You see…due to the intransigence of the new owners at the sf digest magazines (as well as the mystery magazines), I can no longer send them my short fiction. I actually had to pull some stories that were already sold but did not yet have a contract. Long story short, contract negotiations went extremely poorly. (I blogged about this as it went on through May on my Patreon page. Take a look at this post if you’re curious.) I will write a lot more about this in the next few weeks, because I’ll be making some changes to the way I market things.

This Kickstarter is the beginning of the changes. The Kickstarter features four science fiction novellas. Three were published in Asimov’s in the past two years, and two of the novellas are this year’s Readers Choice nominees. The third, “Weather Duty,” appeared in early 2025.

The fourth novella is brand new. It was sitting on Sheila Williams’ desk as the contract negotiations for another story started and ultimately failed. So no one has read this novella. If you back the Kickstarter, you’ll be among the first.

The Kickstarter contains all kinds of goodies as rewards. All of my Diving novels so far. All of the Retrieval Artist novels so far. More novellas. Some writing workshops.

With all of those rewards, you’ll get the novellas. I’m proud of them and I think you’ll enjoy them.

The Kickstarter just went live, so hurry on over and take a look!

You can get them all with a simple click. But they go away in about 48 hours. So hurry on over.

And, in case you’re on the fence, here’s the blurb for “Maelstrom.”

I also taught a workshop on science fiction mysteries, and as I often do, I assigned a couple of books for the reading list that I hadn’t read yet. I searched and searched and searched for good sf mystery anthologies. The ones I was familiar with (and/or published in) were out of print and unavailable for my online students. (I could find enough copies for my in-person students.) The anthology I did find (which I hadn’t read), well, it turned out to be a good teaching tool, just not in the way that the editors intended. It looks like they invited a lot of good writers who just weren’t up to the task, and felt the need to use the work anyway. Sigh. Looks like I might have to do an sf/mystery anthology all my own. (If you’re interested in the in-person workshops, click here. The one next January is nearly full.)

January 2024

Chiarella, Tom, “Henry Winkler’s 6 Lessons of Reinvention,” AARP The Magazine, October/November, 2023. Lovely article about the things learned across a career. Henry Winkler and I share a diagnosis of dyslexia. The difference between us is that I was taught to read by my sister, who also had dyslexia. She had figured out a coping mechanism that allowed me to see words as pictures, rather than an accumulation of letters. I was able to read easily (spelling was much, much harder). Henry Winkler could not. Yet he figured out ways of getting by as well, and making a career even though he couldn’t act quickly on some things.

The choices we make and the ways we cope end up moving our lives forward. I’ve rarely seen an article that captures this so well.

Coates, Tyler, “‘Queerness Was Part of His Strategic Gift,” The Hollywood Reporter, November 27, 2023.  A Netflix film, Rustin, last year brought proper attention to Bayard Rustin and his importance to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. I had no idea Rustin had been lost to history. (Not to me) Nor did I know some of the personal things about him, because I use primary materials in my writing when I work on Smokey Dalton. Rustin’s sexuality caused issues that I hadn’t been aware of, but which makes some comments I saw make sense in retrospect. Fascinating article, and no, I haven’t seen the film yet, but I most certainly will, as I ramp up Smokey in the next several months. Until then, watch the film and read this, and learn about an amazing man.

Day, Sarah, and Pratt, Tim, “Overclocked Holmes,” The Reinvented Detective, edited by Cat Rambo & Jennifer Brozek, Caezik, 2023. If you’re read (or watched) too much Sherlock Holmes, then this is the story for you. It’s a riff on artificial intelligence—”a great weird failure of the back half of the twenty-first century”— with so many Holmesian in-jokes that I’m not sure I caught them all. Try this one just for the fun of it.

