Category Archives: Appearances

Readings, workshops, conventions–if I’ll be there, it’ll be here.

LEAP! (Or… when we said #24hourbook, we meant 24 hour book!)

By | | , ,
Comments Off on LEAP! (Or… when we said #24hourbook, we meant 24 hour book!)

So what did I do yesterday? This:

LEAP

A novel by 29 writers from 4 cities written in 24 hours around the world

February 29th, 2012. In Kuala Lumpur, it’s Sara’s birthday, a day she dreads, even though it only comes around once every four years. In Delhi, Tanya makes a dash for the airport and the carefree lifestyle that she has always dreamed of. In London, Dave wakes up from a bad dream to find his life in fragments that he must piece together before the day is out. In Vancouver, Win’s day goes from bad to worse, as she struggles to face up to her past.

On the leap day of the 29th of February, Spread the Word brought together four teams of writers from across the globe to write a collaborative novel. Spanning Delhi, Kuala Lumpur, London and Vancouver, four characters connect, disconnect, and follow their own journeys of discovery. There was a whole lot of hilarity and hard work, and much coffee and chocolate was consumed. We would love you to enjoy the fruits of the writers’ labours. Visit Spread the Word‘s website to download the book as a pdf or an ePub file from 5pm on World Book Day, Thursday 1st March. There will be an all-singing, all-dancing e-book version available soon!

Team Vancouver consisted of…
Sean Cranbury
Alyx Dellamonica
Jenn Farrell
McKinley M. Hellenes
Alex Leslie
Arley McNeney

Edited to add: I asked them to tell me something about them, and here’s the result:

Arley McNeney’s first book, Post, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, Best First Novel, Canada and the Caribbean and longlisted for such awards as the Saskatchewan Book Prizes and the ReLit award. Her second novel, The Time We All Went Marching, was released by Gooselane in October. Arley is a former Paralympian in the sport of wheelchair basketball and won two World Championship gold medals and a Paralympic bronze at the 2004 Athens Paralympics. She works as a social media coordinator for various nonprofits and blogs about her hip replacement on her blog Young and Hip. She can be reached on Twitter @arley_mcneney.

AmReading: Stephen Baxter’s STONE SPRING

By | | , , , ,
Comments Off on AmReading: Stephen Baxter’s STONE SPRING

I will be interviewing Guest of Honor Stephen Baxter at Norwescon this April 6th and to that end I’ve started Stone Spring, first in his most recent series, The Northland Trilogy. It’s an alternate history about dike-building stone age Britons. The main character is a teenaged girl, Ana; of course, among a people whose life expectancy is in the thirties, this means she is in no way a kid.

I love AH and haven’t read as much of it in the past couple years as I did when I was reviewing for Locus, so it has been a lot of fun. And I’m looking forward to the interview. If you’re gonna be at NWC, it’s at 2:00 p.m. on the Friday.

My previous read was also a novel, Stephanie Burgis’s Kat, Incorrigible, which is a thoroughgoing romp. Kat’s twelve with two marriageable sisters and a family disgraced by their dead mother’s very public use of magic. Her eldest sister is thereby feeling very much obliged to buy into an arranged marriage with the obscenely rich Sir Neville, and naturally it falls to Kat, who has no gift for being ladylike, proper, or even especially inconspicuous, to find a way to save her.

The book is available now and there will be a sequel, Renegade Magic, out in the spring. I’d say they’re appropriate for kids ten years or older, and I found it thoroughly fun.

Finally, I will be mostly unavailable for today, as February 29th is when I and 28 other writers from four cities are participating in the International 24 Hour Book Project. It’ll be #24hourbook if you want to follow the Tweeting fun.

Story Sale, Blue Magic Review, More Buffy

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.

Italy Adventures: Case of the Kooky Corkscrew

By | | , , , ,
1 Comment

Before I tell you all about Christmas in Modica, I want to let you know I’ve got another Buffy Rewatch up on Tor.com, this one about the Early Scoobies.

Kelly and I spent the morning of December 25th scampering up and down the town of Modica, which is built in a serious ravine. Our opulent and gorgeous bed and breakfast was on a long street at the bottom of the incline, just downhill from the biggest of the churches, Saint George.
See? Steep!
All Imported-797
We climbed up to the church and I shot pictures of a few songbirds; there’s a sort of garden around the Duomo, and a little lemon grove. Then we went higher, looking for the clock tower but never quite finding it.
We had a reservation at a restaurant for a big holiday brunch and turned up for that after our hike, along with a number of big Italian families. The food started with a big plate of appetizers and then piled on course after course: three pastas, two meats, two desserts, sweet wine.
All Imported-54
The plan had been to feast like queens for lunch, roll home and then just picnic for supper. We were prepared, because we’d spent much of the 24th acquiring fruit, bread, meat (a lot of meat, because the vendor was extra-cute and charming), more fruit, cheese, cookies and wine. We were trying out as much real Sicilian wine as we could, naturally, so Kelly could learn about it. But horrors! As we were headed back to the room, laden with grocery goodness, we realized we hadn’t managed to get our hands on a corkscrew.
If we hadn’t been carry-on only girls, we might have brought one from Canada, but it seemed a good prospect to get confiscated at the airport.
There was a random scattering of open stores, even though we’d picked a bad time, night before Christmas and all. Though, actually, we always found it rather hard to figure out what types of shops and services would be open in Italy at various times of day. We started going into one place after another, asking for a corkscrew. There was a gadget place that seemed especially promising, but the owner only sold batteries, shaving implements, lottery tickets, first and second-hand smoke… and not so much housewares. Finally we went into a wine bar and the owner told us we could hit up the store down the street (also owned by her) for one.
And they did have one for sale, but it was part of a set of expensive and useless wine accessories. We might have sucked it up, though. Because wine! At Christmas! In Modica! But the folks on duty there decided to lend us theirs. Bring it back on Boxing Day, they said, and so that’s exactly what we did.
(We found the Sicilians supernice in this way everywhere we went, whether or not we could communicate with them.)
It was a good picnic, and that afternoon was practically the only window of time that we spent loafing, rather than walking out to see some marvelous sight. Or walking half a block to make sure nobody had towed, ticketed, rammed or made off with our rental car. After the massive Christmas lunch, we couldn’t possibly have moved! We didn’t break into the stash o’ food for about six hours.
Here’s Saint George’s:
All Imported-8

“Among the SIlvering Herd,” cover art

By | | , , ,
Comments Off on “Among the SIlvering Herd,” cover art

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.