The Journal of Rosemary Edghill

I actually have a OMG !sale to talk about here. I've sold a short story "Passage at Arms" to the latest Valdemar Anthology (which may-or-may-not be called "Moving Targets and Other Stories") and will be published at some point by DAW.

This is, I note with delicate delight, my third outing in Velgarth, and you know, someday I really do have to do a straight-up traditional story about a Herald. No, really...

It looks as if I shall be going (cross your fingers) to Albacon in October, assuming that neither the car or I catch fire and explode in the next five months. As I recall, it is a convention wherein a Good Time is had by all, and I'm really looking forward to going back.

As many of my constant readers know, I was privileged to collaborate with the late Marion Zimmer Bradley on the Shadow's Gate Series. I'm delighted to hear that Tor is re-releasing the books with new cover art by Mélanie Delon. I don't know what the covers are going to look like yet, but she's FABULOUS! You can see other examples of her work here: http://www.melaniedelon.com/

Lunacon is this coming weekend (um… surprise?) This is probably my schedule. Unless, of course, it isn't. I look forward to seeing you all there…


Friday, March 16th, 2008 - 7:00:00 PM - 8:00:00 PM - Westchester Assembly
Autographing: Rosemary Edghill, Ellen Kushner

Friday, March 16th, 2008 - 8:00:00 PM - 9:00:00 PM - Bartell
Genre Blender: Blending of Genres - Are the James Bond works "sci-fi"? Is "Babylon 5" fantasy? Anne Rice's works usually cross lots of lines. Stephen King. Who decides? Does each person make individual choices? Is "erotic science fiction" erotica or sci-fi? Participants: Sam Butler, Rosemary Edghill, Elizabeth Glover[M], Jeff Lyman, Dennis McCunney,

Saturday, March 17th, 2008 - 3:00:00 PM - 4:00:00 PM - Odelle
How I Learned to Stop Worrying, and Love the Post-Apocalyptic Story: John Varley said "We all love after-the-bomb stories. If we didn't, why would there be so many of them? There's something attractive about all those people being gone, about wandering in a depopulated world, scrounging cans of Campbell's pork and beans, defending one's family from marauders." Why *do* we all love after the bomb stories? What is it that makes them so compelling? Subconscious cultural anxiety? Is it Thanatoses, schadenfreude, or something else entirely? There is no track 51. Move along. Participants: John Joseph Adams, Rosemary Edghill, Terri Osborne, John J. Pierce[M],

Saturday, March 17th, 2008 - 4:00:00 PM - 5:00:00 PM - Grand North
Fantastic Females: Do they all have to be large-breasted Amazon warriors or dainty figurines in a noble court? What books are great to read to find strong, capable female heroes? What books are terrible for their portrayal as women as two-dimensional characters who are there to serve only as a plot device or romantic interest? Participants: Jacqueline Carey, Jeanne Cavelos, Kathleen O'Shea David, Rosemary Edghill[M], (OMG I'm moderating this one?)

Saturday, March 17th, 2008 - 6:30:00 PM - 7:00:00 PM - Port Chester
Reading & Signings
(Er… pick one? I'll probably bring the YA I'm working on as my reading, but I could take suggestions from the three people who will show up. Or we could just make the whole thing a Q&A instead. Ah, if there were only coffee….)

Saturday, March 17th, 2008 - 9:00:00 PM - 10:00:00 PM - Boton
I Can Haz Conspiracy? Bring 'em out, people. Let's talk conspiracy theories: the weird, the crazy, the plausible. Is the president actually a very refined robot controlled by an alien mothership? Are UFO's merely weather balloons... sent to observe us by aliens? Are lolcats actually messages from the future, sent to warn humanity of a feline uprising? Why does the grocery store really track your every purchase? There is no track 51. Move along. Participants: Rosemary Edghill, Adam Knave, Laura Quish,

Here partly as a Memo To Me (so I can find the link again easily.)

I hope, intend, and expect to be going to Lunacon again!