DeFrank, Sean, “1983: Dawn of the City of Sports,” rjmagazine, Fall 2023. Las Vegas reinvents itself almost daily, so sometimes it feels like we go through almost fifty years worth of change in a decade. CNN is doing a documentary series on the city’s history, and yep, that kinda confirms the feeling. This article from one of the local publications does as well. We are becoming the sports capitol of the country as we add more and more teams. Because Las Vegas is a destination in and of itself, people come here to watch their team play our team. So the professional sports industry went from nearly nothing when we moved here six years ago to this explosion now.

DeFrank’s article looks at the seeds which were planted in 1983 that made this sports boom possible. Fascinating stuff.

Kowal, Mary Robinette, The Spare Man, Tor, 2022. I’m sorry to say that this is the first Mary Robinette Kowal novel I’ve read. I’ve been meaning to read the others, because I love her short fiction, but I never got around to them. So…I assigned this book for the sf mystery class and am I glad I did. This book is marvelous. It’s the Thin Man in space, with beautiful setting, characters that live and breathe, and a truly sf solution to the various crimes. I hope she writes more in this series, because I am soooo there.

Marcus, Gary and Southern, Reid, “Generative AI Has a Visual Plagiarism Problem,” IEEE Spectrum, January 6, 2024. Ironically enough, the bot on my Pocket app sent me to this story, because clearly I read a lot on generative AI. The authors are a scientist & writer, and a film industry visual concept artist.  They use as scientific a method as they could manage to figure out if generative AI had a plagiarism problem and whoa, boy, did they discover that it did. They also got banned repeatedly from Midjourney for their efforts. Lots to digest here. In particular, look at the comparison to Napster. As I’ve been saying for years now, do not use these generative AI programs until the legal side settles out. Read this.

Morehouse, Lyda, “Go Ask A.L.I.C.E.,” The Reinvented Detective, edited by Cat Rambo & Jennifer Brozek, Caezik, 2023. A wonderfully reimagined trope about a group trying to protect a former sex bot. This story is well done with good suspense, great characters, and a well-defined world. (Something most of the stories in this volume lacked.)

Redgate, Riley, Noteworthy, Amulet, 2017. I loved this book. I binged it. It’s the story of Jordan Sun, a scholarship student at an elite performing arts school. She can never get cast in one of the musicals because her voice is too deep and there aren’t a lot of parts for Alto 2. So…she auditions for a boys’ acapella group instead…as a boy. And gets in, causing her to go to class as a girl and rehearsal as a boy. It sounds like a typical Shakespearean boy/girl swap, but it’s much more than that. The book is actually a great reflection on modern gender norms and on being accepted. It’s quite (ahem) noteworthy. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

Robbins, Dean, “A Media-History Miracle,” On Wisconsin, Fall, 2023. This is almost a public service announcement for those of you who like media history. The University of Wisconsin has an online archive of film and broadcasting publications. It’s got cool stuff. Take a look at this article, and then head to the online site.

Smith, Gene, American Gothic: The Story of America’s Legendary Theatrical Family—Junius, Edwin, and John Wilkes Booth, Touchstone, 1992. I read a yellowed paperback edition of this book, but there is an ebook version. I’m not really sure you’d want to read it. My muse has been directing me to various non-fiction reading projects and this is one of them. I’m not even sure where I got the book. I’m not sure how I will use this in my writing either, only that I will at some point.

I have never read a book about the acting family. I did know that Edwin continued acting and had become the biggest actor in America after his brother’s hideous assassination of Abraham Lincoln. I had no idea how Edwin managed to go on, but it sounds like he had already divorced himself from John and tried to give up acting for a while. He didn’t manage it.

I think the thing I found most fascinating about the book, though, is that this was one crazy family. All of them. That something went seriously awry was not a surprise. What went awry was.

Again, I’m not sure any of you would want to read this, but it’s interesting. And beautifully written…

Turtledove, Harry, “In The Shadow of The Great Days,” The Reinvented Detective, edited by Cat Rambo & Jennifer Brozek, Caezik, 2023. I’d say this is the best story in the book (and that is absolutely the truth), but that’s damning with faint praise. The story is amazing. In about 5,000 words, Harry creates a future that’s believable and tactile, so rich that I knew it from the first paragraph. This is how to write a science fiction detective story. It’s a master class.

