Angels of the Meanwhile

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

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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