It always amazes me how getting a couple of big, mentally taxing projects (like, say, a major novelette commission and the Very Important Third Book Of A Trilogy) squared away opens out the horizons. There are suddenly more hours in the day, and more energy to get stuff done in those hours.

Creative work is really emotionally taxing. The more ambitious it is, the more taxing. I’ve been struggling, the past couple of months, to get the basics done–dishes washed, bills paid, exercise exercised. Now that the book and one of May’s two novelettes are done, suddenly my head is full of room.

Case in point: after yesterday’s marathon work session, I’m achy and exhausted and this morning’s run was kinda brutal (and truncated by two families of geese, who I was unwilling to disturb in order to run along the trail they were hanging out on) but I still got All The Procrastinated Errands Done this morning, and more will happen this afternoon.

And I’ve reread what I have on the month’s other novelette, which is actually probably going to be a short novella, and I like it! It’s good!

I just have to figure out the twist and the rest of the caper, and I’m good to go.

Brave companions of the road: one of two families of feathered dinosaurs encountered on this morning’s jog. The other was a two-parent household with younger goslings, still in the mottled yellow and brown stage. I decided to let them have the path, preferring my arms unbroken.

Excelsior!

Ding dong, the draft is dead.

That’s “The Heart’s Filthy Lesson,” handed in at exactly the contracted length (10K: The manuscript is 10K manuscript (40 pages in manuscript format) ~9.3K MS Word.)

This old features writer still has enough column-inch damage that it feels awfully good to dial it after running 25% long on that damned book last month. *g*

Now there’s just one more June 1 deadline I should really try to hit. And, oh yeah, a cross-country flight, two ten hour drives, and a convention guest gig in the middle.

Where’s my fucking Wonder Woman icon?

Oh yeah, I’ll be at Up In The Aether in Detroit this weekend with my beloved Mr. Lynch! Come out and play!

***
travel and appearances 2013:

Up in the Aether: Detroit, MI, May 23-27 2013
4th Street Fantasy: Minneapolis, MN, June 21-24, 2013
American Library Association (guest speaker): Chicago IL, June 28-30 2013
ConVergence: Minneapolis, MN July 4-8, 2013
Readercon: Burlington, MA, July 11-14, 2013
Space City Con: Houston, TX August 2-4, 2013 (Literary Guest of Honor)
Lone Star Con (San Antonio Worldcon): San Antonio, TX, August 29-September 1 2013
Context: Columbus, OH, September 27-29 2013 (GoH)
Signing (and Scott Lynch’s The Republic of Thieves book launch!) : Pandemonium, Central Square, Cambridge MA, October 8th 2013
NYC ComiCon: NY NY, October 11th 2013 (only)
Viable Paradise: Oak Bluffs MA, October 12-16 2013
World Fantasy Convention: Brighton England UK, October 31-November 3, 2013

2013:

OWW EC: April 15, 2013
Popular Science flash: April 22, 2013
Steles of the Sky final: May 1, 2013
“The Heart’s Filthy Lesson”: July 1, 2013
“Dark Leader”: April 2013
“Green and Dying”: June 1, 2013
Hieroglyph story: August 10, 2013
“Something’s Gotta Eat T. rexes“: October 2013

An Apprentice to Elves: ?

2014:

Karen Memory: January 6, 2014

travel and appearances:
RavenCon: North Chesterfield, Virginia, April 25-27th, 2014 (Guest of Honor)
ConVergence: Minneapolis, MN, July 3-7, 2014
Finncon: Jyväskylä, Finland, July 11-13, 2014 (Guest of Honor)
Worldcon: London, England, August 14-17, 2014

No fixed deadline:

Smile (unless its name is actually Salt Water)
Unsuitable Metal
Gotham Jazz
Untitled Gangland Urban Fantasy That Keeps Bugging Me
“Gallowglas”
“Untitled Space Opera Thingy” aka “Periastron”
“Posthumous Jonson”
“Steel”
“On Safari in R’lyeh and Carcosa with Gun and Camera”
“This Chance Planet”
“Flush”
“Coronado”
“Patience and Fortitude”
“A Time to Reap”

I am so very stuck on how this character outsmarts a nemesis. I’d go write the other story, but I’m stuck on how those characters outsmart their nemesis.

