Tim Pratt's Blog, page 21

We took River to a pumpkin patch over the weekend, which also had a petting zoo and a bounce house. Here's a picture of River squealing delightedly over a goat. Good times.

I did a story for that Monkeypunk online charity project I mentioned, so you can go read "At the Monkey Party" free right now. (And play "spot the fictional simian!") If you like it (heck, even if you hate it, or find yourself utterly indifferent), please donate to help provide clean water to people who need it.

Chapter 8 of The Nex is up, with much running, and chasing, and other adventuresome things.

I gave in to a whim and started writing a new book, a contemporary fantasy adventure for kids. I don't have a ton of time to work on a novel, since I have some other projects with actual deadlines pressing in, and as a result, I'm going to try and get a draft of this done quickly. Managed around 6,000 words over the weekend, and since the whole book will only be 45-50,000 words long, it's a solid start.

On Sunday, it poured rain endlessly in an enchanting patter patter patter down the windows. Fall has come to the Bay Area. I welcome it… though in three months I'll be begging for the sun to return, I'm sure.

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

How exotic and unfamiliar: I seem to have a moment to catch my breath.

I joked on twitter recently about doing an anthology called Monkeypunk collecting simian SF stories (of which there are many). Now there's going to be an online monkeypunk anthology, running simian stories to support charity: water, which brings drinking water to developing countries. Send 'em your monkey stories! I'm gonna try to do something for them myself.

My story A Lake of Spaces is up at Cast Macabre for your listening pleasure. Warning: contains f-bombs and cowardice.

I finished revising the Snake novel. Now Heather's reading it, and will tell me if I missed anything. If so, I'll fix it. If not, I'll send it off to the editor in a week or so. Because I finished that book, and because I'm waiting for feedback on an extensive outline from another editor, I'm temporarily between big projects, which is leaving me feeling weirdly adrift and with way too much free time. Why, I've gone to see movies this week! One movie, anyway. The Social Network. I don't know or much care how closely it hews to reality, but I thought the writing was sharp, the characters interesting (if almost none entirely sympathetic), and the use of unreliable narration with the frame story was very clever. (The entire movie is composed of flashbacks, with people relating stories from two separate "present" moments at legal depositions, and since characters in the "presents" openly disagree with and contradict some of those flashbacks, I think it's fair to say nothing onscreen in the "past" is meant to be particularly reliable.)

I also watched some horror vignettes and old Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes and forgettable action flicks via the wonder of streaming Netflix. But I'm getting itchy to work again, and may have to commit short fiction soon.

My kid is doing wonderfully. He's taken to wearing his lion costume from last Halloween around the house, like it's a smoking jacket or something. It's too small for him — the "feet" reach halfway down his shins — but super cute nonetheless. He's chosen to be a monkey this year (the first time he's really had a say in the matter). In past years he's been a caterpillar and a lion, so we're continuing with our animal (perhaps even jungle?) theme.

I can't remember if I mentioned that our cat Marzi (named after the protag of Rangergirl, not vice-versa) was missing, but she's been found, holed up in the neighbor's shed, so that's one potential tragedy averted.

We went to press at work this week, so I didn't get my usual Tuesday off — I'm home today instead. So it's time to finish my coffee, shower, and load up the kid for an epic journey to Trader Joe's, the playground, and the hospital to get his new glasses. The life of a globetrotting fantasist like myself is one of unending excitement.

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

Various excitements lately. My story "Angel of the Ordinary" is up at this week's Drabblecast. It's only the second piece I ever published, way back in 1999, but I'm still very fond of it.

Also: I sold my story "Hell's Lottery" to Bull Spec (and my wife Heather Shaw sold her hilarious flash piece "Excrement" to Daily Science Fiction. A good week!) My SF story "On a Blade of Grass" will be reprinted on Escape Pod, I think in text and audio form (whoo). Not many people have read that one; it appeared in the Subterranean Press e-mail newsletter, a couple of years ago.

I and various other, ahem, "Next Big Genre Stars," did a Mind Meld feature at SF Signal</em> about which of our stories new readers should seek out.

