Con? What Con?

More like con-medy of errors. Here's the most concise version I can deliver:

My wife, Terry, called me in Richmond and asked me to come home early from RavenCon (which, in three years of cons she has never done before). She had taken my daughter, Katrina, back to the doctor for a follow up visit Friday afternoon (she had broken her arm on Wednesday) and the doc said the xray had been misread the first time and they needed to cut her out of her original cast and put her in one with a different alignment.

Within a few hours, though, Katrina was in so much pain that she went off on her own and somehow got herself out of this second cast (which I never saw, but Terry described as 3/4 cast and 1/4 straight-arm splint). So Terry wakes up the next morning to find Katrina has put her old cast back on (it had been neatly cut in two pieces and she saved it because her friends had written all over it), using an ace wrap to hold together.

So now Terry finds an orthopedic specialist who had office hours on Saturday (how's that for a minor miracle?), who re-xrays the arm and tell her BOTH of the first two diagnosis were wrong and they need to put her in a third cast. (This is the point where Terry called and asked me to please come home.)

In the mean time I'm at RavenCon, losing things left and right because of the pain medication I'm on after the root canal the dentist did on Thursday. Those meds just took my brain and threw it out the nearest window, then ran out into the street where the brain landed and jumped up and down on it. Thank God I carpooled with James Maxey, who did the driving; I really didn't belong behind the wheel of an automobile. Unfortunately I had to ask him to cancel his book signing so we could leave early. I didn't mind too much about canceling my own stuff, but I hated having to ask him to do so. He was extraordinarily gracious about it.

Somewhere in there I did manage to do a few panels and see a few friends. Went out to dinner Friday evening with authors David Coe, Dennis Danvers, and Gail Martin (when we were done I made them wait while I hunted all over the restaurant for my sunglasses, which it turned out I had never taken into the restaurant in the first place). Went back to the con hotel and lost a few more things. Then I did two or three panels Friday night, and a workshop and a panel on Saturday before I left. At least I think I did. Could just be the drugs talking...

At least I was home for Katrina's birthday party, which we held despite everything else that happened. Bad enough to break your arm, but lose a birthday party too would have just been wrong.

So how was your weekend?

Locus Award Nominations

Just a quick note before I run to RavenCon to congratulate Peter S. Beagle for being one of the finalists for the Locus Award for Best Novelette. Peter's "We Never Talk About My Brother" appeared in the summer 2007 issue of InterGalactic Medicine Show and everyone at IGMS knew right away that it was a special story. Congratulations, Peter. Glad to see the story getting the recognition it deserves.

For a full listing of this year's finalists, visit:

http://www.locusmag.com/2008/LocusAwardsFinalists.html

Broken Arms and Little Drummer Girls

I've gotten a couple of emails in the past 24 hours from folks who were more interested in my daughter's broken arm than my con schedule (and who can blame them).

So here are the details: Katrina broke her left elbow at school yesterday. Got knocked down in gym class and fell right on the point of the elbow. She said she heard it crack when she hit the ground. Feel free to wince; every one else has when they hear that.

Coincidentally, she broke the same arm in the same place almost exactly 8 years ago. She'll be in a cast for 6 weeks. It comes off on June 4th, two days after her middle school spring band concert (she's a drummer). She was quite distressed about that because she really enjoys playing the music. "Why couldn't it be two days before the concert," she's asked more than once. I told her not to dwell on it too much, because even if it came off two days before the concert, she still wouldn't be able to play (between not being able to practice and the arm being weak). The really fun part will end of grade tests, because she's a lefty and won't be able to mark those little fill-in dots with her number two pencil.

Not one to let the kid have all the attention, today I went to the dentist and got a root canal...

So, how was your day?

RavenCon 2008

I'm getting ready to head up to Richmond VA for RavenCon. Had a great time there last year; it's one of the most well-organized cons I've ever been to. Road trippin' up with James Maxey, who's always good for several hours of interesting conversation, and looking forward to seeing many other friends while I'm there.

Current schedule as follows:

Friday - 5 pm - Koffee Klatch
8pm - Opening Ceremonies
9pm - Writing The Perfect Blurb
10pm - Quick Write

Saturday - 9am - Allen Wold's Story Workshop (runs until noon)
12pm - The Business of Editing

And that's all. I'll probably hang around until 7 or 8pm to see friends and talk with folks, but since I don't have any panels Sunday, I'm going home early for my daughter's 12th birthday party Sunday afternoon (she just broke her arm today!).

I'll post another Story Behind The Story essay before I leave, so you have something to read over the weekend.

"Horus Ascending" by Aliette de Bodard

"Horus Ascending" was the collision of two ideas I had seen over the year of 2006: first, there was massively parallel computing, in which several computers work together as one. Add to this a conference on image compression and radio transmission that led me to realise that with a proper compression scheme, one could transmit a fair amount of information via a standard radio link. The two ideas collided, and I started to shape a story in which an entire fleet of ships was piloted by one AI--in reality a sum of different processors, linked together by the radio-transmitted instructions. The ships, I decided, would bear colonists to a new planet.

