Yeah, it’s been a while. And while I really enjoyed the audio posts I was doing, I think I need to call a hiatus on them for the time being; some of it is hosting issues and a lot of it is just that lately I haven’t felt much motivation to sit down in front of my dinky little mic and ramble at you. So if you were enjoying those, thanks so much for listening, and this is me telling you that I really hope that they’ll return at some point soon. Possibly when I’m in a better place, mental health-wise.

There’s something about spring semesters, I swear.

There is news, though.

• First and foremost, I’m very late announcing this here given that I’ve been talking about it a lot of other places on the internets, but I’ve sold what I’ve affectionately taken to calling The Big Gay Space Opera – what I co-wrote with a BFF of mine – to Samhain Publishing, under the title Line & Orbit (previously Rosetta). Right now the release date is slated for sometime in early 2013. It will be out in both ebook formats and trade paperback. I’m really, really excited about it, you guys, I can’t even tell you. It’s been a long, strange road with this book and I’m really happy it’s finally found a good home. Right now we’re just in the early editing phase but watch this space for much more about it once I have more to give. I’m hoping to throw together some contests and freebies and whatnot.
• I’ve sold a slipstreamy piece of something called “The Scarred Utopian Takes a Wife” to Jabberwocky, for release this fall. I love Jabberwocky, so that’s awesome.
• My story “The Thick Night”, which originally appeared in Strange Horizons, will be reprinted in the 2012 edition of Lethe Press’s Heiresses of Russ: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction, due out this winter. Also very awesome, especially given the company it looks like I’ll be in.

That’s pretty much it for the moment. Given that the audio thing is on hiatus I’ll be trying to post here more regularly, though. Who knows: I might even try my hand at actually writing things about things again. Shock and awe.

Yes, I’ve finally done another one of these. Yay. In here I talk about Scheherazade’s Facade, its path to publication, and the very awesome message that I think has been sent by the fact that it is fully funded and in fact was funded way, way before the deadline. Which? By the way? Thank you. Very, very happy.

Additionally, if we hit $10k in the remaining time, the editor is putting those funds toward a science fiction edition of the anthology, which would be awesome. So this is not over yet.

I also read a bit of my story, “The Cloak of Isis”, as well as wax slightly neurotic about it. Which is always fun. My neurosis is at least somewhat related to a post I made in my Dreamwidth recently on representation in fiction and the issues inherent in trying to write about a marginalized person’s experience when it’s not an experience that you technically share (basically I feel like it’s something that people should try, provided that they’re willing to learn from fuck-ups).

I want to keep doing these – not sure if anyone is really listening or not but I enjoy it – but I think I may need to investigate other hosting options, since my Soundcloud minutes are running out. Hm.

In the meantime, I have other really really awesome news to report but I can’t until things are more official, so in the meantime I’m just going to be obnoxiously cryptic about it. Oooh.

And now, gentle reader, let me tell you that that attractive specimen of royalty might be you.

Yes, Scheherazade’s Facade is alive again and in Kickstarter form. Circlet Press, bless their freaky hearts, are taking over the actual distribution of the book, but we still need funds to do this right. Fortunately, as of this writing, we’re already over halfway to our goal, with most of a month left to go! But we’re not there yet and we still need you.

Can you contribute? Spread the word? Both? Oh, fetching nobility, do say you will. This enchanted bed isn’t really all that comfy.

So that’s good.

A couple of note-worthy things:

• Circlet Press has fixed the malware issue on their site and it’s now safe to once again go and cast your vote for your top five favorite Circlet stories to be included in their best-of anthology. And again, my story “Catch & Release” is up for a vote, so if you haven’t voted for it that would be a lovely thing to do.
• I’ve fixed some of the broken links on my fiction page; stories on sites that have vanished into the ether are now linked in their Archive.org editions. I may actually host the stories here myself, but for now this seems like an okay stopgap. I’ve also linked to the Smashwords edition of “We Are Such Stuff”, lately out of print from Torquere Press.
• I’m still working on the untitled angel novel and I really like where it’s going now.
• Stay tuned for some super-awesome amazing news in the next week or so. Seriously, I can hardly stand it how much I want to talk about this right now.

