In addition to a discount on The Chocolatier’s Wife, you can also celebrate Celebrate Chocolate Day with some free prose from me!

Back before Sarah was born, I went and banked some blog posts, figuring that for a couple of weeks when I was too frazzled to write, I would be able to just click “Publish,” and the posts would go out into the world.  Well, it turned out I was too frazzled to just click “Publish,” so I’ve had these things languishing in a file, some of them long past the time when they were relevant.  This one seems to have become relevant again, so:

If you haven’t seen it already, I donated a vignette last year for use in promoting WickedFaire.  To publicize this year’s theme, Jeff Mach set up the virtual Wicked Chocolate Factory, which includes individual rooms written by different authors.  Each room contains a vignette or piece of flash fiction, an illustration, and a link to the author’s Web site.  At present, the factory consists of two stories by Jeff, one by me, and another by the lovely and talented Sara Harvey–who, I might add, recognized “Garden of Dreams” as mine even early on when a glitch had the vignettes up without the authors’ names.

Enjoy!

Needles & Bones is now available in the Drollerie Press bookshop (buy page: http://drolleriepress.com/bookshop/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=11&products_id=85 description page: http://drolleriepress.com/needles-bones/)

It will be available at mobipocket.com soon, and at Fictionwise and Amazon as soon as they process it.. . .

I haven’t had a chance to read a lot of the other stories in that book (with work and parenting duties, I manage to finish maybe a page a night of the new novel in progress, and then I’m wiped out), but there’s one right after my poem, called “Sleepwalker” by Darin Bradley, that I’ve started and find really intriguing.

 The Web chat is tomorrow (Thurs 5/21) starting at 10:00.  If I’m not mistaken, the Drollerie Press blog tour also takes place that day.  More info tomorrow on who’s posting what where.

“Subterranean Song” has been moved from the Drollerie Press anthology Things That Go Bump in the Night into the upcoming anthology Needles and Bones, also from Drollerie Press. I’m kind of excited about this, because “Bump” (ghosts, vampires, zombies) sounded like it might be good, but “Needles” (surrealism) sounds downright fascinating.

“Red ‘Hood” is in StereoOpticon, which is now out (also Drollerie).

“Behind the Tower” is still slated for publication in Straying from the Path: New Tales of Little Red (Drollerie again). To the best of my knowledge, the only thing we’re waiting on is the artwork. When I looked over my proof copy, there were more stories without art than with, but the art that was there was phenomenal.

I’ve been working on a story called “Where We Come From,” which will be a chapter in The Skin We Wear. It’s hard for me to estimate a word count, because most of “Where” is handwritten pages (which were written at different stages of exhaustion, in different degrees of lighting, so one page might have 250 words on a side, and the next might have 75), and because the full manuscript isn’t compiled but divided into individual chapters/stories.  But by my best guess, “Where We Come From” is currently at about 6,500 words, and the current book manuscript including those 6500 words (but not including any of the partial writes I’ve done on stories I might or might not finish) is just shy of 40,000 words.

Click here to read the Peace Poems press release.

For those who aren’t on my mailing list, here is the press release for the new publication of Shadow of the Antlered Bird: 

“When you arrive at the end of the novel, you’ll want to immediately reread this wonderful book.”
-Liviu Suciu, Fantasy Book Critic Blogspot
 

In time for Halloween, Drollerie Press has just released the e-book Shadow of the Antlered Bird, an intense and haunting novella by David Sklar that explores the darker side of identity, as a young man’s quest to find himself unleashes a nightmare he is not prepared to face.Order it at: http://drolleriepress.com/bookshop/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=33
Read an excerpt: http://drolleriepress.com/Authors/?page_id=120
Read the review: http://fantasybookcritic.blogspot.com/2008/08/indie-review-shadow-of-antlered-bird-by.html

More information, including the author\\\’s blog and details of recent publications by David Sklar in Membra Disjecta, Space & Time, and other venues, can be found at: http://davidwriting.com/

The Drollerie Web site also now has my author page and an excerpt from the novella.

More info soon.  If you’re on my mailing list, you can expect your first e-mailing from this site.

Yes, my chilling little novella will be available before Allhallows, so you may yet read it in the season to which it is suited.

Antlered Bird Flyer

If you click on the thumbnail, you should be able to see it full size.

In case you can’t view it, there’s a half-size version here.  I had to resize by hand, so the proportions may not be exactly right, but the link on the thumbnail wasn’t working for all visitors.

So

Also in recent promo stuff, I received a flyer via e-mail for the Come Together: Imagine Peace anthology from Bottom Dog Books, in which a poem I coauthored with Geoff Landis will soon appear.  You can view that here:

imaginepeacesflyer.pdf

Wrap-up of AlbaCon after the jump.

AlbaCon Wrap-up

Whenever anyone asks my advice for planning a wedding, my favorite response is that everything will go wrong, but no one will notice it but you–and if you only keep that in mind, you’ll be all right.  Well, planning a convention is a lot like planning a wedding, except on a much larger scale with crappier food.  But at AlbaCon, the biggest thing that went wrong was front and center, because Anne McCaffrey, the guest of honor, had to cancel because of her health.

It was still a good convention.  Her son, Todd McCaffrey, came in her place and did readings and panels.  I didn’t get a chance to meet him, but my wife skipped my book signing to go to his presentation, and she says he’s really nice.  And there was a get well card to Anne McCaffrey, for everyone at the convention to sign.

The hotel was also very nice, and we had a view of downtown Albany, with a river visible between the buildings.  And the hotel catered the Green Room, which was a nice plus, though we didn’t find out about it until Saturday night.  And the pool had good hours, from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m.  We went there Saturday night and had a good chat in the hot tub with some people from the Anne McCaffrey Web forum Meeting of Minds.

My first event of the convention was my book signing on Saturday at 3:30.  It was nice to have the morning off, with Andrew at his grandparents’ house, so Rachel and I slept in, and then went to a lazy lunch, from which we barely got back in time for the signing.  I shared my slot with a military SF writer named Ryk Spoor, who has a following already, so the table was mobbed by four or five of his fans.  I wasn’t sure they would have any interest in my work, but two of them bought Antlered Bird on CD-ROM anyway.  A third came to my reading but didn’t buy a book.

I’m still figuring out what’s the best chapter to do at a reading.  For the last two readings I started at the beginning, but the book starts kind of slowly and builds in intensity, so I’m not sure that’s the best place to start.  On the other hand, each chapter builds on the things that happened before, so starting it anywhere else may leave the reader without enough information.

All my panels were on Sunday, and they were all on heady topics:  Implying Other Languages; Believable Evil; and The Role of the Afterlife in Fantasy Fiction.  Made for some fascinating discussion, but in retrospect it would have been a good idea to ask to be on at least one truly silly panel to break it up.

In additional news, I found the costume piece around which I will build this year’s Hallowe’en costume.  I won’t give details yet, because I want to surprise some people who might read this blog, but I promise to post a photograph once it’s done. And we got into a discussion late Saturday night with an odd group of people with very diverse opinions.  That discussion inspired a piece of flash fiction designed to mess with the head of an editor who was in the room.  We’ll see how that goes.