We only have one spot left in the science fiction class, and the fantasy class is filling up quickly. The other two classes still have a handful of spots.

If you want the sf class, though, now is the time to sign up, because once it starts, you can’t join us.

Here’s the link to more information and how to sign up.

They did so with Gallery of His Dreams, which was a cover story for Asimov’s (my first there), and a limited edition and a many-times reprint. It got nominated for every award in the sf field that existed and that it was eligible for at the time. And, weirdly for me (then and now), almost everyone in the field had read the story, whether they liked it or not.

That’s not what I remember the most about it, though. I remember writing it in my crappy apartment, staring at the wall, with a kitchen to my right that was literally falling apart. In fact, a few weeks later, the kitchen ceiling would collapse, making the place unusable for some time…and my crummy landlord balked at fixing it until I cited chapter and verse of Oregon tenant law to get him off his crooked ass.

I had been entranced by Mathew Brady’s Civil War photographs for a very long time. Not so much by the controversy of him posing the corpses, although that’s there, but of the mission he felt and what it cost him. Gallery is, at its heart, a story about being an artist and doing what you believe, even if it’s not the best business decision. I guess I was preaching to that choir right from the very beginning.

This is the last of the six novellas that I promised to tell you about. (You can read the other posts here, here, here, here, and here.) All six are available until 7 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time as part of a Kickstarter. There are other award-winning stories of mine that you can get through all the stretch goals that we’ve hit, so go take a look. But hurry. The Kickstarter will vanish at 7:01.

I was, in the parlance of children, eight-and-a-half. Apollo 8 had left Earth’s orbit and was the first crewed spaceflight to fly to the Moon. They orbited 10 times. What I remember the most, though, was their travel to “the backside” of the Moon. Their signal would cut out. The first time it happened, no one knew if they would make it back into signal range. Or at least, no one—according to my memory of 56 years ago.

My parents always had the TV on. Always. If they were awake (and there was something on the air), the TV was on. Which meant I watched the Apollo 8 mission start to finish. It happened at Christmastime, and had this lovely moment (as recalled on NASA.gov):

On Christmas morning, mission control waited anxiously for word that Apollo 8’s engine burn to leave lunar orbit had worked. They soon got confirmation when Lovell radioed, “Roger, please be informed there is a Santa Claus.”

Yep. There was. Apollo 8 has appeared in my fiction a number of times, but never like it had in this story. I think the germ for Recovering Apollo 8 was born in that fear I experienced throughout the mission, that these men would be lost. They weren’t. In our world, all went well.

But in the world of Recovering Apollo 8, the worst happened. And provided the catalyst for other kinds of space travel.

This novella, highly acclaimed and award-winning, is one of the six novellas in the current Kickstarter, which ends tomorrow night. You can get it, five more novellas, and at least five more novelettes (maybe another, if we hit another stretch goal). Check it out here. To find out more about the writing of the other novellas, go here, here, here, and here. I’ll post one more tomorrow.

A book editor of mine, Lou Anders, asked me to take part in an anthology of his. Sideways in Crime is a really good anthology of alternate history crime stories. I was writing something else at the time, under deadline, that was eating my brain. I suspect it was a Smokey Dalton novel, because those take a lot of concentration. I figured I had maybe three days to write a story for Lou, but it had to be historical and well thought out and logical and about a crime.

So I told Dean at lunch (at our favorite Thai restaurant in Lincoln City, which I still miss) that I couldn’t write this. I didn’t have time to do it justice. He said, “Pick a time period you’re familiar with.” I shrugged, and still said no. So he tossed out a bunch of ideas.

The American Civil War? No. World War II? No. The 1960s? Yeah, doing that already, but not in sf. Okay, but what if RFK didn’t die? Blerg. Not interested. What if J. Edgar Hoover—Wait! Give it a minute.

