The Cooling Sun sold to Terminal Earth anthology. Second anthology sale, and this time a 6k story, not a flash. The idea came to me when I learned that for the last couple of years, the sun's output has been a bit off, so the general warming trend has been momentarily stopped. So, in the story the sun's output drops so that Venus will get about as much light as we do now.
Another experience that was grist. Last time to Ukraine, We tried to save money by going Aerosvit, rather than Austrian Air. They listed modern Boeing aircraft, so we tried. Big mistake. Out there on the tarmac in Kiev was a surprise. A Yakolev with one engine making a grinding racket, not like a modern jet at all. We took the bus there, and got on. The overhead bins didn't have doors, anything could have flown around, hit people. The noise? In the story and in reality, like dinosaur sized bees.
On the way back Odessa was fogged in so we couldn't leave and they wouldn't transfer us to another airline, so we have two more days in Odessa before we could go. It was their only flight. It went one way one day, and the other day back. Last time on that airline. Great material for fiction, though.
So, I'm told it will come out toward the end of the year. In print!
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
A bit of recognition
Just a lil bit. Fictiondaily.org found Mandala, I know not how. The teaser they used to entice people to the site was:
"For all I knew, she was a bug-eyed wallaby with a taste for gallium arsenide: the stuff my brains are made of."
It comes early, but really, is that the best sentence in it? Authors are supposed to be bad judges of their work, so I'm not going to question that judgment. I can wonder, though...
In the nine thousand words of the story, they chose those 23? Just asking. Not: "She blinked, and I mourned for them in the moment they were hidden." Not, "It was never the eunuchs who led in battle, monks who won the West, or placid women who strode across the rockseas of Cleopatra's World." not, "Sky of ink, falling tiny round laces of snow, and in the center of it all, us together, the still point on the spinning world, in the twirling galaxy."
Who am I to say?
"For all I knew, she was a bug-eyed wallaby with a taste for gallium arsenide: the stuff my brains are made of."
It comes early, but really, is that the best sentence in it? Authors are supposed to be bad judges of their work, so I'm not going to question that judgment. I can wonder, though...
In the nine thousand words of the story, they chose those 23? Just asking. Not: "She blinked, and I mourned for them in the moment they were hidden." Not, "It was never the eunuchs who led in battle, monks who won the West, or placid women who strode across the rockseas of Cleopatra's World." not, "Sky of ink, falling tiny round laces of snow, and in the center of it all, us together, the still point on the spinning world, in the twirling galaxy."
Who am I to say?
Monday, June 21, 2010
Master Mind has sold
Master Mind will have a place in Nova SciFi, probably in the Fall issue I'm told. David Gerrold is still stuck, as far as I know, in his War Against the Chtorr series because he tried for first person psychotic. It has been 17 years. Lotsa promises. All hat no cattle. I attempted a hallucinating protagonist, shelved it for a year, and rewrote in cold third, strong narrator. Only way not to daze the reader. You can only ask so much.
It came out of a rather anti-idyllic start to my college sophomore year, in the Mesozoic, when the best editing tool available was corasable paper, plumbers did more than fix pipes, and women traded secrets about better back alleys. One sophomore drank himself to death and was discovered by the smell. Another lost her battle for normalcy, succumbing to schizophrenia.
I imagined her life after dropping out and wondered if her disease might, under the right circumstances, be beneficial. What if her past were wiped out in an EMP, she walked out of the institution where she had been committed, and tried to help with the war effort? And the attackers were mind control aliens?
It came out of a rather anti-idyllic start to my college sophomore year, in the Mesozoic, when the best editing tool available was corasable paper, plumbers did more than fix pipes, and women traded secrets about better back alleys. One sophomore drank himself to death and was discovered by the smell. Another lost her battle for normalcy, succumbing to schizophrenia.
I imagined her life after dropping out and wondered if her disease might, under the right circumstances, be beneficial. What if her past were wiped out in an EMP, she walked out of the institution where she had been committed, and tried to help with the war effort? And the attackers were mind control aliens?
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