First, good news for me! I've sold another story to Black Gate Magazine. It's called "Rites of Passage" and is another Giliead and Ilias story, set before the Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy. (The other stories are in issues 10, 11, and 12.)

Couple of authors I remembered I wanted to recommend:

Steven Barnes. He has a book about to come out in paperback from Del Rey Great Sky Woman
The Booklist review: This prehistorical novel set in Africa introduces readers to the Ibandi, a peaceful tribe living in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro, or the Great Sky Mountain. When their lives are interrupted by invasions from a brutal neighboring tribe, it falls to two youngsters, Frog Hopping, the third son of a hunter, and T'Cori, an apprentice herb woman, to climb the Great Sky Mountain and seek help from Father Sky. Barnes does a magnificent job of thoroughly grounding his engaging characters in the practical and mystical details of daily life in ancient Africa. An adventure on a grand scale, this initial installment in a projected two-volume series cleverly sets the stage for further action and will leave readers craving more. The second part is coming out in May, according to Amazon.

Laura Joh Rowland has a long series of mystery novels set in feudal Japan that are really good. She also has a new non-series mystery The Secret Adventures of Charlotte Bronte which I'm going to order as soon as I can afford it.

I had some good news: The Wizard Hunters, the first book in the Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy, sold to the same German publisher who released the German edition of The Death of the Necromancer last year. Yay!

ericmarin posted that The Lone Star Stories Reader is now up for preorder on Amazon. It should be out on November 15. It's an SF/F anthology of stories reprinted from the Lone Star Stories Website, and I'm in it along with a bunch of other people. (ETA: and it's up for preorder on Barnes & Noble too.)

Like the web site, the anthology has a large number of women writers:

Introduction by Sherwood Smith
"Wolf Night" by Martha Wells
"Seasonal Work" by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
"'Janet, Meet Bob'" by Gavin J. Grant
"The Great Conviction of Tia Inez" by M. Thomas
"Angels of a Desert Heaven" by Marguerite Reed
"The Disemboweler" by Ekaterina Sedia
"A Night in Electric Squidland" by Sarah Monette
"Thread: A Triptych" by Catherynne M. Valente
"The Frozen One" by Tim Pratt
"Dragon Hunt" by Sarah Prineas
"Manuscript Found Written in the Paw Prints of a Stoat" by Samantha Henderson
"Giant" by Stephanie Burgis
"When the Rain Comes" by Josh Rountree
"The Hangman Isn't Hanging" by Jay Lake
"The Oracle Opens One Eye" by Patricia Russo

***

The Rosenberg Library web site is back up, and they have paypal donation buttons on the front page for both the general library fund and the children's library fund, to repair damage to the building by hurricane Ike. (ETA: There's also a note on there for people who'd like to donate books.)

My offer is still open:

If people were inclined to paypal or send them a check for $25 or more, and then let me know that you had done that, I would be happy to send you a signed and personalized hardcover copy of Wheel of the Infinite. (ETA: I sorted my closet yesterday and I do have some hardcovers of The Wizard Hunters, The Ships of Air, or The Gate of Gods if you want one of those.)

Or for a $10.00 donation you could choose a signed and personalized paperback copy of Stargate Atlantis: Reliquary or Stargate Atlantis: Entanglement. (Or both for a donation of $20.00)

Just drop me an email at msw at charisat.com, and let me know what your donation was and when you sent it, which book you want, the name you want your book personalized with, and the address I should send it to.

The Lone Star Stories Reader got reviewed by Publishers Weekly and my story "Wolf Night" got a very nice mention: The western meets dark fantasy in Martha Wells's standout “Wolf Night,” when a group of people barricaded in a stockade are attacked by an otherworldly creature.

The book can be preordered here and the story is still online in the magazine here.

I've been meaning to post about The Lone Star Stories Reader, which is available for preorder at that link. It's a print anthology with a selection of SF/F stories from the Lone Star Stories website, edited by ericmarin.


Here's the table of contents:

Introduction by Sherwood Smith
"Wolf Night" by Martha Wells
"Seasonal Work" by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
"'Janet, Meet Bob'" by Gavin J. Grant
"The Great Conviction of Tia Inez" by M. Thomas
"Angels of a Desert Heaven" by Marguerite Reed
"The Disemboweler" by Ekaterina Sedia
"A Night in Electric Squidland" by Sarah Monette
"Thread: A Triptych" by Catherynne M. Valente
"The Frozen One" by Tim Pratt
"Dragon Hunt" by Sarah Prineas
"Manuscript Found Written in the Paw Prints of a Stoat" by Samantha Henderson
"Giant" by Stephanie Burgis
"When the Rain Comes" by Josh Rountree
"The Hangman Isn't Hanging" by Jay Lake
"The Oracle Opens One Eye" by Patricia Russo

***

And yay, new SGA tonight!

