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