It’s been a year since I printed out the manuscript for a new novel. It’s been a lot longer than that since I printed out the manuscript for a new science fiction novel, but here it is, all 394 pages of it.

I get to read this over the next few days while doing final revisions. Given the additional work — and the 9,000(!) additional words — that have gone into it over the last two-and-a-half weeks, I’m desperately hoping it still hangs together. For scheduling reasons, I need it to be “done” on Monday.

Wish me luck. Wish me confidence while you’re at it, because confidence is something that tends to wax and wane on projects like this. I loved this story a month ago. I hope to find I still do.

Here’s a fun little piece from io9.com that I got to participate in. Charlie Jane Anders asks an assortment of science fiction authors “What novel, by someone else, do you wish you’d written?”

A new short story collection, Space Magic, has just been released in ebook form by Book View Café, with 15 critically acclaimed science fiction and fantasy stories by author David D. Levine.

From Book View Café:

David’s short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, F&SF, Analog, Realms of Fantasy, and numerous other magazines, websites, and anthologies, including four Year’s Best volumes (two SF, two Fantasy). He’s won a Hugo (Best Short Story, for “Tk’Tk’Tk“) and has received many other awards and nominations.

David likes to think of himself as a writer who takes the classic ideas of Golden Age SF and gives them a fresh, up-to-date presentation… the SF equivalent of a New Beetle or Mini Cooper. He co-edits the fanzine Bento with his wife, Kate Yule, and their website is at BentoPress.com.

Read a sample story, “Wind From A Dying Star,” here.

If you’re a fan of short fiction, Space Magic might be just what you’re looking for.

In case you don’t know her already, please meet author Deborah J. Ross, a fellow denizen of Book View Café. Deborah is guest-posting today, answering questions on her upcoming book, The Children of Kings —LN

What is the working title of your book?
Since I just started noodling around with notes for a new project, in between bouts of terror of the page proofs for one project and editorial revision requests for another that are going to descend on my any moment now, I’d rather talk about the book that’s coming out in March. It’s got a real, official title and you can pre-order it at Amazon. The Children of Kings, AKA The Next Darkover Novel.

Where did the idea come from for the book?
A couple of things. One is that Marion’s original concept for Darkover centered on the clash of cultures, so I wanted to bring the Terran Federation back into the picture, but not in a nice sedately friendly way, in a OMG terrible crisis about to descend upon us way. I also wanted to run away to live with the chieri, and Kierestelli (Regis and Linnea’s daughter, from Hastur Lord) kindly offered to take me.

For this tale set mostly in the Dry Towns, I used as background not only The Shattered Chain but a very early (1961) “proto-Darkover” novel, The Door Through Space. The Door Through Space contained many elements familiar to Darkover readers, from jaco and the Ghost Wind to the names of people and places (Shainsa, Rakhal, Dry-towns). Marion was exploring a world in which Terrans are the visitors, and adventure lurks in the shadows of ancient alien cities. She drew upon and further developed this material in The Shattered Chain (1976).

These books reflected the growth of Marion’s vision, but each of them was also part of the times in which it was written. 1960s science fiction novels were often tightly-plotted, fast-paced, and short by today’s standards. Most, although by no means all, protagonists were male, and female characters were often viewed from that perspective, what today we call “the male gaze.” By the middle of the next decade, publishers were interested in longer, more complex works. Not only that, the women’s movement and the issues it raised influenced genre as well as mainstream fiction, opening the way for strong female characters who defined themselves in their own terms. If Marion had written The Shattered Chain a decade and a half earlier, I doubt it have found the receptive, enthusiastic audience it did. Her timing (as with The Mists of Avalon or The Heritage of Hastur) brilliantly reflected the emerging sensibilities of the times.

Now we live in a different world. This is not to say that the previous struggles have been resolved, but that much has changed in the social consciousness from 1976 to today. In writing The Children of Kings, I considered how Marion’s ideas about the Dry Towns (and any patriarchal desert culture) might have changed over the last three decades. The Shattered Chain, with its examination of the roles of women and the choice (or lack of choices) facing them, focused on only a few aspects of the Dry Towns culture. What if we went deeper, seeing it as complex, with admirable aspects as well as those we find abhorrent? With customs that we cannot truly comprehend but must respect, as well as those that resonate with our own? With men of compassion and women of power?

As the Dry Towns developed in my mind, I turned also to the theme that had characterized the early Darkover novels—the conflict between a space-faring technological race and the marvelously rich and romantic Domains, with their tradition of the Compact and the laran-Gifted Comyn. And now, adding to the mix, the ancient kihar-based Dry Towns.

What genre does your book fall under?
Like much of Darkover, it’s technically sf, reads like fantasy. This one’s a bit more like the earlier novels in that there are space ships and guys from outer space and such. And chieri, native non-humans. Definitely romantic.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
When Terran smugglers arm the Dry Towns warlords with blasters, it’s up to the grandson of Regis Hastur to save Darkover.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
I write Darkover novels under subcontract to the MZB Literary Works Trust, which owns the copyright. Their agent (who coincidentally happens to be my agent for my own work as well).

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
I typically take about a year to a year and half from beginning the outline to handing in the manuscript to my editor. It’s hard to say “first draft, second draft…” as the amount of pre-writing and “oops-in-the-middle” varies so much. I also usually leap-frog rough drafting one project and revising another, interspersed with breaks for other deadlines (page proofs, short fiction for invitational anthologies). This one was no exception.

