Archive for August 16th, 2008

8/16/08: O hai

I still owe you a Worldcon report, but here’s a brief “I’m not dead” report consisting of several miscellaneous items.

I came home from Denver to a mile-long to-do list. I’ve been terribly busy and productive in the last week, but not so much with the writing. Lots of “writing-related program activities,” though, including galleys, submissions, self-promotion, and such.

I was on jury duty. As it happened, I was called down for one jury but not selected. But I have done my civic duty.

At a Worldcon panel, Tom Whitmore defined “famous” as “more people know you than you know people.” (This implies that anyone with a poor memory is “famous,” but never mind that.) Apparently, though, I am famous, because after I mentioned in the jury panel that I am a science fiction writer two people came up to me to talk with me about it. And when I deposited my most recent check at the bank, the teller looked at the check and said “what’s this about a Nebula award?” so I explained to him that the story hadn’t won but will be appearing in the annual Nebula anthology. I gave each of these three people a Space Magic promotional card. I feel so professional. (But see above about writing-related program activities vs. actual writing.)

Now that it’s been officially announced, I can reveal that I sold short story “Sun Magic, Earth Magic” to new webzine Beneath Ceaseless Skies. The first draft of this story was written for a challenge from my Writers of the Future 2002 alumni group, which was to write a story in 24 hours on the topic of caving or cave diving. It was inspired by the story of caver Floyd Collins, who was trapped in Sand Cave in 1925. Another story written for the same challenge, “We Are the Cat” by Carl Fredrick, was published in Asimov’s.

As previously mentioned, I will be appearing in San Francisco on September 20, as part of the SF in SF reading series. The new news here is that my co-presenter will be Nick Mamatas.