Christopher Rowe

Pens on Fire. ON FIRE!

Hey all. Just a quick note about the event described on this flier. I'll be at the Woodford County Library tomorrow, Saturday, November 23rd, 2013, from 2 to 4 pm, discussing science fiction and fantasy, writing, and related things on a panel with a few of my colleagues. If y'all can make it, come on out!

Bibliographia

I'll figure out how to put this up as a permanent, linkable page or something around here sometime, but for now, since I was working it up for other reasons, here's my current bibliography for those who might be interested. At some point, I'll work in links to the stuff that's available online.

 

Novels

Sandstorm, Wizards of the Coast, 2011.

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Collections

Bittersweet Creek and Other Stories, Small Beer Press, 2003.

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Short Stories

“The Contrary Gardener,” Eclipse Online, edited by Jonathan Strahan, forthcoming.

“Nowhere Fast,” Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories, edited by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant, Candlewick Press, 2011. Reprint: Steampunk Revolution, edited by Ann VanderMeer, Tachyon, forthcoming.

“Feast of the Moon,” Realms of the Undead, edited by Susan J. Morris, Wizards of the Coast, 2010.

“Gather,” The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction & Fantasy, edited by Ellen Datlow, Ballantine, 2008.

“Another Word For Map is Faith,” The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 2006. Reprints: Science Fiction: The Best of the Year 2007, edited by Rich Horton, Prime Books, 2007; The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Twentieth Annual Collection, edited by Ellen Datlow and Kelly Link & Gavin J. Grant, St. Martin’s, 2007; The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, edited by Jonathan Strahan, Night Shade Books, 2007; The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction/Czech Republic Edition (Czech translation), March 2007; The Tenth Dimension (Hebrew Translation), April 2007; The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction/Poland Edition (Polish translation), 2010. Long list: The Best American Short Stories 2007.

“The League of Last Girls,” Aegri Somnia, edited by Jason Sizemore and Gill Ainsworth, Apex Publications, 2006. Reprint: Trechu Divné Kusy 3 (Czech translation), edited by Martin Sust, Lazer, 2007.

“Two Figures in a Landscape Between Storms,” Twenty Epics, edited by David Moles and Susan Marie Groppi, All-Star Stories, 2006.

“The Queen of the Moon,” Apex Digest Online, February 2006.

“Whether to Go Through,” Electric Velocipede Autumn 2004. Reprint: Apex Digest, Summer 2006.

"The Voluntary State,” Sci Fiction, May 2004. Reprints: Science Fiction: The Best of 2004, edited by Karen Haber and Jonathan Strahan, iBooks, 2005; The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Twenty-second Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois, St. Martin’s, 2005; Beyond Singularity, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, Ace Books, 2005; Hayakawa’s SF Magazine (Japanese translation), June 2005; Nebula Awards Showcase 2006, edited by Gardner Dozois, Roc, 2006; Rewind: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, Tachyon, 2007.

“Relativity in the Gospel: Five Looks at Matthew 2:9-10” Ideomancer, December 2003.

“Men of Renown,” Bittersweet Creek and Other Stories, Small Beer Press, 2003. Reprints: Apex Digest Online, February 2006; Hayakawa SF Magazine (Japanese translation), June 2009.

“The Children of Tilford Fortune,” Swan Sister: Fairy Tales Retold, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Simon & Schuster, 2003. Reprint: The Dark of the Woods, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Aladdin Paperbacks, 2006.

“The Force Acting on the Displaced Body,” Trampoline, edited by Kelly Link, Small Beer Press, 2003. Reprints: lcrw.net, October 2003.

“Seared Scallops and Steamed Green Beans,” Infinite Matrix, July 2003. Reprint: Scattered Covered Smothered, edited by Jason Erik Lundberg, Two Cranes Press, 2004.

“Interim Discussions,” Beyond The Last Star, edited by Sherwood Smith, SFF.Net, 2002.

“Leadership Secrets of the Prince of Darkness,” The Journal of Pulse-Pounding Narratives, 2002.

“The Dreaming Mountains,”  Ideomancer Unbound, edited by Chris Clarke and Mikal Trimm, Decadent Moon Publications/FictionWise, 2002. Reprint: Bittersweet Creek and Other Stories, Small Beer Press, 2003.

