Counting down to GRAVE IMPORTANCE -- and a giveaway!

I cannot wait for book three to be out there in the world. This one’s got all the good stuff in it, things I didn’t think I’d ever be able to write about, and there is Dr. Faust shouting and trauma surgery and the Lake Avernus Spa & Resort and the Devil wearing white silk suits without a shirt, not to mention antiquities theft, prehensile hair, and the wonders of flying first class —

— and now, for a limited time, you can enter to win the entire trilogy over on instagram :D :D :D (US only).

site housekeeping

The navigation bar was getting a little ridiculous, so I tidied it up and moved the various non-authorial sections into a new page, Art & Design. You can now access Varney recaps, art books that need to happen, logos for imaginary organizations, and photos all in one handy features section.

Coming soon: freelance editing services! Yes, I, that person, who has a goddamn fountain pen devoted to red ink and who carries a red sharpie at all times, can comb through your manuscript (and offer a variety of types of service including line edits, structural edits, proofreading, and formatting). You give me cash money, I edit you manuscript, at reasonable rates plus an introductory discount.

Also, if you liked the stuff I published this year, you can nominate me for the Campbell Award for Best New Author, and for Nebula and/or Hugo Awards for “The Utmost Bound” and DREADFUL COMPANY!

More administrative ephemera, plus AWARD ELIGIBILITY POST!

I love getting to see other people’s imaginary cast lists for my stuff — and doing so reminded me of the old mockup covers and posters Past Me designed in like 2014, back when STRANGE PRACTICE was called THE UNDERGLOW and nobody but friends and LJ followers had read it yet, so I put a few of them up on the site. I still love the stupid tagline on the movie poster and I always will, so fight me.

More importantly, a reminder: IT’S NOMINATING TIME, and I am eligible for nomination for a couple of things including the Campbell Award for Best New Writer (my last year of eligibility), the Hugos, and the Nebulas. So if you’ve read my work and like it, do consider telling people so!

Here’s some useful links:

“The Utmost Bound” is a story I’ve been wanting to write ever since I got a good look at the Soviet Venera images (Don P. Mitchell’s website has all the information you could want; see also the stitched-together and colored versions of Venera-13 and -14’s images, giving you a horribly ordinary view of a landscape that is effectively hell). It’s also a story I’ve been wanting to write ever since I read M.P. Shiel’s “The Dark Lot of One Saul,” a tale that impressed much-younger me with its enormous crushing inevitability, the narrator’s awareness that they were trapped by vast and implacable natural forces, that escape was utterly impossible, that it was only a matter of time — and, also, of course, a story I’ve been wanting to write ever since I read Sturgeon’s “The Man who Lost the Sea.” That narrator’s dying cry and the imagined last words of my own doomed cosmonaut are vastly disparate, but there is an echo there which I so very much enjoyed exploring.

It was also an opportunity to write the kind of hard SF I particularly love to read, given how many times I’ve read and re-read Carrying the Fire and Liftoff and Last Man on the Moon and Apollo 13; I’m the kind of space nerd who was utterly gleeful at getting to include a reference to the CUVMS described by Michael Collins as “the official NASA-approved procedure for going potty in space.” I just really love the history of spaceflight, and getting to play with that and horror at the same time was a plain and simple joy.

It was also an honor to be selected to read an excerpt from the story at the Museum of Science Fiction’s “More than Human” Theodore Sturgeon centenary reading. “The Utmost Bound” will be republished on the museum’s website with the other authors’ work in the near future.

Here’s the opening of the story:

… and this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
—Tennyson

The check-in chime in his headset: on time, annoyingly on time, as usual, waking him as they came around the curve of Venus. “Aphrodite-1, this is Honolulu, do you read?”

Faint washes of static through the words, three months of interplanetary travel and a scant handful of minutes away by radio wave. Again: “Aphrodite-1, Honolulu, do you read? Over.”

“Hi, Hawaii,” said McBride, pushing the headset mike a little further from his mouth. He was used to the delay by now, the measured pauses in conversation while the signal made its way across twenty-five million miles of nothingness. At first it had been disconcerting; now he barely even noticed. “Weather okay down there?”

