Fantasycon 2017: A Jolly Good Surprise!

I am pleased glad deliriously ecstatic to report that Stay Crazy has won the British Fantasy Award for Best Newcomer!

I did have a speech prepared, but I promptly forgot all of it once I got to the podium and I'm not even quite sure what I said once I was up there. (If it was embarrassing, please don't ever let me know.) So in case I didn't say it then, I want to thank my publishers Jason Sizemore and Lesley Conner at Apex, my writing mentor and biggest supporter Nick Mamatas, all the short fiction editors who have bought my work over the years, my spouse/in-house editor Rob, and most of all the British Fantasy Society. I could not be happier that my little small press book has been so greatly honored. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.

Fantasycon itself was wonderful, as was the week in London preceding it. I was especially happy to meet some of my UK-based writer friends, including Eliza Chan, G.V. Anderson, and Georgina Bruce (who won the BFA for Best Short Story, yeah!). I spent a little bit of time hanging out with the Interzone crew (psst, you can buy new the new issue now, which I am in!) and awkwardly barconning. I'm not sure if I'll ever make it back to Fantasycon as it's a bit of a hike, but I hope to see some of the folks I met there at the Dublin Worldcon in 2018, because that's definitely a thing we're planning to do.

Been back home for a week now, and just getting back into the writing swing of things. Some people write on their vacations, but I'm not one of them. Hope to have some new sales and progress reports soon, but until then, you can buy a copy of Stay Crazy directly from Apex here. And keep listening for the signals!

In Which I Am Nominated for an Award!

You know how it goes: You're sitting in a neurologist's waiting room running on a medically-mandated two hours of sleep. You're reading Twitter, because you're always reading Twitter, and you see that you've been nominated for a British Fantasy Award. And then the EEG tech comes and gets you, and you can't play with your phone anymore, and you mumble something like "I think I've just been nominated for an award" but the tech is all "oh dear, you are tired, aren't you?" You lay in a quiet room for an hour trying to take a medically-mandated nap but you can't because you're wondering: did it happen?

It totally did.

I am so thrilled and honored that my debut novel Stay Crazy has been nominated for a British Fantasy Award in the Best Newcomer category. My first shortlist! So incredibly stoked! This book is pretty important to me, and it means the world that some other folks liked it too. Thank you judges and readers, from the bottom of my heart.

Assuming we can get passports and a hotel, I'll be attending Fantasycon 2017, as well as spending a week in the UK because why not. My first trip overseas! Exciting! See you there!

STAY CRAZY Released: We Have Book Sign!

So there comes a time in every manuscript's life where they must be fed into a computer, rendered into pixelated symbols corresponding to various phonemes, and then stamped on the thinly flayed corpse of a thousand-year-old tree.

Anyway, this is just a rambling way of saying that Stay Crazy was officially released today. It's available everywhere: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell's, and the Apex Publications site itself. Here is a terrible picture of it:

And like all 21st century authors, I took a little blog tour. Here's where I've been so far:

Starting at the beginning, at Alex Shvartsman's The Hook I have an essay about the beginning chapter of the novel and why I started my weird SF/horror/WTF book so mundanely. At the South African Speculative Fiction Review blog I talked about the real villain in Stay Crazy (capitalism), and at Midnyte Reader I had a post about some of the darker themes in the book.

One of the main things I wanted to do with Stay Crazy is fight the stigma of psychosis, and so over on John Wiswell's blog I wrote about why I thought it was so important to show a heroic (kinda) character with schizophrenia. And on Mary Robinette Kowal's My Favorite Bit I spoke a little about the interaction between my protagonist Em and her mentally ill coworker Roger, which is the novel's most significant relationship.

I did interviews with Nick Mamatas, Shimmer Magazine, J. Kathleen Cheney, M. Darusha Wehm, and Andrea Johnson the Little Red Reviewer.

Here are some more early reviews:

"Stay Crazy succeeds in its defiance of convention, in taking the most familiar story arc in existence and turning it inside out. As a first novel, it's a promising showcase of Satifka's talent, and fans of Philip K. Dick will feel right at home." --The Semiotic Standard (with bonus interview!)

"What I like about Em is that she is kind of a jerk. I like to have to try hard to find the redeeming qualities in characters." --The Booktrovert

You can add Stay Crazy on Goodreads. I myself am a horrible user of Goodreads, preferring to announce my book recommendations from a megaphone out of the side of a helicopter, but the kids seem to dig it. And lastly I did a reading at the Another Read Through bookstore in Portland, and you can buy it off the shelf there right now!

And finally, I'll be at WorldCon, where there will be a release party on Friday night in the Consuite. I'll be holding one of these:

...and just generally being as awkward as possible so you might as well come over and awkwardly eat cookies with me. YAY BOOK!

