Locus Awards 2008 Announced
The winners are: SF Novel: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon (HarperCollins) Fantasy Novel: Making Money by Terry Pratchett (Doubleday UK; HarperCollins) Young Adult Book: Un Lun Dun by China Miéville (Ballantine Del Rey; Macmillan UK) First Novel: Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill (Morrow; Gollancz) Novella: “After the Siege” by Cory Doctorow (The Infinite Matrix Jan 2007) Novelette”The Witch’s Headstone” by Neil Gaiman (Wizards) Short Story: “A Small Room in Koboldtown” by Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s Apr/May 2007) Collection: The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories by Connie Willis (Subterranean) Anthology: The New Space Opera by Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan (Editors) (Eos) Non-fiction: Breakfast in the Ruins by Barry N. Malzberg (Baen) Art Book: The Arrival by Shaun Tan (Lothian 2006; Scholastic) Editor: Ellen Datlow Magazine: F&SF Publisher: Tor Artist: Charles Vess Congrats to all the winners indeed! (Don’t click the read more, there isn’t any more after this!)
Tall Writing Order
Today is going to be intense and it’s entirely possible that I will explode. Here’s what’s going down: At 10 PM I have to be showered, fed, and mentally prepared to write. Shortly after that point I need to be online. Why? I’ve arranged to do a 2 hour word war with a friend from my website YoungWritersOnline.net. Note: A word war, if you don’t know (and I have talked about it before) is basically a “battle” between any number of people to write the most in a given period of time. Generally they aren’t 2 hours long (15 minutes is normal). You set up a time with whomever you want to write with, with a time limit, and then for that period, you just write, nothing else, period. At the end, you come back and every says how many words they wrote and the person with the most wins (though technically anyone who wrote wins). Prior to this there will be a brainstorming session. It’s quite likely that we will either get tired of something and switch, or finish a couple stories all at once. So, we’re going to brainstorm for probably an hour beforehand. After all this, I’ll likely be dead. If I don’t reappear soon, expect my brain has exploded. It’s going to be intense and insane. Yeah. (Don’t click the read more, there isn’t any more after this!)
My Trip: Part Three (The Last Bits and Tearful Goodbyes)
My apologies for the lateness of this post. I have pictures left to put up and the last chunk of the story to tell. School just killed me and I forgot to get this up. So here it is. Last time I talked about the first two castles I’ve ever seen up close (Conisborough and Peveril) and the Blue John Caverns. That was quite an experience indeed. Now I’m going to talk about some of the other fun things I got to do. Below you’ll see a long distance shot of Chatsworth House, which is probably the biggest non-corporate building I’ve ever been in. Attached to said house are the Chatsworth Gardens, a place of…well, we’ll get to that later.Chatsworth is like an orgy of amazing architecture, sculpture, paintings, and interior design. It’s an amazing place, as you can see:Probably the most memorable part of Chatsworth House is this:No, that is not a door inside of a door. It’s a painting. The put a door there, and painted another door with a violin on it inside of the frame, and when you see it in real life, it looks real. I was amazed by it and still am. Brilliantly done.Once you go through the house, you go out into the gardens, which have been built up over the years into this collage of…well, I don’t know what you call it. It’s amazing all the things they have in there. There’s a hedge maze, foundations, waterfalls, streams, and even this really cool waterfall staircase. And apparently pheasant just wander around there, but we’ll get to that later. Here are some images of the gardens:Here is the maze in the middle of the gardens. This was so cool. I’ve never been in a hedge maze before. There’s a cute story that goes along with it and it’s mushy, so deal with it. Lindsey and I were walking through and she would intentionally take us down the wrong way so we could playfully kiss in the corners (with the funny moment beforehand of us going, “Oh no, another dead end” *insert kiss*). Yes it was cute. Yes it was amazing. And yes Lindsey is a good kisser. Okay, vomit-ish moment over.Another really bizarre thing is this tree. It’s made of metal and they spray water through it or over it or something and it just sprinkles everywhere. It’s really amazing. Lindsey dragged me in a circle around it, which was fun. By the way, you can spend hours in these gardens. We didn’t see everything, but we got to see most of it. The place is enormous!And of course, probably one of the more famous bits of the gardens: the waterfall staircase. The stairs go all the way to the top and you’re allowed to walk on them. We didn’t walk on them on purpose, because it was far too cold for that sort of thing, but we did walk all the way down from the top, which was fun.The last castle (and the last significant place we went to) was Skipton Castle, which is one of the best preserved castles in England. I have to admit that it wasn’t as impressive as the other two, but maybe it was because it was so well preserved and seemed more like a living space than a defensive place. Granted, it is beautiful and