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A Robot, Two Stories, and some Doodles.

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This blog has been gathering a pretty thick layer of dust this year. Blogging has never come naturally to me, and most of my updates get blasted out in snippets on social media. Well, here’s a bigger update!

This has been an extraordinarily busy year for work, which is great since last year was so dry. I spent the last five months working on Disney’s Big Hero 6. The hours were long, the workload intense, but in the end, I’m proud of the work I did, and the awesome stuff my team accomplished. I can’t wait to see it in November!

I did a lot of work on little teasers and other promotional images, but one of my favorites is adorable robot Baymax and his human pal Hiro playing with balloon animals (I worked on cloth, hair, Baymax’s squishy skin, and the balloons):

It was an amazing experience to work at Disney. Hope I get to do it again someday.

Things have been pretty slow on the writing front, as work has gobbled up most of my free time and energy. My story “The Spirit of Mars” appeared in John Joseph Adams’ anthology Help Fund My Robot Army. This is a great collection of stories inspired by Kickstarter and the crowd-funding movement. It’s still available if you’d like to grab a copy.

I’ve also had a story accepted to appear in the forthcoming Not Our Kind, edited by Nayad Monroe for Alliteration Ink. Speaking of Kickstarters, this anthology is gearing up for a crowd-funding of its own, so stay tuned for news. “For Outside Are the Dogs,” is my Clarion West “Week 7 story.” I conceived of it in the final days of the workshop but didn’t write it until I was home!

Some other projects are in the hopper, there always are, and that novel is still waiting for me to come back and prod it to life. It’s been a long time since I had the mental space to tackle new stories. I’m pretty excited about diving back into the waters!

One of the creative outlets I had a little space for outside the day job was rediscovering my love for drawing. It’s intimidating to go to classes at a studio like Disney and draw among the extremely talented artists there. For a while, I was posting a doodle a day, with a #draw365 hashtag. I’ve got a backlog of stuff to post, but I hope to keep it up all the same!

 

I hope you had a great summer, too!

Sale! “We All Look Like Harrie” to XIII

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I can finally announce the news I teased last week — I’ve sold my story, “We All Look Like Harrie,” to Mark Teppo’s upcoming anthology from Resurrection House/Underland Press, XIII*.

I wrote “We All Look Like Harrie”on the first day of this year’s Rainforest Writer’s Retreat. It came together like few other stories I’ve written (there are almost always weeks and sometimes months of revisions in my usual process). Maybe it helped that “Harrie” is very short, very experimental. We had a group reading at the retreat one night, and Teppo more or less bought it on the spot. That’s the quickest a story has ever gone from being in my head to being sold, and I’m still feeling a little wide-eyed about it. Did that actually happen? 

Also, this story is my twelfth fiction sale since I began the writing career in earnest. A dozen stories. That’s almost a collection right there! I’ve got a long way to go, and a lot more to do–and learn, but a dozen stories is a milestone I had to stop and celebrate just a little. Thanks to everyone who’s helped me get here!

“Harrie” very nearly became my thirteenth sale, by the way, which would have resonated nicely with Teppo’s anthology title. Oh yes, my friends, more good news to announce soon!

 

*XIII is still open to subs until March 31st! 

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Late Summer Update & Links Round-up

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While the job market continues to be tough, it’s been a very productive summer for me creatively, and for that I’m grateful. Here are some of the things I’ve been up to — and my sincere gratitude to those who backed me in one endeavor or another.

Launchpad. Space Camp for writers! You can read my full write-up here. I’m still processing the experience (it was amazing), but a few new stories are definitely growing from it.

What Fates Impose. This anthology of fortune-telling tales that includes my story “Ain’t Much Different’n Rabbits” was fully funded! It’s a great TOC, and I’m proud to be a part of it. It’s not available for purchase just yet, but I’ll shout out here as soon as it is.

