Looking back on things I’ve read

I’d honestly forgotten about the Hugo nominations until today. My notebook is looking a little sparse; I don’t know if I started forgetting to write things down when they impressed me, or if the end of the year was just so hectic that I fell far, far behind on actually reading and watching new work. It’s probably a combination.

(That said, with having read 105 books (or at least “things with ISBNs”) last year, plus a great number of short fiction magazines, I am pretty sure I can come up with a few nominations.)

Working fulltime (or fulltime-plus) is not making it easy, plus there’s been a little pet trouble so far this year, but overall I’m actually relatively happy with the amount of writing and submitting I’ve gotten done so far. Hoping it continues.

Magical alphabet noir

I have a short story that’ll be appearing in the No Shit, There I Was… anthology from Alliteration Ink! The anthology theme is pretty straightforward; you could submit any specfic story, as long as it started with those five magic words. It’s currently being funded on Kickstarter; an ecopy of the anthology is $5, although nearly as many people are going for the trade[1].

Alex Acks is doing a daily discussion of the stories over on his blog while the Kickstarter is running, and today he wrote about mine; you can read what he had to say here, and I am sharing this because I am… well, gleeful and flattered and so pleased that apparently my story did what I wanted it to do!

(The discussions are compiled under the no shit anthology tag, and make for excellent reading, joint and severally.)
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[1] Omigod more of my words are going to be in print.

The Western Weird.

Yesterday, my contributors copies of The Weird Wild West came in. (They should have come sooner, but apparently there was some trouble, for which I suspect I should blame Canada Post; in any case, I would like to say that everyone at eSpec Books was absolutely lovely to deal with, and thank them all.)

I’m in a book. I’m in a book with an ISBN, and people said nice things about my story. One of the editors had a lovely reaction to it, and Amazing Stories called it a strong start to the anthology, and overall I am hugely pleased.

And the art is beautiful. I can’t take a good picture of any of the full-page pieces (and I suspect that might not be cool, in any case), but look at my extremely clumsy picture of that beautiful story header. Look. ❤

Anyway, it’s on Amazon; you can get it starting at $5 for the ebook, or in trade paperback. And there’s a lovely page at the front with all the author’s names, and space for signatures; I’m planning to take one of my copies to cons, and get as many as I can.