Category Archives: Announcements

Story sales, articles, reviews, any kind of publication announcement.

BLUE MAGIC – cover post and a review

Posted on February 13, 2012 by | Leave a comment

I get a note whenever some post of mine goes up on TOR.COM, and one came today; I assumed it was my latest Buffy post, but instead it’s my article about the quasi-collaborative process involved in getting the lovely covers of both books in this series. You can find it here–enjoy!

In other news, Publisher’s Weekly was less enchanted with Blue Magic than they were with Indigo Springs. They do applaud my ambition, though, which is no small thing.

Edited to Add: I was wrong. The Buffy Post, Big Bad 1.0, is up here.

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Posted in Announcements, My Novels, Reviews, Uncategorized

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Story Sale, Blue Magic Review, More Buffy

Posted on February 7, 2012 by | 1 Comment

I am happy to announce that my story “The Sweet Spot” will appear online at Lightspeed Magazine in the not too distant. This is the fourth of my Proxy War series (the squid stories, in other words) to see print, and the second featuring the character of Ruthless from “The Town on Blighted Sea.”

In the meantime, if you’d rather talk Buffyverse, Love is a Path Marked by Bloody Footprints is up at Tordotcom.

And Mrissa’s short review of Blue Magic on LJ points out, quite rightly, that it’s a better read if you’ve read Indigo Springs. My favorite bit:

I was pleased with the fact that the characters in this modern fantasy acted like modern people: they read detective novels and tried to figure out the atomic weight of magical substance and generally were not interchangeable with the 13th century.

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Posted in Announcements, Appearances, My Novels

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A taste of BLUE MAGIC… the first review

Posted on February 1, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Here’s a bit from Kirkus, trimmed for spoilers and length:

In the unreal, magic (a blue substance called vitagua) is frozen into glaciers and as it melts it trickles back into our world. The process can be gradual or explosive. Astrid Lethewood, a “chanter” (she crafts magical objects using vitagua), fears chaos and violence and seeks a gradual course. There are dreadful complications, however… Astrid’s old friend Sahara Knax, now brimming with vitagua, has made herself the center of a cult, the Alchemites, who worship Sahara as a goddess. Problem is, though the Alchemites think they’re saving the environment, Sahara’s only interested in power and will sacrifice anybody to keep it…

… Previously charming and intimate, the narrative’s now become a seething fireball of ideas, actions and plots, complicated by GBLT and environmental agendas and a cast of thousands. Undeniably, something changed when the story jumped from local to global, and readers must judge for themselves which approach they prefer.

69 days until the book is out. Eeee!

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Posted in Announcements, My Novels

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“Among the SIlvering Herd,” cover art

Posted on January 19, 2012 by | Leave a comment

As some of you may have seen on Facebook yesterday, artist Richard Anderson has done a marvelous job on the cover for my novelette “Among the Silvering Herd,” whose release date on Tor.com has been shifted to February 15th. (I tell you this in the unlikely event that you remembered and went looking for it Wednesday.)

silvering herd

This novelette is the first in a series of short pieces I’ve written over the past six months. There are five so far and collectively, they’re called The Gales. I look forward to getting them out in front of you all as quickly as ever I can, not least because I am having an obscene amount of fun writing these stories. I can’t wait to see how they grab you.

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Posted in Announcements, Appearances, My Short Stories, Uncategorized

95 days until Blue Magic is out!

Posted on January 6, 2012 by | 3 Comments

That’s right, it’s just over three months away! You can expect to hear more as we get closer to April 10th–there will be at least one contest, and I or TOR will almost certainly put up a first chapter, and I have yet to figure out what else.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE! In just a couple weeks I’ll have a new story up on Tor.com. It’s called “Among the Silvering Herd” and I hope you all enjoy it very much. Or, if you’d rather get your Whedon fan on, watch the TOR blog for my 2012 Buffy Rewatch series, coming any second now.

AND A SET OF STEAK KNIVES: there are still exactly three slots open in my winter UCLA course, “Creating Universes, Building Worlds,” which begins January 25th. Come spring, I’m scheduled to teach Novel Writing I… and I’ll let you know when registration’s open for that. Finally, I will be teaching Novel Diagnostics at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle on Sunday, January 29th from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m..

What have you all got going on?

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Posted in Announcements, Appearances, Fiction Online, My Novels, UCLA Extension, ucla-creatinguniverses, Uncategorized, Welcome

Creating Universes, Building Worlds

Posted on November 29, 2011 by | Leave a comment

This January, I will be teaching Creating Universes, Building Worlds via the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. A full syllabus can be found here. As always, the syllabus is subject to tweaking right up until class starts January 25th… but it won’t change radically. If you want to spend Christmas getting a leg up on the reading and exercises, you can safely do so.

