During my lunch break from recording today, I checked email and had an acceptance from Daily Science Fiction for my story “American Changeling.”  I’ll tell you, a short story sale makes lunch seem a whole lot tastier.

There are two things about this sale that make me giggle. 1) I’m in the middle of recording a Seanan McGuire novel about a changeling. Totally different style of changeling, but it’s still funny. 2) This is not a science fiction story.

I’ll let you know when the story is out, but here’s a teaser.

American Changeling

Half-consciously, Kim put a hand up to cover her new nose ring. It pissed her parents off no end that she could tolerate touching cold iron and they couldn’t.

Iron still made her break out sometimes, but didn’t burn her. It had taken forever to find someone to make an iron nose ring, but the effort would be totally worth it.

“Kimberly Anne Smith,” Mom’s voice caught her in the foyer as surely as if she’d been called by her true name. “I’ve been worried sick. Do you know what time it is?”

“11:49.” Kim dropped her hand and turned to face Mom, her Doc Martens making a satisfactory clomping on the hardwood floor. “I’m here. Home before midnight. No one with me.” Sometimes she thought about bringing friends home to show them what her parents really looked like after their glamour dropped.

I am very pleased to report that my first foray into the Lovecraftian mythos has sold to Innsmouth Free Press. Innsmouth Free Press is a fictional newspaper publishing faux news pieces in a Lovecraftian/Cthulhu Mythos universe, as well as original short fiction stories.

Since “Prayer at Dark River” is flash fiction, I’m only going to offer you a small teaser.

Dear Lord in Heaven, O Merciful Father.

Always I have turned to You in prayer when frightened and my first instinct tonight was to kneel upon these old flagstones and beseech you for guidance. My other choice would be to commune with Professor Webb as we wait to see if his sorcery has had effect. Should I pray the American sorcerer has succeeded, so that Guðrun is safe, or should I pray that he fails?

The story will come out the first week of October in the 2nd issue.

I’m very pleased to announce the sale of my short story “Body Language” to Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show.  This is an important sale for me for three reasons.

1. This is the first story I wrote after attending OSC’s Literary Boot Camp and was one of the hardest things I’ve written because I was so painfully conscious of process.  Ever word that hit the page marked a deliberate effort to use the new tools I’d been given.
2. This is the first story I wrote to a specific market. I wanted to sell it to IGMS.  You’ll note that I wrote it four years ago.  That’s because it was rejected the first time around, but I was offered a chance to rewrite it and resubmit.  It took years for me to do that.
3. This is the only story I have written where the main character is a puppeteer.

So when Edmund Schubert, the editor, called me to tell me that he wanted to buy it, refraining from shrieking with delight was very difficult.

Here’s a teaser of “Body Language.”

Saskia leaned into the darkness above the stage, only vaguely aware of the wood rail against her hips as she retied the left headstring on her marionette. On the stage below, the Snow Queen’s head eased into balance. The marionette telegraphed its stance back up the strings to the control in Saskia’s hands. She ran the Snow Queen across the set to check the repair, barely conscious of her own body on the bridge above the stage. It was almost like being immersed in a VR suit.

One of the techies called up. “Hey, Saskia? There’s a detective here for you.”

Life on the road doesn’t completely suck. I sold a short story today!  Maurice Broaddus is editing an anthology of horror titled Dark Faith for Apex that will come out next May and he just let me know that he’d like to include my story “Ring Road” in it.

Actually… there’s a certain irony to selling that story today, given our travel experiences and that we checked into the “jacuzzi suite” tonight.

Here’s a teaser:

Echoes and steam swirled around Nanna, merging with warm water to ease the tightness in her limbs. God, she had missed spas while she’d been away. The entire state of Wyoming had utterly failed to understand what a spa should be. In fact, the entire country might have failed in that.

Beside her, Eric groaned. “I may never move again.”

“Told you.” Lauger, of all the spas in Reykjavik, was her favorite and the first place she went after a trip abroad. The heat crept into her, peeling off layers of protection that she hadn’t even noticed. She’d been away too long this time. Not that she’d admit it to her grandmother who’d been outraged when she decided to stay at the university over the summer. And following that up by bringing an American boyfriend home had been…interesting.

