Like every year since 2009, I am doing the Clarion West Write-a-thon this year. The idea is simple – you sponsor me and my writing goals, and the money goes to support the Clarion West Writers Workshop. Clarion West made me a better writer and every year it makes other people better writers. The way I look at it, it’s a way to invest in better fiction in the future. Participants of Clarion West do pay tuition, but much of the money that supports the workshop comes from efforts such as this one.

This year, because I have a diverse set of projects I’m working on, I’m committing to writing five hours a week. This writing will likely be devoted to revising short stories in an effort to get them out, writing new short stories, and working on novels.

I know that there are plenty of places that you can donate to, and never enough money or time to go around, but if you love science fiction and fantasy, if you read genre fiction, please think about investing in the writers of tomorrow.

My page is here – please consider donating some money to the workshop.

Thank you.

I have some writing-related news from the past few weeks.

First off, my story, “The Case of the Wounded Heart”, which I enjoyed the hell out of writing, is now available in the anthology, A Study in Lavender: Queering Sherlock Holmes from Lethe Press. I’ve mentioned the anthology here before, but it takes characters from the Holmes mythos (including, of course, Holmes and Watson) and imagines them (or reveals them, perhaps) as gay. I haven’t had a chance to read it, but I’m dying to get my hands on it. It’s available now here or at Amazon .

Second, while the story was accepted a while ago, I finally signed the contract for my story, “The Burning Bridge to Heaven”, which will be appearing in Abyss & Apex next quarter. I will, obviously, link to it when it’s up. It’s a kind of British 60’s X-Files story and was also a lot of fun to write.

Finally, I also signed a contract for my story, “Doors”, which will be narrated as a podcast on Podcastle. “Doors” was originally published in GUD Issue 6 and, though I usually don’t have favorite stories, is probably one of my favorites.

That’s all for now.

I’m behind in posting about this, but earlier this week, my story, “Card Sharp”, went up on Podcastle. I’ve narrated podcasts for Podcastle before, but this is the first time I’ve had a story of my own go up. The narration, by Wilson Fowlie, is excellent. I’m really pleased.

So far the reaction on the forums has been positive, so I’m pleased with that as well.

And, I can mention, that I’m working on a sequel…

So as mentioned previously, I am currently on a writing retreat in Kent, CT. My goal for this retreat was to complete revisions on my middle grade novel.

I can now report that I have done that.

Of course it will need another pass to smooth down and polish the new sections (two new chapters were added), but the novel feels like it’s in much better shape than it was before.

Additionally, I completed revisions on another novel that I had written years ago and that I (hopefully) beat into better shape.

So I’m feeling successful right now.

The retreat ends tomorrow morning, but I’m holding out hope that I can finish up a short story by the end. I already completed one (these are already in progress – so it’s really not that impressive) but if I can go home with two novels and two short stories in very close to finished state, I will be happy.

For the second novel, though, I’ll need new beta readers, so if you’d like to read through a less than 60K word YA post-apocalyptic fantasy novel with brown people, let me know.

Back to writing…

This week is a bit of an exciting one. On Wednesday I leave for the annual Altered Fluid & Friends writing retreat for what will be nearly 5 days of writing. This year it is even more exciting than usual for a number of reasons. One of those being that it will occupy the time between me finishing one job and starting another.

It also gives me the much-needed time to finish revisions on my middle grade novel. Come the end of February, I intend to hand it over to my agent and, hopefully, forget about it for at least a little while. And for the moments when my brain will inevitably need a break from that, I have a few short stories that I need to complete as well.

The other exciting thing is that N will be coming up for part of the retreat, which minimizes one of the harder parts of such retreats, namely being away from the people you care about.

Perhaps in anticipation of this, I had a dream last night that played out like a story. In it, I was picked up from the airport by two men driving a car. The fact that they anticipated where I was going before I was able to tell them, clued me in to the fact that they were up to no good. It was soon clear they were abducting me for nefarious reasons and one of them pulled a gun on me.

Unfortunately I don’t remember the exact reason for them wanting me but I remember pleading with the man, saying that I’d be out of the way since I would be on my writing retreat and it was really important to me and if they just let me go I wouldn’t muck up whatever they were planning. It was as soon as I mentioned the writing retreat and the gunman realized how much it meant to me, that he moved the gun barrel toward my right hand. That’s when I really started freaking out.

Thankfully, the dream shifted gears shortly after that.  So yes, the retreat – I’m really looking forward to it.