certainly a fantastic place. I greatly enjoyed going there and expect if I go to England again (actually, when I go there again, because I intend to see more that amazing country) I will see many more castles and interesting sights. Thankfully, England isn’t a very large country, which makes seeing the sights a little easier than trying to see everything in the U.S. Anyway, here be the picturesThis is the old church at Skipton. It’s mostly in ruin, but look at it! It’s so old and amazing.The tree below is a Yew tree that was supposedly planted there by Lady Anne almost 400 years ago. That would make this a very old tree indeed.In the picture below you can see a clear view of Lindsey reading a information thing (whatever you call those). Isn’t she cute?Here is a random picture up a chimney:And what group of castle pictures would complete without a picture of a medieval toilet?And, of course, another picture of Lindsey reading in a castle and otherwise being beautiful, cute, and lovable:If you look at this picture you’ll notice there are two walls. Why? Well because the original wall, which is all beaten up, was blown down at some point (I think) during a three year siege on Skipton. They rebuilt the wall later, which is very obvious I think.The strange thing is, this stairway leads into the “dungeon”, but I didn’t take any pictures of the dungeon. I don’t know why, but I didn’t. It’s okay, though, the dungeon was just one room with nothing in it and it apparently gave Lindsey and her mum the willies. I didn’t feel too comfortable either.I absolutely love this picture. There were these arrow slits in the walls, and some of them were shaped as cross. We were there at just the right time to have the sun coming in, so it looks like the cross is glowing!Inside the church that was pictured earlier:After Skipton Castle we wandered around in town. Lindsey and I went to a couple bookstores and generally had a lot of fun together before eating lunch. Afterwards, we met up with her mum again and went to the canal. There were sound houseboats there that were for sale, which I didn’t get a picture of, and a cute duck who I named Terrance. I’ve never seen a duck with a blue bill, which is why I took the picture.Also, since i said I would talk about the pheasant, here is a picture of the one we saw. His name is Ted. I don’t know why, that’s just what I called him, if memory serves me
Stories Finish: Now What?
I’ve been working on two short stories as of late: Dreams of Priory and Nobody Gives a Crap About Compsagnathus (working title, I think). Both clock in around 8,000 words (the latter a little shorter, if memory serves me correctly). Both stories are drastically different too. The first story is a bizarre take on life, death, and the afterlife, with aliens thrown into the mix, and the other is about reverse engineering chickens into dinosaurs, which is meant to be mildly humorous (and which the girlfriend really doesn’t like even though she hasn’t read it because she asserts, given her genetics background, that such things are simply impossible…even though I got the idea from a news article).In fact, the first story is really hard for me to pin down to a specific genre. I started writing it with aliens and the supernatural together, perhaps “future urban fantasy” would be a sufficient title. The problem is that I don’t know what to do with it. I’ll be editing it pretty soon and hopefully submitting it. I don’t know if this story should go to WOTF or if the dino story should. I had fun writing both and I like both stories, but Dreams of Priory has a special place in my heart for some reason. Maybe it’s because the story is confusing. It’s never entirely made clear why the main character (Sol) is the way he is. I try to explain, it but I didn’t want to have huge loads of exposition or dialogue where another character pulls an as-you-know-Bob. So, there is explanation, but I left it a little ambiguous. I don’t know if that was a good thing. I personally like stories that make me think about the ambiguity, and make a few of my own guesses too, but that’s not necessarily what I write (perhaps because I might not be good at the whole ambiguity thing). Still, I like the story. I intend to edit both of these and figure out what to do with both of them. I have less than nine days to get one of them off to WOTF though.Now that I’m done with these two stories, I’m left wondering what to do next. I have a quota to meet every day, but I also have a lot of stories I’d like to edit first, some of them a bit on the long side, plus a novel to finish up (I have about 60,000 words left). But I also have a bunch of new story ideas (short stories mostly) that I’d like to work on as well. I like writing short stories now that I have them sort of figured out.So, part of today was spent mulling over what to do next. I started to write a little in The White, but in doing so meant I needed to refresh myself more with the story. I took a while to do that and spent a lot of the day thinking. The result was that I only wrote 744 words. Part of that was from editing the previous chapters for The Spellweaver of Dern because I had left a character out. Yeah, lots of thinking today. But, I’m not going to hold any of that against myself, since I did do quite a lot of work in regards to brainstorming, etc. Tomorrow should be more productive though.We’ll see. (Don’t click the read more, there isn’t any more after this!)