Writer & Editor
Well, the word is official: Edge Books has released the table of contents for Tesseracts 18: Wrestling With Gods, and a story of mine is among them. It’s always an honour to be included in Tesseracts, but especially so for me since Tesseracts 17 saw my first professional sale, and I’d submitted to previous incarnations of the anthology without success over the years.
I was recently invited to explain dressing for the vagaries of dressing for wind chill, blizzards, and temperatures nearing -40 C — or as we call it in Winnipeg, “January”– by fellow blogger and writer Angélique Jamail. I may not have the world’s greatest fashion sense, unless you like t-shirts or movie references, but I do know how to dress for the cold.
I was already thrilled to have a story in the upcoming Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, because I think the concept and motivation behind an anthology that celebrates people who were marginalized in their time and place, and puts them at the centre of the story, is fantastic. (And working and corresponding with the editors Rose Fox and Daniel José Older, and Crossed Genres Publications, has been awesome.)
But now I am even more keen to read and see the finished product, since the beautiful cover (above) by Julie Dillon was revealed.
I’m going to admit: this is slightly embarrassing, but you have to start somewhere. For a long time, the only books I could claim to have stories published in came out when I was in high school.
Don’t get me wrong: at 15, finding out my assassin-droid short story “My Function is to Kill” was going to be published in Creative Minds ’88 made my year. The anthology of student writing was published annually by the school division my high school was in, and it was a real cross-section of what a lot of us were going through and how that came out in our writing. (Er, well, I don’t know what an assassin droid says about my high-school experience, but I thought it was cool.)
Just a quick roundup of what I’ve been up to, writing-wise, this time; though between acceptance into an anthology I really wanted to get into, interviewing many creative folks about an iconic Canadian superhero, and being interviewed myself (twice!) I guess it’s been a busy month.
Award-winning short story writer Douglas Smith has been called “one of Canada’s most original writers of speculative fiction” (Library Journal), and this fall he brings readers a deeper story in his novel The Wolf at the End of the World.
