Tim Pratt's Blog, page 18

My story "A Void Wrapped in a Smile" just sold to newish online magazine Basement Stories, so look for that in their fourth issue. It's a Marla Mason story, sort of, though Marla only appears in a scene or two. It's mostly about Joshua Kindler, a secondary character in Poison Sleep, exploring why he was the way he was and why he did the terrible things he did. It's meant to be standalone story accessible to new readers, though if you've read PS it may have extra resonances. It has one of the coolest fantasy elements I've ever devised.

It's Wednesday, and that means: You can read "B is for Banyan Tree" on the Daily Science Fiction website, the latest in The Alphabet Quartet series. (Subscribers got "C is for Crate" in their e-mail today.)

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Life is a busy boiling cauldron of busy-ness. I need to finish up a short story this weekend, write another story next month, work on a book proposal this week, do some last revisions to my middle grade book so my agent can start sending it out, continue work on the novel in progress (due April 1!), write a foreword… I may need to make a to-do list. Possibly in multiple colors indicating triage priority levels. It wouldn't be so bad, but we're finishing up the monster February year-in-review issue at work this week, so I'm pretty exhausted when I get home, and won't get a day off until Friday (at least, I hope I get to take Friday off). Things should calm down after tomorrow, though, and I can get back on track.

All this work is severely cutting into my Xbox time.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

No, actually, I'm okay, apart from being at crush depth in the dreaded Deadline Sea. But my story "Terrible Ones" went up today at Podcastle for your listening pleasure (especially pleasurable because the one and only M.K. Hobson did the reading). So go enjoy.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

Hey! It's roundabout midway through another week, which means there's another Alphabet Quartet story for lucky Daily Science Fiction subscribers, "B is for Banyan Tree"… and those of you who don't subscribe can read last week's "A is for Arthur" on their website! This is less flash than a bona fide short story, and the others are much shorter — we just figured we'd start you out with a bang. (By "we" I mean me and my co-conspirators Heather Shaw, Jenn Reese, and Greg van Eekhout.)

I just signed contract for an indie filmmaker to do a short film of my story "Morris and the Machine"; I'll say who it is when I can. (He wants to get his website updated so I can point you all toward something pretty.) He's very passionate about the story, and has made some cool genre short films before, so I'm excited.

I've been working mostly on a Project That Must Not Be Named, but it's due in April, so you won't have to endure more than another ten weeks of occasional cryptic comments, fear not. It's keeping me occupied, and has some interesting challenges. Once it's done, I start writing my Pathfinder novel, which I can reveal is tentatively titled City of the Fallen Sky. That's maybe my favorite of any title I've ever come up with for any book.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

Two bits of writing news:

First: I got the okay to announce that one of the new book projects I'm doing is a fantasy roleplaying game tie-in novel for the Pathfinder campaign setting. They don't want me to say much about the plot or specific setting(s) yet, so suffice to say: it will be awesome, and I looooove my characters. Playing in somebody else's sandbox occasionally is fun, and I'm delighted to be dipping my toe into secondary-world fantasy again, especially in such a rich and varied and pleasantly weird game world.

Second: Today is the day The Alphabet Quartet, the suite of 26 flash stories I wrote with Heather Shaw, Jenn Reese, and Greg van Eekhout began running in Daily Science Fiction. If you were a subscriber to DSF (which is free), you would have gotten our first piece, the extra-long "A is for Arthur," delivered magically to your inbox. It'll go up on the website for all to read in a week or so, but why delay your gratification? Sign up if you haven't, and prepare for six months of mythic creatures, robots, superheroes, poignancy, surrealism, monsters, literary gamesmanship, jokes, sex, and willful strangeness at the rate of one story a week.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

I'm home with my sick kid again. He's still got a slight fever and cough and a nose that runs like a faucet, but for all that he's pretty cheerful, especially with some baby tylenol — or "red medicine" as he calls it — in him. Too sick to go to preschool, though, so here we are, watching Dora the Explorer and playing with little toy cars.

Like his mother, my son is oddly beautiful when he's sick: skin very pale and luminous, eyes bright yet shadowed.

