Guest Blog - Alethea Kontis of Ingram Books

This was originally posted on an excellent blog called Magical Words (http://magicalwords.net/), run by a group of writers that includes friends of mine, David Coe and Catie Murphy. In fact, in the intro below, Catie mentions people throwing themselves through hedges at her. She’s been telling that story for over two years now, and I want to set the record straight that it was not a hedge; it was a dense row of potted ficus trees in a hotel lobby and I didn’t throw myself anywhere, I just poked my head through and startled her a little. I mean, really, there’s a big difference, people.

Guest Blog: Alethea Kontis

Originally posted on April 25th, 2008 by cemurphy (Catie)

Catie's note: I met Alethea a couple of years ago at World Fantasy Con in Austin when we were both on a shuttlebus together, and she and her friends very kindly enveloped me into their group and invited me to lunch. We (all) hit it off splendidly, embarking on a weekend that involved people throwing themselves through hedges to greet one another and other such silliness, and it is my utter delight to have invited her to post about a day in the life of an Ingram Buyer.

Ingram Books, for the uninitiated, is the world’s largest wholesale distributor of books. As such, it is very, very important, and not a little mysterious, to those of us who write, and so we thought a back-door look at what the people who help bring our books from publisher to bookshelf actually do day-in and day-out might be interesting…and it is.

-Catie

–

A day in the life of Alethea Kontis, Incredible Whirlwind of Beauty and Dynamite — Ingram Buyer by day, New York Times best-selling author by night.

April 14, 2008

3-something a.m. — The rumble of thunder wakes me up. I stumble out of the bedroom in the dark, unplug the laptop, shut down the desktop, and stumble back to bed.

6:15 a.m. — Wake up before the alarm goes off. Check my email. Solaris got my copyedits yesterday, but they can’t open the attachments. Can I please resave them as .rtf and send them again? Sure. Walk down to the office to power the desktop back up.

6:22 a.m. — Walk back through the kitchen. Put bread in the toaster. Look out the window. Laugh hysterically. What woke me up at 3 a.m. wasn’t thunder.

6:25 a.m. — Grab my digital camera and walk barefoot through the cold grass (there’s a freeze warning tonight) to take pictures of the dead tree that has fallen from my next-door neighbor’s yard onto my back fence. I know to take pictures of the evidence before anyone has a chance to tamper with it. I watch CSI.

7:23 a.m. — Arrive at work. Turn on computer and multicoloured rope lights. Stop by International Department for chai tea. Stop by fellow buyer’s office and check out the thumb she broke while swordfighting. Assemble audio bestseller report for NY Times. Review orders that have come up for release. Check out what my weekly returns cycle looks like. Not too bad.

7:45 a.m. — Send an email to my supervisor reminding her that I’ll be working lunches and staying late this week, because I’m leaving work early Friday to catch the plane to NY Comic Con. I still have no idea what to pack.

(Poster’s note: All this before 8am. I don’t think I do that much in a *day*. And yet there’s more!)

8:03 a.m. — Receive an email from facility services that they will be shutting off the water from 3:30 p.m. until 4:00 p.m. for maintenance. Make a mental note to drink less water today.

8:55 a.m. — Receive call from Publisher A. Apparently, the street date for an important title is not showing up on iPage. Immediately start the emergency email-tree and proceed to remedy the situation and notify all parties involved.

9:02 a.m. — Place call to insurance company. They recommend a local fence company and suggest I call them for a request. The number they give me turns out to be a fax number. After some Googling and trial and error, I finally speak to someone who promises me an estimate this week.

9:45 a.m. — Finish daily orders and start work on returns.

9:58 a.m. — Receive .pdf from Accounts Payable of a check from Publisher B, with no description attached. Three people instantly need to know what this is for. I email our rep for the publisher. She is at Sales Conference this week.

10:16 a.m. — Receive email from Distributor C about a title from a publisher they recently acquired that has been postponed so many times our purchase orders don’t match up any more. Send a file to the rep so he can manually make their systems match ours. Still working on returns.

