Just finished family time - they were here and we traveled around NW Oregon. I was going to post a picture, but they seem to be stuck on my phone for the moment (Internal!Error!1000!). So, just the latest publication news:

1. My poem "And My Sinuses Are Killing Me" is out in the August Asimov's.

2. fairmer posted that "Unplugged: The Web's Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy 2008", which contains my story "The Bitrunners", is now available for preorder on Amazon (I looked for it on Powell's just now to link to that instead, but couldn't find it.)

3. And ericreynolds kindly let me know that "The Bitrunners" also received an honorary mention in Gardner Dozois' Best SF for last year. Cool!

#

Meanwhile, Tim Pratt is serializing a Marla Mason novella for donations, and since I just got Paypal money from Brain Harvest for my choose your own adventure flash, I plan to support (the writing of) a kickass sorceress heroine.

And just in the nick of time. Complete set starts here:



And Portlanders: Don't forget about Camille Alexa's reading tonight - 7:00 at the Cedar Hills Powell's for her PW starred-review collection, Push of the Sky.

The bookstore is right next to a truly delectable bakery, where I've been getting things like potato-leek soup with light rye bread and walnut thumbprint cookies with chocolate ganache. Apparently the guy half of the owners used to run a painting company, because he came over on Saturday* with a metal ladder under his arm. He made me stand on it and try to rock it side to side. Then he told me to take the rickety thing I'd been using and grow pole beans on it. Later in the day, after the bakery closed, his wife brought me leftover challah and snickerdoodles.**

Pole Bean Ladder and Good Ladder:


Closeup on a Rose:


The Road in the Corner:




*I'm two days behind in the picture posting, so you'll get a couple more days of pics even tho I hope to finish today.
**I told her how wonderful the thumbprint cookies were and she said, well, they're an acquired taste because we don't oversugar things here. No wonder I loved them.

Murals and face painting are both more athletic than drawing at your desk. (If you don't think face painting is athletic, try sitting and holding your arms over your head, slowly rocking back and forth for several hours.)

Back when I was painting more murals and theatre backdrops I had a consistent wall that I would hit at 6 hours. (an energy wall, not a house wall.) After I moved to Portland, I started in on the face painting, and the 11-hour days of some festivals. (Rose Fest, I'm talking to you.)

Turns out now my wall for artistic focus+physical activity is 7 hours. 7.5 on the day I didn't do a lot of ladder work.

there are six of these trees, and just painting them took one whole day. By the end of the second tree I was all - "really, Connolly*, six?"







*Percy** calls me Connolly when he's peeved.
**The inner voice which sometimes deigns to act as a muse.

What I'm working on right now. More to come!

New story up at Brain Harvest! A Choose Your Own Adventure in 750 words: Hard Choices.*









*I designed it so it could be read straight through, though (partly cause I used to read some of them like that. Sitting on the school library floor, when I was supposed to be shelving....) I read it out loud at RadCon as part of the Broad Universe reading in February and it was very fun to read. :)

Haiku Earring Party - a wonderful, generous idea. elisem made a tableful of lovely earrings. Pick one out and she gives you a title. Write a haiku to your earrings, and if she approves it, you win your pair.

Camille picked out these awesome little guys for me: and elisem gave me the title of "Cats Keep the Sunshine". Here's my haiku:

Cats Keep the Sunshine

Electric whisker
Kinetic tail battery
Lightning in the pounce

Between work and mowing and about 1500 other things that needed my immediate attention I just got back from my first WisCon.

I face painted at the gathering which was hugely entertaining and let me meet a bunch of cool people right off the bat. Mostly swirlies/masks, but also a pumpkin, and you should all know how I feel about pumpkins, as evidenced by this doodle from Clarion West:



I did my first panel (on Clarion-style workshops). I read a snippet of Turning the Apples for the Broad Universe reading. I read part of Caroline Yoachim's forthcoming-in-Asimov's story for her reading, which she (sniff!) couldn't attend. And I met of bunch of old friends and online friends and new people and that was the best part, as it usually is.*

Now there's festivals and family in town and painting a mural and regular work to cover the rest of June. Expect continued light posting. Oh, but I might be able to do some more picture posts. Since between face painting and wall painting and gardening and traveling I have eleventy billion pictures to share with you all.




