Author: KMc

As some of you know, I’m a novelist writing science fiction and fantasy. The first book in my new series launches today. It’s called Broken Blade and it walks the borders between fantasy and detective noir. It also touches on some of the issues of fairness and justice that are important to me as a progressive.

One of the things I’ve noticed as a fantasy author is that with a few notable exceptions like Terry Pratchett, the genre has a tendency toward the glorification of autocratic government of the one true king variety. This bothers me, so when I set out to write my own high fantasy novel, I decided to try something a little bit different.

The Fallen Blade series is built around a sorcerer-assassin who used to work for the Goddess of Justice, dealing with those rulers and nobles that started wars of aggression or oppressed and murdered their people, criminals too rich and powerful for the regular courts to touch. But, when you push a system like that, the system pushes back. Now Aral and his shadow elemental familiar are on the run.

The following is the short plot teaser book one, Broken Blade.

Aral Kingslayer was an assassin once upon a time, perhaps the best in the world, one of the fabled Blades of Namara, goddess of Justice. With his familiar, a living shadow named Triss, at his side, he killed for a cause, never for money. Life was hard but good.

A simple enough job. Or is it? When Aral delivers the message, he gets the biggest surprise of his new life, and maybe, just maybe, the chance to forge a future where he won’t have to be ashamed of himself.

The three books in the initial series are built around Aral’s struggle to rebuild his life and to come to terms with the idea of justice in a more nuanced and human way as he decides that while much of what his goddess asked him to do was just, it wasn’t always for the right reasons.

At root, what I’m writing is adventure fiction; fast, fun, reads with swordfighting and zombies and magic and lots of special effects, but I’m also trying to layer in deeper issues about the problems of aristocracy and concentrations of wealth and power.

If you’re interested, the opening chapter can be read on my website, and I’ve talked about the launch of the book a bit more in a post there as well.  

I’ll be doing launch events over the next few weeks in the Minneapolis St Paul area, starting tonight with a reading and signing at the Barnes and Noble in the Har Mar Mall in Roseville (St Paul) MN. at 7:00 pm.

I’ll also be signing and chatting with whoever shows up at Uncle Hugo’s science fiction book store in Minneapolis, MN. 1:00 pm Saturday December 3rd. I’ll be signing, maybe reading, and chatting with whoever shows up at Bookends on Main in Menomonie, WI. 5:00 pm Thursday December 8th. Finally, I’ll be signing and chatting with whoever shows up at Dreamhaven Books in Minneapolis, MN. 2:00 pm Saturday December 11th. This will be one of the last events at the book store before they become primarily on online book seller.

The book can be found at all the usual places, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Indiebound (various independents) should you be so inclined, but Uncle Hugo’s and DreamHaven are especially close to my heart as local independents. I should probably note here amongst the commercial stuff that Book II, Bared Blade is actually already available for preorder at places like Barnes and Noble and Amazon.

Thanks for reading, I hope some of you find the idea interesting enough to go take a look at the sample chapter.

Also available in orange.

Despite SpellCrash  being my fifth book launch, I find myself as elated and baffled and nervous and delighted and just plain punchy about the idea that something I wrote is hitting shelves all over the country today  as ever. I don’t think that I shall ever get used to the idea.
It’s an enormous privilege that I get to do something I love so much as my job, and that I get to see my work on the same shelves with the writers who were such a huge part of making me who I am today. I grew up on books, reading every chance I got in my childhood. From the time I learned to read until fifteen or so I read pretty much every day. Sometimes only a little bit, but more often a couple of chapters, and in summers when I was off from school, a book or two a day. With adolescence and then the demands of adulthood that tapered off a bit, but it’s been a rare month when I haven’t knocked off at least a couple of books.

Science fiction, fantasy, and superhero comics formed the core of my younger reading, though I branched into historical and mystery, myth and legend, even the odd bit of mainstream fiction. My ideals and goals, and even the way I think were shaped by endless hours of Tolkien and Norton, McCaffrey, Dickson, Niven, Piper, Kjelgaard and Heinlein among many others. To say nothing of Stan Lee, and all the writers at Marvel and DC. As I’ve gotten older the list has only got longer and stronger: Powers and Pratchett, Bujold, McCullough (Colleen), Lackey, Weber, Cook, Hughart, Martin… I could go on and on and not reach the end, because it will continue as long as I do.

