New collection: The Atlas of Anywhere!

Jun. 24th, 2025 01:36 pm
swan_tower: (*writing)
[personal profile] swan_tower
cover art for THE ATLAS OF ANYWHERE, showing a cool, misty river valley with waterfalls pouring down its slopes

Well over a decade ago, I first had the idea of reprinting my short fiction in little collections themed around subgenres. When I sat down to sort through my existing stories, I found they fell fairly neatly into six buckets, each at or approaching roughly the cumulative size of a novella: secondary-world fantasy, historical fantasy, contemporary fantasy, stories based on folktales and myths, stories based on folksongs, and stories set in the Nine Lands.

Five of those six collections have been published so far: Maps to Nowhere, Ars Historica, Down a Street That Wasn't There, A Breviary of Fire, and The Nine Lands. The sixth is coming out in September, but it's not surprising, given the balance of what I write, that secondary-world fantasy has lapped the rest of the pack -- more than once, actually, since The Nine Lands is also of that type (just all in a single world), and also my Driftwood stories hived off to become their own book.

So yes: as the title and the cover design suggest, The Atlas of Anywhere is a follow-on to Maps to Nowhere! Being short fiction collections, they need not be read in publication order; although a few settings repeat (both of them have a Lady Trent story inside, for example), none of the stories are direct sequels that require you to have read what came before. At the moment it's only out in ebook; that is for the completely shameless reason that replacing the cover for the print edition later on would cost me money, and I have my fingers crossed that in about two months it will say "Hugo Award-winning poem" rather than just "Hugo Award-nominated." ("A War of Words" is reprinted in here: my first instance of putting poetry into one of these collections!) But you can get it from the publisher, Book View Cafe; from Apple Books; from Barnes & Noble; from Google Play; from Kobo; from Indigo; or, if you must, from Amazon in the UK or in the US (that last is an affiliate link, but I value sending readers to other retailers more than I do the tiny commission I get).

Now, to write more stories, so I can put out another collection later!

I'm back.

Jun. 19th, 2025 01:13 pm
sartorias: (Default)
[personal profile] sartorias
Please forgive mush-mindedness; I'm three days out of the hospital and it's taking time for the simplest thoughts to come back on line.

Scintillation was wonderful, as always. And so was Fourth Street Fantasy Convention--what little I saw of it. No fault whatsoever to the con. All fault is due to the trash human in front of me in a very crowded assisted seating area, who coughed and hacked for the entire eight hour ride, refusing to put on a mask. "It's not a rule! And masks are all political anyway!"

By the next night I had a high temp, joints with ice picks stabbing them, skin like the worst sunburn ever. So I missed a lot, but managed to get to some programming including my panels. And I almost made it, tho by then I hadn't eaten for four days, and drunk only sips of water, which tasted terrible, like rusty pipes.

I was moderating my last panel, and I thought it was going okay when we opened to Qs from the audience and I realized that everyone was curiously black-and-white, then the next thing I knew, I was lying on the ground, surrounded by voices.

Here's where perceptions get kind of surreal. I slowly became aware that someone was stroking my arm. I've always known that Marissa L has an infinite capacity for genuine empathy, but I understood it was real. That empathy convey through the slow, reassuring touch, even though when she murmured "non-responsive."

Oh dear. I was not doing my bit! Worse, I'd totally spoiled the panel, yet here I was having somehow floated gently to the ground. I had to get up! Return to my room. Rest! Apologize to everyone for my dumbass move! Yet it felt so much better to lie there, and let trusted voices do whatever they were doing. So reassuring.

I knew those voices. I trusted them. Marissa, who seemed genuinely pleased that I was responsive after all, but she kept up her reassuring touch. (I do know the difference. I've had to drop my head between my knees a few times at distressing moments, and this one specific time, a person I'd known since college kept pawing me, the angle changing in the direction of their voice, as if they were busy looking around the room)

Then E Bear asked for my phone code, and I knew that voice, it's Bear, of course she must need my phone. I trust Bear. Then came the questions as I began to rouse a bit. Scott L, long-serving firefighter and fully trained EMP started what my spouse (who was a volunteer fireman for 20 years, and worked alongside EMTs) called the litany. Scott's strong, clear voice foghorned something much like, "Sherwood, I hate to do this to you, but what asshole is currently infesting the White House?"

And I laughed. I don't know if the laughter got past my lips, but it's strange how humor--laughter--can rouse one. I muttered, "Yesterday was NO KINGS DAY."

Then it seemed they wanted to send me off to emergency services; there was talk, then a fourth trusted voice, belonging to Beth F, insisted that it was not a good idea to be sending me off without anyone knowing where. She informed the company that she was a Registered Nurse and this was SOP, or the like. Beth's on the team, I thought.

