Rosemary Edghill's Blog

DARKOVERCON 36 -- NOVEMBER 29-DECEMBER 1, 2013 -- TIMONIUM, MARYLAND

Here now the Con Report, and doesn't this take me back to the days of hustling to produce miniac for Golden APA? Why yes. Yes, it does. However, in all those days of yore or even mine, I never did a con report. I have, actually, never done a con report. You are warned.
( the most important thing about the con )

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First of all, I would like to thank you for inviting me to Darkovercon; it is truly an honor to be invited to participate in this celebration of Marion Zimmer Bradley.

This is my GoH speech. What it actually is, is an essay that I will post to Facebook and my Journal when I come home from the convention, and it may or may not bear a close resemblance to what I'm going to say.
( it really bore no resemblance at all )

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It's been a while since I reposted a short story, so here we are again. Read Only Memory is a part of the Hellflower series. It's set somewhere after the end of Archangel Blues, and was published in The DAW 30th Anniversary Science Fiction Anthology (ISBN-13: 978-0756400644) back in 2002.

I'm sure Sheila was expecting me to weigh in on the fantasy side of things when she invited me to play, but my first love has always been SF, and my first writing love has always been Sword and Planet -- as is clearly visible in the work that follows. (My apologies to C. L. Moore.)

Read Only Memory started as a fragment produced and set aside back in the early 1980s, a time when I could reliably get into a short story without any means of getting out again. A number of those half finished (in the sense that a trip is half finished after the vehicle crashes into a brick wall doing 90mph) stories lingered in drawer and hard drive for years thereafter, periodically making their presence known by arpeggios of mocking laughter.

So this was a chance to finish one. I hope you enjoy it. I'm rather fond of it.

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( Read more... )

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Okay for some reason I had not been getting notifications of posts and messages in my in-box for about the last six months.

Sorry about that, everyone...

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Biggest and best of all first: I will be GoH at DarkoverCon 36 in Timmonium, Maryland this year! It runs from November 29th to December 1st, and I hope to see all of you there!

http://www.darkovercon.org/2013/index.html

Next, I and my lovely and talented co-author Rebecca Fox have sold two new stories!

One is "Bone Dance", which will be appearing in the second Elemental Masters anthology, edited by Mercedes Lackey and John Helfers. It's a dog's life, especially with a crazy alchemist running around Victorian London...

The other is...

(wait for it)

(this is so perfect)

..."Second Contact", which will be appearing in STARS OF DARKOVER, edited by Deborah J. Ross. This is the second of the new Darkover anthologies (the first was Music of Darkover, to which I contributed MY FIRST EVER FILK), and I really hope there will be more! It's my first Darkover story EVER, and set in my very favorite period of Darkovan history: Recontact. Cultural Reconciliation Specialist Jenny Lauren thinks Armsmaster Zhenyar is a superstitious barbarian. He thinks she's a Terannan fool. Together...

THEY FIGHT CRIME!

So, a lot of firsts this summer! And Book Four of "The Shadow Grail" will be out in April 2014 -- I'm checking the galleys right now!

What are you all up to?

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https://www.facebook.com/C.A.Chicoine

Craig A. Chicoine is some sort of Bladerunner fan (I think he's mainly a film fan; I'm not entirely sure). In connection with this, he is putting some Bladerunner fan-produced material on line. I don't know the extent of this, and I don't know how he's going about contacting the materials' creators for permission; I know that right now he's focusing primarily on Cityspeak, the fanzine produced by the late Sara Campbell. He's talking about putting Cityspeak: The Special Edition on-line; since I'm the one who did the layout and pasteup on that one, I know it had stories by a number of people in it, but I don't remember a lot of the details at this point.

So if you were involved with either Cityspeak or with Bladerunner fandom, you might want to get in touch with Craig. He has a pretty freewheeling attitude toward publishing private correspondence, so please assume any communication you have with him will be published.

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http://www.amazon.com/Marion-Zimmer-Bradleys-Fantasy-Worlds/dp/1938185293/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358145911&sr=1-1&keywords=marion+zimmer+bradley%27s+fantasy+worlds

The above link SHOULD go to the recently-released Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Worlds paperback. It had a limited-edition hardcover printing back in 1998, in connection with the Fantasy Worlds Con in Berkeley (I think it was Berkeley...) but this is the first mass-market edition.

And I am squeeing because my novella "Lizzie Fair and the Dragon of Heart's Desire" is back in print! Yay! ::bounce::

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http://www.meanderingsandmuses.com/2012/12/comfort-reading-by-toni-mcgee-causey.html

If you're a writer who wants to know "why write?" read this.

If you're a reader who wants to know why I write, read this.

Toni's been a friend for years. I have always been awed by her dedication, not just to her writing and to her craft, but to -- hey -- getting up in the morning sometimes. And this proves it in spades.

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Many of you, as do I, have friends and colleagues in New York City. Just because a story has fallen off the news cycle doesn't mean the effects of a disaster are over. I know it's the holidays, money's tight, and we all have a lot of calls on our resources, but please: donate if you can, boost the signal if you can't.

New York is where the books come from.
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HURRICANE RELIEF
The Mayor’s Fund is accepting financial donations from organizations and individuals to support hurricane relief efforts. One hundred percent of donations are being dispersed to relief efforts and organizations. The City is currently identifying immediate aid needs, including food, water and hygiene supplies, as well as long-term relief and restoration efforts.

To donate by mail, make checks payable to Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City and send to 253 Broadway, 8th Floor, New York City, New York 10007 (in memo line: Hurricane Sandy Relief).

For any questions, or to donate over the phone, call 311 (212-NEW-YORK outside New York City).

http://www.nyc.gov/html/fund/html/home/home.shtml

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Today I got a royalty statement for Arcanum 101! This is exciting news, because it tells me how many copies have been sold, something about which I have been wildly curious.

After reading the reviews of it posted to Amazon, I had a trained professional compare the ebook with the original text (because having produced Failure of Moonlight I discovered that creating an ebook is not nearly as simple as making a post to Dreamwidth), and he tells me all the right words are there in the right order. But the italics aren't.

Sigh.

I'll see if I can get the publisher to put in the italics...

But this whole ebook thing is kind of fascinating, and a bit like potato chips, so I spent the last several days fixing up Met By Moonlight. I wrote it in WordPerfect, which Word will convert on alternate Thursdays, but when I went looking for the file, it was nowhere to be seen. The only thing I could pull up was a file that caused Word to leap onto the nearest chair and scream its fool head off. Fortunately, a product called WordPad (which I have no idea where it came from but hey) opened the document. So then I spent ten days removing all the machine language and putting back the scene breaks and the italics. I think what I have here is the pre-Kensington-edit draft. I think it holds up pretty well. I just have to write a foreward, produce the front matter, and find a couple of days to wrestle with the great dragon of epublishing.

And that's the news from here.

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