My First Zoom Class

This last Thursday, I did my first Zoom meeting, speaking to a class full of college students who'd read my story "Staying Afloat." I was nervous, but excited, and felt kind of boingy about it. :) I didn't get much sleep the night before, with my mind racing with thoughts about what I was going to talk about, how I was going to explain things and in what order, how I'd answer questions, and how I'd explain the assignment I planned to give the students at the end.

I had no idea how this was going to work, on a practical level, which was where some of the stress was coming from. On the whole I felt positive about it, but any kind of stress, positive or negative, can mess with your sleep, so when I dragged my butt out of bed after like two or three hours' worth max, I made myself a mug of high-octane tea and went for it.

There was a last minute glitch that was kind of funny. I had the link to click on to get into the class "meeting," and planned to log in about ten minutes early. Good thing, because when I clicked on the link, it asked me for an access code. Umm, what?

Quick e-mail to the professors, and one of them got back to me in a minute or two saying to hang on, that he'd find it. Couple minutes later, I had the access code, yay! Apparently one of the students, who'd also logged in early, had found it. Dr. Matt said he'd get a million extra credit points, LOL! I'm assuming that if you have a regular meeting like a class, you put your code in once and then your computer or the Zoom system or whatever remembers it for you, so Dr. Matt didn't remember the code from back whenever the semester started. Day saved by a tech-savvy student. :)

 The presentation went great. Looking back, my brain is trying to convince me I spent at least half the time babbling incoherently, but going by the responses from both the students and the professors at the end, that part was apparently all in my head. I introduced myself very briefly, then talked about how I came to write "Staying Afloat."

Dr. Tamara had asked me to talk some about research, so I explained about the Anthology Workshop, what the guidelines were, and how I approached coming up with a story idea that fit the guidelines. A lot of the info I used in the story came out of my head, from a unit we did in sixth grade on the pre-Columbian Latin American civilizations, from my high school freshman science class, and from a college geology class. I explained what I Googled and what I was looking for, and how I used the info I found.

I talked about the writing itself, as well. Apparently a lot of the students are interested in fiction writing, and pretty much all the student questions, which were pretty much the second half of the two-hour class, were about different aspects of writing. So I talked about creative brain versus critical brain, and about how writing six stories teaches you a lot more than writing one story and rewriting it five times. And how "polishing" your story with a copy of S&W or CMS in one hand is a horribly bad idea for fiction writing.

Plus a bunch of other stuff. Nowhere near as much as I'd have liked to mention, but I tried to get in as much as I could in the time allowed, considering there were other things we had to do and only two hours to do it.

I talked about some business stuff too, although not too much, because we just didn't have time.

I got the obligatory question about writer's block, and I answered that as best as I could, explaining about writing block versus project block, and some methods I use to keep writing even if I'm blocked on a project, and a (very labor intensive) method I've used to unblock a project, although it's kind of a pain and I haven't done it often.

In all seriousness, I'd like to just be able to teach a class on this. Not that I'm the most successful or experienced writer in the world, and I'm still learning and always will be, but there's so incredibly much info I wish I had when I was twenty, and I'd love to be able to pass it on, you know?

Oh, and I was incredibly glad I'd grabbed my water bottle before sitting down. I'm not used to talking this much, and my mouth was drying out after like ten or fifteen minutes. We took a short break after an hour, and I refilled my bottle. Definitely got my hydration in that day.

I could only see a few photos of other meeting participants in the window, although there were supposed to be about eighteen of us there. I didn't want to mess with controls in the middle of class for fear of messing something up, so I never did see most of the students, but I did see some folks laughing at times when I'd hoped they would, and I saw people taking notes, occasionally lots of notes, so that felt good.

I'd made up a cheat sheet of things I wanted to talk about, so I could keep kind of on track and hit things in some kind of logical order, but I found that looking over at the cheat sheet -- even after having printed it out in 14 pt. type, for extra visibility -- was more disruptive than useful. I'll probably do it again next time, but now at least I know now to depend on it. Yay for lots of random experimentation and rehearsals -- aside from disrupting my sleep, I spent a lot of time subvocalizing explainations and such while walking back and forth, getting my steps. That meant I'd worked out how to explain a lot of things, with relevant examples and comparisons, in the week or more before the session, and even if I wasn't looking down at my cheat sheet very often, I found the info I wanted was usually in my head, so that worked out.

The assignment I gave them toward the end of class was to download a (fake) anthology guideline, and come up with an idea for a story they'd write to submit to that book. I asked for 300-500 words, just the basics -- who the character was, what they wanted, why they couldn't have it, and what they were going to do to try to get it anyway. Since the class is about climate change in media and literature, I made the anthology about a post-global-warming world, so I said I wanted to know how far in the future their story was set, and what the new normal looked like. I didn't necessarily want the protag to be trying to solve the climate change problem, but I wanted the changed climate to have a significant impact on the plot. I also pointed out that the first thing the protag tries to solve their big problem doesn't necessarily have to be the one that works, and probably shouldn't be the one that works, explaining try-fail cycles and how the improve a story.

One student had his assignment in the next day, Friday, with a very nice note thanking me for talking to the class and saying how much it meant to him. That was pretty awesome, and made me feel good. :) I gave them a deadline of Monday at noon, and I'll start reading and writing up comments then.

Oh, and I said I'd read and comment on up to two story ideas per student, although they were only required to do one. I remember when I was a new writer, one of the huge problems seemed to be coming up with story ideas. Newbie writers seem to think that the one good story idea they have right now is the only one they'll ever have, and that causes a host of other problems, so the point of the assignment was to give them practice coming up with story ideas. I also mentioned the Ursula LeGuin thing about how, when you're writing to a theme, every other writer will also think of your first idea, half the writers will think of your second idea, a few other writers will think of your third idea, and finally with maybe the fourth and probably the fifth, you'll think of some things the editor won't see from a bunch of other people. I've gotten two assignments so far, and they've each had only one story idea. I'm hoping at least a few students take advantage of the opportunity to get comments on more than one. [crossed fingers] 

The plan is to read and comment on each story idea individually, then write some comments that'll go to everyone on the whole mass. I'm expecting there to be some overlap. I told them that if I got the same idea from ten different people, I'd definitely let them all know. :) But the plan is to talk about how editors choose stories for a theme anthology, how subthemes can emerge as you choose which stories you want to publish, how everything has to fit together and how you can end up rejecting some great stories you really love because they don't fit with the other stories you're putting into the book. I've never edited an anthology myself, mind you, but I've watched editors do it in front of my many, many times, so I can at least pass on what I've learned. It's certainly helped me understand the inner workings of anthology submission and response. And now, when an anthology editor tells me, "I had enough good stories for four books, but I can only publish one, and I'm really sorry to reject this," I actually believe them. I'll admit I didn't before; I thought they were just being nice. [wry smile]

Anyway, this whole experience was pretty darned cool, and I have another gig for the fall, when Dr. Tamara and Dr. Matt are teaching this class again. Definitely looking forward to it. :D

Angie

PS: I'm filling this under "appearance," among other things, even though I never left home. Because plague times. Close enough. :)

More Ways to Get The Executive Lounge, and Some Thoughts on Sales Channels

I set up a Books2Read universal link for The Executive Lounge, so you can find it on a bunch of different stores with one click. If I add a new store in the future, the link will still work.

