All the Gates of Hell – Incarnate Edition

ATGOH-Proof CopyTo our left is a picture of the printed proof copy of All the Gates of Hell that arrived on my doorstep day before yesterday. The picture isn’t that great (cameraphone), but the book itself turned out pretty good, in my own opinion. So for anyone not yet ready to embrace the ebook revolution, there is now an actual, real book that you can hold in your hands and, you know, read. You can order from Amazon at the link above or directly from your favorite bookseller.

ISBN-10: 1492993263
ISBN-13: 978-1492993261
300 pages, $11.99

“Legal Assistant Jin Lee Hannigan thought she had problems enough as a single woman in rundown Medias, Mississippi. That was before Jin meets a homeless man on Pepper Street who just happens to be the King of Hell, and learns that she’s really the mortal incarnation of Guan Shi Yin, the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, charged with the rescue of unfortunates trapped in the various — and nasty — hells scattered around the cosmos. That doesn’t even turn out to be her biggest problem. It seems that the Goddess of Mercy is on the run and in hiding, which is why she incarnated as a human in the first place. Hiding from what?
Love.
But why would anyone fear love? Jin already knows that love is powerful, but what she has to learn, and fast, is that the wrong kind of love is also potentially the most destructive force in all the universe and–even more important–how to stop it.”

Surfing for Survival

FoxMaybe not literally, but as far as visibility and career are concerned. I’ve been thinking about the question of career survival because it finally occurred to me that I’ve been shifting gears a bit lately when it comes to my own writing, in that I’m doing more novels these days, and fewer short stories. Now, for many cases that’s just considered par for the course, and was once considered the only course—you started off writing short stories, with the intention of getting good enough to sell them to the major magazines, of which there were several. If you were planning any sort of career, then part of the plan was to build up your name recognition through short fiction and then use that visibility to transition to novels. Short stories were never considered to be an end in themselves in that scenario. Sure there were probably as many exceptions as not, and writers who started with novels from day one and were either barely or sometimes not at all aware that the magazines even existed. I wasn’t one of those. I discovered the magazines at about the same time that I started to write in the first place, and I began with short stories, and the first novel I ever wrote I thought was going to be another short story, until an editor took pity on me and informed me that what I had submitted was not a short story, but the opening chapter to a novel, and so it later proved. Regardless, the short story was my go-to form. Continue reading

Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Interludes

WRITING 02Time for a blog post in which a lot is going on but almost nothing is, you know, actually happening. First Reader still has the manuscript for The War God’s Son and probably will for another week or two. Once she’s done I’ll be ready to look at the book again and possibly get the submission draft together. I would really like to get that done before the end of November, though realistically even if I do, that’s very close to the time that publishing shuts down for December, so it’s unlikely I’ll get a decision on the book until January at the earliest. The only reason I think it may be that soon is that the publisher knows the book’s on its way and might be able to expedite things. We’ll see.

Since it turns out my brain is still too fried from TWGS to write anything else for a bit, I’ve used the time to try and get the print version files of All the Gates of Hell ready instead, though I’ve hit a couple of snags with the formatting. That is, the template I’ve used twice before with no issues is now getting reported with errors that I don’t believe are errors. Computers are great, except when they aren’t. I’ll get it sorted out and put up a notice when the physical book is available, since I know not everyone is a big fan of ebooks. I am, but I also acknowledge that there’s just something special about a “real” book, and I don’t think they’re going away anytime soon, if ever. Provided the coming apocalypse leaves us with at least a Gutenberg-era level of technology. If we’re back to the stone age, all bets are off.

 

P.S. Yes, I know I misspelled “lama” in my last post. Or rather used the homonym rather than the proper word. Or was confusing the Dalai Lama with Wally Llama. My mind works that way sometimes.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies #131, Fifth Anniversary

Yoshino-1Partly for selfish reasons, but also because sometimes people get annoyed when they aren’t told these things, I’m proud to announce that my own “Cherry Blossoms on the River of Souls” is the lead story in Issue #131, the Fifth Anniversary Double Issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies. The remainder of the issue’s contents, featuring stories by Adam Callaway, Alberto Yáñez, Rebecca Gomez Farrell, and Naim Kabir, plus a special audio fiction broadcast, will go live on October 10th.

“Cherry Blossoms on the River of Souls” you can read now. If you want.

Time Mis-Management

Bkack Kath's Daughter-2I finished the second draft of The War God’s Son late Friday night. Sometimes projects need a third or more drafts before I dare show them to First Reader, but in this case I can’t think of anything else the book needs, so once I have it printed out the manuscript goes to First Reader for one of the more perilous phases of the project. Yes, I know, but First Reader is Old School, and wants a physical object to tear into. You can’t scribble or hack through paragraphs in phosphors…well, actually you can, but it’s just not as satisfying. So there will be a paper copy, which I will—hopefully—convert back into a finished book once she’s had her way with it. This, naturally, will not happen overnight. So right now I’ve got a little free time–by which I mean writing time not already spoken for–and thus my next problem.

I need to decide how to spend that time. I left the sequel to Black Kath’s Daughter hanging fire because the above project got its priority upgraded. But, to be clear, BKD+ is a personal project and so there are no actual deadlines on it. There are a few people waiting on it, and I do hate to keep them waiting, so I could get back to that while First Reader has her say on TWGS. On the other hand I haven’t written a short story in over six months while I was drafting TWGS. I think I’m getting withdrawal twinges, and I wouldn’t mind using the time to satisfy my short fiction jones.

Must think about this, but not too long since I don’t have all the time in the world and I could end up doing neither. If anyone reading this has an opinion, I’d like to hear it.