Crap, the brain started going. What if someone murdered that evil little man? He was blackmailing everyone in government. What if someone had enough?

So I had my opening scene, and I even had all of the research books. I researched for an entire day, set the thing in NYC, because I had just finished a book set in 1960s NYC and not only had the research materials, but the lived memory of writing that.

The story poured out and I mailed it and Lou took it…and “G-Men” ended up in two year’s best volumes, one for sf and one for mystery. It was also nominated for the Sidewise Award For Best Alternate History.

Not only that, but I had a great time writing it.

Y’know that old saying about writing fast equals writing bad. Yeah, that’s sooooo wrong.

The reason I’m tell you all about this is because “G-Men” is one of the novellas in the 6 SF Novella Kickstarter that we’re running until late Thursday. You can get it, along with five other award-winning and/or critically acclaimed novellas, if you back the Kickstarter for $25.

And because we’ve been hitting stretch goals, you’ll also get five award-winning and/or acclaimed sf novelettes of mine as well. (And a few writing workshops to use yourself or share with friends.) There are lots of other rewards to choose from, so take a look. Click here for the link.

If you want to find out about the other novellas, I’ve written up three of them. You can find those posts here, here, and here. I hope to get to the last two in the remaining hours of the Kickstarter. Enjoy!

Not changing it now, though.

I promised you all I’d tell little background stories about the novellas that are in the Six Science Fiction Novellas Kickstarter which goes until Thursday.

For about ten years or so, the Universitat Politèchnica de Catalunya in Barcelona held a worldwide science fiction novella contest. It was a blind contest (meaning that you submitted anonymously) with huge prizes, funded by the university, the Spanish government, and a few other places. I got paid more for the novellas that placed in this contents (and there was more than one) than I did for a couple of novels. In addition, the novella was reprinted in an anthology that was published in both Spanish and Catalan editions. It was cool…but it became a victim of the Great Recession. When the contest was briefly revived, you had to pay to enter, something I never do.

Anyway, I made sure I wrote a novella per year that I could submit to the contest. I could sell the novella in English after the contest was over, and usually did, often to Asimov’s. Not every novella I wrote placed, but a few did and a couple won the overall prize.

This novella won one of the prizes. The interesting thing about The End of the World, though, is that it is one of the few that I did not write specifically for the contest. I wrote it for an anthology that Mike Resnick was editing for The Science Fiction Book Club called Alien Crimes.

I have no idea where the actual story came from. It features Eastern Oregon, which was going through some changes as I wrote this, and maybe some horrid things I’d learned about the state around that time. There were massacres in Oregon as well as entire groups (from the Chinese to the Native Americans to the Black population) that were chased out of various communities. We won’t even talk about the racist elements of Oregon’s state constitution that remained in place into the late 20th century.

I’m sure all of that got mixed into the stew of The End of the World. I always write what I want to write and what intrigues me. What you will read at the opening of this story is what I started with, and it provided me with the questions about what happens next as well as why did this happen at all.

Now, fast forward to late 2023. I was getting ready to teach an sf mystery class (that I mention in the video for this Kickstarter). I wanted the class to read Alien Crimes. I figured it had to have an ebook edition, right?

No. And at the time, there were only about 10 copies available on Bookfinder.com.  The original publication is rare. In order to have my students read all of those novellas at the same time, I would have had to recreate the book, which I didn’t want to do.

Discovering that the volume Mike edited was out of print and hard to find, as well as another volume that I will mention later in this little series, really lit a fire under me. Through WMG Publishing, we had reprinted all of my sf novellas but we hadn’t done a lot of discoverability on most of them. That’s what this Kickstarter is for, to bring them back to your attention.

It does make me sad, though, that the volume of Alien Crimes is no longer easy to find. Every editor puts their work together in a way that creates yet another form of art. I hate it when these anthologies disappear.

Anyway…the title. It is accurate. It just isn’t exciting. Still, the story is one of my very favorites and I love the cover.

