I attended Boskone last weekend, where I recorded three new conversations I’ll be sharing with you, but before we get to those, let’s pay a visit to the previous weekend’s Farpoint, where I had lunch with Jennifer R. Povey at the Ashland Cafe in Cockeysville, Maryland, which offers excellent diner food and great pie.

Povey has made numerous appearances in Analog, and her short fiction has also appeared in such magazines and anthologies as Daily Science Fiction, Bards and Sages Quarterly, Zombiality,  99 Tiny Terrors, First Contact, You’re Not Alone, and many others.  Her novels include the four books in the Lost Guardians series — Falling Dusk (2016), Fallen Dark (2017), Rising Dawn (2017), and Risen Day (2018) — as well as the stand-alones Transpecial (2013), Araña (2019), The Lay of Lady Percival (2019), Firewing (2020), and The Friar’s Tale: A Novel of Robin Hood (2020) She also has a number of credits in the RPG industry, having written or co-written supplements for Fat Goblin Games, Rite Publishing, Dark Naga Games, Flaming Crab Games, Avalon Game Company, and others.

We discussed how the pandemic altered the timing of her newly begun five-book science fiction series, why she once had to rethink a novel after getting 20,000 words in, the reason series detectives are rarely the true protagonists in their own stories, our differing reasons for taking issue with J. K. Rowling, her Star Trek fan fiction origins, how to avoid sequel fatigue when writing long series, techniques for avoiding self-rejection, her unusual journey to getting published in Analog, how 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea changed her life, the  Doctor Who episode which altered her existential understanding of the universe, how her archeological training helped her fiction, what writers get wrong when depicting horses, how it’s possible for pantsers to write novels, the time she horrified a Klingon in a convention bar, the divisive nature of “ship wars,” and much more.

Here’s how you can join us — (more…)

I haven’t published a short story collection dedicated solely to science fiction since What We Still Talk About in 2010, and because I’ve written so many stories since then featuring time travel, deep space, transhumanism, the post-apocalypse, and other tropes central to the genre, it’s time to start thinking about pulling one together.

My first collection, These Words Are Haunted, focusing on horror, came out in 2001, and was followed by What Will Come After, spotlighting zombies, in 2010. Then came that SF collection What We Still Talk About, also in 2010. In 2018, I published Tell Me Like You Done Before, a collection honoring the writers who helped mold me, a mix of multiple genres. My most recent collection from 2020, Things That Never Happened, was a dark fantasy collection, though horror bleeds into it as well.

But so much has happened since that 2010 SF collection — including the publication of my two Analog stories, the first of which only occurred after 44 years of trying — that I’d like to gather them together for you in a more permanent form.

Here are the possible candidates for inclusion, along with their word counts, presented in the chronological order of their original publication, with no attempt to order them as they might appear in such a project —

“The Man Without the Blue Balloon and the Woman Who Had Smiles Only for Him” — 5,660
originally published May 2016 in Postscripts 36/37

“101 Things to Do Before You’re Downloaded” — 5,850
originally published in 2016  in the anthology You, Human

“After the Harvest, Before the Fall” — 11,600
originally published in the January/February 2017 issue of Analog

“Pity This Busy Monster Not” — 6425
originally published September 2017 in the anthology Adam’s Ladder

“How Val Finally Escaped from the Basement” — 9,425
originally published in the November/December 2017 issue of Analog

“Opossums and Angels” — 5,350
originally published in my 2018 collection Tell Me Like You Done Before

“The Stranded Time Traveler Embraces the Inevitable” — 2,730
originally published March 2019 in the anthology If This Goes On

“Five Years Later” — 6,700
originally published August 2019 in The Unquiet Dreamer: A Tribute to Harlan Ellison

“I Shall But Love Thee Better” — 10,600
originally published March 2021 in the anthology Prisms

“Lost Out There in the Stars” — 9,150
originally published published in the Spring 2022 issue of Parsec

“What Tomorrow Has to Say” — 5,000
originally published in the Summer 2022 issue of DreamForge

“The Time Traveler’s Assistant Discovers What Could Have Been” — 5,100
originally published on the 2022 summer solstice in Underland Arcana #7

“Learning to Accept What’s to Come” — 6,350
originally published in the November 2022 issue of Apex

“The More Loving One” — 6,950
originally published December 2022 in Proton Reader #2

“The Letters They Left Behind” — 7,450
forthcoming in Lightspeed

“The Lessons Only a Jelly Bean Can Teach” — 2,600
forthcoming in Pulphouse

That’s just under 107,000 words, not counting any previously unpublished story which should be tossed into the mix, always a fun feature of a new collection. And even if I kick out “Opossums and Angels,” to avoid duplicating anything from a previous collection, that’s still plenty to work with.

As you can tell by the fact two of the stories above have yet to appear, I’m in no hurry to make this happen, for I believe six months would have to pass from their original publications before I’m allowed to repurpose them. But it’s definitely something I’d like to make happen in 2024 if possible.

Stay tuned!