January Hot Takes

1. My flash fiction story "Human Resources" is now live at Fireside magazine! Here's a clip:

I used to be vain. I didn’t want my body carved up, so when things got rough I auctioned off a small piece of my brain for a luxury condo and free food for a year. You’ll never miss it, the broker said, and most of the time he’s right. I can’t focus too well anymore, and my memory is shot, but it’s actually kind of nice sometimes. Like living in a dream. 

Celia only got a car. The economy really is weak right now.

Economics and mutilation, a winning combination. The rest of the issue contains stories by A.K. Snyder, A. Merc Rustad, and Aidan Doyle, with gorgeous art from Galen Dara. And if you like what Fireside is doing, consider contributing to their Patreon!

2. You may have a word count tracker for your writing, but do you have the best word count tracker, the one that has colors to keep you motivated but which doesn't have all that crap you don't need? The word count tracker that's basically perfect in every way? Well, now you do. All credit to Christie Yant, creator of the best word count tracker.

3. I read a lot of single-author short fiction collections. Partially for learning, mostly for enjoyment. In 2013 I picked up an e-copy of Jennifer Pelland's Unwelcome Bodies based on a vague memory of reading and enjoying one of her stories in a defunct magazine called Helix. The notable thing about this collection is that every story was basically perfect. The collection closer "Brushstrokes" (a novella) was especially moving, a dark SF love story with extremely unique worldbuilding. Reading Unwelcome Bodies taught me a LOT about writing, and I can guarantee that if you like my stories you'll like this collection. All of this is a long-winded way of saying that it's only a dollar this month for Kindle so pick this sucker up now.

Novel sale: STAY CRAZY to Apex Publications

It's on the publisher's blog, so it's official: I'm going to have a novel published. Here's the blurb:

Nineteen-year-old stock girl Emmeline Kalberg isn't surprised when voices start speaking to her through the RFID chips embedded in frozen food containers. Ever since she left college after being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, voices have been a mainstay of her life, something to be ignored. But when Em's fellow employees at Savertown USA start dying around her, victims of a mysterious suicide plague, she decides to listen in. What she hears has the potential to tear apart the fabric of her small western Pennsylvania town -- and maybe the entire world.

The story of Stay Crazy began in 2006, when I wrote a novel called Entity that melded my experiences working for Walmart in that strange-ass year after I graduated college with my love of stories that question the nature of reality. Then a year later I quit writing for reasons that made a lot of sense at the time, and the novel was basically trunked along with the rest of my writing. But the story never left me, I always wished I had done something with the novel, and that wish especially grew stronger when I un-quit and my writing reached a whole new level. Some time last year, I pulled out the novel and well... I'm a much better writer than I used to be. So I rewrote it, line by painstaking line. I gave the story the writing it deserved.

And now... it's going to be published. My weirdo reality-bending category-bending novel with a mentally ill, working-class protagonist living in a shitty small town is going to be available for anyone to read, anytime, anywhere. I'm especially stoked to be published by Apex, since they've released a whole lot of books I've just loved.

Publication date is set for August 2016, so mark your calendars! In related news, I will be at WorldCon next year, so... book release party? Book release party, yes.

EEEEEE!!!!!!

"Loving Grace" up at Clarkesworld

So happy to announce that my story "Loving Grace" is live at Clarkesworld Magazine. Here's a sample:

When full automation made human employment superfluous, the first reaction was panic. Pink slips fell like confetti. Even Chase had protested against the coming of the machines at first, though Marybeth hadn’t.

“It’s a paradigm shift,” she’d said. “Relax, Chase. It’s the way things were meant to be. Machines can do things better than we ever could.” 

The early days of the Shift were a time of great upheaval, as people who’d spent their whole lives working suddenly found themselves without a job, a purpose. The solution was drastic: a complete social safety net, and a draft. Every day, a few people were called for employment, targeted by the drones that also swept the city clean, monitored crime, and performed chit drops. Stretches of employment varied from a few months to a few years. 

You’ll come back, the Employment Bureau said. Everyone will come back. We count on it. Chase knows nobody who has returned, but that doesn’t prove anything.

This issue also features fiction by Robert Reed, Bao Shu, Elizabeth Bourne, and many others! I'm not going to break my usual pattern of not talking about my stories, but I will say that the article "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs" by David Graeber was a huge inspiration for this piece, and of course this poem by Richard Brautigan. Read it if you want to, and let me know what you think!

"States of Emergency" Is Live!

My insane short story "States of Emergency" is live on Shimmer! Here's an excerpt:

NEVADA

The house always wins. So does the Autonomic SmarTrak DwellingUnit 3.0. 

Step inside. Allow the polished servo-mechanisms to lift you up, float you through the air like a luck-kissed cherub. Spin the wheel. Roll the dice. Make merry. Have another scotch. Ante. Raise. Call. 

Later, when the lights go dark and the thrill of winning is gone, sink into the luxurious honeycomb of the fully furnished basement. Order some room service. It’s on the house.

I spend a lot of time in the shower thinking about stories, which I found out is actually a pretty common thing. This story, though, was a first in that it was inspired by the shower, or more specifically the new curtain we bought at Fred Meyer when we moved to Portland.

