Where to find me and what I have been up to!
...reticulating splines...
Hello, CD Listeners!
This is a free edition of this newsletter. For paid subscribers, there’s an additional installment today, entitled “How To Become An Award-Winning Writer In Seven Steps.”
I’m not claiming they’re easy steps!
I’m currently in scenic Gunnison, Colorado, where I’m the genre guest lecturer for the West Colorado State University low-residency MFA program. I met most of the students at a mixer last tonight: today they get to ask me anything.
It seems like a great bunch and I am very excited.
The coffeemaker in my hotel room is busted (they promised me a new one) and I had to fly United to get here, so I’m still reeling from the $25 “not being strapped to the wing of the aircraft” fee and the $15 “cabin pressurization is for losers” fee.
I watched Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase on the plane. As a Nancy Drew fan from the age of six, it pains me to admit that you can skip this one. It has a few charming moments and some good dialogue but uhnnnnn I’m not sure juvenile delinquent Nancy is really working for me.
By the way, my spouse, the esteemed Scott Lynch, has started his own newsletter over here: https://scottlynch.substack.com/
He’s currently ranting about Game of Thrones. It’s pretty interesting.
I will be signing and reading along with the estimable Cadwell Turnbull, debut author of the brutal, thoughtful, evocative Caribbean science fiction novel The Lesson on July 24 at the Silver Unicorn Bookstore in Acton MA.
His book reminds me of Nalo Hopkinson’s The New Moon’s Arms and Octavia Butler’s Kindred in its themes and layerings. It’s something else, and if you come on down to Silver Unicorn Books you can get a signed copy—and a signed copy of my own The Red-Stained Wings or Ancestral Night!
From 14-18 August I will be at WorldCon in Dublin, Ireland. I’m doing a few program events—check the schedule for times and dates!
I’ve also agreed to some 2020 appearances. So far, these include Marscon in January in Williamsburg, VA; Hal-Con from 11-12 April in Tokyo, Japan; 4th Street Fantasy in June in Minneapolis, Readercon in Quincy, MA in July, and ConZealand in Wellington in July-August.
The updated list is available on my Appearances page.
As for actually work that involves typing and stuff, well—I just handed in an introduction for a new edition of Stanislaw Lem’s Memoirs of a Space Traveler, out from MIT Press in 2020. They let me engage critically with the texts, which is something that I really enjoy and don’t get to do enough of these days.
I’ve also sold a couple of novelettes that will be coming out in 2020, because 2019 is more than half over already and I don’t even know how that happened.
“Hacksilver,” a trickstery Norse fantasy about a guy you’ll be seeing more of, will be appearing in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction sometime next year. “On Safari In R’lyeh and Carcosa with Gun and Camera” will be at Tor.com next year as well.
More immediately forthcoming novelettes are the time-travel murder mystery “A Time to Reap” in Uncanny later this year, and “Erase, Erase, Erase,” in the mega fall issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
I seem to be in kind of a novelette mode currently.
I also handed in Machine, aka White Space Book 2. It should have a round of edits and a round of copyedits and then ideally will be in your hot little hands next year! Which means it’s time for me to start serious work on The Origin of Storms, the conclusion to the Lotus Kingdoms trilogy. I’m very excited about it, as I expect there will be even more dragons.
In addition to The Lesson, I’ve been reading Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Arthur C. Clarke award winner Dogs of War, which is a heartbreaking story of war, greed, exploitation, and intense loyalty, displaying an immense command of prose style. (Speaking of prose styles and Clarke winners, mad props to Tade Thompson, this year’s winner for his brilliant Rosewater.)
I’ve also just started This is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, who seem to have knocked it absolutely out of the park with a darkly humorous queer time-travel romance about all the apocalypses. All the apocalypses, everywhere.
I’m also reading (yes, I always have too many books going at once) Molly Gloss’s Wild Life which is chewy as heck and has sasquatches, Sujata Massey’s period Indian mystery The Satapur Moonstone, and Lisa Rosner’s The Anatomy Murders, on a recommendation from Sarah Monette.
Well, that should keep me going through the next plane ride anyway.
So I guess that’s pretty much it for me. I’m hydrating and staying out of that high desert sun as much as possiblem never fear—and my neck has almost stopped hurting from the plane ride. Aoon there will be more tea.
Talk to you next week,
Best,
Bear