Category: LexIcon

Best Science Fiction of the Year #4

Lex

It’s out! The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Four, edited by Neil Clarke and including my novella “Freezing Rain, a Chance of Falling,” is now available in bookstores .

I won’t go on and on–I bragged when I initially learned the novella had been chosen, but I will point out that Best SF also contains novellas and stories by the likes of Kelly Robson, Madeline Ashby, Yoon Ha Lee, Sofia Samatar, Daryl Gregory, John Chu, Ken Liu, Elizabeth Bear and so many other awesome writers. It’s going to make for great summer reading–I’m on the edge of my seat, waiting on a contributor’s copy so I can dig in!

Join the LexIcon – Win a Book!

Lex

Hi! I have a newsletter and I’m hoping you’ll subscribe to it.

To sweeten the deal, I’m drawing one lucky new subscriber’s name on June 21st for an advance reading copy of The Future of Another Timeline, by the incomparable Annalee Newitz, author of Autonomous and co-host (with Charlie Jane Anders) of the brilliant Hugo Award nominated Our Opinions Are Correct podcast.

Here’s the cover:

The most recent issue of the LexIcon has a poem, “Say Cheeze,” that’s part of the exclusive content for newsletter subscribers, as well as Gamechanger news, links, and info. You’ve still got a week--join the fun!

And then go listen to OOAC, because it totally fucking rules.

Westeros: Endgame

Lex

About a month ago people started asking if I was watching Game of Thrones. This set me to reading spoilers for the last three episodes. I’d watched to the end of Charles Dance. From there, in my headcanon, as fertilized by various social media revelations, the GoT story went like this.

On the morning after the finale aired, I rose from my too-narrow hotel bed (I was attending the Nebula Awards in LA), hit the Twitters and found out who’d won and who’d died. I got a decent sense of what fans were mad about, and glad about, and their reasons. I was a little struck by how there seemed to be no new major characters… everyone who had been introduced between the end of The Dance and the Westeros endgame must’ve been killed on their way through the plot.

It was a strangely pleasing experience. All of the closure and none of the angst. It was like offering to help with a holiday dinner once 95% of the cooking was done. 

(Plus of course I saw the shot of Dani with dragon wings. Amaze!)

Then I went to LAX to fly home, and first I ended up in a long line-up behind a guy who was recapping one of the Twitter rants, very passionately, about the pointlessness of it all. And then I got on the plane next to a different guy who hadn’t seen it yet. He had bought the finale from iTunes, for the flight, and he watched it while we flew East, all while I was supposedly getting re-acquainted with my novel in progress.

Naturally this was a polite human with earphones, so I was sneaking peeks, but without sound. But who needs sound when you already know what’s happening? Not me, it turns out.

My journey on that was:

  • Knew that. Knew that too! (Feels smart for no reason)
  • Pang of empathy for a rather bedraggled looking character for whom I had affection.
  • Dragon shot! 12/10, would watch again.
  • And… welp. There’s that thing everyone was talking about.
  • Oh, pupper. Your poor ear!
  • Bye, everyone. That was great!

I’m not sure there’s any great conclusion to be drawn from this experience except that sometimes experiencing things shallowly, rather than deeply, may be an approach its merits. I didn’t enjoy GoT as much as many of you did, but my pain at the outcome is currently zero, and I’m thinking rather fondly of it all.

Holy spectacular Gamechanger cover! – courtesy @TorBooks and artist @smartiniere

Lex

I’ll cut to the chase. Check out this beautiful beautiful cover, by Stephan Martiniere, for Gamechanger.

Stunning, right? It captures exactly what I want for this fictional future—a world still recognizably the one we’re living in now, and yet changed, mostly (though not all) for the better.

(The Gamechanger outcome is actually what I want for our actual future, as far as that goes.)

Cover reveals often happen when a book becomes available for pre-order, and mine is! Powells and iTunes don’t have pages yet, but for those of you who dollar-vote at any of the following retailers, here are links. .

[Amazon HC] [Kindle][B&N] [Kobo]

Things have been very exciting around the Lex Cave these days. Some of you may have heard that “Freezing Rain, a Chance of Falling” is a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, hobnobbing with SF stars like Kelly Robson and Annalee Newitz. Naturally, I’m over the moon!

But rather than staying up there, I’m gonna come down to earth and stare at this beautiful cover some more. I’ll talk more about the Sturgeon, and the novella, and many other things, soon!

“Freezing Rain, A Chance of Falling” to appear in Neil Clarke’s Best SF of the Year!

