Last fall I participated in a free ebook anthology sponsored by The Atlantic Council’s Art of Future War Project. Now I get to be a judge in the next Art of Future War Project story challenge. If you like to write short stories, this might be for you.

The competition is looking for unpublished short stories on themes relating to the US Department of Defense’s “Third Offset Strategy” which is concerned with human-machine collaboration within the military. Check out the website for all the contest details, and note that “The winners of the best written and best visual art entries will receive a $500 honorarium.” Not bad, for a 4,000-word story.

The due date is April 18, less than a month away, so no procrastinating…

Other judges in the contest are Chris Martin, author of Engines of Extinction and Modern American Snipers, and Andrew Liptak who edited the War Stories anthology. Max Brooks, the author of World War Z, will be the final judge.

Third post within 24 hours, because apparently I blog in flurries…

The deadline for Hugo Award nominations is March 31, just a few days away. For those eligible to nominate, I hope you’ll consider Going Dark in the best novel category when filling out your nomination ballot. The Trials is also eligible, if you’re truly enthusiastic. 😉

Another suggestion is a vote for my editor, Joe Monti, in the Editor/Long Form category — but not just because he had the courage and enthusiasm to publish me. In 2015, Joe launched Saga Press, a rapidly growing and much praised line of science fiction and fantasy, at a time when other SF imprints are disappearing. Click here to see some of the books published by Saga Press in their first year, 2015. Scroll through the pages and you’ll be able to see some upcoming titles.

Saga Press is an imprint of Simon & Schuster.

Every now and then, I post on fitness. I’m into weight-lifting, although I live far from the gym and don’t get there as often as I’d like. I also run. I used to run on the road, but around fifteen months ago, Ron and I got a treadmill, which we use a lot.

Anyway, I wanted to share my new strategy, in case it’s helpful to anyone else out there interested in middle-age fitness. (I’m fifty-five years old.)

Over the summer and into the fall I was having issues with running. I didn’t visit a doctor, but I’m sure I had plantar fasciitis in my right foot, some achilles tendon problems in the same foot, and an aching left hip. The hip was helped by stretching, but long periods of rest did not seem to help the foot, which was immensely discouraging. Eventually I visited a running store and got shoe insets for high arches. Since then, things have improved a lot. I’m not feeling perfect. I don’t think the aches and pains will ever be entirely gone, but they’re minuscule enough to ignore for now, and I’ve also changed my routine to minimize impact and wear-and-tear on the body.

My new routine calls for a run on the treadmill only once or twice a week, aiming for five miles at a 9:30/mile pace. I’d like to push this out to an hour of running, but that hasn’t happened yet. At any rate, I listen to my body. If I’m hurting more than a little, or if I’m just not feeling it, I’ll stop. Oh, and I keep the treadmill at a very slight incline, hoping to reduce the impact on my feet.

On other days — as many days as I can manage — I raise the treadmill to a fairly steep incline (usually level 10 on my treadmill) and I walk at a fast pace for a full hour. This was surprisingly hard when I first started. I was walking at a 3mph pace, and I’d be fine until forty minutes or so, and then I’d get really tired or really hungry. But I kept at it, and now it’s pretty easy even though I’m walking much faster, covering over 3.4 miles in the same time.

With running and walking both, I always start fairly slowly and gradually add more speed.

I’ve found several advantages to walking fast on an inclined treadmill:

(1) I CAN READ OR LISTEN TO AUDIOBOOKS WHILE WALKING. A whole hour of uninterrupted reading/listening is a huge gain for me, and I can’t do either when I’m jogging.

(2) Walking is much easier on my body, so I can still get an aerobic workout while recovering between running days.**

(3) Walking absolutely helps with my conditioning for running, without all the wear and tear.

So there you go. If you have access to a treadmill, incline walking provides a great respite from running.

If you have any advice for me on how to up my running game or make the aches go away, please let me know.