*I also somehow kicked over an entire bottle of red wine in the hotel lobby. Glass, crash, splash.

Wow, only two posts in April? it's been crazy around here, that's all I can say. Work stuff for both of us + trying to get the vegetable garden going.

A picture of our almond tree from April! If you click through to flickr there's also a picture of spring treetops and clouds that's rather pretty.

And I sold a few things in the last few weeks, and I'm excited about all of them.

My Choose Your Own Adventure flash "Hard Choices" sold to hip new mustachioed mag Brain Harvest.

An audio reprint of my Strange Horizons story On The Eyeball Floor sold to the widely-listened-to Escape Pod.

And my slipstreamy piece "On Glicker Street" sold to the gorgeous Escape Clause anthology.

I'll post when all these come out, but for now it's back to planting spinach....

I am spam. Someone sent a pseudo-submission/spam to a magazine in the Phillipines containing the text of four recent Strange Horizons stories -- mine, Sean Markey's, Eugene Fischer's, and Shweta Narayan's. (I already recommended Sean's creepy spider story, and I haven't read the other two yet, but I did recently read Kit St. Germain's small town fantasy As He Was and enjoyed that.)

The theatre company I often read with, Portland Theatre Works, had a nice write-up about the March show, Suicide Table, in the Oregonian. You can see a little bit of the space at Theater! Theatre! where we perform (Profile Theatre's space). I am just off-camera in that photo.

It's Buy Indie Day! Go support a local bookstore. You know you love 'em. And a lot of them mail-order special things, too -- like at the St Helens Book Shop you can get very cool signed and/or personalized copies of Chuck Palahniuk's latest book, Pygmy. Apparently he gets very creative with stamps and flourishes.

Gayle Forman - If I Stay (YA) It seems like there were a bunch of cheesy tearjerkers in the 80s with titles like "Six Months to Live" and "A Summer to Die"* - they weren't my thing, but some of my friends adored them. Well, this has a tearjerker setup but was well-written and therefore engaging beyond the basic premise. About ten pages in, the protag gets in a car accident and ends up in a coma. The rest of the book covers 24 hours as she thinks about the people in the waiting room, and her history, and decides whether or not to stay or go. I tend to like when the external conflict amplifies an internal conflict, and this does that, as she's been trying to decide if she should stay in the area with her boyfriend after high school or leave for Juilliard. I also like how both the teens and adults in this are believable people -- too often it seems a book focuses on only one side of the child/parent relationship.

Patricia Wrede - Thirteenth Child. (MG) Ha! I love the worldbuilding. Alternate pioneer America with a lot of extremely dangerous animals west of the Mississippi. The river is protected by a barrier spell that Franklin and Jefferson came up with (and no one since has been able to understand their erudite notes). Little House on the Prairie with magic. First in a trilogy, great stuff.

Ted Kosmatka - The Ascendant. (story) You know when you have a story you're writing that you can't quite master, and then you read someone else's story that tackles similar ideas, except theirs is gripping and heart-beating and seems to effortlessly accomplish everything you were struggling to do? Darn you, Kosmatka! ;)


*Although I ordinarily love Lois Lowry

Updates! I was off in Albany and Vermont, doing family things and writing. Both were good. I got 6K in on the current novel project, and I went to many tiny indie bookstores. Walked up giant hills. Drove past maple trees stuffed full of taps for sugaring. Ate scones and welsh rarebit and generally had a grand old time.

Onto the links!

You can now hear my very very short story Birthday Wish on Podcastle.

You can read Camille Alexa's excellent Shades of White and Road on Fantasy, or hear it read by the marvelous Mark Bukovec.

I have the new Diet Soap and the new Shimmer here to read - the first has a poem by Gord Sellar and the second an engaging flash story by Caroline Yoachim.

Maura McHugh and Neile Graham have two lovely dark poems in the new Goblin Fruit.

Sean Wallace posted the cover for Unplugged and it looks awesome. I'm excited to be in this antho.

LIVE today on Strange Horizons - my dark SF story Turning the Apples.

