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Good news on the short fiction front. I've sold an 11,200 word novelette, "Bones of Air, Bones of Stone" to Gardner Dozois and George RR Martin, co-editors of OLD VENUS, an original anthology that will be published by Bantam Books, publication date still TBD (but I would suspect it'll be late 2014.)
I love writing short fiction, but as I've said before, I'm not one of those writers who can work on three or four projects at a time. I am a writer of Very Little Brain, and thus it's difficult for me to keep one story in my head, much less two or three at a time. I'm usually working on a novel that's due and nothing else. The exception to this is when I receive an interesting invitation to write for an anthology or magazine, and I'll set aside the current work-in-progress long enough to produce a shorter work. I've done that with several original anthologies over the last several years, with various volumes of George's WILD CARDS series, and for the occasional magazine invite (Mike Resnick was especially persuasive with his challenge to write a story for Galaxy's Edge magazine; I'll long remember his admonition, after I'd accepted, of "either one short story by Christmas, or a testicle on New Years…").
Generally, the muse visits me mostly under the duress of deadlines.
OLD VENUS is part of a larger project that Gardner and George have been working on. Their anthology OLD MARS (which will be out from Bantam Books in October this year) looks to be the companion piece to OLD VENUS. OLD MARS is an anthology of original stories set on the Mars of the 19th and early 20th century, before scientific advances showed us that Mars was a dead and dry planet, that the glorious canals and possible Martian civilization that built them were chimeras, and that the Mars of Burroughs and Wells and Bradbury (ah, the beautiful Bradbury stories of Mars…) were impossible.
OLD VENUS is to be the same: stories set on the Venus that might have been, the Venus of early science fiction. This Venus was the world of eternal cloud and rain, of vast oceans and tropical jungles and deep swamps where all manner of curious and strange creatures might be found, before our probes showed those enigmatic clouds were sulfur dioxide and not water vapor, that the atmosphere was mostly carbon dioxide, and that the surface would more closely resemble hell than anything terrestrial.
It's on that older vision of Venus that "Bones of Air, Bones of Stone" is set -- I hope you enjoy my story and the anthology when it eventually comes out. I know my tale is going to be among fine, fine company!
I love writing short fiction, but as I've said before, I'm not one of those writers who can work on three or four projects at a time. I am a writer of Very Little Brain, and thus it's difficult for me to keep one story in my head, much less two or three at a time. I'm usually working on a novel that's due and nothing else. The exception to this is when I receive an interesting invitation to write for an anthology or magazine, and I'll set aside the current work-in-progress long enough to produce a shorter work. I've done that with several original anthologies over the last several years, with various volumes of George's WILD CARDS series, and for the occasional magazine invite (Mike Resnick was especially persuasive with his challenge to write a story for Galaxy's Edge magazine; I'll long remember his admonition, after I'd accepted, of "either one short story by Christmas, or a testicle on New Years…").
Generally, the muse visits me mostly under the duress of deadlines.
OLD VENUS is part of a larger project that Gardner and George have been working on. Their anthology OLD MARS (which will be out from Bantam Books in October this year) looks to be the companion piece to OLD VENUS. OLD MARS is an anthology of original stories set on the Mars of the 19th and early 20th century, before scientific advances showed us that Mars was a dead and dry planet, that the glorious canals and possible Martian civilization that built them were chimeras, and that the Mars of Burroughs and Wells and Bradbury (ah, the beautiful Bradbury stories of Mars…) were impossible.
OLD VENUS is to be the same: stories set on the Venus that might have been, the Venus of early science fiction. This Venus was the world of eternal cloud and rain, of vast oceans and tropical jungles and deep swamps where all manner of curious and strange creatures might be found, before our probes showed those enigmatic clouds were sulfur dioxide and not water vapor, that the atmosphere was mostly carbon dioxide, and that the surface would more closely resemble hell than anything terrestrial.
It's on that older vision of Venus that "Bones of Air, Bones of Stone" is set -- I hope you enjoy my story and the anthology when it eventually comes out. I know my tale is going to be among fine, fine company!
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