Here's a set of recent photos of the little guy, from the past couple of weeks. No beautiful pallor here, though — healthier times!

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

Home today with a sick kid — though it's my regular day off, not a special sick day. Poor little guy. He just has a persistent cough and a mild fever, though, not another Abominable Pukefest, so that's some consolation. If he feels better later today we'll go out, since it's supposed to be sunny. At the very least we should do some shopping for necessities and mail some letters. (I know — mail! Letters! But some things, like checks and contracts, still require a touch of the ol' physicality.)

Speaking of contracts: Yesterday I started off 2011 right by signing and sending back not one but two book contracts. They're both fun work-for-hire things, one pseudonymous, one under my name — I'll tell you about the latter in more detail when I can. I'm now booked up through August 1, 2011. It's nice to have work, even if it means writing 200,000 words in 7 months. (Actually, after last year, that doesn't sound as unreasonable as it once would have.) This will, naturally, delay other books I have planned that aren't under contract. If I write a sixth Marla novel this year, it likely won't be until autumn, and may not happen until 2012.

I just finished my serial of The Nex, so if you want to read the whole thing in one gulp for the low low price of free, help yourself. I still need to do the single-page HTML version, but it'll be along.

It occurs to me that I've now written and sold enough books that I can't remember, offhand, the exact number I have published or pending; I'd have to count. That's got to be some kind of milestone. (I could count, and without recourse to my bookshelves or any lists online to jog my memory, though. Having written so many books that I can't even remember some of them is a milestone for another year, I think.)

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

Hugo nominations are open! I'm not gonna do one of those "Here's my eligible stuff!" lists because, you know, I already got a Hugo, so I don't really worry about it anymore. (Very liberating.) And the time I got one? I didn't do a thing to promote my story or encourage people to nominate me or anything. (I cast no aspersions on those who do indulge in such efforts, but they never did me any good, so I excuse myself.)

But because getting a Hugo is awesome, I encourage you (if you're eligible) to go nominate works you love, so other people can have that awesome feeling too. (But don't nominate anyone born after 1975; I enjoy my weird distinction of being the only person born after 1975 to win a fiction Hugo. At least, as far as I know I still am. It's a distinction that's destined to fall, of course, and soon, I would imagine, looking at some of these amazing new writers coming along…)

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

I usually do a whole big New Year's Resolution post, going over last year's resolutions — or "course corrections," as they might be more accurately termed, since I use this time of year to assess and re-direct my efforts — but I think I'll spare you all that song and dance and Unordered Lists this time in favor of a few simple statements:

I will try to be the best husband and father I can.

I will try to take care of myself, too (whenever, Asimov's-Law style, that doesn't conflict with the above).

I will try to write better, and to write joyfully whenever possible.

I really think that covers it.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

I got up at 7:30 am with the boy on New Year's Day. So far: 2011 is rainy.

Yesterday we went to Wal-Mart to spend some gift cards. Not something we do often, and an odd way to spend the end of 2010. The Wal-Mart closest to us in a mall, though — further proof we're Berkeley People, now, as the Richmond Wal-Mart is closer than the Oakland one — and so there were mall-type things. River got to ride a carousel, and attempted to ride several little cars/jeeps/rocketships/helicopters, but half of 'em were broken, and the other half were "too scary." He did like the fire truck, once we convinced him to give it a try.

We got a new TV (yay for post-Xmas sales) to replace our old ailing one, which we acquired years ago secondhand on Craigslist, and which only worked right if you wiggled and propped up the various cables, as all the inputs were slowly dying. So now we're finally living in the Flatscreen Future!

It's not an objectively gargantuan TV — a 42″ widescreen — but it does constitute an unimaginably vast improvement over our old one. I can actually read the text in video games on screen now. Incroyable. And River is quite enamored of Giant-Sized episodes of Dinosaur Train.

All was not sunshine and roses, though, alas. The TV box was so large it could only fit in the car if I removed the kid's car seat and wedged it in the back seat, so I drove it home while my wife wandered the mallabyrinth with the boy. She was unthrilled about being stranded at the mall near dinnertime while I drove the 20 minutes home and 20 minutes back, as I'd blithely assured her beforehand that I thought the TV would fit fine. My utter lack of any spatial sense will be a subject of my wife's mockery for years to come; like it wasn't already.

