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fantasy fiction football (soccer) historical fantasy Lethe Press novelette novella Rahab SF short stories spec fic

book news

Long ago at the beginning of time—in 1976, that is—the first piece of fiction I was ever paid money for appeared in print. If I remember correctly, that story paid for my first electric typewriter. I’d written it longhand in a prep-school spiral-bound notebook, then typed it up on a portable manual Hermès that might be worth some money now if I still had it.

Let me do the math: Sometime in 2016 I will have been a Published Author for forty years. How is that even possible?

To mark the anniversary, I thought, how about a collection of stories, new and old? Not quite as old as forty years—I reread some of that apprentice work from the 1970s and ’80s. I don’t hate it (much) but don’t feel like preserving it either. Let future scholars and heirs do that after I’m dead. So the initial date I chose is 1990, the year I acquired my first computer (an Apple Macintosh SE of blessèd memory) and determined once for all the name I wished to be known under.

I brought the notion to Gentle Publisher, who agreed with good grace (although he nixed my proposed cover in no uncertain terms) and surprised me utterly by saying, “I’ll find somebody interesting to write an introduction.” I am as curious as you are who that will be!

At any rate, barring unforeseen mischance, out in July 2016 from Lethe Press will be a massive tome entitled Not Here. Not Now. collecting thirteen stories and novellas from a quarter century’s work in (and out of) multiple genres.

table of contents

  • “Composition with Barbarian and Animal” [written 1992/published 1994]
    Science fiction, a tale of barbarian merchants in the strange worlds of the far future.
  • “You Deserve” [2013/2013]
    Contemporary dark fantasy about a teenager and his dads, dreadful impulses and dreadful powers.
  • “Michael in the Library” [1991/1998]
    Quasi-historical fiction set in Roman Alexandria, concerning a scribe at the famous library and his lover, a novelist.
  • “Seb and Duncan and the Sirens” [2010-2012/2014]
    Contemporary fantasy: American tourists. Greek island. Sirens.
  • “A Handbook for the Castaway” [1996/1997]
    Quasi-historical fiction, the shipwreck narrative of an eighteenth-century pirate.
  • “A Portrait in India Ink by Harry Clarke” [2013/2013]
    Semi-historical* romance revolving around an Irish artist’s gorgeous illustration for a minor Poe story.
    *(do the 1960s count as history?)
  • “Dramma per musica; or, The Frenzy of Alexander” [1995/previously unpublished in full]
    Faux-autobiographical fiction containing, as in a matryoshka, a narrative of Baroque-opera castrato erotica.
  • “Three Men I Want” [1995/1997]
    A non-fiction short story, deceptively autobiographical, ambiguously confessional.
  • “The Hyena’s Blessing” [2012/2013]
    Quasi-historical fantasy set in eleventh-century Egypt, involving an assassin, a caliph, and, well, zombies.
  • “Captain of the World” [2010/2011]
    Contemporary sports fiction. No, really. Narrated by a Turkish-American soccer goalkeeper.
  • “#duranperi” [2013/previously unpublished]
    Contemporary fantasy, a kind of fairy tale taking place at the edges of the Gezi Park protests in İstanbul during the summer of 2013.
  • “Two Dead Men” [2012/2012]
    Secondary-world fantasy, a supernatural love story set during and ten years after a vicious civil war.
  • “The New People” [2008-2009/2011]
    Science fiction, an exploration of the society evolved on an isolated colony world three hundred years after all the women died. And a love story. And a fan letter to Israeli singer-songwriter Ivri Lider.

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cats fiction Lethe Press Oregon short stories spec fic

heatwave!

Happy Revolt-Against-Your-Rightful-Monarch Day or whatever you call it.

I have not had much to say these weeks, what with Misses Charlotte and Jane not venturing into the terrifying outdoor world for a while, thankfully. A little earthquake this morning, first I’ve noticed since returning to the west coast although not the first to occur: the refrigerator shuddered, the leaves of the dracaena atop it trembled, and the building groaned. But nothing fell or broke. Also the area is enduring successive heatwaves with afternoon highs well above 90°F. Something I am finding novel about Oregon summers is that, however hot the days, the nights are cool, dropping thirty or forty degrees Fahrenheit between sunset and dawn. (I see too many dawns these days: also novel, and upsetting.) During New England heatwaves I sweated all night long, I well remember. The cats are not best pleased by the heat, languishing in decorative attitudes on the wood floors—I tell them to retreat to the foyer on the ground floor, routinely twenty degrees cooler than upstairs if unwelcoming otherwise, but they don’t listen—and my deck garden finds it stressful. This box of godetia and cosmos is pretty, though.

