In which your humble mods realize their miscalculation

January 8th seemed a long time after Yuletide when we were looking at it from late November, but now that it's nearly upon us, it isn't very long at all. So starlady38 and I are officially extending the deadline on The Aurors challenge to January 22nd, two weeks later. If the lack of sufficient time was your reason for not getting in on the fun, please do reconsider!

Halley's Comet returns!

The one in my book, not the one in the sky.

Just got confirmation today that A Star Shall Fall will be getting a mass-market release in October of this year. So if you prefer your novels in smaller and/or cheaper format, mark the date on your calendar!

(This is actually the first time a book of mine has gotten proper release in a new physical format. There are ebooks of all of them, and the Onyx Court novels got picked up by the Science Fiction Book Club, which does hardcover copies, but this is shiny and new.)

Things I want to improve: production in the new year

I didn't publish a whole lot last year, in comparison with the previous five or so. With Fate Conspire, Dancing the Warrior (the doppelganger novella), and three short stories ("Two Pretenders," "Love, Cayce," and "Coyotaje"). The forecast isn't good for this year, either, because I didn't write a whole lot, either: A Natural History of Dragons, Dancing the Warrior, "Coyotaje," and a novelette I can't tell you about yet, but which has already been sold. In other words, everything I wrote vanished from the pipeline pretty much as soon as I finished it.

I've posted about that latter bit before, reminding myself that selling stories is the goal, not submitting them. Still, I have only four things in the submission queue right now, and one or more of those probably ought to be retired. Even if I sold all four of them right now, and all four saw print this year -- both of which are unlikely -- that's not a lot of new publications compared to some past years, and it leaves me with nothing for next year.

Okay. So I need to write more short fiction. I've vowed this before, and met with moderate success; let's try that again. Simple to say, not so simple to do, but putting it here where the internets can see it should help.