For a couple of months, I amused myself by imagining all the terrible, personalized fates that could befall residents of the fifty states. Then I wrote them down, because why not? And from there, a story was born. It's fragmented on purpose, can be read in almost any order, and is pretty wacky. Hope you enjoy!

Also, I haven't mentioned it yet because this blog is severely neglected, but I'll have a short story out soon in Clarkesworld. Yes, after an eight-year gap, I'm finally going to be in Clarkesworld again. It's an unabashedly political story about drones and full luxury communism, and I can't wait to share it with the part of the world that reads short stories.

New Stuff!

Issue #26 of Shimmer is out! This issue includes my story "States of Emergency," an insane travelogue set in an altered America:

In a no-tell motel just outside Billings, the psychotic cattle rancher known as Paranoid Jack freezes when he sees the baby-blue eyeball glowering at him from the mouthpiece of the Bakelite phone.

This issue also contains stories by Lavie Tidhar, Roshani Chokshi, and Cat Hellisen. My story will be online in August, but if you want to read it now, go grab a copy.

Meanwhile, some rad folks had some nice things to say about "Bucket List, etc." Over on Tor.com, Brit Mandelo calls it "a nice brief punch of feeling," while K. Tempest Bradford at io9 Newsstand named it as one of her stories of the week. What are you waiting for? Get the full issue of Lightspeed's Queers Destroy Science Fiction now!

Destroying Science Fiction, One Flash Story at a Time

The special "Queers Destroy Science Fiction" issue of Lightspeed is out, and my story's in it! Along with a lot of other awesome stories! Check out "Bucket List Found in the Locker of Maddie Price, Age 14, Written Two Weeks Before the Great Uplifting of All Mankind" as part of the free content, or better yet buy the issue and unlock stories by Sarah Pinsker, Rose Lemberg, and many others. I really enjoyed "Emergency Repair" by Kate M. Galey, which you can also read for free.

I've been having a hell of a time finishing stories lately. Over the past month I've started at least five different stories, three of which were variations on a single theme. Sometimes, no matter what you do, a story just won't gel and none of these were working. They were technically good, but felt lifeless. Protip: if your own stories seem lifeless to you, then they definitely will seem that way to an editor.

Most of my stories written in the past two years have been plotted instead of pantsed (improvised) and I've become kind of an evangelist for plotting. However, I think plotting was strangling these stories. They were just sort of limping along from one scene to the next, and while I probably could have "fixed it in post," all of them eventually became chores to write. (And also, five stories. Kind of hard to care about any individual story when your focus is so divided.)

So I started fresh. I reread a few stories that had inspired me in the past and were close to the tone I was trying to set down, figured out the narrator's voice, and just started writing. The new story has pieces in it lifted from the five different stories, but it's really its own thing. It's perhaps a little similar in theme to stuff I've already done, but hey, lots of writers run to similar themes (including some of my all-time favorites). I wrote 1700 words in the first session and plan to finish the story in a second session today or tomorrow, to achieve maximum freshness. I hope this story gels! I think it will. It feels like it will, even if I already see a whole laundry list of tweaks I'll need to tend to.

Not really sure why I felt the need to document this. Perhaps it's just a way to keep myself honest?

My OryCon Schedule

I have an interview up at the Weightless Books blog, talking about Portland, the Codex Writers Group, how boring novels are to write, and more. Check it out!

Also, I'll be at OryCon two weekends from now, November 7-9 and will be on a mess of panels. Here's my schedule:

FRIDAY

1:00 - 1:30PM:  Erica Satifka Reading - Erica Satifka reads from her own works. (Eek!)

2:00 - 3:00PM: Woman in the Fridge - You need to give your hero a reason to do something. Quick! Kill his girlfriend and have him discover her stuffed in the fridge! Come have a respectful discussion on avoiding misogynist tropes in your fiction. MeiLin Miranda, Erik Wecks, Sheila Simonson, Diana Francis (M), Erica L. Satifka

3:00 - 4:00PM: Green Tree, Blue Tree, Purple Tree - What are some exotic ideas that could actually work based on current knowledge? Erica L. Satifka, Richard A. Lovett, Jessica F. Hebert, Daniel H. Wilson (M)

4:00 - 5:00PM: Workshop: Story Outline in an Hour - Bring something to write on and write with. You'll have an outline (or a good start) to a story by the end of this panel. Bonus--this would be a great head start to that creative writing class homework you're ignoring over the weekend. Erica L. Satifka, Frog Jones (M), Jason Andrew

5:00 - 6:00PM: Getting Your First Professional Sale - An author can struggle for months or years before achieving their first success, but even after writing their opus, they can be tripped up by a process which is both entirely new to them and yet critical to their success. This panel describes what an author may experience as they revel in their first success. Shawna Reppert (M), Annie Bellet, Erica L. Satifka, Kristin Landon, Devon Monk

