My Friends Rock (otherwise titled Aliette de Bodard, Benjamin Rosenbaum and Mary Robinette Kowal rock!)

So, Aliette de Bodard is on the ballot for the Campbell and Benjamin Rosenbaum and Mary Robinette Kowal made the Hugo ballot.

I will not try to share my manic happy, unadulterated, stupid grinning glee. I've known Aliette for a while over the internets and got to meet her in person at the first Villa Diodati, which we've both faithfully attended ever since. I'm a big fan of her work: I find it poignant, twisty and very very different from my own stuff, which I appreciate (I like to be surprised). Ben I met at Villa Diodati 3: he's one of the funniest people I know, and I know a lot of funny people. Also, he talks even more than I do. I respect people who can break my records. Third, I've become a fan of his wacky surrealism and plan on incorporating sentient, saintly oranges in my own work. Mary Robinette Kowal I know only over Internet but she's fun and I love her work.

Aliette has gone through the trouble of putting together a fiction sampler for the Campbell here. Even if you can't vote for the Campbell I recommend downloading it because, hey, it's free! Check out "The Last Xuyan Bride". If you've ever wondered what an Aztec+Chinese detective story might look like, well, this is it. It's also alternate history, in case you were wondering, and the plot snaps right under your eyes. Now, go read!

Evil Robot Monkeys by Mary Robinette Kowal is available as an audiostory. Six minutes of awesome. Free, of course.

Benjamin Rosenbaum is on the Hugo ballot for his novella, True Names, cowritten with Cory Doctorow. This one is also for free! It starts thus:

Beebe fried the asteroid to slag when it left, exterminating millions of
itself.

That's the kind of first line everyone wishes they'd written. And now this blog post will be cut short as my attention has wandered to Ben's novella and the sound of the printer, spitting out page after page of deliciousness which I will shortly read.

Announcement

I'm still elligible for the Campbell.

Chech out the links on the right for stories you might like.

HAPPY 500th DAILY CABAL!

The daily cabal, a blog of bite sized daily fiction which I contribute to, published its 500th story on Feb 13th.

Here's the official announcement:

Friday the 13th of February, 2009, a group of 13 science fiction and fantasy
writers called The Daily Cabal posted its 500th story online. The Daily
Cabal has posted a free, previously unpublished story of 400 words or less
every weekday without interruption since it launched on March 26th, 2007.



Most Cabal stories are either science fiction or fantasy. Recent stories
include "The Tungsten Lama’s Weekly Webinar," "Hollywood Goddess," "In the
Elevator with Albert Einstein," and "Math for Witches."



The Cabal is the brainchild of writer Rudi Dornemann and writer and editor
Jeremiah Tolbert. Its members are responsible for scores of professionally
published stories in addition to books, articles, and poetry. All 500 Cabal
stories published to date are available on the Cabal Web site at
www.dailycabal.com , and the group can also be found on Facebook.

The Daily Cabal was born almost two years ago and there have been changes to the lineup of writers since then. Some of us are on hiatus (or sort of) and there have been plenty of new additions, people bringing new ideas (and stamina) to a project that all of us believe in. We've gotten good reader response during this time and hope to keep on going until we run out of ink.

If you haven't stopped by before take the time to peek. There are 500 stories in the archives for you to browse through. That's a lot of microfiction.

Enjoy!

"Slow Stampede" mixed reviews

The March issue of Asimov's is out and "Slow Stampede" has gotten mixed reviews.

Lois Tilton gives me her first RECOMMENDED for this story.

Raj is a bandit, young, ruthless and ambitious to be the next Chief. His village makes its living by raiding the caravans of Swamp Elephants that travel through the Swamp where they live.

From the distance, they looked like Jesus-bugs skimming the mud, but Raj knew that they stood taller than the sequoias that anchored their roots hundreds of yards under the surface. The swampiphant's legs pierced the upper layers of silt, finding purchase further down as the mud served to stabilize their tremendous height.
But the hungry Merfolk also live in the Swamp, and must be reckoned with.

Colorful and imaginative worldbuilding makes this one entertaining.

