Originally, this story appeared in Mike Brotherton’s Diamonds in the Sky anthology and you can read the entire story there. Or you can wait and listen to it.

Here’s the teaser.

I was never one of those girls who fell in love with horses. For one thing, on our part of New Oregon they were largely impractical animals. Most of the countryside consisted of forests attached to sheer hills and you wanted to ride something with a little more clinging ability. So from the time I was, well, from the time I can remember I wanted a teddy bear spider more than I wanted to breathe.

The problem is that teddy bear spiders were not cheap, especially not for a pioneer family trying to make a go of it.

Mom and Dad had moved us out of Landington in the first wave of expansion, to take advantage of the homesteading act. Our new place was way out on the eastern side of the Olson mountains where Dad had found this natural level patch about halfway up a forested ridge, so we got sunshine all year round, except for the weeks in spring and autumn when the shadow of our planet’s rings passed over us. Our simple extruded concrete house had nothing going for it except a view of the valley, which faced due south to where the rings were like a giant arch in the sky. Even as a twelve-year-old, angry at being taken away from our livewalls in town to this dead structure, I fell in love with the wild beauty of the trees clinging to the sheer faces of the valley walls.

1. “Kiss Me Twice” is my first novella sale
2. It began life as my first NaNoWriMo effort
3. It’s my first story with a recurring character

Way back in 2004, I was living in Iceland and working on Lazytown.  Rob hadn’t come over to join me yet, so when I got out of filming, there was a lot of free time. I’d had this idea in a short story form but had quickly realized that it wanted to be longer so had held it for NaNo.  When I finished the month, I had a 60,000 word novel which needed 20,000 words added to it to be viable.

I tucked it in a drawer and went on with other things, intending to get some distance from it before returning to tackle rewrites.

The next year, I was back in the US and attended Orson Scott Card’s literary BootCamp.  He announced the IGMS project, which sounded awesome, so I decided to write a story for that.  In the story “Body Language,” I reused Metta, the AI character from the novel.

After Shades of Milk and Honey came out, I realized that I was likely going to focus on fantasy novels for awhile.  But I had 60,000 words of an SF novel sitting on my hard drive. I figured that I could either add 20k to it or subtract 20k to get it down to novella length.

Cutting commenced.  I dropped backstory and subplots, rolled characters together, tossed red herrings and employed many wonderful beta readers.  The resulting novella is 27,600 and, I think, much better than the original.

Let me show you.

Here’s the opening for “Kiss Me Twice,” which will be in the April issue of Asimov’s

A group of trendy-somethings milled outside the police line, clearly torn between curiosity and the need for a caffeine fix at the coffee shop next door. Scott Huang glanced to the corner of his VR glasses where the department AI hovered. “I guess murder trumps coffee, huh?”

Metta, currently wearing the face of Mae West, lowered her voice to the star’s husky range. “I take my coffee black, like my heart.”

“You don’t have a heart.”

“Then I take my coffee black, like my processor.”

And here is the original written for NaNoWriMo first draft.

Scott Huang ran out of the Tube with the rest of the rush hour crowd and sprinted toward the door of the precinct. As he crossed the threshold, Metta’s cameras swept in his direction. By the time he took his second step, she had taken four hundred and fifty images of him.

He was early, but he wanted some time at his desk before his shift started. The officers on the night shift were coming back to the station to log out, but the other members of the homicide department would not turn up for work till eight. Most importantly, Cameron M. Oakes the Fourth had not shown up yet. Huang liked his F&B colleague, but the flesh-and-blood detective was not as much fun as his AI counterpart.

Now, I could go into the technical reasons that the new version is better than the NaNo version but what it really comes down to are two things.

1. Editing.
2. I’m a better writer now than I was five years ago.

Finishing NaNoWriMo is an awesome and exciting thing. There’s this novel! That you wrote! But there are good reasons to give yourself time to come down from the high of finishing it and see what it is that you have.

Could I have fleshed this out into a full novel? Yes.  Will I someday?  Maybe. Did I waste any of the words that I cut.  No.

They laid a solid foundation for the novella that I wound up with.  More importantly, those words were good practice at a time when that’s what I needed.

So you see why I’m incredibly pleased by this sale?

I also need to thank the folks who beta-read the rewrite for me: Diana Rowland, Priscilla Spencer, The Puppet Kitchen, Bob Howe, Curtis C. Chen, Charleen Heen, Julia Thorne, Eric James Stone, Beth Wodzinski, and  of course, Sheila Williams, who gave me excellent notes when I submitted the story to her.

Way back in 2005, I attended OSC’s Literary BootCamp with Rick Novy. He and I had known each other online, but this was the first time we met in person. We’ve stayed in touch over the years and when he asked me if I had anything that might work for 2020 Visions, his anthology of near-future SF, I was delighted.

I was even happier when he accepted “Birthright,” especially after I saw the rest of the TOC.

1. Mary Robinette Kowal – Birthright
2. Sheila Finch – The Persistence of Butterflies
3. Randy Henderson – A Shelter for Living Things
4. Jason S. Ridler – Showing Light
5. Ernest Hogan – Radiation is Groovy, Kill the Pigs
6. David Lee Summers – The Revelation of Thought
7. Jeff Spock – Teh Afterl1fe (This is not a typo – Rick)
8. Emily Devenport – If the Sun’s at Five O’Clock, It Must be Yellow Daisies
9. Cat Rambo – Therapy Buddha
10. Jack Mangan – Dead Rookies
11. David Boop – Organ Cloning While You Wait
12. Spencer Ellsworth – The Black Plague of Our Generation
13. Gareth L. Powell – The Bigger The Star, The Faster It Burns
14. Alethea Kontis – Pocket Full of Posey
15. Alex Wilson – Nervewrecking
16. David Gerrold – Time Capsule 2120: Actual Comments from Lunar Tourists

Here’s an excerpt of the story.