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The makeshift trellis supports sweat peas, not yet tall enough to be visible let alone to bloom. (There’s [invisible] scarlet flax in there as well.) The tall and blooming sweat peas in a different box are lovely and very fragrant.

Writing news? Publication news? Not much, alas. There’s a Top Secret Project possibly in train but I dassn’t say anything in public until a contract is signed. And there’s this, contributor’s copy received a few days ago:

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Huh. That title is not entirely legible on the laminated hardcover. Careless designer. ::slaps own wrist::

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I will note that this reprint is the author’s cut, so to speak, of “Shep: A Dog,” restoring some bits of characterization and plot-and-theme-wrapping-up the original editors chose to dispense with, and it can be read only in Best Gay Stories 2015.

If you were unaware, the publisher of the Best Gay Stories annual series* and all but one of my currently available books, Lethe Press, handsomely revamped its website a while ago. I could wish for an author index, but one truly welcome addition is a shopping cart. Yes, you may now purchase Lethe books direct and personally, immediately, help improve the press’s bottom line. (And mine. Not so immediately.) You might type sale into the search box: I expect you’ll find a Jeffers title or two at a scandalously low price.

*As well as the Wilde Stories annual, collecting a year’s worth of fine speculative fiction populated by gay men and other fantastic creatures. The 2015 edition, coming soon, will include my novelette of the Kandadal’s World “The Oily Man.”

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fantasy fiction Lethe Press short stories spec fic You Will Meet a Stranger…

voices in my head

I will confess—nay, glory in—the fact that I nearly always read my own work aloud at some point. It’s the surest method I know to discover clumsy sentences and faulty rhythms, especially after one has stared at the black marks on the screen so long they’ve begun to make sense.

However, I am entirely unable to deal with audiobooks. Soon as I hear a professional orator begin narrating a story, my brain makes a frantic scrabbling rush in search of distraction. (This is not something that often happens when I read print.)

However however, I am well aware freak-mutants exist who adore the things. I expect they aren’t even the strangest monsters inhabiting this globe of ours.

For those mutant freaks, then, this note: Lethe Press and Audible.com have released an audiobook of my collection of wonder stories You Will Meet a Stranger Far from Home narrated by one Simon Ralph. Happened about a week and a half ago. I’m told, indeed, it’s Lethe’s audio bestseller for March.

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(I listened to about thirty seconds before I was driven screaming into a hell dimension of horror and remembered I could turn it off.)

But for you, monster, audiobook aficionado, here are links: Amazon or Audible. There’s even a teaser for my next novel, That Door Is a Mischief, in the form of the original short-story version of chapter one. Perhaps Simon Ralph’s melodious vocal stylings can stall your anticipation of that release. (September, probably.)

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awards Deprivation erotica fantasy Lethe Press magical realism The Padişah’s Son and the Fox

multiple finalist

Weallll. This is a startle. Just got off the phone (how I hate the phone!) with Gentle Publisher, who informs me I am a double finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards, longlists shortlists (oh god I’m tired) announced this morning.

1. In the category of LGBT Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror: Deprivation; or, Benedetto Furioso: an oneiromancy.

Deprivation

2. In the category of Gay Erotica: The Padişah’s Son and the Fox.

padishah_testcov02

So. I’m in more than a bit of a fog just now for other reasons entirely and will confess that, although Gentle Publisher listed off my competition in both categories, I don’t quite recall. And am far too bleary to go look at the list. Except that Deprivation’s up against two books I am very fond of, Death by Silver by Melissa Scott & Amy Griswold (Lethe Press) and Light by ’Nathan Burgoine (Bold Strokes Books), so when I lose to one or the other I won’t be all that upset. If I lose to one of the other seven (! I believe GP said) finalists, possibly a different story.

