A Sexagesimal Fairy Tale

I’m back home now, after returning (somewhat reluctantly) from the Taos ski valley and a fantabulous week at the Rio Hondo workshop.

Walter Jon Williams has provided an excellent roundup of last week’s festivities at Rio Hondo (literary, culinary, and otherwise) here and here.

Melinda Snodgrass has done likewise, with accounts of various adventures here and here. (Reminder! Melinda’s new novel, The Edge of Reason, is now available! She kindly brought champagne up to Rio Hondo, and we toasted the official release of her book last Tuesday.)

I got to spend a week hanging out with my Critical Mass colleagues Walter, Melinda, and Daniel Abraham; catching up with Wild Cards cohort Carrie Vaughn and my OWW buddy from the old days, Sam (S. C.) Butler; and making new friends of Alan DeNiro, Kristin Livdahl, Maureen McHugh (who posted some great photos of the environs of Rio Hondo on
her blog), and Cat Valente. (Thanks for the plug, Cat!)

Did I mention the critiquing sessions, the meals, and the hiking? The waterfall? The snowstorm? The electrical outages? No? Well, we had that stuff, too.

The story I wrote for this workshop was generally (perhaps even surprisingly) well-received. I came out of the critique session feeling excited and fired-up, raring to revise the piece based on the wise feedback I received last week. It’ll have to wait at least a little while, though, because now it’s time to start typing away on the second Milkweed book, The Coldest War, which is due to my editor on or before July 1, 2009. I’m glad I had the chance to cleanse my palate with some unrelated short fiction before diving back into Milkweed– I’m feeling refreshed and rejuvenated and eager to get back to it. I miss Gretel.

In the meantime, the new story has a tentative title now. I’ve begun to think of the poor little thing as Still Life, or, A Sexagesimal Fairy Tale. And, if the concom kindly gives me a reading spot, I’ll do a reading of the new-and-improved version at Bubonicon this year.