Writers weren’t my heroes when I was younger, but they created them, and I loved and honored them for giving me their worlds to play in and peopling them with my heroes and villains–gods, demons, monsters… I wanted a fire lizard of my very own, a magic ring, a blaster… Again, the list is endless. But most of all what I wanted was a doorway into other worlds, and despite the fact that I didn’t realize it right away, my writers gave me exactly that. They did it again and again and again with each new book. And it is my dearest hope and fondest ambition to provide a few of those same doors for my readers.

So, if it strikes your fancy, open SpellCrash and step through into some other place for a little while. That’s what doors are for.

Updated to add some book and author links that should have been in there in the first place:

The first chapters of all five books are up on the online fiction page of my website for anyone who wants to see them, along with some short stories.

My website, where I blog. Also Twitter and Facebook

Reviews of the new book: Huntress (currently the top review on the page), and Skunk Cat. And, for flavor, probably the most thorough review of book I in this series, WebMage.

Oh, and a few buy link for the series. Dreamhaven and Uncle Hugos both usually have signed copies of most my stuff. Also: Indiebound, B&N, Amazon

Today my third novel, CodeSpell, is coming out from Penguin’s Ace division. It’s a great day for me. It’s also a very hard one. In mid-March my grandmother, Phyllis Neese, died. She had a huge role in raising me and in my becoming a science fiction and fantasy author. She was my grandmother, she was my friend, and she was one of my biggest fans. Not having her here today to see the book hurts. She was born in 1924 and she was a grand old lady on many levels.
She was the first woman to go to the tech school where she learned to repair radio equipment. She was a single mother in an era when that was even harder than it is now. She went from a rural beginning in an era before the advent of the transistor to a computer test equipment technician. She lived through a lot of hard times, both personally and with this country but she was never bitter. She embraced change her whole life and she worked hard to stay current.

Nixon made her into a yellow dog Democrat, and she made me into one too. I know one of the things she was most looking forward to these last few years was the departure of George Bush from the White House. Unfortunately she didn’t live to see it, though she did take enormous satisfaction from the 2006 election.

She was also looking forward with great anticipation to the publication of CodeSpell and the sequel that will follow next year. She was a huge fan of science fiction and fantasy and she passed that love of genre on to my mother and the both of them passed it along to me. Some of my earliest memories are of my mother and grandmother reading the Lord of the Rings to me, or Asimov’s Foundation trilogy and I know that I wouldn’t be where I am now without that.

One of her big regrets over the last two years was not having been well enough to attend any of my readings or signings and I know she would dearly have loved to be here today and to hold the book in her hands. I’ve tried to write about how I feel about her death a couple of times but it’s hurt too much. Too be honest, it hurts too much this time too, but I refuse to let this day go by without acknowledging how much this book and all of my writing owes to her, how much I owe her.

Thank you, Grandma.
I miss you, especially today,

Kelly McCullough

CodeSpell (reviews)
Cybermancy
WebMage

Howdy all,

I’m a relatively long time member of the community, and occasional diarist and commentator. I’m also a science fiction and fantasy writer and my second novel, Cybermancy, is out today from Penguin’s Ace division. It’s the sequel to WebMage, though it’s intended to stand on its own.

Like any book, it has a story behind the story. In this case the decision not to quit. Which is, I think, quite relevant to today’s political situation.
Cybermancy is a contemporary fantasy/cyberpunk hybrid available pretty much everywhere and the various details are available down below.

What I want to talk about first is how I got to the place where I’m blogging about a new book coming out and how that matters to the current political struggle. Both involve a lot of not quitting. I frame it that way instead of talking about following a dream because following a dream is the easy part. Dreaming of writing a book is easy. Dreaming of a new Democratic majority and what it can do is easy. Setting out to write or change the world is easy too. Not quitting when the writing becomes difficult or the world won’t change is hard.