Update 4/30/2016: I’ve moved my newsletter list to Mail Chimp and have updated the forms. So please…sign up!

A Grumbly Post

For no reason that I can parse, my newsletter signup forms have started getting several spam signups a day, far exceeding the legitimate signups. This is perplexing for a couple of reasons. First, the form is double opt-in. You receive an email which then requires you to click a link. Have spammers now automated this process? Second…what is the point? Why are spammers asking ME to email THEM with my newsletter? I don’t understand.

Newsletters are considered the best promotion, because those who sign up tend to be the most enthusiastic about a writer’s work, and most likely to be interested in new work. So I am discouraged.

That said, I’m not planning to send many newsletters in 2016. I’ve never sent more than a few a year, but this year I don’t have any plans (so far) for new publications. So instead of dealing with my spam problem, I’m going to put the newsletter on hiatus. I’ll probably send one more newsletter to announce this, and then I’ll wait until I have a new publication or some other worthy news.

Until then — or until I find the time and motivation to try a new email-list provider — I’ve removed the signup forms from my blog, which is the source of the problem. I’ll leave the forms up at my website, at least until the spammers discover those.

So if you’d like to sign up to receive my newsletter, go here. (top left of the page)

If you’d like to view my past newsletters, go here.)

As if you don’t already have enough distractions…

I failed to post here at my blog for almost the entire month of February, so I’m making up for it with a flurry of posts in early March. (If posting regularly is the key to building a blog readership, well, that explains a lot.)

Recommended Audiobooks

Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion
by Dan Simmons:
These are science fiction classics that I loved back when they were originally published, and they are just as amazing today. Instead of re-reading, I listened to the audiobooks and was extremely impressed by the production. I’ve been listening to audiobooks for only about nine months, and early on I got into the habit of listening at a slightly faster than normal speed, usually 1.25x, unless I really wasn’t enjoying a book and then I would shift to 1.5x. But with these books I downshifted to 1.0x because every word is worth hearing. Truly amazing writing, characters, and world building. I’ll be moving on to the next book in the set, Endymion, before too long.

The Southern Reach Trilogy
by Jeff Vandermeer:
Audible had all three volumes of the Southern Reach trilogy — Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance — in an omnibus edition, available for a ridiculously low one credit, so I decided it was high time I familiarized myself with these much-acclaimed novels. I’m not entirely sure what I expected of the Southern Reach, but I was surprised at what I found. These are “literary” novels. They engage with fine language and description and, especially in the first two books, there is much time spent exploring the odd and troubled pasts of the main characters. At times I found it slow going, and early on I tweeted this:

Random observation: I think I'm more patient w/audiobooks, more likely to stick w/a story that I might abandon if I were reading it myself.

— Linda Nagata (@LindaNagata) February 14, 2016

What kept me going was the truly amazing writing, and a wonderful cast of narrators. As above, I slowed this one down to 1.0x speed, to catch every word, and as the story proceeded, I began to feel I was drawn into a spell of words and insight. I also felt that the quality of my own writing was improving as I continued to listen — a very nice side effect!

Of the three volumes, the third was my favorite. I found it the most engrossing, as some of the mysteries are being worked out. Some reader reviews complained that the ending was too abrupt, but I didn’t find it so. Highly recommended.

Links

• In midFebruary SF Signal published a piece by James Wallace Harris called Staying on the Cutting Edge of Science Fiction. I found it to be an interesting look at how the idea of what constitutes “cutting edge” technology shifts over time and how technologically based science fiction responds to that, especially since this is a subject I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. James suggests that writers wanting to “extrapolate about the impact of real scientific knowledge … can’t let older science fiction cloud their vision.” I think this is a very important point. The post was surrounded by controversy though, because none of the books cited as examples were written by women. I wish it had been different and that the post had included a more varied list of examples. Nevertheless, I thought it was an interesting perspective.

