The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath...

you might enjoy Rachel's new novella--the longest piece she's written to date, unless I'm mistaken--The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen's Window. Because, you know, it's awesome.

The Native Star by M.K. Hobson

Y’all know that M.K. Hobson is awesome, right? Because you’ve read “The Hotel Astarte” or “Hell Notes”, and you’ve heard her narrate stories and host episodes for Podcastle. Right? Well. Her first novel, The Native Star, comes out today. It’s 1876, and business is rotten for Emily Edwards, town witch of the tiny Sierra Nevada settlement of Lost Pine. With everyone buying patent magicks by mail-order, she’s faced with two equally desperate options. Starve—or use a love spell to bewitch the town’s richest lumberman into...

and close up these my weary weeping eyes

Every now and then, I run across the comment that too many books are written “for critics” and not “for readers.” Sometimes the comment explicitly states that books (or stories) ought to be entertaining, and fiction that is difficult to read, highly stylized or poetic or idiosyncratic in its prose, and/or requires some amount of previous reading or cultural knowledge, or has some complex structure, the apprehension of which enhances the piece but requires a fair amount of thought to puzzle out, or …books like this aren’t entertaining. ...

and a fear of fire and water. who am I?

So, several things! Because I am mostly written out for the afternoon and I've got an hour or so before I have to be anywhere specific.

Always used to wonder who I’d brin...

Hey, I just realized that I never mentioned Halfway Human being back in print. Halfway Human is back in print! It’s by Carolyn Ives Gilman–you remember “Arkfall,” which was fabulous and on the Nebula ballot this year and everything? Yeah. She has this novel about a world where babies are born neuter, and when they become adults some become male, some female, and some stay neuter. Only it’s not really that simple. It’s well worth a read. I’d write more in detail, but honestly I’m not good at that sort of thing, and...

I've been kind of quiet for a while--not sure why, I guess there's just been plenty to do. I did write a blog post and then let it sit on my hard drive instead of posting it--it seemed too disjointed for public consumption. There are a few things in that post, though, that I think bear saying publicly.