Tim Pratt's Blog, page 23

It's been an extremely social week, especially by my hermitlike standards. Had a great afternoon out and then dinner on Tuesday with my wonderful agent Ginger, who took my wife Heather and I to Limon, one of our favorite restaurants. Truffle mac and cheese oh my yum.

On Wednesday Heather and my boss and I all went up to Sonoma to have dinner at the indescribably lovely home of a certain poet (and former head of a major arts institution) with whom I've corresponded for years but had never...

My anthology Sympathy for the Devil is out now, and you can order it from the publisher or from Amazon.com or from anywhere else you want, of course. Publishers Weekly says this about it:

Hugo winner Pratt turns his Locus-honed editing skills to the crowded field of themed anthologies. His chosen unifying element is the Devil, or devils, broadly interpreted in 36 original and reprinted works. Bygone days are represented by an excerpt from Dante's Inferno; well-known 19th-century tales such as...

Big news (I think it's big, anyway): Hart & Boot & Other Stories is available as an e-book. Just in Kindle format now, but I'll work on getting it available in others. I've had the e-book rights all this time, but lacked the technical skill to actually do something with those rights myself. But I taught myself the formatting stuff and Amazon makes it easy to upload titles. (Though it took some convincing to make them believe I was really truly allowed to sell an e-book of a collection that...

We're heading off on a little camping trip tomorrow, for a few days. (A few days camping is plenty of days when one has a toddler.) Our neurotic cats will be left in the care of a kindly house/petsitter while the other three-fifths of we house mammals head for Santa Cruz and Monterey and points, er, in between the two. I'm excited. I have Dashiell Hammett: The Complete Novels and oodles of podcasts to keep me occupied when the thrills of walking in the woods, looking at the ocean, and...

This is the last day for donors to get their name (or the name of a loved one) into Broken Mirrors. So far donors have provided names for several sorcerers, Sanford Cole's subterranean lair, and a curse, so I'm flexible. After today I'm finalizing the text and sending it off to the print publisher.

Donating $300 for the tuckerization also gets you the comic drawn by Justin Pierce, a signed print copy of the final book, a postcard (ostensibly from Marla), a chapbook with a Marla story, a...

I did not win the Sturgeon Award, but James Morrow did, and since he's a) one of my favorite writers, b) one of my favorite teachers (he was one of my Clarion instructors), and c) one of the earliest supporters of my work, I'm happy for him rather than crushed by immense disappointment. Now I can add the Sturgeon to the long list of fine awards I've lost (Nebula, World Fantasy, Campbell Best New Writer, Gaylactic Spectrum, Mythopoeic, Stoker... I hope to collect them all!).

I did a reading at...

Want to come see me? Head into San Francisco for the Clarion West Fundraiser Reading with Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Murphy, Katherine Sparrow, Rachel Swirsky, and me, Saturday, July 10th (that's tomorrow!) at 3:00 pm at Borderlands Books. Details at the Borderlands site, but basically, we'll all read a bit and chat and say rah rah Clarion(s)! (I still hope someday to be invited to teach at one of the Clarions... it's one of those major career dreams... in the meantime, I'll support 'em however I ...

I was promised that an already long-overdue check from a publisher would mail last week. My agent didn't get the check, and followed up, and... nope. The money didn't get sent. It might get sent in a week, or two. If that actually happens, fine; but having been lied to already, I have no confidence that I'm not being lied to again.

A shame, as I was feeling reasonably okay financially, knowing that check was on the way -- I knew it would cover next month's preschool tuition and health insuran...

Busy weekend!

I wrote a synopsis and sample chapters for a new novel project. Assuming my agent thinks it works, we'll start shopping that around. Fun fun fun. Oh, and there's a new chapter of Broken Mirrors up, featuring murder and conversation.

On Saturday we went out and had brunch at the Vault, where our kid flirted with a cute little girl who shared her tiny animal figurines with him. We strolled to the library, which has a good kid's section -- with puzzles and toys! -- and then to the...

Chapter 15 of Broken Mirrors is up. Only nine more chapters after this!

Big fun for the weekend: wrote 18,000 words in three days and finished off the first draft of Broken Mirrors, my 13th -- lucky 13! -- completed novel and my seventh published novel, counting the self-published short novel Bone Shop. Finishing the novel produced a brief evening of euphoria on Sunday, shortly followed by ennui, malaise, and the howling void that opens deep within my chest whenever I don't have a big...