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Calling All Problem Daughters!

~ N. Barischoff ~ 1 Comment

Hello, hello dear Reader! Happiest of New Years! It’s so good to see you again! What? Where have I been, you ask? Nowhere. Everywhere. I can’t say. There’s no time. Shut up!

Something wonderful has happened,  dear Reader! In the time since we last spoke, I have undergone a marvelous transformation. I have become… an EDITOR!!!

I’m pleased to announce that I will be co-editing (with Rivqa Rafael and Djibril al-Ayad) Problem Daughters, a brand-spanking-new anthology of Feminist speculative fiction forthcoming from the Future Fire.

But this ain’t your mom’s Feminist speculative fiction anthology! (Or maybe it totally is.) Here’s our brief:

Problem Daughters will amplify the voices of women who are sometimes excluded from mainstream feminism. It will be an anthology of beautiful, thoughtful, unconventional speculative fiction and poetry around the theme of intersectional feminism, with a specific focus on the lives and experiences of women of colour, QUILTBAG women, disabled women, sex workers, and any intersection of these.

Sound cool? We think so, too. Female agency isn’t something invented by middle-class North Americans in the mid-to-late  20th century, after all.  Empowered women have always existed, across culture and across time. And they have lived millions and billions of lives, and carried entire communities on their backs.

Not all women choose to express their agency in the same way, and not all feminists share the same vision of the world. We want to bring you lots of sparkling new sci-fi and fantasy tales filled with bold, actively compelling heroines unlike any you’ve met before!

Help us bring them to you a little faster. Check out our freshly launched fundraiser here:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/problem-daughters-fantasy-feminism/x/10044963#/

We’re up to our ears in kick-ass perks! Head on over and pick out something you like. There’s something for everyone:

You’ll be able to pre-order  Problem Daughters in whatever format you may desire (there’s even a super-limited edition hardcover with personalized insert, custom  crocheted bookmark and numbered bookplate, signed by the editors. How cool is that?! Only three of these  left in the whole wide world! Make one of them yours!)

We’ve got complete canon book bundles for all you Future Fire fans of all Future Fire titles (including  Accessing the Future, home of my space opera Pirate Songs). For you book collectors, we have a  signed and personalized hardcover of Sofia Samatar’ s new book The Winged  Histories , the story of four “problem daughters” seeking not just to survive war, but to be remembered by history.

For all of you  writers  wanting to give your short fiction that extra edge, we’ve got short story critiques and coaching sessions aplenty,  from acclaimed authors as well as editors, so you can see how this short fiction racket works from both sides of the slush pile (you can even get your story critiqued by one of the Problem Daughters editors, if you’re interested to know what kinds of  stories knock our socks off). And the television writer seeking an experienced set of eyes on her pilot or spec script can win herself a comprehensive script critique (not to mention usable and practical advice) from a 20- year industry veteran.

We’ve got some simply fucking adorable, very limited edition  and completely custom-made crocheted “Problem Daughter” dolls. Have one created for you in the likeness of any historical problem daughter you wish. Crocheted Lady Godiva doll, anyone? I wonder if she’ll come with her own little crocheted horse? Get ’em while they’re hot. Only two remain.

If you really feel like digging deep and helping this beautiful book get made, 5-time Bram Stoker winner Nancy Holder needs a name for a very complex and important character (well, a character, anyway) in her next book, and she wants to use yours! In the biz, we call it a Tuckerization.  Act quickly, and you could be a character in the next Teen Wolf. Or Buffy novel. Or something entirely new and equally cool!

I can’t tell you any of these awesome perks will go unclaimed for long, but there’s more perks to come, so stay tuned! I’ve heard rumblings of signed art prints, and super exclusive batches of a certain writer’s rare-breed grape jam.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Unlikely Academia, or Why We All Want to Go to Hogwarts

~ N. Barischoff ~ Leave a comment

In a very splendid piece of writerly news, my novelette Follow Me Down will appear in Unlikely Story’s upcoming Journal of Unlikely Academia, a collection of stories devoted exclusively to strange and fantastical institutions of learning.