I call this my time-traveling Grandma story, which isn’t a spoiler, since the story opens with her standing in a time machine. I based the main character on my own grandmother.

When Patrick Nielsen Hayden bought it for Tor.com, he asked me to change the character’s name. Why? Because her name was Elois, just like my grandma.  The problem, though, is that at the end of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, he visits the Eloi.  Elois looked like a deliberate play on that, but didn’t go anywhere.  Once he pointed that out, I was only too happy to change the name.

Here’s a teaser of “First Flight.”

Eleanor Louise Jackson stood inside the plain steel box of the time machine. It was about the size of an outhouse, but without a bench or windows. She clutched her cane with one hand and her handbag with the other. It felt like the scan was taking far too long, but she was fairly certain that was her nerves talking.

Her corset made her ribs creak with every breath. She’d expected to hate wearing the thing but there was a certain comfort from having something to support her back and give her a shape more like a woman than a sack of potatoes.

A gust of air puffed around her and the steel box was gone. She stood in a patch of tall grass under an October morning sky. The caravan of scientists, technicians and reporters had vanished from the field where they’d set up camp. Louise inhaled with wonder that the time machine had worked. Assuming that this was 1905, of course – the year of her birth and the bottom limit to her time traveling range. Even with all the preparation for this trip, it baffled her sense of the order of things to be standing there.

Edited to add August 25th: Whoops! If you are looking for Grandmas’s recipes, I linked to the wrong page.

I’m thrilled because my short story “The Shocking Affair of the Dutch Steamship Friesland” will appear in John Joseph Adams’s anthology, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.  I’ve been wanting to make a sale to him for a while now because I’ve really liked the anthologies he’s put together.

It’s a reprint anthology and this story was my second sale ever, back in 2004. Funny, but I just realized that my first two sales weren’t spec fiction.  Anyway, here’s a snippet

I was born Rosa Carlotta Silvana Grisanti, but in the mid-Eighties, I legally changed my name to Eve. As you have guessed in your letter, after the shocking affair of the Dutch steamship Friesland, my dear friends Dr. Watson and Mr. Sherlock Holmes suggested that my safest course of action would be to distance myself from my family.

The title, by the way, comes from a story that Watson mentions but never tells.

• 10:43 You can tell you’ve been gone for a week when breakfast = birthday cake. #
• 12:01 Heading out for lunch with @scalzi now. Truly, the fun, it never ends. #
• 13:22 Novel + sold = Best Birthday present EVER. Short form: to @2muchexposition of Tor by @arcaedia Long form: tinyurl.com/bnkenp #
• 17:22 Thank you all for the good wishes about my novel sale! I’m now off to the theater because you know, the day job still calls. Er…night job? #
• 21:13 Having a cheese flight with @scalzi @paul_cornell and his lovely wife Caroline. Rob is selecting wines for us. #

I’m stunned.

“Evil Robot Monkey” will be appearing in Gardner Dozois’s Year’s Best Science Fiction. You know, there were anthologies that I regularly bought before I started writing seriously. This is one of them, because the selections were always thought-provoking and that’s what I loved about SF. And to have one of my stories in there… I’m stunned.

And not using nearly enough exclamation points for the occasion.

I’m delighted to announce that my short story “At the Edge of Dying” will appear in the anthology Clockwork Phoenix 2, edited by Mike Allen. The first anthology was full of amazing stories and I’m thrilled to be in the second incarnation.

Here’s a teaser:

Kahe peeked over the edge of the earthen trench as his tribe’s retreating warriors broke from the bamboo grove onto the lava field. The tribesmen showed every sign of panicked flight in front of the advancing Ouvallese. Spears and shields dropped to the ground as they tucked in their arms and ran.

And the Ouvallese, arrogant with their exotic horses and metal armor, believed what they saw and chased the warriors toward him. The timing on this would be close. Kahe gathered the spell in his mind and double-checked the garrote around his neck. His wife stood behind him, the ends resting lightly in her hands. “Do it.”

I’m delighted that “Evil Robot Monkey” will be appearing in Mr. Horton’s anthology, Science Fiction: The Best of the Year 2009. This is the second of my stories that he’s taken and I’m thrilled that he continues to enjoy what I do.

Here’s a snippet of Evil Robot Monkey, as a teaser.