10:30 a.m. — Receive a quick call from St. Martin’s Press — they would like me to add a column of info to the Dark-Hunter trivia questions I’m doing to promote the Sherrilyn Kenyon series. There’s a chance it could be a Facebook application. How cool is that?!?

10:53 a.m. — Receive a list of active publishers from Distributor C, for use in reconciling our systems. Forward that list to the three departments who will need it.

10:55 a.m. — Receive email from branch of the emergency email-tree requesting clarification on street date issue. Still more returns.

11:09 a.m. — PW Daily arrives. A quick skim reveals that the London Book Fair is really expensive, and it’s the 50th anniversary of the Crayola 64-pack. Shoot…THAT should have been my angle for the storytime books intro I recorded last week for the Ingram Podcast.

11:31 a.m. — Receive an email from C.E. Murphy asking me to guest blog “A Day in the Life of Me.” I laugh and tell her that today would make a very good example. I start taking notes.

11:59 a.m. — Lunchtime already? Put lunch in microwave and pop in an audiobook to listen to while I work on even more returns — Cecelia Ahern’s If You Could See Me Now. It’s pretty fabulous, and very well-performed. A busy woman loves her audiobooks.

12:02 a.m. — Rep from Publisher B sends details for that no-longer-mysterious check. Microwave beeps.

12:06 p.m. — Customer Service gets in touch to verify street date title.

12:23 p.m. — Publisher C sends an email to say that they discovered one of the titles they sent is defective. They are sending replacements, but they are not interested in getting the defective stock back — we should just throw it away. Makes sense, but I still have to check with several people, because the system doesn’t have a “throw it away” key. (Probably a good thing.)

12:40 p.m. — “…the tone of his voice was like a favorite song she wanted to blare and put on repeat.” Brilliant, Cecelia. Her heroine sleeps about as much as I do, and I’m suddenly craving coffee.

1:01 p.m. — Finish the week’s returns. Start reviewing monthly title forecast exceptions.

1:30 p.m. — Weekly Staff Meeting. We decide it should be spelled “e-books.”

2:04 p.m. — Come back from staff meeting to an email from Publisher D regarding a new title buy that got skipped. After ten minutes of searching through sell sheets, I determine that Vol. 1 was bought, but Vol 2 was never presented. I place a buy for Vol. 2.

2:30 p.m. — Ask my supervisor who would need to okay my “Day in the Life” blog for public consumption. Realize I am having the famed “case of the Mondays.”

2:45 p.m. — Break down and make a quick trip to Starbucks, since caffeine and whipped cream are the key to happiness. Drive slowly due to abundance of trucks and ticket-happy cops in the industrial park. I smile at a baby in red socks and listen to Chris Martin from Coldplay tell me how beautiful I am. I know he doesn’t mean it, but it’s still nice to hear.

3:00 p.m. — Enter August new title buys for Publisher C.

3:37 p.m. — Set up new drop-in titles (titles outside a catalog) so I can place those buys tomorrow.

3:45 p.m. — Check set up of Fall titles for Distributor E while chatting on the phone to Dan Gamber from Meadowhawk Press. He requests a blurb and convention advice, among other pleasantries. It’s all about multitasking.

4:15 p.m. — Send around an email asking for help on a project I’ve been asked to do for Children’s Book Week in May.

4:19 p.m. — Clean up and add a quick intro to my Sarah Addison Allen “Genre Chicks” interview for the May Library Services e-newsletter. Her new book The Sugar Queen is one of my absolute favorite books this year.

4:50 p.m. — Pack up to leave and…and don’t use the restroom. The water is apparently still not back on. Good time to be getting gone.

5:20 p.m. — While driving home, realize 1.) it is already starting to rain and 2.) I forgot to thaw the chicken this morning. Arrive home / cover flowers in the back yard with sheets / use facilities / thaw chicken / check email. In that order. Check in with my writers group. Set my Facebook pet dragon to attack “Doombringer.”

