Holy crap.

March 19, 2013 at 6:09 am (Wild Hunt)

Holy crap.  The FBI says they’ve identified the Gardner Museum thieves.

Those of you who’ve read Wild Hunt will know why this is such a big deal for me.  I suppose it’s a risk when working with real-life situations and mysteries that one of them might be solved after the book comes out.  Hard to regret it, though.  (And hey, it’s not like I haven’t run into this before — I remember having to revise an early draft of Spiral Hunt after the Sox won the World Series, which till then had been a major plot point.)

I am so going to be following this story.  And I really hope they get the paintings back, and that they’re in good condition.  Those frames have been empty far too long.

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Still here

April 28, 2010 at 7:47 am (Appearances, The Internet Is Full of Things, Wild Hunt)

I’m still here, just terrible at blogging.  I’m actually trying to sort out why I have such a weird response to putting my thoughts out on the Net, and with any luck I’ll be able to turn that into another post.  Maybe later this week.

In the meantime, there’s a very nice review of Wild Hunt on Tor.com.  I had one of those “Oh God!  The Internet found me!” moments discovering it — I clicked over to Tor.com just out of curiosity, saw the cover of Wild Hunt, made a sound audible only to bats, and shut down my browser before I could read any of it.  Normally I don’t have that panicked a reaction to reviews, I swear, but this one caught me by surprise.  But personal neurotic author reaction aside, it’s a great review, and I’m glad they saw fit to post it.

On an entirely unrelated note, I’ll be at the Danvers Literary Festival on Saturday, May 8, as part of a panel on fantasy.  I’m not yet sure what we’ll be discussing within that topic — for all I know, the moderator will bring a stopwatch, point at each of us, and yell “FIVE PROFOUND THOUGHTS ON FANTASY!  GO!”  That might be entertaining in itself, even though my five profound thoughts would probably consist mostly of “wha?” and “do what now?”

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News, reviews, and edits.

April 12, 2010 at 9:19 pm (Spiral Hunt, Stories in print, Stories online, Wild Hunt)

That totally failed to rhyme.

I’ve been a total slacker when it comes to blogging lately, so all of these are a little out of date.  Which in Internet terms probably means they’re approaching antediluvian, but what the hey.

First off, a couple of reviews are up: one of Spiral Hunt in Realms of Fantasy, and one of Wild Hunt in Fresh Fiction.  *happy review dance*

Second (and with no excuse, since I’ve had my shiny contributor’s copies for a little while now), Realms 2: The Second Year of Clarkesworld Magazine is out, and while my story “When the Gentlemen Go By” is reprinted in it, that’s not why you should get it.  You should get it for all the other fantastic stories — “Blue Ink” by Yoon Ha Lee, “The River Boy” by Tim Pratt, and “A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antarctica” by Catherynne M. Valente are just a few of the stories that have been haunting me since I read them.  Clarkesworld has also been nominated for a Hugo in the Best Semiprozine category, as have two stories from last year (including one of Nora’s!  Woooo!).  If you’re not reading it, you should be.

Another online magazine that I’m far too fond of, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, has bought another of my steampunk short stories.  “The Guilt Child” will be coming out sometime this year, and while it does not immediately follow the adventures of Charles, Dieterich, and the Professora, it’s part of the same world.  (This is what happens when I start worldbuilding.  I come up with a cool idea for backstory, then turn that into a story of its own, and so on…)  I’ve been calling it the story of a girl and her stamping press, and really, there’s no better way to sum it up.

Meanwhile, the edits for the third book are in, and they look…startlingly good.  Usually I read the edits, fuss for a day and feel all cranky that My Beautiful Deathless Prose is being questioned, and then go and make all the edits anyway (which inevitably makes it much, much better).  This time, though, I can’t think of any of the edits I disagree with.  That’s encouraging, I think, and it’s certainly making this round of edits a lot easier.  I think this will be a better book than the two that preceded it, though as usual I’m too close to it to tell.

...can you use “antediluvian” when referring to the Internet?  Maybe in a scaled-down sense, such as “before a flood of new traffic”…no, I’m reaching.  Also, it’s late and I’m babbling, but that’s what a blog is for.

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Big Idea: The urban part of urban fantasy

January 26, 2010 at 10:30 pm (The Internet Is Full of Things, Wild Hunt)

John Scalzi has again been kind enough to let me post a Big Idea essay on the Whatever — this time, about Wild Hunt, cities, and the magic of new places.  Go and take a look — or, if you’re coming here from that article, hello and welcome!  I’m afraid I’m unlikely to have anything new for you for a little while, since I’m still stuck in a revision, but some of my fiction is linked in the sidebar, and some below — I’d particularly recommend “A Serpent in the Gears” just because I love it so (and because it’s not yet linked — I am terrible at updating my bibliography) or the novel writing text adventures.  Or, if you’d like to read more authors talking about their work, take a look at The Magic District.

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Interviews: Stealth nerd and difficult writing

January 21, 2010 at 10:44 pm (The Internet Is Full of Things, Wild Hunt)

Part of the problem with being stuck head down in novel revisions is that I miss the fun stuff.  (The important stuff is harder to miss, and aside from repeatedly banging my head into a wall Tuesday night, I’m dealing with it.)

But belated as this is, I need to get off my hinder and post about two very kind bloggers who asked me to be interviewed on their sites.  Two interviews are online: Sci-Fi Fan Letter (in which I talk about the difficult parts of writing and decide not to live in my made-up world) and Over the Edge (in which I confess my identity as a stealth nerd (okay, those of you who know me are now wondering how “stealth” plays any part in my nerdiness) and give some examples from the internal soundtrack for Wild Hunt).

I’m really grateful to both sites for inviting me to their interviews, and I’m really sorry it’s taken me so long to get around to posting about it.  Funny, how the Internet can both keep me from the novel work and the novel can keep me from the Internet…or maybe it’s just about procrastinating no matter what.

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