Winners announced sometime in May, I think 2 June 2014, at some kind of folderol ceremony in Manhattan. Possibly by then I will be awake and competent again. Probably not in Manhattan. Zzzzzzzzzzzz.

[Edited 8 March to add a few links.]

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erotica fantasy fiction Lethe Press novella The Padişah’s Son and the Fox Turkey

how has this happened?

I woke two days ago with a sore throat and stuffed-up sinuses. Granted in the northern hemisphere it’s the beginning of the traditional season for the common cold but I’ve been more than usually eremitical lately. It was a good four days since I’d been within sneezing distance of another human being (who did not in fact sneeze on me). All my understanding of the etiology and epidemiology of rhinoviruses is thrown into disarray. I am ’mazed and bewildered by this dark, fearsome sorcery.

Also I feel like shit. Coughy, snivelly, mucussy, achey, miserable shit.

Meanwhile, whilst I drink liter after liter of Jamaican ginger tea with honey and continue listening to Mashrou’ Leila, I’ve been putting the last polishes to The Padişah’s Son and the Fox. Text and cover files will be submitted to the printer tomorrow, conversion files to the wizard who makes Lethe Press’s e-books. So I’m expecting all editions to go on sale within a week. Watch for it at your favorite on-line booksellers.

padishah_testcov02


I have also been contemplating the collection of wonder stories I mentioned last time. This is still up in the air, you understand. But my expectation is it’ll be released sometime in 2014 and its title will be Not Here. Not Now. Here is the tentative table of contents:

  • “Composition with Barbarian and Animal”—written 1992 / first published 1994.
  • “A Handbook for the Castaway”—1996 / 1997.
  • “The Celebrants”—1979 / 1981.
  • “Cartography”—1988 / 1988.
  • “A Man Not of Canaan”—2010 / 2013.
  • “Seb and Duncan and the Sirens”—2010-2012 / previously unpublished.
  • “Michael in the Library”—1991 / 1998.
  • “The Fire the Fire”—1980 / 1992.
  • “Annie”—2008 / 2010.
  • “From the Bridge”—1982 / 1992.
  • “The Hyena’s Blessing”—2012 / 2013.

Eleven is an uneasy number and the MS is a bit lengthy so I won’t be surprised if I end up pulling one story from this list. Which one is the question.

A question I will consider in bed with more Jamaican ginger tea.

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Deprivation fiction Ireland Lethe Press short stories

spring, huh?

And yet I look out my window to snow flurries. Feh. Well, if we must go by the calendar (Gregorian/Persian/Bahá’í), Happy Northern-Hemisphere Spring (I’ll believe it when I’m not wearing longjohns and fuzzy slippers), Nowrūz, and Naw-Rúz. Slightly belated on the first two, sorry.

I have been ill and distraught in a distressing number of ways and so missed noting a very kind review of Deprivation last week, by the ever kindly Jerry L. Wheeler of Out In Print Queer Book Reviews.

[Deprivation], then, is a wonderfully plotless piece of art to be savored and admired. How could you possibly ask for anything more?

Warms the winter-shrivelled cockles, that does.


Ill, distraught, and writing. (And designing and proofreading and whatnot, but who’s counting.) Completed in draft this afternoon, revised and sold this evening: a story I never intended to write. Said repeatedly throughout the open-submissions period I. Would. Not. Write. Changed my mind when the theoretically final MS of the anthology came into my virtual hands for copyediting and eventual layout.

Artwork & design: Niki Smith.
Artwork & design: Niki Smith.

The anthology is Where Thy Dark Eye Glances: Queering Edgar Allan Poe, a Steve Berman production for Lethe Press which means to do exactly what it says on the tin.

Exactly what I’m seldom interested in doing. “I don’t like being bound by another writer’s imagination,” I whined in response to Steve’s artful, flattering cozening. “I refuse to write slash/fic, however gussied up as homage. It’s unseemly. I find Poe’s prose—and verse, my God!—unreadable, his obsessions repulsive.” (Substitute Stoker for Poe and you hear my arguments against writing a story for Steve’s Suffered from the Night: Queering Stoker’s Dracula. We’ll see how well my scruples stand up to that one. There’s still time.)

