I was on the amazingly fun (and Hugo-nominated) podcast Tea and Jeopardy by Emma Newman!
And the Manly Wade Wellman Award nominations honoring NC sff writers were just announced and The Shambling Guide to New York City was nominated! The award will be given out in the middle of July at ConGregate in Winston Salem!
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It’s time to talk entitlement – readers who expect too much, AND authors/publishers who expect too much. Then we talk to Pip Ballantine.
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Pen names, characters, and editing! I also mention the follow up post of the Max Gladstone interview where Max was talking about ideas.
Imposter syndrome, Dork Tower, and you.
If you haven’t heard, Amazon and my publisher Hachette are bickering, and Amazon is punishing the authors by messing with book delivery times. So I will say that Barnes and Noble is having a buy 2, get 1 free sale, and my books are included in there.
And if you want the books signed, you can always order from Chapel Hill Comics.
I was asked to be part of podcaster and author John Mierau’s Walk the Fire 2: May the Ferrymen Take You anthology, as one of the many authors writing in his world. I had a lot of fun with this one, and hope you check it out. Learn more about it on John’s site.
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I am not terribly productive because I’m in a rut.
And I didn’t say this in the podcast, but RIP Jay Lake. 🙁
Lightspeed magazine decided last year to do a magazine of SF created entirely by women. Some bigots in the industry believe that we are ruining the genre with our icky fallopian tubes and our breast milk spraying everywhere and should just sit down and shut up. So, we have decided to let their prophecy come to pass. We have decided to completely destroy science fiction.
Guest edited by the amazing Christie Yant, this month’s magazine has many more stories as usual (from Seanan McGuire! Charlie Jane Anders! James Tiptree, Jr! NK Jemisin! Amal El-Mohtar! Nonfic from Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam! And more more more!) , over 180,000 words of content, and twice as many stories podcasted as usual, and that’s where I have the honor of coming in. I am the guest host of this month’s podcasts, taking over from Jim Freund. So if you miss my intros from Escape Pod and Pseudopod, this is where you can find me for a month at least, introducing some amazing stories.
You can find out how to get the magazine – and its unprecedented print copy! – at Lightspeed’s website where you can subscribe, get the podcast, or leave a comment about how icky girls are getting their cooties all over your space ships. But we’re coming.
(And I kept waiting for someone to “well, actually” me and say the phrase is “resistance is futile” and then I would point out that I was quoting Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – I love the Vogon guard, who knows exactly what he wants out of life – and not Star Trek, but then no one, did, and my defense went pffffftttt. But I do have this neat image from the classic BBC series.
Jay Lake passed this morning. When I think about him, I remember him as strong, kind, and welcoming. And those seem like mild words, but Jay was the epitome of all three, unlike anyone I’ve ever met.
Jay wouldn’t say he was strong against his cancer, he was the first to say he was angry and frightened. But he was strong in the way that he didn’t hide it, he didn’t deny it, and he was open about what it did to him. He blogged about his cancer, he revealed much of the mystery behind it, and the treatments, and he was totally honest. He never put hope into miracles; he had hope, of course, but when the science told him he was terminal, he accepted it and put his affairs in order making sure his daughter was taken care of. (I had a relative who denied cancer for months and the family scrambled to get things done when the end was obvious. This was difficult.) He even threw his own wake to say good bye to friends last summer.
He also fiercely protected his daughter’s privacy, wanting her life online to be hers, not an extension of him. He blogged about his politics and his atheism with equal strength, never getting shouty and personal, but always presenting his arguments clearly.
Jay was always kind to me, he gave me an interview at my first WorldCon, and always said hello. He always welcomed people into SFF; I heard twice today on Twitter that new(ish) writers said they had met Jay, and he had remembered them the next time they met, even though they didn’t expect him to. Writers meet a lot of people at cons, after all, but Jay would likely remember you.
The day after the Hugo awards last year, he made a point to talk to me and tell me that he was in charge of caring for/keeping track of the Campbell tiara. He told me that, in addition to me winning the award, he was passing that responsibility to me, since he thought I was passionate enough about the award to make sure the tiara tradition continued. I nearly cried right there.
One of the biggest thrills of my life was receiving the Campbell Award from Jay and his daughter, and then getting a picture with them afterward. Jay is well loved and will be missed.
I am thrilled to announce I made a story sale to John Joseph Adams for the extremely amusing anthology, Help Fund My Robot Army! This book features stories written entirely in the form of Kickstarter (or other crowdfunding) campaigns, inspired by the Keffy R.M. Kehrli story of the same title (and format.) My story is “SAVE THE PHOTOPHOBIC HEMOGLOBIVORES WITH THE SANGUINE RESERVE!” *
* Thanks to Fran Wilde for helping me make the title sexier.