SATURDAY

10:00 - 11:00AM: What I Wish I Would Have Known: Pitfalls for New Writers - All the things writers should know going in, from craft to scams, and what our panelists wish they'd known. Erica L. Satifka, Marshall Ryan Maresca, Dean Wells, John Hedtke, Mike Moscoe

1:00 - 2:00PM: Backstory: Too Much, Too Little, Just Right - What to use, what to lose. Writing the details without having to explain every last one. G. David Nordley, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, John C. Bunnell (M), Erica L. Satifka, Matthew Hughes

3:00 - 4:00PM: Broad Universe Rapid Fire Reading - Join members of Broad Universe--an organization dedicated to women in genre fiction--for a whole bunch of really short readings crammed into one hour. MeiLin Miranda, Shawna Reppert, Erica L. Satifka, Susan R. Matthews

SUNDAY

10:00 - 11:00AM: Organizing a Successful Critique Group - A good critique group can make or break a writer. Different types of critique groups, the lifespan of a group, ground rules, ideal numbers, etc. Clayton Callahan, Erica L. Satifka (M), Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Edd Vick

1:00 - 2:00PM: Fiction in a Flash - Short fiction for a world of compressed time--flash and tweetable micro-fiction. Common pitfalls, quirks, problems and teh awesome inherent in the very short form. Jennifer Linnaea, Jason Andrew, Esther Jones, Erica L. Satifka (M)

Whew! Anyway, it's at the DoubleTree Hotel right next to the Lloyd Center in beautiful Portland, Oregon. Come check it out, and make sure to stop in the mall to visit the Suncoast Video.

Two Stories and a Cake

Words to live by, awesome cake.

I have two new stories out! The first is my flash fiction story "Useful Objects," which came out in Nature last week (and on the site as well). Nine years intermittently getting my stories published and this is my first appearance in a print magazine. There is also a rad illustration, though it's not as rad as the cake in this post!

Also, my creepy telepathy-in-space-with-pronoun-shenanigans story "We Take the Long View" is free to read at Shimmer now. An excerpt:

Us-in-Devora is the first of us to stumble into the clearing to the landing site covered with a fine layer of snow. She-that-is-us paces around it, careful not to step on the pieces of us that were broken off at the Wrong. Our nose wrinkles. 

Smelly, she says, her mind-speak betraying her disgust. 

It's... Mel grasps for a word, but can't come up with a better one. Smelly. Yes. 

We pick up a stick, a stray dead part of us, and poke the thing in the clearing. It stirs.

Novel revisions continue. Is it November 6th yet?

Buy My Book!

Well, it happened: I finally became curious enough about self-publishing to throw a story of mine up on the Kindles and see how it plays. "Some Kinds of Life" is a rewrite/expansion of a story I had published in a print anthology way back in 2005, a simpler time of LiveJournals and palm-sized cell phones. Here's the description:

Sam sells children. Or close enough. After biological warfare ravages the planet, an organ dealer rebrands its product line by creating artificial offspring. But Sam's faltering career in sales stirs up unpleasant memories of the children he mothered and had to leave behind. "Some Kinds of Life" is a 4500-word short story about what's real, what isn't, and the things that really matter. An earlier version of this story appeared in the anthology Triangulation 2005 under the title "Wave of the Future."

This e-book includes the bonus story "Super-Parents Last All Childhood Long." When Caleb's girlfriend tells him that her parents were robots, is she lying? Or is the truth stranger than it seems? Originally appeared in Daily Science Fiction.

It's only on Amazon right now, and it will likely stay that way because I am far too lazy to port this to other e-book retailers. On the plus side, if you have Kindle Unlimited, you can read it for free and I still get paid in some kind of wacky Internet money. Either way, if you're looking for something weird and kinda depressing then this is something you can download for all your "weird and kinda depressing" fiction needs. I am a marketing genius, clearly.

(The title of this post is of course a reference to this. Semi-coincidentally, Rob and I are re-watching The Critic right now. If you remember the nineties, it totally holds up.)

P.S. Thanks to Annie Bellet for sourcing the cover image for me, since unlike zines, if you use a cover image you haven't paid for on an e-book, you're likely to be caught and sued. Isn't that crazy? No, wait, it's completely sane.

Publications, Also an Ocean

First of all, my story "Five Days to a Better You with Parallel Worlds (Executive Edition)" went live at Daily Science Fiction last week. A sample:

Mandy the receptionist will press the alarm when you burst into the room, but that doesn't mean you should be alarmed. In the real universe, the one you come from, her name is Sandy. She loves cats. Flash those pearly white teeth of yours.

Second of all, the newest issue of Shimmer is out and it contains my story! "We Take the Long View" is a story of telepathy, colonization, body horror, and evil forests. The story will be online in mid-October but you should really buy the issue now.

In non-writing news, I finally put my feet into the Pacific Ocean:

Picture taken by Rob. Doesn't this look like it could illustrate some self-help article about following your dreams?