Yes, that means every wonderful thing you think it does: complicated lessons in magic, syllabaries of untranslatable runes and long-forgotten languages, tomes of alchemal wisdom, hidden passages to hidden libraries, sacred objects of divination…

As my third pro-rate sale, this qualifies me for full active membership in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (be sure to visit my snazzy new updated SFWA profile in the coming weeks!) and I truly do not think I could have conjured a better hat trick! Seriously, for a proud Ravenclaw, and long-time scholar at Jordan College, what could be finer?

(The answer is nothing could be finer. Check out Unlikely Story this August and discover how the experts navigate supernatural pregnancy at the New York College of Theogony and Preternatural Obstetrics!)     

So, this has me thinking. What is it that appeals to us about these magical schools? What exactly causes us to want to gallivant around Lyra’s Oxford with only our daemons as company? What’s so thrilling about finally having puzzled out, by long and scientifically rigorous processes, what Hogwarts house we empirically belong to? (before Pottermore, children, we did it the old-fashioned way, by the blood-tainted sweat of our fevered brows!).

The secret, powerful bastion of knowledge seems to be an ever-renewable story concept. There are always new school stories in speculative fiction, strange places to learn strange things. There were, of course, a rash of fantastical school stories trailing in the wake of Harry Potter, some of them entertainingly derivative, some beautiful, some painfully sloppy. But long before readers rushed to the post-Hogwarts succor of  Rick Riordan’s  The Lightning Thief,  or Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, there were books like Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea , and even Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game to school us in things unusual.

Part of the reason the schoolroom remains such a wet well for telling speculative stories has to do with the nature of speculative fiction itself. Speculative Fiction is all about rules. It’s about acclimating the reader to a special set  of laws that govern the universe of the story.  Who becomes a ghost and why? How much blood to make a spell work? Which carefully selected fourteen year-olds will pilot our giant battle-robots?

School is a natural setting for learning new rules. In an almost literal sense, a writer can sit her reader down and say “Listen up! Pay attention! There’ll be a test on this!” School settings are an ideal place to dump exposition, install important plot devices, and world-build. The fantastical school is, in a lot of ways, specially formatted for a wide-eyed protagonist to uncover  and explore it.

But it’s not just the story opportunities they offer writers that make school stories appealing. Such stories always seem to find an effusive audience, no matter how many times writers write them.

I suspect that a larger part of the draw for readers-we bookish, we nerdy, we asthmatic few- is the bright, shimmering meritocracy that is school itself.  School is a place for learning the laws of the universe, but it’s also a place for learning new skills, for testing previously untested powers (magical or otherwise). It’s a place where, if you are clever enough and quick enough and skilled enough, and hard-working enough, the world will unfold like a paper fortune-teller and reveal to you its secrets.

The true nerd ever suspects that there is some radiant untold truth she has yet to set eyes on waiting just behind the curtain. In a small way, she really believes in great, powerful books she hasn’t read, and great powerful tables of elements with which she is not familiar, and great, powerful maps of places she has never heard of. Because the world is always full of strange new things to know.

Hooray for Locus, Ellen Kushner, and Early Reviews!

~ N. Barischoff ~ Leave a comment

So, holy crap! The people have cast their votes. The Locus Award finalists are in, and it appears that the home of my very first pro sale, Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction From the Margins of History has made the shortlist for Best Anthology!

That’s some truly head-exploding news for a baby writer to wake up to. It’s been over a year, and I still feel dizzyingly fortunate to have been a part of something as varied and wonderful as Long Hidden. To discover that other people find it to be  as utterly full of wonders as I do…  well, that’s just the most beautiful and sparking icing on the cake I can think of.

Very few people can say that their first paid work as a writer found a home in such company as Tananarive Due, Sofia Samatar, Sarah Pinsker, Ken Liu, Thoraiya Dyer, Christina Lynch… and even fewer people can say that their first paid work was part an anthology so well-appreciated that it incited its readers to want to bestow on it something  they’d normally only give to that Song of Ice and Fire guy.

Needless to say, I’m crazy humbled. Congratulations to all my Long Hidden betters, in particular to the radiant Sofia Samatar, whose absolutely wonder-stuffed, “Ogres of East Africa” is up for Best Short Story. Good luck everyone. In the words of the marginalized poet, Fezzik the Giant: “Inigo… I hope we win!”