“Just dandy, since you ask, Commander, but it’s time for the morning report. How’s Little Buddy doing?”

McBride yawned and keyed up the monitors, one by one, waking them into life: you didn’t waste juice out here on instruments you weren’t actually using. The cabin lights dimmed slightly as the displays came on line. “Little Buddy’s reet and complete at last report,” he said, scanning the data, and typed in the downlink command to send Honolulu everything the rover had been up to since the previous infodump transmission. “There you go. Still trundling west over Lakshmi Planum as we speak. Temperature’s—let’s see—still holding at 469 C, pressure 93, no significant changes in atmospheric makeup. Yellow sky. Ugly as shit.”

Honolulu laughed, a tinny little sound, rasping with distance. “Keep your personal aesthetic impressions out of the record, Commander. Okay. We want you to go north today—there’s a couple of anomalies we’d like to get a closer look at. Stand by for transmission of coordinates.”

You can read the whole story here.

The second thing of mine that came out in 2018, DREADFUL COMPANY, was definitely the hardest of the Helsing trilogy to write, and that’s why I’m particularly proud of it: there was a lot of work and despair and horror and excitement and moments of inspiration that went into book two, and what it ended up being is something I am pleased with. The fact that it was so damn hard to write makes the achievement slightly more of a thing, in my mind, than it would have been had it come out smoothly in one go. I got to explore stories and locations I haven’t played with in twenty years: I spent two weeks in Paris at 18 on the student-exchange AP French trip and by the end of that time I was dreaming in French, which was both bizarre and exciting, and I fell desperately in love with the city itself. It was very satisfying to get to revisit the Palais Garnier via Google Street View, a thing 18-year-old me could not possibly have imagined.

You can read the first three chapters of DREADFUL COMPANY on the Orbit website — there are also links to the hard copy, audiobook, and ebook from various retailers.

If you like my stuff, you can nominate me for the Campbell Award for Best New Author, and for Nebula and/or Hugo Awards for “The Utmost Bound” and DREADFUL COMPANY.

Thanks as always for reading, and for your consideration!

JanFeb18_Issue20_coverMED-340x510.jpg
DreadfulCompanyUS_Shaw.jpg

SO IT'S AWARDS SEASON (AND MY LAST YEAR OF CAMPBELL ELIGIBILITY)...

I’ve been writing books since I was eleven or so, but the first thing I ever had professionally published in my life was STRANGE PRACTICE, Greta Helsing 1, back in 2017. Which means I’m still eligible for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer this year, along with the Hugos and Nebulas.

2018 has been a dumpster fire of a year in terms of politics but not too shabby for me in terms of publication; my first-ever short story, “The Utmost Bound,” came out in Uncanny issue 20 and Greta Helsing 2, DREADFUL COMPANY, dropped at the end of July. I’m enormously proud of both of them, for quite different reasons.

“The Utmost Bound” is a story I’ve been wanting to write ever since I got a good look at the Soviet Venera images (Don P. Mitchell’s website has all the information you could want; see also the stitched-together and colored versions of Venera-13 and -14’s images, giving you a horribly ordinary view of a landscape that is effectively hell). It’s also a story I’ve been wanting to write ever since I read M.P. Shiel’s “The Dark Lot of One Saul,” a tale that impressed much-younger me with its enormous crushing inevitability, the narrator’s awareness that they were trapped by vast and implacable natural forces, that escape was utterly impossible, that it was only a matter of time — and, also, of course, a story I’ve been wanting to write ever since I read Sturgeon’s “The Man who Lost the Sea.” That narrator’s dying cry and the imagined last words of my own doomed cosmonaut are vastly disparate, but there is an echo there which I so very much enjoyed exploring.

It was also an opportunity to write the kind of hard SF I particularly love to read, given how many times I’ve read and re-read Carrying the Fire and Liftoff and Last Man on the Moon and Apollo 13; I’m the kind of space nerd who was utterly gleeful at getting to include a reference to the CUVMS described by Michael Collins as “the official NASA-approved procedure for going potty in space.” I just really love the history of spaceflight, and getting to play with that and horror at the same time was a plain and simple joy.