Hopefully next week — or possibly even this Friday — we’ll be back with more audio. In the meantime, wash your hands carefully and frequently. Cough cough.

Fresh new post-comps edition of the ongoing podcast-esque project. I talk about something I’m running into in one of the books I’m currently reading that is proving to be a barrier to me really immersing myself in its world, and that I feel is often a stumbling block when it comes to constructing really vital, believable fantastic worlds of any kind – especially hard to deal with because of its subtlety.

I also read a bit from one of my current two WIPs (short SF time travel-gone-wrong piece). The text of it is after the cut. Enjoy.

- – -

CERA is telling me that the visual feed is fine. I curse again and I shove her back into another round of diagnostics. I have no idea if an AI at her level can feel–that kind of thing is for the people who made her to puzzle over, though after a year in training with her and a third of a second in nearly constant uplink you’d think I’d know her well enough to tell–but I could swear that she’s getting tense. Or perhaps I’m projecting. Perhaps it’s my own tension. I’m taking deep breaths. I’m making myself relax into the folds of my cocoon. Easy. Easy.

I understand that, in theory, the system could have broken down in such a way that CERA can’t see the damage even when she runs the full set of diagnostics. I know that this is possible. But knowing it is useless. We have no plan for that scenario.

CERA, if the visual is working then why can’t I see stars?

Unknown, CERA pings me, and of course it is. Without any of the rest of the sensory array, how could she even begin to collect herself into an answer?

Speculate?

It’s a half-literal stab in the dark. I don’t even know if CERA can speculate on that level. I drift in the cocoon, in warm darkness, and I listen to the silence of her thinking. I know it’s wild anachronism, but I imagine immense gears turning in blackness, grinding through numbers like meat.

It is a remote possibility that the craft has emerged into normal space-time far beyond the edge of any local galactic groups or clusters.

I have to take a breath and hold it, listening to my pulse pounding between my ears. That would be beyond miscalculation. That would be disaster. Which I planned for before I climbed into my soft cocoon world. Or I told myself I was planning for it. But it’s never quite the same as being faced with the fact of it, is it? You think you can teach yourself to expect the worst, to train your mind to bend around and against it like a reed. But so often, it’s a lie.

Some things you can’t plan for.

How remote is the possibility?

CERA tells me. I swallow the number down and it burns in the core of me. Really, I know, it doesn’t matter how remote the possibility is if it’s actually what’s happened. I float and I try to think. I turned off the visuals what feels like hours ago, but now I cut them back in again and stare at the darkness.

Nothing. Not even the tiniest, faintest specks of light. If the rest of the sensory array was online I would have ultraviolet, infrared. But I don’t.

All I have is what’s in front of me. I just need to be sure of what that is.

CERA, I say. Give me full manual interface.

Immediately I can feel it, a kind of ticking over into a widening of everything. The visuals are still engaged as I dive into her, spreading myself into her channels and pathways, hunting for a sign.

The book in question, for any interested readers, does appear to be available for pretty cheap prices in both hardcover and paperback on Amazon. I’m sure it can be gotten elsewhere, too. And yes, it really is entirely worth it.

Circlet’s made a business of putting out not only top-notch erotica but also top-notch writing, period – I’ve been continually impressed by the quality of work that I’ve seen them put out, and it’s been an honor to be a part of the anthologies in which they’ve included me. They were actually my very first publication ever and I’ll always be grateful to them. Congrats, Circlet. Here’s to many more years of SFnal porny goodness.

I’m including a lengthy and NSFW excerpt of “Catch and Release” below the cut.

- – -

It takes him a second or two to get the field down with how much his hands are shaking, but he calms them, closes his eyes and takes a few breaths, and even the stale, recycled air is soothing when pulled in at that amount. When he opens his eyes again, the field is down, and it takes another couple of commands to lower the tray and open the column’s panels with a soft hiss, making an opening he can walk through.

