Now there’s a snappy blog post title. I am the King of SEO!
Okay. Maybe not. Under the circumstances, it’s as close an approximation to a snappy title as I can muster. Deal.
First, though: enjoy the swell cartoon above, courtesy of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Thanks to haikubica for turning me onto SMBC when I mentioned at his and Kathy’s house that I was becoming obsessed with webcomics.
I have some I follow religiously; also have some book recommendations. But later: this post is really all about me. Me, me, me.
Fa-sol-la-ti-da!
So I am, yes, punch-drunk; thank you so much for noticing. Thursday night I finished the draft of my new Deathlands novel. I sent it off Friday, meeting my deadline thereby, with mention that it still wanted a finishing pass, which I am process of accomplishing now. (Well, not now now. You know what I mean.)
Hooray!
Also, there is Big News on the Wild Cards horizon. First, the very first anthology, imaginatively titled Wild Cards (hey, it was imaginative then!) is about to be reprinted. But that’s not all: this new edition contains three all new stories, by grizzled Wild Cards vets Michael Cassutt and Carrie Vaughn (okay, it just amuses me to refer to Carrie as a “grizzled vet”), as well as newcomer David D. Levine. David won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story for “Tk’tk’tk.” Which oddly was on my to-read queue – trying to get into reading short stories – when David’s entrance into the Wild Cards crew was announced.
But wait – there’s more. News which actually pertains directly to me. (Wait – I thought this was all supposed to be about me! I ripped myself off! Dang!)
There is also a brand-new Wild Cards anthology in the works. It’s entitled Fort Freak. It features stories by hoary WC old-timers like Stephen Leigh, Melinda M. Snodgrass, Kevin Andrew Murphy, John Jos. Miller – and me! (Since Melinda never reads this blog I totally don’t have to worry about her kicking my ass for referring to her as a “hoary old-timer.”)
There’re also some who are newly-infected with Xenovirus Takis-A contributing to this volume: Cherie Priest, David Anthony Durham, Paul Cornell, and Mary Anne Mohanraj.
For more information on the new additions to the WCverse, click on this link and this one to That American Tolkien Dude’s Not A Blog.
In one week I sold a new story and finished a novel. I’d call that pretty cool.
So, contrary to what you probably believe, I have not been frittering away all my time on webcomics and Twitter. Oh, no, my friends. Not even close.
(By the way, you might want to check out Cherie Priest and David D. Levine on Twitter, too; I follow ‘em. If any of the other Carders I mentioned above are on there, they’re successfully hiding from me. So far.)
Along with averaging north of 6000 words a day on my novel – so my mad time-management skills are more mad than actually skillful – I wrote a lengthy detailed story proposal for my as-yet-untitled contribution to Fort Freak. Plus, I wrote four new character bios: two for characters that have actually been around since the early days of Wild Cards and are coming back into play (they had bios; it’s just that they’ve been lost, plus there’s twenty years worth of history to catch up on), and two for the brand-new characters I’m using in my yarn. Both of whom, I’ll add, are jokers without an ace power to their names. Although that’s not to say one or more may not enjoy certain advantages.
All of which may have something to do with why I’m so damned fried today despite having slept until one minute before one in the afternoon. Y’think?