Get The Executive Lounge

Right now, links are live to Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Scribd, 24Symbols, Angus & Robertson, and Mondadori, although the book isn't actually available on Scribd yet. Sometimes it takes a while for everything to percolate through. :/

If you haven't heard of 24Symbols -- I hadn't until I saw it as a B2R option -- it's a subscription service similar to Kindle Unlimited, but it doesn't require any kind of exclusivity crap. Unless Amazon changes its policy, you'll never see my books in KU, but 24Symbols doesn't make any outrageous demands, so I'm giving them a try.

I've never set up a Books2Read link before, but it was easy to do. The web site is well designed and the process is pretty intuitive. And if you distribute through Draft2Digital, which I am for some vendors, those vendors are automatically included in your B2R link, because B2R and D2D are linked sites. Setting all this up is free, so even if you only make a few sales through the less-popular-in-the-US vendors, it's still worth doing. And I've made one sale in Euros so far, so yay!

I've heard some writers say that they don't go wide because their wide sales are negligible, and it's not worth missing out on KU sales. I think this is short-sighted.

I figure, nobody in Europe, or India, or Australia, or anywhere else besides the US and maybe Canada knows who I am at this point. You build a fan base one reader at a time, and that applies to each sales channel. If you're not available in European stores, then you're probably not going to have any European fans. If you start publishing books in the European stores (or wherever,) you're there, and you'll eventually start building your fanbase there. It might well take a while, but as Kris Rusch always says, this is a marathon, not a sprint.

Looking at this another way, it reminds me of the way some tradpubbed writers were experimenting with indie publishing a while back, indie pubbing one book and then looking at their first month or two of sales. When they didn't earn thousands or even hundreds per month right away, they declared the experiment a failure, and said it proved that indie publishing was an overhyped bubble. Heck, I remember one writer, known for SFF novels, who indie pubbed a contemporary short story, saw a small trickle of sales in the first couple of months, and declared the whole indie publishing business a clear failure, with a bit of snarky smirking. [huge freaking eyeroll] Well, no kidding! That's not the kind of book you're known for!

The folks who tried going wide for a month or three, then declared it a failure and scurried back to KU are making the same mistake, I think. (Okay, maybe not the exact same mistake as the Contemporary Short Story writer-person, but plenty of others did the same experiement with the kinds of books they were known for. It still takes time to build up indie sales, when that's not how your fans are used to buying your books.) Any time you're looking to expand into a new market, it's going to take time. You're not going to hit it big in any new sales channel right away, unless you win the lottery. And "Step 5: Win the Lottery" doesn't belong in anyone's business plan.

And I have to think back on how many times I've heard a collective howl go up from the Kindle Unlimited community, whenever Amazon makes some major change in policy, or changes how they distribute money, how they credit "reads," how they require books to be formatted. Whenever Amazon tries to plug a hole being exploited by scammers and cheats, huge crowds of folks who were legitimately publishing through KU (but often were riding the edge, gaming the system while staying just this side of the line) scream and cuss and complain that their sales have tanked because of the change. They're collateral damage, and since Amazon's primary concern is the experience of its customers, not its vendor-partners, they don't care what the indie publishers think.

(Which I believe is a good policy in the long term, from a hard-nosed business perspective. If you piss off your authors, there'll always be more where they came from [that's how New York publishing has stayed in business so long, with the horrible treatment they give their writers] but if you piss off your readers, the authors will suffer too and the whole thing will spiral.)

I know some folks who see KU for what it is -- a right-now cash cow, that could change or shrink or go away at any time. If you grab the money and run month-by-month, paying off existing bills or making one-time cash purchases or just socking the money away, that'll work and it comes with little risk. The people who scream loudest whenever Amazon pivots are the ones who were paying their mortgage and buying groceries with their KU money, which IMO isn't a great idea. Amazon could make another change next week that'll completely tank their sales, and then they're screwed.

Personally, I'd rather build a fanbase spread across as many vendors as possible, to insulate myself from the effect of changing conditions at any one vendor. It's doable -- I know writers for whom Amazon is less than half their income. It takes patience and a long-term view, and I'm willing to give it that.

New Release -- The Uncanny Valley

A new book -- my first to be indie published, yay! -- called The Uncanny Valley is finally available!

This is a novelette, a contemporary fantasy about 10K words long, set in Silicon Valley.

"Uncanny Valley" is part of a group project called The Uncollected Anthology. It started in 2015, with a group of writers who loved urban and contemporary fantasy and wanted to write for more theme anthologies in those areas. But putting an anthology together is a lot of work, and that work doesn't stop when the book comes out. Someone would have to play accountant, to collect sales data from the vendors, work out what everyone was owed, and make sure they all got paid regularly. Nobody wanted to do that.

Then Dayle Dermatis got the idea of doing an uncollected anthology, where they'd write to a theme, but each writer would publish their own story as a separate e-book. They could coordinate release dates, use a cover template so the stories all looked like they went together, and have everyone chip in on promoting the project.

Later on, when bundling became viable as a do-it-yourself process (mainly through BundleRabbit, which is a great service), they started collecting the Uncollected Anthology, so now if you want all the stories, you can buy an actual anthology of each of the thrice-yearly issues. Or you can buy one or more of the individual stories, whichever you prefer.


Individual story: "The Uncanny Valley:"

Darcy James, a Detective Sergeant with the recently-formed Uncanny Crime Division, always has more on her plate than there are hours in the day. Hysterical civilians are screaming "Magic!" every time they catch a cold or get a flat tire. Overdosing on a new uncanny drug called Turbo results in gruesome death. And what's up with the dogs commuting into downtown every day on the train?