Everything echoes tinnily once he’s inside, and usually he doesn’t spend much time in here, the air strangely thin and a profound feeling that he is somehow closer to the vacuum here than at any other point in the ship except the main airlock, which he knows isn’t true, but he also knows by now that here, feelings count for a great deal.

And still he hesitates, standing over the little cylinder. It doesn’t look like anything. He knows that technically, he could be bathing in radiation, though the scan at least hadn’t detected any emissions of any kind. Still. He swallows hard, bends and picks up the thing.

It’s astonishingly light for how dense it’s supposed to be. It feels as though it might contain nothing. So perhaps it does. He turns it over in his hands, squinting at it in the bright lights that ring the inside of the intake column. It’s smooth, metallic, featureless but for a small panel set into one end. He knows he shouldn’t touch it. He touches it. It depresses very slightly. He knows he shouldn’t press it. He presses it.

Later, he will decide that any number of things could have made him do it. The laughter of the people in the pub, the flush in his face, or the boy-self, lying on the rooftops of the new Baghdad, staring up and dreaming star-dreams. Aiwa. Dreams that stayed that way, only dreams melting away into the everyday slog that his life up here has become. To catch something big. To have a good story to tell, one that doesn’t make them laugh or make his face burn. Yes, it could be so.

But he will also know that none of those things is the real reason why. He will know that it is her. And here she is, standing in front of him, her long hair full of starlight.

It’s the hair that he sees, at first and most clearly. Then the rest of her comes into focus, though whether it’s his eyes or reality he’ll never be sure. Her long limbs, almost bizarrely slender, a half inch away from alien, the transparency of her flesh, her essential nudity. He can see the lights of the column shining through her cheeks. Her skin has a faintly blueish tinge. her eyes are closed, and she is making no attempt to cover herself, though her hair floats around her and now and then passes over her small breasts. Suleiman looks down, momentarily unable to draw breath, and he sees that the tips of her toes are only just brushing the floor.

Her eyes open. There are no pupils there, and they are the color of the densest parts of the Milky Way.

Have you come to kill me?

Suleiman shakes his head. It’s all he can think to do. Her voice is low, smooth, quiet, and does not even seem to be sound as he knows it, for it comes from the very center of his head. “I…” he starts, hands at his sides, though they already itch to reach for her with the same itch that brought him back up to this deck in the first place. “I found you.”

It occurs to him to wonder if he might already be dead.

She cocks her head slightly, lifting her arms in a kind of supplication that becomes a dance that becomes an echo of flight that becomes merely her, if she can be called “mere’ in any sense of the word, floating before him with her hands held out, palms up. Then my term is not ended? Am I still to be imprisoned? Are you still angry with me? She pauses then, and seems to look more closely at him. At another time and with another woman he would be ashamed of his rumpled clothing and his mussed hair, his face badly in need of a shave. But this is now, and she may not be a woman. He’s sure she isn’t.

She shakes her head slightly, and when she speaks again her voice is edged with slow realization. You are not my adjudicator.

“I am not.”

She steps forward without stepping, her star-filled hair rising around her as if blown by a breeze he can’t feel. Her hands lift with real purpose now, and the first time they touch him he thinks of ice so cold it burns. Then touch me, would-be liberator. Aiwa, touch me… it has been such a long time.

She does not have to tell him. She is already touching him, and to that he thinks there can only be one answer.

He manages to get them out of the cylinder and then they sink to the floor, her levitating body coming to rest on it at last, and he has time to wish that he kept this deck cleaner before she closes a burning kiss over his lips and he thinks of only her, her breasts curving into his palms as if they ache to be there, nipples so hard they no longer feel like flesh. When he pulls back to look at her beneath him, he can see light moving beneath that glass-like skin, not veins or organs but electrical impulses, tiny surges of power. He lowers his mouth to her, takes her nipple between his teeth and bites down and he could swear he sees sparks.