Shortly thereafter they got my wreck of a bod onto the conveyance and I was in for an ambulance ride. It was beautiful teamwork--cons these days have security teams, and here I was proof that their protocols were functioning swiftly and smoothly, which would permit them to pivot straight back to con stuff.

While I was in for a wad of tests. So many tests. I soon had two IVS going, one in each elbow.

Presently the doc came in and said that I had an acute case of influenza, compounded by severe dehydration. Beth F heroically came to spring me, and saw me to my room, promising me a backup call the following morning.

Another perceptual eddy: I thought, wrongly, I'd wafted quietly and softly to the floor. Maybe even discreetly. Ha Ha. When I stripped out of my influenza clothes I discovered gigantic bruises in weird places--the entire top of one foot is discolored, another baseball-sized bruise on one calf, and so one. I began to suspect that I had catapulted myself whammo-flat with all the grace of a stevedore hauling a sack of spuds.

The following days I slept and slept, forcing a few bites of salad and oatmeal. I have zero stamina, must work on that, but at least I am home, and I guess all that unwanted experience can sink into the subconscious quagmire.

It was a dark and stormy cookie

Jun. 16th, 2025 09:58 pm
lizvogel: fancy N for Narrativity (N for Narrativity)
[personal profile] lizvogel
Cookies have been made. And believe me, coming up with cookies that fit the theme of "a dark and stormy night" that aren't all gray-to-black was an interesting challenge.

For my future reference:

3 batches of dough: 2 hours
making all of it* into cookies: ~5 hours
  plus about half an hour of setup
decorating: 5.5+3.0+4.0+6.0+8.0+5.5 = 32 hours
photographing & packing: ~1.5 hours

So about 41 hours total.

I only ended up decorating about half the cookies; fortunately, largely by chance, I started with the most thematic ones, so when I ran out of me, I could stop without much loss of effect. The rest will wait until I get back, and get done for the household. (These cookies last just short of forever.) Since membership's low this year, I'm hoping:

44 lightning bolts (3 sizes)
~60 clouds (3 sizes)
12 moons
39 candles
15 creepy houses
23 ravens

will prove to be plenty.

*I always make more dough than I need, because when I first started doing these, I would invariably burn several trays, and depending on the shapes, also break quite a few. But I've been getting better; this time I didn't burn a single one, and broke very very few. So there's an awful damn lot of cookies around here.

Tech Tribulations of a Con Chair

Jun. 16th, 2025 12:19 pm
lizvogel: A jar of almonds that warns that it contains almonds. (Stupid Planet)
[personal profile] lizvogel
Aaaaaand the program book is at the printers.

I was really good this year, and did the cover design and most of the text & layout well in advance. Which meant I was only up until 2 am instead of all night when something inevitably went wrong.

The program book took some extra work to get some extremely long panel descriptions to fit, but the real problem was the pocket program. I do that one document in a nearly-prehistoric piece of software, because it has really powerful and easy-to-use typesetting controls -- far better than any modern word processor. But because it is nearly-prehistoric, it won't run on any of my newer computers. The elderly laptop runs it just fine, but when I go to make the PDF, if the document is complicated (which this is), the elderly laptop runs out of memory and the bottom of the PDF comes out blank. So I have to make the PDF on my ancient desktop machine, which does PDFs just fine, and works great 95% of the time -- the other 5% being late at night when I'm up against a deadline, which is when it crashes and crashes more and then won't even boot. Luckily this time it only needed an hour of unplugged rest time before it was willing to play again (it's taken much longer in the past). So then I was able to transfer the file again (by 3.5" floppy rather than USB, because loading a USB is one of the things that will sometimes set it off when it's having a bad day; luckily I have an external floppy drive for the elderly laptop), and readjust the bottom margin because the software automatically resets it for its default printer, and oh yes the font I had to convert from OTF to TTF (because the ancient desktop doesn't speak OTF) seemed to work fine, and then make a perfectly lovely PDF. Which I then took to the newest laptop and submitted to the library's remote print queue, because my color printer is RIP, and then went and picked up this morning. And then came home and did it all again, because I wanted to tweak some of the colors.

And now I get to wait for the proof copy, which is when I find out if I get to do it all again again, because printers are not standardized and the professional print-shop printer has historically produced darker, more muted colors than the home/small office printers I've had access to. Which I'm actually counting on this year, I want the darker/muted effect, but I'm having to guess based on previous years' files and printouts. Fun, whee.

On the other hand, the badges were easy to lay out and the merge worked first time without hiccups. That's unusual if not unprecedented, enough so that I keep checking the file to make sure I didn't put the wrong year or something.

I'd be annoyed with the person who told me they aren't coming just after I finished all the layout, except that going back and taking their name off panels was when I discovered a couple of spectacular cock-ups I'd made. So that actually saved me a probably much-later and more-stressful re-edit.

And now I get to drink a great deal of coffee and work on some of the other things I need to get ready before I leave in a week. Eek!

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