In which I prove I'm not dead.

So yeah, it's more than three months since I last posted to this blog. I've been head-down, banging out Brass and Steel: Inferno. Since I finished it in May, I've hacked about 10,000 words out of it and put a couple thousand new words in. Hopefully that's the end of the heavy revisions (replotting, etc). I'm also beta-testing my Firearms: A Quick and Dirty Guide for the Non-Shooting Writer document, version 2. And finally, I'm doing major surgery on my website to switch over to simplepie to aggregate this blog, my goodreads RSS feed, and twitter, so watch for those changes on the website coming soon. Also starting to cook ideas for Brass and Steel II in my head. Hoping to start storyboarding it out (new technique I learned at Taos) this week. I was at ChiCon 7, but participated very little (my wife and I were both not feeling very well, and the ChiCon folks didn't invite me to any panels when I offered.) Met up with a bunch of the Taos Toolbox 2011 gang, including Walter Jon Williams and Nancy Kress, our instructors, which was a lot of fun. Many pictures, especially of the Hugo ceremony, can be found here: Click These Words. Yes, new DSLR is sensitive enough to use the 500mm catadioptric lens under stage lighting. :) Finally, I will be attending MileHiCon again this year, and I am on panels. More info on that here as I continue to dig out. -JRS

MileHiCon 2011

As always, I will be at MileHiCon this year, and this year, I'll be joined by fellow author,co-author, and friend Jeff Duntemann, which should be fun.

My appearances in panels and such are as follows:

Friday, Mesa Verde B, 10:00pm: Can't Stop the Prose: Late Night Readings/Discussion. My guess is that this will be exactly what it sounds like - readings and discussion about them. Jeff's scheduled to be in this one, so expect readings from our double novel, /Drumlin Circus/ and /On Gossamer Wings/.

Saturday, Mesa Verde A, 4:00pm: Fan fiction. Does fan fiction still carry the stigma it used to for both fans and publishers, or has that changed? This ought to be interesting. My nano group in Colorado Springs had quite a few fan fiction writers, so it's a topic I've heard about, but not really dug into. Rest assured, I'll be digging between now and then.

Sunday, Wind River A, 10:00am: To FTL or not to FTL? A discussion of
relativity, fantasy vs. known science and other factors involved in that
venerable SF standby, faster than light travel. I've given this topic quite a lot of thought, especially lately since neutrinos may have been caught violating the speed limit. It's one of those tropes that's been around forever, and it's time we go after it with the dissecting tray, pins, and scalpel.

Sunday, Mesa Verde B, 1:00pm: Programming the Future. Where are computers headed and what will it mean for our future? A look at AI and other, more imminent, possibilities. Okay, I'm on a panel about computers and the future. No worries, right? Let me rephrase. I'm on a panel about computers and the future with Vernor Vinge. One of cyberpunk's founding fathers. Still, it's a subject I've given a lot of thought to in the process of writing my first two novels, and if memory serves, the only work I've done since I went pro that /doesn't/ have a machine intelligence in it someplace is /On Gossamer Wings/. And even that one's debatable. Should be fun.

See y'all there.

-JRS

Reading at Who Else! Books on Aug. 13 @3:00pm!

Reading! Jeff Duntemann and I will be joining mystery writer Mark Stevens for readings at Who Else! Books. Jeff and I will be reading from our respective short novels in Drumlin Circus/On Gossamer Wings, and Mark will be reading from his novel Buried By the Roan. For Jeff and me, this will be the first reading we've done since the premier at AnomalyCon (it's been a busy summer for both of us) and it will be great to get back in the saddle. Who Else! books has a number of copies of Drumlin Circus/On Gossamer Wings on hand, for those who wish to buy a hardcopy.

If you've never been to Who Else! books, it's a wonderful place, part of the Broadway Book Mall, and Ron and Nina Else have been staunch supporters of my previous work, and they are deeply and passionately involved in science fiction in the Denver area. Also really, really nice folks. Who Else! Books is in the Broadway Book Mall, at 200 S. Broadway, Denver, Colorado, 80209.

