'd believe. (Also a hell of a cook, but that's not really relevant here.)

Speaking of Mary Anne… she was the founder and original editor-in-chief of online magazine Strange Horizons, which published some of my earliest stories. (And has published me more recently too. I should send 'em more stories.) SH is running their fall fundraiser right now. (Not on Kickstarter, but hey: giving is giving.) They've been publishing great fiction, poetry, and reviews for over a decade — but they can't keep doing it without your help.

Take a look, and help put the "fun" in "crowdfunding!" (And also the "fund." That part's important too.)

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

Foods!

We went to a lovely birthday party on Saturday, for one of River's school friends. We like the parents a lot (they came to River's birthday last year), they have a beautiful house, they did a treasure hunt for the kids, and they fed us deep dish pizza and good ice cream. Normally children's birthday parties are fun for the kids and not that scintillating for adults, but this one was a really good time.

And Sunday, we went to the Eat Real festival! It was raining intermittently, and cool, which made me happy, because that meant: it would be less crowded. But it wasn't raining much, and it was gentle rain when it did, so it was mostly quite nice to wander around and eat the world. We tried many things: pulled pork, cupcakes, meatloaf-bacon sandwich, falafel sandwich, fish taco, and my eternal always favorite, Fat Face Popsicles, where I got my yearly fix of a Thai Iced Tea and Sweet Potato popsicle. (And shared an awesome Lime and Avocado popsicle with my wife and kid.) Not to be all internet-cliche, but: nom. (We weren't that gluttonous — we shared things, portions are small, etc. The point is to sample many things, and oh, we did.)

Our friend Gail (sister of our friend Karen!) had her Liba Falafel food truck there, and we chatted a bit with her — and she gave River a little tour of the truck's kitchen! He loves helping us cook at home (and is basically a tiny aspiring chef who's always making pretend pies and cookies from bubbles, play doh, and mud), so he was excited, and thought it was really cool.

Plus, he got to dance around to live music, and that's always good.

Then I came home and worked on Grim Tides a bit (I haven't quite hit 30,000 words yet, but I should by tomorrow night), and wrote a scene where Marla has lunch at the amazing Mama's Fish House in Maui. Gah now I want to go back there so badly. At least I can feed imaginary characters their lobster guacamole and stuffed mahi mahi.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

Antiquation

My novelette "Antiquities and Tangibles" is up at Subterranean. This is the "happiness story" I've mentioned before, and I think it's one of the better things I've written in a while. Read it, please. I hope you like it.

There's a good review of Welcome to Bordertown at Strange Horizons. Nice words:

Tim Pratt rocks the hell out of "Our Stars, Our Selves," wherein Allie Land, lesbian lead singer of the outfit "Allison Wonderland" is hilariously pursued by a poser elf-lord… Pratt's prose sizzles.

Yeah, I'll take that.

Briarpatch is available in e-book form! In assorted delicious formats!

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.