Clockwork Canada is gearing up for publication, and some new interviews and reviews are just around the corner. I’ll be posting about them soon. In the meantime, here’s something about my own writing!

The table of contents for “Those Who Make Us: Canadian Creature, Myths, and Monsters” edited by Kelsi Morris and Kaitlin Tremblay was announced today. It includes my story “Where Roots and Rivers Run as Veins”, a magic realist tale set in 1840s Peterborough.

I’ll be sharing a ToC with some very fine writers like Corey Redekop, Helen Marshall, Rati Mehrotra, Kate Story, and many others. Very exciting!

Here’s the link to the ToC.

 

 

 

The wonderful Derek Künsken was kind enough to interview me about the Clockwork Canada over at Black Gate (the same place that hosted the official cover reveal for the anthology!). Derek had some great questions. I was able to gush about a few of the stories, and give some context for the project as a whole.

You can find the interview here.

Happy 2016!

2015 has come and gone, and it was certainly an interesting year for me. On a personal level, I had the most difficult year in recent memory. There was a great deal of change and uncertainty, the end of my marriage, and a general lack of stability. There was also the birth of my niece and goddaughter, more time spent with family than in the last five years, and some truly beautiful and memorable moments.

From a career standpoint, 2015 was a most excellent year. I now have regular freelance editorial work with a great publisher, and I love every minute of it. That kind of stability does wonders, I couldn’t be happier with the kinds of books and people I’m working with.

This was also a hallmark year for me in terms of projects. The biggest development was that I signed a three-book anthology deal with Saga Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, and I’ll be co-editing all three books with the talented Navah Wolfe. The first is The Starlit Wood, an all-new anthology of cross-genre fairy tales featuring some of todays best writers. Navah and I both love fairy tales, and it was a delight to work with some of my favourite authors on this anthology. We were even fortunate enough to have the cover and ToC released on Io9. We love everything about this book, from the amazing stories to the gorgeous cover by Benjamin Carré to the illustrations by Stella Björg. Saga is also is also bringing out the book in a really remarkable paper-over-board edition with some great design work. I can’t wait to hold the finished product in my hands. Navah are finishing up the anthology in the next two weeks and it’ll be good to have this project finished for now until the release/marketing later in 2016. Here’s the Goodreads page for it.  And here’s the ToC because I just love sharing it:

• The Super Ultra Duchess of Fedora Forest by Charlie Jane Anders
• Pearl by Aliette de Bodard
• Seasons of Glass and Iron by Amal El-Mohtar
• The Thousand Eyes by Jeffrey Ford
• Giants in the Sky by Max Gladstone
• The Other Thea by Theodora Goss
• Even the Crumbs Were Delicious by Daryl Gregory
• Reflected by Kat Howard
• Some Wait by Stephen Graham Jones
• When I Lay Frozen by Margo Lanagan
• The Briar and the Rose by Marjorie M. Liu
• In the Desert Like a Bone by Seanan McGuire
• Penny For a Match, Mister? by Garth Nix
• Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
• The Tale of Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle by Sofia Samatar
• Underground by Karin Tidbeck
• Badgirl, the Deadman, and the Wheel of Fortune by Catherynne M. Valente
• Familiaris by Genevieve Valentine

 Navah and I are already hard at work on the second anthology, which is completely different from The Starlit Wood. More details on that one later in 2016.

The other other big editorial project was Clockwork Canada, coming out from Exile Editions, also in 2016. CC is a real passion project for me. I love history, and I love steampunk. With CC I really wanted to see Canadian authors explore Canadian history and engage with steampunk in critical ways. When I first sent out the call for submissions I indicated that I wanted a really broad range of interpretations and that I was looking for stories that would engage with some of the more challenging or even problematic aspects of the genre. Fortunately, the writers delivered and the book is one of which I’m quite proud. The cover and ToC for that one were featured on Black Gate, another great website. I’ll have more posts about in the next few months. It does have a Goodreads page now, which is exciting. Here’s the awesome ToC for the book:

• La Clochemar by Charlotte Ashley
• East Wind in Carrall Street by Holly Schofield
• The Harpoonist by Brent Nichols
• Crew 255 by Claire Humphrey
• The Curlicue Seahorse by Chantal Boudreau
• Strange Things Done by Michal Wojcik
• Buffalo Gals by Colleen Anderson
• Our Chymical Séance by Tony Pi
• The Seven O’Clock Man by Kate Heartfield
• The Tunnels of Madness by Harold R. Thompson
• Let Slip the Sluicegates of War, Hydro-Girl by Terri Favro
• Equus by Kate Story
• Gold Mountain by Karin Lowachee
• Komagata Maru by Rati Mehrotra
• Bones of Bronze, Limbs like Iron by Rhea Rose

2015 also saw the publication of other projects I had a little hand in, including Sisters of the Revolution, a remarkable anthology of Feminist Speculative fiction edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer. Another anthology, The Bestiary was offered as an ebook in a winter storybundle and will be released in print in 2016 as a gorgeous limited edition by Centipede Press.