Birthright

Restless within the confines of the waiting room, Helen looked out the window of the Birthright Clinic. Her fingers twisted her wedding ring as if she were spinning straw into gold.

Her husband read an outdated magazine with a relaxed air that magnified her tension. Light caressed Daniel’s freckled cheekbones. He looked up, as if he felt the weight of her gaze. “Are you all right?”

“Of course.” She smiled at him.

He closed the magazine. “We don’t have to do this today.”

You can read more about the anthology on Rick’s site.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I will send a gift to the first 3 people who leave a comment here on my blog.

I don’t know what that gift will be yet, but you will receive it within 365 days (likely sooner than later). This may end up being almost anything. It could be a gift box, a hand made craft, a thrift store/garage sale find, a holiday oriented fascination, a poem, a book, a photo, or something else I find. Anything.

The only thing you have to do in return is “pay it forward” by making a similar agreement on your Journal.

Today, the towel blew off the box.

There’s been this stray cat hanging around our house for about a month. It’s a poor scrawny thing, with patchy fur. It was in the box. I wanted it to be sleeping, but what cat would sleep inches away from a busy road?

Someone must have hit it with their car and tried to find the owner. I mean, they took the time to stop and put it in the box and cover it with the towel. I wonder if they picked our house because that’s where the cat was headed or because one of our neighbors told them that we have a black cat.

I’ve got this strange mix of sadness and relief. The sadness is easy to understand. But the relief? She never looked happy and she’s not struggling to survive anymore. That’s not it though, not really. I’m relieved that she wasn’t my cat. I’m relieved that I know she was feral and that no one is sitting at home wondering where she is. And then that makes the sadness comes back around.

The county animal control is coming to pick up the body.

And with an hour left in the yard sale, we still have the cyclops head.

Edited to Add: Evan Nichols stopped by and took this photo of us. Note the grey and Novembery weather.

After that, we biked down to the farmers market. Oh, my goodness. I’d missed that so much. The produce is just starting to come in and there were some really gorgeous mushrooms. Biking home, we stopped at four or five yardsales (one was a whole street, so there were really more, but it was only one stop) but didn’t find anything until the last one. We got an ice chest for the trip across country, a pair of dress shoes for Rob, and a book from 1856 for me, called The Wedding Guest. It’s an anthology of marriage advice, some of which is presented in dramatic format. Really good stuff.

In the evening, we went down to Laurelhurst to see a 1953 film noir called The Big Heat. It was a very satisfying film.

The connection between 23 April and books was first made in 1923 by booksellers in Catalonia as a way to honour the author Miguel de Cervantes who died on that day. This became a part of the celebrations of the Saint George’s Day (also 23 April) in the region, where it has been traditional since the mediaeval era for men to give roses to their lovers and since 1925 for the woman to give a book in exchange. Half the yearly sales of books in Catalonia are at this time with over 400,000 sold and exchanged for over 4 million roses.

In 1995, UNESCO decided that the World Book and Copyright day would be celebrated on this date because of the Catalonian festival and because the date is also the anniversary of the birth and death of William Shakespeare, the death of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and Josep Pla, the birth of Maurice Druon, Vladimir Nabokov, Manuel Mejía Vallejo and Halldór Laxness

The Ensemble Studio Theatre

First Light Mainstage Production
Power. Sex. Status.
And that’s just the monkeys
David Zellnik’s SERENDIB is a witty comedy about a group of scientists trying to save the world’s most important monkey study. The scientists invite a team of filmmakers to create a documentary of their work and of the monkeys. But the guests prove to be more unwieldy than their hosts can handle. Combining puppet work and traditional theatre, SERENDIB ponders the line between empathy and anthropomorphism.

March 28 – April 22 , 2007
Tickets will be on sale starting February 1

Emily DeCola is designing the monkeys.

Happy New Year everyone!

Mom is disturbed just knowing that I wrote a horror story.

In his notes to me, Jason Sizemore said, “Whoever wrote this has no soul…” Which I think is a compliment, given the circumstances.

Here’s the letter.

Dear Mary Robinette Kowal,

We’re pleased to accept your story “Portrait of Ari” for publication in Strange Horizons, at a rate of 5 cents/word.

Our current schedule has this running early in 2006, but that could change.

At some point between now and then, we’ll do a detailed editing pass and send you the results for your approval. But that probably won’t happen for another few weeks.

In the meantime, below please find a copy of our informational questionnaire. Once we receive your response to it, we will send you a check and contract. Please allow two months after sending the questionnaire for processing; if you haven’t received a check and contract within two months, please let us know. And please don’t hesitate to contact our editor-in-chief, Susan Marie Groppi, at editor@strangehorizons.com, if you have any questions about your contract.

If you have any other questions, please feel free to ask. And thank you for sending us this story!

Sincerely,

–jed

For those of you following along, Susan Marie Groppi is my editor at All-Star Stories. I don’t know how much that had an impact on my story’s acceptance, but I’m counting my blessings in whatever form they take.

Now I just have to hope that tomorrow’s audition will go as well.

In other news, Mom and Dad have gone to London to visit my brother.

Rob stubbed his toe, while wearing slippers, on our front steps and is now shy a toenail. I’ll spare you the details.

We carried our yard sale things down to the Celsi’s. Speaking of which, I have to get up early tomorrow.

Oh. And to update on the pantry floor; nothing has happened since my last update. I still have two and a half boards left.