So the MS came to me and I read Steve’s introduction with its charming recollections of gay-boy-geekdom…and was somehow reminded of the luxurious, poisonous illustrations created for a 1916 British edition of Poe by the Irish graphic (and stained-glass) artist Harry Clarke. Now, I was as much a gay-boy geek as Steve, though *cough* significantly longer ago. Young Steve, I believe, missed out on the glories of Lin Carter’s Ballantine Adult Fantasy program (unfortunate title, wut?) and had to settle for Poe to get his fantastical adolescent jollies. But I was also an illustration geek: Aubrey Beardsley, Alastair, Kay Nielsen, Erté…Harry Clarke. Who I didn’t recall was Irish until Wikipedia told me just two weeks ago.

Bitten by the nostalgia bug, I went Googling and quickly found the full, public-domain complement of Harry Clarke illustrations for Tales of Mystery and Imagination. What glory. Those crazy tapered hands! The faces! The knowledgeably horror-vacui textures and patterns! The draftsmanship!

Nostalgia bug had not had its fill of my tasty, tasty blood. Wikipedia’s telling me Harry Clarke was Irish threw me back to my long-ago Co. Waterford childhood at Rockmount, a grand Georgian big house nr. (as our postal address put it) Kilmacthomas. This is a setting I had, astonishingly, only once used for fiction—a twenty-odd-year-old novella that had best not see print in my lifetime.

I wrote to Steve. I said, “Hrrrrm.” He said, “Go for it. I can give you a week or two.”

So my very first completed story of 2013 is not any of those I’ve been badgering to death since last year (or longer ago) but “A Portrait in India Ink by Harry Clarke”—inspired by the illustration for “Morella,” below, and my own history of migraine, and which, truly, queers Clarke more than Poe, but so be it—set in a grander house than Rockmount on a stormy winter night of 1968. Due in print and e-book in July. How delightful to share a table of contents with Christopher Barzak, Richard Bowes, and Jeff Mann, whose recent/forthcoming books I had a hand in, as well as a mysterious and imaginative congeries of others new to me and not.

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design fantasy fiction Lethe Press short stories spec fic You Will Meet a Stranger…

to print, to print

Although not officially on sale until the 14th, You Will Meet a Stranger Far from Home has gone to press. Primarily so that publisher Steve Berman can schlep printed copies north from New Jersey next week for display on the Lethe Press table at Readercon in Burlington, Mass. (Sell many copies to discerning con-goers, little book!) And drop a few off with the author in Rhode Island along the way.

Just under the wire to appear on the flyleaf, capricious and brilliant author of Lambda Literary Award-winning Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories Sandra McDonald offered up a gobsmacking blurb:

These ten stories transport us in smart, dazzling, and sometimes brutal ways into worlds that are both familiar and unfamiliar, near at hand and far over the horizon.  Alex Jeffers writes like a man with a thousand years of stories to share. Each is like a prism held up to the sun, refracting hard but rewarding truths unlikely to be found in any other place but these beautiful pages.

Tangentially related to You Will Meet a Stranger: At Out in Print Queer Book Reviews this morning, Jerry L. Wheeler posted a review of Steve Berman’s marine anthology The Touch of the Sea, saying extremely flattering things about my “Ban’s Dream of the Sea,” reprinted in the collection.

Also sent early to press today so Steve can promote them at Readercon, two anthologies. Wilde Stories 2012: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction, edited by Himself and with fantastic cover art by Ben Baldwin, should be generally available around 1 August.

Lauriat: A Filipino-Chinese Speculative Fiction Anthology, edited by Charles A. Tan, cover artwork/design by Maxie Wei, is scheduled to go on sale 15 August.

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awards BrazenHead Lethe Press novella spec fic

the occult head of brass speaks

BrazenHead news:

Our first release, Dayna Ingram’s exhilarating Eat Your Heart Out, is a finalist for the Golden Crown Literary Society’s Goldie Award in Speculative Fiction. Alas that BrazenHead is competing against our corporate overlords at Lethe Press, which has two titles (both of which I also designed) in contention for the same prize: Hellebore & Rue: Tales of Queer Women and Magic, edited by Catherine Lundoff and JoSelle Vanderhooft; and Heiresses of Russ 2011: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction, edited by JoSelle Vanderhooft and Steve Berman. Winners of all the myriad Goldies are due to be announced this coming Saturday, 16 June, at the 2012 GCLS Literary Awards Ceremony in Minneapolis. Bated breath, bated breath. May the best women win!

