Archive for March, 2012

FOGcon program

Word count: 12620 | Since last entry: 503

Heading off later today to the Bay Area for FOGcon. I’ll be on the following program items:

Friday 4:30 PM, Salon B/C: Designing Alien Bodies. Aliens are probably going to have very different biology than humans do. How do bodies evolve from their surrounding environments? What might be different if an alien evolved in a waterless wasteland, or a chlorine swamp, or in the goo-powered city we designed at FOGcon 1? Ann Wilkes (Moderator), Carol Dorf, M. Christian, David Levine.

Friday 9:30 PM, Sacramento: Mars Wants Our Genitals. Humanity has often been described as exogamous — if it’s strange, and new, we want to have sex with it. This was simple enough when it was the people from the group down the river who spoke strangely — but what will it mean as we move out into the universe? Writers have already gone there — James Tiptree Jr.’s “And I Awoke And Found Me Here By The Cold Hill’s Side”, for example. How will we relate to a universe whose expectations of sex (if they exist at all) may be very, very different from ours? Shannon Prickett (Moderator), Mary Anne Mohanraj, Steven Schwartz, David Levine, Jean Marie Stine.

Saturday 8:00 PM, Salon B/C: Ask a Pro. Ask a professional writer anything you like about craft, business, or whatever you want to know. David Levine (Moderator), Nalo Hopkinson, Rachel Swirsky, Jean Marie Stine, Nick Mamatas.

Sunday 1:00 PM, Santa Rosa: Reading 11. Daniel Marcus, David Levine, Chaz Brenchley.

Armored! Now available!

Word count: 12117 | Since last entry: 7043

Some of you have heard me read from my story “The Last Days of the Kelly Gang,” AKA the Steampunk Ned Kelly Power Armor Story. It’s longish, so I’ve never had the opportunity to read the whole thing and I always end on a massive cliffhanger.

This had a purpose. The purpose is to make you salivate to buy the story on the day it comes out. And that day is here!

Armored, a big fat anthology of power-armor stories edited by John Joseph Adams and published by Baen, is now available “wherever fine books are sold,” as they say. (Also, presumably, where crappy books are sold, but please don’t hold that against it.) I recommend that you buy it from Powell’s. You can also buy the ebook directly from Baen in a wide variety of DRM-free formats.

In addition to my story, Armored includes stories by Tobias Buckell, Genevieve Valentine, Jack McDevitt, Simon R. Green, David Barr Kirtley (I love that one), Michael A. Stackpole, Alastair Reynolds, Tanya Huff, Carrie Vaughn, Daniel H. Wilson, and others. And if that isn’t enough to convince you to buy it, you can check out the editor’s website for the book which includes several sample stories, interviews with the authors, and more.

Ding! Ding! Salivate, little readers, salivate! And buy!

For your Hugo consideration

Word count: 5074 | Since last entry: 4274

The deadline for Hugo Award nominations is March 11, and I hope that you will consider my stories “The Tides of the Heart” (fantasy short story, from Realms of Fantasy) and “Citizen-Astronaut” (SF novelette, from Analog).

You can read them for free here:

The HTML files are plain old web pages that you can read in any browser. The EPUB files are ebooks that you can download and read on your computer, phone, tablet, or ebook reader; they are completely free and unencumbered by DRM. The MOBI files are ebooks for the Kindle ebook reader; they are also completely free and unencumbered by DRM.

This is the first time I’ve done an ebook conversion, so if you have any feedback on the formatting, appearance, navigability, readability, or other quality of the ebook, please email me.

Enjoy!