It's been a busy month since my last post. The biggest news of direct import to Missionary Man fans is the KGB reading which I announced in my previous entry. I was paranoid at first that it wouldn't actually happen, but now Ellen Datlow is sending out little press bits with my name in them, so it looks like it's safe for my pessimistic self to say it's on.
Of course, the press material Ellen prepared is a bit misleading. Her notice (forwarded to me by my friend Mark Worthen, from the Horror Writers Association newsletter) says this:
CHINA MIEVILLE, author of KING RAT, PERDIDO STREET STATION and THE SCAR and WILLIAM SHUNN, author of short fiction in Vanishing Acts and Realms of Fantasy and of the forthcoming novel SILVERTIDE on Wednesday July 17th at 7 p.m.
Yes, the sticky bit is that "forthcoming novel SILVERTIDE," which implies that I've actually sold that book. Evidently this is my week for miscommunication, and while I thought I had told Ellen that I was working on a novel called Silvertide and hoped to have news about it soon, Ellen evidently heard something a bit different. Now, Jim Frenkel at Tor has certainly let me know that he is eagerly awaiting Silvertide, but that's a long way from a book contract. I hope he doesn't see that notice somewhere and assume he's been preempted by some other publisher.
At any rate, Jim is currently reading Missionary Man, and as far-fetched as it seems, how cool would it be if he ended up acquiring both books?
I'm mulling over the idea of generating a press release of my own. After all, the whole point of a reading is publicity, and since I don't have a book to push to readers right now, why not try to get some editors and reporters there, right?
Anyway, in other news, I am as I said above working hard on Silvertide. In fact, a complete draft of the book is finished. I'm in the middle now of some extensive revisions, and hoping in the process to trim it down from 180,000 words to 125,000 or so. I'm shooting to have that finished by summer's end.
In short story news, Nick Gevers selected "The Veil Beyond the Veil" (from the April 2002 Realms of Fantasy) as a recommended story for June in Locus. Nick's arrival at Locus signals a sea-change in their short-fiction reviewing, if only because Mark Kelly never liked my stuff much and Nick has historically liked it very much. Here's what he said in his column:
"The April Realms of Fantasy is impressive, a testament to the skill of Shawna McCarthy, once of Asimov's, in editing a magazine some seem unfairly to underrate. . . . No less credit to William Shunn, who in 'The Veil Beyond the Veil'—a sort of metempsychotic tour de force—hurls a woman's soul across the myriad realities, until, with excruciating gradualness, she may look beyond Maya at last. Shunn conveys his wisdom fragmentarily, but it is cumulatively ineluctable, a more sober recasting of Robert Silverberg's classic timeline-hopping story 'Trips.'"
Yes, I'm somewhat abashed to admit that I had to look up those words.
And in submission news, I currently have eight short stories out in the mail, five of which I mailed out on Monday. "The Two Towers" came back from F&SF, so I sent it straight back out to Asimov's. I sent a slightly older story called "Why I Think I'll Be Staying Home Tonight" to F&SF, another called "The Diner" to Realms of Fantasy, and yet another called "Mrs. Janokowski Hits One Out of the Park" to Electric Velocipede. Finally, I sent one called "Whether We Are Mended" to Keith DeCandido for his novelettes-only anthology Imaginings.
With eight stories out (others are already at Interzone, Sci Fiction, and The New Yorker), you'd expect at least one of them to sell, right?
And that's the writing news for today.
