how i spended my summer unvacation
It's been a pretty good year for me, productivity-wise. I've published four short stories, a novella, a novelette, a piece of flash fiction, and a novel. And I've written and delivered a whole bunch of stuff that's not coming out until next year...
...and my dance card for 2014 is officially full. That's a pretty nice feeling right there.
If you want to find any of my work from the past year, here's your handy year-end list for doing so.
Shattered Pillars, the second Eternal Sky novel, came out in March. This central-Asian epic fantasy has been pulling in great reviews and reader response. I also made an intemperate blog post about being the first writer of an epic fantasy trilogy in history to deliver the third book on time. And I did it, albeit by the skin of my teeth. Steles of the Sky is scheduled for April of next year, and the ARCs are already in the hands of reviewers.
My other stand-alone book of the year was Book of Iron, a novella from Subterranean Press, the prequel to Bone and Jewel Creatures. These stories are also in the Eternal Sky universe, set about four hundred years later and in a different part of the world. In this one, Bijou and her friends race through poison Erem in order to stop a foreign Wizard from making a very, very bad mistake.
The flash fiction was an untitled piece for Popular Science, published in the July 2013 issue, dealing with interstellar travel and the way space smells.
The novelette was audio-only, in METAtropolis III: Green Space. It's called "Green and Dying," because everything is improved by Dylan Thomas, and it's a caper story about an attempt to liberate some IP from a seastead. Of course, something goes... really, really wrong.
And then there's the short stories!
From Fireside III, "Form and Void," a science fiction story about mean girls and hurt girls and space exploration and Io. I'm awfully proud of this one, and you can read it for free here. (I think this one is technically a 2012 publication, but it happened very late in the year, and you can actually read it online now.)
From Dark Faerie Tales, "Samarkar's Tale of the Three Genjia," in which one of the Eternal Sky protagonists retells a fairy tale. You can read this one for free as well. Obviously, this too is an Eternal Sky story.
There's a second Eternal Sky story out this year: "The Ghost Makers," in Fearsome Journeys. It's about a Gage and a Dead Man who discover they have an enemy in common, and what they do about with that knowledge.
My last story for 2013 is "The Governess," which was published in Queen Victoria's Book of Spells. It's about an unlikely alliance between two very different women... and some other things.