RECOMMENDED

Garbled Signals has a less than enthusiastic review:

“Slow Stampede”, by Sara Genge, presents a finely-imagined world of bandits raiding caravans of immense “swamp elephants” on a low-gravity planet. The main character is well developed and very realistic, as a young bandit chafing at the authority of his tribe; but maybe he’s too self-confident and amoral to win our sympathy. He is also the only character to really be developed (perhaps reflecting his own self-centered point of view). The story ends with his marrying a character who has not been developed beyond a brief sketch. This, and other loose ends, makes the story feel incomplete. On the other hand, if this is an excerpt from a novel, there is plenty to build on here.

That one goes to show how hard it is sometimes to make unlikable protags work.

Another one:

"Slow Stampede" by Sara Genge is set in a world with swampiphants and Merpeople. Raj wants to be the Chief of his village and plots ways to do it. How things work out for him make for a nicely-told little story--

SFRevu

Overall, I'm pretty happy with what people have been saying about the story. I've finished the copyedits of "Shoes-to-Run" so that one should appear in Asimov's in a few months.

*Edited to add this revue by Colin Harvey, Suite101

Separating them is Sara Genge's 'Slow Stampede.' On an alien planet, Raj and his tribe eke out a marginal existence in a vast swamp also inhabited by cannibal merpeople, through which pass regular caravans of swamp-elephants ripe for the picking. Newcomer Genge skillfully depicts an exotic world peopled by ambitious youngsters, doddering elders and indulgent mothers. Recommended.

Benjamin Crowell's 'Whatness" also gets a recommended and Holly Phillip's 'The Long, Cold Goodbye' gets a highly recommended. Reading all these reviews of the other stories in this issue makes me look wistfully at the mail and wonder when I'll get my copies.

Overall, the issue seems to be sitting well with reviewers.

17h shift

Not so bad, as far as shifts go but I've slept only 5h in the last 40 and those have been in 45 minute naps (for some reason I couldn't sleep when I got back home and then somebody called on the phone...) Needless to say I'm grumpy and busted and exhausted from my 3 hours of doctorate course (dealing mostly with proteins and antioxidants that are toxic in the doses needed to do their antioxidant business--but these cell biologists wouldn't know that). I haven't written much in the past 6 months and haven't finished a story. So doubly grumpy.

I'm writing a fantasy story now, and it sort of seems to be working even if I'm screwing with the rules more than usual and don't know whether it will see the light of day.

So, if anyone knows of any really cool anthos that could motivate me to write, comment away.
Or, if anyone would like to see some Genge stuff on their magazine/ezine suggest away. I could probably finish something if I were writing with an objective in mind. Or maybe not.

What the World is thinking about the US now

Oooohhhh, wasn't the speech luvely? And we really liked Michelle's outfits (the white dress more than the suit) and isn't Barack handsome? You can tell he's really in love with his wife by the way he twirls her around and steps on her dress (WTF??? SRSL!) And American's sure know how to throw a ceremony. And isn't the curious mix of formality and familiarity such an American thing? The daaaarlings. Americans are cute and cuddly. Cute and cuddly like a bear eating honey. A feral bear eating honey before he tears your limbs apart. Oh, yes, cute and cuddly Americans.

And best of all, Americans are suddenly not so horrible anymore because Obama's daughters are SWEET!

(By God, you/we better live up to this, people.)

200 subs. Stats

I've been writing and submitting since 2006. I created an account in Duotrope and logged in my first sub on July 13th 2006. By that time, I'd been subbing for a few months and had sold my first story to Strange Horizons so the stats here are skewed. My 200th submission (to ASIM) came back rejected on December 16th. Anyway, in case anyone is interested, here's some juicy bits of statistical nonsense I thought I'd share.

200 subs, 17 accepted pieces, that's an 8.5% acceptance rate, assuming that all 6 of my pending subs gets rejected. Of course, many of those pieces were subbed multiple times before being accepted and some of them are reprints which get counted several times. I told you the data was wrong!

A total of 12 different markets bought my stories. One market bought 3 stories, 3 markets bought 2 and the rest bought one each. Six of these stories were (or will be) published online only, 7 went to print markets (these may have online pdf copies available, but they're considered mainly print mags) and 4 went to markets like Shimmer who favor neither print nor e-formats but offer both.

Three stories were sold in 2006, seven in 2007 and six in 2008 which shows just how little I've been writing in 2008 (new job, new home, new life basically).

I don't know how useful any of this is, but here you go, my end-of-two-years stats. Enjoy.