Woo! The fantasy podcast site PodCastle is buying "The Osteomancer's Son," my story about bone magic in Los Angeles. It'll probably run sometime next month.

And today I got my contributor's copies of Spin, a Finnish science fiction/fantasy magazine, containing "Kirjailijatalo," a translation of my story "Authorwerx."

The podcast of "Authorwerx" was in Escape Pod last year.

Now I need to get "The Osteomancer's Son" translated into Finnish ...

***

We in the USA are now assaulting teens with ultrasonic noise weapons. Because if there's one thing teenagers can't do, it's retaliate by making noise of their own. And it's always a good idea to antagonize those who will be responsible for our care in a few decades, isn't it? Our nursing homes will be pits dug in the ground. At least we'll be able to gum our earthworms.

I'm an old man with the knees of Geezer McCreakster, but I have the hearing of a young adult. I'm immune to these assaults, but not by much. I did have the Lakers game on when I took the test, though, so for all I know these emitters will melt my geriatric brains.

You are about 20 years old

The teen repellent will no longer foil you, but you can still hear some pretty high tones. The highest pitched ultrasonic mosquito ringtone that I can hear is 16.7kHz

Find out which ultrasonic ringtones you can hear!

About two weeks ago I met up with writer and podcaster Shaun Farrell, to record an interview for his podcast, Adventures in Scifi Publishing. We drank coffee and hung out and chatted about writing and personal finance and traded a little gossip, and it was a lot of fun. At one point Shaun hit the record button and shoved a mic in my face and I blathered for about ten minutes and then we went back to using profanity.

My interview's appears in a new segment, Out of the Slush, which features writers who've just signed their first book deals, and I come on at about the 37-minute mark, after the main interview with Cory Doctorow.

Listen here.

sarah_prineas, author of the soon-to-be-blockbuster-not-to-mention-utterly-HAWESOME Magic Thief, has been blogging about publicity this week from the perspective of a new author being given significant push by her publisher. Her posts have been chockfull of good general information, and today's post on prepublication is no exception.

***

Today's San Diego Tribune runs a feature on "writing coach" Midge Raymond, who holds workshops that include an opportunity for writers to shred their rejection letters.

They sat on couches and chairs in an airy East Village loft, sipping Starbucks. It could have been a writers' meeting anywhere, or maybe a book club, except for the unusual guest in the middle of the room.

A paper shredder.

The machine was there Monday night as a weapon, a way for the writers to fight back against one of the literary world's fiercest demons: rejection.

“We all learn about dialogue, about characterization, but nobody talks about rejection, about how to deal with it,” said Midge Raymond, a local author and writing coach who hosted the session.

Craziness. I have a big file drawer stuffed with rejection letters. I wouldn't think of shredding them. They are among my most valued possessions.

***

mythusmage kindly pointed me to this very thorough review of Paper Cities: an Anthology of Urban Fantasy in Fantasy Book Critic, which not only says nice things about my story, but also gives my book some pre-pre-pre-publicity:

At only four pages “Ghost Market” gives new meaning to the term ‘short story’, but it’s an intriguing concept where inhaling ghosts is a form of drug dealing, and I think it would make a pretty interesting series. We’ll have to wait on that though because Greg’s first novel “Norse Code” (Bantam Dell) is “a mythic fantasy set in contemporary Los Angeles in which a minor Norse god, a modern valkyrie, and a Viking thug are pitted against the Norse pantheon in an attempt to stop Ragnarok, the long-ago foreseen destruction of the entire universe.”

I imagine this will be thoroughly bloggered about by the cluster of blaggers with whom I cluster, but I did want to mention that Paper Cities, an anthology of urban fantasy stories with little or no relation to the current hot, hot publishing sub-genre of urban fantasy, is out today.

It can be purchased here.

I think listing the table of contents is probably the best salesmanship I could do, because my own contribution notwithstanding, it is a very fine table.