5:38 p.m. — Indulge in a walk on the treadmill and an episode of CSI:NY. The writers on this show are the best of all three CSI incarnations, and the cast has great chemistry. This time, the killer was the publisher. Figures. Have some dinner.

6:43 p.m. — Clean up Jay Lake Q&A for Subterranean Press Online. The hard part will be coming up with an intro worthy of someone like Jay.

7:00 p.m. — Continue work on Dark-Hunter trivia questions. (Facebook, here I come!)

8:30 p.m. — Receive a call from my friend Priscilla in NY. Talk while typing. It’s all about multitasking.

9:05 p.m. — Receive short story email rejection from Clarkesworld Magazine. I have to wait seven days before submitting again. I know which story to pick next; I’ll mark my calendar.

9:10 p.m. — Start typing up this blog from notes on several scattered scraps of paper I’m sure I’ll lose.

10:08 p.m. — It’s ten o’clock already?!? I have GOT to jump in the shower and get to bed. After all, tomorrow is another day, and I want to squeeze in a few more chapters of Ken Scholes’s Lamentation manuscript — my favorite book of next year…so far. Nighty-night!

"Limbo" by Stephanie Dray

My dead great grandmother talks to me.

She was an immigrant to this country and she feels perfectly entitled to lurk in the back of my mind demanding that I make an accounting for my life, since I have opportunities she only dreamed of. This constant nagging, this sense of inter-generational obligation, has always informed both my politics and my writing.

Of course, my great grandmother was illiterate and probably considered writing to be my most useless skill. But I still think she’d have been tickled to find out that she’d inspired a story like “Limbo”--a quirky tale about a young Italian-American woman whose dead grandmother possesses her body and meddles in her romances. At its core, though, “Limbo” is about the inherited baggage we carry through life. And I consider this story my own little tribute to the colorful women of my family, whose flaws and virtues I really could not exaggerate with my prose if I tried.

But “Limbo” was also inspired by some of the other great ladies I've learned from, including my three female instructors at Clarion East. Nalo Hopkinson encouraged me to enrich my own writing with the details of my cultural heritage. Maureen McHugh challenged me to test out different authorial voices and to give myself permission to engage in wacky thought experiments. And Kelly Link prodded me to break with convention and try my hand at something just a little bit weird. (I like to think that Kelly will appreciate that I finally found a way to work a metaphorically disembodied head into my writing.)

The night before I wrote “Limbo,” I was at a writer’s convention and someone dared me to emulate the voice of a writer I admired. I have problems resisting dares, and at the time, I was immersed in Maureen McHugh's "Mothers and Other Monsters.” I’d never written anything in the present tense before and I wasn’t sure I could do it. On the long car ride home from the convention, I felt overwhelmed by the challenge and filled with self-doubt about my chosen career path. Right on cue, great grandma started yammering about how I really ought to learn some marketable skills like goat-herding. (To be fair, she doesn’t just nag me when I’m feeling insecure. She also has an opinion on my home décor, since a lot of the furniture in my house once belonged to her.)

Anyway, the point is that great grandma’s yammering, a writer’s conference, and the collective influence of some of my favorite female writers converged on one long car ride, and “Limbo” was born.

I knew the story was a success when my writing group asked me for the recipe for pasta fagioli and started sharing tales of their own zany relatives. In those stories, more narratives about how we’re shaped by the influence of people long departed began to emerge.

You see, deep down, I think everybody’s dead relatives talk to them. I just hope that “Limbo” will help people listen to what their ancestors really have to say.

(artwork for this story (in the current issue of IGMS) by Anselmo Alliegro) (Stephanie's website: http://www.stephaniedray.com)

"Accounting For Dragons" by Eric James Stone

In the summer of 2007, I attended the six-week-long Odyssey
Writing Workshop.  One of the events of the workshop was
the "Odyssey Slam" at the Barnes & Noble in Nashua, New
Hampshire.  Each workshop participant had to read a flash fiction piece in
five minutes or less.