In the acknowledgments of Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty and the Midnight Hour there’s a note that says “to Dan Hooker for calling the day after I almost decided to quit.” Every writer who has followed the dream to fruition knows about that day, or those days, as the case may be.

It might be the day you got the rejection letter for that first novel, the letter that finished off the set of major publishers and killed the book for the foreseeable future, the one that meant that if you wanted to be published it would have to be the next book or the one after that. It might be the day your agent called to tell you the 3 book deal that tied all of your work up for the last 2 1/2 years had been killed at the last minute by marketing. Or it might have come earlier, when you realized that after taking three years to write the first book, it was now going to take another one to revise it.

The reason is almost immaterial. The decision not to quit is what really matters.

For me it came in 2005. I had a good agent who believed in my work, more than 20 short stories either in print or forthcoming, 2 novels in the trunk and 5 out with various editors none of which had sold. I also had family stress at levels that damn near broke me. I was depressed, not clinically, but damn close, and I felt like 15 years of hard work had officially gone to hell. But worse, far far worse, I wasn’t enjoying writing. I was doing it–I can’t not–but I wasn’t taking the joy from it that I always had.

When I hit bottom I spent probably three hours staring at the ceiling and doing nothing but thinking about how something I had loved and pursued for years had crashed and burned. I tried to figure out what else I could possibly do with my time–I was writing full time. The answer was nothing. Nothing. There wasn’t anything else that appealed to me. I don’t know what I’d have done if something else had occurred to me but the fact that nothing did was totally bleak at the time. I felt like the only thing I wanted to do was going nowhere and would continue to go nowhere. In retrospect it was a powerful moment. I had come to place where I realized that writing wasn’t just something I did that I could walk away from. It was who I was down in the bedrock.

The next day I got up and wrote, though I didn’t much enjoy it. And the next day. And the day after that. Somewhere in there I started to love the work again, and here I am two years later watching Cybermancy appear in the bookstores and I’ve rarely felt better.

I had another black day, a political one. It was the morning after the election in 2004. I think you’ll all remember it. I had poured three months of time that should have been spent writing books into editorials and door knocking and it had all come to nothing. No matter how annoyed I get with some of the things our current Democratic majorities are doing, I can think back and compare where we are now to the morning after the 2004 election and feel whole lot better.

So, if you have a dream and you’re where I was a few years ago, either artistically or politically….

Don’t quit. It’ll be the best decision you ever made.

Now, on to that book launch stuff:

Since many of the Cybermancy reviews aren’t accessible online yet, I’ve posted transcriptions of several at Wyrdsmiths (my home blog). For WebMage which has been out for a year let me just note: SciFi.Com, Romantic Times, blogcritics.org, and Huntress Reviews (scroll down the page for both Cybermancy and WebMage). Two sequels, CodeSpell and MythOS, are slated for June ’08 and summer ’09.

If you’re interested in buying the book and supporting the liberal blogosphere at the same time, you can pick up a copy at Powells via these Booman links Cybermancy or WebMage.

Another blue option would be Barnes & Noble.

Or, if you’re interested and an Amazon shopper: WebMage, and Cybermancy.

I’ll be happy to talk about not quitting or following the dream, or even that book thing that comes out today in the comments area below, though it may take a little while for me to respond as I’m blogging in about five places today.

Thanks for reading!
Kelly

Crossposted from wyrdsmiths.blogspot.com with edits.

Free Science Fiction.

As has been mentioned elsewhere in the blogosphere, there is some gentle* debate among the professional community of fantasy and science fiction writers about the utility and advisibility of allowing some of one’s work to appear online for free.

This has parallels to the blogger/mainstream media kerfuffle that made me think it might be of interest to folks here in the political part of the blogosphere. The threat that electronic media poses to the old style content models and to writers and publishers who can’t learn to adapt in the fiction world is almost a perfect mirror for what’s going on here on the political side.
The most recent round of the debate started when the outgoing vice-president of SFWA** posted this screed in which he called those who give away content on the web both “webscabs” and “Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch.” For some strange reason this did not sit well with the more technologically liberal-minded among us.

In particular, it set off Jo Walton to declare “Monday 23rd April is International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day” and to propose that a bunch of us who write professionally should post some item of our work for free viewing.