Being a destructive sort of person, I immediately wondered what would happen if the radio transmissions between the ships were cut off. Massive computer crashes would take place, followed, most probably, by the fleet tumbling down from the sky--a disaster both in human lives and in material costs, since little would be salvaged from that ship. It was probable the colony would be very reduced in its first years of life.

That was a cool setting; but I didn't have a character to go with it. The colonists were mostly faceless, and I wasn't really interested in writing a long, dragging story about the slow process of rebuilding. I thought then of what would happen to one of those computer units--one that managed to get itself restarted after the crash, on autonomous. What would it remember of its time in space? What would it be dreaming of?

One morning, I woke up and wrote the very first words of the story: "In my dreams, I'm my father...", and I knew I had found the voice of my main character. The rest followed pretty easily--I added the complication in the person of Amanda, a person whom Horus was bound to loathe; and I drew on my knowledge of computers and image processing to add the technical layer to the story. The final few paragraphs were the ones that gave me the most trouble; I ended up writing three different versions before I found one that satisfied me.

(artwork for this story (in the current issue of IGMS) by Laura Givens: http://www.lauragivens-artist.com) (Aliette's website: http://www.aliettedebodard.com)

"From the Clay of His Heart" by John Brown

The story behind From the Clay of His Heart

I was on a business trip, and just before checking out of my hotel, I read an interview with Deborah Vetter who used to be the editor for Cicada. She said that many stories she liked took a common theme and gave it an unexpected twist. Cicada was open to fantasy at the time, and so I asked myself: what’s a twist on a common fantasy element?

I got my luggage together, checked out of the hotel, and drove over to a Lowe’s around the corner. All this time I’m running various fantasy elements through my mind—witches, ghosts, dragons, etc.—asking how I might twist them. I got out of the car at Lowe’s, walked in, and realized I needed to use the restroom. I made a bee-line for the back, but kept running options through my head. About halfway there, on the trim isle, I got to “golem.”

All the golem stories I had read were about the guy who created the golem. So I asked: what if it wasn’t about the guy who creates the golem? What if it’s about someone who finds a golem?

I immediately saw the bank of a river, the Evanston, Wyoming river my girls and I had been playing on a few weeks earlier. I imagined the river in autumn, yellow leaves on the ground. I imagined a bald man of red clay, half exposed in the freshly shorn bank, the rune of power on his forehead and neck. The river was low, the mint growing on the exposed sand and gravel bars, the smell of leaf mold hanging low over the water.

My cool meters went wild. Some ideas carry such a delicious energy.

I finished my business, captured the image on a scrap of paper, and began asking questions. Who finds it? A woman. Zing! Where? In the woods of North Carolina. Zing! And it was some Native American creature. Zing! What’s the problem? What’s at issue? Either the redman has his own agenda, I thought, or it's others forcing it on him, or he's trapped. A trapped soul…and the woman and the golem love each other…Zing!

I did pre-draft work for the NC setting and found I wanted to move it in time and location to Medieval Croatia. That’s just were the juice led. So I did research on Croatia and golems. I followed the idea of her finding the golem, taking the thing home, cleaning it, stroking its cheek, humming to it, stitching clothing and socks. And then one night she hears a gasp. It’s alive. It’s a story of obsession, I thought. But the energy of that idea eventually petered out.

So I went searching for another problem. I made the following entry in my pre-draft document.

What's at stake? The woman finds this thing, so what? She's obsessed. But what's the big issue here?

· Danger, if she wakens maybe it will kill

· Maybe if people find out they will want to use

· Maybe she will be declared a witch

· Maybe it will eat her out of home

· Eat her children

· Maybe it will force her to feed it, force her to bring people to him so he can kill them

· Is it a thing of danger?

· Maybe it will force love upon her? Breed with her and create a race of goblins or trolls.

· It is a great thief--bringing her presents, presents for the master. And one day it brings a child.

· A goblin with long hair and not dumb, not brutish, by hungry, a predator, one who will eat you, who loves hunt and chase, but can dress and act civilized.

· Maybe that's the thing--it draws you, draws your dreams or your mind, feeds on these things until it has strength to go on and takes a part of you with it, your longing, longing, longing for it to return.

I tried a few drafts, still focusing on it being a thing she wakens, but they all eventually lost energy. So I tried something new. Here’s what I wrote:

What if it IS about him stealing things? "The golem was a thief, and this made her believe it might not have been such a holy thing after all."

Or

She's looking. Can't destroy it because of its holiness. But didn't the wizards of the devil turn rods into snakes in the Pharaoh’s court? And didn't men always take God's gifts, like Adam, and throw them away?

This was a question.

That last line brought in a voice. I tried that on for size and wrote the first paragraph of the current story. The paragraph just rolled out of me—“The golem was a thief”--and so I wrote another and another until I ran out of ideas, which took me to about page three. I loved the voice. I loved the issue. I realized the idea that was crackling with life wasn’t about obsession, but something else entirely.

And so the process of creation continued until the very last piece, which, in this instance, was the title. The story was originally named “The Valiant Women of Plavca.” I wasn’t satisfied with that, but I couldn’t come up with anything better at the time. Luckily, Edmund requested something with “a bit more punch,” and, after much creative Q&A, I found the current title—yet another small joy in the long line of delights I discovered while writing this story.

