Christopher Rowe

Welcome

This is the online home of Christopher Rowe, science fiction and fantasy author, great cook, raconteur, and independent bookseller. (Some of these things may be lies. Or none of them.) 

He is the author of the acclaimed story collection, Telling the Map (Small Beer Press), as well as a middle grade series, the Supernormal Sleuthing Service (Greenwillow), co-written with his wife, author Gwenda Bond. He has also published a couple of dozen stories, and been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy and Theodore Sturgeon Awards. His work has been frequently reprinted, translated into a half-dozen languages around the world, and praised by the New York Times Book Review. His story “Another World For Map is Faith” made the long list in the 2007 Best American Short Stories volume, and his early fiction was collected in a chapbook, Bittersweet Creek and Other Stories, also by Small Beer Press. His most recent stories are “Jack of Coins” and "Knowledgeable Creatures" at Tor.com, selected by editor Ellen Datlow.

He has an MFA from the Bluegrass Writers Workshop and lives in a hundred-year-old house in Lexington, Kentucky, with his wife and their many pets. 

 

His first novel, Sandstorm, fulfilled his childhood dream of writing a D&D novel and was published by Wizards of the Coast. He doesn't blog nearly often enough, but when he does, you can find the entries below. If you want to catch him more regularly, he's frequently time-wasting at Facebook.

A Thousand Miles Across the Commonwealth

This is a post about a bicycle and a bunch of bicycle rides. If that’s not your jam, fret not, I’m planning a writing update over the weekend.

Onward.

In the next day or two, I’m taking delivery on a 2020 Trek Émonda SL 6 Disc full carbon road bike. The picture is from Trek’s online catalog, but mine will have minimal modifications (it will have pedals and a computer mount, for example), so this will give you a good idea. The only substantial change to the stock bike I’m making is swapping out the 172.5mm cranks for 165mm versions, on the advice of the eerily competent bike fitter I visited in Louisville last spring.

I’ll be riding this bike a lot on my own and on club rides, once weather permits (it’ll take awhile before I’ll be willing to ride my new baby on wet roads). In addition to those regular rides, though, I’ve registered for nine “event” rides throughout the spring, summer, and autumn, all in Kentucky. Those event rides total fourteen days of riding, just over a thousand miles, and an amount of vertical climbing that I’m choosing not to think about at this time. Thus, “A Thousand Miles Across the Commonwealth.”

Those of you in the know, well, know that a thousand miles is not a particularly great amount for even a casual club cyclist to aim for, and I certainly plan to hit multiples of that number in 2020. I just like the sound of it as my “title” for this “project.”

Here are the Kentucky event rides I’ll be participating in.

Saturday, April 18. The Redbud Ride starts and finishes in London. This is the kickoff event of the five-ride Kentucky Cycling Challenge. If the weather cooperates, it should feature spectacular views of Eastern Kentucky’s mountainsides spotted with blooming redbud and dogwood trees. I’m riding the 71 mile route.

Sunday, April 26. The Tour de Lou is a 62 mile ride (or “metric century”) that takes in many of the sights of the Commonwealth’s largest city. I’m most looking forward to riding through the parks designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, and along the tree-lined parkways that connect them. This ride is part of the Kentucky Derby Festival.

Friday, May 22 through Sunday, May 24. The Horsey Hundred is the signature event of the Bluegrass Cycling Club and the largest annual cycling event in the Commonwealth, drawing thousands of riders from all over North America. I’ll ride a tune-up ride of approximately 25 miles on Friday, an “imperial century” of 100 miles on Saturday, and a 75-mile route on Sunday. The weekend rides start and finish in Georgetown and take riders throughout the rolling hills and past the scenic horse farms of the central Bluegrass. The Horsey is the second stop in the Kentucky Cycling Challenge.

Saturday, June 27. The Licking Valley Century out of Alexandria is a new event sponsored by the venerable Cincinnati Cycling Club and constitutes the third stop on the Challenge. It takes in the ridges and valleys along the Licking River, which drains Northeast Kentucky into the mighty Ohio.

Saturday, August 15. The fourth stop of the Challenge is the 100-mile Rock the Crater ride (no website that I can find) out of Middlesboro, in Southeast Kentucky, right on the Tennessee border. Middlesboro is located within a mile of the famous Cumberland Gap and has a couple of interesting claims to fame. It is (allegedly) the birthplace of ragtime music and (definitely) located entirely within an enormous meteorite crater.

Friday, August 21 through Sunday, August. The Derby City Fondo, put on by the Louisville Bicycle Club, is the successor event to that club’s My Old Kentucky Home cycling weekends. I’ll be riding the 20-mile Friday tuneup, the century route on Saturday, and a 40-mile ride on Sunday. All of these start and finish at the Milewide Beer Company near downtown Louisville.

