It’s been two-and-a-half months since I posted a progress report. Oops.

So where am I?

Well, as reported last time, my big project for this year is a duology of novels. Book 1 is “done” in the sense that it’s a good, solid, complete draft. It is now with my freelance editor, Judith Tarr, who has served as editor on my last four novels and has done a terrific job.

I’m half done with a rough draft of the second book in the set. I’ve got a good general idea of the events that will make up the second half of the novel, but figuring out the details of how things will go down has been a real challenge. For the past two or three weeks I’ve been combing through my notes, organizing and assembling a detailed chapter-oriented outline. I want to make sure that all the important characters in this volume have a significant role to play as events unfold.

Plot is always such a challenge!

That said, I feel like I need to start writing actual chapters again. I’ll probably begin that tomorrow.

My plan is to publish both books this year, probably a month or two apart. To that end, I’ve begun the process of acquiring cover art, which is always exciting and scary. So much of a book’s success depends on the cover!

Anyway, these two books together will be a complete story. There is a potential for more in the series if these first two sell well. But if they don’t, I won’t be leaving anyone hanging.

Onward!

I’ve read several really interesting articles lately. Here they are, if you’d like to check them out:

“The Hunt for Wonder Drugs at the North Pole” by Kea Krause in The Atlantic
Remember how bioprospecting in the Arctic was a background element in my novel Going Dark? This article is about the challenges and potential of real world Arctic bioprospecting.

“Was There a Civilization On Earth Before Humans?” by Adam Frank, also in The Atlantic
Oh sure, this sounds like supermarket tabloid material but in fact this is an utterly fascinating planetary-science article. The author tries to answer the question of what evidence might remain from some hypothetical long-ago civilization.

“Trillions Upon Trillions of Viruses Fall From the Sky Each Day” by Jim Robbins in The New York Times
Did you know that a stream of viruses is “circling the planet, above the planet’s weather systems but below the level of airline travel?” I didn’t. Another fascinating article, and a testament to the awe-inspiring complexity of life on Earth

Finally, this has been a terrible week for the island of Kauai which has suffered record-setting levels of rain. (Don’t worry about me — I live on Maui and we’ve been fine.) It turns out there is a buffalo ranch on Kauai, and several animals were swept away by a flooding river, which led to the surreal scene of paniolo (Hawaii cowboys) rounding up buffalo on the beach at Hanalei. Take a look at the user-contributed video (second video on the page) here at Hawaii News Now.

Aloha and best wishes for a swift recovery to our neighbor island of Kauai!

The finalists for the 2018 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award have been announced. The award is for the best short science fiction of the year — and my Tor.com story “The Martian Obelisk” has the honor of appearing on the list, among some stellar company.

The other finalists are:

“The Martian Obelisk” is available to read online here.

Aloha!

Are you new to my work? Love short stories? If so, this post is for you.

The recent announcement that my short story “The Martian Obelisk” is a finalist for the Hugo Award, has brought a surge of visitors to my blog and website. If you’re among that number and would like to read more of my short fiction…

Here are some stories you can find online:

• “The Way Home” (Operation Arcana / Lightspeed Magazine)

• “Codename: Delphi” (Lightspeed Magazine / The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera)

• “Halfway Home” (Nightmare Magazine / The Best Horror of the Year Volume Six)

• “Nahiku West” (Analog Science Fiction / Republished at Clarkesworld
→ “Nahiku West” was the 2013 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award runner-up and selected for The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven edited by Jonathan Strahan, The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2013 Edition edited by Rich Horton, and The Year’s Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction 5 (audiobook) edited by Allan Kaster.

Much of my recent short fiction is also available in a convenient collection, Light and Shadow, in both print and ebook editions.

– Here’s a link to Amazon

– Here’s a universal link that will get you to alternate vendors.

Enjoy!

I’ve got some wonderful news to share: My short story “The Martian Obelisk” has been named as a finalist for the Hugo Award!

This is pretty exciting for me. After all, I’m a bit of a late bloomer. It’s been thirty-one years since my first fiction publication, and this is my first-ever appearance on the Hugo ballot. So it’s extra special!

If you haven’t read “The Martian Obelisk” yet, please check it out! You can find it online right here at Tor.com.

I want to say THANK YOU to everyone who’s read the story, to everyone who nominated it, and especially to editor Ellen Datlow, who liked the story enough to publish it at Tor.com.