Rob's parents came to visit and they wanted to go to the beach, which I was very excited about since I have never seen the Pacific Ocean and one of my friends said the Oregon Coast is one of the most beautiful places on Earth. We didn't get to see the sunset, but even so, I can see the appeal. The first beach we stopped at was pretty wild, with rocks jutting up from the coast and mountains in the distance. It was cold, and there was an old shipwreck on the beach. We spent the night in the very cute town of Astoria where I somehow managed to crash a loaner beach cruiser. On the second day, we went to the town of Seaside, OR, which reminded me more of the beach towns on the Atlantic. The beach there was also much more "tame," though there was some grass and of course the mountains over the horizon. There was also a swingset. There aren't many things in life more relaxing than swinging on a swingset while facing the Pacific Ocean on a hot (but not too hot) day.

Clatsop County is also the ancestral home of Bigfoot:

Sup?

We also went to Lewis and Clark's winter fort. Man, Oregon is just lousy with Lewis and Clark stuff. It's like that's the most important thing that's ever happened here. (I can't judge. The only historical thing that happened where I grew up was a battle from a war nobody cares about anymore.) We ate some really good vegetarian burgers at the Coast, drank some excellent microbrews, and fed seals at a small aquarium that has its own Wikipedia page. After getting back, we took Rob's parents to Powell's and I failed to convince them to eat at a food cart. Then on Sunday we went to Mount Hood, which was very impressive. I've never seen a real mountain up close before, and it was actually a little terrifying. There's a sign at the hiking station that basically says "if you get stuck up there, you're on your own." (Fine, Mount Hood. Be that way. I guess I'll never find out if you're filled with candy.) I have pictures of this stuff too, but there are already too many pictures in this post.

And finally, a picture that proves once and for all that Portland truly is Etsy's brick and mortar storefront:

Goddamn, I love it here.

Erica's Infrequent Book Reviews Presents: AFTERPARTY by Daryl Gregory

Afterparty by Daryl Gregory
Tor Books
Buy at Powell's or Amazon

Neuroscientist Lyda Rose has just learned that the experimental drug which drove her crazy and caused her wife to be murdered is loose in North America. The drug, codenamed "Numinous," causes users to experience a hallucination of God, and to believe in it. Lyda breaks out of the mental health facility where she's being detained to find out the source of Numinous and stop it from spreading. Part near-future science fiction, part murder mystery, Afterparty is a novel for anyone who likes smart fiction.

I first discovered Daryl Gregory's writing in 2012. Searching for novels recommendations, I went to the list of Philip K. Dick Award nominees and checked out some of the synopses. The one for The Devil's Alphabet stood out to me, and I fell in love with the novel. I went on to read the rest of Gregory's output very quickly (always a marathoner) and was just as impressed, particularly with Pandemonium, which was hands down the best novel I read in 2012, holding my attention despite a general preference for short stories. So when I read that Gregory was working on a novel that combined my two favorite subjects, recreational pharmaceuticals and spiritual inquiry, I was immediately intrigued. And then I had to wait a year and a half! Such is publishing, I guess.

Like his previous novels, Afterparty delivers healthy doses (so to speak) of philosophy, well-rounded characters, and not a small amount of dark humor. That's especially true when describing the many pharmaceuticals in use in his near-future setting, like the sexual orientation-altering drug "Flip," which straight frat boys use to have a night of raunchy sex with their buddies. Another example is the apartment rancher/hired killer Vincent, who uses a designer drug to strip away his moral code. I get the feeling that Gregory is using these drugs less to make commentary on (prescription) drug culture than he is to investigate the mechanisms that make us what we are, and how easily biology can override what we believe to be true about ourselves.

Gregory's damaged characters are painted with great detail, from the driver Bobby (who wears his consciousness in a plastic aquarium toy around his neck), to Lyda's girlfriend/co-conspirator Ollie, whose paranoid tendencies were solidified with a drug that causes her to see patterns in everything. Lyda and Ollie sneak across the Canada-America border to investigate the spread of Numinous, but the conspiracy goes deeper than they think--all the way back to the five scientists involved in the creation of the drug and the fateful afterparty that left one of them dead and the rest of them locked into a permanent relationship with their unwanted spiritual guides.

The book is structured like a thriller, but the real meat is in the philosophical questions Gregory brings to the table. Is God only a chemical reaction, and if so, does that make the spiritual experience any less valid? (We are our minds, after all.) How do you regulate drugs in a world where everyone can be an amateur neuroscientist? While it doesn't have the same kind of world-shaking conclusion that Pandemonium did, I was still blown away by the ending, which features a crucial and surprising choice by the atheistic Lyda about the nature of drug-induced faith. It's also a diverse novel, with a lesbian protagonist and a rainbow of characters much like one would expect to populate Toronto a generation from now.

Afterparty by Daryl Gregory gets my highest possible recommendation, but then, I have a severe soft spot for philosophical writing and drug novels. (Like I told Rob when reading him the synopsis, "it's like it's written for me!") This is kind of like a novel Philip K. Dick himself would have written if he'd been allowed to edit and hadn't had hang-ups about women. Thanks to Gregory for writing it, and to NetGalley for the advance copy.

