Categories
design fantasy fiction short stories spec fic YA

Steve Berman day at s&p.com

Every day is actually Daulton and Steve day, of course.

Unsilent partner in all SB's endeavors.

But above and beyond all that, today saw receipt of contributor copies of Steve’s new anthology of stories for gay teens (and teens at heart, and gays at heart), Boys of Summer, available any week now—or RIGHT NOW direct from the publisher.

My contribution is “Wheat, Barley, Lettuce, Fennel, Salt for Sorrow, Blood for Joy,” a long tale (even longer than the title) of a summer sailboat cruise off the Aegean coast of Turkey, in which young Luke becomes enmeshed in multiple strands of multiple variations of the Adonis story.

And also! Originally scheduled for last September, then pushed forward to this July, now rushed into print because why not: The Touch of the Sea, a seaweed garland of fantastical tales of men and the life-giving and -taking ocean. Should be available in print in a week or so, in e-formats not much later.

Besides the cover and interior design (which all the other writers seem to like, yay), my contribution is “Ban’s Dream of the Sea,” a story of a mysteriously ancient city in the sea, its uncanny original inhabitants, and the interlopers from across the ocean who have claimed it as their colonial capital.

And…and…this evening I’ll be attempting to add more sentences and paragraphs to a new story intended for another Steve Berman anthology about which I’m not yet permitted to speak.

Categories
awards fiction Lethe Press

excellent news

To my mind one of the strongest of all the books I’ve designed for Lethe Press, Livia Llewellyn’s Engines of Desire: Tales of Love and Other Horrors, is on the just announced short list for the 2011 Shirley Jackson Award in the category of Single Author Collection. Livia’s gorgeous and troubling long story “Omphalos,” first published in Engines, is up for a Jackson on its own as well. Go Livia, go Livia, go!

Also go: all the authors in Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s Teeth, up for Edited Anthology, especially my dear friend and Lethe’s publisher, Steve Berman, for his wicked little tale “All Smiles.”

Categories
design fantasy fiction short stories spec fic The Unexpected Thing

housecleaning

A good deal later, I have finally brought the designs portfolio up to date. Also reordered it in reverse-chronological order so you don’t have to scroll way down to see what’s new.

What’s new? Eleven books designed, laid out, and sent to press over the fall, winter, and into early spring. (There were twelve, actually, but one of ’em will remain unrepresented here for reasons private to the publisher and myself.) So go take a look at: Fog by Jeff Mann, The House of Wolves by Robert B. McDiarmid, Tales from the Den, edited by R. Jackson, Jewish Gentle and Other Stories of Gay-Jewish Living by Daniel M. Jaffe, Eat Your Heart Out by Dayna Ingram (the first BrazenHead novella), The Master of Seacliff by Max Pierce, Heiresses of Russ 2011, edited by JoSelle Vanderhooft & Steve Berman, Purgatory by Jeff Mann, Point of Hopes by Melissa Scott & Lisa A. Barnett (which I wrote up here, if you missed it), The Dirty Boys’ Club: The Soap Opera Murders by Simon Sheppard, and Beyond Binary, edited by Brit Mandelo.

Ten others are in my files at various stages of production—the majority fully laid out but not yet in print, including two sequels to Point of Hopes, my own You Will Meet a Stranger Far from Home, Steve Berman’s annual round up of the best gay speculative fiction, Wilde Stories 2012, and the second BrazenHead novella, Green Thumb by Tom Cardamone (whose surname I invariably mistype as Cardamom). So there’s those to look forward to. Maybe I’ll even get them posted timely.


What else is new? In March I managed (two weeks past self-imposed deadline) to complete an 11,000-word story begun nearly a year previously, “Seb and Duncan and the Sirens.” What it says on the tin. And then, in the face of an irresistable challenge, wrote from scratch “The Other Bridge,” a 5,600-word story of post-colonial brittleness. Which one reader has told me is among the best I’ve ever produced. My judgment is reserved.

April promises to be devoted largely to intensive revision of The Unexpected Thing. Joy.