(artwork for this story (in the current issue of IGMS) by Scott Altmann: www.scottaltmann.com) (John's website: www.JohnDBrown.com)

NASA's new top scientist - 13 year-old German boy

What are a couple of decimal places among friends...? It's only the fate of humanity and piddly stuff like that. (Actually, I find it particularly ironic that of our space trash makes us 100 times more likely in this case to die a fiery death.)



German schoolboy, 13, corrects NASA's asteroid figures

BERLIN (AFP) - A 13-year-old German schoolboy corrected NASA's estimates on the chances of an asteroid colliding with Earth, a German newspaper reported Tuesday, after spotting the boffins had miscalculated.

Nico Marquardt used telescopic findings from the Institute of Astrophysics in Potsdam (AIP) to calculate that there was a 1 in 450 chance that the Apophis asteroid will collide with Earth, the Potsdamer Neuerster Nachrichten reported.

NASA had previously estimated the chances at only 1 in 45,000 but told its sister organisation, the European Space Agency (ESA), that the young whizzkid had got it right.

The schoolboy took into consideration the risk of Apophis running into one or more of the 40,000 satellites orbiting Earth during its path close to the planet on April 13 2029.

Those satellites travel at 3.07 kilometres a second (1.9 miles), at up to 35,880 kilometres above earth -- and the Apophis asteroid will pass by earth at a distance of 32,500 kilometres.

If the asteroid strikes a satellite in 2029, that will change its trajectory making it hit earth on its next orbit in 2036.

Both NASA and Marquardt agree that if the asteroid does collide with earth, it will create a ball of iron and iridium 320 metres (1049 feet) wide and weighing 200 billion tonnes, which will crash into the Atlantic Ocean.

The shockwaves from that would create huge tsunami waves, destroying both coastlines and inland areas, whilst creating a thick cloud of dust that would darken the skies indefinitely.

The 13-year old made his discovery as part of a regional science competition for which he submitted a project entitled: "Apophis -- The Killer Astroid."



Tomorrow: new essay from one of the authors in the current issue of IGMS.



But first, a follow-up. Here's the latest on the 13 year-old wunderkind:

Schoolboy's asteroid-strike sums are wrong

German kid saw 1 in 450 chance of Apophis apocalypse

By Lewis Page → More by this author

Published Wednesday 16th April 2008 11:06 GMT

---

Widespread media reports claim that a German schoolboy has recalculated the likelihood of a deadly planet-smasher asteroid hitting the Earth, and found the catastrophe is enormously more likely than NASA thought. The boy's sums were said to have been checked by both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), and found to be correct.

There's only one problem with the story: the kid's sums are in fact wrong, NASA's are right, and the ESA swear blind they never said any different. An ESA spokesman in Germany told the Reg this morning: "A small boy did do these calculations, but he made a mistake... NASA's figures are correct."

It would appear that the intial article in the Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten, which says that NASA and the ESA endorsed Nico Marquardt's calculations, was incorrect. The story was picked up by German tabloids and the AFP news wire, and is now all over the internet.

It seems that Marquardt's calculations included the possibility of collision with a satellite in some way not thought to have been covered by NASA, which bumped up the odds of a subsequent Earth strike. But NASA says:

[The asteroid will pass] within the distance of Earth's geosynchronous satellites. However, because Apophis will pass interior to the positions of these satellites at closest approach, in a plane inclined at 40 degrees to the Earth's equator and passing outside the equatorial geosynchronous zone when crossing the equatorial plane, it does not threaten the satellites in that heavily populated region.

All in all, it seems there's no need to dust off the asteroid-busting space nukes just yet. ®

“The Angel’s Touch” by Dennis Danvers

How I Came to Write “The Angel’s Touch”

Sarah and I were traveling. We turn into TV sluts when we have a hotel room and a remote control, cruising up and down all those channels. At home we wrestle with rabbit ears for everything we watch, a struggle with cosmic forces, not unlike Jacob’s tussle with an angel but with much less spectacular results.

I came out of the shower, and found Sarah watching some sappy tale of divine intervention nearing its predictable conclusion. You could tell by the music, the beatifically smiling faces. It made me nauseous. “It’s one of those angel shows,” Sarah said. “The one on the left’s an angel. She saved them from suffering.”

“What suffering?”

“I missed that part.”

I groaned. “Anything else. Please.”

I knew I was running a great risk. Sarah has been known to land on a televangelist and stay put just to lure a bit of sacrilege out of me. It’s one of my more attractive traits, she claims.

The angel was still on the screen, being angelic. I grumbled, “If they wouldn’t always make angels so insipid, so goody-goody. I mean, the angels in the Bible aren’t exactly Care Bears with wings.”

Sarah finds it interesting that a non-believer like myself has read the Bible more than once. It’s a strange world. When I taught Bible in World Lit. classes at a Texas university, a student who claimed to believe every word of the Bible to be literally true, couldn’t remember what it was exactly Abraham had done. “Was he the guy with the ark?” he asked me. “No, he was the one who almost offed his kid because God told him to.”

“I think you should write an angel story,” Sarah said as the credits started to roll, and she resumed surfing.

“Right,” I said.

“I’m serious.”