Belated Anomalycon Wrapup

I was surprisingly stressed out on the approach to AnomalyCon 2011. I've been into Steampunk since it first had a name (around the time Gibson and Sterling's Difference Engine hit the scene.) It's a genre I've enjoyed for quite a while, and the very first novel I completed for NaNoWriMo is in that genre. (It will probably never see the light of day.) Still, I had no real handle on what the crowd would be like, and Jeff and I, by vacuuming up any panel space that came free when the inevitable cancellations cropped up, had both a reading and a topic panel to give.

As it turned out, it was a lot of fun. The Tivoli Student Union building is a defunct 19th century brewery, still replete with much of the equipment - a large steam engine, keg management equipment, and so on - so it was a perfect setting for the con. It is also enormous, so when the con ran to three times the number of people the staffers reasonably expected to see, it still didn't feel crowded or harried, and we weren't getting the hairy eyeball from some hotel staff. The LLC running the con did a remarkable job for the first time around. Kudos to them.

Our presentation on Saturday was on Steampunk in post-future worlds. What this translates to is that Jeff's Drumlin world, while strictly by date, is set in the distant future. However, because the people of the colony have undergone a technological regression (they were never expecting to colonize a world from scratch, so the information they brought with them was on consumer grade electronics - which only lasted 10 years or so.) What our talk centered around was what forces made the original Victorian era occur, and if, given the same or similar values in the culture, it would recur in this future world. We concluded that not only would it, but between cultural DNA (they had lots of pictures and some pattern books) and manufacturing technology, it would likely /look/ very much like the Victorian era.

On Sunday, we did readings from our double novel: Drumlin Circus/On Gossamer Wings. It was reasonably well received, though we were across (and literally right below the balcony of) a somewhat more popular panel. Fortunately Jeff and I are both experienced readers who can fill a decent sized room with sheer lung power.

The downside of the Tivoli building is that the light is absolutely terrible in it. Getting good pictures inside the con was very much hit or miss, even with my mighty F1.2 Pentax-A lens, which is the fastest camera/lens package I own. So I don't really have any compelling pictures to share.

A fun con, and I'll most likely be going again next year, with intent to read and/or panelize.

-JRS

AnomalyCon

For those in the Denver metro area, I will be appearing at Anomaly Con on the 26th and 27th of this month, in support of Cooperwood Press's Copperwood Double #1. This book contains two stories set in Jeff Duntemann's Drumlin world, which I've talked about before. On Side one is Jeff's novella Drumlin Circus and side two of the double-book is my novella On Gossamer Wings.

If you've never seen one of the old Ace doubles, double novels work like this:
On side one of the book, you have cover art, and a short-ish novel. Flip the book so the spine printing is now upside down, and instead of the back cover, you have different cover art, and a different novel. The two novels meet in the middle, one upside down from the other so you know where one ends and the other begins. Page numbers go from the side you started on toward the center. In the center was a catalog of other titles from the same publisher. Double novels often contained abridged versions of the novels within, so they'd both fit in the relatively small number of pages allowed. (Neither Drumlin Circus nor On Gossamer Wings has been abridged in any fashion, as they were written with this format in mind.)

Novellas run, according to Wikipedia, somewhere in the huge span between 10,000 words and 70,000 words. Novellas are fun to write. They're middle-length stories where you can experiment with writing style, with story lines, with characters, without the screamingly tight word constraints of short fiction, and yet without committing the time and intricate story telling of a novel. They're fun to read too, since you can read them at one sitting and still have time to do other things the same day.

Unfortunately, novella length fiction is typically impossible to sell. Publishers usually want either short fiction of less than 7000 words for print in magazines, or they want 90,000 to 110,000 word novels - or longer if you're Stephen King. Double Novels give you /two/ novella length pieces in one cover. If you've never read a novella before, you're in for a treat.