Sliding his hands over the clay, Sly relished the moisture oozing around his fingers. The clay matted down the hair on the back of his hands making them look almost human. He turned the potter’s wheel with his prehensile feet as he shaped the vase. Pinching the clay between his fingers he lifted the wall of the vase, spinning it higher.

I’ll let you know when the book is available for pre-order.

I think this post should probably consist of nothing but exclamation points.

Growing up, I subscribed to Asimov’s and had a shelf full of back issues until I went to college.  It was one of my favorite tickets to other worlds but I never imagined, back then, of actually appearing in its pages.  But my story, “The Consciousness Problem” just Sold! To! Asimov’s!

!!!!! !

Be happy there’s no audio component to this post because the squeel would destroy your eardrums.  This is my first sale to one of the “Big Three” and I’m so pleased that it’s to Asimov’s.  I wrote the story as part of the workshop run by Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch, with special guest Sheila Williams.  Clearly, I got invaluable feedback from that.

Could this day get any better?  Oh yes, I think it can.  I just have to wait for the polls to close.

I’m delighted that “Ginger Stuyvesant and the Case of the Haunted Nursery” is going to appear in Talebones #38, tentatively scheduled for Spring 2009.  This will be my second time in Talebones, which is one of my favorite magazines. Seriously, if you’re only going to subscribe to one magazine (besides Shimmer) I highly recommend Talebones.

Here’s a teaser:

A liveried manservant waited by the front stairs of Fairbairn Hall as if he expected to take the reins of a horse. Ginger stopped her roadster next to him, shaking her head. These Brits had such queer, old-fashioned ideas.

She hopped out of her car, tossing her cloche on the front seat. With any luck, the hat had controlled the worst of the damage to her hair on the drive up from London.

The front door of the manor house flung open. In a flurry of crepe chiffon, Lucy Rhodes hurried down the stairs. “Ginger, darling! Thank heavens you’ve come.” Even in the daylight, circles of fear rippled through her aura.

I just sold “Jaiden’s Weaver” to Diamonds in the Sky, An Astronomical Anthology edited by Mike Brotherton. I’m extremely pleased by this because I came up with the idea for the setting while at the Launchpad Writer’s Workshop. Jerry Oltion, one of our fabulous instructors, helped me work out what it would be like to live on a planet that had rings.

Many, many thanks to the very kind folks who read the draft of this and offered feedback. You guys rock.

I love, love, love Subterranean Press and am so delighted to have finally landed a sale there. This actually happened a couple of weeks ago, right before Launchpad, but I was sitting on the news until I finished revisions. Which I just did and had accepted today. Hurrah!

Here’s the opening bit as a teaser. I’ll let you know when the story is up.

Mundari Vineyard 2045, Nashik (India), Shiraz
Black cherry, plum, and currant flavors mingle with aromas of sweet tobacco and sage in this dependable offering from India.

The sun peeking through the grapevines felt hotter on Bharat Mundari’s neck than twenty-four degrees. Another perfect day. Bharat scowled and worked his way down the row of vines, thinning the grapes so the remaining Shiraz crop would become fuller and riper.

Not that there was a point in having healthy vines when he couldn’t pay his weather bill. Without rain, the grapevines would weaken under the stress, and stressed grapes made poor wine. No one bought flawed wine.

Just to keep things in balance though, I should tell you that the night I got home from the Campbells, I had a rejection note waiting in my inbox. Doesn’t matter. My life is very, very good right now.

Yesterday, I sold “Scenting the Dark” to Apex Digest and felt like, given everything, that I should hold onto the news until after April Fool’s was over.

Many thanks to those of you who read a draft of this. Your comments helped me enormously.

Edited to add: The story will be in the next issue of Apex Digest, lucky issue 13 The Table of Contents is:

“Scenting the Dark” (4000 words) – Mary Robinette Kowal
“Blankenjel” (6100 words) – Lavie Tidhar
“In the Seams” (7200 words) – Andrew Porter
“Nature of Blood” (7500 words) – George Mann
“I Know an Old Lady” (500 words) – Nathan Rosen
“The Limb Knitter” (6300 words) – Steven Francis Murphy
“These Days” (5600 words) – Katie Howenstine
“Collecting James” (5500 words) – Geoffrey Girard