Audiobooks!

Jaydium is now available as an unabridged audiobook, narrated by Molly Elston.

Amazon.com

Audible.com




The audiobook version of Northlight will be released November 4, 2013.

Azkhantian Tales is in the works.

The Writing Life: Re-entry and Changing Gears

For the last seven weeks, I’ve been away from home, helping to take care of my best friend and her family during the end of her life. I had no idea how hard it would be, but we did well by her and her passing was peaceful, attended by great tenderness and forgiveness. I stayed on for another ten days to organize the memorial and transition for her family. 

During this entire time, one of my personal anchors was writing. I loaded up my netbook with current projects and took the folders with checklists for various Book View Café projects I was working on. In this way, I created a portable office, albeit one that lacked all the resources I had at home. For example, although I had access to the internet through my carrier’s website, I didn’t have my address book files. I learned to “work around” these limitations, focusing instead on what I could do, delegating and asking for help with things I couldn’t, and postponing other tasks. As a result, I was productive with some projects but “on hold” in others.

Now I’m back in my own office, resources at hand. I’m facing a dual challenge: coming “up to speed” and getting back into balance. What do I mean by balance? I mean reapportioning (or rather, un-deapportioning) my time and focus. Rarely have I been so aware of the many activities involved in my life as a writer. These include, to name a few, original fiction writing (drafting, revision, revision-to-editorial-request), other aspects of book production (proofreading); editing anthologies; beta-reading and editing books, often for other Book View Café members; writing blog posts like this one; keeping up with professional communications (reading and responding to email from fellow writers, fans, and editors, not to mention news of the publishing world).

GUEST BLOG: Janet Freeman on Gratitude and Stewardship

I was awed and inspired by how fully my friend lived the almost-five years between her diagnosis with Stage 4 ovarian cancer and her death last week. I am reminded that a terminal diagnosis does not mean we stop living -- it is an invitation to make every moment count, and thereby enrich not only the life of the patient but those around her. Here is author and lung cancer patient Janet Freeman-Daily on her own experience of hope, illness, and the zest of being alive.

I’m grateful to be here.  Actually, I’m grateful to be anywhere.  I’m grateful to be alive.  The fact that I’m alive is a modern-day medical miracle.

In May of 2011, after a few months of a persistent cough, I was diagnosed with pneumonia caused by advanced lung cancer.  No, I never smoked anything except a salmon.  Five months after diagnosis, despite chemo and radiation, the cancer spread outside my chest and I was given at most two years to live.  A year later, after more treatment and another recurrence, I learned my cancer had a rare mutation.  Last October, I found a clinical trial that could treat that mutation with an experimental pill, and I flew to Denver to get it.  In January, I achieved the dream of all metastatic cancer patients: No Evidence of Disease.  My cancer is no longer detectable.

I am overwhelmingly grateful for everything and everyone that has brought me to this state of grace: medical science that discovered new ways to treat my condition, insurance that paid for most of my care, family and friends who supported me, a knowledgeable online lung cancer community, and all the prayers and good wishes lifting me up throughout my cancer journey.  Thank you.  I am truly blessed.

I am not cured.

BOOK RELEASE! Mad Science Cafe (anthology)

My latest anthology, from Book View Cafe!

From the age of steam and the heirs of Dr. Frankenstein to the asteroid belt to the halls of Miskatonic University, the writers at Book View Café have concocted a beakerful of quaint, dangerous, sexy, clueless, genius, insane scientists, their assistants (sometimes equally if not even more deranged, not to mention bizarre), friends, test subjects, and adversaries.

Table of Contents:
The Jacobean Time Machine, by Chris Dolley
Comparison of Efficacy Rates, by Marie Brennan
A Princess of Wittgenstein, by Jennifer Stevenson
Mandelbrot Moldrot, by Lois Gresh
Dog Star, by Jeffrey A. Carver
Secundus, by Brenda W. Clough
Willie, by Madeleine E. Robins
One Night in O’Shaughnessy’s Bar, by David D. Levine
Revision, by Nancy Jane Moore
Night Without Darkness, by Shannon Page & Mark J. Ferrari
The Stink of Reality, by Irene Radford
“Value For O,” by Jennifer Stevenson
The Peculiar Case of Sir Willoughby Smythe, by Judith Tarr
The Gods That Men Don’t See, by Amy Sterling Casil

You can download a sample from the BVC  bookstore, too. This anthology includes both original and reprint stories and is available as mobi and epub formats, so you can download the version that's right for your ereader. Best of all, because BVC is an author's publishing cooperative, 95% of the price goes to the authors themselves.

Book View Cafe Editor Interview

Over at Book View Cafe blog, Katharine Eliska Kimbriel interview me "with my editor hat on."


When did you become interested in editing other writers’ work as opposed to concentrating on writing?

I first started thinking about editing during the years when I’d visit Marion Zimmer Bradley on a regular basis. I helped read slush for her magazine (MZB’s Fantasy Magazine) and we’d talk. I got a “behind the scenes” look at what she looked for and why, and how she handled rejection letters. She taught me that the work of an editor isn’t mysterious, in part because her own tastes were so definite. A story could be perfectly good but not suit the anthology or magazine she was reading for, or might do both but not “catch fire” for her. I learned about “no fault” rejections (and I’ve received them myself, for example if the editor had just bought a story on the same theme by a Big Name Author) and that sometimes if an editor thought the story had merit but didn’t fulfill its promise, she could comment on its shortcomings or issue an invitation to re-submit after revision. I thought, “I can do this!” I’d had so many experiences from the Author side of the desk, I approached editing with a set of wild hopes and convictions.