A few things:


Black Gate #12 should be shipping now. My story in it is "Houses of the Dead." It's another prequel story to the Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy, about Giliead and Ilias.

naominovik's Victory of Eagles is out today, which I'm going out to buy later.

Stargate: Atlantis season 4 DVDs are out today, which I can't go buy because I preordered them, which seemed like a good idea at the time, but now I have to wait for them to get here in the mail. Season 5 starts airing this Friday, so that's something else to look forward to.

Last week or so I rearranged the bibliography page on my web site, adding a list of publications by date as well as by category.

The livelongnmarry auction is still going on. Someone added up the high bids so far on July 4 and they came to over $18,000. That's a serious donation already, and the auction goes to July 15. My offer post for my autographed books is here. It's at $100.00 now, and I figure that if it goes over $125, I'll add a sixth book.

A few other things I meant to mention:


- Book rec: I saw Cassandra Chan's mysteries mentioned on arcaedia's LJ, and went and bought the first one, The Young Widow. I really enjoyed it. It's set in the contemporary UK, but does have a very Peter Wimsey/Dorothy Sayers feel, with a Scotland Yard detective and his rich dilettante friend, Phillip Bethancourt, solving mysteries. It was a very good read and didn't end at all like I expected it to. I've ordered the next two, since the local store didn't have them. Hopefully they'll get here by this weekend.


- Something else I did in court: helped older ladies turn off their cell phones. Apparently their families were big on insisting they have one but not so much with the follow-up of how to use it.


- a couple of links for Ile-Rien fans: ilerien a comm for Ile-Rien fanfic, fanart, discussion, etc. I don't read it, and it's completely fan-run. And Ile-Rien on Wikipedia. Again, this is completely a fan project.


- And Black Gate #12 should be out soon, with "Houses of the Dead," another Giliead and Ilias prequel story.

A few things:


The Death of the Necromancer is coming out in a new German edition

Click to see the large version of the cover, it's really neat:



I mailed out the hardcover copies of Wheel of the Infinite to the winners on Friday, so they should be arriving sometime this week.


The Match It For Pratchett movement has already raised 50,000 pounds for the UK Alzheimer's Research Trust just since March 15! That's huge.

A few things:

"The Potter's Daughter" is now up at Anthology Builder. It originally came out in 2006 in Elemental: the Tsunami Relief Anthology and was in The Year's Best Fantasy #7 from Tachyon Press last year. (Anthology Builder is a neat site where you can pick from a list of SF/fantasy or other genre or classic stories, pick your cover art, then buy it as a printed book for $14.95) My other stories on the site are listed here.

City of Bones is now up for sale at Barnes and Noble, Amazon, or independent book stores in the US through Booksense. This is not a revised version, just a reprint of the original, which has been out of print for a few years and was getting hard to find.



Progress on new book:

98414 / 120000 words. 82% done!

I've slowed down a bit, because of a few false starts on the climax, so there's been a lot of forward progress, followed immediately by backward progress as I take all of it out and start over. But I think I'm finally heading in the right direction.

Wow, this cover is beautiful. It's the French edition of The Ships of Air from l'Atalante:



It's available at Amazon.fr.


Also, The Element of Fire is now available for free download in a variety of eBook formats at ManyBooks.net. It's also on my web site, but only in HTML.

Just saw that Black Gate #11 is at the printer and there's a preview of the issue here. My story is "Holy Places," which is another Giliead and Ilias story, a prequel to the Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy (The Wizard Hunters, The Ships of Air, The Gate of Gods), and it's about how Giliead and Ilias first met. They've posted an excerpt from it here.

The cover is also gorgeous.

ETA: This is the Giliead and Ilias story I most proud of. It was also going to be the first couple of chapters of the novel that is not to be. The story that's going to be in Black Gate #12 was also from that novel, plus the one I still need to finish up and send in.


