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Month: October 2012

Strange Horizons and Things

Strange Horizons and Things

Strange Horizons are a terrific online magazine who published my story The Rugged Track, a rollerderby fairytale. Their staff are volunteers with a professional attitude and they pay their fiction writers professional rates.

To continue as a non profit magazine that pushes the awesome, actively encourages diversity, values creators, and brings to the world some of my favorite fiction they have to raise funds.

October is the month of give Strange Horizons some money and you go into the draw to win nifty prizes. You could win a book from Mary Robinette Kowal… THE ONE THAT HASN’T COME OUT YET!… not that I’m excited about her latest book. In the listing there’s cool art, books by new and established authors and new prizes added to the long list every week.

Today's Things comic
You will also go in the draw to get your very own letter from Things Without Arms and Legs! The winner of this prize can pick a topic to inspire the Things to write a letter: to a specific person, or perhaps to a category of person. A letter like this, or perhaps entirely different.

You want to tell your Mum/Mom or Best Friend how great they are? This might be the perfect letter. You want to send a big love letter to zoo keepers or zebras, the Things can do that too :-)

So go to, go to! I hope you win a nifty prize. The Things don’t often write letters, so this will be a rare thing.

Strange Horizons is a registered 501(3c) non profit, so yes, your monies will also be tax deductible.

Machine of Death, Dear Ms Moon & Bunny Feelings!

Machine of Death, Dear Ms Moon & Bunny Feelings!

Machine of Death in French

Machine of Death

Machine of Death 2 will be launched at Comicon next year, but right now I’m even more excited about the French translation of Machine of Death. If you go to the French website they have a working MOD Machine. It’s kinda awesome. I think you get to pick the category of death you are told and I think I chose silly death… or on fire. My French consists of counting to 20 and listening to Geek Girls Rule when she says it’s La Revolution, not Le Revolution.

Google translate tells me “You will die like the man in Alaska who amused himself throwing a stick of dynamite that his dog, well trained, hastened to tell him.”

How did it know?! :-) Check out La Machine à écrire la mort and if you want to share your fortune cookie in the comments that would be super dooper awesome.

Dear Ms Moon – On the Stage in Portland in JANUARY!!!

Dear Ms. Moon” is one of my favorite stories to read out loud for people and now it is going to be brought to life as a staged reading for Pulp Diction 4, part of the Fertile Ground 2013 Festival of New Work.

Yesterday I spoke to Director Sarah Peters about her vision for “Dear Ms Moon” and she sounds like an amazing lass bubbling with ideas. It’s always cool chatting to someone who is creatively brilliant in ways so different to mine. So much of my process is about doubt and listening and feeling with my body, stripping it down, closing my eyes and listening for the resonant note. Sarah (from what I know so far) is a dynamo, is “I read your story and I saw all these things and had all these ideas and boom!” which is the best thing to hear from a reader and an essential skill in a director. I don’t know what this performance will be like. My experience of collaboration inclines me to believe it will be beyond my anything I could imagine, radically different to what I envisage and wonderful. I trust her to honor the characters and I’m so curious. I’m sure I will learn things about my own text when it comes to life – and that is one of the gifts of collaboration.

Bunny Feelings

I have created over 50 comics over at Things Without Arms and Without Legs! 50!! That is a nice round number and thank you everyone who’s been reading, sharing, liking and commenting. It’s a fun, challenging, sometimes scary, cuddly, kind, stretching, peaceful process that reminds me to breathe more often than not. And my superficial self, or with kinder words my self that likes to be of service and likes to be heard, feels little thrills of delight when the page hits go up and makes me more determined to keep this thing going and feel like I’m doing something good.

My Things website is the opposite SEO optimized, I keep forgetting to put typed words on the page, but the good thing about this is that it’s only been really nice search terms that find my site. My number 1 search term (at a whopping 7 searches over this history of the site), “Jokes about Art.” The only search term that has hit my site in the last two days? “Bunny Feelings.”

Bunny Feelings! I love that someone was searching for information about bunny feelings (and they are sensitive souls who can experience a lot of social anxiety). I love that their search took them to a bunny that hangs out in a shoe and enjoys a friendly rivalry with a sock.

Work and hands

Work and hands

Cover of Apex Issue 41Dirt, work and hands – Casanova Clay is now live at Apex.

You can read Casanova on his own.

You can purchase the entire e-book.

It’s a very nice feeling to share a cover with Mary Robinette Kowal, Cecil Castellucci, Dean Francis Alfar and Rachel Swirsky.

… I hope those bunnies on the cover are ok. BuNSOn Hoppydew might get worried.