(I mean, I thought: "A 42″ TV? Sure, that'll fit in the trunk." And the TV itself would, easily… but it comes in a giant padded box, of course. Which I rather failed to account for. And unpacking the TV in the parking lot and driving it home un-padded seemed, um, inadvisable. Anyway, I made it up to her by offering to get up with the kid and letting her sleep in this morning, even though it's my turn to sleep in.)

Not that we can afford a new TV, really, but there's a fair bit of fiction money coming in soon, and my wife's financial situation is stabilizing a bit in the new year, so the expense shouldn't linger overlong on my credit card. It's definitely an indulgence… but I have few enough of those that I don't feel bad.

And if I did feel bad, I would let the light of my new giant TV soothe me.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

So how was 2000-2010 for me? (I know, the decade was 2001-2010, but the transition is more striking if I start a year earlier.) Well, you know, it's kinda when my adult life began…

In 2000 I was 22 years old. I'd graduated college and subsequently attended Clarion the year before, and was full of the fire to be a writer, but I'd only sold three stories, to 'zines and e-zines that paid maybe $20 a pop. I was still writing poetry very seriously — indeed, I was more successful as a poet. I'd published twice as many poems as stories, and it's expected that poetry won't pay much, so that was okay. I was working in the in-house advertising department of a big company, writing sales copy about objects. (By local standards it was a fantastic job — indeed, I've never had a day job that paid so well since, even living in vastly more expensive California — and if I'd kept on working there, I'd have a nice house in the mountains of North Carolina by now, probably.)

But I wasn't happy, so in August 2000, I kissed my girlfriend Meg goodbye, loaded up my silver Nissan Sentra, and drove to Santa Cruz to crash with my friend Scott and figure out what to do with my life. Got a job at a disability advocacy company, hung out in coffee shops a lot, ate good Mexican food frequently, and had a nice if somewhat lonely life. So ended 2000…

In the decade since then I:

Wrote my first published novel, The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl; sold two story collections and a poetry collection; produced (by a conservative estimate) about 2 million words of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry; wrote 11 more novels; sold four books in an urban fantasy series, which was subsequently optioned for film and has been continually under option since then (I just had lunch with the producer on Tuesday); had that series dropped by my major publisher; despaired; self-published a sequel, which turned out pretty well; sold a bunch of work-for-hire and small press novels; sold my first anthology; spent nine years and counting working at Locus magazine, where I'm now a senior editor (I never thought I'd have the same day job that long); reviewed hundreds of porn movies and dozens of science fiction books (for, er, different venues); sold well over a hundred stories, many to pro markets I'd been reading since I was a kid, and about 40 poems; got reprinted in heaps of year's best anthologies, including twice in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, which I'd always read religiously; worked as a poetry editor for two publications (Speculon and Star*Line); co-founded and co-edited and closed a 'zine called Flytrap that ran for 10 excellent issues; attended my first science fiction convention and many more subsequently; got to attend professional invitation-only writing workshops; rode the coattails of the podcast revolution, with more than 30 stories and/or poems (original and reprints) adapted for audio, bringing me to a whole new audience; published many well-received chapbooks by myself and other, more awesome writers; won a Hugo Award, a Joshua Norton Award, a Rhysling Award, an Asimov's Reader's Poll, a Romantic Times Reviewer's Choice Award; was a finalist for a Nebula Award, World Fantasy Award, Sturgeon Award, Campbell Award for Best New Writer, a couple of Gaylactic Spectrum Awards, a Stoker Award, and a Seiun Award.

But more importantly than the writing and career stuff: Met my wife (through mutual acquaintances in science fiction), fell in love with her, moved in with her in Oakland, proposed to her, married her, honeymooned with her in Hawaii, had a child with her (and became a father! Whoa!); and had an ongoing awesome life with her, my favorite human, my very own Person of the Decade: Heather Shaw.

It makes me hopeful for the next ten years. It's a long time. A lot can happen. And in 2020, I'll only be 43. I have time.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.