In April, I am scheduled to run Novel Writing One: Writing a Novel the Professional Way. Though there are no guarantees, what generally happens is that one teaches N1 in a given term, then teaches N2 in the next, N3 in the one after that, and so on. This allows students to work through the lion’s share of a book with one instructor, if they wish.

Questions? Let me know!

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Posted in Announcements, Appearances, ucla-creatinguniverses, Uncategorized

“The Sorrow Fair,” now available on Kindle

Posted on October 5, 2011 by | Leave a comment

I’m pleased to announce that my dark fantasy novelette, “The Sorrow Fair“, is available in the Kindle Store for the princely sum of $0.99. The novelette made its original print appearance in 2008, in the now-defunct Helix Speculative Fiction, and was edited by William Sanders and Lawrence Watt-Evans. Here’s a taste:

Gabe tried to push past the child, to hop over the turnstile. She grabbed his forearm with irresistible strength, turning it palm-up and swiping her candy floss over his wrist. The fibers smoked where they touched him: there was a smell of acid and a blister rose on his forearm. Swelling to the size of his fist, the skin mottled and blackened, scorched first into indecipherable patterns and then into something recognizable: a printed rectangular ticket.

“Admit one,” it read.

Setting the candy aside, the Girl Scout pulled out a straight razor.

“Stop,” Gabe objected, but he couldn’t pull free.

My chosen Exquisite Words quote from this past Monday came from Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America, a book that inspired my choice of setting for this story: reading Larson’s book and especially the history surrounding the invention of the Ferris Wheel was what drew me to Chicago, and The World’s Fair, for this.

I don’t remember that much, besides that, about the process of writing “The Sorrow Fair.” It was written right smack in the period when I was going to Alberta for a lot of family funerals, and the story certainly holds a resonance with the sadness that permeated those years.

But it has romantic love and music and all the kinds of weirdness you’ve probably come to expect from me. I was pleased with how it turned out, I still am, and I hope you will be too.

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Posted in Announcements, Ebooks, My Short Stories, Short Story Intros, Welcome

Joining the Write-A-Thon

Posted on June 14, 2011 by | Leave a comment

I have just signed up for the Clarion West Write-A-Thon… they’re trying to get 100 writers joined up for the summer, so I thought I’d play along. If you might like to sponsor me, there’s a link here. Clarion’s a terrific workshop and a good cause. I got to meet some of last year’s class and their excitement about writing and general enthusiasm for SF and fantasy writing was infectious and delightful. You could be paying to teach your next favorite writer evar.

I’ve never done this before, but it’s pretty straightforward. The site says:

Sign up by June 18 to participate as a Clarion West Write-a-thon writer. Pick a writing goal: something that’s a little stretch; something that motivates you. Shadow the workshop from June 19 through July 29. Then write, write, write! Write 15 minutes or 4 hours a day, 250 words a day, or maybe 8000 words a week (we call that a “Swanwick”); revise a story or a chapter of your novel every week; complete a story, novella, or trilogy; submit three short stories to professional markets; or do something else completely different.

My goal is to write 20K of fiction between June 19th and July 29th. Ideally this will wrap up two half-written stories in progress and get me a little further into the current novel.

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Posted in Announcements, Uncategorized, Welcome, Works in Progress, Workshops

Opportunities for new writers

Posted on May 18, 2011 by | Leave a comment

A very exciting newsflash: author Saladin Ahmed is offering one on one mentoring for interested writers:

I am pleased to announce that I am currently offering a limited number of one-on-one creative writing mentorships. These mentorships will be individually tailored to the needs of the client, involving a combination of detailed manuscript critique and advice on publication and professionalization. My areas of teaching expertise include poetry and fantasy fiction.

Full details are here.

Second, PEN USA’s Emerging Voices Fellowship is open for applications. This is a terrific program. One of my students, Natashia Deón, was a PEN fellow, and everything I heard about it from her made it sound like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

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Posted in Announcements, Resources for Writers, Uncategorized

So you wanna create a universe?

Posted on April 25, 2011 by | 2 Comments

My UCLA Extension Writers’ Program course, “Creating Universes, Building Worlds,” is officially open for students this week. This is a ten-week course that runs online, available to anyone in the world (well, fifteen anyones, anyway). Classes start on June 29th and run to September.

Anyone is welcome, including students who’ve taken the class before and simply want to workshop another short story with a new group. If you have any questions, let me know.

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Posted in Announcements, UCLA Extension, ucla-creatinguniverses, Uncategorized, Welcome