Blogs

I'm giving a series of workshops (Feb 3, 10, 17) for the New England chapter of Sisters in Crime on selling short fiction and using it to build your writing career. Member free, non-members $25.

More info here.

Register here.

Exactly twenty-five years ago tonight, on New Year's Eve, 1996, I received a letter in the mail (yeah, snail mail back then) that I still remember fondly.

The letter was from the (even then) multi-award-winning Canadian SF writer, Robert J. Sawyer, and his award-winning poet wife, Carolyn Clink. Rob and Carolyn were guest editors of the next instalment in the annual speculative fiction Tesseracts anthology series, which would be Tesseracts6. And the letter was their acceptance of my story, "Spirit Dance," into the anthology.

It was my first sale. What a way to end a year and start a new one.

Twenty-five years ago. A quarter of a century. Yikes.

I've sold over two hundred stories since then and seen them published in twenty-seven countries and thirty-five languages. I've published three collections (Chimerascope, Impossibilia, and the translated La Danse des Esprits), a novel (The Wolf at the End of the World, which is a sequel to "Spirit Dance"), a writer's guide (Playing the Short Game: How to Market and Sell Short Fiction).

And I am currently finishing the last chapter in the final book on a new urban fantasy trilogy, The Dream Rider Saga, the first book of which, The Hollow Boys, will be released in 2022.

But it started with that first sale. "Spirit Dance" was also the first story I'd ever written (well, as an adult), so that made the acceptance even more special. And it led to my first award, when a French translation of the story won the Aurora Award after its appearance in the Quebec magazine, Solaris.

So thanks, Rob and Carolyn, for accepting the story and making that New Year's Eve one of my best ever.

And if the quarter of a century that's passed doesn't make us feel old, this picture from the launch should do the trick. Left-to-right: me, Scott MacKay, Rob, Ed Baranosky, Carolyn, Andrew Weiner, Peter Bloch-Hansen.

My SF first-contact story, "Symphony," will be appearing in the upcoming space opera anthology, Have Ship, Will Travel, coming out in January from Stories Rule Press in Canada. It's a reprint, but I got a special kick out of this one.

If you're one of my newsletter subscribers, you would've received "Symphony" as your monthly ebook story back in March of this year. If you're not on my list, you can subscribe here (and get a free ebook for signing up).

And if you want to check out the excellent bunch of stories in this very large antho (over 400 pages), you can pre-order it here from your favourite retailer (note: an Amazon link will be added soon).

So what was that special kick I got? Check out the cover on the right. I'm one of the two "featured authors" at the top along with the multi-award-winning author and editor, Kristine Katherine Rusch. I've attended ever so many craft workshops given by Kris. This is my first (and likely last time) being billed ahead of her. Kris's story opens the antho and mine closes it. Very cool.

I'll be giving a series of three workshops in early 2022 via Zoom covering my writer's guide, Playing the Short Game: How to Market & Sell Short Fiction. The workshops are free and sponsored by the Richmond Hill Public Library of York Region and will be offered the first Thursday evening of March, April, and May (Mar 3, Apr 7, and May 5) from 7:30-9:00pm.

Topics covered in workshop #1 (March 3, 2022) include:

• The benefits of writing short fiction
• Avoiding traps for the beginner
• Understanding rights and licensing for short fiction
• Finding short fiction markets
• Selecting the right market for your story
• Submitting short fiction to a market
• What not to do when submitting
• What to do after submitting

If you're interested, go here to register ahead of time. Note that you'll be registering for all the Jan-Mar workshops offered by the library. They're all free, and you don't need to attend any other workshop (but you're welcome to).

Registration links for workshops #2 and #3 are not yet available, but I'll post here when they are. I look forward to seeing you there.

I posted earlier about recently selling a brand new short story that I'd written at the start of the pandemic. Well, I sold another "new" story in November, but it's one that I wrote much earlier than 2020. As in much, much earlier.

This sale is a first for me in a couple of ways. One, it's not a genre story. "The Balance" is mainstream. It's also not a "new" story.

I wrote this one almost two decades ago, in 2002. It's a very personal story, inspired by events surrounding the birth of our second son and the time he spent in hospital having far too many operations in his first few weeks of life.

Although I kept submitting it to markets all those years, I'd come to believe it was too personal to ever sell. So I was extremely happy when the excellent Canadian multi-genre magazine, Pulp Literature, accepted it. This will be my second appearance in PL. The cover from my earlier appearance is pictured

I'll post here when the issue with "The Balance" is published and available.

I sold a new short story in November, one I'd written at the start of the pandemic and, aside from a flash piece in late 2019, the first new short story I'd written in a long, long time, since I moved to novels.

"Gypsy Biker's Coming Home," based on the Springsteen song of the same name, will appear in an upcoming issue of the excellent, multi-award winning, and long-running Canadian speculative fiction magazine, On Spec.

The story is set in my Merged Corporate Entity universe, the same setting for many of my other SF stories, including "Scream Angel," "Enlightenment," "Memories of the Dead Man," and "Jigsaw." Those stories garnered three award nominations and one Aurora Award win, so fingers crossed for this one.

This is a long story, almost 10,000 words, and stories at that length are hard to sell. Most markets top-out at 6,000 words. So I was thrilled when long-time Executive Editor Diane Walton said she'd take a look at it even though it was well over their maximum word count..

This will be my fourth appearance in On Spec. Earlier appearances also resulted in two award nominations, plus another Aurora Award win for "The Walker of the Shifting Borderland" (issue's cover pictured here), so again, fingers crossed. This will also be my third Springsteen-inspired story I've had published, the others being "Going Down to Lucky Town" and "Radio Nowhere."

I'll post here when the issue comes out.