What a ridiculous idea, I thought, and immediately started thinking about it. If God employs a tribe of assistants in the world, they would have to have a wide range of duties and personalities to match. Some of them might be a bit unnerving, even scary as shit. They are, after all, alien beings, and their duties might very well include the full range of divine prerogatives, which would include, well, everything. Even all the unpleasant bits. Like death and sin and suffering and disease and... You get the idea.

Maybe it was because there was an elevator in the hotel, but almost immediately I saw my scary angel packed rather uncomfortably into an elevator, riding in close quarters with my hapless protagonist. However unpleasant he might be, I did want him to be a real angel, that is, an agent carrying out the will of God, so that the result of his intervention in my protagonist’s life should plausibly represent the will of God, which, if you believe in an omnipotent God, would be, well, everything, so I didn’t see that as much of a plot impediment. I decided to make it a love story, since, speaking from experience, love offers so many opportunities for mortals to screw up.

In an early draft of the story, I blew everybody up, just to get it out of my system, I suppose—to flex my God muscles. I call that the Sodom and Gomorrah draft. Once I didn’t blow the lovers up, the story wrote itself. Since God is reportedly keen on the forgiveness of sins, I daresay he would approve of the results.

My neighborhood association each year asks me to read at the neighborhood Christmas gathering. Year before last I wrote a story, “R³,” especially for the occasion, which ended up appearing in Strange Horizons last December. This last year I read “The Angel’s Touch,” and got a terrific response. That is, they laughed in all the right places.

Actually, the story was dictated to me by an angel after every publication in heaven turned it down as insufficiently angelic. He’s letting me keep the money. Seems they don’t have money in heaven.

(artwork for this story (in the current issue of IGMS) by Liz Clarke: www.lizclarke.co.za)

(Dennis's blog: www.dennisdanvers.com)

IGMS - Issue 8

Wow, I thought the cover illustration for James Maxey's story in issue 7 was cool (and it still is), but the illustration for John Brown's "From The Clay of His Heart" in issue eight rocks the house right down to the ground. It only came in two days ago, which is why we're about a little late getting the issue up (you can fudge a lot of things with an online magazine, but the cover isn't one of them) so I'm just seeing this now for the first time and I've gotta say, I'm blown away. And the bigger it gets, the more impressive it gets. Click on the link at the bottom of this post and tell me I'm wrong.



Okay, I'm done being a fanboy now.

Ahem...

Issue eight, available for your reading pleasure, includes:

"From The Clay of His Heart" by John Brown
"The Angel's Touch" by Dennis Danvers
"Accounting For Dragons" by the ubiquitous Eric James Stone
"End Times" By Scott Emerson Bull
"Horus Rising" by Aliette de Bodard
"Limbo" by Stephanie Dray
"The Frankenstein Diaries" (novelette, Part I) by Matt Rotundo

www.InterGalacticMedicineShow.com

Dreaming Creek

I just got the the final files from the designer who did the cover for my upcoming novel, Dreaming Creek. I haven't been this excited in a long time; it's gorgeous work. I just wish I didn't have to wait until this fall to hold the book in my hands...

Roads To Writing With Orson Scott Card

Last week I was lucky enough to be invited to do a presentation along with Orson Scott Card (who organized this day-long workshop), Jake Black, and Mette Ivie Harrison. After an introductory panel discussion about how all four of us got started in the business, Scott did his 1,000 Ideas workshop, followed by his structure and viewpoint lecture, all of which he also does as part of the two-day workshop he does before his now famous Literary Boot Camp. Given that the two-day version costs $175 and this one only cost $25, I'd say the 75 or 80 people who came got quite a bargain.

After the lunch break, Mette Ivie Harrison (author of the novel Mira, Mirror, which I am in the middle of and greatly enjoying), did a brave presentation on revision. I say brave because she showed the entire crowd 'before' and 'after' samples from several of her novels. I don't know that I would have the courage to show people 'before' samples of my work, but Mette did, and then explained why she made the changes she did.

Jake was up next, and his presentation was about how to network, as well as the importance of doing so. It was a great presentation--he had everyone laughing and talking the entire hour--and it was also an important one. So many writers are solitary by nature, and that's fine, but you can make it in the business without acknowledging the importance of networking and getting at least passably good at it.

Last up was your truly. My presentation was about the Business of Publishing: where to find markets, what to look for in those markets; the differences between publishing short and long fiction, online vs. print; etc. etc. I also talked about what to look for in an agent and how to spots scams (which there is no shortage of). I had done a similar presentation at UNC in Greensboro about a week before, but it was a two-hour presentation. Then a few days later I taught a five-hour workshop on the same subject and threw in additional material about writing non-fiction books and magazine articles and such. So I cut a lot of material out for my SVU talk for fear of going over -- and ended up running out of new material well before my hour was up. Fortunately the crowd had a lot of questions, and when things seemed like they were slowing down, Scott threw out some new questions that re-ignited the discussion. All in all it went well, and frankly I'm happier having a dialogue with an audience rather than feeling like I'm just lecturing them.

Then we wrapped the workshop up the way we opened it, with all four of us on stage doing a final Q&A wrap-up. Of course the bulk of the questions were aimed at Scott, but he managed to work the rest of us into the conversation very naturally. Despite the opinion that some folks may have formed from his religious and political views, he really is a generous soul.