In news of other people's books, eldritchhobbit announced the publication of Past Watchful Dragons: Fantasy and Faith in the World of C.S. Lewis

I've been sick lately, especially yesterday, so I'm going to be slow to respond to...pretty much everything. But with the new Harry Potter movie and book coming out soon, I wanted to remind people about this:

Mapping the World of Harry Potter, a collection of essays by SF/fantasy authors on Harry Potter, from BenBella Books that came out January 2006. My essay was "Neville Longbottom: the Hero With a Thousand Faces."


The other essay I did for BenBella was "Don't Make Me Tongue You: John Crichton and D'Argo and the Dysfunctional Buddy Relationship" in Farscape Forever, which also has essays by Jim Butcher and rachelcaine.

Black Gate has posted the cover of issue #11, and it looks really nice, I can't wait to see the big version next month. The story I have in that issue is "Holy Places." It's a Giliead and Ilias novella, about how they first met, and is actually the story I'm most happy with. It was going to be the first section of the prequel novel that ended up not happening.

Random things: The store had some heirloom tomatoes and I tried a couple and damn, they were good. If you're used to normal tomatoes they are kind of ugly -- one of them looked like it had already passed through the human digestive system -- but the flavor is incredible. The ugliest one was very thick and solid, and would have been really good just sliced and grilled.

Other news: if you're still having trouble extracting SGA: Entanglement from online outlets in the US, Who North America is listing 25 copies ready to ship (they also have a bunch of Stargate non-fiction, some at discounts) and you can try Booksense. Just enter your zip code on the first page and it will find the nearest independent bookstore that has it and will let you order it online.

I am working on another fantasy novel and it is going well, but I'm not going to post a word count or anything else about it since that's jinxed me in the past.

It looks like the The Year's Best Fantasy #7 (Tachyon Publications) is starting to show up in various places. The story I have in it is "The Potter's Daughter," which was published in 2006 in the Tsunami relief anthology Elemental. It's a prequel to The Element of Fire, about Kade.

It's at Barnes and Noble, Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon.ca, Amazon.de, or you can find it at a local independent book store through Booksense.


Also, The Element of Fire is out again in the French mass market edition Amazon.fr here. I was not born in 1954, that's a typo.

Gorgeous covers:




These are the Bibliopolis editions.


The Year's Best Fantasy #7, with "The Potter's Daughter," looks like it's going to be nice, but so far I've just seen the tiny version:

Stargate Atlantis: Engtanglement is finally up for preorder on Amazon US here. You can see the cover and sample first chapter on web site here.

bg_editor reports here: Black Gate 10 has been printed and is now off to the distributor. It should be appearing in retail outlets like Barnes & Noble, Walden's Books, Borders, and other book stores within the next week or two. Keep your eyes sharp!

If your local retail outlet doesn't carry the issue, order it from our home page (http://www.blackgate.com).

Don't forget, for a sneak peak at what's in store, drop by here:

http://www.blackgate.com/bg/issue10.htm

And lest you forget, Black Gate 11 really is around the corner.

I've got stories in 10, 11, and 12. All three are early prequels to The Wizard Hunters, about Giliead and Ilias. The one I'm most proud of is "Holy Places" which will be in issue #11. It's also quite a bit longer than "Reflections" in issue 10.

From jamesenge, there's a new LJ for Black Gate: bg_editor


Issue #10 which has my first Giliead and Ilias story, "Reflections," should be out soon. "Holy Places" should be in #11 and "Houses of the Dead" in #12.


Here's the cover:




ETA: Oh, just saw Rich Horton included Wolf Night in his list of "Best Online SF/F of 2006." Here's the article.

Amazon Canada is now taking pre-orders for Stargate Atlantis: Entanglement. It's getting closer and closer to the US.

(ETA: someone's started a community for discussing the SG-1 and SGA books here: gate_pages)

I did a bunch of updates to the web site. Most of it was just cleaning up old links, adding new ones, re-organizing, etc.

Still plugging along on the new fantasy novel. I had to throw out about 15,000 words (yikes) but I'm a lot happier with what I'm doing now.

The elusive pre-order button has appeared on the listing for Stargate Atlantis: Entanglement on Amazon.uk and Amazon.fr. It's not showing up on Amazon.ca yet (though it may show up later today or tomorrow, since I think it's on the same thingy as amazon.uk). The listing isn't on Amazon US or B&N/Borders/etc yet, but hopefully it'll turn up there soon. The release date is still listed as March 31.

ETA: beanie_j also found it on Play.com