Last Friday, my mom took a tumble down the stairs. I’d mentioned this in a couple of private forums, but with Mom’s okay am actually blogging about it. She’s going to be fine and it’s not the sort of fall that require surgery, but she’s got a cast on that’s keeping her pretty immobile.

I’m flying to Chattanooga on Saturday to help my folks out for a couple of weeks. I am, I think, going to try to teach my dad to cook.

I know.

But he’s clever and it’s just like mixing emulsion for silk screening, but not poisonous. Usually. We haven’t decided how long I’m going to stay yet, but I wanted to keep you up to date on which time zone I’m in.

I just had an email from David Hartwell, requesting permission to reprint “The Consciousness Problem” in The Years Best Science Fiction #15, to be published in the spring as a mass market paperback original by Harper Eos.

Naturally, I said yes.

And then jumped up and down in the hotel room for a bit wishing I had someone to squee with.

Remember how excited I was when Shades of Milk and Honey became available for pre-order on Amazon.com? It no longer is.

Why can’t you pre-order my book on Amazon.com?

Because on Friday, amazon.com stopped carrying all the Macmillan books. My publisher, Tor is an imprint of Macmillan. You can still buy some through third parties on Amazon.com, but no new books, which means you won’t be able to buy Shades of Milk and Honey there.

How did this happen?

According to Macmillan CEO John Sargent:

This past Thursday I met with Amazon in Seattle. I gave them our proposal for new terms of sale for e books under the agency model which will become effective in early March. In addition, I told them they could stay with their old terms of sale, but that this would involve extensive and deep windowing of titles. By the time I arrived back in New York late yesterday afternoon they informed me that they were taking all our books off the Kindle site, and off Amazon. The books will continue to be available on Amazon.com through third parties.

Basically, Macmillan wanted to be able to control their pricing of e-books and offer them in a dynamic price range from $14.99 to $5.99. Amazon wants to cap e-book prices at $9.99.

Now, Amazon is perfectly within their rights as a company to decide what they will and won’t stock.

I also have the right to decide where I send my website traffic, so I’m swapping out all the links to books to point at Powell’s Books, which is after all, my local independent book store. Meanwhile, I also changed my author bio on amazon.com to explain why you can’t buy my book there.

For fuller analysis of the situation, I recommend the following links:

Tobias’s Buckell’s “Why My Books Are No Longer Available on Amazon.com”

Charlie Stross’ “Amazon, Macmillan: an outsider’s guide to the fight”

Edited to add: You can pre-order Shades of Milk and Honey from Borders!

I have a 5600 word fantasy story that I’d love to have some readers for.  If you have time to give a read and offer feedback, please drop me a line and ask for the password.

The teaser:

A Piece of Valiant Dust

Harloyd walked through Loveman’s department store, swinging his brass thurible from its chain. A fine dust of fern, stream-smoothed stone, willow bark and all the other little things that made up a chilling spell fell from the tiny holes in the cone and drifted to form patterns of cool in the air.

His dark blue uniform, with its double row of shiny brass buttons and neat brimmed cap, marked him as Loveman’s heating and cooling magicker. As he went, the patrons smiled gratefully at him for keeping the venerable building comfortable. Sure, lots of folks bought ready-made cooling powders for their homes, but the temperature always fluctuated as the dust settled out. Only Loveman’s had heating and cooling men working to keep an even temperature, so folks tended to come in to shop more than at other stores.

It had gotten so Harloyd couldn’t walk to catch the streetcar home from downtown Chattanooga without someone tipping their hat to him and saying, “Evening, Mr. Varnell.” Some days he felt like everybody in town knew him. His wife joked that he should go into politics.

His rounds took him onto the ladies’ floor, where gleaming cases of walnut and glass held the latest in jewelry and cosmetics. His wife, Addie, worked in the evening wear section helping the most notable society ladies find the right dress for whatever event they needed. She was with one of her regulars, young Miss Priest. Harloyd just tipped his head at the ladies and kept walking with his thurible. While it made him proud to see Addie working here, there was always that worry that her powder might wear off while she wasn’t paying attention. Loveman’s didn’t let the colored in. Not that Addie had more than a touch of the paintbrush, but there was no telling what they’d do to her. Him either, since mixed marriages were a illegal in Tennessee. For all that, the day she’d come into his life, looking for a spell to help her pass had been the best thing that had ever happened to him.

