Ceallaigh's Blog
I'm pleased to announce that I will soon be releasing a Lodhuven novelette entitled 'Grandmother Mælkevejen's Belly' under the Triskele Media imprint! This story takes place several hundred years after 'The Longest Road in the Universe' and explores the lives of Lodhuven descendants whose broken genome forces them to seek salvation from near-mythical Bodhuven dissidents rumored to be trapped in the event horizon of a supermassive black hole. Here's a little something from the story to whet your appetite:
What It Is
A is for Apocalypse contains twenty-six apocalyptic stories written by both well-known and up-and-coming writers. Monsters, meteors, floods, war–the causes of the apocalypses in these tales are as varied as the stories themselves.
This volume contains work by Ennis Drake, Beth Cato, Kenneth Schneyer, Damien Angelica Walters, K. L. Young, Marge Simon, Milo James Fowler, Simon Kewin, C.S. MacCath, Steve Bornstein and more!
I'm super stoked to announce that I'll be participating in writer and editor Rhonda Parrish's next letter-themed anthology entitled, B Is for Broken.
I've been assigned the letter 'C'.
Hmm...C Is for Clock...Cerebrum...Cànan...Ceangal...*grin* Did I slip into Gàidhlig there?
Aaand as soon as she releases the (admittedly awesome) cover for A Is for Apocalypse, you can bet I'll be showing it to you!
My poem 'Coming of Age' is the featured piece at Polu Texni this week. You can read it here.
The lovely Jolene Dawe has interviewed me for her Celebrating Pagan Fiction series. You can read the interview here.
Monday and Tuesday, I outlined the endings of Books 1 & 2 in what I'm presently calling the Motherland Duology, though that name might change as time passes. Today, I plotted the protagonist's thread through Book 1 in Freemind using the end to beginning technique I wrote about here in the comments:
I put out the call a few weeks ago for links to awards, blogs and other web sites for speculative fiction writers. My friends at SF Canada were quick to respond, and with their help I've compiled the following. Please note that this is primarily a short list of longer lists, since others have paved this road long before I came to it. Still, I hope you find the information useful.
Awards
Science Fiction Awards Database
The Locus Index to Science Fiction Awards (Phasing out and superceded by the the SFAD, above.)
The Guardian: Most writers earn less than £600 a year, survey reveals
I recently wrote about the idea that writers are routinely expected to create 'for the love', and the phenomenon is sufficiently related to the above truth about the writing life that I run the risk of repeating myself here. My argument there was that writers and other artists should not be expected to work for free, but my focus here is on some of the barriers writers meet on the way to whatever income we do earn.
I've just encountered an interesting point of confusion between my writing and its reception by readers that I thought it might be useful to discuss. In a recent blog entry, I defaulted to the feminine, third-person pronoun when discussing an animal because I wasn't certain of the animal's sex and didn't want to use the gender-neutral 'it' for reasons having to do with my vegan ethics. This created some confusion in my readership, so I subsequently footnoted the relevant passage to indicate that my usage was a default preference and not a specific gender identification.
2013 was a year of forward progress in my writing career, often self-directed. I began receiving the sort of rejections from top-tier publishers that validated the quality of my writing, the 'this isn't right for us, but we like your voice so please keep submitting' personal notes that mean my work is sufficiently professional to compete in the traditional marketplace and to make a proper showing of itself in the independent marketplace. I learned the term 'hybrid writer' from Kristine Kathryn Rusch's blog and became one, selling my work to traditional markets and also publishing it myself.