As for working with Jeff on this one, it's been a pleasure. Jeff's an old hand at Science Fiction, and a damn good one. He's been on the final ballot for a Hugo (twice) and he's been selling short science fiction since 1974. His first novel, The Cunning Blood came out in 2006. He's also a good friend. You've seen his name in my blog before.

We're still hammering out the final details of the book, and the deadline is tight, but we should have copies in hand to sell at the con. Look for the guys in the top hats. Our panel reading is Sunday, the 27th, at 1:00pm. I'll put up another posting here when I know where in the con the reading will be.

-JRS

MileHiCon Followup

MileHiCon 42 has come and gone. We gave out about 240 light sticks that look remarkably like the graphic at the top of my website (at least until I get round to the full overhaul that the website needs), talked with lots of people, bought art, and generally had a good time.

Highlights:
Robert Stikmanz. He's got a new short story out in The Sorcerer's Scrolls Magazine called Death on the Toilet. It's Robert's usual combination of absurd humor, deep character, and intensive story, and highly recommended - I went to the reading.

Ron Sering's story K.O.T.L., which he read at the same reading with Rob Stikmanz, is also very good. It was published in Cemetary Dance Magazine #41, in 2002. The reading was a trifle rushed, probably due to time constraints.

The two panels I was on - Psychology of Fandom and Bionics Now and in the Future were good panels, with a group of excellent panelists. It was interesting in the latter to hear all my panelists agree that the real thing holding back the development of bionics is lack of government and industrial will. My usual bleak view of industry is that if there's a market, someone will make money at it. The idea that nobody's willing to fund blue-sky research on an area that would be a license to print money if it pans out seems awfully short sighted, even for industry and government. But, I suppose, nobody ever went broke underestimating Industry and Government's short-sightedness. As a side note, DARPA, the organization that brought you the Internet, is working on the Luke arm - a fully neuro-controlled upper extremity with full sense feedback within the next ten years. It's named for the hand Luke Skywalker got after his first duel with Darth Vader.

And then came the exquisite corpse reading. When I first saw it in the program, I assumed it was a horror themed reading and prepared my short story, Brass and Steel accordingly. After a day or so, I started to wonder if Exquisite Corpse wasn't a book title, to be read Eye of Argon style, where you go around the group reading as much as you can stomach, then hand it off to the next person.

As it turned out, there is a novel entitled Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite, and it is indeed a novel for the strong of stomach. I've been dismissing it all weekend as serial killer slash fic, and there is a great deal of that in the story, though there's somewhat more lurking below the surface. I'm not sure I'll finish it to find out, though.

What an Exquisite Corpse reading is, as it turns out, is a reading where you bring some piece of work or other to the reading. Read a paragraph or so, and the next person jumps in with a paragraph or so from a completely different work, usually with hilarious results. My lovely wife M found me a copy of the novelization of Star Trek 5, and parts of it, when bolted on to Laurel K. Hamilton's rather er... sticky narratives recast the paragraphs I read into whole new meanings. Speaking of slash fic…

So kudos to Rose for some very fun panels, a shout-out to Rob Stikmanz, the panelists of both panels, Donita K. Paul, with whom I shared my reading slot, and to Donato Giancola, the artist guest of honor, for a drawing that I didn't buy but that gave me a whole new vector to take the current novel in. A virtual light-stick (see the top of my website) to everyone who somehow didn't get a real one from me, and I'll be back next year.

-JRS

MileHiCon Schedule

It's MileHiCon time again, and once again, I'm on the schedule. :) So if you're looking for me, here's where and when to look:

4:00pm Friday - Wind River B - Author reading with Donita K. Paul.

3:00pm Saturday - Wind River B - Psychology of Fandom Panel


11:00pm Saturday - 12th floor - Exquisite Corpse Reading with A. Bugg, T Kroenung, and N. Leyba.

2:00pm Sunday - Wind River A - Bionics now and in the future (I'm moderating this one)

This year, I'll be handing out some promotional thingies, starting at my reading on Friday, and after that there will be a basket of them out somewhere. I'll probably save some to give out at the Exquisite Corpse reading too.

Hope to see y'all there.

-JRS