She moans and clutches at him, and it doesn’t take very much to make himself forget how different this is, how strange this is, how remarkable that he remembers how to do everything and that what he does can give her pleasure. He’s stripping off his rumpled clothes and she’s helping him with her icy fingers; he’s looking up for permission as he slides between her thighs and she’s already shoving his head down, gone from so calm to so frantic in a matter of minutes. She tastes like lightly sugared milk and the succulent juices of a broiled hen. She tastes like he somehow knew she would taste. She comes explosively and this time he knows he sees sparks under her skin, lines of chain lightning shooting up into what would be her spine.

She doesn’t give him time to rest and she does not take it for herself. She’s pulling at him again, dragging him up against her, gone from frantic to ravenous, and part of him is beginning to be a little bit afraid. She reaches between them and grasps at his cock and he cries out, because it hurts, it hurts almost as much as it did when he woke in his bunk with dreams of her and of Baghdad still echoing behind his eyes. She strokes him and the pain is bowled over and forgotten. She is opening her legs for him, rolling up with her hips, her whole body like a hungry mouth. He falls into her and she hooks her legs over his hips and takes him, her long arms curled around his neck and the whisper of a hundred half incomprehensible demands and entreaties between his ears.

She is Baghdad, he thinks fitfully. They are one and the same, new, ancient, enticing, hungry. Baghdad rebuilt, center of the new world, rich with the wealth of the global economy, swelling with all the nations, reaching out to take him in. Trying to hold on. Which is why he had run, and now he is caught again. She is Baghdad, gleaming and seductive; she is the stars over him and the hot roof beneath, she is the lights and the noise and she is touching him, and this time he doesn’t pull away.

Later, when they lie together in the tangle of his clothing and he notes that her skin shines without a drop of sweat, she tells him that she will give him a gift. She will let him choose how he dies.

I like doing these, and I like Soundcloud, but I think I may need to move to a different host. At some point I’m going to run out of space.

As always, please give me things to talk about if you want me to talk about about anything specific.

The text of the excerpt I read is under the cut.

- – -

Samir Ghani dodged the first punch but failed to evade the second. Pain exploded up through his jaw and into his skull, a spike of pale light stabbing into his temporal lobe and spidering out into the rest of him. He was sure he felt his teeth crunching into the inside of his cheek; he tasted blood. Someone was screaming, a wet and gasping sound. He had an awful suspicion that it might be him.

So much for a quiet evening.

Not that he really should have expected it. But one found oneself hoping, no matter how much one tried to restrain the impulse.

The punch had dropped him down to one knee; he rolled and tried to scramble away, the world doubling and lurching around him in a dim, warped image like a scene underwater. Was he under a table? Something was towering over him—a table, a person, flesh and furniture, and there wasn’t always the finest distinction between the two.

He was aware of other looming shapes, possibly animate and possibly not. He was aware of flashing lights, bass that thumped against the outside of his skull in time with the blood thumping against the inside. He was aware, even through the haze of pain and noise, of the sensation of being watched—on a large scale. The bar had been crowded when the fight began; he remembered that, even if the beginning of the fight itself was now as fuzzy and indistinct as his vision. The bar had been crowded, and every one of those people would welcome a free show. So they were probably the people he sensed watching him. And they were probably benign.

For now.

And then the shape looming over him took a heavy step forward and he was sure that at least one of them wasn’t benign at all.

“Take it easy, man,” he slurred. His lips weren’t being responsive. He swiped at them and his hand came away in a glistening smear of blood. Again, he tried to move backward, and his shoulder-blades struck an obstacle—rough edges, exposed brick. The wall. “You win, okay? Whatever, fuck it. You win.”

“Yeah,” the looming form rumbled, laughed a sound that was only a deeper and louder rumble, and then something like a sledgehammer slammed into Samir’s gut and the world faded out for a while.

When it swam back into focus he was in the air. For a moment he was simply confused in a foggy kind of way, blinking swollen eyes and trying to make sense of gravity, airflow, movement and the raucous cheers all around him. Then he got it, and the hard tug of his shirt under his arms helped. He was being lifted bodily up, held and turned around the room, displayed like a fucking trophy. Which he supposed he was. All those cheers, like rocks raining against the inside of his head—benign now?

In that they weren’t actively trying to hurt him. And what a low, sad benchmark that was.