I've done lots of work in the past week — revised an outline for a work-for-hire project, and polished up "A Void Wrapped in a Smile" and created the edition-of-one chapbook for the donor who commissioned it, and am deep into revising the Snake novel. Zoom zoom zoom. And yet, I'm very nearly caught up on my work, which means I can start writing more short fiction soon!

We recently got a burr grinder for coffee, and it really does make a difference. The coffee is sooo much yummier in the mornings now. Small things like that make life better.

Chapter 6 of The Nex is up — introducing the Steam Colossus! Great fun. (You know, I read the whole book in one shot to do a final line-editing pass before I started uploading chapters, and at the risk of sounding ridiculous, I can't believe nobody wanted to publish the thing. I think it's easily as good as my other books. Ah, well. What do I know?)

Broken Mirrors and The Nex are now available for the iPad via the iBookstore, and Broken Mirrors is available at Barnes & Noble for the nook e-reader. (The Nex will be there soon, and I may get Bone Shop into those stores, too.) I continue to slowly conquer all.

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

Three things of note, including a piece of big news I've been dying to tell you about for a while, and some bad news:



I sold my contemporary fantasy novel Briarpatch to ChiZine Publications. (This is the book I have previously referred to as the Bridge novel and The Light of a Better World. Titles are hard.) It should appear in 2011 — currently scheduled for August. There will be a fancy, pricey, signed limited-edition hardcover (my first hardcover for a novel!) and an affordable trade paperback.

I first published in their online magazine Chiaroscuro years ago, and have been really impressed by the stuff ChiZine has published since they started doing their book line — especially Gemma Files's debut novel, the Robert J. Wiersema novella they did, and other good stuff. Thanks to publishers Brett and Sandra for taking the novel, and to my agent Ginger for negotiating the deal. I'm so excited. This book is hugely important to me. You'll all finally get to read about Darrin and Bridget and Ismael and Orville Troll and the Wendigo and the Queen of Bears and and and… It's a book about secrets, lies, betrayals, hidden worlds, bridges, magical thinking, suicidal ideation, the redemptive power of love, the failure of love to conquer all, the poisonous nature of nostalgia, the quest for purpose, and other things.

Chapter 5 of The Nex is live — only 13 more to go!

If you just can't wait to read the book, or prefer reading a whole novel in a gulp: The Nex is available as a Kindle e-book now too. (Here's the link to the UK Kindle store for all you Brits.)

My wife Heather had her hours slashed in half at her day job, so our financial stability — never that stable to begin with — is now downright precarious. The timing's bad, too. I got a chunk of money recently for the Marla Mason movie option and promptly used it to pay some taxes, pay off many outstanding bills, buy some long-delayed household necessities, and to have a lavish anniversary dinner. If I'd known we were going to take such a financial hit, I would have hoarded the money more. If you know of any freelance gigs she might like, let me know. Heather's a great writer with experience doing general non-fiction, book reviews, catalogue copy… most kinds of commercial writing, really. And in the meantime, if you've been thinking of donating for The Nex, now's a good time. This really sucks. We were feeling somewhat financially stable for the first time since she spent six months unemployed last year, and now the rug's been jerked out from under us. I'll just have to hustle harder and write more stories. Nothing motivates like panic.

(Clicky above to donate via PayPal.)

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

My vacation week has been splendid, though I haven't been lolling about. Mostly I've been working on my Snake novel (which I'll be able to tell you about soon, I think). This morning, around 10 am, I finished the first draft. The manuscript stands at 77,000 words, and 72,000 of those were written in the month of September. I was more diligent than I usually am, these past few weeks. There were only 8 days in September on which I didn't write at all, and no more than two non-writing days in a row — much better than my usual pace. (For example, in both August and July, I only wrote on five days each month; for 26 days each of those months, I didn't do a damn thing. Summer was exceptionally lazy for me this year, but I'd just finished Broken Mirrors, so I needed a break.)

