My short story “Apotheosis” has been reprinted by Lightspeed Magazine! It’s available now as part of the ebook edition of the magazine, and it will be posted to the website on January 7.
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/issues/jan-2014-issue-44/
When I wrote this story in 2004, and for quite a few years after, it was my favorite thing I’d ever written. I wouldn’t quite call it that now, but I still like it very much, and it’s exciting to see it in print again.
I’m thrilled to announce my first foreign rights sale! CRUEL BEAUTY will be published in Spain by Ediciones Kiwi.
Cruel Beauty has a book trailer! You can see it at the USA Today blog, along with a short post about how what inspired me to write it.
(Trying to condense “East of the Sun, West of the Moon” into a one-paragraph summary nearly killed me, and I still feel a little guilty about how inaccurate it turned out. So here’s a link to the Sur la Lune page about the story, so you can get ALL THE FACTS.)
One of my favorite conventions is Sirens, which is focused on women in fantasy literature. It’s small, friendly, exciting, and has a strong YA presence. This year I’ll be attending it for the third time, and I’m really excited — especially because this will be the very first time that I go there to present a paper:
“You Who Read, Judge”: Storytelling in Till We Have Faces
Many first-person novels use the conceit that the book itself is being written by the narrator. Fewer make that act of writing an integral part of the plot. In C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces, Orual’s telling of her own story transforms her, as she comes to understand how she has been telling stories to control others and justify herself all her life. Her journey becomes an exploration of the ways in which stories are inherently participatory and transformative—and sometimes redemptive.
I saw the rough draft of my cover art last November and I was utterly thrilled. And now I finally (finally, finally!) get to share it with the world! You can see it now on the Epic Reads blog.
Long ago, I was nearly ready to look for an agent. My opening pages glittered. My query letter shone. There was just one problem: my book didn’t have a title, and “Please represent my book UNTITLED” didn’t have quite the competent, professional air I wanted to project.
I made lists of keywords and quotations and random ideas, and none of them me got anywhere. Finally I said to myself, “One-word titles are hot right now. I’ll call it SUNDERED and it will be fine, because everybody knows that the marketing department always changes your title anyway.”
Then I got an agent and an editor and provisional cover art and nobody seemed to think that my title ought to be changed. Until last month, when the marketing department finally decided that my book should have a new title after all.
The brainstorming process that followed was only slightly less lengthy and arduous than the trek to Mount Doom, and I’m just really glad that I had my editor and agent to help me this time, or else I would probably still be staring at the wall and making lists of keywords. But we finally found a title that everybody liked, and so now I can announce that my debut novel is going to be called CRUEL BEAUTY.
WordPress-powered website: accomplished!