Miscellaneous writing-related tidbits

Word count: 6844 | Since last entry: 2637

I’m into the home stretch on the vampire story; it should be done today or tomorrow (which is good, because I need to send it to critique on Saturday at the latest). It’s already passed the 6000-word limit for the target market, but I hope that once I’m done I’ll be able to go back and cut a couple thousand words out.

Meanwhile, I have some other minor writing news to report:

  • SF Signal has a regular feature called “Mind Meld” in which they ask a number of writers to contribute short essays on a given topic. I’m participating in the latest Mind Meld, on the topic “what books and writers have influenced you and what influences do you hope to have on future writers.” Other participants include Tobias Buckell, Mike Resnick, and Jay Lake.
  • I learned from this blog post that my story “Firewall” has been translated into Chinese, in the magazine “SF King”. This was, shall we say, a surprise to both me and my editors. It’s the first time, to my knowledge, that I’ve been pirated, and I’m actually kind of proud, in a strange way. I found a contact email for the editor, and got this response: “We tried to get touch with you,but failed,which is really a pity. Now we will send you the copy of our magazine in which you can find your fiction.” We shall see. Ironically, the first sentence of the story is “It started in China, as I’d always feared it would.” (You can read the whole thing here.)
  • I learned from another blog post that the February issue of Realms of Fantasy was briefly reviewed in Locus (I had read the issue but managed to miss that somehow.) Rich Horton led off the review with my story “Joy is the Serious Business of Heaven,” which he called “a nice humorous story.”
  • I received payment for my story “Fair Play” from Circlet Press, and galleys of my story “Midnight at the Center Court” from Witch Way to the Mall.
  • I’m working on a Sekrit Projekt which is extremely cool and unlike any other kind of writing I’ve ever done. (This is not related to the other Sekrit Projekt I was working on earlier this month, which wasn’t writing-related.)

Now I’m off to Potlatch, with a few days of hanging around in the Bay Area afterwards. See some of you there!

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