Anyway, blah blah metrics. Wrote a lot, got a draft done. It's 3,000 words short of the target length, but I know I need to add some setup and foreshadowing when I revise it, so it'll get longer. I also need to put in some smells — it's the sense I ignore most in my first drafts — and break up some long strings of pure dialogue with a little reinforcing/contrasting action to make it more interesting. Needs some more little character touches, too, for a few of the characters. I think the structure of the thing is pretty sound though, and the book's not due until 11/1. A whole month to revise! How decadent!

Otherwise, I've been reading. Lev Grossman's The Magicians is good, far better than I expected — I had the vague sense Grossman was sort of a fantasy genre outsider coming in to Show Us How It's Done, and I was prepared to find it annoying, but I was wrong. I'm about 3/4 of the way through and I really love it. (I mean, the characters explicitly attempt to reproduce Dungeons & Dragons spells at one point. This is my kind of writer.) I've also been reading old comic book collections (The Age of Apocalypse, which was the only Big! Comics! Event! I halfway paid attention to in my teenage years, and which I think influenced me in obvious ways… see Broken Mirrors, for example.) Also been reading K.J. Parker's The Fencer Trilogy (odd name, as the protagonist is only a fencer for the first part of book one) and enjoying it a lot, though it's not as good as his later work. Full of great technical stuff about archery and bowmaking though, which was actually unexpectedly quite helpful, as a character in the Snake novel is an archer.

And in Life Stuff, I've been playing with my kid and enjoying my wife's company, pretty much the usual. Heather and I went to the Wood Tavern for our 5th anniversary and had a truly divine meal. The cheeseboard alone was to die for. Nice to find time for a little romance outside the Land of a Three Year Old, where we usually dwell.

I go back to work on Monday, which means I still have a few days of vacation to enjoy without going flat-out on writing a novel. (I'm sure I'll work some on other things; I'm still in a work mode, so I might as well use that. But I'll read and watch TV and run around the yard with the boy more, too.) In the meantime –

Ooh, my agent just sent book contracts for me to sign. I'll be able to tell you about this one soon, too, then.

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

My time travel short-short "Fiddle" is up at Daily Science Fiction.

I am on the very edge of the very cusp of the very rim of the very precipice of my vacation, and the view from here is glorious. (As my wife says: "Damn, how much vacation do you get?" Well, my workplace is fairly generous. After several years of loyal labor they start giving us extra vacation time each year, gradually accruing into a snowball of freedom. And since I only work four days a week anyway, I can string together...

I've been distressingly low-energy lately, partly because I have the Family Cold, but also — I must admit — because my eating habits have deteriorated drastically in recent weeks, with too many meals (read: most) consisting of burgers, or sausages, or just chips and ice cream. Delicious, yes, but not energy-imparting. (I've been pretty good about getting better food into my kid, but not myself.)

So I'm going to work on fixing that. I'd love to get back to our tradition of having salad for...

What with the exigencies of parenting and having a day job and everything, I haven't been producing fresh wordage at the prodigious rate I did while I was in Los Angeles. I haven't slacked off entirely, though. I did a thousand-word essay on Wednesday, which will appear under a byline not my own to serve as publicity/extra material for a novel that also doesn't bear my name. (I thought, being pseudonymous, that I wouldn't have to do any publicity for this particular project. But, alas.)

Last ...

So many things… My new online serial novel The Nex started this week, and will continue for 18 weeks total, with a new chapter every Monday. I love this book, so I hope you'll read it, and donate if you like what you see. (There aren't as many fundraiser prizes — not even close — as I had for Broken Mirrors, alas. It's easier to generate goodies for a series than a standalone…)

I went to LA for five wonderful days, starting last Friday. The weather was such a change from the rather cold and...

Last weekend I wrote a story — I think only the third one I've written this year — called "Shark's Teeth". It's a fundraiser prize for people who donated forty bucks or more to Broken Mirrors. The story is set shortly after the events of Broken Mirrors, and might end up as chapter one of the sixth Marla novel (though some alterations would be required to make that work).

On my day off yesterday, since I had the wonder of Grandma babysitting, I got a lot more work done, revising an outline...