My original plan was to read a revised version
of the 1000-word story I had written earlier in
the workshop,but in the last few days before the
Slam I started leaning against that. The night
before the Slam I began working on a more
humorous piece, as I've noticed that humor tends
to go over very well at readings.

In the morning I got up and decided that piece
wouldn't work, because it was too cliched.
It was a punchline-type story, and I Googled the
punchline and saw a couple of similar stories.)  
Also, the story itself would be too serious
before the punchline.

So I looked at revising some of my unpublished
flash pieces, and none of them appealed to me.
Then I looked at the possibility of chopping down
my humorous fairy tale "Bird-Dropping and Sunday,"
which always gets a great reception at readings
even though editors keep deciding it's not quite
right for their magazines, but decided there was
no way I could cut half the story.

Finally, before deciding to just go with the
original plan, I went over my lists of titles and
story seeds, and came across "dragon accountant,"
which was a seed I had jotted down sometime in the
previous couple of weeks, based on a comment by
someone (I think it was a guest lecturer, author
Michael Arnzen) about dragon accountants.

It occurred to me that dragons might need some
basic information about accounting, sort of an
Accounting for Dummies--except for dragons, not
dummies.  That gave me my title and basic premise.

Not until I had written over half the story did I
realize there was an actual character reading the
information aloud to a dragon.

"Accounting for Dragons" is the first story I wrote
almost entirely using voice dictation software.  
By sheer coincidence, the name of the software
is Dragon Naturally Speaking.

Anyway, I finished the story in a couple of hours
and read it at the Slam.  It went over pretty well,
with people laughing in the right places, which is
always a plus.

After the Odyssey workshop was over, I revised the
story with some help from my brother Michael, an
actual accountant who works for something far scarier
than a dragon: the Internal Revenue Service.  My
writing groups were also helpful in bringing the
story up to snuff, particularly by letting me know
what to cut out because it wasn't working.

(artwork for this story (in the current issue of IGMS) by Nick Greenwood: http://www.nick-greenwood.com) (Eric's website: www.ericjamesstone.com)

“The Frankenstein Diaries” - by Matt Rotundo

Inspiration can strike you anywhere, at any time. With "The Frankenstein Diaries," the idea sprang at me as I read the newspaper. I chanced upon an article about a father exploring the possibility of cloning his deceased son from the DNA in a lock of the boy's hair--a memento from a first haircut, as I recall.

And I got angry.

Seriously. I wanted to smack the guy. His child was gone. Cloning, even if someday perfected, would not bring him back. Didn't he get that?

Maybe part of the problem, I thought, was the way cloning is depicted in popular culture. Clones are almost uniformly shown as exact duplicates of the "original"--in every way, not just in appearance--and more often than not emerging from some laboratory fully grown, to boot. Now, I'm not knocking such stories; they can be entertaining on their own terms. But someone cloned from my cells would not be another Matt Rotundo. He would just be someone who looks a lot like me. And he would start out, like we all do, as a baby.

I began to wonder what it would really be like to raise a child cloned from another's cells. What sorts of unique difficulties would the family face? And perhaps more important, why would parents choose to clone a child in the first place? Even if natural conception were impossible, why wouldn't the parents consider adoption? Would you opt for cloning even if you were fully informed of the realities? I thought again about that grieving father from the newspaper article, and I began to pity him, a little.

It was then that I knew I had a story.

I wrote the first draft of "The Frankenstein Diaries" in an epistolary format--as a series of journal entries, naturally. I rather enjoyed the challenge of telling the story this way, but a wise reader advised me to recast it in third person. I really didn't want to do that, fearing the story might lose a bit of what made it special. I also suspected such a rewrite would involve a lot of work.

Or was that just laziness talking? I couldn't tell.

So I grudgingly made a deal with myself: I would write a third person version of the story, as a sort of test drive, but I would keep the original in a separate file. When I was finished, I would compare the two drafts, and decide which one I liked best.

