DECEMBER DEATH POST (death is certain)

I’m trying to write this damn story for an opportunity I don’t want to miss and it’s killing me. I think I’ve cut at least ten words for every word I’ve kept. I’m literally dying here. I’ve died. I’m dead.

While I rot into my keyboard you might be interested in the following:

I’ve got two stories up that I haven’t posted about, ‘Never Dreaming (in Four Burns)’ on Clarkesworld and ‘Testimony Before an Emergency Session of the Naval Cephalopod Command’ in Drabblecast. A rocket scientist grapples with her faulty plasma thruster and her own imminent insomniac death. A United States Navy giant squid goes rogue and starts hunting down Soviet nuclear submarines. I’m very happy with the response to both. Audio versions accompany both links.

My full-blown novel take on The Traitor Baru Cormorant is done and making the rounds. Suggestions for agents looking for new fantasy novels are welcome.

Benjanun Sriduangkaew, who I’ve recommended in the past, has a great post up on her own blog about writing gender. All speculative fiction must – yes, an unqualified declaration! – engage with gender norms on some level, and all spec-fic readers should be armed with the tools to think about gender norms, so I can’t see any reason for you not to read this post. We can fight about this if you want.

Bee’s story ‘Silent Bridge, Pale Cascade’ opens with one of my personal favorite sentences. I’m planning to do a close reading of the piece to examine some of her choices regarding gender performance and scare quotes ‘worldbuilding’ unscare quotes in the near future, once I finish this impossible story and return from death as some kind of blog revenant.

The Inscription IndieGoGo campaign deserves your attention. Under the capable leadership of Rachel Halpern (one of those Rachels I learned a lot from), Inscription wants to provide a market for diverse YA fiction – a place where young people can find allied narratives. When I was in the social sciences I found a small iceberg of evidence about the real, empirical, statistically robust effects of representation in fiction on people who aren’t part of the mainstream narrative. Science says this matters.

Upcoming Tom Cruise mil-SF vehicle ‘The Edge of Tomorrow’ is based on a Japanese novel, Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s All You Need is Kill. Nick Mamatas’ Haikasoru Press, which translates Japanese SF and brings it to American markets, sells the novel – and while I don’t know to what extent Haikasoru was involved in bringing the story to Hollywood’s attention, I think that bringing world SF to the American market is a crucial project, worth support. When I was a kid I was completely ruthless about Christmas: I had indexed, cross-referenced lists, sorted by priority, every item linked to a supply chain and a set of acceptable fallbacks. Now that I’m an adult* I can just buy my own copies of All You Need is Kill, though, so don’t get any ideas, Mom.

Look for more of my fiction coming up in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

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