Just a reminder, or a head’s up for those who don’t know, the official Campbell site is displaying all the eligible authors that they know about.  The key here is the phrase “that they know about.”

If your first pro-sale has appeared in print in 2008 or 2009, make sure you contact them to get included on the list of Campbell eligible authors.

My dad called me today to tell me that he had spent some time with my grandmother and had taken Scenting the Dark with him. We talked about the three stories he read today and it was interesting because he read drafts of the first and third but I guess never got to see the finals.

One of the things I found interesting was that on “Some Other Day” he said that the first time he read it he focused on the mosquitos and that this time he focused on the love story. The difference? I’m fairly certain I didn’t add a word. But I rearranged them. In the draft Dad read, I started with what is now the second scene in the story. It was really hard to decide to move it because it has one of the best opening lines.

“The summer the mosquitoes died began as the best one in Josie Landon’s childhood.”

I hated losing that opening line, but as my Dad has noticed, it puts all the emphasis on the mosquitoes.  The published opening is “Josie Langdon leaned back from her microscope and rolled her neck to ease the kinks.”

While this opening line isn’t as attention grabbing, it sets the scene, tells you that she’s been at it a while and that she’s some sort of scientist. Two lines later I introduce the boy and this puts the emphasis on the love story by making it the first source of conflict I introduce.  All by flopping the first and second scenes.

This is an example of fixing the ending of a story by changing the beginning and I’d totally forgotten that I’d done that until Dad called today. Pretty cool, huh?

As you know, the Hugo nomination period is open.  I thought I’d post a list of my stories published in 2009.  Just a reminder, I recused myself from SFWA Nebula eligibility this year, so none of these are Nebula eligible.

I’ve bolded my favorites. If the story title has a link, you can read the story online.

Short Story

The Conciousness Problem — Asimov’s, August 2009

At the Edge of Dying — Clockwork Phoenix 2: More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness

Jaiden’s Weaver – Diamonds in the Sky (February, 2009)

Ginger Stuyvesant and the Case of the Haunted Nursery — Talebones #38

Prayer at Dark River — Innsmouth Free Press

Novelette

First Flight — Tor.com

Body Language — Intergalactic Medicine Show #15

Rich Horton has just given my short story collection a really lovely and lengthy review. Here’s a teaser.

Scenting the Dark and Other Stories is notable, compared to other first books I’ve seen, for its brevity — only 8 short stories, some 80 pages. I rather think this is a wise choice — start with something of a taster, a sample. It’s not that she has used up all the good stuff either — for instance, neither of the stories I've reprinted is included here. The book does represent her style and concerns very well. It’s also representative temporally — a couple of her earliest stories are included, and a couple from 2009, including one new to this book. On the evidence of this book (and, I will add, her other work that I’ve seen) Kowal is a writer interested to a great extent in the characters behind her stories.

You can read the rest at The SF Site Featured Review: Scenting the Dark and Other Stories.  Needless to say, I am very, very pleased.

Once upon a time, someone starting a new publishing house would either have a personal fortune or would seek large private investors. Crowdsourced fundraising allows the masses to chip in for projects they believe in.

Tu Publishing is one that I’m excited about. Tu Publishing is a small, independent multicultural SFF press for children and YA and they are raising money for startup costs right now. I’ve had the opportunity to correspond with Stacy Whitman in my role as SFWA secretary and she’s sharp, knows the industry and is passionate about YA and SF.

The catch is that the fundraiser only has four more days to go and they only have 40% of their total.

Fantasy and science fiction, mystery and historical fiction–these genres draw in readers like no other. Yet it is in these genres that readers of color might feel most like an outsider, given that such a large percentage features white characters (when they feature human characters). It is the goal of Tu Publishing to publish genre books for children and young adults that fill this gap in the market–and more importantly, this gap in serving our readers. By focusing on multicultural settings and characters in fantastic stories, we also open up worlds to all readers.

Now, given my history with fundraisers, I want to let you know that Kickstarter rocks. It’s a very solid platform. I’ve talked to the developers and experimented with donations on the site. It’s beautifully done.

