blushing

[mrissa]

There is an astonishingly lovely and complimentary post about some of my stories over at Lady Business. I feel odd even linking to it because it feels perilously close to linking to reviews--which is not something that is wrong, but it's not something I do. But it's more general than that, and just leaving it unnoticed also seems like not the thing. So: gosh, what a nice thing, there it is.

Comments

[themagdalen]

Oh! It is nice to be loved, but even nicer to be loved for the exact things for which one might have hoped to be loved. Intergeneral relationships and women live in real worlds and class and physics and so forth.

Which all reminds me to ask: wasn’t there a novel about hockey happening, slowly? is it still happening? was it not a novel? I don’t care about hockey, like, at all, as far as I know, and yet somehow I was already very fond of that story and want more of it (and I don’t think I ever read any of it, just you muttering about it).

[mrissa]

Ah. Yes, I see how this got tangled.

There was a hockey novel that got written not particularly slowly. As far as I know the editor who requested the full never read it--at least never responded--publishing industry, these things happen. At that time I didn't have my first agent, much less my current agent, so that was all happening unmediated.

The problem is, while we don't think of fantasy novels as being susceptible to the pace of change in the world as much as SF novels are, this one was, because it was a contemporary, and one of the major emotional arcs of it was that a young woman hockey player had nowhere to play after college once she didn't make the national team and had to figure out what she was doing with her life from there. (Since it was also a Tam Lin story--as the short stories that actually were published indicated--magic was where.) That is no longer the case: there are now pro women's leagues in the US and Canada. YAY! But it messes with my plot just as surely as any other social change. So now it is in that no man's land of not really working as a contemporary and not being historical enough to work as an historical.

So. It's not one of the books that my agent and I are submitting or working towards submitting at the moment. There were enough published short stories in the hockey fantasy series that I think I will do a collection, but it really wants two more specific stories for the arc of those to work excellently, and it's not where my head has been for several years. So the question will be: will I get my head back around to there and write those stories to make it the best possible collection of that set of short stories it can be, or will I just publish the collection of what has already been published and call it good. And: at some point will the novel feel historical enough to polish up and publish on its own, or will I have moved on from there and just say, well, trunk novels happen?

Publishing is complicated. Being reasonably fast and prolific doesn't always make it less complicated.

[themagdalen]

Oh but there *were* short stories! Are they somewhere?
I see how reality broke your plot. So yay that that’s no longer a realistic plot obstacle but... boo that the story it was driving is now a too-recent historical.

[mrissa]

Yes, several of the short stories were in On Spec, which is a print market, which gives me more impetus to collect them somewhere people can get at them.

[radiantfracture]

Hurray!

[okrablossom]

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[jesse_the_k]

I was thrilled by that post, because it pointed me at the Oort Cloud stories. 4H in space just made me grin so hard, and intergenerational care you show makes me glad to be human.

[mrissa]

Oh, I am glad.

One of my long-term ideas of things that ought to be done is that when I get my website redone, I want the stories searchable by genre but also by tag, such as "Oort Cloud stories," because there are others, there is another coming out in Analog. Having all my stories in a big long list is not the most useful thing for anybody even me. Honestly I have this horrible habit of just putting things out and not thinking of them any more. But it's one of those things that is not urgent to get done today, alas, even though I can see how nice it would be for non-me-entities. And even actually for this me-entity.

Tagging things is really great when

[jesse_the_k]

...you think of it at the very start.

But I suspect that you could crowdsource the tagging to your devoted fans.

"Left to Take the Lead" is the one upcoming? Might be time to renew my Analog subscription.

Re: Tagging things is really great when

[mrissa]

That's the Oort Cloud one, yes!

[mrissa]

PS Thank you. Thank you.