North Continent Ribbon
Valiant readers,
I have news in the shape of a book! Neon Hemlock Press will be publishing my interwoven collection of short stories North Continent Ribbon in 2024.
Neon Hemlock publishes smart, weird, experimental, sexy, queer stories. When I was thinking about where the Nakharat collection might fit in, this press was my very first choice. I'm delighted to be working with them!
There are two natural questions that arise here. One is a business question: "How did you sell the collection?" The other is, "What is North Continent Ribbon actually about?"
The business question is much easier to answer. There are standard processes for selling novels or short stories, but single-author science fiction short-story collections don't have as clear a publishing and marketing niche. Collections like mine, where the stories are connected in a broader arc, are even rarer. That means, if you want to publish one, the process is to talk to people.
As it happens, when I submitted a version of "Closer than your kidneys" with extra space armour to the forthcoming anthology Luminescent Machinations, dave ring wrote the nicest rejection letter I've ever received, on the theme of, "I love your writing, but this story isn't close enough to the anthology theme." As I was finishing the final novelette in North Continent Ribbon, I contacted Neon Hemlock to see if they'd be interested in reading a collection of stories in the same universe. I expected that the answer would be either "No" or "Yes, during our upcoming novella call." But the answer was an unconditional "Yes, please!" This made for a flurry of last-minute edits. The final edits were made at a research conference in Edinburgh, where I spent lots of time huddled in my hotel room, flipping between my manuscript and a terminal where I was valiantly attempting to compute a very large differential equation. On the last day, manuscript completed and math talk disposed of, I went for a ramble and looked at the sky.
And eventually the answer was yes!
Because my process of selling the collection was so informal, I didn't have to go through the process of honing a pitch. This is all to the good--except now it means the collection is harder to summarize. What is North Continent Ribbon about? It's about the feeling of being on a planet that isn't ours, in a society that has not existed. It's about work and homesickness and fury at injustice. It's about yearning toward the beauty of someone you admire. It's about trains.
Seriously, though, it's about trains. Also bicycle cabs, buses, spaceships, and a space elevator named Chinuyat.
I did, in full disclosure, try writing a pitch. Here's how it began:
On Nakharat, every contract is a ribbon and every ribbon is a secret, braided tight and tucked behind a veil. Artificial intelligence threatens the tightly-woven network. Stability depends on giving each machine a human conscience--but the humans are not volunteers.
Chinuyat is a convicted felon: she was framed and convicted for forgery, and sentenced to be the conscience of an elevator car as punishment. The long arc of North Continent Ribbon, the story that ties all the stories together, is the story of where this system came from, why it seemed moral or convenient to trap humans in machines, and how people start to fight back.
Maybe Kosmas looking portentous is the right note to end on.
Yours, hopefully,
Ursula.