Please consider donating to get Tu Publishing off the ground.

I have been reassured that I am not alone in my reaction.  Today a friend pointed out that Shades of Milk and Honey is on Amazon. There’s no cover image yet, but seeing it on the website makes it seem much more concrete.

August 3rd release date, 272 pages. Hardcover.

I went to the bookshelf and pulled down a Tor hardcover (Lamentation by Ken Scholes) and flipped to page 272 just to get a sense of how thick the book would be.  Persuasion, by Miss Austen, for the curious, is 288 with introductions.

Way back in September, Joe Iriarte, asked a question on one of my process posts for writing Glamour in Glass.

Hey Mary–I know that this is primarily a blog about whatever happens to be going on in your life, and not about teaching writing, but could you possibly tell a little bit about what you mean by “emotional throughline”? I googled the phrase, both as three words and as two, and found lots of sites where people talk knowingly about emotional throughlines, but not a real good definition or a how-to.

“Throughline” is really an acting term that was coined by Constantin Stanislavski. The idea is that actors should know what their objective is in any scene as well as the line of thought which led from one objective to the next.

In acting you’ll sometimes hear people say that acting is reacting, meaning that no one ever does anything without a reason, this includes emotions. Even chemically induced paranoia comes with a perception of reasons for the paranoia.

If it were possible to chart a character’s emotions through the course of a story the emotional throughline would be the line that connected all the points. Characters go flat when they jump from one emotion to another without any intervening thoughts or reactions.

I’m not saying that you can’t go from happy to angry in a single scene, but something has to happen to cause that shift. That progression is the emotion throughline which propels a character through the story.

Well, not actually on me, but on a tuckerization by me in a short story or novel as part of a fundraiser for the Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund this year.

For those of you who don’t know, TAFF sends – in alternating years – a delegate(s) from North America to Europe or from Europe to N. America, to attend a science fiction convention. The point of the auction is to raise funds to make this possible. The folks running for TAFF this year are the team of (1) Anne KG Murphy and her fiance Brian Gray and (2), Frank Wu.

Frank says:

I have posted to eBay several Tuckerization auctions (in which you get to bid on the naming rights of a minor character in a novel or story by a famous author!). The auctions for Tuckerizations from Cory Doctorow, Charlie Stross, Nalo Hopkinson, David Brin, Elizabeth Bear, Julie Czerneda and Mary Robinette Kowal are up!

We also have auctions for first editions of Orwell’s “1984″ and John Hersey’s “Hiroshima”.

In addition, Chris Garcia’s fanzine The Drink Tank, issue 231, has been posted with articles by Anne KG Murphy + Brian Gray, and by Frank about our TAFF campaigns. Anne and Brian’s article serves as a good introduction about them to everyone!

And, of course, don’t forget to actually vote for TAFF!

So go on, bid on me.

It’s like I’m the Scrooge of Thanksgiving. Leftovers? Bah! Humbug.

In America, nothing matches the archetype of “Feast” like the Thanksgiving dinner, which conjures images of tables groaning with food. But all that bounty comes with a price: leftovers. Sure, with that first turkey sandwich you're living the good life. But how long before the dread sets in? More cranberry sauce? Another helping of sweet potatoes? Soon you start to fantasize about all new meals. And what better way to do that than with fantasy, which offers bounties both fantastic and filling. Herewith, my top ten leftover alternatives.

via AMC – Blogs – SciFi Scanner – Ten Fantasy Meals I Would Rather Eat Than Thanksgiving Leftovers.

Orycon starts tomorrow, which I’m very much looking forward to. Here is my schedule and I hope to see some of you there.

Woot! Scenting the Dark and Other Stories has come back from the printer which means that Subterranean will be shipping them shortly. This is excellent news, in part because it means that they’ll be here in time for Christmas.

What? You don’t think I’m spoiling the surprise that our folks are getting copies do you?  I’d be killed if I didn’t give them one.

The other cool thing is… well, collection includes an introduction by John Scalzi, which I knew, but today is the first time I read it.  Somehow I didn’t realize that it was on the order page for Scenting the Dark, you have to scroll down to see it.  Scalzi makes me weepy and blush all at the same time.  He says some very, very kind things.