Jess Nevins - Foreword
Forrest Aguirre - "Andretto Walks the King’s Way"
Hal Duncan - "The Tower of Morning’s Bones"
Richard Parks - "Courting the Lady Scythe"
Cat Rambo - "The Bumblety’s Marble"
Jay Lake - "Promises; A Tale of the City Imperishable"
Greg van Eekhout - "Ghost Market"
Cat Sparks - "Sammarynda Deep"
Steve Berman - "Tearjerker"
Stephanie Campisi - "The Title of This Story"
Mark Teppo - "The One That Got Away"
Paul Meloy - "Alex and the Toyceivers"
Vylar Kaftan - "Godivy"
Michael Jasper - "Painting Haiti"
Ben Peek - "The Funeral, Ruined"
Kaaron Warren - "Down to the Silver Spirits"
Darin C. Bradley - "They Would Only be Roads"
Jenn Reese - "Taser"
David Schwartz - "Somnambulist"
Anna Tambour - "The Age of Fish, Post-flowers"
Barth Anderson - "The Last Escape"
Catherynne M. Valente - "Palimpsest"

My short-short, "Chi," is up at Drabblecast, the weekly flash fiction podcast magazine.

Norm Sherman did a really great reading and production. Listening to it, I felt as if I were being read a story I'd never heard before. I liked it much better than my print version.

And while I'm on the hype, I'll mention that "C-Rock City," a short story I wrote with jaylake (Jay Lake) made the Locus Recommended Reading List.

Also, I have no underwear so I must do laundry.

paulmelko's (Paul Melko's) first novel Singularity's Ring debuts today. Honestly? I haven't read it yet. But I have read his short fiction and parts of his novels in-progress, so I'm absolutely confident that I'm going to like Singularity's Ring a whole bunch, and perhaps you will too. Thing is, you won't know unless you buy it, so you know what you have to do.

Also, sandramcdonald's (Sandra McDonald's) novel The Outback Stars is now out in paperback. It's got cosmic grandeur, suspenseful action, workplace conflict, and romance, all on a big starship in space. It's really, really good, and if you read it now, you'll be ready for The Stars Down Under, Sandra's follow-up book, which comes out this May March.

***

Another reason why Phoenix Suns point guard Steve Nash is my favorite pro athlete: Steve Nash invests in pro women's soccer league. He's also the only athlete I know of who was outspoken against the war when the war was still popular. I also liked it when he apologized to the entire nation of Canada for NBA players being such wussy brawlers.

***

I just voted my ass off. If you can, I suggest you do the same. (I'm for Obama. I won't be broken-hearted if Clinton gets the nomination, but I think Obama's the better choice.)

I just got notification (plus permission to announce) that I've sold my novel Norse Code (or NorseCODE, if we use my rendering, but who knows what the final title will be) to Juliet Ulman at Bantam Dell, via Caitlin Blasdell (Liza Dawson Associates).

In other words, DUDES!!!!!!

I'm going to need a veeeerrry long acknowledgements page to thank everyone who helped me with this, but for now, I'll leave it at thanking all the people here who've cheered me on. Getting an agent and making the sale all happened this week, but it's been a long march, and so many of you guys helped lighten my load.

I'm going to have a lot of work ahead of me in the next several months, but I'm looking forward to it.

The pic below, from June '07, isn't even remotely from the first time I worked on the book, but I think it might be the first coffee/computer pic I ever posted.



Man, I've had a lot of coffee.

I'm not sure why this panel from Atrox Comics cracks me up so much. But, really, I can't think of a better thing to do with yarn.



***

Speaking of yarn, I sold podcast rights to a flash piece, "Chi," to The Drabblecast. The text version is here, but I edited it a bit before sending it to The Drabblecast, and I think the podcast version will be superior. For one thing, the who in the first sentence should be whom.

After the holidays and enjoying a house guest (hi, David!) and spending a week out of town, I feel like I'm just starting to settle back into the post-holiday routine. I'm working on a small, low-paying, but easy freelance gig (the sort of thing I need to be doing much more of, only with bigger pay, since it doesn't look like I'm going to be getting any adjunct teaching this semester), and after finishing the latest "final" draft of the Norse book, I'm getting back to the actual writing of the YA weird beach book. Since I found last week's visit to the Museum of the Weird in Austin so inspiring, I'm starting the book right in the middle of the shrunken heads and the Fiji Mermaid and the What-Is-It???? in the box.