I am gleefully adding my name to the list of writers giving it a whirl by posting electronic reprints of the two stories listed below on my personal website:

The Uncola is a near future snarky science fiction piece about the ungoing cola wars between the big brands. Originally appeared in Cosmic SF Vol #4

When Jabberwocks Attack is a humorous contemporary fantasy piece that gives a college his chance to break into the newly booming field of magical reality TV. Originally appeared in TOTU #22

I hope that you enjoy them.

The links are also posted at the wyrdsmiths blog (my writers group) along with links to other works by some of our members, including Namoi Kritzer and Sean Murphy.

Oh, and if you feel like buying some of my work as well, my novel WebMage is out from Ace with three sequels forthcoming, one each in ’07, ’08, and ’09 and can be picked up from Amazon or most bookstores. The stories linked here are similar in general flavor to the novel length work.

For a complete list of all the stories and other bits added to the list, please look at Jo Walton’s master post here. Or go to the livejournal community set up for the effort here. I will also endeavor to post a copy of the inevitable master list over at the Wyrdsmiths blog in a day or two.

______________

*i.e. Pistols or swords.
**Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

We need to drive the following message home, and we need to do it quickly, while the election is fresh in everyone’s mind:

Now that the election is over, let’s talk about its implications. The country has seen complete Republican control of government and did not like the results.

Make no mistake, the policy disasters of the last six years are not primarily a function of incompetence, though that was certainly to be had in abundance. They are the result of the unfettered implementation of Republican policy. This Republican majority has controlled the policy agenda to an unheard of extent. They controlled all the levers of government. They did exactly what they set out to do and said that they would. And the results have been catastrophic.

The American people have now seen what happens when those who believe that government is the problem are placed in control of government, and they have resoundingly rejected the results. Not one Democratic incumbent at the national level was defeated. Not one. This is unprecedented in modern American history. But it should not come as a surprise. Not with the disastrous results of Republican public policy now clear for all to see. Hopefully it is a lesson we will not soon forget.

Yesterday over at big Orange Eric Massa had a diary  that introduced a powerful meme: They were warned and they did nothing.

Here’s my letter to the editor on that theme:

They were warned and they did nothing

That is going to be the epitaph of the current Republican control of the national government. They were warned about Bin Laden in August of 2001 in the Presidential Daily Brief and they did nothing. They were warned about the disaster Iraq was likely to become without sufficient troops or planning and they did nothing. They were warned that Hurricane Katrina was likely to drown New Orleans and they did nothing. They were warned that their tax cuts for the rich would create record deficits and they did nothing. They were warned about one of their own, Rep. Mark Foley (R) Florida, and the dangers he presented to the House pages and they did nothing. They were warned that their isolation strategy for North Korea would lead to the nuclearization of the Korean peninsula and they did nothing. The evidence is overwhelming. They were warned and did nothing time and again. This is the Republican record. This is what happens when you hand control of government to people who believe government is the problem. It’s time to vote them out.

[Update]

Tampopo’s note below reminded me that I hadn’t said this explicitly. Please feel free to steal, borrow, adapt…whatever any portion of this or the whole thing for your own LTEs or whatever.

This diary also available in Orange.

Howdy all,

I’ve been around close to a year now as an occasional diarist and regular commentator. As many of you know, I’m also a science fiction and fantasy writer with a first novel out today from Penguin’s Ace division, and I thought that was worth a diary. So, read on if you’re interested. The book, WebMage is a contemporary fantasy/cyberpunk hybrid available pretty much everywhere, and it’s been getting some pretty great reviews:

In a starred review, Publishers Weekly. called it an “original and outstanding debut…” and said “McCullough handles his plot with unfailing invention, orchestrating a mixture of humor, philosophy and programming insights that give new meaning to terms as commonplace as “spell checker” and esoteric as “programming in hex.” And even, “this is the kind of title that could inspire an army of rabid fans…”

Romantic Times gave WebMage 4 stars and said “McCullough has done a fantastic job integrating technology and mythology, and Ravirn is a wonderfully sympathetic protagonist who remains accessible and likable throughout the course of this novel.”

