DOUGLAS SMITH | Writing the Fantastic

My story, "Spirit Dance," has been picked for a new anthology from Nanopress entitled The Aurora Awards – Thirty Years of Canadian Science Fiction. Nanopress is a new small press based in Montreal, and their authors include Elizabeth Vonarburg.

Looking back, the road for "Spirit Dance" from birth to a "best of" antho seems like a long and strange one. It was the first story I ever wrote and the first I ever sold.

It appeared in Tesseracts⁶ in 1997, was a finalist for the Auroras in English the next year, and snagged an honourable mention for The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, all of which I thought at the time was pretty good for a first story. And that was where I figured it would end.

But then I discovered reprints, and foreign language reprints in particular.

I sold "Spirit Dance" to a great little (and now defunct) dark fantasy magazine in France, called Tenebres, whose editors kindly translated stories from English.

Once it appeared there, I was able to sell the translation to the excellent Quebec magazine, Solaris, which only takes subs in French. That translation, entitled "La Danse des Esprits," went on to win the French Aurora Award for short fiction in 2001, which then, almost a decade later, brings it to being picked for this Aurora Award anthology.

What a long strange trip it's been for the little story that could. "Spirit Dance" has been reprinted a total of eighteen times in several languages and was included in my mini-collection, Impossibilia in 2008. It's also the story on which I based my first novel, "Spirit Dreams."

The nomination period for the 2010 Aurora Awards is now open. Each year, the Auroras recognize the best in Canadian speculative fiction. This year my story "Radio Nowhere" is eligible to be nominated under "Best Short Form Work in English." "Radio Nowhere" appeared in the excellent Canadian anthology, Campus Chills (October 2009), edited by Mark Leslie. While the nomination period is open, I've put the full text of the story online here.

Anyone who is a Canadian citizen (not necessarily living in Canada), or a permanent resident may nominate a work for the Auroras. See here for a list of eligible 2009 works. Nominations can be done online or by mail-in ballot. Click the link below for access to the official Aurora Awards nomination site:

Nominating for the 2010 Aurora Awards

All nominations, both mail-in and online, must be submitted by February 8, 2010.

This will be the 29th year that the Canadian SF and Fantasy Association awards (the "Auroras") will be presented. On a per-capita basis, the Aurora Awards have the largest voter turnout of any national SF award in the world, exceeding that of the American-dominated Hugos, the Japanese Seiuns, the British Arthur C. Clarke Awards, and the Australian Ditmars.

Each year, a different convention or group hosts the awards. This year, they will be presented at KEYCON 27 in Winnipeg May 22-24, 2010.

Hey cool! My first collection, Impossibilia is currently sitting at #43 on SF Crowsnest's Top 100 SF&F Books of 2009.

If you've read Impossibilia and liked it, please scoot over to the list and vote for it. Or for any book on the list that you enjoyed, for that matter--but, uh, mine would be the preferred choice, preferred by me anyway.

If you order the signed, numbered, limited hardcover edition of my new collection, Chimerascope, you'll be getting an additional story that won't be included in the trade paperback editions. ChiZine Publications will be including "Murphy's Law" (reviews) in the hardcover. And an order for the hardcover also makes you eligible for the free book giveaway. Hardcover orders must be placed by Dec 31.

ChiZine Publications has decided to go with a single release date for both the limited hardcover and the trade paperback editions of all their new releases going forward, including my new collection, Chimerascope.

This means that the release date for the Chimerascope hardcover has been moved back to March 2010, to match the release of the trade paperback. They've also extended the ordering period for the hardcover to December 31, 2009. The limited, signed, and numbered hardcover edition is available only by pre-ordering.

And I'm also extending the free giveaway contest to Dec 31 as well. I'll be drawing three numbers from the pre-order list, and if you ordered one of those numbered editions, you'll receive a free copy of my first collection, Impossibilia (if you already have a copy of Impossibilia, I'll substitute a copy of the By Her Hand, She Draws You Down" Movie Companion Book).

My story "Jigsaw" has been published in the Greek magazine, Ennea.

Now, "Jigsaw" was originally written for Odyssey, a YA SF anthology edited by Julie Czerneda in 2004, and being YA, I'm fairly certain my story didn't inspire the cover shown here at the right. Ennea is a weekly comic magazine supplement to a major Greek newspaper that publishes an SF story in each issue.

This is my fourth appearance in the magazine, so by now I'm used to their, uh, interesting covers (see here and here for covers from my earlier appearances).

Hey, it's a comic magazine, so their covers reflect their target audience of teenage boys. But the story did get published with a couple of illos that do reflect the story, shown here as well.

My first (and most published) story, "Spirit Dance," appeared in June this year translated into Italian in the long-running magazine, Robot (cover to the left, by Stephan Martiniere).

Cool to be sharing cover credits with Lois McMaster Bujold and Robert Reed.

This is the 18th appearance and 14th language for this little tale, which is encouraging, seeing that this story was the genesis for my just-completed novel. A French translation of this story won the Aurora in 2001. "Spirit Dance" was included in my collection, Impossibilia.

Here's a plug for the gentleman (and friend) who hosts my web site here. Marcel Gagné, via his consulting company, Salmar Consulting, offers web sites for professional writers. Marcel hosts the sites on very fast servers, and they run under Drupal, which I personally have found to be powerful, flexible, and easy to use. I maintain the content and design of this entire site myself, with only a bare minimum knowledge of a few HTML codes. Check out the link above for more information.

My short horror story, "By Her Hand, She Draws You Down," has been translated into Galician and published in the web zine, Nova Fantasia, accompanied by cool and creepy illos like the one to the right here.

Twenty-four languages and counting.

Back in February 2008, I'd blogged about an unpublished novel by the late great Roger Zelazny that had been discovered in Roger's papers by his son, Trent, and was to be published by Hard Case Crime in the US.

I'd forgotten all about until today, so I did a search to see if it had ever come out. Major woo hoo's!! It was published back in February to very positive reviews, and is available here. Try to ignore the trashy cover with the cute brunette, bare midriff, eyes locked on the hero's big blade (not too Freudian, eh?), and instead check out an excerpt from the first chapter.

It is just so cool to be reading "new" Zelazny prose again. This one is on my Christmas list, and when I finally have it in my hands, I'm going to follow Neil Gaiman's advice from that article:

"I am reading this book really slowly. A chapter a month. Because when it’s done, there won’t be any classic period Zelazny novels I haven’t read ... And from what I have read so far, it is classic wonderful Roger Zelazny all the way."

At least this is one more Zelazny novel than any of us could have expected. You are missed, Roger.