The mail recently brought in my contributor’s copy to Paula Guran’s new Year’s Best Fantasy series from Pyr Books. It’s a pretty thick volume with over twenty stories from people like Elizabeth Bear, Karen Joy Fowler, Fran Wilde, Isabel Yap and “Many Others,” including well, me. She included “The Fox’s Daughter,” a Yamada story from BCS.
The book releases on August 16, but it is available for pre-order at the link.
Now that the contracts are signed I see no reason to keep anything secret. Paula Guran has picked up “The Fox’s Daughter” from Beneath Ceaseless Skies #344 for the first issue of her new Year’s Best Fantasy series from Pyr Books. It’s nice to be working with Paula again. She was my line/copy editor for most of the Yamada Monogatari series when I was with Prime Books.
There have been a lot of YBF series over the years, and I’ve managed to appear in a few, but this is the first in a while. I remember the David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer Year’s Bests fondly, so it’s great to see a new one getting started. I’ll put up links as soon as Paula’s is out and I hope it does well. The field always benefits from a diversity of sources.
Fresh From the Box
I guess you could call it a perk of being the author that you get to see the books straight from the printer instead of, you know, actually waiting for the publication date. Only the irony of seeing them first is that I’ve already read the darn thing. Multiple times. I do consider it a good thing that they exist, and will soon be going into sales channels and possibly a B&N near you.
My thanks to the publisher, Sean Wallace, and the editor, Paula Guran of Prime Books for making it happen.
Happy 4th to all those stateside. Our across the street neighbors apparently chose to celebrate by re-enacting the Battle of Bunker Hill. Our cats disappeared for a while but came out unscathed when the coast was finally clear. Not that I should complain. I went through my own phase of being enamored with firecrackers, but that was mostly because I was a kid in a small southern town and often there was literally nothing better to do. Read all the books/comics I had multiple times (no internet). Run out of scrap wood for tinkering. Night too cloudy for stargazing. I know! Let’s set off low-scale ordinance! What I have trouble understanding is why alleged grownups want to do it now. I grew out of it before I’d left my teens, and count myself fortunate I still have all my fingers.
Good thing, too, as I needed them to make final corrections on the typeset manuscript for The Emperor in Shadow, which from the link you can see now has its own Amazon page, and an official release date of September 6th. Which means it’ll more than likely be available in August, because that’s how these things usually work. Since it’s July now (What gave it away? Oh, right, fireworks…), that’s not very long, but why wait? You can pre-order it now and have it as soon as it’s available.
On that subject, I want to give a shout-out to my editor, Paula Guran, who turned the manuscript around in a short time under extremely trying circumstances, only one of which was me cutting it so close to the deadline. It’s a much better book for her efforts. Anything you don’t like falls squarely on me.
Continuing with the purge and pack up, and in the process of cleaning out the closet in the library, I came across an unmarked box. Inside were several things I thought I’d thought gone forever, namely my accumulation (I wouldn’t dignify it as a collection) of digest magazines from the late 1970’s. It was originally much larger, but I’d reluctantly purged it during one lack of space or other. In my faulty memory I thought I’d purged them all. There are several AMAZING STORIES from the period, and even a COVEN 13, but I was especially glad to see the FANTASTIC STORIES from Ted White’s editorship. FANTASTIC was the first fantasy magazine I ever discovered. More to the point, I soon realized that there were such things as writers who sent them stories. I soon became one of them. I never did sell to Ted White, and by the time I sold one to his successor, Elinor Mavor, FANTASTIC had been folded into its sister magazine, AMAZING. Yes, I know. Just a second tier digest back in the days of ANALOG/ASTOUNDING and GALAXY, but there was something about the stories there that appealed to me more. I still regret that I wasn’t good enough soon enough for FANTASTIC, but I remember what I was shooting for.
No sooner had I turned in the final manuscript of THE WAR GOD’S SON to Paula at Prime than I got an email from Audible.com telling me that the audiobook version is already going into production. I don’t know yet who’s doing the narration, but it should be out at the same time the print and ebook versions are available, still officially set for October. Which should happen on time, since the book is being typeset even as I write this. Not much longer now, people. If/when there’s a link for pre-orders, I’ll post it here.
Richard Parks 