Whether I'll be on the panels or just in the bar still remains to be seen, but Oh God, I'm really hoping to stay out of the Dealer's Room this time...


http://www.lunacon.org/

...my virtual house, that is. Chez Edghill has just gotten a complete overhaul, redesign, and face-lift (the first since it was set up lo! these many years ago...) and I am pretty sure that D-Mac is going to stop twitching some time really soon now, because it was a lot of work to do (although if she says anything more about this mysterious "code" stuff, I'm going to start looking over my shoulder for Opus Dei and Tom Hanks on a bad hair day) but apparently it was completely full of stuff that hadn't seen the light of day for ever so long. And now that it (my page, you are to understand) is tanned, fit, and ready to party, I'll be er, grovelling a lot as I dig up ancient history from the far corners of my hard drive for her to add to it (yes, I know, becoming computer-literate is on my do-list, it really is.)

So go take a look!

http://www.sff.net/people/eluki

"...in the Bowl of Night Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight..."

Imagine my surprise to discover that BOWL OF NIGHT is finally going to get a mass market edition! Those of you who collect the Bast Mysteries in paperback have long been vexed that the first two books were available in paperback but the third book was only available as part of the Bast Omnibus, BELL BOOK AND MURDER. Well, okey-dokey: Forge is now bringing BOWL OF NIGHT out in mass. (And yeah, I know that the first two books are OP in mass; this is just one of Life's Little Ironies…) Anyway, the pubdate, according to both Amazon and Baker & Taylor is January 30, 2008. Mark your calendars...

And who knows? Forge might be planning to reprint the first two as well.

Pre-order on Amazon!

(This link will take you to the page so you can see for yourself! Whee!)

ETA: (1/14/08) Okay, apparently I glee'd too soon. I spoke to my editor at Tor about this, and she was deeply puzzled, saying Tor/Forge has no current plans to reprint either BOWL OF NIGHT or any of the Bast mysteries. It's business as usual for Amazon to list mythical books and editions, but B&T is usually correct (*sigh*). I'll keep you posted...

It's November. Apparently I missed October completely. Oh, well.

I am a newsless writer. However, I have rejoined SFWA (*shudder*) and if I could only figure out how to get into my comment threads over on the old message board, I'd say so. However, that involves mastering the current iteration of a newsreader I never really understood in the first place, so...

My newslessness relates to the fact that the YA Series (I can call it "The YA Series" now with douce impunity because TOR didn't like the title, so we need to come up with a new title. I'm pretty sure that they won't like either "Gone With The Wind In The Willows" or "And The Band of Brothers Played Waltzing Matilda", which are my only two ideas, so we'll see what it ends up being called. Other than: OMG This Is Not A Harry Potter Rip-Off No!) is in Revision Hell, which means it no longer has a pub-date. Pray for Me.

I want to write a new book. The book I want to write, of course, is the sequel to Warslayer and have it rife with homoerotic subtext. Pity I don't have a plot (not actually a problem, since I often start writing on nothing but a mere device, and I have that, also a cool title) or someone willing to pay me sufficient amounts of Real Money (this is rather a large problem, and an insurmountable one, alas.)

I'm going to Lunacon '08 (okay, *some* news) which is cool, since I can't remember the last time I went to (a) a con (b) Lunacon. Apparently it left the Escher Hilton and came back since the last time I was there. At least I don't have to learn a new hotel.

Hm. I really need jazzier and apropos userpics like all the Cool Kids Have. Any ideas?

Friday's mail brought me cover flats for the paperback version of MUSIC TO MY SORROW, which (I therefore assume) is forthcoming.  It's gorgeous, of course, all gold foil overprinted, and I think it's possibly the nicest pb cover Eric has gotten.

Baen also sent me two reviews of  "Bedlam's Edge", one from the September 2006 New York Review of Science Fiction (woo!  we made the big time!) and the other from the 9/06 SFBC  (no, do not ask why Baen waited more than six months to send them: they're doing me a huge courtesy in sending them at all.)  Both are pretty positive, and NYRSF's is long (and yay!  mentions my story positively!  yay!), so .... win!

Synchonicity is cool. What are the odds that within the same six-month period I'd get two short stories - one a prequel, one a sequel - to the same series published?

Two different editors, two COMPLETELY different projects, two different houses.

One was from Meisha Merlin and the charming and exciting Lee and Miller, for the anthology LOW PORT. This "concept anthology" wanted to feature stories about how the "other half" lived and worked - in short, tales of cabbages, not kings.

The other was for the DAW Books 30th Anniversary Anthologies, and there were absolutely no restrictions there. One of the anthologies was SF, the other was fantasy, and I'd done both for DAW. If memory serves (and it probably doesn't) they were hoping for stories revisiting a series (or a book) that you'd done for them at some time in the past.