“Horsethieves and Preachermen,” Ideomancer, July 2002. Honorable Mention, Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Sixteenth Annual Collection.

“High Water,” The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Spring 2001.

“VFD Adventures,” Quantum Speculative Fiction, edited by Kurt Roth, Obscura Press, 1999. Reprint: Ideomancer, September 2002.

“Sally Harpe,” Realms of Fantasy, October 1999. Reprints:  Bittersweet Creek and Other Stories, Small Beer Press, 2003; lcrw.net, December 2003. Honorable Mention, Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Thirteenth Annual Collection.

“Baptism on Bittersweet Creek,” Realms of Fantasy, April 1999. Reprint: Bittersweet Creek and Other Stories, Small Beer Press, 2003.

“Long Live the King,” Pulp Eternity, September 1998.

“Kin to Crows,” Realms of Fantasy, June 1998. Reprints: Ideomancer, August 2002; Bittersweet Creek and Other Stories, Small Beer Press, 2003. Honorable Mention, Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Twelfth Annual Collection.

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Poems

“Our Prize Patrol Will Find You, No Matter Where You Are,” Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, 2001.

Book List, and a bit of news

As announced elsewhere already, I've just sold another short story. "The Contrary Gardener," which serves as a sort of companion piece to "The Voluntary State," will be in the next volume of Jonathan Strahan's Eclipse series of anthologies. I think the book will be out sometime in 2012, and I'll say more about it closer to publication time.

I'm spending most of my time this summer working on my next novel, but my first semester as a graduate student in Eastern Kentucky University's MFA program will start in a week or so. The two courses I'm taking (one of which is a fiction workshop) combine to yield this list of assigned books. I've read about half of them before, but look forward to reading or rereading all of them in an academic setting.

• The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, translated by Lydia Davis
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
• The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
• Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
• After This by Alice McDermott
• Beloved by Toni Morrison
• Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, annotations and other apparatus by Alfred Appel, Jr.

All but the García Márquez and the Kundera are available for the Nook (well, the Nabokov isn't quite available yet, it'll be out on the 16th, I think, and here's hoping that the notes &c. are hyperlinked) which brings up the point that I've lately learned to enjoy being a reader of screens. I've even been reading on my computer, just this week having read the first four of Elizabeth George's Inspector Lynley mysteries on my laptop. I like having other windows open with the OED and Wikipedia live so I can flip back and forth when I come across a word or something else I'm not familiar with. In the case of Elizabeth George, that means I now know what secateurs are (well, I guess I already knew what they were, just not their proper name), and now know a lot more about the furniture makers of England than I ever thought I would.

In which we learn it's all Holly Black's fault

There's an interview with me up today at my publisher's website (I promise that my internet life is not going to be all-Sandstorm all-the-time from here on out, it's just that kind of week). Therein, I talk about how I wound up getting the opportunity to write a Forgotten Realms book in the first place, quite a bit about the book itself, and, heh, a little bit about my teaching "philosophy" when it comes to writing. Also, a bit about Clarion West. West is Best! (Look, sweetie, I made it all the way to the end before I used an exclamation point, and held myself to one just like you said!)

Launch Day!

At long last, Sandstorm is released today. If you have any inclination to pick it up, or just want to know more about it, you can check out this page. Meanwhile, Gwenda has put together a fascinating roundtable with some fabulous writers (and me) talking about how gaming and gaming fiction figured in their lives. What I wrote is this:

When I was in my early teens, I lived in rural Kentucky, which can be a pretty fantastic place. But I also lived in fantasy worlds, because I had a taste for the more literally fantastic. In particular, I played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons and read a lot of high fantasy novels. My favorite world to play in or read about was the Forgotten Realms, and a lot of what I know about wonder, action, and scope in fantastic fiction comes from reading those books and playing those games back then. I decided that one day, I would be a writer myself so that I could write a Forgotten Realms book of my own. And despite all the twists and turns my life and my career as a writer have taken since since then, I'm delighted that that day has actually come.

Check out what everyone else had to say.

And thanks, everybody. If you read the book, I hope you like it!

