Some good news…

While I was traveling last weekend, I learned that my short story “The Martian Obelisk” won the Locus Award for best short story. I’m honored! Very honored.

The Locus awards are determined by readers voting for their favorite fiction of the year. So I want to thank all of you who felt “The Martian Obelisk” was worthy of your vote. I truly appreciate it!

The story is also a finalist for the Hugo award, so if you’re eligible to vote for that, I hope you’ll consider it.

If you haven’t read “The Martian Obelisk” yet, you can find it online at Tor.com.

And follow this link for a list of nominees and winners in all categories.

I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life by Ed Yong

I just got back from an eight-day vacation and I’m frantically trying to catch up, so instead of writing an actual blog post I’m just going to echo what I said on Twitter:

Tweet #1:
This is not a good day to talk about great books, but if I don’t mention it now I’ll forget. So…

Tweet #2:
I just finished the audiobook of I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong. It’s about microbes: their ubiquity, their variety, their chemistry, and their interactions with the web of life that is Earth, including all of us.

(Hat tip to Vonda N. McIntyre for bringing this title to my attention.)

Tweet #3:
Highly recommended, and lots of ideas for you near-future SF writers. The world we live in is fascinating! Respect it, cherish it, preserve it.

Tweet #4:
Also, if you haven’t already, read KSR’s Aurora which has much to do with microbes and their contributions to ecosystems.
/end

After On: A Novel of Silicon Valley by Rob Reid (audiobook)

OMG, I loved this audiobook!

After On was published last August and I have to confess that I didn’t hear anything about it when it came out and I was not familiar with its author Rob Reid. I decided to check it out because it kept appearing in the “also bought” recommendation list at Amazon, and because it was near-future and sounded like it was going to engage in themes similar to my own work — you know, near-future manipulative AI, that sort of thing.

I listened to the sample and I was still sort of “Hmmm…” But if I didn’t like it, I could always return it, so what-Ev-er!

And yes, so to-tally worth it. (I’m trying to capture the voice of one of the characters here.)

This is a smart, funny, ingenious, and informative novel. As the title suggests, it’s set in Silicon Valley and follows several entrepreneurial (OMG, I spelled that word right on the first try!) characters as they try to stay afloat in their highly competitive world while striving to come up with the NEXT BIG THING.

There is lot of informative discussion in this novel. EULAs and privacy and Pascal’s Wager, venture capital, how to make a fortune while your company fails, the implications of “Super AI”, Twitter lynch mobs, fiction as thought experiments that might be applied to life, Fermi’s paradox, people-people, and people who aren’t so good with people, just for a few examples.

It’s possible some of this might be a little tedious to read, I don’t know. I found it all fascinating to listen to.

The audiobook is read by a large and very talented cast. They put a lot of effort into their performance, and I found the story fun and fascinating.

Highly recommended.

Yes, I have made some progress since my last progress report. I’ll admit though, it’s been slow going. Here’s a tweet from last week that captures my feelings nicely:

I'm starting to think that thrashing around with the plot for two months in the middle of a first draft is JUST THE WAY IT'S DONE THESE DAYS.
It's become all too familiar.
Sigh.

— Linda Nagata (@LindaNagata) June 2, 2018

As of today, I’m around 62,000 words into the initial draft of book 2 in a duology of novels. I’m hoping that this means I’m around 2/3 done with it. Over the past few weeks, a lot of time has gone into visualizing the next section, trying to figure out how to present it while giving all the characters their proper time on the page as well as meaningful roles within the plot.

An interesting breakthrough came a few nights ago, I woke up at 1am and lay awake for a while thinking about things. I ended up jotting down a few new approaches that have proved to be quite helpful. Implementing these ideas meant dropping back in the manuscript and adding new scenes and sections. I’m still working on that, but I hope to be moving into new territory again in another day or two. And then maybe a sprint to the end? I hope so!

Some writers love first drafts and hate revising. Other writers, like me, are much happier once we have a solid draft down. I’m looking forward to the revision stage.

Don’t worry! I am still writing and still publishing!

Did you know I had my own e-bookstore? (Probably not!)

I launched my store back in January of 2013. Here’s a post on it, if you’re interested in the software or the process. I launched it to ensure my complete independence and because, at the time, some of my readers in “non-Amazon” countries had to pay a premium to pick up my books.

The store was a fine experiment, and it had a good long run, but in the rapidly changing world of indie publishing, it ultimately became more of a burden than an asset. So I decided to close shop.

Be assured that my books are still available through major vendors.
You can find them at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and iBooks — all of which are a lot more convenient to use. You can also find several of my titles at Book View Café. The only thing that’s changed is that you can no longer buy them from my personal store.

Thank you to everyone who visited my store or used it to purchase books! And please, keep reading!

Find my ebooks at these vendors:

• Amazon
• Kobo
• iBooks
• Barnes & Noble
• Book View Café

Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr by John Crowley

There seems to have been a good deal of publicity around this novel when it came out last October, but I missed all of it and didn’t take notice of Ka until I heard Jonathan Strahan praising it. The novel is published by Saga Press, which charges a very reasonable $7.99 for the ebook, so I picked it up, read it immediately, and I’m now perplexed that Ka did not appear on either the Hugo or Nebula ballots. This is a wonderful novel.

Ka is a story told from the point of view of a crow, whose name is “Dar Oakley” and who, by strange circumstance, comes to live over a span of time encompassing two to three thousand years. The stories he takes part in and the people he comes to know are endlessly fascinating.

Not since childhood have I been interested in stories told from an animal’s point of view, but this one was so highly praised I had to look into it, and I was hooked from the first page.

From a personal perspective — that of a writer forever struggling to comprehend the marketplace — Ka astonishes me for the sheer bravery required of its author to even conceptualize a novel like this — a novel about a crow! — and the confidence to believe, during the long hard writing process, that there would be a market for it. I hope there’s a market for it! I hope it’s doing well. And I’m very glad there are still great writers willing to take chances of this kind.

For more about the novel, see Gary K. Wolfe’s review at Locus.

Find it at Amazon here.

I usually provide a universal link to other vendors, but the link site wasn’t working. Sorry!

I don’t write only science fiction. I’ve also written two fantasy novels. The first of the pair, The Dread Hammer, is now part of

The Myths and Legends Fantasy Storybundle

Curated by Kevin J. Anderson, it’s available starting today!

Directly from Kevin, here’s a description of the Storybundle:

Follow this link to check out all the details.

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.