I need your help! At one of the Nebula panels, a successful indie writer talked about mobilizing your “street team” to help get the word out for you. I don’t have a street team yet. Will you join my street team?
Specifically, are you attending any upcoming SF conventions? Do you circulate in places where books could be promoted? Are you part of an SF club? I have right here a stack of Reefs of Time flyers and Reefs of Time coasters. Would you be willing to take some with you to a con or similar venue, and distribute them for me? I would be immensely grateful.
In fact, besides the obvious that you’d get to keep a few coasters for yourself, I will joyfully send an eARC of both books to anyone who pitches in! (eARC = ebook Advanced Reading Copy) You can be first to read the new books! All I ask is that you help me with a bit of publicity.
If you’d like to join in on the fun, please email me from the contact form on this here website. Thanks in advance.
How can you resist these sad eyes???
![Drum roll, please! The End Times have arrived! The End Times! The End of waiting for me to finish The Reefs of Time. Yes, I have reached the end! The Reefs of Time is substantially DONE. That’s right—I’ve finished the major rewrite of the 268,000 word manuscript! Most of those words, I now believe, are the right words, and in the right order. That works out to about 1326 manuscript pages in Courier New, with two spaces after many periods, and one space after others, because habits die hard. Ten years in the works, this novel has been through the fermenter, the extractor, the refractors, the distillers, the boilers, the oven, and aged in camphor-wood in the cellar. Here’s what the manuscript looks like, with its tired but happy progenitor. [CUE “cheers” and more “cheers,” and maybe a few “huzzahs”!] “But wait!” you say. “Is that some kind of weasel wording, ‘substantially done’? What are you trying to pull here?” Trust me, I’m not trying to pull anything. Over the next week or so, I’ll be cleaning up some edits I’ve made notes to myself about, and responding to final suggestions from my stalwart (if annoyingly discerning) writing group. And then off it goes to the editor. The editor will edit, and I’ll do a polish pass over the whole thing as I respond to his editorial suggestions. And after that? Why, you get to read it! At last, at long last!](https://i2.wp.com/www.starrigger.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/JC-Reefs-final-ms-5-19-18-elbow-smile_sm.jpg?resize=500%2C375&ssl=1)
That 7 a.m. flight out of Burbank was definitely out of my comfort zone time-wise, but it was a very smooth flight nevertheless, and we arrived early in Boston. Here’s what it looked like, coming in low over the harbor.
This year’s Grandmaster Award went to William Gibson, one of the founders and the best-known practitioner of cyberpunk SF. In an interview session, he said something I really liked (I believe he was quoting another writer, but I missed that part). He said: “Writing is like digging an 8-foot hole because your scanner seems to indicate something interesting down there. Then you discover that the scanner is just picking up the steel toe on your work boot. There’s only one thing you can do at that point, and that’s keep digging.”
I’ve been enjoying this year’s Nebula Conference (in Los Angeles) hugely. It’s been years since my last one, and the number of new faces is astounding. I’ve seen old friends, made new ones, had dinner with some of my Book View Café buddies, and attended a couple of business meetings, which were actually quite interesting. I’m part of the rules committee that wrestles with issues pertaining to the Nebula, Norton, and Bradbury Awards, and for once, we were all in the same room, talking face to face instead of through endless emails. Much more satisfying.
The science fiction world lost another giant with the passing of Vonda N. McIntyre on April 1, and I lost a friend and colleague. Vonda was probably best known for her Nebula and Hugo Award-winning novel, Dreamsnake, which was feminist and compassionate and insightful, and also heartbreakingly beautiful. But she wrote lots of other books, as well, including several Star Trek novels, and The Moon and the Sun, filmed in 2014 as The King’s Daughter with Pierce Brosnan and William Hurt, but not yet released. Vonda died two months after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and she finished writing her last novel, Curve of the World, just days before leaving us.
