alastairmayer

November is National Novel Writing Month, and I've been head down cranking out the prose every day so far. I just broke the 45,000 word mark, 90% complete, so I'm into the home stretch. At least as far as NaNo is concerned -- most markets for the genre I'm writing in are looking for more in the 75k to 100k range. That's okay, my novel will shoot past 50k just finishing up loose ends, and I have a lot of backfill to do.

Making that kind of progress is tough slogging; I want to have a usable first draft, not fifty thousand words of stream of consciousness babbling. So I find myself doing research, or plotting, in time when I could be writing. The upshot is a lot of very late nights getting my daily wordcount quota in. You know it's time to go to bed when you notice that you've been typing the name of your starship, the USS Heinlein, as the Heinekin. Maybe I should look for product-placement sponsorship. ;-)

MileHiCon, the Rocky Mountain regional science fiction and fantasy con, is this weekend. It's at the Hyatt in the Denver Tech Center.  Come have a good time.  Check the link for details.

I’ll be there, I’m on a few panels, but don’t let that stop you. ;-)

My short story "Light Conversation" has been accepted by Analog magazine! This is my first sale to Analog or any of the Big Three SF magazines (the other two being Asimov's and Fantasy & Science Fiction). I'm thrilled, I've been reading Analog since I was a teenager.  No, I don't know when it will appear yet -- probably middle of next year, from what I hear from others about the lead time.   (The story as submitted was titled "Conversation" but the name change occurred to me just after I mailed it.  I'm hoping to have the longer title when it sees print.)

And I hear that Q3 results for the Writers of the Future contest are starting to roll in.  Fingers crossed.

I really need to be updating this more often.  Apparently there's a Wordpress plugin that will allow me to do that from my main web page.  Ah well.

Footprints
Since my last post here, the Footprints anthology (edited by Jay Lake and Eric Reynolds, from Hadley Rille Books), with my story "Snowball", was launched on July 20th, the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing.  Jim Van Pelt (who has the lead story) and I did a signing at Who Else! Books in Denver, and in August, Borderlands Books in San Franscisco announced that Footprints was their #1 bestseller in trade paperback.  Woot!

Latest publication
My story "The Gremlin Gambit" has just been published by MindFlights, it's an on-line 'zine, go take a look.

Other stuff
I'm getting ready for the upcoming MileHiCon, the annual Rocky Mountain regional science fiction convention in Denver.  I'm responsible for the science programming as well as being on several panels, so things are getting a bit hectic.  Since I also have a goal of writing and submitting a story a week (not necessarily the same one, I'm overlapping first and final drafts), I'm keeping busy.

I have three words to say about this movie: go see it.

Actually, I have a few more words. Sam Rockwell’s acting (as Sam Bell) is superb. If you give them the basic premise (and in what SF movie don't you?), they get the science right. And the plot turns in ways you might not expect. (I was expecting twists, and knew some of the basic premise from what I’d read about the movie, but I was still surprised — pleasantly so.)

Moon is one of the most intelligent SF movies I’ve seen in a long time, without the largely incomprehensible (if you haven’t read the book) ending of, say, 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Moon’s set design is an obvious homage to 2001.) I hope the movie makes a bundle, that might encourage more like it.   It has some of the feel of Silent Running (without the level of craziness of Bruce Dern's character), with hints of Solaris near the beginning.  (If you remember the old British TV series Star Cops (lousy name, great but too-short series), it has the feel of that, too, but with a much smaller cast.)

If you’re looking for them, there are trivial nits to pick, mostly due to the fact that we still can’t film on location on the Moon. But spending a few tens of millions to fake Lunar gravity wouldn’t have added anything to the story, and in fact they do get the gravity right in a couple of outside scenes and where Sam is comfortably carrying something that would be heavy on Earth.  The story is well done.

Like I said: go see it.

I signed up for this site and then kind of forgot that I had it. D'oh. Mind, it's not like I don't have other places that I'm posting (like my home page, and that timesink Facebook), but I really should get here more often. I'll try to do better from now on.

Right now I'm in the middle of a story blitz. I have three June 30 deadlines that I want to get stories out to -- I sent one earlier today -- and two softer self-imposed deadlines of July 4th. Fortunately several stories are nearly complete, but I need to do one starting from nothing. (Well, I have an idea, but no words written.)

Coming up in a few weeks I'm scheduled as a speaker at the July 18 DASFA (Denver Area SF Association) meeting. (Their web site is somewhat dated, but the meeting time/place info is still correct.). The next day (July 19), I'll be at Who Else! Books in Denver, signing copies of the Footprints anthology. Better than that, fellow (and better known) Colorado author James Van Pelt will also be at the signing, he has a story in Footprints too. (Jim may also be speaking at the DASFA meeting the evening before, I'm a bit fuzzy on the details.)

Before that, I'll be going to Westercon (aka FiestaCon), the big western regional SF con in Temp, Arizona over the July 4th weekend. I'm just a con-goer at this one, not speaking, but I'm looking forward to seeing some old friends and meeting new ones. I'll be cleverly disguised as myself, if you see me feel free to step up and say hello.

I have a few other web sites, including my original, and my more current one, which focuses more on my writing.  I kind of stumbled in to LiveJournal because of some other folks that are here, so I'll give it a try.