And to wrap up our night, he took all of the presenters, as well as the professor from the English department who helped organize the workshop, to a fantastic restaurant in downtown Roanoke VA. It was called Metro, and we all ate and ate and talked and ate some more. We were probably in that restaurant for two and half hours, and the time flew. All in all, a very good day.

Agent Insight

I was recently invited to give a presentation at the the Greensboro campus of the University of North Carolina about publishing science fiction and fantasy. I have to admit, the idea of a university asking me to come in and talk about SF was a pleasant surprise; far too often academics don't take our genre seriously. So I obviously wanted to make a good impression and as I started to prepare, one of the things I did to get good, current information was email Jenny Rappaport, a literary agent with the Lori Perkins agency, and ask her what trends she saw developing with science fiction and fantasy novels. She replied with this, which I thought interesting enough to share with you:


Hi Edmund,

It's really interesting that you ask about this, since I've been having a series of running discussions with Lori Perkins about this. Basically, I think there's an overall trend in publishing right now that's based on the lagging economy; if you compare the number of deals being posted on Publisher's Marketplace now, to the number of deals being posted last summer, they've pretty much been cut in half. This doesn't necessarily mean publishers aren't buying as many books, but it could mean that they're buying them for less money, and thus the agents aren't posting the "nice" deals as often. I don't think the industry has been drastically affected by the economy yet, but I think that if we do slip into a recession, you're going to see that reflected.

In terms of sf/f, I've heard a couple of things floating around. One editor is looking for an urban fantasy, a la KITTY AND THE MIDNIGHT HOUR, with a male protagonist. Another is still looking for sexy vampire and werewolf stories. Overall, I think the trends are definitely going more towards urban fantasy at the moment, particularly because it has such crossover appeal with paranormal romance. And although I'm not sure the publishers are taking this into account, romance and women's fiction sales tend to remain strong during times of economic downturn, so that may be another reason urban fantasies are doing well. Epic fantasies are having more difficulty selling, even when I've felt the books aren't really epic in nature; if the publisher can put that label on it, it's making it harder for the editor to buy it, even if they like the book.

Will any of this change? I think it's cyclical, and that it will eventually swing back around again. I've only talked about fantasy, but science fiction is still being bought and read--just at a much lower consumption rate than fantasy novels. Sci-fi seems to be doing well in terms of military/espionage books, as well as ones that trend in the utter opposite direction, and are uber-intellectual (think Charlie Stross; at least, he seems intellectual to me).

Anyway, I hope this helps you!

Jenny

More Free Stories

On February 1st we made two of IGMS's early stories available for free. Now two more stories, "Xoco's Fire" by Oliver Dale (from issue 3) and "Tabloid Reporter To The Stars" by Eric James Stone (from issue 4, and also to be featured in the upcoming IGMS anthology (next August)), are now also available at no charge. Just go the those issue's respective table of contents and enjoy!

We're also only about five weeks away from issue 8, which will be our first themed issue. More on that shortly.

Lost Soul – by Marie Brennan

Sometimes you write the wrong story first.

A while back, I was working on a story set in Tir Diamh called "Returning to the Nest." It was about a minstrel named Tirean going back to her old master Decebhin, whom she had left years before, and having an argument with him about different kinds of music, and the role they play in people's lives. Nice idea, but the story was unfortunately preachy; I submitted it for a while and then trunked it.

But out of that was born "Lost Soul." I wrote it three months after "Returning to the Nest," because I started thinking about what happened to Tirean in between running away from Decebhin and going back. Music means a lot to me; I learned to play piano at the age of six, and French horn when I was eleven. I know that incredible energy you get when a piece comes together, when everything's careening along and you wonder how it isn't falling apart. It really is a kind of magic. And somewhere between her departure and her return, Tirean found that magic. I was curious as to how.

Unsurprisingly, this story has a soundtrack. The five-beat court waltz wasn't anything specific, but the notion of having such a form came out of pieces like "Mars, the Bringer of War" by Gustav Holst and those parts of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ, Superstar that are in 5/4. (It's an odd meter, and one I quite like.) "Flower Face" is essentially a stand-in for "Dulaman," a traditional Irish Gaelic song about talking seaweed. But the most important song, the one I had in mind the characters played "Stone the Crows," comes from the Green Linnet collection Playing with Fire: Contemporary Celtic Instrumentals. Wolfstone has a track on there called "Gillies: The Sleeping Tuna/The Noose and the Gillies," the second half of which is the closest I can come in real life to what the group is playing in my mind.

"Lost Soul" fits into a bigger picture, though, than just a trunked sister story that will never see the light of day. Tir Diamh is part of a broader setting called the Nine Lands, that I created years ago, as an exercise in building a whole world -- that is to say, different countries, each with its own language, religion, clothing, governmental system, cuisine and so forth. For a while I was on a kick of writing stories set in different corners of that world, as a means of exploring it. Some of those stories have been published; others may be someday; a few have been permanently retired.