Made a nice reprint sale: "Far As You Can Go" to the audio anthology, mini-Masterpieces of Science Fiction from Audio Text, due out I'm-not-sure-when.

Speaking of routines, time now to strap on, change into t-shirt and kung fu pants and go smack big wooden sticks.

My chapbook, Show and Tell and Other Stories, has just been reviewed by Paul Di Filippo in the February '08 issue of Asimov's. An excerpt:

Van Eekhout's language is zestily inventive, his story premises splendidly wacky, and his execution flawless. Whether he features Santa Claus as an end-times superhero a la Captain Future ("In the Late December") or posthuman school kids striving for a good grade (the title story), he can be counted on to amaze, entertain, and illuminate the sapient condition.

It's 15 minutes 'til midnight where I am, but I just got an early present from Escape Pod by seeing my Christmas story, In the Late December, just now posted.

Wishing you comfort and joy, and to all a good night.

The Year's Best Science Fiction Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection (edited by Gardner Dozois) appears to be out, and included in its pages is "Far As You Can Go," my story about yearning and questing and freeways and friendship and broken robots and grabby spider hands.

(And, yikes, Gardner had a quintuple bypass last week, but fortunately appears to already be making a good recovery.)

I wrote this one (well, most of it, I had about a third of it lying around already) for my chapbook Show and Tell and Other Stories (which you can still get from the fine folks at Tropism Press, by the way), and while I'm being all hype-y, I'll mention that that SFRevu has nice things to say about the story.

***

Life right now is mostly sorting and tossing and packing for the move, which keeps me busy but isn't much exciting to blog about.

I did get most of my hair cut off yesterday. And I'm still revising the book. So. Well.

Fantasy: The Best of the Year 2007 (Richard Horton, editor), which includes my story, "The Osteomancer's Son", is now out in mass market paperback.

You can also find the story in Year's Best Fantasy 7 (edited by David G. Hartwell and Katherine Cramer), which has been out for a while, I think.

I suggest getting a copy of each, because that way you'd have, like, dozens of cool stories by dozens of good writers to read, and why wouldn't you want that?

Looks like Year's Best Fantasy 7 is out, wherein my story "The Osteomancer's Son" is reprinted.



Nice company I'm in:

"Hallucigenia" by Laird Barron
"Four Fables" by Peter S. Beagle
"Yours, Etc." by Gavin Grant
"Sea Air" by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
"I'll Give You My Word" by Diana Wynne Jones
"The Bonny Boy" by Ian R. Macleod
"Ghost Mission" by L. E. Modesitt, Jr.
"The Roaming Forest" by Michael Moorcock
"Show Me Yours" by Robert Reed
"Christmas Witch" by M. Rickert
"Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter" by Geoff Ryman
"The Lepidopterist" by Lucius Shepard
"The Double-Edged Sword" by Sharon Shinn
"Pimpf" by Charles Stross
"An Episode of Stardust" by Michael Swanwick
"The Osteomancer's Son" by Greg van Eekhout
"Thin, On the Ground" by Howard Waldrop
"The Potter's Daughter" by Martha Wells
"Build-a-Bear" by Gene Wolfe
"Bea and her Bird Brother" by Gene Wolfe

I didn't participate in yesterday's International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, primarily out of laziness, but also because I've already got plenty enough free stuff online, a portion of which is linked to here.

I do want to spend a moment to take special notice of the paying online market that gets my vote for the best new fiction outlet to emerge in the past two years. By now, lots and lots of people know about Escape Pod, the science fiction short story podcast, and lots of people also know about their sister podcast, Pseudopod, dedicated to horror and dark fantasy. And don't forget about Escape Pod Classic, conveniently posting Escape Pod reruns for those who don't want to go digging through the archives. This week's featured classic is one of my favorites, Seamstress, by Sarah Prineas.

Sarah's story is a fantasy about exploitation of labor, and considering the impetus behind International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day (the short of it is that sitting SFWA VP Howard Hendrix called writers who post their stuff online for free scabs), it's particularly pertinent.

There's lots and lots of great fiction online, written by talented professionals. An embarrassment of riches, really. It makes me cheerful.