Somehow Darcy has to figure out what's real and what's not in a world turned inside-out, hopefully before anyone else dies.

E-book on Amazon
E-book on Kobo
E-book on iTunes
E-book on Barnes & Noble

The whole anthology:

All sorts of things make their way into a city.

They come, they breed, they adapt. One day, you’re looking at a raccoon breaking into a garbage can.

The next day, you’re not sure what you’re looking at, but it has intelligent eyes, lizard scales, and tentacles.

Should you get rid of it, or try to tame it? Spray some repellant, set out cheese for a midnight snack, or set the whole city on fire?

Can you make friends? And if you can, will it be more trouble than it’s worth?

Or will it lead to something glorious?

E-book on Amazon
E-book on Kobo
E-book on iTunes
E-book on Barnes & Noble

Dragged Kicking and Screaming into Social Media

So, I've finally succumbed to the Dread Lord Zuckerberg, and joined Facebook. :P An anthology project I'm in is organizing on Facebook. I'm not going to be precious about it, so I signed up. If you want to friend me, I'm here.

I have no idea how much time I'll spend on Facebook. I don't need another timesink, but I'll probably browse through periodically. We'll see how it goes.

There's a whole lot of stuff here, and I'm sure my page or wall or whatever it is looks pretty bare. I refrained from dumping my entire contact list from Gmail into the system. If I've ever e-mailed you, you're welcome. :) I still need to go digging through the privacy settings and figure out how to turn off as much of that stuff as I can. I've heard it's a pretty horrific experience, requiring a machete and several maps, so I'm not looking forward to it. :/

With any luck, it'll be fun too, though. I might even run into some folks I've lost track of over the yars; that'd be cool.

Angie, looking over her shoulder

Patreon Follow-Up

I've figured out how I want to schedule anthology posts, juggling posts here along with the various Patreon levels, two of which get posts a week early. I did the April post yesterday and put it up on my Patreon account, for folks getting the regular listing a week early, and folks getting my full listing, which also goes up a week early. Nobody's signed up for those levels yet, but if anyone does, they're there. :)

I have the post for here on the blog ready to go in drafts, and I'll release it on the 15th. Changing the lock on the April Patreon post from $3 to $1 will let those supporters see it. (I did a test, and $1 supporters do get an e-mail when a $3 post has its lock changed, so that works, yay.)

It's interesting (and sometimes frustrating) to actually dive into a completely new system and figure out how it works, what doesn't work the way I thought it would, and what the most efficient workflow will be each month.

One thing I didn't know when I started this is that Patreon won't accept HTML code in its posts. :/ At all. The completely unhelpful Help topic discussing this says it's because they haven't been able to get HTML to work in their mobile apps. Which isn't my problem, and doesn't make me any happier with this.

I hand code my posts here -- I've been online since before HTML was a thing, and while I'm not any kind of a wizard at it, the sort of coding that's useful for a basic blog post is pretty automatic for me -- and I just assumed I could do a copy/paste to put things onto Patreon. Well, not so much. [headdesk]

Patreon has its own system for formatting posts and inserting links, and once you see how it works, it's very easy to use. Which doesn't change the fact that it took me about an hour and a half to convert my post (keeping in mind that I was doing my full file, not just the two months' worth I post each month) and get everything looking more or less the way I wanted. It wasn't hard, (yay, HTML!) there was just a lot of it. :P

Since I'm still posting on my blogs, I can't just convert over to Patreon's system; I have to maintain two formats for the listings. I'm hoping that, now that I've reformatted my whole file, maintaining two differently formatted files in parallel won't be such a hassle. I usually find a few new markets per month, depending on the season, so I won't have to redo the whole thing again. I'll just double format each new entry and insert it into its master file. Hopefully that'll work. [crossed fingers] I keep my files in Word documents, and in the past I've had trouble saving something to Word, then re-opening the file and posting it into a different system. Not often, but occasionally, something will go Sproing! at that point and it's time to start headdesking again. Hopefully that won't happen this time. [more crossed fingers]

After a night's sleep, I'm feeling a bit better about this. I'm sure I'll figure out a decent workflow, although I won't know until next month. We'll see.

I do think my problem is probably particular to me. What I'm putting up on Patreon is pretty unusual; most other creators whose pages I've browsed are offering art, music, video, that sort of thing. The writers are (unlike me) generally focusing on their fiction creation, and they post downloadable files of stories, or short videos, podcasts or blog posts talking about their creating, their experiences, their characters and worlds, answering questions, etc. Also cat pictures. [wry smile] Writing right into the Patreon form isn't difficult; I'm probably one of very few people trying to paste huge swathes of HTMLed text into Patreon, so I doubt anyone's working behind the scenes to make HTML work on that system.

At any rate, it does seem to be working. Onward....

Angie

Patreon

Okay, I got a bunch of responses to my question about a Patreon last month, mostly in e-mail, and all of them were positive. So I've set up a Patreon page, yay. :)

Now that I've poked with the system a bit and seen how things actually work, I've made some changes in how I've set it up, versus what I came up with when I was thinking with my keyboard before.

First, I've set it up for a monthly donation, rather than per work. I originally wanted it to be per work, so if I missed a month (which I've only done twice in the eight years [wow, eight years, really?!?] that I've been doing the anthology listings) it wouldn't be a huge deal and no one would get charged. But Patreon won't let you do a "paid" post that only charges a subset of your patrons -- I don't know why not, but there you go.

So, I want to offer an option to get my whole list (which means all the anthologies I know about at the time, rather than just the two months' worth I post here) as a premium reward. But there's no way to only charge the $5/month people for that one, while only charging the $1-3/month people for the shorter listing. If I posted them both, it'd charge everyone twice a month, and that wouldn't work. Charging everyone once a month seems to be the way to go; I'll do my best to maintain my low rate of missed months.

Also, I originally thought about doing PDFs of the listing to e-mail people, as a sort of slightly fancier way of distributing things. But half the usefulness of the listings, now that I've thought more about it, comes from the links to the editor/publishers' web sites. They very often have more info than I include in the listings, and I always recommend a writer click through and check out the site before submitting something. That's tough to do from a PDF. Scratch that idea.

So I'll be posting the listings to my Patreon page, and patrons will get an automatic e-mail.