SFRevu., said, “WebMage contains a good deal of humor and a highly inventive new way of looking at the universe which combines the magic of old with the computer structures of today.”

Here are links to a couple of other reviews, Fresh Fiction. Alternative Worlds, and epinions.

If you’re interested in buying the book and supporting the liberal blogosphere at the same time, you can pick up a copy at Powells via the Booman link here.

Another blue option would be Barnes & Noble.

Or, if you’re interested and an Amazon shopper, you can go here.

I’d love to hear comments, answer questions, etc, though it may take a little while for me to respond. I’m away from home and my internet access is a bit spotty today.

Thanks for reading!
Kelly

I wanted to say thank you to women of bootrib for sharing your stories. This started as a comment in IndyLib’s diary which quickly grew into a diary and I’d also like to send a many years later thank you to the friend who was there for her when she needed it, and to all those friends and family who helped these people who I care about through their own bits of hell. And thank you, Booman for providing this forum.

I haven’t been commenting much in these diaries though I’ve been reading and crying and raging for so many friends hurt so deeply. You all have my love and respect and a nigh infinite number of electronic hugs. I’m so proud of you all for the courage it takes to tell these stories.

The one thing that I found myself wishing with each new diary was that I could be more surprised, more shocked, more jarred in my sense of what my fellow humans and particularly my fellow men could do.

But I remember too well the stories that are not mine to tell. The friend of a friend that I drove to the clinic to abort the fetus of one her teachers when I was seventeen. Or when I was fifteen and held the hand of friend while another friend made the call to tell my first friend’s mother that my friend and her sister were being raped by their stepfather. I remember being twenty and catching a guy molesting a drunk friend and stepping in to stop it, and I remember how much restraint it took not to break the molester’s bones.

It is a restraint I have had to exercise too many times and I can feel that rage and that urge to avenge a friend’s pain rising each time I read one of these diaries. It is a restraint that I am helped to exercise by the bitterly ironic understanding that the urge to violence in the service of justice and the protection of those I care about is a cousin to the violence that hurt those people in the first place. It is not the same violence, and it is certainly my opinion that there are times and places where violence in the service of protection and justice is the only answer.

This was perhaps a bit of a ramble, but I felt the need to thank all of the wonderful people that make up the bootrib community.

So, once again, Thank You.

I promised a number of people that I’d write a World Fantasy Convention Report.

So, World Fantasy Convention (WFC) was held in Madison this year, which is practically on my doorstep. I still don’t know if I have enough for a real diary since it wasn’t that coherent an experience, but here goes. This was my third WFC, so I’ll lay things out about WFCs in general then this one in specific.
WFC is different from any other con I’ve ever been to. It’s deliberately expensive and the membership is capped at 850. Both are measures designed to keep it as professional as possible. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a name writer, an editor, or an agent. You’ll also hit one gonna-be and three wanna-bes. I don’t mean that in a negative way. I’ve been both a wanna-be and a gonna-be, and have moved up to a low slot on the “is” list. Fantasy artists, reviewers, publishers, and book store people are there in abundance as well. Of that 850, there are maybe one hundred folks who don’t fall into the above categories. These are by and large very serious fans. Many are SMOFs – the secret masters of fandom, who hold the F&SF world together in many ways. They’re also the folks (often overlapping with bookstore people) who do most of the volunteering and make sure the convention actually happens.

WFC is very much about making connections and networking. I’m decent at doing both of these things when I’m motivated, but I don’t enjoy it as much as some do. That’s why I try not to go with an agenda. If I don’t have to meet people, I tend to meet more of them and stress about it less. My first WFC got me an invite to write Star Wars short stories that was eventually rescinded by Lucas Film because I didn’t have the right credits. It was a surreal ride. My second WFC is kind of blurry because I came down with the flu in the middle of it.

Parties. I spend a lot of time hanging out in the publisher parties where things really happen at WFC. There are also secret pro parties where many of the mighty hang out. I’m currently not cool enough to get invited to those at the WFC level. I’ve been to them at smaller cons though, so I know they exist, and the fact that there were a ton of pros that I didn’t see until the very last day suggests they were somewhere I was not. I did have fun at the parties I went to, and Laurel Winter (outstanding YA author and long time friend) talked me into a long pink wig. There were a couple more wigs as well and Charles DeLint took pictures. I suppose that since I mentioned them, I have to post them. See below.