Edited to add: I'm dumb. In honor of IPSTPD, Wheatland Press's Deborah Layne has posted a downloadable PDF of "Gillian Underground", a collaboration between Mike Jasper, Tim Pratt, and myself, from Polyphony 5. Much more there besides. Read. Buy lots of books from Wheatland. Deborah's great people and makes great books.

This looks like it's gonna be a good one:

Paper Cities: an Anthology of Urban Fantasy, edited by the estimable E. Sedia, will include my story, "Ghost Market", alongside stories by a rather stellar group of writers, scheduled for a November release.

Tangent Online has posted a review of Fantasy: The Best of 2007 (this is the one Richard Horton edits for Prime Books, for those keeping track), which includes impressive works by Ben Rosenbaum and snurri (David Schwartz) and M. Rickert and Peter S. Beagle, among others, and my "The Osteomancer's Son" as well.

Amazon still says the book ships in one to two months, which I take to mean Prime hasn't actually released it yet, but I'll be keeping an eye out for it whenever I'm in a bookstore, because that's just how I bump.

***

If you like looking at really great photography, you should be checking out the_flea_king's (Jeremy Tolbert's) LJ everyday, everyday, everyday. Dude's got enviable talent. Check out his Flickr, too.

***

I've got a cold or allergies or some kind of airplane-induced sinus malfunction, and with the coffee joint being as empty as it is, my sneezes are sounding like an artillery battery. It's distracting me, and I'm going to blame my lack of writing productivity this morning on it. I was hoping to get to the zombies today.

I will do some contract work instead.

***

Really good sparring sessions last night, ranging from a new yellow belt who had a lot of energy and really kept me on my toes while giving me opportunity to practice a less-is-more strategy, to matches with another brown belt who's way better than me, and a black belt who could twist me into a very tight knot if he felt like it. But in both of the latter two cases, I managed to survive and get in some good shots. I'm learning to use more techniques from my forms instead of just the block-kick-punch all the time. It makes sparring a lot more challenging, but also way more interesting. Fun stuff.

***

( cup/page pic below the cut )

Steve Gould (you know his YA book Jumper is coming out as a major motion picture next year, starring Hayden Christensen, Samuel L. Jackson, and Diane Lane?) has posted his Podible Paradise interview with me, and I have to say, he did a really fine editing job, especially considering what he had to contend with, including but not limited to a pair of horrendously loud Harleys that cruised by in mid-conversation.

If you're even remotely interested in the Viable Paradise writers' workshop, you should keep coming back to Podible Paradise as Steve posts more interviews with students and instructors.

***

Shortly after posting yesterday's entry, I did a bunch of situps, which of course didn't make me less fat, but it did allow me to convince myself that any discomfort was due to having worked my abs rather than abdominal distension from overeating. I'm such a genius.

Today's coffee beverage was made with skim milk. You can practically see all the way through the cup!

Surpassed 98k words this morning. When I'm finally done adding words, much chopping of them will follow.

I'm going to be guesting on online talk radio show The Dork Forest, hosted by stand-up comedian Jackie Kashian, tomorrow between 4:30 and 4:45 Pacific Standard Time. The show will be archived, but don't you want to catch it live to hear me say "um" and "er" a lot? I think you can even call in if you want, like I'm Anne Coulter or one of the Car Talk guys. (Only I'm less virulent and less knowledgeable, respectively.)

Four-hour sparring seminar tomorrow in the park. Between my cold and my reliably allergic reaction to screwing around in dirt and dry grass, this entry may well be my farewell to the world.

Obviously I'm being melodramatic, but hopefully typing this out will remind me to go get some Benadryl.

***

SF Signal posts a favorable review of "C-Rock City", a story by jaylake and me, from The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction.

***

Novel writers, do you ever get tired of your manuscript? Not your novel, not the story, but the actual manuscript, or the actual word processing document? I mean, there it is, day in, day out, that damn file in that damn font on that damn white background. All of a sudden I find that I want my novel written out long-hand in rich, purple fountain pen ink. I have some nice empty journals. I have some nice pens. I have some very nice inks. (I'm particularly fond of "Copper Burst," so retro.)

Ah, well. Maybe I'll change the font.