Other short story finalists are:
• “Carnival Nine,” by Caroline M. Yoachim (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, May 2017)
• “Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand,” by Fran Wilde (Uncanny, September 2017)
• “Fandom for Robots,” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad (Uncanny, September/October 2017)
• “Sun, Moon, Dust” by Ursula Vernon, (Uncanny, May/June 2017)
• “Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience™,” by Rebecca Roanhorse (Apex, August 2017)

Check out the full list of Hugo Award finalists here at Tor.com. You’re sure to discover some amazing reading.

This is just a brief post to share the news that a short story I wrote last fall — in fact, I started it when I was at the Master Class Workshop — has sold to Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine! I’m thrilled that “Theories of Flight” has found such a great home.

Those of you familiar with my past work might be interested to hear that “Theories of Flight” takes place in the story world of my novel Memory, and involves a character from that novel — and that is the only hint I’m going to give!

No publication date yet, but I’ll let you know.

Ron and I spent the past week in Arizona. In my last post I talked about some of the sites on the way to the Grand Canyon. This post is about our canyon hike, down and then back up the Bright Angel Trail.

We arrived at the Grand Canyon late on Friday. After a traumatic but ultimately successful search for parking outside our hotel, we made it to our room. Very cold outside! We knew that rain was heading our way, but it wasn’t due to arrive until late Saturday. Regardless, we were going in.

The next day, Saturday, we set out from our hotel at 9:25am. The weather was cold with high clouds, but no rain yet.

I’d hiked part of the Bright Angel trail once, long, long ago, in the summer. It had been so hot! This time, there was ice at the start of the trail. We went carefully and soon left most of the people behind, although there were always others on the trail, including some long-distance trail runners.

It wasn’t long before the temperature warmed up. We paused to take off some layers and then, stopping only briefly to snap a few photos, we made our way to Indian Gardens, 4.6 miles down the trail and a 3,000-foot drop in elevation. Yes, the downhill muscles were a bit tired of downhill at this point!

We had lunch and debated if we should add an extra three miles to our trek by heading out to Plateau Point. My courage was fading as I looked up at the cliffs we would have to climb to get out, but then I interrogated someone who’d just returned from the point and his enthusiastic recommendation decided us. We headed on.

Fortunately, this section was nearly level — and totally worth the effort. The view of the Colorado River was amazing! Absolutely the highlight of the hike.

Well, it was getting late. The day had been beautifully overcast, with curtains of rain over the north and east sections of the canyon. Great hiking weather. We hadn’t gotten wet yet, but it seemed inevitable. We set out, going at a steady pace, and sure enough the rain caught up with us, the drops hitting the light-colored trail dust, turning it dark. We got a little wet, but the rain was fairly light and kept us cool. Eventually I put on my rain jacket, mostly to avoid getting chilled.

Where there had been ice in the morning, there was thick gooey mud in the afternoon. That was kind of a bummer, but what can you do? We tromped on and managed not to fall down (thankfully we had our hiking sticks which helped immensely), and we reached the top a bit before 5pm. We’d done twelve miles on the trail and a bit more than that given that we walked to and from the hotel. So this was one of our longer day hikes — and a terrific one. The highlight of our trip.

I didn’t do any fiction writing while we were on the mainland. A whole week with no progress on the newest novel! But I wrote this post on the plane, so as you read this I’m already back to work.

Getting there:

Ron loves to travel. I’m less enamored with it. I like visiting places, but the hassles of planning, packing, and getting there would likely keep me at home if I didn’t have Ron to encourage me and to do most of our trip planning.

This past week we visited Arizona, with the Grand Canyon as our primary destination. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that we are into hiking. Our primary goal was to do a rigorous hike down the Grand Canyon’s Bright Angel Trail.

The first step, of course, was getting there. We flew into Phoenix and took a couple of days to drive north, stopping at six National Monuments on the way. These monuments exist to preserve relics of First Nation pueblo life, but I admit the three things that excited me most were three natural features.

The first was at Montezuma’s Castle. The cliff dwellings are amazing. It’s impossible not to consider the challenges they embody, the difficulties of getting to them, of hauling water and other necessities up a series of ladders, day after day. Still, what I fell in love with at this site was the grove of Arizona Sycamore trees — huge, and gorgeous in their white-bark. We were there so early in spring that they were not in leaf yet, but they were still very beautiful.

The second feature I gushed over — pun intended — was the entirety of Montezuma’s Well. Here there is the well itself, which is a deep pool surrounded by cliffs. Water from a limestone cavern gushes into the bottom of the pool at a furious rate, causing sand to swirl, meters deep, above a bottom that no one has ever accurately measured. Despite this, the pool’s surface is calm and quiet, giving no hint of the turbulence deep below. Water drains from the pool through a series of cracks so that the water level rarely varies.