Eat Your Heart Out has also been the recipient of still more rave reviews since the last time I posted about it here on the front page. In print: Black Static in the UK, the Bay Area Reporter on the left coast, Rue Morgue magazine. On the web: the Edge network, Lambda Literary Review, and the book blog The Rainbow Reader. Check out excerpts and (as available) links here.

Speaking of favorable reviews, forthcoming second release Green Thumb by Tom Cardamone is reviewed in this week’s Publishers Weekly. Quite happy about that. Scheduled publication date for Green Thumb remains 1 August.

Brand-new news! Official announcement, more or less. BrazenHead’s third release will be The Grigori by Joshua Skye. The Grigori is a thoroughly disturbing dark fantasy set in contemporary Pittsburgh, about which I will say nothing more (until I compose some marketing copy…) except two words: Angel. Meth. Joshua and I are just beginning the final edit phase prior to layout and, barring unforeseen hiccups, the book should be out by 1 November.

Meanwhile, here’s an interview with Joshua published in the Pride edition of Philadelphia Gay News. You can also explore his other work at his official site.

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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.”

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design fantasy fiction Lethe Press recommendation spec fic work in progress You Will Meet a Stranger…

return to Astreiant

Nicolas Rathe and Philip Eslingen are back! And I am really very extremely pleased to be involved in their renascence.

Point of Hopes, the novel in which Rathe, Eslingen, and the great city of Astreiant were introduced, was the second collaboration of science-fiction novelist Melissa Scott and her partner, Lisa A. Barnett, following by several years and solo Scott novels The Armor of Light, their dazzling alt-history fantasy of an Elizabethan era in which neither Sir Philip Sidney nor Christopher Marlowe died untimely but allied to defeat a magical threat to the kingdom.

First published by Tor in 1995, Point of Hopes is rather a different animal, a pure secondary-world fantasy of a peculiarly solid, matter-of-fact sort. This is a world that feels, as Booklist’s review of the first edition put it, “lived in.” It’s a world lit by two suns—the familiar day-time primary and the smaller, more distant winter-sun—in which astrology, alchemy, necromancy, and other magical disciplines are demonstrably science, every great household employs a wizard (or magist, in the novel’s terminology), and nobody would risk making a major decision without first consulting her horoscope.

And yet it’s the farthest place from the idealized, romantic, sorcerous Age of Heroes of Tolkien and his innumerable followers. Middle Earth is a lovely place to visit but it’s not anywhere you, as a reasonable human person with human needs and desires, could live. The city of Astreiant, the nation of Chenedolle of which Astreiant is capital, Chenedolle’s immediate neighbors and distant trading partners, all possess the qualities of actual places with working economies, histories, technologies. (My guess—probably wrong—is that Astreiant’s models were the wealthy mercantile cities of the Burgundian Low Countries in the early Renaissance.) Life would be hard in Astreiant for a refugee from twenty-first-century USA but not especially harder than in Elizabethan London and conceivable in a way that acclimation to daily life in Minas Tirith or the Shire, it seems to me, is not. Indeed, for women and queer people, Astreiant has multiple advantages over our own time in that, without any fuss at all, Scott and Barnett have imagined societies in which gender equality is the norm and minority sexualities no big deal.

Refreshingly furthermore, although Chenedolle and other nations naturally possess entrenched aristocracies, nearly all the principal characters in Point of Hopes are ordinary people—not quite middle class, largely because an Astreianter middle class hasn’t quite evolved yet. Ladies and lords are, as they would be for you and me, distant glamorous figures who make you self-conscious about your second-best coat and unpolished manners when the course of events brings you into contact with them. Neither Rathe nor Eslingen are hidden heirs to any kingdom nor potential heroes of the humble-hobbit-turned-Savior!-of-the-World! variety. They do their jobs as best they can, worry about money and laundry like you and me, live their mostly ordinary lives without expectation of being extraordinary. Which, of course, makes them all too extraordinary in fantasy-land.