I was right; it was a lot of work. It involved much more than simply changing a bunch of pronouns. I had to do some major restructuring. Entire scenes disappeared; others had to be shuffled around. For instance, the opening, with John Griffin picking up his son after an incident at daycare, originally appeared some twenty pages into the story. If the epistolary format had been a challenge, the more conventional third person proved even more so. Ah, the irony.

In the end, of course, my wise reader was vindicated, and I remain grateful for the input (thanks, Rita!). I kept some of the journal entries, though. You can't really call a story "The Frankenstein Diaries" without showing a bit of the diary, right?

Some readers have found this a pretty bleak piece. That feedback surprised me at first, but upon reflection, I suppose I can understand why people would feel that way. A whole string of terrible events occurs, even in just the first half of the story. Still, for what it's worth, I maintain that I've never seen "The Frankenstein Diaries" as downbeat. I don't want to give away too much, but I'd like to think the ending rewards the reader, at least a little, for sticking it out through the hard times.

(artwork for this story (in the current issue of IGMS) by Kevin Wasden: www.kevinwasden.com) (Matt's blog: matthewsrotundo.livejournal.com.)

Letter From The Editor - April 2008, Issue 8

It's like when you (or your wife) are pregnant: suddenly there are pregnant women everywhere. At the mall waddling from storefront to storefront; in the DMV standing in that line that never moves and never ends; in the supermarket buying ice cream and cookies. The truth, however, is that there really aren't any more pregnant women than there were before; it only seems that way because your awareness of them has been heightened.

It was that way for me when I put the current issue of IGMS together. I didn't set out for it to be a themed issue, and I'm still not completely convinced that it is. On the other hand, once the idea reared its head, it seemed quite inescapable.

I blame Dennis Danvers. His story "The Angel's Touch" opens with a man getting on the elevator in his apartment building, only to find an angel there, waiting for him and wanting to chat. Not the nicest angel you ever met, either. Although "The Angel's Touch" wasn't the first story I bought for this issue, without it there probably wouldn't have been any of this 'theme' business.

You see, I had already bought Matt Rotundo's "Frankenstein Diaries" and planned for it to begin in issue eight (it's our current novelette, and will be concluded in issue nine), and at the time it was simply a great story about a man and his son's clone, nothing more. And even when I found Dennis's story after that, still the word 'theme' never entered the conversation.

Next came Stephanie Dray's "Limbo," and I thought to myself, Now there's an interesting and amusing twist on the afterlife . . ."

And then John Brown's "From The Clay of His Heart." It's your typical girl-meets-golem, girl-can't-rid-of-golem, girl-almost-loses-golem-to-evil-volhov story. You know how those go.

But then "End Time" arrived. Maybe I should point the finger at Scott Bull instead of poor Dennis. But as soon as I read it, I thought, Hey, I've already got the angel story . . . I should put this story, about a guy who's tired of doing the devil's bidding, in the same issue. Kind of a yin and yang thing. They would be great together . . .

And then suddenly all of the stories were pregnant with thematic possibilities. The golem, the distant and not-so-distant relatives displaced from the afterlife, the angel, the devil, even the novelette, which so nicely captures the original Frankenstein's theme of man playing God and paying a price for it. They all seemed to have religious implications.

But I needed one more piece. I had enough fantasy stories for this issue; I needed one more SF piece to balance things out. So when I found Aliette de Bodard's "Rise of Horus" about an AI (artificial intelligence) and his murdered father -- who were both named after Egyptian gods -- I knew I had to include it in this issue. It just fit . . .

But, hey, there's still Eric James Stone's ultra-fun flash fiction story, "Accounting For Dragons." It features dragons and virgins and treasure and accountants (oh my). No God or gods or even anybody named after one. So you see, it's not a themed issue. Not on purpose, anyway. Really.

Happy reading.

Edmund R. Schubert
Editor, Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show

P.S. Yes, here comes issue eight, and no, we still haven't posted the Ender universe story for issue seven. It is coming. We promised an Ender universe story in every issue and we'll keep that promise as soon as humanly possible.

P.P.S. New Story behind The Story essay tomorrow. I promise.

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