If you use the listings, if you find them helpful, any support would be appreciated. If you can't afford to contribute right now, that's fine; I totally get that times are tough for a lot of people. And I'll still be posting the listings here; I'm not cutting off anyone who can't afford to support my Patreon.

Here we go -- let's see how this works. :)

Thanks!

Angie

New Release -- Alien Artifacts

I have an SF story called "Me and Alice" in the new Alien Artifacts anthology, edited by Josh Palmatier and Patricia Bray. "Me and Alice" is about a young boy who's worried about his pet toad. Alice is very elderly (for a toad) and hasn't been feeling too well, but old age isn't something you can fix with care or medicine. An archaeological dig on his family's land provides a distraction, and a puzzle.

This anthology, and its sister book, Were, were funded through a successful Kickstarter campaign, and backers got mass market paperback copies. My trib copies were also MMPs, which is pretty cool; I've never had anything come out in that format before. Paper copies for sale now are trade size.

Paperback on Amazon
E-book on Amazon
Paperback on B&N
E-book on B&N
E-book on Kobo
E-book on iTunes



Josh and Patricia are also doing a Kickstarter campaign for their next batch of anthologies. This year they're doing three -- All Hail Our Robot Conquerors, Submerged, and The Death of All Things. They sound like fun; I'm especially looking forward to writing for Robot Conquerors, and maybe Submerged. And maybe Death of All Things too, but who knows? :) They've already made their goal, and have just a few days left, so you can pledge knowing that you'll definitely get whatever goodies you sign up for.

A New Reprint

My story "The Rites of Zosimos," originally published in Alchemy and Steam, has been reprinted in The Year's Best Crime and Mystery Stories 2016. "Rites" is a murder mystery set at a 19th century alchemical university. It's one of my own favorite stories, and it's awesome that the editors thought it was one of the best mysteries of last year, along with stories by Joyce Carol Oates, Mary Higgins Clark, Tananarive Due, Carrie Vaughn, Annie Reed, and a bunch of other great writers. I've never been in a "Best Of" anthology before, so this is doubly cool. Check it out!

Available:

as an Amazon e-book
as a Kobo e-book
as a Nook e-book
as an iTunes e-book

The paperback edition will be out soon, if you prefer paper.

Loosed Upon the World Is Out

Loosed Upon the World, the cli-fi (climate fiction) SF anthology edited by John Joseph Adams, released today. I have a story in it, along with a bunch of other great writers.

The table of contents has a lot of great names in it, including Paolo Bacigalupi, Robert Silverberg, Tobias Buckell, Margaret Atwood, Nancy Kress, and more. This is a beefy collection of stories, and everyone should find a lot of good stuff in it.

Available to Order:

in hardcover from Amazon
in paperback from Amazon
in e-book from Amazon
in hardcover from B&N
in paperback from B&N
in e-book from B&N
in e-book from Kobo
in e-book from OmniLit

So far as I can tell, it's not up in the Apple store yet.

This is my first reprint. Getting a letter from the editor asking if he could have my story for an up-coming anthology was just as exciting as my first story acceptance almost ten years ago. Having a well-known editor come to me for a story, rather than me having to beg and plead submit something? That's completely awesome. :)

Angie

Anthology Sale

I just sent back a contract for a short story called "Ghosts of the Past," which will be published in the ninth Valdemar anthology, a collection of stories set in Mercedes Lackey's Kingdom of Valdemar. This is the first time I've been invited to submit to a closed anthology, and it was a different experience. I'll admit I was nervous at a few points. :)

John Helfers, an editor I've worked with on a couple of Fiction River volumes, knew I was a fan of Misty Lackey's work and invited me to submit a proposal for a story. I've never worked that way before -- usually I read the guidelines for a book, then write a story and sub it, and I'm frankly not very good at judging ahead of time how long a story's going to be. There are writers who can aim for a 5K short or a 15K novelette or an 80K word novel, and hit right on, within a couple hundred words for the shorter lengths and within about a thousand for the novel, but I'm not one of them. I guess that's one of the skills you develop with a lot more practice and experience than I have. But I needed to sub a story synopsis and commit to bringing it in under the limit. So rather than just writing down my idea, I started writing the story. Good thing I did, because I got a few thousand words into that first idea and realized I had at least a novella on my hands.

Okay, scratch that and start over. I came up with another idea, pulled up a fresh story file and started writing again. After about 3K words I got a sense of where the story was going and how long it'd take to get there. I was sure I could bring it in under the wordcount limit, so I wrote up a synopsis and sent it in. John and Misty both liked it, and I got a go-ahead to write.

The writing was fun, and this is one of the areas on the commercial side of writing where having fanfic experience can be a help. All the characters on the page were my own inventions, but I wanted to do justice to Misty's world, and to the tone -- in computer OS terms, the "look and feel" of it -- so that the story sounded like a Valdemar story, and felt like something Misty could've written. I sent it in, got some edits from John, and we eventually got it hammered out such that we're both happy with it. Misty liked it too, so I got a contract.

[I've had questions about this before, so just in case anyone's wondering, my experience has been that contracts are issued after edits. That way, you get paid for the actual number of words that are going to appear in print. And I've never gotten the feeling that an editor was trying to shave things down to save a few bucks. In fact, most of my edits have resulted in the story being a bit longer.]

I found I was a little more nervous about this one than I've been about other anthology submissions. I think it's because I was playing in someone else's sandbox, borrowing their toys (even if I brought some of my own) and I didn't want the sandbox's owner to think I was doing it wrong, or being disrespectful. It's like going over to someone's house for the first time and wanting to make a good impression. :) Getting the final okay on my story, from John and Misty both, was a great relief.

The book will be out in December, from DAW. I'll post a cover when I have one.

Angie

How to Get a Reprint Offer

So, back in December, I got an e-mail from John Joseph Adams, one of the better known anthology editors in SFF. He'd read my story "Staying Afloat," and wanted to know if he could have reprint rights for a climate fiction (CliFi) anthology coming out in 2015. I said "Heck yeah!" and we made a deal. The project was confidential for a while, but it's been announced, so I can talk about it now.

The word rate was good (twice what I've seen at a lot of reprint markets, plus potential royalties if the book sells well) and the contract is author friendly. What's important here, though, is that at the time Mr. Adams wrote to me, I had one (1) science fiction story in print -- this one. I was as much of a nobody as you can be while still being published in the genre, but my story came to the attention of a prominent editor. I had someone (who had plenty of options to choose from -- check out the TOC below) find me, and write to offer me money, out of the blue.

