Launch and #Giveaway! Mosaics Vol. 1: A Collection of Independent Women #feminism #womenwriters

Today's the day! Mosaics is out in the world. I would be excited about this anthology no
matter what, but I'm delighted to say that I will have a story in volume 2. Let's give volume 1 a hearty launch!

All the excitement, all the anticipation, and now it's finally here. And don't forget to enter the mega giveaway, including a Kindle Fire, a $50 gift card, and a paperback library, at the end of this post!

A project focused on bringing women's voices to readers and celebrating the stories they have to tell. Including stories by Keyan Bowes, Carol Cao, Chelo Diaz-Ludden, Sarina Dorie, Naomi Elster, Jordanne Fuller, Ari Harradine, ​Karen Heuler, L.S. Johnson, Tonya Liburd, Kelsey Maki, Julia Ray, Patty Somlo, P.K. Tyler, Deborah Walker, Keira Michelle Telford, ​Kim Wells, Elizabeth Wolf, and Sylvia Spruck Wrigley

Mosaics: A Collection of Independent Women Vol 1

Buy Your Copy Now! 

Mosaics: A Collection of Independent Women will inspire and shock you with its multi-faceted look at the history and culture surrounding femininity. If gender is a construct, this anthology is the house it built. Look through its many rooms, some bright and airy, some terrifying- with monsters lurking in the shadows.

Mosaics Volume One features twenty self-identified female authors writing about Intersectionality, including women of color, and members of the disability, trans, and GLB/ GSD* (Gender and Sexual Diversities) communities. We have curated amazing short fiction, flash fiction, poetry, essays, and art. It’s personal, political, and a great read.

This collection includes Hugo Award Nominees, Tiptree Shortlists, Pushcart Prize Winners, USA Today Bestsellers, indie superstars and traditionally published talents alike. The anthology combines leading and new voices all proclaiming their identity as Women, and their ability to Roar.

Buy Your Copy Now! 

Click here for the Rafflecopter giveaway!

Launch Day for YOUNG ADVENTURERS #YAlit Anthology

You know what makes a great holiday gift for a teen?

A book!

(I bet you already knew that.)

Here's a nice new one to consider:

Intrigue Publishing presents YOUNG ADVENTURERS: Heroes, Explorers & Swashbucklers, a collection of exciting YA stories in a variety of genres.

I'm delighted to say that my science fiction story, "Toori's Constellation," is included in these pages.

Find it on Amazon, BN, and other major online retailers. Enjoy!

Cover reveal: BEYOND: SPACE OPERA #scifi anthology edited by @mfowler76

Pleased as intergalactic punch to be included in this gorgeous collection, which comes out on August 15. Here's the plug from editor Milo James Fowler:

Mark your calendars, bold starfarers. Beyond: Space Opera will be available wherever eBooks are sold on August 15th, and it'll be chock-full of rollicking space adventures the likes of which you've never seen!

Included in this collection:

"The Ungreat Escape" by Siobhan Gallagher 

"All Comms Down" by Anne E. Johnson 

"Remembrance Day" by Simon Kewin 

"The Lion's Den" by Devin Miller

"Captain Clone" by Deborah Walker

"Captain Bartholomew Quasar and the Kolarii Kidnappers on Zeta Colony 6" by yours truly

When will this awesome anthology be available? August 15th. Where will it be available? Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, Kobo, Smashwords. How much will it cost? My goal is to make it FREE, but Amazon usually takes a few days to price-match. The list price will be $2.99, and I plan to have it perma-free by August 15th.

 

PLEASE SHARE THIS WITH EVERYONE YOU KNOW!

Save the Funny #Scifi. Pre-Order Alternate Hilarities: Weirder Science #AltHilKS4

If you know my work, you know I love funny.

And now I've gotten myself involved (embroiled?) in another funny project. Strange Musings Press is publishing Alternate Hilarities: Weirder Science, the fourth volume in a series that pays tribute to a previous sci-fi periodical of the same name, from back in the day when magazines existed only as bound paper objects.

I'm very pleased that my space mining caper, "The Motherlode," will be included in this new anthology. And now's your chance to pre-order through Kickstarter:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/809941908/alternate-hilarities-weirder-sceince

Here's some info from the series editor, Giovanni Valentino:

Science can be both savior and damnation. The inventions of the great minds of the world can make our lives easier, bring about our destruction and facilitate the delivery of terabits worth of funny cat videos. Technically, those last two might be the same thing.

Here is a collection of humorous tales of science like the perils of time travel, how body switching can both help and hurt the gender gap, the woes of the classic Mad Scientist in a modern world and the importance of pizza throughout the universe.

So grab your guide and towel. Get ready to brave the dangerous terrain of theory and hypothesis.

Madness and Science go hand and hand.

Skipping, Singing and Laughing Maniacally!

Muahahaha!

Seriously...don't you simply need to read this?

Heckuva week: A new #kidlit blogging gig and 3 story sales!

It's been a crazy few days. And I mean crazy in a good way (for once). Here's the scoop:

1. I've been named the first-ever Children's Lit columnist for a wonderful website called Eat Sleep Write.

2. Dreaming Robot Press will publish my middle-grade sci-fi story "Leafheart" in the 2016 Young Explorer's Adventure Guide. I'm especially pleased about this, both because I was also in the 2015 edition, and because the folks at Dreaming Robot are outspoken advocates of diversity in kidlit.

3. Urban Fantasy Magazine will publish my weird, funny tale called "The Duchess of Fitzrovia," which I wrote a couple of years ago during a trip to London.

4. Strange Musings Press will publish my story "Motherlode" in the anthology Alternate Hilarities 2: Weirder Science. If you're a fan of my Webrid books, you'll enjoy the style of this space mining caper.