Long ago, the pueblo people constructed a ditch to direct some of the outflow. This ditch has been rebuilt and you can walk around to the primary place where water escapes. The path is directly alongside the little ditch, which is beautifully made, and there are more huge Arizona sycamores. I imagine in summer it gets very crowded, but when we were there, only a few people were about and it felt like a magical place, a scene from some lovely fantasy story. Ironically, the water from the well is supposed to have a high level of arsenic in it, which likely contributed to ill-health in the people who created the original ditch.

Limestone caverns create some amazing effects. Montezuma’s Well is one; the “blowhole” at Wupatki is another — and it’s the third feature on my list. Wupatki is an area set aside for its many pueblo ruins, but there is also the blowhole. In Hawaii, a blowhole is a hole in shoreline lava rock, one that goes all the way through the shelf of rock to the ocean. When big waves roll in, the water slams under the rock and shoots up through the hole, creating a column of spray. A blow hole in Arizona is completely different. I don’t really understand why it works beyond “differential air pressures” but air was continuously rushing out of this small hole, creating a strong wind. And if the barometric pressure were to change the flow could reverse and air would rush back in. Amazing. (The picture shows the stone frame constructed around the blowhole.)

Next time: the hike.

New York 2140 is Kim Stanley Robinson’s newest novel and I love it. It’s a GREAT novel. It’s the best KSR book I’ve read in years and I’m supremely annoyed — No, more accurately, I’m embarrassed for our genre — that NY2140 is not on the Nebula ballot.

People! What are we here for if not to look ahead and imagine what might be, and to learn?

Alright. I understand. Science fiction means different things to different people and besides, SFF has long ago yielded dominance to the many great fantasy writers.

Still, this is a novel not to be missed. NY2140 is a wonderfully well written, engrossing, incredibly smart novel. It is also that rarest of birds in this genre of doom and dire warnings — it’s an essentially optimistic novel.

Very briefly, NY2140 is about an odd assortment of characters living and thriving in New York decades after two events of massive, successive sea-level rise. Lower Manhattan, aka “the Super Venice,” is flooded and has been for decades but life goes on — although buildings not anchored in bedrock continue to fall. Meanwhile, the world of finance — and the associated endlessly greedy billionaires — are still in control.

Early on in the story it’s hard to know what all these disparate characters have in common. Every passage is interesting, but from time to time the detailed descriptions can feel overwhelming. Just take a break and then get back to it (you’ll be drawn back to it). It’s all worthwhile.

In my early days as a writer, KSR was right up there at the top of my list of favorite writers. The Memory of Whiteness and The Wild Shore were favorites. But as his novels got longer and longer, I stopped reading them. Just in the last couple of years, I’ve started again, first listening to The Years of Rice and Salt and then reading Aurora. I suspect I am going to have to go back and read some of the in-between books that I missed. Given that I’m a slow reader, I might be some time at it.

Still, let there be no doubt: KSR is one of our greats.

Here’s a link to Amazon.

Here’s a universal link that will get you to alternate vendors.

Last fall I bought a Mac Air laptop to replace my ancient Toshiba laptop, aka “the writing laptop.” Out of habit, I would have installed Microsoft Word, but I didn’t want to pay a monthly subscription and I didn’t want to install the very old version of Word-For-Mac that I have. So I decided to try Nisus Writer Pro.

NWP is Mac-only software, but it can save files in standard *.doc format — and it came highly recommended by other writers. So I downloaded a trial copy…and never looked back!

Well, okay. Maybe I glanced wistfully over my shoulder a few times. Leaving a program I knew and understood quite well, for one that required me to repeatedly figure out how to do basic things — or to establish a way to do basic things — was frustrating. But that’s a fixed cost of change.

Since October I’ve been using NWP exclusively for fiction writing. In that time I’ve finished drafting a novel, completed a full revision of that novel, written two short stories, 90% of a novelette, and I’m presently brainstorming a new novel.

And I’m very happy I made the switch to NWP!

In the paragraphs that follow, I take a look at some of the things I like about it, but first let’s agree that a new program is an invitation to explore. I used Word for so many years that I came to accept the way I did things and I was only occasionally inspired to seek out features I hadn’t used before. I don’t doubt there is a lot I could have done with Word that I never got around to doing or figured out how to do. But since I’m new to NWP I’m much more likely to investigate possibilities.

So here are a few new-to-me features I like: Read the rest of this entry »