The take-away here is that you don't have to be famous or even well known to get subsidiary rights offers, but you do have to be findable. Dean talks about this periodically, about how you don't need an agent to get sub rights offers, but you need to have a very findable home online, with an obvious way to contact you. Whatever name you write under, that name needs to be easily found, and -- no matter how much you hate spam -- you need to have an e-mail address out there that folks who want to offer you money can use.

Don't wait until you've "made it" or are "established," or until you have a "reasonable" number of stories published, or until you've had some award nominations, or whatever bar you think you have to clear before anyone will be interested in offering you money and/or work. If you have a single story published, it can happen. Don't sabotage your own career by hiding.

And now for the book:

This is the definitive collection of climate fiction from John Joseph Adams, the acclaimed editor of The Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy and Wastelands. These provocative stories explore our present and speculate about all of our tomorrows through terrifying struggle, and hope.

Join the bestselling authors Margaret Atwood, Paolo Bacigalupi, Nancy Kress, Kim Stanley Robinson, Jim Shepard, and over twenty others as they presciently explore the greatest threat to our future.

This is a collection that will challenge readers to look at the world they live in as if for the first time.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

o Shooting the Apocalypse—Paolo Bacigalupi
o The Myth of Rain—Seanan McGuire
o Outer Rims—Toiya Kristen Finley
o Kheldyu—Karl Schroeder
o The Snows of Yesteryear—Jean-Louis Trudel
o A Hundred Hundred Daisies—Nancy Kress
o The Rainy Season—Tobias S. Buckell
o The Netherlands Lives With Water—Jim Shepard
o The Precedent—Sean McMullen
o Hot Sky—Robert Silverberg
o That Creeping Sensation—Alan Dean Foster
o Truth or Consequences—Kim Stanley Robinson
o Entanglement—Vandana Singh
o Staying Afloat—Angela Penrose
o Eighth Wonder—Chris Bachelder
o Eagle—Gregory Benford
o Outliers—Nicole Feldringer
o Quiet Town—Jason Gurley
o The Day It All Ended—Charlie Jane Anders
o The Smog Society—Chen Qiufan (translated by Ken Liu & Carmen Yiling Yan)
o Racing the Tide—Craig DeLancey
o Mutant Stag at Horn Creek—Sarah Castle
o Hot Rods—Cat Sparks
o The Tamarisk Hunter—Paolo Bacigalupi
o Mitigation—Tobias Buckell & Karl Schroeder
o Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet—Margaret Atwood
AFTERWORD: Science Scarier Than Fiction—Ramez Naam

PRE-ORDER THE BOOK:

Amazon | Kindle
B&N | Nook
Other Retailers

Looking Forward

Yesterday was my birthday -- I turned fifty-one. Which makes today the first day of my second half-century.

It sounds pretty neat, actually. I've never had any age hang-ups, and thoroughly agree with this cartoon by The Oatmeal, but being fifty-one feels unusually cool. The Start Of My Second Half-Century sounds like a beginning, and it's a beginning to something pretty darned big. There's an excitement in that, like I'm starting a new slate and I can write whatever I want on it. The past is even more past than usual, and this is the first step into the future, like I've come to a whole, huge beach of fresh sand to leave footprints on.

That's what it feels like, anyway, and I'm looking forward to the next chunk of my life.

Angie

Anthology Acceptance

I got a note from Corie Weaver, editor of The Young Explorer's Adventure Guide, saying they want the story I subbed to them. This is pretty awesome -- it's my first pro sale to someone I haven't met face-to-face, fourth all together.

The publisher, Dreaming Robot, is going to be running a crowdfunding campaign starting on 1 August to raise the money to pay their writers the pro rates they're offering. Normally this would be a red flag for me -- not a scammer-type red flag, but an "Is this worth the time and hassle for something that might not work out?" kind of red flag. But their web site says:

If the crowd-funding fails, please note that we are still committed to this anthology, and will find other ways to fund the project. However, there may be delays. If authors feel the need to withdraw their submission due to delays, we understand.

And the sample contract sent with the acceptance letter states:

In the event that The Anthology has not been published within twelve (12) months of signing of this agreement, all rights revert to The Author, and The Author has the right to sell or arrange for publication of The Work in any manner.

So the editorial team plans to be cool about people withdrawing because of delays, and if they get hit by a bus and their sociopathic cousin takes over ownership of the project and its contracted works, the contract still protects us from unreasonable delay. I'm satisfied with the situation.

They're taking subs through 31 August, if you're into YA SF. It'd be cool to be in an antho with some of my blog buds. :)

Angie

PS -- I had to dig the original acceptance letter out of my spam folder. :/ Always-always check before you delete!

Trying This Google+ Thing

Okay, so what happened is a couple/few months ago (don't remember exactly how long) I came across this add-on for Chrome that'd let you use the old Compose box with Gmail. I really hate the new one, and a lot of people seemed to like this add-on, so I added it on. It had a quirk or two (like adding space between the lines in your in-box right after you'd used Compose) but I could live with that to have the old Compose box back. And all was well for a while.

Then like a month ago, I suddenly couldn't get into Gmail on Chrome. First it was just my desktop system, but a few days later it broke on my laptop too. I had no idea what the problem was. I could get into that Gmail account just fine on Firefox, or even [shudder] Internet Explorer, but when I tried to bring it up in Chrome, it just kept cycling and cycling forever, as though it were processing the page but couldn't get anything to resolve. I logged out and logged back in -- nothing. I logged out, restarted the computer, then logged back in -- nothing. I tried approaching Gmail from different angles -- nothing.

Now all this time, Chrome had been bugging me to "complete" my Google+ profile for my AngieBenedetti mail address and, like, get with their system. I wasn't interested in another social network thing, so I ignored it. But eventually, after trying everything I could think of, I though, Maybe Google's messing with me because it wants me to do this Google+ thing? It wouldn't be the first squirrely thing some huge company had done to try to get folks to use one of their products, and Google's been closing its eyes on its "Don't be evil" thing now and again over the last few years, so I figured I might as well try. So I set up my profile on the angiebenedetti mail account.

Nothing.

[sigh]

I moved on, and eventually figured out that it was the add-on that let me have the old Compose box. :( I turned that off and poof! I could see my in-box in Chrome again. I figured the most recent Chrome upgrade had hosed the add-on. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that Google did it deliberately, either, because they have major issues about forcing everyone to do things exactly their way. But anyhow.