"This ain't a negotiation, boyo," says Jonny. "They're fresh and Hawk's in a lather, he needs what you do." Then Jonny is gone and Szo is sick to his knees because he's just remembered that fresh means awake and screaming.

The podcast of Campbell nominee Gord Sellar's wonderful jazz story Lester Young and the Jupiter's Moons' Blues.

Where The Wild Things Are trailer.

Someone named Kutiman mixes YouTube videos into new music on ThruYOU.

Sean Markey's creepy-awesome story The Spider in You on Strange Horizons.

And you can now hear Erin Cashier's fantastic alter-wild west story Hangman on Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

ETA: Oh right, and one more - Greg Manchess and Irene Gallo talk you through the concept to final painting for Ken Scholes' Canticle. Fascinating post.

In the last couple weeks I've gotten to do two readings of new plays - one with PTWKS that was really well-attended, and one with a local playwrights' group that meets at Portland Center Stage. They're basically a crit group, but unlike novel groups, play groups need to hear their works out loud. I've read for them before, and for a couple similar groups over the years, and it's very fun.

I stay for the talkback or feedback section on all of these, and one thing that always strikes me is that I completely do not understand play structure. Not intuitively, I mean. (And I say "intuitively", but it took me 6 years of writing novels before I understood their structure on any kind of "intuitive" level.)

I know some of you write plays and screenplays. Does playwriting seem like an entirely different beast to you? Or just as different as say, stories and novels (which, the scale is radically different, and this was enough to stymie me for a long time, but they have more similarities to each other than either does to plays. Right?)

Saturday there was a book swap at camillealexa's! Felicity took this shot of us pondering stacks of tomes. Sadly, I came away with more books than I brought. Bad, bad, TBR pile.

Also, last week I made these apple butter cookies from Robin McKinley's blog and they were sooooooo good. She mentions that all apple butters are different and you may need to adjust sugar, flour, etc. I think I should've added more flour, because they came out a little overly soft. Whatever. Fantastic. It's one of those recipes where you taste the quality of whatever ingredients you use. I had a nice unsweetened apple butter that actually tasted like real apples, and that came through. Plus there's butter in the icing, so it kind of tasted like a moist apple muffin slathered with butter and apple butter.

Nom!

I'm thrilled to say I sold another story to Scott at Beneath Ceaseless Skies! The story is called "Child of Sunlight, Woman of Blood", and it's pretty new. I finished it in December, I think.

My favorite among my stories are the ones where a unique voice-pattern comes and grips me out of nowhere and makes me write the story. (Like On the Eyeball Floor, like A Day Out, With Stereoscopes.) Well, it's true of the majority of my stories, I guess -- I have to find the story's internal rhythm to get the writing of it correct -- but it's truer of some stories than others.)

#

In that coal-dark cave, time ran for me like a hobbled spider, now fast, now slow, lurching as the world ran 'round its clock. For the first century I thought of tactics. What I would do with the changed world when I was freed, for Yan could not live forever. In the second century I found solace in remembering the tales of the gods, in repeating to myself the words of their failures and miseries, triumphs and joy.

For the third I thought only of food. Bafalo haunches, spitted and roasted over fire, crackling crisp black-gold on the outside. Tender spinica leaves, folded around melting pepperpear fruit. And chokolat, always chokolat. The human part of me overcame my maar heritage, and I spent my precious time arranging menus.

Thus three centuries passed as the last of the maar stood in ice, unable to fulfill her sworn purpose.

#

You can also hear the audio of my first story at BCS, The God-Death of Halla, which according to the Fix today is "Well written, read, and produced."

Ooh! I just got my proofs for my Highlights story and it's scheduled for this October. It's a Halloween story, so I was hopeful it would be this October and not 2010 or beyond. Highlights has a lot of fiction in stock, so you never know.

It's a really-truly proof too -- it's on a big 11x17 sheet of paper, and shows my story will be on pages 8 & 9. It'll have art :D but it doesn't have it yet.

And the cover letter notes: "I think you'll be interested in knowing that the current circulation of Highlights is about 2 million." Um, yes! Yes, that is pertinent to my interests.