Saturday, September 12. Starting and finishing on the Ohio in Maysville, the Limestone Cycling Tour is the century that marks the fifth and final stop of this year’s Kentucky Cycling Challenge. Maysville is a fascinating place. Daniel Boone was one of the founders and it was an important stop on the Underground Railroad. The slave auction scene in Uncle Tom’s Cabin was inspired by such an event witnessed at the court house by author Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Saturday, September 19. Elizabethtown is the host city for the Hub City Tour. I’ll be riding the century route. Of all these rides, these will be along the roads I know least well.

Saturday, October 3 and Sunday October 4. 2020 marks the 51st edition of the oldest continually held cycling event in Kentucky, the Red River Rally. The Rally consists of two days of riding through the astonishingly beautiful Natural Bridge State Park and surrounding Red River Gorge. I’ll be riding the 64 mile and 43 mile routes on the successive days, and hoping for some spectacular fall colors along the bluffs.

Starting with the blooming redbuds and ending with the bright colors of autumn sounds like a great way to bookend the cycling year to me.

Y’all come with.

"Everything is bicycle." --Stephen Crane

Years ago, for me, everything was bicycle.

I was an active club rider, I served on my city’s bicycle and pedestrian advisory committee, I watched the professionals race as much as was then possible in the USA, I even raced a couple of times, and promoted one race. I also helped run an early version of a city bikes program here in Lexington Kentucky.

It was while serving in that last capacity that everything changed. One day, while riding home from recovering a wayward rental bike in a nearby park, I was assaulted by a group of young men, robbed, and badly beaten, resulting in numerous serious injuries.

I did not react well. I went home, sat down at my desk, and stayed there for nine years, gaining a hundred pounds.

Then this past December, just before my 49th birthday, I was unexpectedly diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes. This time, I decided to react better. This time, I got back on my bike.

I took my beloved Lemond Tourmalet to the shop and they cleaned and updated it for me. I rejoined the local bicycling club. I hit the road.

I have lost a significant amount of weight. I have vastly improved my cholesterol and triglyceride numbers. Most particularly, through a combination of medication, mindfulness, diet, and exercise, I moved my A1C from 11.5 in early December to 7.1 at the next check, two months later. in early February. On June 1st, I will ride a metric century as part of the American Diabetes Association’s Tour de Cure fundraiser. I’ve already raised well over half of my US $10,000 goal.

I have about a month to go before the ride. I still believe I can hit my fundraising goal, with your help. I know I can complete the ride.

Please consider donating at this link. Thank you.

A giveaway! Win an ARC of Telling the Map

Just look at this blog post full of fabulous prizes!

Well, a singular prize anyway, and one I hope you find fabulous should you win it. Here's the deal. I'll mail a randomly determined person who comments on this post one copy of the advance uncorrected proof of my upcoming collection, Telling the Map. I will sign and personalize it or not at your preference. All you have to do to enter to win is write a comment on this blog post (the one you're reading right now) and make sure to sign in in such a way that you leave a good email for me to reach you after the drawing, which I'll need so I can get your physical mailing address. Your email isn't viewable by other readers or commenters. Make sense?

The text of your comment should consist of whatever you want to write. A greeting, a haiku, a barbaric yawp, whatever. Okay? Comment! Contest runs through midnight Lexington, Kentucky, USA time, 13th April, one entry per person, please!

Acknowledgements

Because I'm aware that a fair number of folks who are likely to see this post are not, on the other hand, likely to read this in my upcoming collection, here I offer the text of the (brief) acknowledgements page of Telling the Map.

The stories in this book were all developed and improved by their original editors, to whom I owe a great debt. They are Ellen Datlow, Gavin J. Grant, Susan Marie Groppi, Kelly Link, David Moles, Jonathan Strahan, Gordon Van Gelder, and Sheila Williams. Gavin and Kelly also edited this collection as a whole, and published it, for which I offer thanks.

As a writer, and as a person, I have benefited enormously from my association with several workshops. I first learned to take myself seriously as an artist and to think carefully about the crafting of stories at the Clarion West Workshop in Seattle in 1996. I completed my formal training as a writer under the tutelage of Derek Nikitas at the Bluegrass Writers Studio of Eastern Kentucky University. Most of all, though, I here acknowledge the sincere thanks I owe to those many colleagues who read and critiqued most of these stories at the annual Sycamore Hill Writers Workshop, now guided by my best unbeaten brother, Richard Butner.