2,833 Miles

So, we're in Portland now.

There was a more impressive welcome sign a few hundred feet from here, but I missed it.

I'm not going to get much into the trip itself, because I'm saving that for the split zine I'm making with Rob, but suffice it to say that it came out much, much better than we expected it to. All three cats are still alive, though Oxford managed to destroy his own carrier. The most beautiful state we went through (including Oregon, which is half desert) was Utah. The worst state was Idaho, with the caveat that we only traveled through the south of it, and the panhandle is supposed to be way better, and we were also getting very tired of traveling by that point. Everyone we met was friendly as hell. Seriously, the Midwest has the most ho-hum topography but the best people. We went through twelve states, eight of which were new to me, and somewhere in Wyoming the terrifying visage of Abraham Lincoln passed judgment upon me and found me lacking.

Rob pulled a U-ie to see this. It was worth it.

Our apartment is fantastic, a very short walk from the bus stop and a longer walk to the Alberta district, home of a fancy waffle shop I imagine I'll be frequenting quite a bit. Surprisingly, I haven't been doing much biking since I got here, since our apartment's one downside is that there is no way to lock up your bike in the front. We have a tiny back yard, but it has a fence around it and is only accessible through the apartment, and my bikes are both 35+ pound behemoths with wide handlebars. I'm thinking about selling one or both of them and getting this contraption, which I'll actually be able to carry easily through the door/apartment. What biking I have done, however, has been glorious. People aren't actively trying to kill me anymore!

It's very peaceful here. We're still mostly in the setting-up phase, and haven't started jobs yet, so that could be part of the reason for the calm. But there's also such a sense of friendliness here, of community, which is strange considering that three-fourths of Portlanders are transplants, but there you go. While I hate to be one of those people who constantly compares Portland to the place they come from, I do think that the friendliness reminds me a lot of Pittsburgh. You know how people in Pittsburgh kind of smile and do a little wave at each other, even if they're complete strangers? Sort of like that, only minus the wave, because come on, that's creepy. It's very flat here and you can walk for miles without getting tired, and Rob's health is improving so much.

This terrible statue in Nebraska is supposed to represent the Oregon Trail. Isn't it ugly?

So yeah: Portland. It's a thing that's happening, right now. I've already met a few writers here, and I'm looking forward to meeting more people in both the science fiction and zine communities, as well as putting together some paying work! Oh, and it's barely rained at all, although it is spring. I like rain anyway.

In writing news, I've sold my short story "We Take the Long View" to Shimmer, one of my favorite magazines! I've been a reader of Shimmer since my friend K.M. Szpara had a short story in one of their previous issues. I'm very excited to share this bit of shimmery science fiction with you all.

Links, with Occasional Exclamation Points

1. I have a new short story out! "The Speaking Ground," published in AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review, is a flash fiction tale of madness on an alien world. Enjoy!

2. You can now order a copy of the Bundoran Press anthology Strange Bedfellows, including my story "The Afternoon Revolution," from Powell's Books and the Bundoran web site. Black Gate calls my story "a grim and relentless look at humanity and inhumanity and how the US is really f&*king it all up with the economic misdistribution of resources driving the decay of America, wrapped in an exciting kidnapping tale." Seems legit!

3. Hate Star Wars? I know I do! Over on SF Signal Mind Meld I bloviate about my least favorite epic science fiction movie. Okay, I don't like any epic anything, but Star Wars holds a special spot of hatred in my pitch-black heart.

4. I will only be on the East Coast for seven more days. Unreal.

5. Saturday's night State of Short Fiction roundtable at BSFS was a success. We discussed the differences between print pubs and online pubs, crowdfunding, podcasting, rising short fiction stars, diversity in the slush pile, and the current popularity (or possible lack thereof) of the short form. Couldn't make it out? Watch the link!

The BSFS State of Short Fiction crew.

6. Are you using Habit RPG? You should be!

Going to Portland

After a long and harrowing search, we have secured an apartment in Portland, Oregon. NE Killingsworth to be exact, a short walk from Alberta.

WE DID IT!!!

The journey begins.

We haven't seen the apartment yet, which is of course a bit of a gamble. But in a city with a 2% vacancy rate, if you find something you like, you have to be quick. We also have three cats, which makes the search a lot more difficult. The location couldn't be better, and it has two bedrooms, and there's nowhere in Portland that is really "bad." I feel very confident about this place. The fact that we've cut down our worldly possessions significantly also helps, and I don't think this will be nearly as bad as the move from Pittsburgh to Baltimore, despite the massively expanded distance. (We are also hiring movers. It will be the best $3,000 we ever spend.)