Basically, I have made the critical error of trying to write stories about people being smart, which means I have to be smart.

*sigh*

I have my first pair of new glasses since 2009. I can see leaves on trees! And freckles on the lovely person who helped fit my glasses!

In other news, I am apparently nominated for four separate Locus awards in four separate Locus award categories: Novella, novelette, short story, and collection. All three of the short fiction offerings are available in their entirety, for free, online. You may read them here, if you like:

Novella: “In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns“

Novelette: “Faster Gun“

Short Story: “The Deeps of the Sky“

Congrats to all the other nominees! Here’s the complete list:

SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL

• The Hydrogen Sonata, Iain M. Banks (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
• Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen)
• Caliban’s War, James S.A. Corey (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
• 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
• Redshirts, John Scalzi (Tor; Gollancz)

FANTASY NOVEL

• The Killing Moon, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
• The Drowning Girl, Caitlín R. Kiernan (Roc)
• Glamour in Glass, Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor)
• Hide Me Among the Graves, Tim Powers (Morrow; Corvus)
• The Apocalypse Codex, Charles Stross (Ace; Orbit UK)

YOUNG ADULT BOOK

• The Drowned Cities, Paolo Bacigalupi (Little, Brown; Atom)
• Pirate Cinema, Cory Doctorow (Tor Teen)
• Railsea, China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan)
• Dodger, Terry Pratchett (Harper; Doubleday UK)
• The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There, Catherynne M. Valente (Feiwel and Friends; Much-in-Little ’13)

FIRST NOVEL

• Throne of the Crescent Moon, Saladin Ahmed (DAW; Gollancz ’13)
• vN, Madeline Ashby (Angry Robot US; Angry Robot UK)
• Seraphina, Rachel Hartman (Random House; Doubleday UK)
• The Games, Ted Kosmatka (Del Rey; Titan)
• Alif the Unseen, G. Willow Wilson (Grove; Corvus)

NOVELLA

• “In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns”, Elizabeth Bear (Asimov’s 1/12)
• On a Red Station, Drifting, Aliette de Bodard (Immersion)
• After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, Nancy Kress (Tachyon)
• “The Stars Do Not Lie”, Jay Lake (Asimov’s 10-11/12)
• The Boolean Gate, Walter Jon Williams (Subterranean)

NOVELETTE

• “Faster Gun”, Elizabeth Bear (Tor.com 8/12)
• “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi”, Pat Cadigan (Edge of Infinity)
• “Close Encounters”, Andy Duncan (The Pottawatomie Giant & Other Stories)
• “Fake Plastic Trees”, Caitlín R. Kiernan (After)
• “The Lady Astronaut of Mars”, Mary Robinette Kowal (Rip-Off!)

SHORT STORY

• “The Deeps of the Sky”, Elizabeth Bear (Edge of Infinity)
• “Immersion”, Aliette de Bodard (Clarkesworld 6/12)
• “Mantis Wives”, Kij Johnson (Clarkesworld 8/12)
• “Elementals”, Ursula K. Le Guin (Tin House Fall ’12)
• “Mono No Aware”, Ken Liu (The Future Is Japanese)

ANTHOLOGY

• After, Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling, eds. (Hyperion)
• The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-ninth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed. (St. Martin’s Griffin; Robinson as The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25)
• The Future Is Japanese, Nick Mamatas & Masumi Washington, eds. (Haikasoru)
• Edge of Infinity, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Solaris US; Solaris UK)
• The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Six, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Night Shade)