I'm working on different things these days -- most notably a historical fantasy series that will be eating my brain for the foreseeable future -- but the Nine Lands project is a long-term one for me. I hope to be still playing with it decades from now, because the whole point is to have a world big enough that I can always find something new to do there. And if that happens, you'll see Tirean again -- and Andris, and Ennike -- and yes, you'll get to see Tirean at the satire festival.

Because you know she's going there someday, and something interesting will happen when she does.

Free IGMS Stories

Below is a letter that just went out to our e-mailing list. Apologies if it's something you've already seen. We're making some of our stories free for everyone to read so that people will have an idea of the kinds of things we publish and I thought you all might be interested. And I'd like or as many people as possible to know about this, so feel free to copy and paste my letter anywhere you think appropriate.


To Readers of Science Fiction and Fantasy everywhere,

When you have something great, you want everyone to know. So you tell people about it. You share it. You pass it along to friends everywhere. Well, that’s what we’re doing with InterGalactic Medicine Show. We want to make sure everyone has had a chance to check out what we’re doing, so we’re offering up a sampling of our stories – for free.

During the month of February we are going to make one story from each of our first four issues available at no charge. Two stories will be set free on February 1st, and two more on February 15th. Just visit www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com and explore the table of contents; the free stories will be clearly marked.

Issue one’s free story will be “Trill and The Beanstalk” by Edmund R. Schubert, issue two’s will be “Yazoo Queen” by Orson Scott Card (from his Alvin Maker series), issue three’s “Xoco’s Fire” by Oliver Dale, and issue four’s “Tabloid Reporter To The Stars” by Eric James Stone. Each story is fully illustrated by artists who were commissioned to create artwork to accompany that tale -- as is every story published in IGMS.

“Tabloid Reporter To The Stars” will also be featured in the upcoming InterGalactic Medicine Show anthology from Tor, which will be out this August (we wanted you to get a sneak peek of the anthology, too). However, the other three stories aren’t available anywhere except the online version of IGMS.

It’s really quite simple. Great stories. Custom illustrations. Free. We’re pleased with and proud of the magazine we’re publishing; now we’re passing it along to our friends and telling them about it. We hope you’ll enjoy it and do the same.

Edmund R. Schubert
Editor, Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show
www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com

The Smell of the Earth - by Joan Savage

I started writing “The Smell of the Earth” one day when I needed a break from the novel I was working on. I had been exploring, in the novel, how music affects those who play it, as well as those who hear it. So the Jongleurs and their world and their history were already deeply engrained in me, and the problem of music was chasing itself around inside my head.

I had been working on something so large-scale, with such huge problems facing the characters, that I really wanted to play with something more intimate, where the character only had one dilemma to face, one problem to tackle. But the novel was still stuck in my head. I kept mulling over the danger of how music could make its listeners happy but how that power, in the wrong hands, could be turned and used for something quite the opposite of happiness. So I began to wonder. What if another Jongleur had the same musical power as the main character in my novel, but he didn’t have her level of commitment to something beyond himself? What would a fundamentally good but self-centered man do with a power he didn’t see as dangerous? And that was when the protagonist, the Jongleur of this story, stepped onto the stage, and I met him for the first time.

When I write, I feel like I meet characters, not like I create them. It’s as if they already exist without me, and it’s through the process of writing about them that I learn to know them. So this story really began, for me, when I met this Jongleur.

He was sitting in the bar, mourning his dead wife, and I just happened to overhear a wizard ask him what he wanted. Which was exactly the question I wanted to ask him, so I suppose the wizard was doing my work for me. And because I’m a musician I guess I can confess that the Jongleur’s longing for greatness was my longing, at one point in my life (though I’m happy to say it’s not any more!). And his fear is the greatest fear of most of my musician friends—the fear of losing the use of a hand, or a finger, and being unable to play. I think the fear is deeper than the loss of livelihood. I think it’s a fear of silence—the silence of being unable to say the things you need to say.

I wish I could say that, once I had the initial concept and had met the characters, the story wrote itself. (I wish I could say any of my stories wrote themselves!) I knew from the beginning that the farmer’s young wife had traded away the farmer’s favourite pig, but it took me a long time before I knew what she had traded the pig for. (I read somewhere—I’m sorry I don’t remember where—that you should always take the third or fourth answer to a question you ask the story—never take the first answer. I have long lists of possible answers to story questions from this story.) As I wrote, the farmer kept asserting himself and developing a life and problems of his own, until he became a much more important character, and much more interesting to me, than I had originally intended. His life in some ways began to mirror the life of the Jongleur—or at least enough that the Jongleur began to see it that way, and learn empathy.

I have to confess that the wizard and her motivations remained a mystery to me long after I thought the final draft of this story was done. I didn’t find her interesting and, I have to admit, didn’t spend as much time thinking about her as I should have. It wasn’t until someone pointed out to me that she needed a motivation more real than the stock motivation I had assigned her that I went back to the story and began to see the wizard as a three-dimensional character. So I sat down and asked her the questions—who are you and why are you doing this? And I not only learned her story, I also discovered that, if I ever go back to explore this historical period of the Jongleurs’ world, she is probably the character I would most like to follow around and write about.