So I had this Google+ profile floating around out there, with basically nothing but my name on it. Then someone added me to a circle. And someone else added me. So I guess I'm sort of there whether I planned to be or not?

I decided to give in and at least try it. I filled out my profile a bit more, and added a couple of people to circles, but most of the folks it suggested to me to add weren't people I know terribly well. If you're active on Google+, even if only a little, and would like to add me or have me add you or whatever, let me know. I'm still woefully ignorant about how this system works -- I'm not even sure if you'd look for me there as "Angie Benedetti" or "AngieBenedetti" or "Angela Benedetti" -- so however you want to ping me about it, do that. :)

We'll see how this goes. If it turns into a huge timesink, I'll probably walk away. But for now, it might be fun. Anyone else playing?

Angie

[ETA: Closing comments because of a ridiculous amount of comment spam. :/ ]

A Great Reading

So yesterday evening Jim and I headed downtown to the University Bookstore to do a reading. I was nervous for a day or two leading up to the event, and kind of twitchy-stressed. I've never done this before, I was worried no one would show up, I wondered if anyone would like my work, or whether I'd verbally stumble my way through a horrible performance. You know, the usual newbie-nerves one gets about pretty much anything taking place in the public eye.

Our reading time had been cut down by a few minutes, so I spent Wednesday finding a scene that'd work -- something that stands sort of alone, was interesting, and was short enough. I picked an early-ish scene from A Hidden Magic and cut some bits out of it, a few words here, a line or two there. When I was pretty sure I had something that'd work, I printed it out, because I've noticed at other people's readings that writers who read from print-outs looked more comfortable than writers who read from books.

Tracy, who organized the event as part of the Gay Romance Northwest Meet-up in September, was there, along with some people from Old Growth Northwest, which is partnering to put on the meet-up. Tracy'd warned us that traffic was awful in the early evening, so we all got there early and hung out until the start. Chatting with Astrid Amara, Ginn Hale and Laylah Hunter was fun. None of us had ever done a reading before, and we were joking around about whether all of us could fit under the draped table, and just pass the mics back and forth without having to be, like, right there in front of the audience. Because writers tend to be hermit-ish, and that was certainly true of all four of us. O_O

Once it got going, though, it was great fun, and I wasn't nervous anymore, anticipation being worse than the actuality and all that. The bookstore had set up a table and chairs for us, so we sat there in a row the whole time rather than having to shuttle up to a podium or whatever, and there were a couple of mics we ended up ignoring because we didn't need them. There were probably about thirty-some people in the audience, which filled most of the chairs, with a few people standing around the edges or sitting on the floor. I enjoyed the other readings, and when it was my turn, I was glad I'd printed out my scene; not having to use both hands to keep the book open was nice.

Doing the reading was fun, and I managed not to stumble too badly. :) Once I got going it just flowed, and the line about the goblin wearing a "Tolkien Sucks" T-shirt got a great laugh. I wrapped up and got some nice applause, which was pretty awesome.

There was a lively Q&A session after the readings. We talked about where we get ideas (of course -- I think it's illegal to have an event featuring writers without that being discussed) and whether we outline or not (I was the sole dedicated pantser in the group). One person asked whether where we started was always the actual beginning of the story, which was an interesting question. My beginnings usually stay my beginnings, except when I'm writing SF. I tend to do a lot of worldbuilding right there in the first few pages, and I do a lot of cut/pasting into another file as I pull the blathering out of the story, before the real beginning of the story shows up.

One young man thanked us for helping to queer SF, which was great. And yeah, that's part of the point. Writing queer characters in fiction helps normalize queerness, if only a little. People who know queer or GLBT people are less likely to be homophobic than people who don't (or do but don't know it). I can't go around introducting folks to actual GLBT people in realspace, but putting queer characters into fiction, treated just like any other characters who have problems to solve and worlds to save, who go on adventures and kick butt on the villains and get the guy or girl of their dreams? That has to help, at least some, and that I can do.

When the Q&A was over, I signed some books and then the event broke up.

Thanks to Tracy and the Old Growth folks, and the U Bookstore for putting on the event, to Astrid, Ginn and Laylah for plotting to hide under the table with me, and to everyone who came out to hear us. I had a great time, and am very much looking forward to the meet-up in September.

Angie

Reading on 25 July in Seattle

On Thursday, 25 July, I'm going to be reading at a Gay Romance Northwest special SF/Fantasy event, at the University Bookstore in Seattle, along with Astrid Amara, Ginn Hale and Laylah Hunter. The U Bookstore is at 4326 University Way NE Seattle, WA 98105, and the event starts at 7pm. It's free, so I hope everyone in the area who likes SF, Fantasy and/or gay romance will come down to hang out with us.

This event is a lead-in to the Gay Romance Northwest Meet-Up on 14 September, at the Seattle Central Library, in the Microsoft Auditorium. The library's at 1000 4th Ave Seattle, WA 98104, right downtown. This is a one day event, with registration starting at noon, the event itself from 1pm to 5pm, and Happy Hour from 5pm to 7pm for folks who can't stand to leave and want to stay and chat a while longer. (I'll be there the whole time, and hopefully we'll get a group to go to dinner after. [crossed fingers])

Early registration for the Meet-Up is $15; it goes up to $25 on 1 August. This is a great price; I've been to a lot of conventions and conferences, and I haven't seen one-day prices this low for a couple of decades. Pre-register here.

Writers attending the Meet-Up in September:

Astrid Amara
Talya Andor
Eric Andrews-Katz
Cate Ashwood
Heidi Belleau
Angela Benedetti
Sarah Black
Kade Boehme
L.C. Chase
Megan Derr
Stormy Glenn
Amelia Gormley
Ginn Hale
Lou Harper
Daisy Harris
Laylah Hunter
Amber Kell
Nicole Kimberling
Morticia Knight
Pender Mackie
Finn Marlowe
Sasha L. Miller
M.J. O'Shea
Rick R. Reed
Devon Rhodes
P.D. Singer
Tara Spears
Andrea Speed
Ethan Stone
Lou Sylvre
Anne Tenino
Piper Vaughn

This event is being hosted by Old Growth Northwest, a non-profit organization working to support a complex ecosystem of writers and readers in the Pacific Northwest. Thanks to them for helping put on these events!

