And though there's so much to do, there's only so many hours in the day, hey hey.
Hey, folks,
Just a little check-in from the other side of 4th Street (survived! No covid reports!) to let you know that my next appearance will be at Readercon in Quincy MA the weekend of July 14th.
It’s been a busy few weeks, and it’s going to be even busier coming up—Spola (the new mare) arrives on July 8th and Scott and I need to go get some instruction on handling her a couple of days before, so that’s two trips to Vermont next week. Plus all the time spent in the car on the way to Minneapolis and back, and I feel a little permanently car-seat-shaped.
I’m chipping away at a novella for another Sekrit Projekt, but I’m taking today off fiction writing to let my brain drain a little. I’ve got a couple of months until it’s due—but Gencon and Readercon are sandwiched into that time. So I’m gonna have to get my afterburners working.
Ormr is hating the humidity, which has been crushing since we got home, and the cats are overjoyed to have us back and are a little clingy. We had excellent catsitters while we were away and I even remembered to throw out most of the perishable food before we left, except for two tomatoes in the fruit bowl. (oh no.)
Before we left I hit about the halfway point in a murder mystery, sequel to the one that’s out on submission. My other projects for the year are going to be revising The Folded Sky once I have editorial input, and hopefully writing a chunk of Angel Maker, which is the full-length sequel to Karen Memory.
I will probably be kickstarting that once it’s drafted, because Tor doesn’t want it: their official word is that Steampunk Is Over. I tried to convince them that Well Aksually It’s A Lesbian Adventure Novel but no dice—but we all know it’s a Lesbian Adventure Novel, right? Anyway, Priya and Karen will be back, I hope in 2024.
And I also hope there will be some continuing adventures after that, as I’ve picked out the historical cameo and plot for a third book, which doesn’t have a decent title yet.
Scott and I have been listening to the audiobook of Alastair Reynold’s House of Suns in the car—we’re nearly done—and I’m reminded that if anybody in the current crop of my colleagues can just throw big idea spaghetti at the wall a la Jack Vance, it’s Al. Seriously, he just tosses out the kind of stuff most of us would build an entire book around as a passing reference. It’s pretty awesome.
Apparently I’m in a whodunnit mood, because I finished Malka Older’s The Mimicking of Known Successes, which is the third or fourth Sapphic speculative Sherlock Holmes riff I’ve read recently. I liked it a lot. The tone and voice reminded me rather a lot, in a good way, of Katherine Addison’s The Angel of the Crows, another Sapphic speculative Sherlock Holmes riff.
I guess you railroad when it’s railroading time.
I also just finished reading Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Spare Man, which is a nice play-fair whodunnit in space, using a bunch of Space Weirdness as plot points. I think it’s a step up for MRK, who was already operating at a pretty high level.
In other news, I’m wading through a pile of doctor appointments trying to get better treatment for that food intolerance and my psoriatic arthritis. Of course the rheumatology appointment I waited a year for got pushed back to August and the immunologist is booking out to December…
What if we had a functional health care system in this country. Hmm.
Hope this finds you well and surviving the summer heat/storms/humidity/wildfires/smoke/drought/everything. What have you been reading?
Best,
Bear