Happy one-year birthday to ANOTHER LIFE, my #solarpunk novella about reincarnation! @StelliformPress brought this to life one year ago today. Many thanks to everyone who has bought, read, or reviewed it!
A Spanish translation is coming soon from Crononauta, and a Catalan translation from SF Fábula. 🥳
Since my dear friend @Cbarzak and I had our first novellas published about a month apart, we thought it would be fun to chat about the form and our individual approaches to it. So we did!
#writerscoffeeclub 23. What's your strangest source of writing inspiration?
I was playing a game where you designed an English country cottage (interior and exterior) and a London townhouse interior. When I finally had both where I wanted them, I began to imagine who lived in what dwelling ... and how the two might meet.
#WritersCoffeeClub April 8
Do you think of your books as having a particular length? <-- catching up.
The only time I consider the length of my books is after they're written. Then, I check to see what qualifies as a #novel or #novella.
Since jumping into the #webnovel arena, one platform has demanded chapters be no greater than 15k characters—this is because of the fiction-on-phone readership's alleged 'short attention span'. rolls eyes
The Famous Magician, by Cesar Aira; trans. by Chris Andrews. You are an older writer of some renown, who is convincingly offered omnipotence in exchange for never writing, nor reading anything again; unfortunately you are not good at making decisions. 3 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈. #bookstodon@bookstodon#reading#writing#argentina#novella
System Collapse, by Martha Wells. You are a sentient construct that can pass as human, but you really don’t like humans much (other than their TV shows) but nonetheless endeavor to keep them from dying at each other’s hands in the f***ed up world they created. 4 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈. (Series) @bookstodon#bookstodon#books#murderbot#scifi#reading#novella
A DEFT, SHARP FABLE that could not be more timely. In a world where everything is decided by vote, what does democracy mean? Clever riff on Borges and Jackson stands on its own merits as well. B PLUS
Rumi's actually the first character I came up with, and the one that changed the most! I'd planned for someone much more happy-go-lucky and pure, but when I got to draft, Horace occupied a lot of that space, and Rumi became the grumbly one 😂
Portrait is by Vanessa Isotton, and is included in the book!
INNOVATIVE WORLDBUILDING AND THOUGHTFUL characterization make this steampunk speculative fiction tale about the hidden marvels in a glacial mountain shine. B PLUS
Hey, mastodon! Nerds of a Feather is reviewing a bunch of Novellas this month, and I have the honour of contributing the first review of Nerds today. It's a review of Indra Das's 'Last Dragoners of Bowbazar', which is a thoughtful meditation on memory, identity, and coming of age, but which does not quite deliver on the promised dragons.
Five stars: When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain by Nghi Vo (2020) is the second novella in the The Singing Hills Cycle series. Cleric Chih, always in search for a new story, finds themself at the mercy of some hungry tigers. To save the lives of themself and their companions, Chih enters into a lengthy story swapping session with the tigers.
Walking past thousands of openings in the ether, long reddish cracks in a seemingly invisible wall, as they would appear to the trained eye, we were truly happy. Lyanna held my hand—something she usually didn't do for some unknown, inexplicable reason. I, on the other hand, was a romantic fool; hence, I loved holding her hand, showing her, and the whole fucking world, that I belonged to her. That I was her grangent, and nobody else's…
We always found ourselves in Magdalena, a quaint, abandoned town nestled far in the western reaches, Lya and I, as we ventured into the Spree. I didn’t know why. And I had never really thought about it. Until now. Something had changed. An unfamiliarity settled in, akin to a glitch in the synaptic code—subtle yet present, behind the scenes—rendering the details of our surroundings more vivid; the once-dimmed sun now brighter, the pale blue sky intensifying, and the weight of the prairie dust seeming to lift…
Breakfast. I always got my breakfast at Pushkin's. It didn't matter how early, how late, how tired, or how stoned I was—the coffee shop next to our apartment building had become my steady waterhole. The gent that owned it, Greg Pushkin—a middle-aged Russian immigrant from the Cuban colonies in the Atlantic—was a good friend, or rather, he'd become one, because I would always pay him straight up, with either creds or dope…
Lyanna was sound asleep. I looked at her. My eyes touched her silky smooth skin, lingered there for a while, then regressed, slowly, back into a semi-dark, blueish abysmal world of nightly dread and anguish—the buzzing strobe-light from the handheld projected screen faintly mirrored my pale, unshaven face on the wall…
It never stopped raining. It never ever stopped raining. Hence, the crimson red always washed away. Good, or bad? I didn't know. I didn't wanna know.
"Inexplicably dead, this man is, isn't he?" I thought, and turned to Lya to get her beautiful but sad-looking face remapped in the kibershop window in front of us…
Step into the dystopian future of Spree, a genre-blending novella that throws all the storytelling rules out the window. Think sci-fi, cyberpunk, and then some—it's a wild journey that keeps morphing with every tweak and cut. This isn't your typical tale; it's a live experiment, guiding you through an unpredictable mental maze where the lines between reality and fiction, sanity and madness, are constantly getting smudged. Just like the portrayed instability, this adventure will leave you contemplating the dynamic nature of stories and the worlds they conjure, especially when they vanish.