Books and Birthday

The Complete Birthday News

I have gone around the sun another time. My eldest is in North Carolina (where I ought to be, instead of being a frozen magnolia in the No’th), and my husband the mighty adventurer is stalking around after elk and mule deer in the wilds of Montana (his share of Akwesasne Mohawk blood must be acting up), so the day will be comparatively quiet around here with me, R, and N. Cake, presents, and modest frolics in the offing.

Book-length fiction: Val/Orson

Val/Orson (U.K.: P. S. Publishing) now has a pub date of March 2009. If anyone would like a pre-pub .pdf copy to review for print or web publications, including blogs, please leave me a note. And if anyone would like to pre-order, the book will be available in jacketed hardcover (limited edition of 200) and hardcover (limited edition of 500). (Does that seem confusing? What it means is that the hardcover without a jacket will have the jacket image on the body of the book.) Catherynne M. Valente will write the introduction.

Long narrative poems and lyrics

Currently I have poems forthcoming in Books & Culture and Mezzo Cammin. As I like Mezzo Cammin, I have sent the editor a number of poems and will have some in the December 2008 and June 2009 issues. I’ll put up a link when “The Throne of Psyche” goes up there, as I’d love to have any feedback on that one. It’s blank verse narrative in seven parts. In addition, chapter IV of my 24-part post-apocalyptic poem, Thaliad, will be up soon at qarrtsiluni. Any feedback on the long poems will be appreciated…

Stories

I also have several stories coming out in Postscripts, the hardcover/softcover magazine of P. S. Publishing—just signed limited edition sheets for the December issue. They will be shifting to anthology format soon. “Rain Flower Pebbles” is the one due out next month; it is another in a small series of stories that pilfer reality—my children, my federal house, the Fenimore-and-baseball-famous Village of Cooperstown—for purposes of strangeness.

Currently out is “Static” in Extraordinary Engines (a steampunk anthology from Solaris, edited by Nick Gevers), a rather Dickensian revel involving static, spontaneous combustion, and lightning. Next up (January 6, 2009) is “The Chinese Room” (DAW, ed. Pete Crowther) in We Think, Therefore We Are. This is a zany story based on an artifical intelligence “thought experiment” of John Searle. If that is not enough for you, there are midgets and former jockeys and love and sausages.

And there will be more anthology stories in 2009 as I whirl around the sun.

Photo credit: I have borrowed (as Huck Finn would say) this from Eric H., on www.visitingcooperstown.com/library.html, so be sure and visit his site--you can see what I see on a regular basis! I eyeball the interior of the library a lot more often than the precincts of The Baseball Hall of Fame, I promise.

Please check out poems by Corey Mesler directly below--I'm banging shut the door until the Another Dratted Birthday banner flies on the 22nd. I need to meet deadlines, literary and otherwise, and when I come back, I'll have news. I'll do my annual purge of ephemeral posts as well. For now, feel free to leave Corey a note or questions... Addendum, Nov. 5: We have a President-elect who has shown people that a man of any color can become President of a country that promised to be a nation under God, with liberty and justice for all, and that is good. Here's advice for each of us, including presidents, from Honest Abe Lincoln: Whatever you are, be a good one.