Lex

It’s another frabjous day here in Wockyland, and I am calloo callaying all over the damn place because my first-ever novella will be appearing in Neil Clarke’s The Best Science Fiction of the Year v. 4!

The whole ToC is here, and it’s amazing. The antho includes stories by Kelly Robson, Alyssa Wong, Naomi Kritzer, Yoon Ha Lee, John Chu, Sofia Samatar… actually, every time I start to type a name I imagine putting (!!!) behind it. Let me just say it’s an amazing list, and the book is already available for pre-order in a host of bookstores, including the extraordinary and always marvellous Powells.

Having a story in an anthology like this is an honor. Books like this are crucial to our genre’s short fiction ecosystem. They create delivery systems, enabling people to see the best pieces from markets they might not follow–nobody can follow everything. They put stories in the hands of dedicated library users, for example, and provide a virtual gathering place for writers whose work we love… and whose work we haven’t yet seen. And they add longevity to the mix–when I was young and broke I used to trawl through libraries and used bookstores looking for the Gardner Dozois Years’ Best anthos because they were eclectic, delightful, wide-ranging and affordable.

So I’m pleased to think my depiction of life here in Setback Toronto, in all its high-tech and economically savage glory, might find its way to someone like young me one day.

Here’s the cover:

LexIcon: Jigsaw Narratives

Lex

Each tiny scene in a jigsaw narrative is is a puzzle piece, freestanding in its own right, yet intended to interlock with the others to evoke a whole picture of an unfolding story. Readers are invited to fill in the spaces between the missing pieces, bringing the full image into focus.

Jigsaw narratives are immensely gratifying to readers when it’s comparatively easy to put the picture together; it lets them feel like they are not only at play with the author, but winning. The drawback comes if the picture is too elusive, when the connections are hard to find. The leaves the reader feeling left out, thwarted, and cheated.

Jigsaw stories often work well when they’re stretching a smaller story over a long stretch of years—imagine seven pivotal moments from a fifty year space voyage—or when their scenic pieces imply a much longer story. Sometimes when they fail, it’s because the story in question really wants to be a novel, and the puzzle pieces on the table are less a complete story and more a suggested outline for the longer work.

LexIcon: Cube Farm Purgatory

Lex

Nobody snatches up a novel after work hoping to be immediately transported back to the worst parts of the day they’ve just been paid to live through. A reader ends up in Cube Farm Purgatory in any workplace scene that amounts to colleagues, bosses and rivals gnashing through their professional relationships, pushing paper, attending meetings, or dealing with bureaucratic minutiae.

Fictional depictions of work and workplaces, whether those workplaces are realistic or speculative in nature,  need to be heightened. If your characters have a hell job, the workplace scenes must be cringingly, agonizingly hellish. If they are getting something interesting done, that something better be so cool it reaches out and grabs us by the throat.  If they’re just trying to get the zoning changed on the building across the street, somebody better be getting killed or laid. Otherwise you’re just inflicting unpaid overtime on an audience that could be playing Angry Birds.

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Hey, what gives with this LexIcon thing?

Join the LexIcon!

Lex

My newsletter is an occasional source of poetry, politics, and proprietary language. An issue of the Lexicon newsletter starts with verse and can move to the end of the universe, or our little corner of it, anyway. Each issue has some content exclusive to subscribers to go along with writing news and talk about the state of the world. Sometimes there are also contests.

Occasionally, too, there’s writing advice. Like most editors, I beat the same lessons into new writers over and over and over again. The LexIcon is a tool, a taxonomy of linguistic criminality, an attack on the villainous habits of aspiring authors everywhere.

Join me!

LexIcon – Bouncing out of a manuscript

Lex

Bouncing occurs when some small detail within your manuscript causes the
reader to pause and consider whether they believe your facts, agree with your narrator’s opinions or otherwise buy into the assertions or events in the text. Rather than being swept along by suspense or the power of your writing, their attention has shifted. They are questioning your construct, heading to Google to find out if you’re right, looking up the definitions of terms they don’t understand, or otherwise trying to evaluate the viability of something in the text.

The problem with bouncing is, of course, that sometimes the reader doesn’t come back to you. And if they did look up your facts and you weren’t quite right, they’ll bounce higher next time.

The things that make us bounce can be entirely valid, well researched points, things that happened in the real world…  which makes it even more frustrating. You have to be convincing whether you’re lying or telling the truth. Fail to beguile, and face the consequences!

(Bouncing is also often referred to as being thrown out of the manuscript.)

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Hey, what gives with this LexIcon thing?