I hope you’ll pick up The End of the World with the other five novellas, and all of the sf novelettes that will come with the stretch goals. Click here to take a peek. Enjoy!

We’re going to start with a personal favorite of mine: The Tower.

I’m a history nut and a crime fiction nut. A million stories have been written—and maybe a million more discussed—about ways to steal the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London. I know I first contemplated that very thing as I stared at those jewels when I visited the Tower of London the first time while in high school.

The idea never left me. Many years later, I was reading about the Tower shortly after I had broken my left elbow. The time travel element came to me in the middle of that ordeal, because who doesn’t want to go back through time and redo a moment that caused physical pain? I tried to write this novella longhand because I couldn’t type and, well, writing longhand for a person who has been typing since she was eight was a nearly impossible task.

So, this story got to percolate a little longer. And percolate it did, until one day after yet another visit to the Tower, I figured out how this very thing might get done. I wrote the novella quickly, and yes, yes, I know, there’s the germ of a novel here. Maybe I’ll write that too.

The Tower is but one of the novellas you’ll get if you back this Kickstarter at $25 or above. You’ll also get (at the time of this writing) three novelettes and a writing workshop, because we hit our first three stretch goals. Also at the time of this writing, we’re doing a short-term stretch goal. If we hit 170 backers by Monday night, every backer at the $25 and above level will get another novelette and yet another writing workshop. Take a peek at the Kickstarter for all the details.

The realization made me sad. I had some great stories in those anthologies. But it wasn’t just me. Several other writers had amazing stories in them. I was not willing to put the time in to have WMG reprint other people’s anthologies, but the entire experience did get me thinking about discoverability. It was a mental nag, something that reverberated in my mind and in my heart.

Fast forward to that same workshop. The in-person writers were amazing. I suspect you’ll see their work in the science fiction magazines soon, because these pieces were original and very creative. We finished, as we often do, with an invitation to write a novella in a few weeks that I would read. People did take me up on that, and I am reading the last of those novellas now. (Spoiler alert: they’re good.)

But I did not feel creatively satisfied as a writer or as a teacher. I really wanted to teach a novella class in person, and I investigated it for like the 100th time. To teach that class would require me to take two weeks out of my life to work on in-person classes, and the differences between the different novella forms, and all that reading. It would require the students to come to Las Vegas, stay for two weeks (minimum) and work their butts off. It wasn’t tenable. So Dean and I came up with series of novella classes that will spread over 9 weeks. Students study the forms at home, and in the end, write a novella that I will read. (For more information, check this out.)

That niggle hit me again. That discoverability niggle. I wanted folks to read my sf novellas, the ones that haven’t been part of the discussion (if there still is one) for a while now. The Diving novellas that Asimov’s publishes are part of the conversation. People bring them up to me all the time.

But these? The standalones? They seem to be one and done, unless something draws the readers attention to it.

So…I mentioned this, and somehow the entire team got behind a Kickstarter to raise awareness about my sf novellas. We have put six into this Kickstarter.

They are the award-winning Gallery of His Dreams, The Tower, the award-winning Recovering Apollo 8, September at Wall and Broad, the award-winning The End of the World, and the novella that hit two year’s best books in two different genres, G-Men.

Stretch goals, should we hit them, will include many of my sf novelettes, also standalone.

We had to redo covers and reissue some of the paper editions to make them comply with standards of the 2020s. We had to dust them off, in other words, so that they’d be worth reading as you all rediscover them.

They’re not all of my standalone sf novellas, but they cover some good ground.

And as we did this, I looked at all of the other novellas I’ve written—the ones that are not in any series—and realized that yes, indeedie do, I have standalone novellas in romance and mystery and fantasy…

But we’re going to focus on this bunch for the next ten days.

If you want to see what we’re doing, head over to Kickstarter using this link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/403649867/six-science-fiction-novellas

As the two weeks progress, I’ll talk about the experiences of writing the novellas. I’ll post six different blogs along the way. Those are always fun to write.

But not quite as much fun as writing novellas…