Story Release -- Staying Afloat

I have a story called "Staying Afloat" in the current volume of the Fiction River anthology series, How to Save the World. It's an SF anthology, part of a new series of multi-genre anthologies. John Helfers edited this book, with Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch as the series editors.

This is the story I wrote for one of the workshops back in March, and it was awesome to get my trib copy, especially since this is my first pro-level publication. While travelling in Mexico, I saw fields on hillsides so steep I wouldn't want to have to climb them (even when I had two good knees) much less establish crops there. It made me think about what would happen if the annual rainfall doubled or tripled or more -- watering a steep slope makes it more likely to slide, not less, contrary to popular belief. And I wondered whether there was a solution that would be viable for small farmers, whose economic situation is usually pretty marginal. Then I remembered something I learned about the Aztecs in sixth grade, and it all came together.

I started out as an SF fan watching Star Trek, back when it was in its original run on NBC in the 60s. I have fuzzy memories of watching the show at home, and then playing Star Trek on the playground with a bunch of boys when I was in first grade. When I was in sixth grade, I discovered books about Star Trek, including The Making of Trouble with Tribbles, by David Gerrold. Tribbles was always one of my favorite episodes, and I've read some of Gerrold's other work over the years. Now, almost forty years later, I'm in an anthology with David Gerrold, who wrote the lead-off story for How to Save the World, and it's pretty awesome.

Reading through my copy, I remember some of the stories from the workshop, while others were new to me. They're all worth reading, and some of them are excellent.

Busy with Business

Wow, two anthology posts in a row! I've never done that before. I've been kind of busy, doing some cool things.

Early in May I attended a workshop on how to do POD books -- covers, interiors, marketing and selling, with a lot of really shocking info on how the business has changed very recently. I spent the time between my April anthology post and the workshop itself fiddling with Photoshop Elements (which it turned out I didn't need for the class :P ) and InDesign, which is an awesome tool -- once you've learned even the basics of ID, it becomes clear why it's the industry standard. Once you have your art (for about fifteen dollars off a stock art site -- and yes, they have art art as well as photos) you can do the whole cover, beautifully, in InDesign.

Flowing the text in is easy. Front matter goes in first, then your story or novel text; ID will create as many pages as you need, and you use master pages to set the layout. The fiddly part here is making sure the formatting works at the line- and paragraph-level. Hunting for widows (the first line of a paragraph alone at the bottom of a page), orphans (the last line of a paragraph alone at the top of a page, and widowed orphans (the last line of a paragraph, totally alone at the top of a page, with no other text on the page) can make your interior look much better. Most of these can be fixed easily by using the tracking tool on a whole paragraph at once, tightening or loosening it enough to pull a lone word or two up onto the previous line (re-flowing everything up to close the space) or to push a word or two onto the next line (pushing everything down a line) while not changing the spacing so much that someone casually reading will even notice.

InDesign is an incredibly powerful tool, and there are usually multiple ways of doing just about anything, which means it can be overwhelming at first. Having personal classroom instruction, one-to-three instruction with Allyson in small groups, and people coming around to give us one-to-one help during lab periods, was worth the cost of the workshop, and then some. The workshop was taught by Dean Wesley Smith and Allyson Longueira (Allyson is the publisher at WMG), with help during labs by a couple of local writers who are old hands at this and came to help out. Lee Allred was particularly awesome in giving assistance to all of us newbie book designers.

And really, that's what it comes down to: the design. You can achieve the same results with other tools, but what's important is the design. Look at other books in your genre -- professionally published books, not just indie books -- and see what they look like. What elements are on the cover? How are they laid out? What's large or small? What elements are associated together, and placed near one another? Notice those little tags -- "Bestselling author of Popular Book," or "Book 3 of Author's Cool Series" -- that are too small to read in thumbnail? You still need them on your e-books. Even if they're unreadable in an online bookseller's catalog, they're design elements and readers are used to seeing them, even as a little line of unreadable text, on professionally designed covers. The cover will look naked and unfinished without them.

What's included in the front matter, and how is it laid out? What do new chapter pages look like in a novel, or new story pages in a collection or anthology? What does the spacing look like, between the headers and the text, the footers and the text, the text and the margins? If your presentation is amateurish, potential readers (buyers) will notice, even if they can't articulate what bugs them about a particular cover or interior. New York has conditioned us to expect certain things about a professional book, and if an indie book doesn't have all those things, or they're not laid out the way we're used to seeing, that'll ping our "amateur" alarm, even if we can't put our finger on why. Learning how to design the book, and the cover, is more important than learning to use kerning tools or feathered gradients in a particular software package. (Although you really should learn those things in whatever software you're using.)

So before the workshop, I was playing with the software and watching instructional videos online. Then I was in Oregon for a week and a half, and a lot busier than I thought I'd be. The day I flew to Portland, I met a writer friend [waves to PD Singer] at the airport, along with a friend of hers who lives in Portland, and we went and had lunch with a few other writers in our genre who are local to Portland. I love meeting internet people in realspace, so that was very cool. After lunch, Pam and I drove out to the coast, and we roomed together for the workshop itself. We sat next to each other in class, swapping help and opinions and angst. :)

After the workshop, we drove back to Portland and Pam dropped me off at my hotel. When I'm at these workshops, I like staying an extra night in Portland; not having to scramble to catch a plane that day means that I can flex my schedule to match that of whoever's driving me. One of the writers we had lunch with on the way out came to my hotel that evening. [waves to Amelia Gormley.] We chatted, had dinner together, and chatted some more.

The biggest bomb dropped on the workshop, though, was during the evening sessions, which were all business discussions. Remember Ella Distribution? I mentioned them a couple of months ago -- they were set up to distribute indie books by small publishers to bookstores. Well, Ella is gone. It was well organized, with an awesome web site, and had great people working on it, but within less than half a year, the industry changed. Now, not only is Ella no longer necessary, but it can't compete with the big kids on the playground.

Dean and Sheldon McArthur (Shelly's one of the best known booksellers in the country) talked to us about what'd changed recently with the distributors. Basically, 1) Baker and Taylor no longer marks books as POD published, and Ingram and the others followed suit; 2) B&T (and the others) now offer POD books at a good discount to booksellers, about 45%, and more if they keep on top of their bills; and 3) B&T (and the others) now allow returns on POD books.