There is also a lot of programming, mostly panel discussions. I rarely go to programming that I’m not on any more. I used to go to tons and somewhere along the line I burned out. Instead I spend a lot of time lounging, often in the halls, and always with a fairly good sized group of friends. I’ve heard them described as my entourage, but that’s just silly. I’m just a social soul and have many friends in the F&SF community. We tend to have a lot of silly fun. We spent three hours playing with a couple of superballs and a cup on Saturday night and acquired a number of new friends. If you’re having silly fun in a serious place, other people who like silly will quickly join you.

Shmoozing. As I mentioned above, shmoozing is a key activity at WFC. I did some, but not really very much. Less than I usually do, and probably less than I should have. The odd thing is realizing that over the last two years or so I have become a shmoozee instead of just a shmoozer. And perhaps even more odd, it makes some sense, as I’ve been at this long enough to have the sorts of useful information that are worth seeking out. The dangerous side to this is that shmoozing often involves the buying of drinks and I’m the world’s cheapest date. 1.5 beers and I’m into frame dragging land, so I have to be very careful.

Lounging. This is what I did the most of. The hot tub was hot, the drinks were cold, and the company was fabulous. With the aid if a friendly bartender I perfected the Snarky Booswarm which is a shot of Citron, a shot and a half of Midori, a shot of lemon juice, and about as much sour as the rest combined, all served over ice. I also had Spotted Cow and Fat Squirrel, two of Wisconsin’s finest beers.

Pros. I hung out with or at least exchanged greetings with a ton of writers and artists. Here’s the list:

Published Writers with whom I had some interaction more than hello and goodbye: Barth Anderson, S. N. Arly, Elizabeth Bear, Tracy Berg, Charles de Lint, Alan DeNiro, Matt Forbeck, John M. Ford, Terry A. Garey, Paul Genesse, Laura Anne Gilman, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Nancy Holder, Naomi Kritzer, Ellen Kushner, Jay Lake, David D. Levine, Sandra Lindow, Kelly Link, Catherine Lundoff, Rebecca Marjesdatter, Sarah Monette, Hilary Moon Murphy, Darrell Schweitzer, Delia Sherman, Carrie Vaughn, Joan Vinge, Anna Waltz, Terri Windling, Laurel Winter, Jane Yolen, Sarah Zettel.

Published Writers, with whom I exchanged hellos: Holly Black, Ted Chiang, Ellen Datlow, Stephen R. Donaldson, David Drake, Carol Emshwiller, Esther Friesner, Gregory Frost, Gavin Grant, Eileen Gunn, P.C. Hodgell, Ellen Klages, Eric E. Knight, Patricia McKillip, Garth Nix, Kristine Smith, Midori Snyder, Michael A. Stackpole, Caroline Stevermer, Terri Windling, Gene Wolfe.

In closing. One of the best aspects of the F&SF community is that it is a community. We have a very strong tradition of welcoming new writers to the fold and of mentoring. That means that I get to spend time just hanging out with some of my heroes, including many who couldn’t make this particular convention. It also means that my answer when someone asked me how long before my students cut the apron strings was a blank look. As long as they stay in the field they’ll be my proteges, even if some of them go on to far surpass my own humble career.

I was particularly excited this month that two of my students have taken the next big step in their writing careers and actually survived submission to a major magazine and the following rejections. It’s the only way for them to go on to next level which is acceptance and publication, and I’m very proud of them and of the two others who have stuff out but haven’t heard back yet. The other thing I’m proud of is that my entire class is still meeting together twice a month as a writers group to support and critique each other’s work. That’s really exciting. They’re currently discussing names, and the one I most favor is the Glitter Glam Rainbow Bunny Death Pixies, in part because I want the t-shirt that names me an Honorary Glitter Glam Rainbow Bunny Death Pixie.

Oh, and you haven’t forgotten the pics, have you? Didn’t think so: