Brenda Cooper's Blog, page 16

This is the week to prepare to start Mayan December

Well, it’s December 2012.  If you order Mayan December this week, you should have it in time to start reading along with the days as they count down to the end of the Mayan calendar.  A few of my friends are planning to do this, and I’m hoping it might be fun.

It’s NOT like the movie. The entire world does not blow up in any spectacular way.  :)

But if you like a little Mayan magic, a little mystery, and a little time travel, consider going for it.

Either way, have a fun December 2012.

NOTE for those who have loved The Creative Fire. They are not very similar.  I love both books.   The Creative Fire is all science fiction, and Mayan December is all about the beautiful Yucatan Peninsula and about possibilities and a strange friendship.

The lovely art is by Scott Grimando.

Free flash story at Black Friday Blog Tour

One of the best things about the flash and energy of book promotion is that you meet new folk on the blog tour, and you get to do strange new things.   Kind of like mini-anthology requests, only you’re returning a thousand word blog post instead a three thousand word story.

At any rate, if any of you are curious about how Ruby from THE CREATIVE FIRE first sang in public, you can find out over at Literary Escapism.   It also looks like you can win a book if you comment, and all you have to answer the question What type of gift would you make (and give) for the Festival of Leaving?

 

A Discussion of Positive Futures on SF Signal

There’s a fabulous mind meld over on SF Signal today.  Kristin Centorcelli gathered up a bunch of us and asked us about positive futures.  So David Brin, Charles Stross, Julie Czernada, Jestse deVries, Guy Haley, Paul Weimer, Neal Asher, Stephen Euinn Cobb,  Sharon Lynn Fisher, me, and Andrea of Little Red Reviewer all pitched our thoughts into the ring.  That’s a pretty powerful and diverse set of people.  Drop on by.  I think it’s convinced me to spend much of my Thanksgiving thankfulness on the idea that the world might just become highly better.  Not for free, but with effort.  And once again, SF Signal demonstrates why they won the 2012 Hugo. 

Reading Recommendation: Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille, by James Van Pelt

I’m extremely pleased that this collection is now available.  Jim is one of my favorite short-work authors and if he’s not also one of yours, then I suspect you haven’t read him.  I actually got a chance to do the introduction for this book.  It’s the first time I’ve ever been asked to do an introduction.

It was fun.

Reading all of the stories in the book was even more fun.

You can buy this directly from Fairwood Press or I’m pretty sure it can be had from other online booksellers as well.  It’s really phenomenal.

Jim’s writing is rich, classic, and literary and yet it drips with a sense of the supernatural.  If you can get it in physical form, the cover is worth having,  The art is by Elena Vizerskaya.

Unexpectedly Awesome

Sometimes you stumble into something unexpectedly awesome.  I was invited to attend a poetry reading at The Grape Choice in Kirkland, a small and very nice wine shop down by Lake Washington. I like poetry.  I used to write and read poetry a lot, and even now I occasionally publish a poem or pop off something too cute to publish and donate it to the universe via FaceBook.  But I was primarily thinking of it as a social night out.

None of the people who invited me showed up.  So I sat with my journal and a glass of Riesling called Poet’s Leap and watched.  The poetry was all good, some even pretty phenomenal.  I used a light blue pen and doodled notes about my next book and stray thoughts about work and sipped my wine.

Then some of the people in the audience helped an old man up onto the stage.  His hands shook and sometimes his whole body shook.  He breathed through an oxygen tube.  He looked about like my little brother did a week before he died of cancer – weak and bony and bent at angles that implied the long last journey into the uncanny valley of death had started.  The old poet had to work to hold onto the books he was reading from.

Jack McCarthy.

He recited powerful words from memory – multiple page poems from memory —  keeping eye contact the whole way, catching the audience on his words and jerking tears from us.  Taking us with him.

I hope that when I am failing I will still be on a stage with words.  Sometimes the most powerful gifts from one to another are between strangers and unexpected.

Reading Recommendation: Glamour in Glass by Mary Robinette Kowal

I’ve had Glamour in Glass on my shelf for a while, looking longingly at it while I read other things I needed to read or had promised to read.  I was saving it for a time when I needed something light and thoroughly enjoyable.  As I expected, Mary didn’t disappoint.  I fell in love with this world when I read the first of these, Shades of Milk and Honey. Mary artfully crafts a world that appears serene on the surface and yet with enough tension and pleasure for me as a reader that I just start these books, turn the pages, and finish.

Because they are so well-researched and because the prose and dialogue  actually feels authentic to the time, reading Glamour in Glass really felt like being transported back to the past.  I also truly love the magic system, which like the book, has a subtle power.

Visit Mary’s Glamour in Glass page for a sample, an extra short-story, and more.

 

Strong Women and Fabulous Books: Interview and Giveaway

Drop by My Bookish Ways today and grab a chance at a free copy of The Creative Fire. I have a long interview posted there.  I liked the questions.  Here are a few of them:

Do you think recent sci-fi has been better about featuring strong women? What is your take on that?

and

If someone were just now dipping their toes in the sci-fi genre, where would you suggest they start? (which let mw list some books – but I could have listed 100!)

Of interest – My Bookish Ways has a logo that goes with an activity that was happening at our house this morning as the household teenager was doing homework (listening to a rather famous poem).

Reading Recommendation: 6 Degrees, by Mark Lynas

Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, presents climate change research in an easily digestible format.  It explores the chilling effects of a heating planet degree by degree, including both the results of models that peer into possible futures and the findings of paleoclimatology. The book endeavors to tell the story of a frightening future that is becoming ever more plausible.

As Sandy bore down on New York City, I was part way through the section of the book that describes things that might happen at three degrees of warming.  As we watched the storm come in, I was reading, “Instead of a shortage of water, the great threat to the Big Apple is too much of it.”  After describing how much of New York is threatened by sea level rise, Lynas goes on to say, “The configuration of the East Coat shoreline also makes New York particularly vulnerable to storm surges, because the right-angle bend between New Jersey and Long Island funnels water right into the city’s harbor….”  Later in that section, he looks even more prescient as he notes that larger hurricanes and larger nor’easters may make perfect storms more likely and more frequent.

Just a day or so after the remnants of Sandy wetted Toronto, I flew in there for the World Fantasy Convention.  Many of the attendees were from the New York publishing business, and I heard stories of flood fears and felled trees.  People were calling home to check with loved ones to see if the power was back on yet.  At different points in the convention, three people who know of my futurist bent and my interest in climate change came up and told me they are planning to move to find a place that will be safer (and not all of them were from New York).

Even though it was published in 2008, and thus is missing the most recent data, the information in this book is important.  Many people should be reading it.  Six Degrees left me with near certainty that we will experience significant change because of what we have done in the past regardless of what we do today.  While we may not yet have passed the worst tipping points outlined in current research, we are running up on them fast.

This is a plausible future.  Perhaps even a likely one. We should be reading this the way that we read 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, as warning, and we remember that this is science and not science fiction.

Note – this is NOT a book about solutions.  It is simply a well-told story based on science.  If you want to pair it with a book that includes solutions, consider Peter Diamandis’s Abundance or Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded.

Coming up: The best time to read Mayan December

I’m right in the middle of the release activity for The Creative Fire, but I also noticed that it’s getting to be late in 2012.  This is a great time to read Mayan December, which tracks the world from December 10th through December 21st 2012.  It’s available from Prime Books (Sean Wallace) and from the usual other online venues.  Mayan December is set in one of the most beautiful places in the world (the Yucatan Peninsula), and it was one of the most fun books I’ve ever written.  It’s not my usual SF…there was a dinner discussion last night where we were trying to decide if it was historical fantasy, contemporary soft adventure/romance, or time travel.  We decided on time travel.

If you’ve read it, or you do read it, let me know if you think time travel is the right answer!

Lone Boy and The Girl with Microphone (You Say You Want a Revolution)

I’m extremely pleased to see John Picacio and his new company, Lone Boy, will be putting out a calendar via a kickstarter campaign.  And in the calendar?  Girl with Microphone (You Say You Want a Revolution), which is the cover of The Creative Fire.  I believe she’ll be July.  Chances are she’s looking at you right now from my webpage header, where she’ll stay for at least a few months.

I couldn’t be more tickled about the calendar.  Both for John, who is one of our great SF artists, and because  in a way this means Ruby Martin is getting more play. When I first saw John’s art, he had so clearly captured Ruby’s essence that I wrote the second book with his rendering of Ruby up on the screen so I could look into her eyes.  It gave me a fresh new way to talk to a character.

Ruby aside, I love the other work John has chosen for the calendar.  The cover is fabulous.  Gateway is a beautiful print I want to own someday…and Away From Here was the cover of an Asimov’s I had a story in.

There’s an extra bonus.  I learned a thing or two about John while working with him on my cover.  Not only is he thoughtful and creative, but he’s a complete perfectionist.  And he’s designing the whole calendar.  I think that means it’s going to be really awesome.  Get yours by sponsoring the kickstarter.