My mom said "you must be scared," and that's kind of true. We won't have jobs there waiting for us like we did when we moved to Baltimore. Of course that's scary. But life is about taking risks, about throwing caution to the wind to carve out the kind of life you want for yourself. When I moved from my small hometown to Pittsburgh in 2005 I took those same kinds of risks. I had savings, but no job. I didn't have any pre-existing friends in the city. (Something that is not true now, we know dozens of people in Portland.) Even though Pittsburgh was the closest big city to where I grew up, I knew virtually nothing about it, except that I somehow knew in my heart that my life would be better there than it was in Fayette County, and I was willing to risk my carefully hoarded savings and all of my security to make a big change for myself. And even though it wasn't sunshine and roses all the time (because what is, really?) I can definitely say that moving to Pittsburgh was the best decision I'd made up to that point.

Rob said he'd never have made this move without me. I asked if that meant I'm his manic pixie dream girl (although I've always thought of myself as more of a depressive sluagh nightmare woman, credit to Nick Mamatas). Although the truth is just the opposite. I'm tired of moving. I want to stay in one place for years and years, ideally the rest of our lives. We didn't want to do that in Baltimore, and Pittsburgh is kind of "been there, done that." We felt more at home in Portland in a week than we did in three years of living in Baltimore, despite all our friends here. It's just such a relaxed, calm place, so far from the rat race of the East Coast. We have savings, and freelance streams of income to shore them up. It's a risk, but a calculated one, and just like in 2005, I know in my heart we'll be okay.

And so, like the pioneers of yore, we set out in early April with our rented covered motorized wagon. My only regret in this is that we won't be able to see very much of the country, since we'll be taking the fastest route and traveling nonstop. (Cats. It's always cats.) If we were traveling alone we'd probably take a couple weeks to get out there and see a bunch of stuff along the way. But the destination is the important thing, and I am thrilled to be finally settling in the city I've wanted to live in for over a decade with my favorite person in the whole wide world.

2013 Year in Review

So, 2013. Kind of a year. Recap time!

Writing: I wrote ten short stories this year, which includes three flash-length pieces and one novelette. (This only counts stories that I sent out for submission.) This is three times as many stories as I've written in any other single year dating back to 2005 when I made my first sale, and comes very close to equaling the amount of stories that I have written in all years combined since that time, counting the two or so years I was all "fuck writing" and didn't type a word of fiction. I didn't track word count, I only care about individual stories.

I sold five of these stories, plus two written in previous years. Three are currently out:

• "Super-Parents Last All Childhood Long" in Daily Science Fiction
• "You Will Never Be the Same" in the Whispers from the Abyss anthology (buy it!)
• "Thirty-Six Interrogatories Propounded by the Human-Powered Plasma Bomb in the Moments Before Her Imminent Detonation" in Daily Science Fiction. I will never write a better title.

...and the remainder will be out sometime next year. I sold a story to a dream market and three to print anthologies. I joined SFWA as an associate member, and then became active a month later. I went to four conventions, and paneled at two of them (although one was a "stealth" paneling, ha!). I did not work on any novels.

But though sales and publications are certainly nice, the most important thing is that I was writing. Even though certain things in my life are less than ideal right now, I kept writing, and I didn't stop. It's like a switch has been flipped, and while I wish this switch-flipping would have happened in the mid-aughts, better it happened now than not at all.

What is this thing?

Non-Writing: Okay, here's the part where I get to talk about Portland. We went to Portland, and it was amazing. We also visited Boston, which was similarly amazing. I've made no bones about the fact that I haven't enjoyed living in Baltimore, where we relocated in 2010 for Rob's Teach for America job. We went to both Portland and Boston partly for a vacation (and in the case of Boston, an excuse to go to Readercon), but also to "audition" these cities as possible places of habitation. Boston, I love you but you're expensive as hell. Portland, however, lives squarely in the center of an imaginary Venn diagram with "affordable" on one side and "spectacular" on the other, and in that space is a one-bedroom apartment for less than a thousand dollars a month with our name on it.

Everyone, or at least a lot of people, love Portland and I didn't expect it to live up to the hype. But it totally did! It reminded me of the best parts of Pittsburgh (which never gets any hype). The weather is beautiful, even the rain. Bike lanes, cheap food carts, and Powell's Books, yay! Also, we already have a lot of friends there, as opposed to Baltimore where we knew nobody before moving here and had to build everything from the ground up. And even though we did manage to do that, it was very hard going there for awhile.

So yep, we're shipping out, hopefully in April. I will dearly miss the friends I've made here in Baltimore, but this is something we have to do (also there's this thing called "the Internet" now, which makes distance easier to take).