The Unrhymed Couplets of the Universe - by Sharon Shinn

"The Unrhymed Couplets of the Universe" was one of those stories that just comes together for you when the disparate elements of ordinary life suddenly crystallize into a recognizable pattern. My sources were wildly different conversations and interactions I'd had over two or three months with a handful of different people. My friend Mark had been forwarding me junk emails with bizarrely lovely nonsense subject lines. (I quote actual emails in the story, as well as Mark's comments about poetry, which is why I named a character Mark). My friend Laurie had been complaining how her house steals objects from her (in one week, her cell phone charger, her iPod, and her checkbook). My brother Ray had explained how such thefts could be remotely possible, given what we know about quantum physics. I had been in a seminar where the ringtone on a stranger's cell phone was Pachelbel's "Canon." I had recently re-set my mother's engagement diamond into a filigreed white gold ring.

I so often write alternate-world fantasy that I don't get much chance to draw on the mundane details of everyday life when I'm putting together a story. Maybe I enjoyed writing this one so much because all the elements were so familiar. When I read it at the World Fantasy Convention in 2006, someone in the audience asked me if I'd just looked around my house to find the objects I'd described. I admit, I own boxed sets of the first couple seasons of "Moonlighting"…and a purple sweater…but no turtle…

"After This Life" by Janna Silverstein

The first germ of this story was planted when I saw a news piece about a prison inmate named Tommy Silverstein. He’s no relation of mine (though the fact of our identical surnames certainly drew my curiosity), but he is the longest held prisoner in total solitary confinement in America, possibly the world, maintained at a supermax prison in Colorado. I was fascinated and horrified by every angle of the story. It led me to try to learn more about him and other prisoners, to read the online diaries of solitarily confined and death row inmates, and to think deeply about how I felt about such treatment.

The second germ of this story came out of the fact that I am an unrepentant fan of Star Trek and have been interested in the idea of teleportation for years. I always wondered, among other things, where the developer of such technology would find human test subjects.

The last germ came from a challenge that writer Michael Heibert and I posed to each other, to write a story in which a coin played a prominent part. I wrote the first draft of this story with these three ideas in mind. I didn’t go into it with the idea that a parent-child relationship would play any role in the story at all. That theme, however, crops up again and again in my writing. I have learned to let it be, so once that element appeared, I knew it was there to stay.

It was science fiction writer Michael Burstein who led me to reading more thoroughly about the theory behind real teleportation. If I was going to write science fiction, he insisted (and quite wisely), the science had to be there. Part of me rebelled; I just wanted to write the story, dammit, and not bother myself with all that pesky research. He was right, of course. The reading was fascinating. In the end, the horror of what I discovered—that every teleportation would be a death—took me that last step toward making this story what it ultimately became when I submitted it to IGMS. Edmund’s insightful revision requests made me think about who would be willing to sacrifice lives to develop such technology.

Friends who read early drafts criticized my softening the details of prison life, suggested that I’d made Jake too smart, too sensitive, too sympathetic. But if I learned anything by reading all those inmate diaries, it’s that prisons are full of people who are intelligent, articulate, sensitive, and very sharp. It’s a frightening thing to consider: that people who share characteristics that we on the outside value highly are incarcerated for committing acts that we could never conceive of committing ourselves. This is the line between us, and it’s a fine one indeed. It wasn’t my intention to diminish the horror of what such people have done with their own hands. It was one of my goals, however, to find the animal commonality between us, to consider what it means to look into the abyss and the possibility of coming out the other side. To suggest that Hell may be what we create for ourselves rather than anything supernatural. If I haven’t dwelled on the details of prison life, if they don’t appear harsh enough, and if I haven’t espoused one position or the other on the question of capitol punishment, well, these issues aren’t really the point of the story.

I didn’t decide to deal with Louisa’s spirituality until very late in the writing process. By the second-to-last draft (and this story went through more drafts than almost anything else I’ve ever written), I found myself wondering if the story shouldn’t have been told from her point of view. Ultimately, she changes more than Jake does. On the other hand, I wanted very much to be inside Jake’s head when the teleportation started, when he faced his own end in the wake of the deaths he caused, to see where his thoughts might lead, to feel the process as it occurred.

If I hope readers come away with anything from “After This Life,” it’s that they find themselves wondering about the costs of technology to our own humanity. It’s also that they find an awareness of how fragile our lives are, how our choices rest on an edge fine and wicked as a paper cut, and ultimately to find some kind of compassion for the people around them, each one being faced with the same decisions moment by moment every single day.

The Braiding - by Pat Esden

I believe that in every profession there are moments when a person stops using logic, truly focuses on their work and acts automatically in a sort of hypnotic state--a state of magic.

It was with this notion in mind that I decided to write a series of fantasy tales about women artisans. Glassblowing, with its intrinsic beauty and connection to alchemy (and because it was an art I knew nothing about) felt like the perfect place to begin. Besides, I was quite sure there had to be more to the art form than sticking a blob of molten glass on a pipe and blowing.

Research is where I began my search for the details of setting and character that I needed to take my story seed and make it blossom. I knew nothing about the history of glass, but I quickly uncovered fascinating details that were beyond anything that I could have created out of thin air.