“This is what fucking happens!” the looming man-thing was yelling, his voice rumbling over and under the noise of the crowd, the bass underpinning everything. “This is what you get!”

Then Samir was flying.

He expected it. That didn’t make it easier. The ceiling of the bar was strung with garlands of red lights, hung with crimson paper lanterns, and the whole room dissolved into a sickly red blur as he hurtled backward. It would have made him sick if he had stayed airborne longer, and he was almost thankful for the flimsy pressboard table that took the impact of his weight and then collapsed under it, pulling kinetic energy out of him and swallowing it down, glass shattering as it all hit the floor. He hoped that what he felt pooling at his back was just spilled beer. He didn’t think anything besides the table and the glasses were broken. Not as bad as it could be.

A kind of mantra, really. The chorus of his entire life. Not as bad as it could be.

How much longer might that be true?

Whatever. Perhaps judiciously, he passed out again.

New thing-what-I-don’t-feel-comfortable-calling-a-podcast. Turns out I’m feeling a lot better this week. Also I wrote a story that I actually like. I read a bit of it. Text of the excerpt is under the cut.

As always, please get in touch with me with any questions, anything you want me to read or talk about -  really anything.

- – -

There are the houses of bodies in the district of the dead, an entire section of the city marked off to stand in silent evidence of what happened. But then there are also the memorials at the city center, and we go there in the first warm swell of the afternoon before second sunrise. We’re accompanied by a Lejshethri guide; her name is Shairovin, and even for a Lejshethri she is long-limbed and graceful, floating rather than walking and making me feel heavy-footed and clumsy. At the memorial she stands quietly aside, her hands tucked into the folds of her light tunic. I note that it is the same color of blue as the cloth that wrapped the spine in the house of the dead.

The memorial itself is a single black spike one hundred feet high. It impales the sky. Shairovin has told us, in a tone that subtly suggested apology, that her people feel that it is too aggressive. Too accusing. They worried that it might maintain the terror that followed the killing weeks, when the colonists began preparing for the war of Lejshethrai retribution. The war that never came.

But we wanted it, so as with everything else, they stood aside and allowed it. “I think it is for you more than it is for us,” Shairovin said on the ride to the memorial. “All that business, what good it is to remember? It can’t be undone.”

She said that some of the Lejshethrai would just as soon bury the dead, clear the houses, and make use of the space. “We don’t wish animosity.” In the groundcar, she leaned forward, her narrow eyes widening to show her earnestness, her three-fingered hands outstretched and open. “All we want now is peace.”

It puzzles them, our need to remember what we’ve done. The way we seem to treasure it, to hold it close like something precious.

Aaron and I stand in the shadow of the spike, looking up until our necks are sore and our eyes ache. “It’s bigger than I thought,” Aaron murmurs. I just nod.

The spike is bounded by a circular plaza dotted with stone benches. There are no trees. Besides Shairovin, we’re the only ones there. After fifteen minutes, we get back in the car and roll back to the hotel in silence.

Note: I mean that I’m in my third year of grad school. Not third semester. Blahblah.

You can read the excerpt I read aloud below. From untitled time-travel-war-thing.

- – -

Let me start over.

Once upon a time there was a girl and she was going to be married to herself. Everything was arranged for the wedding day, but after the ceremony was solemnized and she was joined to herself in faithfulness unto death, the world opened up and swallowed her into darkness. Frantic and grief-stricken, she searched, and in the end she went down into the darkness after herself, down into the bowels of the realm of the dead, and there she found herself cold and frozen, sitting with her hand in the skeletal grip of Death.

Give me back myself, she said to Death, and such was her pain and grief that even Death was moved.

You may recover yourself, said Death, and return to the world above. But you may not reflect on yourself on the journey. Keep moving forward. Do not look back as you climb.

So the girl began her long climb back to the world above, followed by the silent shade of herself–or so she believed. So she was made to believe. Until her conviction began to waver there in the darkness. Until she began to wonder if she was anywhere at all. Until she came to a moment where she knew she would either look, or not.

All our choices are made in single instants. All our lives are singularities of time, strung together like pearls.