A Preternatural Experiment
I have a short story in the latest Tesseracts anthology. It’s about the Polish winged hussars, the best-dressed cavalry force of the seventeenth century.
You can get Tesseracts Twenty-Two: Alchemy and Artifacts from Amazon.ca, Amazon.com, Kobo, Barnes & Noble and Google Play.
There are a lot of books on writing fiction, so many that I wonder just who’s buying them all. They’re either disproportionate to the people who actually sit down and write, or publishers can always count on writers (published and unpublished and self-published) to buy these books to the degree that releasing one is always a safe investment. Or else I’m missing something about the marketplace completely. Continue reading “The Perilous Sea of Story”
A new author interview with yours truly went up today at Corey Redekop’s website, this time about monsters and the upcoming anthology Those Who Make Us.
Two bits of news today, my first full day of being 28 years old (ooh, just a couple of years left where I can mark “new generation writer” on my short story submissions…):
Clockwork Canada: Steampunk Fiction was released today and received a fantastic review on Tor.com from Haralambi Markov, with some attention given to my story “Strange Things Done.” Get the anthology from Exile Editions, Amazon.ca, Amazon.com, and Chapters-Indigo.
I’m also appearing in another Exile Editions anthology later this year, Those Who Make Us: Canadian Monsters, Creatures and Myths. You can view the table of contents here. “A New Bestiary” transplants medieval ideas on monstrosity into a cyberpunk-infused Montreal, and probably contains the most in-jokes out of anything I’ve ever written.
I didn’t write a story set in the Yukon until last year.
The why of it is difficult to explain. The why of it became something to ponder after reading Thomas Wharton’s old blog post “I hate it here”, a reflection on why students in his creative writing class at the University of Alberta never seemed to write about Edmonton:
But I also shouldn’t have been surprised that this student never writes about Edmonton. It seems to be the attitude of most beginning writers here that only New York, London, or Big Gritty Generic City USA are proper settings for a story (actually the problem for them isn’t so much Edmonton as an unworthy setting as it is Canada altogether, which is another problem for another post). Many of my students over the years have set stories in these famous foreign cities, often for no good reason other than they believe this is where stories take place. Stories that matter, which seems to mean stories they see on TV.
My short story “The Dragons of Kraków” was published today on Pornokitsch.
What’s the story about? Well, it’s in the title.
EDIT: The web serial site has been set to “private” until further notice.
My steampunk parody novella series Zeppelins are what Dreams are Made of wrapped up on Saturday. It’s time for Jennifer Asten to take a well-deserved rest.
You can read from the beginning here if you’re so inclined.
…at Black Gate.
My story, “Strange Things Done”, among them, in which the Klondike holds more than mere gold in its soil.
The anthology will see print in the spring of 2016.
EDIT: The web serial site has been set to “private” until further notice.
A while back I posted about my dilemma after Eggplant Literary Productions shut down: what was I going to do with my novella serial Zeppelins are What Dreams are Made of, which was set for publication no longer?
Turns out I’m going for Option 4: publishing it as a serial online.
As I initially wrote the first short story in a serial-like format, i.e., releasing it in small chunks to my friends, it seems like a natural fit.
Follow the adventures of dimension-hopping assassin Jennifer Asten as she faces perils untold by following the link below!
https://zawdamo.wordpress.com/
There are some things you should probably know about Jennifer Asten. She was born in Winnipeg and spent her early days as a bounty hunter when her degrees in Philosophy and Religious Studies didn’t pan out. If she hadn’t met Dr. Malgrave, she wouldn’t currently be entering the main lounge of a first class airship flying Paris to Peking. Next, she was commonly beautiful…the uncommonly beautiful would have drawn too much attention to themselves. Dusky hair, thin eyebrows, sharp nose, pursed small lips, general expression of content on most occasions. While some young gentlemen might find her “absolutely ravishing”, she hadn’t found one on this flight. Finally, within the book Jennifer held lay a short coded message that she probably should have burned but, in not carrying out such an act, she felt put her at a most interesting advantage.
One Last Sketch 