Ongoing

When not frolicking in the snow, checking out steampunk shops, and visiting fearless editor Ellen Datlow while she was laid up in hospital (a good precis of her adventures can be found here; she's been released back into the wild now, I'm pleased to say), I've been doing the odd spot of writing. I finished, finally, a fairly long story, and Gardner Dozois has bought it for the issue of Subterranean Press's magazine that he's guest-editing. Gardner tells me that the issue should start running in March, and includes stories by Joe Lansdale, Carrie Vaughn, Ken MacLeod, Liz Williams, Ted Kosmatka, Lucius Shepard's story from Songs of the Dying Earth (Gardner's Jack Vance tribute anthology), a Lucifer Jones story by Mike Resnick, and an audio from Elizabeth Bear, as well as the usual features. Hey.

My contribution is called 'Crime and Glory' and it was one of those stories that did not come easily. Some do, and it's lovely when it happens. This was a bloody affair, with much hacking and cursing and backtracking until, finally, I turned the plot inside out and everything clicked into place and began to flow, despite the narrator's blustering evasions and refusal to face up to what she was really about. And hard on the heels of that, I started in on the editing and polishing of Gardens of the Sun. Luckily, my editor had only a few points, and all of them are good. But I'm still compelled to go through it sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, to make sure that every word is the right word, and counts. As far as I'm concerned, writing is all about rewriting.