Broken Eye Books / By Faerie Light. Another anthology I’m part of, By Faerie Light, is one of the rewards for backers of Broken Eye Books’ 2013 Kickstarter campaign. By Faerie Light contains 18 dark tales about the fae, including my story “The Forest Also Remembers.” (Wow, another sweet TOC, too. I’m lucky!) Broken Eye Books has a lot of other great looking titles as part of their campaign, and there’s still lots of time to back them.

Clarion West Write-a-Thon / Novel Draft: Completed. It’s just one milestone in what promises to be a long project, but my initial draft of my rural fantasy novel is complete! This was my goal during the Clarion West Write-a-thon, and I finished the draft on the final weekend of this years’ workshop. Thanks to all who backed me this year! I’m giving the novel a little time to breathe before I jump back in. You can read more about that over at Inkpunks.

photo by Bryan
photo by Bryan

Everything Is Festival / “Final Cut: Ladies & Gentlemen.” On Monday night, Carol, Bryan, and I attended the opening night for the Everything Is Festival, a film festival celebrating found footage. While most of the mashups in the festival are short pieces, “Final Cut: Ladies & Gentlemen,” a film by Hungarian filmmaker György Pàlfi is a feature length film edited from something like 500 different movies! It’s a classic “Boy meets Girl” tale, and while the actors change with every cut, it’s a surprisingly robust and affecting narrative. Pàlfi never takes it too seriously, either, which is good since it embraces just about every romantic trope found in 100 years of cinema. Something to be said for universal stories, eh?

Everything Is Festival: “Final Cut – Ladies & Gentlemen” (trailer) from Cinefamily on Vimeo.

Final Cut is an homage, and none of the clips or music were cleared by the filmmaker, so the festival circuit is likely to be the only place to see it for some time. (L.A. folks, I think there’s another screening this coming Monday.)

Sekrit Projects. These are in such embryonic stages of development it doesn’t seem quite right to talk about them yet. New short stories, some projects with a  visual component. Some collaborations. All irons in the fire, and who knows where they will lead — but  it’s good to have some time to explore various creative paths.

Hope all of you are having a good summer!

 

 

 

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What Fates Impose (and a round or two on me…)

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Don’t we all wish we could see the future? Catch a glimpse of of how things turn out if we choose A over B, go right or left? What if you got that glimpse and didn’t like how things turned out? Would you blame the one who gave you that peek? Would you blame yourself? WFI-web

I’m very stoked to be a part of the anthology What Fates Impose edited by Nayad A. Monroe and published by Alliteration Ink. In twenty one stories by an amazing group of contributors (including Inkpunk cohorts Wendy N. Wagner, Erika Holt, and Remy Nakamura!) you can read all about the consequences of trying to peek into the future. The antho is running on Kickstarter, and as of this writing, we are a little over 25% funded with 27 days to go. If you’re inclined to back us, I would deeply appreciate the support. Any amount will help, but there are many fabulous rewards for helping What Fates Impose meet our goal.

At $25+, your pledge will entitle you to a PDF booklet of five fate-themed cocktails custom-designed by yours truly! (Including a couple of virgin cocktail recipes as well). I love crafting cocktails at home for friends, and occasionally write about my mixology adventures on this blog and over at The Functional Nerds (as the Booze Nerd). I created custom cocktails for all of the Inkpunks, and even brought a portable bar to World Fantasy a few years ago to mix drinks. I love sharing my knowledge (and my booze), so I hope this helps encourage you to start you own home bar. I predict it will! 😛

If you can’t donate, but would still like to support the project, consider passing word along to your friends by using one of these handy buttons.

Thanks so much for your support!

“Vinegar Pie” — A Sale to Coins of Chaos

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I’m very pleased to announce that Jennifer Brozek has accepted my story “Vinegar Pie” for her Coins of Chaos anthology. Thanks Jennifer, I’m very excited to be a part of the collection! Details to follow soon.

I must say that I got very hungry writing this story. Very hungry. Some days, being a writer means intensive research. You have to sample all your sources. Critically. Carefully.

Preferably a la mode.

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