Christopher Rowe

First taste is free

Well, not free. But fairly cheap. Less than twenty bucks, anyhow.

(This is another post about SFWA--if you don't care about that, just skip to the bottom for a puppy picture.)

Okay, for those of you who've been following it, obviously there's a lot of stuff going on with the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America organization. And lots of people are hanging back, deciding whether to join or not based on the outcome of the current officer elections.

Well, as Will Shetterly has pointed out in various places, with SFWA's pro-rated membership rates, if you wait until April 1st you can join for $17.50. Next year's dues come due on June 30th, so essentially it's a two month trial membership, like at the gym. It's not entirely clear right this second whether you'd get a chance to vote, mainly because of timing issues with joining, getting a ballot, and getting it back in by the April 28th deadline.

I don't have a good answer right now for "why join SFWA" (although I can tell you that this document does not answer it to my satisfaction, and I'm in the club), because I think SFWA is changing, maybe a lot, hopefully for the better, and definitely right now. Maybe you can influence that change for less than twenty bucks.

Check and see if you qualify, then go to the goofy webform. I don't have anything to do with membership applications, but if I were you I'd take a look at that contact info in the lower left of that last page and ask about sending in scans of the requested documents instead of waiting on the mail.

Thank you for your patience. Now, here's Puck, Emma, and their pal Pickles the Neighbor Pup not exhibiting patience.

The Do The Commentary in Different Voices (updated)

But all are worth a look.

Not funny.

Funny.

Devastating.

Library, Alchemy, SORBS, High School

I've been asked to give an introductory seminar (an hour or two, I think) on "improving your science fiction & fantasy writing" at one of the local libraries. It's scheduled for the afternoon of October 28th, so hopefully you guys will come up with some great stuff for me to say by then. My other teaching stints have all been sprawling, multi-week gigs and I'm interested in what people would find most beneficial from a more concise, focused session. Please, comment away, or drop me a line.

Pleasant surprise in PO Box 1304 this morning. Editor/publisher Steve Pasechnick sent us a copy of the third issue of his gorgeous magazine, Alchemy. It features stories from a lot of my favorite writers; folks like Hannah Wolf Bowen, Theodora Goss, Beth Adele Long (twice!), Sonya Taaffe and Sarah Monette. Also some folks who are new to me. You can (and should) order it here.

This situation with SORBS blocking some messages from gmail and other e-mail providers (search on "vindictive") is getting on my nerves and costing me time. Please ask your ISPs to not use this junk.

Click on the "continue reading" link to see me meme it up on the high school thing going around. I got it from Gwenda, and she should be mindful that I'll be aggressively policing the comments to this post.

Nephewed!

Hey, check out this handsome guy!

That's William Lee Austin Rowe, my new nephew. Son of William Fred Rowe (and of my sis-in-law Bridget) and grandson of William Reburn Rowe. That makes him William III, which means there's historical precedent for him leading a Glorious Revolution to take the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland. So he's got that to look forward to.

Before that, he can look forward to books, bicycles, and books about bicycles.

Helix

A group of well-known sf/fantasy professionals headed by Lawrence Watt-Evans and William Sanders have just launched a new venture called Helix. It looks to be funded on a donation model similar to that pioneered by Strange Horizons. Note that they apparently solicit their fiction; this is a place to read stories,  not send them.

The most interesting thing about this to most UnCommonwealth readers, probably, is that the first issue contains a new story by Rick Bowes. (Mama, it also contains a story by Janis Ian.)

The editorials are worth a read (that links to one by Sanders, scroll down for another by Watt-Evans). Everybody loves subtext.

Of Nebulas and Novels

I'm serving on the Nebula Novel jury this year. The Nebulas are the awards given annually by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America and one interesting wrinkle (among the many, many devastatingly uninteresting wrinkles) in how the awards process works is the existence of "jury adds."

To wind up on the final Nebula ballot, a work must either have survived a round of recommendation and preliminary voting that makes up in Kafka what it lacks in elegance, or it must have been "added" by one of several juries, each of which look at different kinds of work (short fiction, produced screenplays, novels) and each of which operates under its own set of rules and protocols.

Still with me?

A jury consisting of myself and several of my peers may or may not elect to add one novel length work of fiction published in the USA in 2006 to the final ballot of next year's Nebulas (for our purposes a novel is a work of fiction 40,000+ words long).

Our job is to keep an eye out for the rum and the fey, for excellent works that might have escaped the notice of the SFWA membership at large owing to details of the work's publishing history. Perhaps they're books that were under-publicized or which were published by small houses. Perhaps they were published "out-genre," that is, presented as a mystery or a romance or even "straight" fiction while still fitting a generously broad definition of "science fiction" or "fantasy." Perhaps they were tightly targeted at particularly gendered readers, or readers of a particular race or ethnicity, but have things to say to everybody.

If we find one (and there can be, as the man with the sword said, only one), we'll add it to the final ballot. If we don't, we won't.

So your job, reader, is three-fold. First, if you happen to be a writer, publisher or publicist involved with putting out a book in calendar year 2006 that you feel might fit the bill(s), please send it to me:

Christopher Rowe
PO Box 1304
Lexington, KY  40588-1304

Second, if you're not a writer, publisher or publicist etc etc, but you happen to read such a book that you're enthusiastic about, please let me know about it via e-mail and I'll try to track down a copy (if you have info on obtaining a review copy, please send that along as well).

Third, if you have an electroblog yourself, and you think some folks read it who might fit category the first (keywords: writer, publisher or publicist 2006 sf/fantasy might be overlooked etc), will you please let them know that I'm over here, looking for books? Thanks!