I Here’s the opening of the story:

… and this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
—Tennyson

The check-in chime in his headset: on time, annoyingly on time, as usual, waking him as they came around the curve of Venus. “Aphrodite-1, this is Honolulu, do you read?”

Faint washes of static through the words, three months of interplanetary travel and a scant handful of minutes away by radio wave. Again: “Aphrodite-1, Honolulu, do you read? Over.”

“Hi, Hawaii,” said McBride, pushing the headset mike a little further from his mouth. He was used to the delay by now, the measured pauses in conversation while the signal made its way across twenty-five million miles of nothingness. At first it had been disconcerting; now he barely even noticed. “Weather okay down there?”

“Just dandy, since you ask, Commander, but it’s time for the morning report. How’s Little Buddy doing?”

McBride yawned and keyed up the monitors, one by one, waking them into life: you didn’t waste juice out here on instruments you weren’t actually using. The cabin lights dimmed slightly as the displays came on line. “Little Buddy’s reet and complete at last report,” he said, scanning the data, and typed in the downlink command to send Honolulu everything the rover had been up to since the previous infodump transmission. “There you go. Still trundling west over Lakshmi Planum as we speak. Temperature’s—let’s see—still holding at 469 C, pressure 93, no significant changes in atmospheric makeup. Yellow sky. Ugly as shit.”

Honolulu laughed, a tinny little sound, rasping with distance. “Keep your personal aesthetic impressions out of the record, Commander. Okay. We want you to go north today—there’s a couple of anomalies we’d like to get a closer look at. Stand by for transmission of coordinates.”

You can read the whole story here.

The second thing of mine that came out in 2018, DREADFUL COMPANY, was definitely the hardest of the Helsing trilogy to write, and that’s why I’m particularly proud of it: there was a lot of work and despair and horror and excitement and moments of inspiration that went into book two, and what it ended up being is something I am pleased with. The fact that it was so damn hard to write makes the achievement slightly more of a thing, in my mind, than it would have been had it come out smoothly in one go. I got to explore stories and locations I haven’t played with in twenty years: I spent two weeks in Paris at 18 on the student-exchange AP French trip and by the end of that time I was dreaming in French, which was both bizarre and exciting, and I fell desperately in love with the city itself. It was very satisfying to get to revisit the Palais Garnier via Google Street View, a thing 18-year-old me could not possibly have imagined.

You can read the first three chapters of DREADFUL COMPANY on the Orbit website — there are also links to the hard copy, audiobook, and ebook from various retailers.

JanFeb18_Issue20_coverMED-340x510.jpg
DreadfulCompanyUS_Shaw.jpg

If you like my stuff, you can nominate me for the Campbell Award for Best New Author, and for Nebula and/or Hugo Awards for “The Utmost Bound” and DREADFUL COMPANY.

Thanks as always for reading, and for your consideration!

All the Varney recaps collected for your convenience

Because this blog has basically zero navigation tools (working on it) I’ve gathered all the Varney posts together in a list under “Miscellany and Disasters,” which I think wholly appropriate.

At this point I'm going chapter by chapter, unless the chapters themselves are unusually short or I really want to spork the next part. The early posts were more fluid with regard to chapter delimitation. I am having way too much fun with this and plan to do the whole of the Gutenberg edition, which will probably take me several months, and am consummately okay with that.

New site, not quite polished yet

So I've moved my official author site from Tumblr, for a number of reasons; my personal blog is still going to be located over there to provide a regular dose of pretty rocks, fashion history, and bredlik re-blogs, but we'll be at vivianshaw dot net for Author Stuff henceforth. 

I intend to maintain a more active posting schedule on this blog than I did on tumblr, with a variety of topics, and possibly in the future develop a newsletter if there's sufficient interest to warrant it. For now, I've created specific pages with links to my books and short fiction for ease of navigation, as well as a link to my twitter account, and am continuing to refine the design.