Finally, all who read these stories should know that almost none of them would have been even begun, much less been finished and published, if it weren’t for the essential, indispensable contributions to my art and to my life made by my wife, Gwenda Bond. Whatever I have accomplished as a storyteller in the 21^st century, I could not, would not, have done without her.

House of Harmonious Wisdom

In addition to the fairly standard fictioneering I do (subcategories science fiction and fantasy), I also dabble in game design. Those of you who play the Pathfinder tabletop role-playing game might be interested in this new series of short adventures out for electronic distribution later today, "House of Harmonious Wisdom." The scenarios are designed for play in Paizo's Pathfinder Society organized play campaign, but can be easily adapted to any Pathfinder game and, without too much trouble, for other fantasy RPGs as well. This was a lot of fun to work on, and I hope people have fun playing the quests designed by me and my co-authors and developers.

Wild Cards

As most of you probably know, I work with George RR Martin and a bunch of other writers in a group called the Wild Cards Consortium, which produces the vast, ongoing Wild Cards series of shared world anthologies. It's an alternate history series of interlinked stories that started back in the 1980s and is still going strong. Now is a great time to start reading the books (23 so far, and more to come!) and stories, because tor.com has announced this guided group read (or reread) of the series, which you can read all about here.

Telling the Map

I am so pleased today to reveal the cover of my upcoming collection, Telling the Map. The art is by the wonderful Kathleen Jennings, and I couldn't be happier with what my publishers at Small Beer Press have done with the design. The concept for the cover originated with Gwenda Bond, who was inspired by the maps of Pauline Baynes.

The book, due out July 11th, collects ten of my stories, one of which—a forty thousand word novella—is new. The new novella is "The Border State," a prequel to my Hugo- and Nebula-nominated story, "The Voluntary State," and here, friends, is the opening.

Look down on the Liberty Hills of Kentucky where they spring up north of the traitorous, twisting Green River. Look down on untended fields and tumbledown houses; look for a clean pavement line stretching along a ridge top, a road punctuated by empty churches and empty stores.

See twin bicyclists, working hard. The gold of their jerseys matches the springing hawkweed crowding the lowland fields, the blue of their shorts is a half dozen shades deeper than the cloudless sky.

Here is the brother, Michael, a sprinter. His legs are sculpted pistons, bunched muscles that push and demand, exhort and explode. Michael is an unsubtle cyclist, capable of terrifying speed along the flats, of finishing spurts that demoralize other riders and electrify the Viewers at Home.

Here is the sister, Maggie, a climber. She dances—this is the parlance of commentators—she dances on the pedals. She is a bird with strengths hidden and unhidden, with secret discipline and public fire. She breathes metronomically; she pedals in perfect circles.

This day above the Green, they trained for a race they might not ride. They awaited trustworthy word but had given up hope of anything but an unremarkable day in the saddle.

Then Michael killed a telephone.

 The book is available for preorder here or at the usual online retail places.

For Gwenda, on this super day...

Gwenda's new book, Lois Lane Fallout, is officially out today. I wrote this in celebration of her and of her heroine.

"Truth, Justice, and the American Way"

Truth is, his first teachers were alien ghosts,
Robot voices from a dying planet,
All cool crystalline logic, or, no,
All four-color missile-finned joy–it keeps changing.

Then there were the Americans,
Childless and with dirt beneath their fingernails.
He’d learn humility and, sure, platitudes from them,
But joy, too, so there’s that.

But in all that timeless time,
There was only one other he could turn both his faces towards
And have his telescopic microscopic solar gaze met
Eye to unblinking eye.

Not a mermaid or an Amazon,
Not a rocket-powered princess from an alternate timeline,
Her real, secret, so-misunderstood superpower
Was that she didn’t define herself in relation to him.

Save the world or save her,
Bless him, he could never tell the difference.
She could.
Truth is, she named him.
He was defined by her.

Book Launch Day!

Today marks the launch into the world Jonathan Strahan's latest anthology, Fearsome Magics, which includes my new story, "The Dun Letter." I hope you'll all consider picking up a copy from wherever you buy books. If you're an Amazon user, click here. If you're not, please order from your local bookstore or the online retailer you prefer. Cheers!

Everything's coming up August

A few quick notes for those of you who don't follow me on Facebook or Twitter.

• My short story "The Unveiling" will be published in the upcoming January issue of Asimov's Science Fiction.
• I'll be at Gen Con this weekend, paneling about short fiction on Saturday evening.
• Gwenda and I will be at DragonCon over Labor Day weekend, where she's on the YA programming track and I'm a husband-in-tow (hoping to sneak off and get in a game of Dungeons & Dragons).
• Finally, I was a guest on The Buterverse Podcast recently, so if you want to hear me ramble on for a half hour or so about, well, about a lot of stuff, check out this link.