My life is feast or famine. Ask anyone, they'll tell you. Good things in clumps, bad things in clumps. Today, this year hopefully, considering the last, seems to be the start of a good clump. I learned today I sold two short stories (commences with Peanuts Happy Dance to celebrate selling two stories in one day). The first, "Paper Man", will appear in a forthcoming issue of Shimmer . The story is about a young blind woman named Millie who sees the world through the things she makes of paper. The second is "Black Eyed Moon," about best friends who go in search of fallen moon rocks after an asteroid strikes the moon and the debris falls to earth. This will appear in the summer '06 issue of Fantasy Magazine . I want to take a moment and thank E. Sedia for her confidence in me and this story, and all her help. I really appreciate it. Back to happy dance...
Recently I bought a copy of a pretty well reviewed and promoted speculative fiction novel. About two chapters in, the main character looks in a mirror and describes themself. I literally closed the book and stopped reading. The novel had other issues, but this put me right out of the story. This technique - being generous here - occurs a lot in first person narratives, about as often as a story beginning with the main character waking up from a dream. The mirror device is best avoided, but not necessarily because it's so overused - it's best avoided because simply put, it's so easy. A character, especially a protagonist, should never be described; they should be imagined.
Commence the Peanuts Happy Dance: I've sold my first novel, The Book of Elizabeth , to Sean Wallace at Prime Books . It will appear in hardcover in early 2009. You can read more details here . I see there's also a little blurb at SFScope . The novel takes place in a world where none of our history - none of it - occured. No Roman Empire, no Reformation, no Berlin Wall. No Berlin. A new history has taken its place, except for one little problem: people from our history inexplicably find themselves swept into this alien one, people from all eras of history, poets and gladiators. Poets and queens. One of them is Queen Elizabeth I. As a girl, she hand copied passages of the Bible for her step-mother; now, Elizabeth writes out a copy of the entire book from memory, to keep her own sanity in this strange new world, a world where Moses never went to the mountain, and Jesus never to the cross. Elizabeth learns to cope, to embrace the virgin world; yet she can't avoid her ...
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