Nico Rathe is a pointsman, member of a kind of city guard or police force that’s grown up in the various districts (points) of Astreiant, charged with maintaining public order and investigating crimes. Only a century or so since the institution’s establishment, pointsmen are still regarded with suspicion by the city people whose business they’re likely to interfere in and the nobility, fearful of erosion of their privileges. Meanwhile, Philip Eslingen, a mercenary from Chenedolle’s traditional enemy, current ally, the League (a loose confederation of independent city states, apparently), is paid off at the end of the campaign season and looking for work to keep him through a winter in Astreiant, where foreigners are less trusted than pointsmen.

The plot of Point of Hopes involves the mysterious disappearance of scores of Astreiant’s children and an alchemical conspiracy in support of one candidate for Chenedolle’s childless queen’s throne. It’s an excellent, clockwork plot, and grand fun to watch it working out, red herrings, detective work, adventurous rescues, and all. But for this reader the real joy of the book was the picture of a fully realized, working secondary world—and the pleasure of making Rathe’s and Eslingen’s acquaintance, for they are lovely, solid, imperfect men.

Point of Hopes was followed by Point of Dreams (also Tor, 2001), set largely in Astreiant’s theatre district. I haven’t reread it as recently as Hopes—this will be remedied soon!—but as I recall the plot was smaller scale though no less satisfying and the new corners of Astreiant fascinating to explore. The big surprise was discovering Rathe and Eslingen to be acknowledged lovers now, not so many months after the end of Hopes when they were merely good friends and accidental partners in adventure who had (subtly, subtly) admitted an attraction between them. At any rate, I enjoyed Dreams a great deal and resigned myself to waiting another six years for the next Point.

Very sadly, that was not to be. Barnett was diagnosed with cancer in 2003 and after a long, hard fight died in 2006. Tor ceased releasing a new Scott novel just about every year. As best I could determine (admittedly I didn’t try that hard), Scott fell completely silent—understandably!

Then, ’round about the time I became inextricably entangled in the webs of Steve Berman’s Lethe Press, Steve announced he would be reissuing Scott’s Lambda Literary Award-winning science fiction novel Shadow Man, although he didn’t ask me to design it. Nevertheless, I perked up, very happy to see that fine, extremely peculiar book rescued from out-of-print oblivion.

Two and a bit years later, after negotiations I don’t pretend to know anything about, huzzah!, Lethe is also rescuing Nico Rathe, Philip Eslingen, and Astreiant.

Spectacular cover art by Ben Baldwin; cover layout and interior design by me. I uploaded files for the dead-tree edition to the printer earlier today; that and various e-book formats should go on sale within a few weeks.

But that’s not all! Steve confessed feeling a dreadful disappointment, when Point of Dreams was first released, about not getting to witness the beginning of Rathe’s and Eslingen’s non-working relationship, skipped over in the interval between Hopes and Dreams. And so Melissa Scott took herself back to Astreiant, bittersweetly solo, to write Point of Knives, a savory novella which, in the interstices of another tricky case for Adjunct Point Rathe and his ex-mercenary sidekick, shows exactly that. And, incidentally, Rathe’s transfer/promotion from Point of Hopes to Point of Dreams, something that was rather glossed over in the second full-length novel.

Another spectacular piece by Ben Baldwin.

Point of Knives is scheduled for release this summer, followed in the autumn by Lethe’s new edition of Point of Hopes. Rumor has it we can expect the fourth Book of Astreiant, Fairs’ Point, next year. I’m pretty damned impatient, let me tell you.


On a self-involvedly personal note, the other day I received You Will Meet a Stranger Far from Home’s second blurb. Christopher Barzak, author of the widely acclaimed novels One for Sorrow and The Love We Share Without Knowing, writes:

Step onto this flying carpet and prepare to be carried away to exotic times and places, where Alex Jeffers has set up camp to tell his tales to both those already familiar with his wonderful wonder stories and to those strangers who happen to be passing by.

And I am within spitting distance of completing a draft of “Seb and Duncan and the Sirens,” a longish story begun over a year ago, set aside several times, but now (foolishly) promised to Somebody (he knows who he is) by month’s end.