UPDATE: It's been suggested that I emphasize that the jury is empaneled for all of 2006--the awards  will be given in  Spring of '07--so we'll be looking for work all year long. Keep those cards and letters coming, folks!

The Machine Stops

Well, that turned out to be a longer hiatus than I'd intended.

Various occurrences occurred twixt then and now, not least of which was a two-day bout of Rampaging Kelvin Scale Coldy Cold immediately after I finished finals. I wound up spending 48 hours in bed, with about 38 of those spent asleep, so I guess it wasn't completely awful. Worse than that, though; as predicted, my computer has gone to the computer graveyard, or at least into the weird little storage cubby in the end-table next to my reading chair. So yeah, I haven't answered your e-mail. Or done much else of note on the internet either, unfortunately. Lack of computer has presented some hurdles in my big "Write at Least Two Novels and a Half Dozen Short Stories During Holiday Break" plan, but it's just within the realm of possibility that my plan was overly ambitious to start with.

There is some good news. First of all, I aced all my exams, which in turn led to grades of all As for my first semester back at college. So there's one goal met, anyway. Also heard that the Czech magazine Ikarie will be reprinting "The Voluntary State," which I believe brings the number of translations for that piece to six, which is very cool. But where are the French? I want to be translated into French, as it's the only language I have half a shot at actually reading the story in! Other than English, I mean.

Some more writing stuff: a few members of my local writing group decided, as a group exercise, to write stories for the recent Apex Digest "sci fi ghost story" contest and my entry bronzed, as we supporters of the Olympic movement euphemise. I'd also just placed a reprint with Apex, and now it turns out I'm going to be their on-line version's featured writer for...I'm thinking February. Being the featured writer means I've also agreed to contribute an as yet unwritten story to an as yet untitled, as yet unthemed themed anthology that Apex will be putting out in December. So, the Christopher Rowe Apex Digest summary sheet looks like this:

• A new story by me, "Queen of the Moon," will appear for free on the Apex website...sometime in the near future. I just realized I'm not sure when that will be, exactly. I'll link to it when it goes up, though, for sure.
• An interview with me and a reprint of "Men of Renown" (originally published in the chapbook Bittersweet Creek) will appear on that same website in February.
• A reprint of "Whether to Go Through," which originally appeared in Electric Velocipede #7 in Fall 2004 and was Honorably Mentioned in the Honorable Mentions section of the most recent Year's Best Science Fiction anthology, will be in Apex Digest #6 (Apex is quarterly and #4 is shipping today, I believe, so I guess that means June or so).
• That as yet unwritten story will appear in an original anthology from the editors of Apex in December 2006.

That's about it for now. Hopefully I'll have a computer to call my own again sometime in the next couple of months, but until then things are likely to remain sporadic around here, sorry.

A miscellany

• Today on my bus ride home from school (Route 32 represent!), I learned that LexTran is joining transit services around the country in marking the fiftieth anniversary of Rosa Parks refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. There was a photograph of Mrs. Parks and a sign explaining what was going on taped to the foremost seat.
• At the post office, there were, as usual, books for Gwenda. I'm in the habit of discarding the packing material in the recycling bins they have there to save a little weight on the walk home, and that's how I know that we now have a copy of the recent Jeffrey Ford short novel, The Cosmology of the Wider World. Yay!
• I went out to a local bookstore yesterday and jotted down the table of contents of the book I mentioned yesterday. There are some very good stories in Beyond Singularity; here, have a look (listed in the order they're printed in the book):
• Old Hundredth by Brian W. Aldiss
• Border Guards by Greg Egan
• All Tomorrow's Parties by Paul J. McAuley
• Naturals by Gregory Benford
• Osmund Considers by Timons Esias
• Coelacanths by Robert Reed
• The Dog Said Bow-Wow by Michael Swanwick
• Barry Westphall Crashes the Singularity by James Patrick Kelly
• Flowers From Alice by Cory Doctorow & Charles Stross
• Tracker by Mary Rosenblum
• Steps Along the Way by Eric Brown
• The Millennium Party by Walter Jon Williams

My own contribution is at the end of the book, which you can order by clicking the cover over there to the left.

Always start with garlic

Team T-day outdid ourselves this year with four Thai dishes that ranged from spicy and garlicky to garlicky and spicy. Barb and Richard arrived a couple of days early from the City of Oaks and Alan and Kristin stayed over a couple of extra days before returning to Moscow on the Mississippi, so it was a week's worth of high level entertainment here at Fortress of Words HQ.

Gwenda mentioned this morning that the day after Thanksgiving Weekend should be half-day so that people can transition back more easily. I support that proposal and recommend that you contact your elected representatives with your opinions on the matter as well.

Meantime, here's a fun way to ease into the week. Strange Horizons showcases a one-two Gwenda Bond double punch this week with a review and the featured article. Check 'em out.

More teaching

Today's news is that I'll be continuing my teaching gig at Lexington's Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning through their Winter Session, which begins in January. It will be a slightly different class this time around, and while they still haven't made a decision about the cost, I imagine it will be in the $100 range for the twelve week course.

Science Fiction & Fantasy Workshop: This peer review workshop will consider short stories and novel extracts in science fiction, fantasy and allied genres. For intermediate to advanced writers. Led by Hugo and Nebula finalist Christopher Rowe. Meets Thursday nights, 6:00 pm to 7:30 pm. Start date: January 12.

Hopefully I'll come up with a spicier description for the fliers.