I had a rather good year in terms of my own writing. I prefer working on other people’s work, so I tend not to write much. That said, I’m really happy with the work I produced this year. I sold three short stories (well, one is more of a prose-poem), two of which have been published, and two poems. I’m especially pleased with “Goodbye is a Mouthful of Water” and “To A Dying Friend”, which are both deeply personal works.

Fiction:

• Spider Moves the World, Lackington’s (the prose-poem)
• Goodbye is a Mouthful of Water, The Playground of Lost Toys
• Where Roots and Rivers Run as Veins (forthcoming. I’ll talk about this one later)

Poetry

• To A Dying Friend, Uncanny Magazine
• A Portrait of the Monster as an Artist, Mythic Delirium, reprinted in Mythic Delirium Volume 2

 

So that was 2015. On to 2016!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Black Gate has revealed the cover for Clockwork Canada!

The link includes the ToC for the anthology, along with additional details about the book. Black Gate publisher John O’Neill seems very excited about the book, and so far the reception to the cover has been great.

I’m incredibly excited about this book. The stories are fantastic and I think we’re doing something really innovative in looking at Canadian history and identity through a steampunk/alternate history lens.

The book is now one step closer to being out in the world!

I’m incredibly excited to announce The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales, an all-new anthology of cross-genre fairy tale retellings that I’ve co-edited with the brilliant Navah Wolfe.

The book features original stories by a star-studded group of writers, including Naomi Novik, Garth Nix, Seanan McGuire, Aliette de Bodard, Marjorie M. Liu, Jeffrey Ford, Catherynne M. Valente, Charlie Jane Anders, Theodora Goss, Kat Howard, Stephen Graham Jones, Margo Lanagan, Karin Tidbeck, Max Gladstone, Daryl Gregory, Sofia Samatar, and Genevieve Valentine.

Working on The Starlit Wood has been a dream, and Navah is the very best of editorial partners. I can’t wait for all of you to read it. The book will be published by Saga Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, in October 2016.

For the full ToC and some additional information, see the post here on io9.

The gorgeous cover is by Benjamin Carré.

The latest issue of Uncanny Magazine is now live and it includes my poem To A Dying Friend, written for my good friend Denise Rager who passed away in 2013. She was 82.

This poem means a great deal to me, and it’s a tremendous pleasure to have it appear alongside the work of people I really admire. The issue features new short fiction by Paul Cornell, Isabel Yap, Liz Argall, Kenneth Schneyer, and Keffy R. M. Kehrli, classic fiction by N.K. Jemisin, nonfiction by Diana M. Pho, Steven H Silver, Michi Trota, and David J. Schwartz, poems by Rose Lemberg, Dominik Parisien, Amal El–Mohtar, and Jennifer Crow, interviews with Isabel Yap, and Liz Argall and Kenneth Schneyer, and Matthew Dow Smith’s The Future Matters on the cover.

Lynne and Michael Thomas along with Michi Trota continue to publish wonderful work in Uncanny, and I’m incredibly happy to have my work appear in their magazine.

The Clockwork Canada: Steampunk Fiction table of contents is now live at Black Gate. View it! Share it! Here’s a description of the anthology:

Clockwork Canada runs the gamut of steampunk, showcasing a wide variety of genre elements, from purely technological contraptions to combinations of the mechanical and magical. The stories in the anthology reimagine important Canadian historical events, provide us with alternate Canadas, and gather inspiration from the Canadian landscape to make us wonder: what if history had gone a different way?

Clockwork Canada will contain fifteen stories; all are steampunk, and all are set in Canada. The anthology will be published in April 2016 and retail at $19.95 CAD.

A big thanks to the wonderful John O’Neill at Black Gate for hosting the ToC!

(And yes, that is the cover for a previous Exile Editions anthology, Dead North. The Clockwork Canada cover is not yet available for release.)

I’m thrilled to announce that I will be co-editing an all-original anthology for Simon and Schuster’s Saga Press with the talented Navah Wolfe, an editor at Saga. Navah and I have been hard at work for months, and we’re extremely proud of our growing table of contents. More details to follow.

Clockwork Canada is also moving along nicely. The publisher will be sending the contracts out shortly, so I will be able to announce the table of contents in a few weeks. It’s a stellar group of writers, and they’ve done some amazing work giving Canadian history and locales a fresh steampunk take. I can’t wait to share this book with the world.

In other news, Exile Editions is publishing another Canadian anthology: Those Who Make Us: Canadian Creature, Myth, and Monster Stories, edited by Kelsi Morris and Kaitlin Tremblay. Canadians, send your stories!