The Middle of the Dark

Which Buffy the Vampire Slayer Character Are You? Created by BuddyTV I found this interesting because like everyone else I have novels that sleep away, not quite in trunks, but drawers or computer files waiting for the light of day. I especially found Amanda Craig's entry funny, because I too have a big damn space opera on deck, and it too has its roots in The Tempest. Though it doesn't seem as literal as hers does. My favorite cocktail: apocalypse, feminism, and literary vs. genre.

Heartbreakingly sad.

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 ...

Happy belated new year. I began it with much sickness. I'm still pretty under the weather but I am up and walking around and also at work with such a thin voice a man actually called me 'some Arab' today. I informed him kindly I spoke English and could give him lessons if necessary, as he did not seem to recognize it. Teacher and author Martin Roper has an interview at the Dublin Quarterly. My novel mutates. I think it wants to be a Miyazaki film. Or an Elseworlds graphic novel. (Gaslight Batman or something.) It takes place in a world slightly - slightly maybe isn't strong enough - different version of our world. The history is different, but contaminated. The polluters are people from our history, and the most toxic bit of 'waste' is a document utterly integral to our history, and utterly alien to theirs. My research has led me pretty far from the path I thought I was going down, so there's been some stops and starts, but overall I'm pretty ...