• Yesterday Charles Stross published a very entertaining and thought-provoking piece called Towards a taxonomy of cliches in Space Opera, in which are listed several hundred “already seen it” tropes from science fiction. To my mind, this list is asking a similar question to that above: what’s new? and what’s left to explore in a literary sense?

• And finally, just for fun… this was making the rounds a few weeks ago, but if you haven’t seen it yet, check it out, and know that we are doomed:

I just finished reading The Revenant, the 2002 novel by Michael Punke which inspired the 2015 movie of the same name. One reviewer described the novel as “plainspoken” and I found this to be true. The style of writing struck me as old fashioned, in that it felt like books written in the fifties and sixties that I’d read as a child. It reads more like a biography than a novel, and a few chapters in I paused to check that it actually was a novel. The narrative voice is omniscient, moving from the head of one character to another without hesitation or transition, and several times moving from one time and place to another without so much as a helpful blank line to cue the reader.

All that said, I found The Revenant to be captivating.

Long before I was interested in science fiction, I had a childhood passion for frontier fiction, and reading The Revenant has been a welcome chance to revisit that — and to discover that I am just as fascinated now by the vast and amazing landscapes of the American West, and by the dangers and the clash of cultures on the American frontier. In short, my love of adventure fiction began early, and I have never outgrown it.

If you haven’t yet seen the movie (I haven’t!), The Revenent is the story of frontiersman Hugh Glass who was horribly mauled by a grizzly and then abandoned by his companions when they feared an attack by Arikara warriors was imminent. It depicts a level of strength and endurance that feels almost superhuman to us feeble modern folk, and it depicts in fairly good detail a way of life long gone away. If your reading requires women characters, you won’t be pleased with The Revenent. Women are background elements. I’m not sure that even one ever comes on stage.

This is a short novel and in my opinion well worth reading. From a writer’s perspective, it’s good to be reminded that there are many ways to tell a story, and that the scene-by-scene, show-don’t-tell style of modern novels is not the only option. In the end, it’s the story that matters, and the story told by The Revenent has made this novel a success.

In a word: Publicity.

With thousands of books published every month (and all those earlier books still available, if not in print, then in ebook form) what are the odds of any particular book being noticed? Well, the odds are not good.

On occasion I will hear that “awards don’t matter” and for many titles this is true. They sell abundantly regardless of short lists. But I can say from personal experience that being short-listed for a significant award really does increase a book’s visibility, and I think it’s a safe bet that winning a significant award increases visibility exponentially. So, since I really don’t want to see my books quietly fade away, I’ve made it a point to try to get them considered for awards.

With the Hugos and the Nebulas there’s not a lot you can do beyond saying “Hey, voters, please consider my book.” With other awards, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, for example, the publisher has to send print copies of a qualified book to a jury of judges.

All three of the awards I just mentioned are open to all novels published in their area of interest in the award year, regardless of who the publisher is … in other words, they are technically open to self-published novels.

The Arthur C. Clarke Award
Much to my disappointment, another major award, the Arthur C. Clarke award, is not open to self-published novels. The Clarke Award is a juried award for best science fiction novel published in the United Kingdom, but when I asked if I could send in the UK editions of The Trials and Going Dark, I was told those books did not qualify because they had been published under my own imprint, Mythic Island Press LLC. (The North American edition is published by Saga Press/Simon & Schuster.)

Yes, I was disappointed, but I am not criticizing. The award administrators have a very challenging job as it is, and it’s certainly up to them to set the rules. I was also told that they are continuing to review their policy regarding self-published submissions.

Unlike most awards that I’m aware of, the Clarke Award releases a list of those books that have been submitted for consideration. This list of novels was published today. It includes 113 titles — with just 33% by women.

I would have loved to increase that percent just a little! Ah well.

I do encourage you to read the commentary that follows the list of books. There is some interesting analysis and a brief discussion on the focus of the award, and on the question of “What is science fiction?”