I can’t believe people signed up for my newsletter the other day. I WAS BLUFFING BUT NOW I GOTTA COME UP WITH A NEWSLETTER GODDAMMIT. I HOPE YOU ARE HAPPY.
Anyway, I guess in the meantime I’ll continue to use my blog for stuff that ought to be in a newsletter of some kind?
My story ‘For Each of These Miseries,’ which I’ve been billing as a genderswapped Beowulf with a lady scientist hero (she even has a scientific name!) set at a mysterious underwater military research base, with an increasingly mentally-unbalanced general (and old family friend) and some Very Questionable Enemies who wish to gain entry, is out! It can be acquired here for very few dollars and, I think, at the publisher store. I got a copy of the paperback as a contributors’ copy and spent the usual embarrassing amount of time touching the cover and going “Oooohh, smoooooooth.” A nice little addition to my desk stack!
The Q&A I did for Analog for my story ‘Shepherd Moon’ is out! I’m afraid it makes me sound like one of those, you know, literary-type wanks, instead of… whatever flavour of wank I actually am, but anyway.
I am going to the Scintillation convention in Montreal in October! Well, I’m really going to visit my best friend and his husband, as my annual trip is sorely overdue this year (I usually go in July so we can pretend to be young and vigorous for his birthday, and injure ourselves eating sushi and doing karaoke) but there’s also a convention in there somewhere. I’m already mildly uncomfortable with the speeches I’ll have to give about how I can’t go out with a bunch of literary folk every night because I need to see my best friend of 26 years, but I suspect people will understand that I didn’t really fly thousands of kilometers and spend thousands of dollars to hang out with strangers. And apparently I am also giving a reading (I’m splitting an hour slot with a fantastic author who shared a table of contents with me for that Lackington’s Gothics issue, thank God; no one wants to hear me talk for an hour) and I’m on a panel (Lovecraft!) so that should be interesting. My first ever reading and my first ever panel! HAHAHAHAHA I AM GOING TO UTTERLY FREEZE. FREEZE AND THEN FORGET HOW TO SPEAK ENGLISH.
Last thing — I am meaningfully astonished so far with sales of my novella, ‘The Apple-Tree Throne.’ The number of copies I was hoping to sell was, literally, about ten (my writerly friends who would have felt obliged to get a copy when I yelled about it). And the reviews have mostly been good! I keep telling myself: It’s a fluke, people are being nice. And yet, the actual feedback from some readers is: Yes, it’s a quiet story; yes, there’s not a lot of action, it wouldn’t be filmed as one of those billion-dollar blockbuster bloodbaths that are so popular now; but sometimes a quiet story with low stakes can still be good. The small amount of royalties I’m getting from the various sites is going straight into my Dublin 2019 account, so I hope I can continue to sell a few more between now and then!
On Twitter I said ‘I think it’s finding the people it needs to find,’ and I stand by that. People have even been contacting me privately to say so, which is goddamn thrilling. Maybe I have not written anything important or even talented, but I’ve written something that’s resonating with a few folks, which is all I can really hope for, I think.
It took a couple of weeks to get permission for the Google Play store, but it’s up there now! Buy link for Google Play
Buy link for Amazon US
Buy link for Kobo
Yeah, it’s all different prices, I have no idea what’s happening there. Amazon put the price up by two cents without my say-so. Google put the price down by six cents. Whatever. Go buy it, and if you liked it, tell your friends!