Tag: Apex

Journal

Lull

Tonight’s a moment of respite, I think, amid the pell-mell rush of the last few weeks. And for all that it’s been a good kind of rush, full of new jobs and new words and ticking things off the metaphorical to-do list, I’m kind of glad to be easing off the accelerator a little. I’m currently sitting my study with a snifter of port, my belly full of well-roasted vegetables, and my head full of stories that I’d really like to write in the near future. It’s a pleasant kind of feeling, one that’s been all too scarce over the last eight months, and it’s rather nice to be looking at things I could do instead of panicking about the things I haven’t yet done. # So, yes, an update. Where shall we begin. As I mentioned in my last post, I disappeared down the Rabbit Hole over the weekend just gone. It was a deranged and foolhardy exercise, conceived

News & Upcoming Events

Blatant Self Promotion: February

Okay, since February is deveoted to the Gauntlet, I’m just going to cram a whole months worth of blatant self promotion into the one post. Strap yourselves in, ’cause it looks like February is a busy one: – Descended from Darkness volume II is out, collecting another twelve months of short fiction originally published in Apex Magazine (including my story To Dream of Stars: An Astronomer’s Lament). For a limited time you can pick this up with the first Descended from Darkness collection (which included my story Clockwork, Patchwork, and Ravens) for only $25US. – My story Briar Day is live over at the Moonlight Tuber site, as part of the line-up of the “Moonlight Tuber #2 – Captain Homonculous Dines with ‘That Irascible Mizzen Mast’ – Part Three” issue of the zine that’s available for online reading or as a downloadable PDF. I think this officially marks editor Ben Payne as the man whose acquired more of my short fiction

News & Upcoming Events

L’esprit de L’escalier live at Apex Magazine

So the latest issue of Apex Magazine is now online and features my story L’esprit de L’escalier about a guy, and endless staircase, and the things you think about during the descent. There’s already some discussion about the story taking place over at I09 which has left me thinking, among other things, “wow, I really do need to read House of Leaves.” And since we’re talking Apex, I’m going to take the opportunity to re-post something that the Apex Chief Alien Jason Sizemore put up on their blog recently. It interests me for two reasons: firstly, because Apex has been pretty good to me as a writer. This is the third of my stories they’ve published, and the first two have managed to sneak onto the occasional recommended reading list and awards shortlist, but I was a fan of the magazine long before I was published there. I subscribed, back when they were a semi-pro hardcopy magazine, and I’ve signed up to

Journal

7 Days ’til Worldcon

Man, I’ve been all over the place for the last week. Good stuff happened and bad stuff happened and my emotional state bounced around like one of those 20-cent rubber crazy balls you used buy from the machines out the front of the grocery store, but there was rarely a moment where stuff happened all on its own and demanded no real engagement on my part. Fortunately the last three or four days have trended towards the good rather than the bad, but I suspect any seven day period that starts with your parents ringing from the other side of the world and saying “we were almost killed in a car crash” is going to struggle to come out ahead on points. Still, among the cool stuff: – Doing edits and contracts for my short story, L’esprit de L’escalier, which will be coming up at Apex Magazine in the future. Astute readers may put two-and-two together and realise this was

Works in Progress

And lo, I could not think of a title

Mornin’ peeps. The laptop’s on battery power* at the moment so I’m racing against time to get a blog-post written before the computer yawns and says “sleepy now, going away.” Yesterday I wrote 381 words on a story, poked at another to see where it fell over**, cleared out 50-odd e-mails had been waiting for me to answer them since the beginning of January***, ate half a loaf of bread, took out the rubbish, pondered tactics for tonight’s Bloodbowl game****, and learned that one of my stories from last-year has been picked-up-for-a-reprint-that-I’m-not-sure-I-can-talk-about-yet-so-we’ll-leave-that-there. Among the various e-mails was a note from Andrew C Porter that basically went along the lines of linked you on my blog, and you might want to go check out the nice things Apex Submission’s Editor Maggie Jamison said in her interview. And so I went, and nice things were said, and Andrew’s blog proved to be fun and vaguely maddening with his insistence on posting Advanced Dungeon’s

News & Upcoming Events

What I did With My Weekend, and part of the week thereafter

1. So it’s three five-day-old news by now, but Clockwork, Patchwork and Raven won the 2009 Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Short Story and I now have a shiny glass trophy kicking around the flat. The Spokesbear demanded I photograph him with the newly acquired, but it’s remarkably hard to photograph a curved glass trophy with a bear looming over it. Instead I’ll just mention that a hardcopy of the story is available in Apex’s Descended from Darkness anthology and sales of the book go towards keeping Apex Magazine running. The weekend itself was freaking awesome and laden with opportunities to catch up with folks I don’t get to see anywhere near enough (the redoubtable Jason Fischerand Best-Fantasy-Short-Story-Co-Winner Christopher Green among them). 2. Finally sat down and indulged my inner Charlie Kaufman fan by watching Synecdoche New York. It felt rather like someone had cut the last twenty minutes off Adaptation and left us with the confused muddle of stuff,

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

This is my Pimp Hat

Three things worth noting: 1) Tio Gilberto and the Twenty-Seven Ghosts @ Podcastle The audio version of Ben Fransisco’s story Tio Gilberto and the Twenty-Seven Ghosts is live over at Podcast. Go forth and feast your ears upon it; you will not be sorry. 2) Fantasy Magazine Best Story of 2009 Poll If you haven’t had the chance yet, hie yourself over to Fantasy Magazine and place a vote in their 2009 reader poll to determine the favourite story published there last year. My votes swung towards Angela Slatter’s The Chrysanthemum Bride and Lisa Hannett’s The Good Window, but as usual you can’t go wrong with the majority of the stories that Fantasy publishes. 3) Apex Magazine’s First Annual Reader Poll Apex Magazine is also looking for your vote on the best story they published in 2009, although I’m steering clear of recommendations given that two of the stories involved were mine.

News & Upcoming Events

Announcing the first Apex Magazine Story of the Year award–They need your vote!

I’m just going to snurch this one straight from the Apex blog: To celebrate the end of our first year of becoming a professional level digital magazine, I’m pleased to announce that we will be presenting an award to the best original fiction published by Apex Magazine. The award will be voted on by the fans, meaning you! Voting starts tonight and will continue through January 30th. The story receiving the most votes will be announced on February 1st. The author of the Apex Magazine Story of the Year will receive a trophy and the unique distinction of being the best Apex had to offer during 2009. Presented below are the twenty-two original stories published during 2009: “59 Beads”(4300) by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz “Overclocking”(2600) by James L. Sutter “After the Fire”(2900) by Aliette De Bodard “Benjamin Schneider’s Little Greys”(2100) by Nir Yaniv “A Poor Man’s Roses”(2400) by Alethea Kontis “To Dream of Stars: An Astronomer’s Lament” (5500) by Peter M. Ball