Sarah Monette's Blog, page 77

stories, finished and unfinished

90,000 words! 20,000 to go! That February 1st deadline is practically looking, you know, doable.


Also, since I observe it's that time of year again, for the benefit of anyone who might be thinking about the Hugos or the Nebulas or suchlike--my publications in 2009, let me show you them:

NOVEL
Corambis, Ace Books.
SHORT STORY
"White Charles," Clarkesworld Magazine.
with Elizabeth Bear ( matociquala ), "Mongoose," Lovecraft Unbound (ed. Ellen Datlow).

... and that's it. One of the things I am most hopin...

RT Reviewers Choice nominations

Thank you, papersky , for the heads up!

The nominees have been announced for the 2009 Romantic Times Reviewers Choice Awards. Many people I know should be congratulated on their nominations ( matociquala , jimhines , coffeeem , oracne ...), but since this is my blog, I shall be utterly egotistical and only congratulate ME. Corambis is nominated in the Best Epic Fantasy category.

Since the competition in this category includes Jim Butcher and Brandon Sanderson, I don't expect to win, but the hoary ol...

quite possibly of interest to no one but me

Since it has occurred to me that somebody out there may be curious, below is an extremely incomplete list of the nonfiction books I'm currently looking for.

Caveat: Except in exceptional circumstances--such as a gift card--I don't buy books online. When I tell you that the complete (though of course infinitely expanding) list of books I'm looking for--fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama--is 17 pages, 10-point and single spaced, you will perhaps understand that this is an act of mercy upon m...

!UBC: Hilter's War

Hoyt, Edwin, P. Hitler's War. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1988.

This is a !UBC because I stopped reading on p. 70, for reasons I will explain below.


There are two books with the title Hitler's War. One, by David Irving, is a revisionist history arguing that Hitler was not responsible for the genocide of the Jews. This one promised, from the dust-jacket copy, to be an analysis of Hitler's foreign policy and military decisions. I'd quite like to read that book; pity this wasn't it.

From th...

UBC: Ivan's War

Merridale, Catherine. Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945. New York: Picador-Henry Holt and Co., 2007.


This book makes a good pairing with Hitler's Army , which is about German soldiers on the Eastern Front, and in another direction, a good pairing with The Gulag Archipelago , since it is from that same front that Solzhenitsyn began his journey into the strange and desolate archipelago he writes of, and Merridale provides context for the world which he left.

But this is also an ...

March 3rd event

Information about the event in DeKalb on March 3 is here (scroll down). Dessert and discussion of The Bone Key! What could be better?

Also, if anyone is wondering, yes, I will be happy to sign books. Yes, books other than TBK, even. Although it will probably be best if such things wait until after the discussion.

status report

85,000 words. 25,000 to go.

Outdoors, it is all snowpocalypse now.

My Storytellers Unplugged column for January, "Everyperson Blues," is here.

The dance of happy book acquisition, I does it.

This is a PSA and also a gloat: Stephen Booth's King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy is now available from the most excellent people at Cybereditions. How do I know this? Because I HAVE A COPY. I am not clutching it in my grubby little paws even as we speak because I have to type, but otherwise I totally would be.

Despite its unwieldy title, KLMIT is my favorite book of literary criticism EVER. It radically changed the way I thought about plays and narrative, and I am incapable of tal...

Where I'll be in 2010

These are the events it looks like I'll be attending in 2010:

a library event in DeKalb, IL, on March 3 ( rarelylynne , is there a more descriptive way to put it?)
The Second Annual Tucson Festival of Books, March 13-14
Odyssey Con X, April 16-18
Penguicon (unnumbered), April 30-May 2
WisCon 34, May 27-31
Fourth Street Fantasy Convention (also unnumbered), June 25-27
World Fantasy Convention 36, October 28-31

And I'll insert my usual disclaimer: I am very shy and very near-sighted, but that doesn't mea...

quarantining the girl cooties

yuki_onna has a good, chewy post about Realms of Fantasy's plan for an All Women-Authors Issue. What she says about it, of course, goes for any minority group: women*, African-Americans, GLBT writers, writers with disabilities, etc. etc. etc. I think there's a point in the process of opening a genre where the Very Special Episode Issue is a good thing, when what you're saying with it is, HEY! There are enough [women/African-Americans/GLBT writers/writers with disabilities/etc.:] doing excellen...