There are indie-pubbed books in bookstores right now. If you go through Createspace, and pay the extra $25 for extended distribution, your books are available to bookstores through their standard distributors, on terms that make stocking them attractive. The only barrier right now is your book's presentation -- mainly cover and summary blurb. (Again, does your cover look professional, or does it look amateur?)

The playing field between an indie-pubbed book and a midlist New York published book is now level when it comes to getting into bookstores.

Shelly talked about how he finds books to buy for his store, through the distributor, through publisher catalogs and promotional material, and through sites like Goodreads, where he'll go to see what books people might be talking about that he hadn't heard of. He's been buying indie books ever since the distributors changed their policies. He doesn't care where a book comes from so long as it's a good book, professionally presented, and neither do the readers.

Dean and Kristine Kathryn Rusch are talking about this all month on their blogs, in much more detail. As always, there's good stuff in the comments, too. I highly recommend you read their posts on the subject. (Actually, if you're a writer I highly recommend you read their blogs all the time. Lots of great stuff there.)

During all this, I had a deadline on the 15th to get a story turned in for an event running in June on Goodreads, and the story I was writing was getting longer and longer and longer.... [headdesk] When I wasn't futzing with InDesign during the workshop, I was writing, and after I came home I was still writing. I got it done, a 60K word novel that'll be available on Goodreads some time in June, and as an e-book on Goodreads and ARe some time after that, depending on where it is in the very long list of books the group's volunteers have to work on. I'll be doing a paperback version some time after that. (I did a cover for it at the workshop.)

And now I'm back to writing other things.

The business is changing while we sit here. If we stay on top of the changes, and take advantage of them, they'll work for us. This is a great time to be a writer, and a wonderful time to be indie publishing, or getting into it if you're not yet.

Angie

February Stuff

I've been on the Oregon coast for the last week and a half, doing two workshops back-to-back. It was a grueling experience, as the single workshop I did last year was. And it was awesome, and I'll definitely be doing it again. I got lots of writing done, and I SOLD A STORY!! Which got the all-caps treatment because it's my first professional sale, as in more than five cents per word, holy freaking yay!!! :D

I'm going to have a story in Fiction River's anthology How to Save the World, edited by John Helfers. (Scroll down a bit -- it's the second book.) Holy sheep, I'm gonna be in a book with David Gerrold!

I've been trying to break into mainstream SF/F for ages, so this is a huge deal for me. I'm still getting this really silly grin on my face whenever I think about it, so I beg pardon of anyone who sees me and thinks o_O about my state of mind. :)

I wrote almost 29K words in February, which is good -- I'm still well ahead of quota for making my 2013 goal. My wordcount meter says I'm at 27%, so I'm where I was hoping to be at about a week into April. That's great; I love having padding on my quota. I was hoping for more in February (January was over 35K) but there were several days when I was in the workshop and frantically reading rather than writing. I count those days well spent, though. I also killed my streak, but I was anticipating that, too. No prob; doing an Oregon workshop is one of the better reasons I can think of for having days with no actual writing.

The workshops I did were The Business and Craft of Short Fiction, and the Anthology Workshop. The Antho Workshop is a repeat for me; it's worth doing over and over, and many writers do. I took a ton of notes, especially at the first one, and learned a lot of stuff I didn't know before, which is the point. (Wow, a story that's in a continually extended option with Hollywood can make you a buttload of money, even if they never make the movie!) Great info; it's going to take a while to absorb it all.

Currently I'm sitting in a hotel room in Portland; I have a flight home at 2:30. I'll do some writing today, then fall into bed (ten hours last night, still not caught up) and my next Thing To Go To is a dentist's appointment on Thursday.

Oh, yeah, didn't blog about that before. :/ So on Wednesday two weeks ago, Jim and I were having dinner at this little cafe across the street. They have these really good ice cream sandwiches -- two chocolate chip cookies, made in-house, with in-house ice cream in the middle, then freeze the whole thing. So I was eating my ice cream sandwich when one of my crowns (upper incisor) snapped off at the gum line. :( Luckily I had a root canal before they put the crown on, so it didn't hurt; I was just damn startled, and then all ACK!! when I realized what'd happened. And that I was getting on a plane Saturday morning to go to the workshops. [headdesk]

I went to my dentist the next morning and they put in a very fragile, non-functional, temporary tooth-like object, cemented to the teeth to either side on the back. I was warned not to bite anything, and not even to brush. And when your dentist tells you not to brush, you know your fragile dental work is FRAGILE. I was very careful, but it was a bit wiggly within about 24 hours. I had some vague hope that it'd last at least until the second workshop, but no luck; it came out just a bit over three days after having been installed. So I've been going just over a week now with this huge gap in my front teeth, and talking a little funny.

I feel like I'm seven again. :P

Anyway, this is fixable, although it's going to be expensive. Civil Service has notoriously lousy dental insurance, and the Pacific Northwest has notoriously expensive dental care, for whatever reason. So the bill for an implant is going to be very large, and our insurance isn't picking up a dollar of it. This is our tentatively planned cruise for this year, going into my mouth.

I just hope my other crowns last longer. At least I know to stay away from the Market Cafe's ice cream sandwiches; that was the most expensive dessert I've ever eaten, by a couple of orders of magnitude.

Angie

Emerging Magic and A Hidden Magic out in Paperback

Amazon has copies of Emerging Magic in paperback. The paper version is 390 pages long, and costs $16.95, free shipping if you have Prime.

I also have to laugh -- there are three companies offering to third-party sell you a new copy already, all with a $3.99 charge for shipping, which is doubtless how number one, who's charging $16.94 (Ooooo, discount!) is making money. Number two is charging $17.19, and number three (who's got to be seriously delusional, is all I can say) is charging $57.87. Good luck, dude. :)

I've heard some other writers griping about this, but so long as I get my royalty, they can sell the book for whatever retail price they like. I'm certainly not going to stress out over a business whiz who thinks he can sell a sixteen-something dollar book for almost sixty dollars, on the same page with a [Buy] button for the (identical) sixteen-something dollar version.

Anyway, I'm sort of boinging over here, because this is my first paperback book. I turned in the EM galleys ahead of the HM galleys, so I'm assuming the paperback Hidden Magic will show up some time soon; I'll definitely post about it when it does.

[ETA: Charisstoma found the A Hidden Magic paperback. It's not linked to the Kindle edition yet, so I didn't see it -- stealth paperback! It's 248 pages, and costs $14.95 with Prime shipping available. Thanks to Charisstoma for pointing it out!]

Angie