COLLECTION

• The Best of Kage Baker, Kage Baker (Subterranean)
• Shoggoths in Bloom, Elizabeth Bear (Prime)
• At the Mouth of the River of Bees, Kij Johnson (Small Beer)
• The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories Volume One: Where on Earth and Volume Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands, Ursula K. Le Guin (Small Beer)
• The Dragon Griaule, Lucius Shepard (Subterranean)

MAGAZINE

• Asimov’s
• F&SF
• Tor.com
• Clarkesworld
• Subterranean

PUBLISHER

• Tor
• Subterranean Press
• Orbit
• Baen
• Angry Robot

EDITOR

• John Joseph Adams
• Ellen Datlow
• Gardner Dozois
• Jonathan Strahan
• Ann & Jeff VanderMeer

ARTIST

• Donato Giancola
• Stephan Martiniere
• John Picacio
• Shaun Tan
• Michael Whelan

NON-FICTION

• An Exile on Planet Earth, Brian Aldiss (Bodleian Library)
• Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010, Damien Broderick & Paul Di Filippo, eds. (NonStop)
• Distrust That Particular Flavor, William Gibson (Putnam)
• The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, Edward James & Farah Mendlesohn, eds. (Cambridge University Press)
• Some Remarks, Neal Stephenson (Morrow)

ART BOOK

• Spectrum 19: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art, Cathy Fenner & Arnie Fenner, eds. (Underwood)
• Trolls, Brian Froud & Wendy Froud (Abrams)
• Tarzan: The Centennial Celebration, Scott Tracy Griffin (Titan)
• J.R.R. Tolkien: The Art of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, Wayne G. Hammond & Christina Scull, eds. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• Steampunk: An Illustrated History, Brian J. Robb (Aurum)

And I’m interviewed at Amazon’s Omnivoracious regarding the awards.

Excelsior!

Let’s talk about the fact that Amanda Berry is a hero, and that she rescued herself, her daughter, and two other women from a horrible situation.

Let the record show that she did what she had to do, and if she hadn’t, those four women would still be in that house.

Because the media seem to want to cast her and the other women only as victims, and that narrative is a lie.

Let’s talk about the fact that Charles Ramsey is a hero, too. Because he saw a person obviously in distress, and he acted. And the fact that that person was white and female, and that he was black and male, living on a job as a dishwasher, and that his police record would be brought up afterward, definitely entered his consciousness; and he did it anyway. Because he saw a person who needed help.

That does not decrease his heroism. It increases it.

Let the record show that he did what he had to do, and if he hadn’t, those four women would still be in that house.

And Ariel Castro might be getting away with it for another fifteen years.

And now I’m speaking here as an abuse survivor.

That Mr. Ramsey allegedly has a record for domestic violence is not beside the point; it is the point. It’s people who abuse other people, and it’s people who help other people. And people can learn better, or make a mistake one time and do something to repair it another.

Ramsey doesn’t have to be perfect to be a hero. Berry didn’t have to be perfect to be a hero. Michelle Knight was a hero when she delivered Ms. Berry’s baby daughter, with no experience and no support, and she doesn’t have to be perfect for that to stand, either. Gina DeJesus has no doubt done some pretty heroic stuff in the last ten years or so as well.

Our absolutist cultural narratives do nobody a service. People do not have to be perfect and blameless to be worthy of respect and admiration; they only have to be trying.

And one of the effects of that absolutism is to tell survivors who are not perfect and blameless (and who is, and who who has been abused can see themselves as perfect?) then they are somehow villains too, or responsible, or that they bear guilt for what they’ve suffered.

Another effect is that people who are capable of making a change may not, because they are scared of how they will be perceived if they aren’t perfect.

***

(As for Mr. Ramsey’s drug charges: if you don’t understand the interplay of race, class, and drug-law harassment, I suggest you do some reading, and understand that middle class suburban white people can get away with a lot more than some black guy from Cleveland.)

It’s finally Spring in New England (I got out of Wisconsin just in time, apparently; I beat the blizzard by a day) and I get to be home with my dog for a whole three weeks before I head back to the Midwest.