Items 2 and 3 are made especially sweet because both were revisions requested by the respective editors. This maintains a stat of which I am exceptionally proud: I have a 100% acceptance rate on stories I've been asked to revise. That's a darn good skill to have in this biz.

Cupid, Kidlit, and Comics. Oh, My!

It's been a while since I posted an update on my own publications. (Letting other authors tell us about their work is just too much fun!) But I do have a few pieces of news:

1. ROMANTIC RUCKUS. My LGBT mad-scientist sci-fi romance, "The Love Gun," is included in this collection of crazy tales about every imaginable kind of love gone wrong, published by Strange Musings Press. Buy Romantic Ruckus in both e-book and print editions.

2. 2014 YOUNG EXPLORER'S ADVENTURE GUIDE. I'm particularly pleased to have my middle-grade sci-fi story, "Standing Up," included in this anthology. It's about a differently-abled girl who isn't sure she wants to be normal. Or even human! The team behind Dreaming Robot Press has a wonderful view of the potential for science fiction to open young minds. You can hear about their philosophy and also back this worthy project on their Kickstarter page.


3. FrostFire Worlds, from Alban Lake Publishing, has purchased the third story in my series about the dragon Koob and her human daughter, Akilah. (Want to know how a dragon can have a human daughter? Read the series!) "Song from Silence" will run in the August, 2014 FrostFire Worlds.


4. Prose comics! I can't tell you much about this yet, but it's too awesome not to mention. I've been commissioned to write some novelettes and short stories for adults over the next couple of years. They will be heavily illustrated by an astonishingly talented artist, who is also coming up with the basic concepts and characters from which I will build the stories. Stay tuned!

Alex Shvartsman on Humor, Subjectivity, and Slush

This week's guest talks about fiction-writing from a different perspective: as an editor. Alex Shvartsman, whose own collection of published science fiction stories would stretch from here to Cleveland if laid end to end, has edited an anthology called Unidentified Funny Objects. He shares with us an insider's view about the difficult task of picking stories from the pile of submissions.

*   *   *

Humor is subjective.

This was the mantra of my associate editors and I as we read submissions for Unidentified Funny Objects last year. My stated goal was to collect a wide assortment of humorous stories and to feature a variety of styles and sub-genres that would offer something for every palate. But how to make certain that my personal tastes don’t skew the book toward the kind of humor *I* like at the expense of what other readers might enjoy? In order to build a healthy, balanced collection, I developed a slush system that’s quite different from most publications.

Each story we received was read by the first reader (in most cases it was me, only about 20% of the stories were seen by one of the other editors first). The first reader’s job was to look for stories that *might* be a good fit even if they weren’t that reader’s personal favorite. This culled well over 80% of the submissions and left us with a handful of very strong contenders.

Each story that made it past the first reader was stripped of any personal information and sent out to 5+ associate editors for evaluation. Anonymity was meant to help the editors judge the story solely on its merit – they didn’t know whether they were reading a submission by a Nebula winner or by a previously unpublished author.

Each editor offered a Yes, No, or Maybe vote with some comments. Based on those votes and feedback I either released the story back to the author, held it until the end of the reading period, or (in a few rare cases) bought it immediately because I knew I had to have it for the book.

I ended up buying 29 stories out of over 900 submissions. Do you know how many of those 29 received a unanimous vote from the associate readers? None. Not a single one. Because--say it with me--humor is subjective.

I don’t truly expect any one reader to enjoy every single story collected in this book. However, I strongly believe that almost anyone will find multiple stories they can love. Both readers and critics have been very kind to the volume so far, sharing this sentiment.

But don’t take their word for it – you can read a number of additional bonus stories posted for free at www.ufopub.com -- and if you are a Twitter user, may I suggest that you begin with this one: http://www.ufopub.com/twitter

Unidentified Funny Objects is available as trade paperback and eBook at Amazon, B&N, and Kobo, as well as directly from UFO Publishing:

http://www.ufopub.com/buy-our-books/

Of Publishings and Editings

Greetings, all. Just a round-up for the week. Several things to report:

1. The zombie anthology So Long, and Thanks for All the Brains, containing my story "Stir-Fried Cerebrum," has been released. You can purchase it here.

2. My fractured fairy tale, "An Exceptional Clothier," has been accepted for publication in Enchanted Times, to appear sometime in 2012.

3. I've received first edits for my middle-grade paranormal mystery novel, Ebenezer's Locker. Nice to have that process up and running.

4. I'm three-quarters finished with the first draft of the sequel to my middle-grade medieval mystery novel Trouble at the Scriptorium. This new novel, featuring several of the same characters, is called The London Hurdy-Gurdy.


5. My story "Cheering Up a Friend" is published on Knowonder! You can view it here.

6. My story "Sisters' Sight" is published in the pagan anthology Etched Offerings, from Misanthrope Press. You can puchase it as print or e-book here.


I hope you're all having a productive December. I'll be taking next week off from blogging, so I wish you all a wonderful holiday!

"Big Rock in the Big Slime River" published in Knowonder! e-zine

Here's a link to my latest published children's sci fi story. Please leave a comment on the Knowonder! site if you get a chance to read it.

Big Rock in the Big Slime River


In other news, the release date for the charity anthology Resilience has been pushed back to January, but the cover is done.

Also checked on the Etched Offerings anthology from Misanthrope Press. They're behind, too, but do seem to be moving forward.

Buy links for Greek Myths Revisited

Greek Myths Revisited, an anthology published by Wicked East Press, is now available. It contains my story "Table Manners," a sci fi re-telling of the bloody, crazy myth of Tantalus, which is all about how jealous the gods get when men are too proud and ungrateful.

You can buy it from Pill Hill Press Shoppe

or from Amazon

(This is definitely not for children!)