I have been traveling lately, so I’ve been remiss in reporting that Lightspeed has reprinted my story, “Card Sharp,” in their latest issue (August 2019). They will be publishing the third story in the sequence, “All In,” in September, so now all three stories are available on the Lightspeed website. They don’t need to be read in order, but all three tell one extended arc. The stories and links are:
I’d been thinking about it for a while and I always shied away from it. But I realized that in addition to strange writing projects that I couldn’t find a home for, there were other projects of mine that fell through the cracks — gaming/RPG stuff and, most recently, music. So I now have a Patreon. For the low price of $1/month you can subscribe to either the Stories, Songs, or Arcana (gaming) tier. Or, for the also low price of $2, you can get all three. I intend to put up original content monthly, whether that be small pieces of fiction, or original songs or lyrics, or gaming material — characters, settings, items, etc. It’s also an opportunity for me to connect directly with people who are interested in these things, which I am definitely looking forward to.
I’ll be posting free content in each tier in the coming weeks so people can get a taste of what they will get by signing up. I’m looking forward to trying something new.
I am participating in the Clarion West Write-a-thon this year. Since it’s been 9 years since my own Clarion West class (2008), I have decided to have 9 goals:
The idea of the Write-a-thon is simple — writers commit to certain goals for the period of the current Clarion West workshop and collect donations that go to help the workshop. As I said on the website, I truly think of it as investing in the future of great speculative fiction. I have seen so many scarily talented people come out of the workshop and so I think it’s a no brainer to help support many years of fulfilling, enjoyable fiction for everyone.
I am not giving a specific fundraising goal, but I have decided to offer perks for people who want to donate specific amounts
I will be raffling off a complete series of my first three books — Falling Sky, Rising Tide, and Raining Fire — in print or ebook, personalized however you’d like.
For each $5 donation you get one entry for the raffle.
You get one additional entry for each $5 donation to one of my Clarion West 2008 Classmates:
https://www.clarionwest.org/members/douglaslucas/
https://www.clarionwest.org/members/tracyharford/
https://www.clarionwest.org/members/kira/
https://www.clarionwest.org/members/psbains/
https://www.clarionwest.org/members/tdelucci/
https://www.clarionwest.org/members/aowomoyela/
https://www.clarionwest.org/members/mcroft/
https://www.clarionwest.org/members/shanusmagnus/
https://www.clarionwest.org/members/carolryles/
https://www.clarionwest.org/members/edenrobins/
https://www.clarionwest.org/members/owen08/
For a $20 donation, you can read any of the revised stories before they’re published.
For a $50 donation (stolen from Caroline Yoachim), I will write a story of indeterminate length (but probably short) based on 5-10 words that you supply as a prompt (I will only use some of them).
For $100 you will be tuckerized in an upcoming work, either a short story or novel.
In two weeks, on Thursday, February 19 at 7:00 PM, I will be doing a Reddit AMA. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the AMA, it stands for Ask Me Anything. I’ll answer questions on any topic, but probably mostly about Falling Sky, writing, writing a first novel, airships, post-apocalypses, beer, writing groups, workshops and more. I hope you’ll tune in and ask me a question. Anything. It’s right there in the title. Do it.
Let me state first that there are no zombies in Falling Sky.
Technically…
In the blurbs I received, E. C. Myers references The Walking Dead and Tad Williams’ blurb mentions zombies outright.
See, the thing is that when I started writing the short story that inspired Falling Sky, the idea was that people were living in the air because something horrible was on the ground, something so dangerous that to even spend a short amount of time there could risk your life. Originally I had envisioned some kind of alien organism, but it was 2 AM that night at Clarion West and the story was due the next day and the mental acrobatics required to work all of that out was beyond me. So, in a moment of clarity I fell back on a tried and true genre trope – the zombie.
Originally, that was what made the ground so dangerous. Plain old ordinary zombies. It fit the bill – scary, easy to infect, reason for people to want to avoid their territory. But, as was communicated in the many crits I received, zombies were, well, unoriginal. Obviously there’s still life left in the common zombie (combie?) but it wasn’t serving my story very well. That’s when Mary Rosenblum, our instructor for that week, suggested that instead of zombies it was some other disease. Super-Alzheimers, she said.
It was a solution. I think that what she envisioned was somewhat further away from zombies than my Ferals, but it helped guide me to the right path. There’s certainly a lot of zombie in my Ferals, but I’d like to think that they’re different enough to stand alone (while still hitting some familiar notes).
Splash in a little noir, and a touch of Western (two of my favorite genres) and you generally have Falling Sky. Will it all work? Well, that’s up to the readers, but I hope that at least it presents an interesting mix. If you read it, you’ll have to let me know what you think.