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(Feb 25, 2025) — So things are proceeding well enough. I’ve just received the Random House version of HOUSE RULES, the most recent of the WILD CARDS series of books, edited by George RR Martin with the assistance of Melinda Snodgrass. I have written essentially a short novel for the book, which includes a novelette as well as the interstitial material (featuring my ‘deuce’ character Gary Bushorn) between the other stories. The other writers in the book are (in order of their appearance) Mary Anne Mohanraj; Caroline Spector; Kevin Andrew Murphy, Peter Newman, and Peadar Ó Guilín. It’s a thick book, and gets rather darker in feeling and mood as it proceeds, though I think the final interstitial lightens it up and adds a touch of optimism to the ending. Grab it and let me know what you think!
As I’ve mentioned on FB, Megen gifted me with lovely fountain pen by Brad, The Pen Guy, at Monumental Confusion. The pen has a barrel carved from 4,000-6,000 year-old bog oak from the fens of England. Having written in the past a novel centered around an alien bog body (DARK WATER’S EMBRACE, winner of the 1999 Spectrum Award, on the Locus Magazine recommended reading list, and on the 1998 Tiptree Award Long List). I’m still proud of that book and its critical reception. The fountain pen is a memory of the fact that I used to write all my first drafts longhand. I’d have written this entry with the pen and photographed it to insert it here, but my handwriting sucks anymore and is probably unreadable to anyone but me.
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(December 8, 2024): I’ve been tapped to be the creative GoH at Monumental Confusion (https://2025.confusionsf.org, the 50th Confusion). My first time at Confusion was 1980, where Ro Lutz-Nagey (as she was known then) and I decided to become “Cosmos” and “Chaos”, the juggling duo. I wanted to be Chaos, but we asked everyone who knew us all, and they unanimously shook their heads and pointed to Ro, saying “Chaos!”.
So I became Cosmos, which made sense, since in our juggling partnership, my job was to be steady and catch all the garbage that Ro was throwing at me, settle it all down, and give it back to Ro as a catchable throw that Ro could put back in the pattern. We also had Frank Johnson as our stage manager, to bring out the props at the right time, to give us our musical cues, and generally handle the backstage stuff (and to occasionally be the prop between us as we tossed sharp or heavy objects back and forth around him.
I’ll doing some programming at the con, some of it based on my writing, some on on my music, and some on my artwork, and maybe some juggling, though I’m woefully out of practice at that. It should be fun — if somewhat chaotic :-).
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(September 12, 2024) Limited time offer from Audio books for 50% off the price of BOUND TO A SINGLE SUN! Grab it while you can! https://www.audiobooks.com/promotions/promotedBook/619309/bound-to-a-single-sun?
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(August 29, 2024) Yes, it’s been awhile since I updated the NEWS section… and for good reason. Most of you who know us well, know that Denise has been dealing Parkinson’s for several years now, and if you didn’t know, now you do.
Anyway, as part of that journey, we’ve been looking into Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) surgery for her, as the best treatment pathway for her in minimizing the effects of Parkinson’s. If you don’t know about DBS, I’d tell you to look it up for more information rather than going on about it ad nauseum here.
But to make a long story MUCH shorter, DBS surgery is two parts, one to install the electrodes in the brain, and another to hook up a battery to power the electrodes. The surgeries are generally done a week apart, and Denise has just had the surgeries completed, but that only installs the equipment. Then there’s a waiting period for the patient to heal, then a complicated progamming of the equipment and testing to make sure everything’s optimal. We’re talking about a 2-3 months for all that.
DBS has pretty much consumed most of her time and mine for the last few months, and will continue to do so for a while yet. So if you’re waiting to see when I might publish the novel and/or the novella I’ve completed, I don’t know when that might be.
Be patient, and send Denise good healing thoughts in the meantime!
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(May 14, 2024) Some good news (finally) on the writing front. I’ve signed two separate contracts with George RR Martin for a pair of novellas that will appear in the upcoming Wild Cards book HOUSE RULES: one for a long story, “Promises Redux”; the second for the interstitial thread in the book, “Longing For Those Lost”. Yay! I have actual new contracts in hand! Note that there will be two separate releases of HOUSE RULES, one from Harper Voyager (British) and one from Bantam Books (USA)— I’ll remind all of you about each release when they happen.
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(May 7, 2024) I had a long chat with my former (and now retired) editor, Sheila Gilbert, the other day about my writing and the current publishing industry. Sheila wasn’t optimistic about the current state of publishing, where it was going, and what it meant for authors. As she said “Everything’s changed from the way it used to be just a few years ago.” I talked with her about where I was with my current novel, and she suggested that self-publishing was something I should look at long and hard, given my long publishing record. So that’s what I’m doing at the moment. I’ve been getting nowhere with agents and current publishers. Going the self-pub route means more work for me, and it means I have to conquer my reticence to toot my own horn and put myself out there. We’ll see if I can manage that. Stay tuned to this station for updates.
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(February 19, 2024) I’ve finished the authorial revisions for the latest novel (5th draft) now entitled WORLDS NOT VISIBLE. But now I have another (and more significant) issue—how to get it out there to readers. My publisher since 2000 had been DAW Books, then part of Penguin Random House, and my editor was the excellent (and multiple Hugo Winning Sheila Gilbert), and I was extremely happy to be a DAW authot, publishing two trilogies there (THE CLOUDMAGES series and the NESSANTICO CYCLE) both under my S.L. Farrell pseudonym, as well as six other books (IMMORTAL MUSE, CROW OF CONNEMARA, A FADING SUN, A RISING MOON, AMID THE CROWD OF STARS, and BOUND TO A SINGLE SUN) all under my own name: a total of a dozen books from 2000 to 2023
But… DAW Books sold itself to Astra Publishing back in 2023 (it still exists, as one of the ‘brands’ of Astra Publishing) and Sheila retired around the same time. I was massively unhappy with how Astra/DAW published my last DAW book, BOUND TO A SINGLE SUN as an e-book only with no print edition and minimal promotion. It felt like they were doing the very least they could do to fulfill their contractual obligations, and though I let Astra/DAW know that I’d already begun to draft a new book (because my contract with DAW required me to do so), I heard nothing from them about any interest in continuing to work with me.
So now I have to figure out how to get WORLDS NOT VISIBLE into the hands of readers. I could: 1) query agents and see if I get any interest there; 2) look at small presses and see if any of them would be interested in publishing this; 3) self-publish. That last option is the ‘easiest and quickest’ in one sense but also the most onerous for me as it means I’d have to do everything, and I suck at self-promotion. *sigh* Hopefully you’ll eventually see this book, as I think it an interesting and engaging (and different for me) novel. Watch this space!
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(February 3, 2024) SLEEPER STRADDLE (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/.../george-r-r-martin.../), the second Wild Cards original under our new contract with Penguin Random House, will be released in hardcover on FEBRUARY 6. As it happens, I'll have an Croyd/Oddity story in the volume—make sure to check it out!