Novel Progress and Other Irons

The Novel
I’ve been working my way through the first draft of what I’m calling my first novel. I have written a couple other long – um – things that, while technically novels, well, let’s just leave them in the drawer filed under “experience.”

Izzy Crow is the working title and the name of the protagonist. Here’s the proto logline: 

Freed from a powerful spell after centuries, a fairy tale princess must learn to live in the modern world.

I have a lot of irons in the fire, so I’ve set what I hope is a reasonable goal of completing a chapter a week. I’ve added a word count progress bar to the sidebar in order to keep myself accountable to y’all. 

Other Irons

I’m about halfway through the University of Iowa’s How Writer’sWrite Fiction mooc and really enjoying the experience. The syllabus is well thought out and the lectures have been useful and thought provoking. While I have not spent a lot of time on the teaching team discussion boards there are plenty of opportunities to interact with both teachers and students

The writing assignments are thoughtful and challenging enough to have me stretching my writerly muscles. It’s genre friendly but literary over genre, which for me who writes in both, is a refreshing change, and just the thing I needed to shake up my writing.

The feedback/critique element is a bit hit or miss, but I expected this. (All of the feedback on the writing assignments is student on student. The teaching team is in place to support the lecture discussion threads.) This is a "massive" and "open" course, so there are all kinds of people participating for all kinds of reasons and at all levels of ability.

I think what I am enjoying the most is connecting with writers from all over the world. I hope to not only generate some material that will be converted into complete short stories over the next few weeks, but also to form some budding friendships with other writers who I would have otherwise never met.

The Ecotones Anthology

My story, The Silva, will be appearing in Ecotones, SFFWorld's  fourth annual anthology.

The table of contents has been announced, and boy howdy am I in some amazing company: Ken Liu, Tobias Buckell, and Lauren Beukes!

The kickstarter for this anthology will be debuting next week, so you’ll be hearing more about it and all the great stories within soon!

Read My Post-Scarcity Day-After-Thanksgiving Tale at Devilfish Review

The idea for Black Friday came to me while contemplating the ruination of one of my favorite holidays. Thanksgiving is like the easy-going uncle of holidays, it shows up a couple months into the school year grind for a long weekend of cooking and eating while near continuous football games play in the background. Not that it can't be tricky, centered as it is around sitting down with relations with whom you may or may not see eye to eye. If sharing an annual meal includes an argument or even a family dust up, well, that too is an American tradition. Think about how many times a family gathered around the Thanksgiving table has been featured on the stage, in movies and TV dramas? Annual ordeal, priceless family bonding, or both--Thanksgiving is a touchstone of American culture. 

And I don't even like turkey! Our family tradition, in fact, is to create our own quirky meal (alternatives have included quail, octopus, and lobster). Of course we prepare so much food that we can eat of the leftovers for the rest of the long, lazy weekend. We also make a point of not shopping at all for the entire weekend. All that mindless consumerism, the crowds chasing after phyrric savings--it's bad for the digestion.

While the Black Friday tradition is fading, it's only because stores are starting to open on Thanksgiving day. Sad. 

So, that's how this story got its start. Although I'm not exactly sure how the tooth fairy got involved.

I'm delighted that this story found a home in Devilfish Review among so many other great stories and poems!