With spring come the historical re-enactors. There’s a pile of them camped out on the town common currently, firing off muskets and terrifying my poor dog. He would like you to know that he is not a gun dog. He doesn’t mind thunderstorms in the least, but the musketry was bad enough that he had to climb into my lap and tremble.

I was half tempted to go out there and give them a piece of my mind, but I suppose it wouldn’t be neighborly. And they probably have a permit or something.

The bugler playing Taps horribly was more frightening to me. But I’m not a Briard.

ETA: Oh, god, now they’re playing fiddle. Badly.

I delivered the publication version of Steles of the Sky at about 4 AM this morning. It goes to production now, and if all goes well, next April you will have a lovely bundle of pages or pixels in your hot little hand. (I’ve already seen sketches for the cover art. Oh man. This is not going to suck. The roughs are currently my computer desktop. Thank you, Donato Giancola, for another gorgeous cover.)

It’s the longest of the three books at 153,000 words Microsoft word count, and about 190,000 words manuscript word count.

Why the big disparity? Well, here. Because I keep getting asked what the difference between a word processor’s word count and “manuscript word count” is, I explain.

No, take too long. I sum up.

Your word processor will generally give you a word count when you click the proper button. This word count will vary from word processor to word processor, because Scrivener uses a different algorithm than MS Word than Wordperfect than Open Office than what have you. How can algorithms vary? Because wordcount is a judgment call. Is fire-fighter one word or two? Do we count letters and punctuation? MS Word thinks a hash mark for a scene break is a word. Not all word processors agree.

Manuscript word count is calculated a different way. It is not a measure of the number of words in a piece, but the number of “words,” where “words” are bundles of five characters and a space. Like column inches, it’s meant to tell an editor or a compositor how much space the piece is going to take up in a finished work. So a page of dialogue may have far fewer words than a page of description, but the same number of “words.” (Dialogue, you see, has a lot of white space.)

In the era of typewriters, you didn’t calculate your word count by counting every word on the page. You calculated it by setting your margins such that your page had either 24 60 character lines on it, or 25 50 character lines. This gives you (very roughly), ~250 words to a page. (This is one reason why standard manuscript formatting calls for a fixed width serif font such as Courier, double-spaced. Another reason is that fixed width serif fonts, double-spaced, give editors and copyeditors and compositors room to scribble all over your manuscript. Another reason is that you get used to reading it, and picking out errors becomes easier. Proportional fonts (where the letters are different widths) look prettier and save space, but also hide errors and make it harder to guess how much space (how many pages or column inches) a given story will take. Sans-serif fonts make it harder to tell a 1 from an I from an l.

In the ebook/webzine era, the industry seems to be transitioning from manuscript word count to MS word count in general–both in terms of payment for stories that pay by the word (alas! because we get paid more for manuscript counts: they average 15% higher, especially if you’re a sesquipedalian bastard like me) and in terms of award eligibility categories.

It doesn’t matter so much with novels, where you’re not paid by the word and the chief issue is the price of printing additional signatures. (Google it.)

But I find I can’t accurately compare word I do now with work I did ten years ago unless I keep track of the manuscript word count.

(By the way, this makes Steles of the Sky the second-longest book I have ever written, after The Stratford Man. Which was a 290,000 word monster eventually published in two volumes: Ink and Steel and Hell and Earth. The manuscript was 1190 pages long.)

Excelsior!

I just handed in the manuscript for Steles of the Sky. 6000+ words today.

It’s only about a quarter again as long as it was supposed to be. I guess that makes it a real epic fantasy now.

Going to go soak my hands in ice now. And read somebody else’s book for a change.

Tah dah:

Nov. 6, 2013

I’m thrilled that Range of Ghosts is the 2012 Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice Award for Best Epic Fantasy! The other SF/F category winners are John Scalzi and N. K. Jemisin.

Yay books!