What's up for 2014? Well, moving to Portland and acquiring at least one of their notoriously scarce jobs will take up a lot of our time. I still plan to write at least one more short story in 2014 than I did in 2013, and keep on submitting them. I plan to finally, finally, FINALLY get my novel (yes, that one) ready for submission to agents and/or small presses. I want to put out a zine and keep my hand in the zine community, since my fiction writing has essentially put zining on hiatus. That won't be hard in Portland (will you be at the Portland Zine Symposium? I will, for the first time!), but my priority going forward will still likely be fiction. I feel grateful to have my creative life on track

Spammers Live in Vain

Hey guys, the Lovecraft anthology I'm in is out! Whispers from the Abyss (.01 Publishing) includes stories by Nick Mamatas, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Greg Van Eekhout, Tim Pratt, and many more. My story "You Will Never Be the Same" is a mash-up of Lovecraft and the seriously weird SF of Cordwainer Smith. It was a real departure for me, trying to ape someone else's style while using yet another someone's plot elements, but I think it works. (Besides, Nick already got dibs on DFW.) I'm thrilled to be sharing a line-up with these folks, and I hope you check it out!

In fund-raising news, the speculative fiction podcasts PodCastle, Escape Pod, and Pseudopod (collectively known as the Escape Artists) are in financial trouble and can use your support! My story "Hand of God" appeared in PodCastle last September, and while I don't listen to very much audio fiction myself (most people seem to listen on their commutes, and I ride a bicycle to work on the most dangerous streets in North America), these three magazines are a great resource. They podcast everything from new fiction to classics. If you like audio fiction, do yourself a favor and chip in a few bucks. Specific links to each magazine are here.

Portland Trip (Part 1 of ?)

Normally if it rains most of the days you're on vacation you'd call it a bad vacation, but Rob (who took all the pictures in this post) and I knew what we were getting into when we decided to travel to the creative mecca of Portland, Oregon last week, so he could attend the Rose City Comic-Con and so we could both explore a city that was high on our shortlist of potential future homes. There's far too much awesome for one little post to contain, so on his advice I'm going to be splitting up this series of posts topics-wise, so you can read or ignore at your leisure.

First of all, let's get this out of the way: Portland is fucking beautiful. Look at these fucking mountains:

Nature in your face.

The first area of the city we stumbled into was the Pearl District, where we saw one Portland landmark right off the bat.

Words to live by.

A few days later we went to Powell's World of Books, which really deserves its own post that I might write at some point, but just so you know it contains over four million books both used and new, takes up an entire city block, and is the largest independent bookstore in the world. There were also a lot of smaller independent bookstores and even though we didn't go in any of them I'm certain that if we lived there I'd never step foot in a Barnes & Noble again. (Not that I do that now.)

Four million books!!

Portland bears a lot of similarities to Pittsburgh, with its rivers, bridges, and mountains (although according to westerners, the Appalachians are just big hills... they're right). It doesn't rain a lot in Pittsburgh, but it's the third cloudiest city in the country, and I quite appreciated the blanket of haze between me and that big glowy thing in the sky. Pittsburgh is kind of a "weird" city, too. They're both pretty cheap. But unlike Pittsburgh, Portland is almost totally flat which makes it excellent for cycling and walking. They're also a little less clannish in Portland, maybe? Probably because most Portlanders weren't born there, and Pittsburgh has a large native-born contingent. I mean, I love Pittsburgh, I think it's a vastly underrated city, and I was happy to see that the elements that make Pittsburgh great exist somewhere else. I'm totally a city girl, but I'm coming to realize that what I really love are small, easily-traversable cities that are not part of a megalopolis. Baltimore/DC is just too big for me.

Just one of Portland's eight bridges. Pittsburgh has more, but it's not a pissing contest (or is it??).

The public transportation in Portland is amazing, especially for such a small city. I never waited more than twenty minutes for a train or bus, and that was at night. Every stop was announced both over the loudspeaker and visually (in Baltimore they usually skip a few, especially at night when I can't always see where I am, and the trains don't have a visual display). It's also super easy to roll your bike onto the train and they have bike hangers for them. They actually want you to ride your bike in Portland! Bike lanes were fucking everywhere and weren't full of cracks and debris. Drivers are not insane and they will stop for pedestrians. Since I have given up trying to get a driver's license, it's very important to me that wherever I live permanently is a good place for non-drivers.


Happy little streetcars.

Everyone in Portland, or at least everyone I talked to, was super nice. Almost Canadian, really. I've never been west of Ohio so while I'd heard about how different the "vibe" is out west, it has to be seen to be believed. On the East Coast, and even in Pittsburgh to some extent, life is all about maximizing your time for ultimate productivity and making sure you look super busy. Portlanders work as hard as everyone else (especially the self-employed ones) but there's not that rushing around "get out of my way, I'm an important person!" feeling. Even the people who were obviously going to work were playing it much cooler than their East Coast counterparts. A question you will never get asked in Portland, at least not by strangers, is "what do you do?" That could be because the unemployment rate is so high, but I'll take it anyway.


We went to all four quadrants of the city, though all of our neighborhood walking was on the east side (the side with the cheaper rent). It rained more days than it didn't but when it wasn't raining there was zero humidity. I thought the weather was awesome, actually. And while Portlandia is more fiction than fact there are certain "trapped in the nineties" details like free-standing record stores and even a Suncoast in the mall. I was really excited about the Suncoast.

Up next: beer and food of Portland, or, why I may turn into a foodie after all!