(Incidentally, if you ever get a chance to check out the limited-edition slipcased edition, do. It's gorgeous! But just buying the anthology itself in any edition is a treat. A lot of fine stories there.)

Anyway, I couldn't think of a single thing to do as a "Twelve Treasures" s/s. The one associational short I had written, "Paying The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn," had already been published in MZBFM. So I returned to my first love, SF, and pulled out the fragmentary notes I had for STEEL PHOENIX, the sequel trilogy to the HELLFLOWER TRILOGY. The result was "Read Only Memory," which was sort of ... experimental. But I did enjoy the chance to step back into that universe about twenty years on.

What was even more fun (and a HECK of a lot harder to write!) was "Riis Run," my story for LOW PORT (which you should all go out and read immediately because it's wonderful!), which is a prequel to HELLFLOWER, set back in the days when Butterfly and Paladin are still deep in the throes of their darktrading career. What nearly broke my brain was getting back into Butterfly's, er unique patois after all these years. But hey, if the assignment is to write a "bottom-of-the-food-chain" look at space opera, I really only had one choice... *g*

What really tickles me is having the two stories appear almost on top of each other, temporally speaking.

The simplest things amuse me...

I really love playing in other people's sandboxes. And some wonderful people down through the years have given me some great opportunities. The more complicated the canon I have to master (or try to), the more fun it is. Really.

My long-time co-author, Mercedes Lackey, opens up Valdemar to a number of fine and talented writers now and again in a series of short-story collections, and my second foray into the world of Valdemar is "Horse of Air" in CROSSROADS AND OTHER TALES OF VALDEMAR.

This was, er, like a total improvement over my maiden voyage "Icebreaker", which appeared in SUN IN GLORY (AND OTHER TALES OF VALDEMAR) because, um, this time I actually remembered the deadline and Misty didn't have to like, call me up and say "so, um, where's your story?" And there was a lot less scrambling and freaking out. Plus, this time The Valdemar Companion was out and I had MAPS.

I love maps.

Now, Heralds are cool. But I have SO never been able to do anything the easy way. *g* So while both of my stories involve Heralds and Companions, they don't exactly deal with them in a straightforward head-on way. Anyway, I had a lot of fun.

(It's nice having an LJ. I'm digging through that whole pile of books and finding all my 'old' short stories...)

The last thread was getting cramped, I'm starting a new one.

The title of the "Crownlands" story in HAGS, SIRENS, & OTHER BAD GIRLS OF FANTASY is "Bitter Fruit: A Tale of Crownland." Which was, like, its sixth title...

I had another "Crownlands" story in WOMEN OF WAR edited by Tanya Huff and Alexander Potter. It's "Painted Child of Earth" and it's another Ruana Rulane story. I love my Ruana Rulane stories. "The Ever-After" was my first fantasy short-story sale, and the first s/s I sold after a gap of years and years.

Another entry from another series: there's a Bast short story in MAIDEN MATRON CRONE edited by Kerrie Hughes and Martin H. Greenberg, "Advice From a Young Witch To An Old Priestess." It's a prequel to the novels.

Under the heading of "good luck if you can find this" is the anthology MYSTERY IN MIND: A COLLECTION OF STORIES OF THE PARANORMAL (ISBN 0-9727494-0-3), no editor given, collected and published by the Rhine Research Center in Durham NC as a fundraiser. I have a Bast s/s in that titled "Burden of Guilt," in which Bast goes to the other kind of Pagan gathering...

I seriously need to update my bibliography...

Misty and I are currently working on the first book in our new YA series, and I gotta say it's big fun. Back to our roots in Urban Fantasy, picking up a lot of threads from the SERRAted Edge series, the Eric the Bard books, and the Diana Tregarde books, though you don't have to have read any of those to enjoy these. New characters, new problems, and, I think, lots of fun.

I'm not sure when they'll be coming out. It's going to be a while, alas.

Let's see, what else...

Another story in my "Crownlands" cycle came out just recently, in HAGS, SIRENS, & OTHER BAD GIRLS OF FANTASY, edited by Denise Little for DAW. Due to conflicts, the title of the story was changed so many times that I don't actually remember what title it went into the book under... *g*

I'm still really pleased by "An Axe For Men", which appeared in YOUNG WARRIORS, edited by Tamora Pierce and Josepha Sherman. And the anthology is doing all kinds of well, too...