Champagne and Socks

I’m still quiet here but for different reasons. After getting better, and I mostly am even with a slight recurrence yesterday (after the removal of two ticks I picked up whilst on a site visit – probably not related but mentioned here for proper scientist street cred), I’m head down and trying to get like the world’s to do list finished before I LEAVE FOR WFC ON SATURDAY. But I’m not stressing. OK, fine, I’m freaking the hell out.

I want to get Bad Power to the printer before I go. And it’s mostly on track. I’ve proofed the layout and I’m so proud of this book. I read “Palming the Lady” in an earlier version when we were working on A Book of Endings and leaving it out, for this suite (that I admit maybe I did a series of 12 volumes just to talk Deb into letting me publish it or maybe this was just serendipity) was very much the right decision. I’m excited for this book to be released and read and I think that’s about the point where you know the book is done, and ready to be printed. I think this book is a natural progression of Deb’s work, if you follow the publication history of the stories in A Book of Endings. A sneak peek at some of the blurbage:

“There are two kinds of people with lawyers on tap, Mr Grey. The powerful and the corrupt.”
“Thank you”
“For implying you’re powerful?”
“For imagining those are two different groups.”

Crawford Award nominee Deborah Biancotti gives us a sinister short story suite, a pocketbook police procedural, set in a world where the victories are only relative, and the defeats are absolute. Bad Power celebrates the worst kind of powers both supernatural and otherwise, in the interlinked tales of five people – and how far they’ll go.

These appetisingly wicked stories give you the perfect taste of Biancotti’s talents – Ann VanderMeer

If you like Haven and Heroes, you’ll love Bad Power.

Gwyneth Jones on the Twelve Planets series, “These Australians give me hope for the future of female, and even feminist, writers in sf.”

 

So, of course, getting a book done is nowhere near enough for me to feel accomplished these days. So I’m also trying to get Showtime, Volume 5 in the series, close to being ready to go to layout before I go. That’s a bit ambitious but that’s also how you get more done than you thought you could I’m hoping to also get some of Through Splintered Walls signed off and have been working on Margo’s collection, or more to be fair throwing things at her and running away.

This week I have almost completed all the slushing I had been sitting on. I think I have three novelettes left to respond to as well as a few other odds and ends. And that would put me almost up to date with everything that is not Twelve Planets related. Can that be true? (Surely not!)

And Charles has been converting more of our backlist into ebooks. Hopefully he will have some extra volunteer help from here on out which should be helpful. Last week we published Thief of Lives in epub and mobi and distributed these to Wizard Towers Books as well. This week, we published two versions of the novella double Above/Below (and Below/Above) in both epub and mobi. And these are also now available at Wizards Tower Books. (That’s FOUR electronic versions. You can pick any which way you want to read em on your electronic device!) Cheryl Morgan gave a lovely review today of the book:

One of the best ways to get yourself noticed as a small press is to undertake very interesting projects. Twelfth Planet does this brilliantly. The latest book of theirs that I have uploaded is Above/Below, a back-to-back double containing two linked stories: “Above” by Stephanie Campisi and “Below” by Ben Peek. I quote from the blurb (which is once again top quality)

And then I’ve been doing all the thousand and one small tasks that make up running a press – answering emails, processing orders, sorting review and awards copies, developing new projects, updating ASif!

I realised the other day that I’ve settled into living down here, this far south from where I grew up. It’s weird how you get used to things. And it’s lucky that happened just in time for this big CRUNCH that hit me on the weekend. A kind of reality awakening, of sorts. A “wow this is really real and happening”. Which is probably hard to explain. But in some ways, it feels like everything else up til now was killing time, or practicing, or trying on a dress and shoes but not really owning them, just seeing what they were like. And now, I am living the actual life I’m going to live. I don’t know if I’m explaining this very well. But I’m excited about going to  WFC  and a little scared at the same time. And then I shall come home and it will nearly be Christmas (November flies by, don’t you find?) and then it will be 2012. And a lot of very real things are going to happen for me in 2012. And that’s … I dunno. Scary?

It’s made me realise a bunch of personal deadlines. One of which is the press. I’ve given myself a two year deadline – and that means things have to really ramp up. And that’s a bit scary given how many hours I am already working, I’m not quite sure how I will find the time, though I have some ideas. It’s all starting to get very very real.