One of the reasons I haven’t blogged very much recently is that I’ve been so damn busy. I went away for a while to a lake up north, where I worked on the story in this subject heading as well as a couple of others (I even did some foresighting work, if you can believe that). The good news is that all of the stories I was working on were requests from other people — this one came from Rudy…
On June 14, a bystander shot this video of a Seattle police officer punching a 17-year-old girl in the face during an altercation with her 19-year-old cousin. My pal David Forbes tweeted this bit of news to me this afternoon, and I’ve been trying to wrap my head around both the video and the responses to the video ever since. The response is overwhelmingly in support of the officer. Here are a few choice snippets:
Charles Tan was kind enough to interview me about The Shine Anthology, and you can read it here. Snip: CT: What made you decide to write science fiction? MA: A lot of things. I was raised in a science fiction household. My dad had this copy of “To Sail Beyond the Sunset” under the bed, the one with Maureen doing her Birth of Venus thing on the cover. We also had the Dune and Foundation novels around, and we watched…
In case anyone’s curious, I’ve gotten feedback on my manuscript from both my agent and (most of) my workshop. I’m still waiting on a couple of opinions which really matter to me, and for this reason I’ve been reticent to attempt any re-writing. I’m waiting until all the science is in, to use a climate-denier phrase. That said, I’m slowly growing more excited about the process. Everyone has a slightly different take on the book, but the good news is…
From Food This is the dinner I prepared after finishing the first draft of a novel called The von Neumann Sisters. My agent is reading it, my workshop is reading it, my husband is reading it. The title is taken from a comment Peter made in a Starship Sofa podcast, when talking about it. He mistook the title I had in mind, but when I thought about it, I realized it was a better fit. But that final moment reflects…
I’m not joking. Jetse de Vries, editor of The Shine Anthology of Optimistic SF is giving away free cognac, whisky, and wine if you guess the end of a sentence correctly. No, really. How it works: Below are fragments from all the stories that will appear in the Shine anthology. Each fragment has an ending sentence, for which four possibilities are given. Three are false (made up by me, or—in same cases—by the author), one is correct. Guess the correct…
Thanksgiving, as I was exhorted late last night, was October 12th. It was, according to some, the only Thanksgiving that should count. However those of us with two countries to our names sometimes get double holidays. (Japan, it should be known, has the best assortment of holidays: Christmas is for lovers, New Year’s is for family, Valentine’s Day is for men, White Day is for women, Golden Week is a whole week long, and there’s Obon and Halloween. But I…
When I returned from the lake, my husband had one piece of news for me:Michael Jackson’s signature white sequined glove has sold for three hundred and fifty thousand dollars at auction. “Somebody must have read your story,” he said. This is what he means: Slipping on the glove, I felt a heady rush of temptation despite the way the fabric wilted from my too-short fingers. I suddenly understood Joe’s speedy conquering of time. His desire to leave his mark on…
You can read my story, “Milk+” at The Orphan. Snip: Braxtin had no need for the milk bar until a week after starting Milk+. By then, her breasts already felt stretched and sore, and a hot little knot of pain had tightened between her shoulders. But according to the pamphlet inside her free box of Milk +, her new breast milk contained a more even distribution of fats and sugars, thus eliminating the peaks and valleys created by conventional insulin…
I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw what Cory Doctorow wrote about my story: This week’s Escape Pod podcast story is Madeline Ashby’s ?oyfriend, a marvellous, sweetly romantic science fiction story about teenagers who use clever artificial intelligences as “training wheels” on the way to their first real love, but who quickly find themselves substituting the warm companionship of their imaginary friends for the confusing and fraught people around them. It’s got Ashby’s sly humor, heart and it’s got…