EDIT: I'M SELLING CARAMELS ON ETSY. I PROMISE THEY ARE YUMMY. If you're not on Etsy, but are interested in buying some yumminess, just paypal to me at nicolekornherstace AT gmail with a note saying what you want. Please don't forget shipping costs (listed on the etsy pages)!
EDIT ALSO: STORY WITH TIP JAR IS UP!
Also there are books for sale!
Signed/inscribed (or not, as you like!) copies of The Winter Triptych ($10)
Signed/inscribed (see above!) copies of Demon Lovers and Other Difficulties ($5) -- note: these are in transit to me, I think, so I can't mail them immediately.
Signed/inscribed (see above, again!) copies of Desideria ($15 -- sorry so expensive, the thing has an $18 price tag)
Shipping info for books is $2/book. All the shipping info for the caramels is on the etsy link!
Please add shipping costs to your total and paypal to nicolekornherstace AT gmail. You don't even need to comment here if you're ordering something -- just put what you want in the notes section of the payment. Also please please please do the "payment owed" option so I don't incur a bunch of fees (and you shouldn't either with that option). But if you have any questions or you want me to double-check your total or anything, do please feel free to ask in comments. Please remember to include your mailing address in your payment!
Thank you so much in advance if you can help out. You are helping to rescue our house from its builder's multitudinous fuckups (seriously about $35k of fuckups we have to fix and it's only a 10-year-old house we just bought in 2009), and for that I am extremely grateful. We bought the house primarily so we wouldn't have to move Julian from house to house like I was when I was a kid, and you're helping us make that possible for him.
Signal boosting is also extremely helpful and VERY much appreciated!
I just drafted my third full-length novelthing. (Well, apart from the one I wrote in my freshman/sophomore years of high school, the less said about which the better.)
Something funny about this. Let's recap.
I wrote my first novel the summer after I graduated from high school, because I fell down the stairs and fucked up my ankles and spent the better part of two months sitting in bed. I got five legal pads filled with notes, murdered I don't know how many trees with my rather copious use of index cards, and got the first half or so written. I finished it when I was 20 or 21. It took two years and change.
My second novel, Blithen's Tarot, I also spent about two years on. Shopped it to the interested agent, interested agent changed her mind, it's on the back burner. But yeah, again, two years and change.
This last one, which doesn't even have a working title, took about two months. And that's with full-time mommying and also running a fairly bustling little etsy shop. I'm still not entirely sure how it happened except that this book basically ate me alive. I literally enjoyed every moment of writing this thing. I woke up every morning excited to get back to work on it, and drafting it made me feel more depressed than relieved, like what, over so soon? I wanted to back off of it for a week before I went back in for revising, but this thing has other ideas. I'm sitting here next to a pretty lengthy page of notes I took on it in the lousy day and a half I managed to keep my fingers out of the file. The last two, I was so happy to have them put behind me. This one, I never want to climb back out of.
I have no idea whether it's at all marketable. I could probably pitch it as YA, and will try to, as the protagonist is sixteen. I've been referring to it over on Facebook as a postapocalyptic katabasis ghost story, and it is that and it isn't. I'm terrible at synopses so I'm not even going to try, but in a nutshell it condenses so many disparate, mismatched things I love and somehow built them into itself: postapocalypse, katabasis, and ghosts, but also a Golden Bough-ish mythology and stars and a strong flawed ghosthunter-historian-priestess girl and (hopefully!) overturned tropes and dead sort-of superheroes and contested cities and loss and freedom and grail quests and knife-fights and swordfights and history and breaking oppressive systems down and Unlikely Alliances and trial by ritualized single combat and things-are-not-quite-as-they-seem, and about a million other things I won't tl;dr you to death with now. And also a saltlick. For catching ghosts with.
I've never had so much fun writing anything in my life.
2. this, in which I'm flattered to be listed with
3. prospective agent does not in fact want to represent Blithen's Tarot, despite previous enthusiasm, and without requesting rewrites. Onward, I guess. First, though, writing new bookthing abovementioned. Prospective agent has "great confidence in [me] as a writer" and is very eager to see more from me. Deciding whether I want to pursue that if it means giving up on a book that my readers generally thought was pretty strong, and after only one rejection. Eh.
4. two poems written last year, two Rhysling nominations. Pretty cool.
Some really sweet nonfiction this year! (And I'm starting 2012 with some more sweet nonfiction: On Monsters by Stephen T. Asma, which is so much fun.) As usual the list is pretty much all over the place -- I'll read anything. A couple of these were gifties from
Anyway, the list!
1. Cherie Priest, Dreadnought
2. Catherynne M. Valente, The Habitation of the Blessed
3. Joe Hill, 20th Century Ghosts
4. Geoff Ryman, Lust
5. Cory Doctorow, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
6. JoSelle Vanderhooft (ed), Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories
7. Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share Without Knowing
8. C.S.E. Cooney, Jack o' the Hills
9. Elizabeth Bear, All the Windwracked Stars
10. Kathe Koja, Under the Poppy
11. Nalo Hopkinson, Midnight Robber
12. Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun
13. Roger D. McGrath, Gunfighters, Highwaymen, & Vigilantes: Violence on the Frontier
14. Claire Rudolf Murphy & Jane G. Haigh, Gold Rush Women
15. Life and Exploits of the Daring Frank & Jesse James
16. Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds
17. Francine du Plessix Grey, At Home with the Marquis de Sade
18. The Complete Marquis de Sade
19. Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
20. Gemma Files, A Rope of Thorn
21. Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
22. Paolo Bacigalupi, Pump Six and Other Stories
23. John Crowley, The Solitudes
24. John Crowley, Love & Sleep
25. John Crowley, Daemonomania
26. John Crowley, Endless Things
27. Christopher Barzak, One for Sorrow
28. Dictionary of Rogues
29. Charles de Lint, Dreams Underfoot
30. A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book
31. Inga Clendinnen, Aztecs
32. Parker Pearson, The Archaeology of Death and Burial
33. K. David Harrison, The Last Speakers
34. Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692
35. Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
36. Joe Hill, Horns
37. Joe Kelly and J. M. Ken Niimura, I Kill Giants
38. Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
39. Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire
40. Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay
Nicole,
Thanks for the submission! I hope you can forgive me for taking so
long to get back to you.
I was very impressed with "Queen's Progress" -- you have a real
gift for prose. It has a marvelously colorful setting, carefully
depicted, and complex and fascinating characters.
Most readers will be delighted to be immersed in such a colorful and
original landscape, and be patient enough while the narrative takes them
places they don't yet understand. Unfortunately, the opening pages of
"Queen's Progress" are so densely packed with unexplained
references and asides that they are virtually impenetrable.
For example, paragraphs 7 to 11 are pretty much incomprehensible, and the
next few pages are almost as bewildering. While you take great care
to eventually unravel the mysteries you lay down in those pages, by the
time you do I think most of my readers would have given up. As
strong as your story is, I'm afraid I'll have to return it, with genuine
regrets.
[etc etc etc],
[Editorperson]
See? It's constructive, it's useful, and the criticisms are specific and absolutely true. Most of my rejections follow this same pattern of "Wow, this was a super cool story and here are some things that we dug about it but we're not buying it." They don't often bother to tell me WHY they didn't buy it, and I love that this one did.
In other news, Blithen's Tarot is off to the agent! Longer post about that later, probably.