In other writerly news, the order period for the e-book Angels of the Meanwhile has been extended for one glorious month. You now have until June 1st to order this eclectic and beautifully strange volume of prose, poetry, and short fiction. And, good God, if we’re gonna talk about icing, another one of my favorite living authors, Ellen Kushner, has added her prose piece to the table of contents! How cool is that? I’ll tell you. It’s ridiculously cool. It’s a dog-pile of cool.

So, for the price of your choosing, you get poetry by the shimmering Catherynne M. Valente, (oh my God!!), prose by the unbeatable Ellen Kushner (oh my God, folks, oh my God!!!) a new story by me (it’s a nice, short one) and tons of other cool works, both new and previously published. Here’s the link again, for those of you who need it. Just ignore the place where it tells you the pre-order ends May 1st. JUNE 1st is your date. Go and do it!

http://alexandraerin.dreamwidth.org/638796.html

Also, most nerve-wrackingly, the reviews have already started to trickle in for Accessing the Future. I’m sure it will all be very exciting, once I stop hyperventilating and shake the feeling back into my legs. Before I go, check out this early shout-out from Publishers Weekly! Nice work Future Crew, we snagged a star! (my pirates earned themselves a little mention, too!)

http://publishersweekly.com/pw/reviews/single/978-0-9573975-4-5

Meanwhile…

~ N. Barischoff ~ Leave a comment

In writerly news, the crazy cool limited edition e-book Angels of the Meanwhile finally has a table of contents! Check it out, and tell me you don’t wanna get your hands on this little morsel!

http://alexandraerin.dreamwidth.org/638796.html

For the low, low, price of whatever the hell you want, you can read my story “Changed” along with poetry and prose by at least thirty other wicked, quirky, beautiful astounding authors  (Cat Valente, folks! It doesn’t get quirkier or more beautiful than that!)

While there’s no centralized theme to this anthology, you’ll find my little winged debutante tucked in amongst dozens of mermaids, monster girls, witches and wonders just like her.

You’ve got until May 1st to buy this thing, after which I turn into an unseasonably early pumpkin. Get it now. Save me from being a pumpkin, and help someone whose insurance company is essentially putting a band-aid on her torn tendon and telling her to walk it off! Let’s make lives better with some art!

Space Pirates, and Some Angels

~ N. Barischoff ~ Leave a comment

In latest writerly news, the official release date of the anthology Accessing the Future, home of my big bad space pirates as well as fourteen other brand-new disability-themed science fiction stories, has been set for July 1st.

I don’t write with great frequency about disability (for reasons I will discuss at length in a later post)  but I’m very happy that my hard-bitten little space opera, “Pirate Songs” has found a home in something like Accessing the Future, alongside such talents as Sarah Pinsker and Rachael K. Jones.

Accessing the Future is not a collection of essays on the stigmatization of disability thinly disguised as fiction; It is a collection that endeavors to create windows into several varied embodied experiences of disability, as well as to create a dialogue about disability as a relative concept. What would a “disability” be in a future where the landscape of ability is radically different from that which we now inhabit?  Given that “disability” is a relative term, and thus, like “poverty”, will always exist, what technologies and spaces will exist in the future for the optimization of personal ability?

It’s got Mech- battles, generation ships, sex in zero-gravity, crazy hologram use, genetic engineering, all that good shit!

And, oh my God, space pirates! Holy cats, did I have fun writing the space pirates!(New Idea: we desperately need an SF/F anthology that centers around pirates–historical, modern, futuristic, fantastical, of space, cyberspace, and sea–and the reasons why we’re so obsessed with them. Kickstarter, anyone?)

Also in writerly news, a tiny little piece of historical fantasy called “Changed” (you might call it my “A Very Young Girl With Enormous Wings” story) will appear in an e-chapbook  alongside one of my absolute favorite authors, Catherynne M. Valente (squee! I never thought I would actually use the word squee!) and many other glowingly brilliant authors and artists (like the amazing Rose Lemberg, and neo-pagan folk musician SJ Tucker. Read the full table of contents here: http://alexandraerin.dreamwidth.org/638796.html ).

The e-book, entitled Angels of the Meanwhile will be a collection of new and previously published works, incidentally released the day before  Accessing the Future, NEVER TO BE RELEASED AGAIN! and the only way to get it is to pre-order it from the link below. Order now, folks! Pay what you can. All donations go to pay for the desperately-needed surgery of  a very loved and well-respected lady.

http://alexandraerin.dreamwidth.org/636831.html