Cover me

Editors Ellen Datlow and Martin Sûst have both sent me cover images in the last couple of weeks. The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy will be out in Spring '08 and will feature a new story by me called "Gather." Martin's book features a passel of reprints from various, mostly newish anglophone sf/fantasy writers and will reprint my story, "The League of Last Girls," in a Czech translation.

Hmm, that'll be the third story I've had in Czech in the last year or so. (Will he be able to resist a terrible pun, wonders the reader).

Maybe soon I'll have enough for a Czech book. Thank you! Thank you!

And now his power is mine...

 

Holy crap, I accidentally Sylared Jeremy Lassen!

Here's how it went down. There was a biggish box from Night Shade Books in the post office box, and, unlike most times when there's a box of books, it was addressed to me! My immediate assumption was that Gwenda had surprise gifted me as congratulations for the Stats midterm that I aced last week by buying me the gotta-have-'em hardback Malazan novellas by Steven Erikson that Night Shade puts out.

So naturally I ripped into the box and accidentally took off the top of Jeremy's head, supervillain like. Sorry, Jeremy!

As it turned out, what was inside the book was not the novellas, but something else very, very shiny. This year, Night Shade, who, if you didn't know, are the hippest kids on the street, have launched a new series edited by Jonathan Strahan, who would be the coolest kid on Coode Street, except that I'm pretty sure Coode Street is in the middle of a desert. Or in Australia at any rate, which I believe amounts to the same thing.

The new series is The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, this is volume the first, and you can order it direct from that link or probably pretty much from anyplace that sells new American books. You can also check your local library system's website for a form for inviting suggestions for books to purchase and see if they'll buy it for you (and all your neighbors). Hell, you could do both.

I guess that I should mention that the reason they sent me copies is that my story, "Another Word For Map is Faith," is included, along with a big bunch of other stories by some very fine writers indeed. I'm on page 93, right between Ellen Klages and Margo Lanagan.

Anyway, check it out. Pretty, eh?

Enter to Win

This is cool. AbeBooks, one of the best places to buy books on the web, is joining with the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America to offer readers a chance to win a pair of tickets to this year's Nebula Awards Banquet. No travel provided, alas, but there's a two-night stay at the Marriott included, so if you live in the northeast you should enter. You have to answer a trivia question, but I'm assuming you're up with the google.

Spotted at SFScope.

"They're like jackals. Yet they're...children."

We were at the library last night so I could pick up an inter-library loan of a Fables collection (I love I.L.L.!) and so that Gwenda could pick up sixty pounds of young adult novels. On a whim, I pulled down Essential X-Men Volume 2. These Marvel "essential books" collect huge runs of comics on the cheap by reprinting them on pulpy paper sans color. Works well enough, for plot driven stuff drawn all clean and John Byrney, anyway.

I had my second nostalgia attack of the week when I flipped through and realized I was reading a reprint of the very first X-men comic I ever saw. I must have bought it on a Thursday afternoon right at the end of fourth grade, almost thirty years ago. It had to be a Thursday, because Thursdays were the day that my grandmother had a rinse and set at the Glamorette (still does, I believe) and I got to hit the library and the little convenience stores that sold comics.

Man, this issue is something else. Just 17 pages of story, but 25 named characters and settings that jump from Westchester to the "Imperial Center" planet of the Shi'ar Empire to the Outer Hebrides to Harlem to a private jet above London. Heroin addicts, alien princesses, Soviet mutants and guys with really big helmets speaking comic book versions of at least a half dozen accents.

I can't remember what my nine year old self thought about Luke Cage busting down a door to prevent Storm from being stabbed by a punk named "Bluie," but in that time and place, his dialogue must have been as alien to me as the outer space lady with the crazy eyebrows: "What's a righteous lady like you doin' in a dump like this?"

It's funny, I think of myself as a "DC guy," but the stories in the hundred or so issues of X-men that followed this one are the ones I remember best.

Okay, 'nuff o' that, true believers. Here's a little bit of writing news. Both "Another Word For Map is Faith" and "The League of Last Girls" are listed among the short stories on Locus Magazine's Recommended Reading List for 2006, where they're keeping some pretty heady company.

Hugos

Some good work and some good folks won shiny statues last night. Congrats to all--especially to Scalzi for his Campbell win. And it's good to see one of Robert Charles Wilson's fine novels finally get some award love.