I don’t want to spoil the story, but I was totally unprepared for the similarity between the freedoms modern day women enjoy and those experienced by woman glassblowers during the early years of the Venetian Republic. Actually, I was shocked to discover women could become master glassblowers. The opportunities available to these women glassblowers (or women fortunate enough to belong to glass blowing families) exceeded those available to other women and most men. They could marry a man of any level of society--even royalty, they were more highly educated than most men . . . but these benefits and freedom came at a cost.

Because glass was the foundation of the Venetian Republic economy, no glassblower could ever leave the boundaries of the Venetian Republic or they would be assassinated out of fear that the secrets of working glass could fall into another country’s hands.

This research into glass working and Venice’s past gave me my main character: Iseau, a creative woman both liberated and imprisoned.

Now that I had the time period and the main character I moved on to learning about the art itself.

Armed with a newly learned and very basic idea of how glass is worked and a mental list of questions I wanted to ask, I drove to Waterbury Vermont where Ziemke Glassblowing Studio is located. By this time, I knew I wanted my main character to make a heart, so that was my first question. Can it actually be done? I also wanted to know things you can’t learn in books: what the furnace’s heat feels like, how much do the tools weigh, how balanced does the pipe feel in your hand? I wanted to watch the glass blower’s movements, see which muscles he used. How strong would Iseau have to be? Would she still appear feminine? Did the work require an assistant . . . little details that make a story come to life.

In my short visit to Ziemke Glassblowing I learned more than I ever could have ever hoped for.

Glassblower, Terry Pagel was working that day. He is not only an amazing artist, but also has a true love of his craft and is a vault of knowledge. He talked about the history of Venetian glassblowing from an insider’s point of view, about early alchemy used to create clear class and other early trade secrets. But beyond that, he gave me a glassblower’s perspective on how writers often misrepresent glassblowing to a laughable degree. Then he did the most amazing thing: he and his assistant created a heart from molten glass while I watched.

I left with my mind overflowing with ideas. Five minutes into my drive home, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I pulled my car over to the side of the road and I wrote the glassblowing scene for “The Braiding”. Watching and talking to Terry Pagel put me into a writer’s “state of magic” and at the same time had allowed me to feel (as much as a non-glassblower can) like I was actually holding the tools and feeling the heat.

So if the history in “The Braiding” feels true and what happens when Iseau takes up her tools feels right, it’s because to a great extent they are accurate. And personally, I like to think that the magic in the story is nothing more than a magnification of what any person experiences when they focus on their chosen profession, relax and let their mind slip into a hypnotic state.

Here’s a link to Ziemke Glassblowing Studio—enjoy.

http://www.zglassblowing.com/glassblowing.htm

You can find another of my woman artisan tales, “Suck of Clay, Whir of Wheel,” at AnthologyBuilder

http://www.anthologybuilder.com/

Silent As Dust - by James Maxey

I grew up in Roanoke, Virginia, in a little house on Courtland Road that was full of hidden rooms. Most adults probably wouldn't have been aware of these rooms; they were really just gaps and spaces leftover by architectural flourishes. For instance, above the front door of the house, there was a little gable in the roof with a window in it. The gable was purely decorative. But, in the attic, where the roof sloped down, there was a paneled wall about a yard high. If you pulled off one of the panels, there was a wedge-shaped crawlspace where my mother used to store Christmas decorations. If you wriggled inside onto the plywood floor, then crawled along it until the plywood ended, you could continue along the rafters until you reached the little gabled room with the window. It couldn't have been more than a yard wide and deep, maybe four feet tall at the midpoint. There were loose boards across the rafters that formed a place to sit. This tiny forgotten room was useless space for any adult, but for a young kid, it was a top-secret clubhouse.

This wasn't the only secret place. There was a pretty cool cave under the basement stairs. There was also the kitchen table with the drop down leaves. With those down and chairs at the ends of the table, it was a practically a fortress. I can still recall being able to crawl under beds, or climb inside kitchen cabinets. The world just offers more spaces for children than adults.

All these hidden spaces were in a little two bedroom house. I haven't been back as an adult, but, if you didn't count the basement and attic (which weren't heated), I'm guessing the whole house was maybe 900 square feet. Growing up, however, it felt like an enormous kingdom that was forever yielding some new secret. I remember digging in the dirt near the front porch and finding a little plastic army man. An archeologist pulling a golden cup out of the sands of Egypt couldn't have been as happy.

"Silent as Dust" has its origins in those childhood explorations. There's a mansion a mile away from me in Hillsborough called "Seven Hearths" that's reported to be haunted, so I loosely based "Seven Chimneys" upon it. And, like the town of Seven Chimneys in the story, Hillsborough is a city where a core of large houses downtown give way to old mobile homes and tin-roofed houses just a few blocks away. I myself live in the tin-roof and mobile home district, in a cinderblock house about 900 square feet in size. I actually have a conventional roof, with a decorative gable above the front door. In the attic, there's a panel that can be pulled aside, revealing the rafters beyond.

Alas, I've never ventured into that dark, narrow crawl space to discover if the tiny gable holds its own secret room. I'm 6'2" and some of the useful spaces of my childhood would be extremely uncomfortable to explore.

Still, I sometimes wonder about that space, and whether any children ever discovered it. If I were ever to crawl into it, I would discover some childhood treasure? Perhaps a green plastic army man, forever standing sentinel over a forgotten kingdom?