The Children of Kings is a March 2013 release from DAW. (You can pre-order it now.)

Toward the end of December, I spent some time putting together my very own e-bookstore at MythicIslandPress.com, the website I set up for my publishing company. In this blog post, I’m going to talk in general terms about how I put the store together, on the chance that other indie authors are interested.

The Mythic Island Press store is a highly simplified, single-author version of the store I set up for Book View Café. Both stores run on WordPress software, which isn’t something I really recommend from a technical point of view. WordPress is adaptable of course, but it’s blogging software, not e-commerce. Still, it works well enough at a small scale, and my little store is definitely small scale. So I opted to start with a system I already knew well, with the goal of putting up a smoothly functioning store in a very short time span.

BVC uses a paid WordPress plugin called Cart66 for the ecommerce portion. At Mythic Island Press I’m using Cart66 Lite, which so far looks entirely sufficient for my less-demanding needs.

To create the store, I installed WordPress and then Cart66 Lite, created a “child theme” of one of the standard WordPress themes, and then modified that to match my existing website. I grabbed a small portion of the functions I’d developed for BVC and included those in the child theme, along with some directives from the style sheet — again, so I wouldn’t have to re-invent the wheel I’d already invented last spring.

What took a surprising amount of time was figuring out how I wanted to present the books. I settled on a largish cover pic, the book’s description, and quotes, with a link to “read a sample.” (You actually need a function to change the wording of that link.)

I decided to present all the books on one page, but once you click through — either by clicking the book cover, the book title, or the “sample” link — then it’s one book per page, with links to scroll to the next and previous books. In the right-hand column I used a WordPress text widget and hand-coded an index with links to all the books.

For my store, payment is via Paypal. The Cart66 system does support some other options, but I already had PayPal set up and it doesn’t cost me any extra. Once a book is purchased via Paypal, the buyer is returned to a receipt page with a link for immediate download of the ebook. The link is also delivered in an email sent to the buyer. It was this ability to handle digital downloads that led us to use Cart66 in the first place.

So that was the process. Do stop by and check out the result.

There are great aspects to having a store on your own website–complete independence for one. Also, receiving the money at the time of the sale and not months later, as well as receiving nearly all of the sale price instead of yielding a hefty cut to the host store. In my store, prices are the same no matter what country you, the buyer, reside in, which is not always the case with other vendors.

Of course, you need to know how to get the downloaded file onto your e-reader of choice. That’s probably the trickiest part for those who are used to automatic downloads from Amazon. But it’s a fairly easy process. And whether you buy books from me or not, I do encourage you to consider doing at least some of your buying from small vendors. After all, monopolies aren’t good for anyone.

Evidently it’s customary at this time of year to list one’s award-eligible work — at least that’s what I’m seeing on twitter. So I’ll jump in too. Those of you who read this blog regularly have heard all this before, so I’ll keep it short:

Novel:
Hepen the Watcher: Stories of the Puzzle Lands–Book 2 — published in print and ebook editions by my own imprint Mythic Island Press LLC.

Novelette:
“Nahiku West” — originally published in the October issue of Analog, and selected for Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven, The Year’s Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction 5 an audiobook compilation edited by Allan Kaster, and Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2013 Edition. Also received a “recommended” from Lois Tilton at Locus. Available in the SFWA members forum.

Short Story:
“Nightside on Callisto” — originally published at Lightspeed Magazine in the May 2012 issue and selected for Gardner Dozois’ The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Thirtieth Annual Collection

“A Moment Before It Struck” — originally published at Lightspeed Magazine in the August 2012 issue.

In 2011 I started posting a list of writing goals for the ensuing year, and at the end of the year I started doing an assessment of what goals I’d met, or failed to meet. Here’s my assessment of 2012, published a few days ago.

I’ve come to like this goal-setting routine. It helps me stay focused on doing the work, but diversified in the kind of work I’m doing. It also lets me realize that I really am accomplishing things, because when viewed on a day-by-day basis, progress can seem painfully slow.

In the context of these posts, a goal is defined as something I can control and complete through my own effort. This is opposed to a dream. Dreams depend on the cooperation of others, or of fate. Dreams are out of my control. I might dream of being on a bestseller list, or winning an award, or getting a movie deal, but those aren’t goals, so you won’t see anything like that listed here.

So with that understanding, here are my writing goals for 2012:

1. In March, publish my first adult science fiction novel in TEN YEARS!! Yeah. I’m excited. You’ll be hearing a lot more about this later in January.

2. Write the sequel to the novel referenced above. Bonus points: publish it before the end of the year. Can I do it? Time will tell.

3. Write and finish one additional Zeke Choy short story. Bonus points: finish two more stories.

(You’ll notice how I frame these goals so that they’re relatively easy to meet, while adding a degree of difficulty through the bonus points. This way I have a good chance to succeed, even if I don’t succeed stupendously. Clever, huh?)

4. Write and finish three other short stories.

5. Write and finish a completed draft of a third Puzzle Lands book…

(Oh boy! I hesitate to include #5 because I don’t know if I can do it, or even if it’s worth doing given the low sales this series has had, but I love these quirky books, and I’d really like to continue with them.)

And that’s enough commitment for me! I’ll check back here at the end of the year and assess how I did.

What are your goals for 2013?