Blog

Well, this is nice. 

Apex Book Company has posted a very positive review of Bitter Seeds on their blog.  Jenn Brozek’s review also includes an interview with me about the Milkweed books, demonology, and other sundry topics.  I met Jenn at LAX in August, while we were both waiting for our flight to Melbourne en route to Worldcon.  I was flattered by her interest in my book, and I’m deeply pleased that she enjoyed it.

Meanwhile, over at Locus Online, short fiction reviewer Lois Tilton lists two of my stories in her roundup of the year in short fiction!  (Tilton’s original review of “What Doctor Gottlieb Saw” can be found here, and her review of “Still Life (A Sexagesimal Fairy Tale)” can be found here.)

And the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel lists Bitter Seeds among 2010’s “Transporting Book Successes”: personal recommendations from their reviewer, Jim Higgins.  Wow!  That’s my book listed alongside fiction from Connie Willis, Kim Stanley Robinson, Alan Furst (!), and Emma Donoghue (a Man Booker Prize finalist, no less).  What a compliment.

I’m very happy to see these things here at the closing of the year.

I’m still wrestling with epic internet problems, so I’ll keep this short.

My friend and mentor Walter Jon Williams brought it to my attention that the venerable and life-changing Clarion Writer’s Workshop is now accepting applications for the 2011 class.  Ditto Clarion West.

The Clarions are a marvelous, once-in-a-lifetime experience for people who are really serious about writing.  I wasn’t kidding when I used the term “life-changing”.  Clarion isn’t for everybody, and it isn’t 6 weeks of 24/7 fun.  It’s hard work, and can get pretty draining at times.  Some people discover that they don’t enjoy writing that much; others learn the thing that will push their work over the hump and launch their career.  Everybody learns something and comes away changed.

I can’t recommend it highly enough.

For me, plotting is the slowest and most difficult part of the writing process.  How many times have I wished there were an easier way to develop the plot for a novel, story, or “scenario”?  Too many to count!

If only, goes my constant lament, somebody would build a mechanical tool for devising plots automatically.  Preferably out of wood and Bakelite, and possibly powered by coal.

Little did I know my prayers were answered over 40 years before I was born.  Feast your eyes on this wonderment of modern scenario development: the Plot Robot.

I’ve been sitting on this news for a few weeks, because I wanted to be a good boy and not let the cat out of the bag.  (Also, I’m hella superstitious about these things.  Announcing something in public before the editor officially finalizes things seems like a good setup for public humiliation.  And I know about public humiliation, okay?)

Anyway…  I’m super, super thrilled to announce that editor extraordinaire (and newly-minted World Fantasy winner!) Jonathan Strahan has chosen to include my story from the October issue of Apex Magazine, Still Life (A Sexagesimal Fairy Tale), for inclusion in his upcoming anthology, The Best SF and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 5.

Hooray!

I don’t own a dog, but this had me in tears.  I need to start reading Hyperbole and a Half much more frequently.

That is all for now, while I continue to wrestle with epic internet problems.