France, shiny writing news, and the impending arrival of the cymbal-clapping demon monkeys

Life has been so amazingly nice to me lately that I’m expecting the other shoe to drop at any moment, complete with an army of cymbal-clapping demon monkeys. I’m a pessimist like that. But in the meantime, I shall revel in the shiny!

I just got back from a rather lovely trip to France with my husband’s family. Much awesomeness was experienced. As an opera nerd, getting to see the Palais Garnier was the highlight for me during the few days we spent in Paris. After Paris, we took a barge cruise through Burgundy, which rocked on every level—the food, the wine, the weather, all the places visited, the amazing crew, and the chance to go bicycling along the canal route. But now, alas, I am re-adjusting to real life, where lunch sadly does not include wine and a ridiculous number of cheeses.

There has also been continuing writing-related shininess, most of it occurring while I was off learning just how rusty my French has gotten:

* My story “Memories of Mirrored Worlds” is now available online at Daily Science Fiction;

* Last week I got another acceptance from Daily Science Fiction for a flash piece called “The Perfect Coordinates to Raise a Child”;

* And finally, “The Girl Who Welcomed Death to Svalgearyen” from issue 124 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies received some nice comments in reviews at Locus Online and Tangent Online. BCS will also be offering the story as a podcast sometime in the near future, which I’m quite looking forward to hearing.

The Writerly Update: Rising from the Grave Edition

Holy crap, has it really been that long since I’ve posted something? Sorry not to have been keeping up lately, but life has continued to dance on the insane side of the fence. Hopefully come fall I’ll be able to settle back into a blog reading and writing routine. Until then, I’ll probably remain my current scattershot, occasionally resurfacing self.

In the meantime, here’s the bullet points of what I’ve been up to in the writing department:

* My zombie apocalypse story “The Holy Spear” has been accepted by Black Static. This will be my second appearance in their pages, which I’m thrilled about.

* Speaking of Black Static, reviewer Peter Tennant wrote a nice post about my story “The Wounded House” from issue 20 on his blog.

* Received my shiny contributor copy of Aoife’s Kiss (10th anniversary issue) this morning. Pretty.

* Gearing up for this summer’s TNEO workshop for Odyssey alum. As of last night, all the critiques I had to do are officially done! I’ve still got a ton of other things to do, but it’s nice to put a big fat check mark next to that beast of an item.

* Unfortunately, progress on the writing front has been mostly non-existent. I got in a good afternoon of revision work on My Big Fat Epic Fantasy Novel a couple weeks ago, but otherwise, that’s been kind of it. But now that TNEO critiques are out of the way, I can hopefully get back in gear. I’ve got some revisions to do on a short story, several flash pieces I should probably polish up and send out somewhere (anyone have suggestions on where to send an unabashedly liberal-leaning gay superhero flash story?), and then back to the novel grind.

Today’s Entry: One Part Plug, One Part Review

1) The non-shameless plug: Fantasy Magazine has a poll for the Best Fantasy Magazine Story of 2010. The shameless plug: my story “Mortis Persona” is among the stories you can vote for if you enjoyed it and feel so moved.

2) In a review of issue 20 of Black Static at Suite101, my story “The Wounded House” gets an “outstanding.” I’ll quite happily take that!

Two Quick & Shiny Things

First, my story “Dumping the Dead” was selected for inclusion in The Best of Every Day Fiction Three.

And second, a review of “Mortis Persona” at Tangent Online says, among other things, “Barnett’s lush prose does a fantastic job of building this world.” I don’t think I’ve ever had my prose described as lush before, but it’s a description I’ll happily accept.

Shiny New Stuff for the (Almost) New Year

1) Shiny new website look here at http://www.babarnett.com. The previous version was adequate, but limited in what I could add to it and not particularly interesting. This version is much more fun.

2) Daily Science Fiction‘s January line-up has been announced, and my story “A Song Never Tasted” is slated for January 14. If you’d like to see the story in your inbox that morning (and receive lots of other fiction on a daily basis to boot), you can subscribe to DSF for free. If you’d rather read it later, you can wait a week until the story’s up on DSF’s website. And if you don’t want to read it at all, then fine, be that way. Make me cry.

3) Shiny new reviews! (Oh, Google Alerts, what would my ego do without you?) “The Wounded House” is called “remarkably well-written” in D.F. Lewis’ real-time review of Black Static 20, and a review by Nicole McClain at The Portal has many lovely things to say about “Mortis Persona.”