The sad incompatibility between wanting fame and fortune and being shy about the self-promotion part

[taste_is_sweet]

I'll admit it--I should have done this at least a month ago, but I always feel weird about metaphorically yelling LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! and waving my arms like mad from the back of the room. However, it is true that some of you might like to know about this, so:

LOOK! LOOK! I HAVE TWO NEW STORIES OUT!



The first one is the story, "A Fairy in his Bed" which I co-wrote with squeakyoflight (Corinna Silver), who is an all-around fantastic person. Writing this with her was a lot of fun. You can find it in the Myths and Magic: Legends of Love anthology from Dreamspinnerpress.com (Isn't that a beautiful cover?). You can read excerpts of the story here and here at Dreamspinner's very own blog.

To quote from the blog post, "A Fairy in his Bed" is about Quinn, a fairy as whimsical as he is beautiful, and Daniel Tibbits, the cynical, heartbroken writer who accidentally inherits him.

Inherits? Oh, yes…

I also want to let you know that Dreamspinner is having a big sale at their website--20% everything until the end of the weekend! Great time to buy an anthology of fantasy M/M romance, don't you think? Unless of course you'd rather win a hardcover or eBook instead...

More on that in a minute! But first I want to tell you about my second new published story(!). This one came out in November, so I feel less bad about waiting until now to mention it, because at least it's the same month. "The Pickup", which a few of you might remember from when it was very briefly part of a monthly brigits_flame contest, isn't whimsical or beautiful. It's typically Canadian sci-fi, in that nothing much happens and it ends badly anyway. I posted about it getting published (as well as "A Fairy in his Bed") back here several months ago. It's available in the Tesseracts 14 Anthology, available from Edge and Tesseracts Books.



Now the contest!

Last time I had a free book contest I chose the winner from the first person who commented with their name and address. This time I'm going to be a little more creative. The theme for Tesseracts 14 is "Strange Canadian Stories". In honor of that, one trade paperback copy of the Tesseracts 14 anthology will go to the person who, in my most humble opinion, comments with the niftiest anecdote about a real-life strange thing that's happened to them. The runner up will receive a trade paperback copy of the Myths and Magic anthology. (This isn't because I think the Tesseracts 14 book is better than Myths and Magic, but because I only have one Tesseracts 14 book to give away.)

The next two runners up will each get an eBook copy of the Myths and Magic anthology (unfortunately, Tessaracts 14 is only available in trade paperback format).

Awright! Anyone got a strange story to tell me? :D

Comments

[dungeonwriter.livejournal.com]

I'm happy for you!

[dungeonwriter.livejournal.com]

The day before I met my best friend, I dreamed about him and even his name (I dreamed of befriending a lion and his name means lion)

[sgamadison.livejournal.com]

I got nuthin' in the strange department... either my life is completely boring or it is so strange all the time that nothing stands out. :-)

Congratulations on the new stories--I'll have to go check them out! And for what it's worth, I *completely* sympathize between the need to self-promote and the reluctance to do so. If I wasn't such a Chatty Cathy and felt the need to post about nearly *everything* in my life, I doubt I'd ever make an announcement at all...

I'll stay tuned in--I want to know what kinds of weird things happen to other people!

[danceswithgary]

Congrats on the stories!

[chkc.livejournal.com]

Yay! Go you! Congratulations! :D

[debris_k.livejournal.com]

That's wonderful, congrats! I've been thinking of strange real-life things that might do for this occasion, but nothing strange or nifty enough came to mind; no one would be impressed with tales about how 90% when I take an umbrella with me it doesn't rain and often even the sun breaks through the clouds, and when it does rain on the way home and I finally open the umbrella — the rain will stop when I'm 5 minutes from home 80% of the time, almost like clockwork, if there were clocks with such crummy percentages. See, not very strange or nifty at all. :-/

I am so gonna win your book!!!

[squeakyoflight.livejournal.com]

When I was just dating John, I was out with my mother when I suddenly got this strange and terrible compulsion to call him. My mom very kindly lent me her cell phone (I was an impoverished student without such newfangled technologies) and when I called, he said: "Thank God! I've been trying to get ahold of you! I locked myself out of my car and I need you to come pick me up." So I did. And that was only the first time that happened.

However, as I'm reading this anecdote, I'm thinking it may not actually win because it's cool, but not 'wow! That is SO messed up!' cool. Hrm.

I'll get back to ya.

Love Squeaky

[sholio]

First off: Congratulations! :D That's so awesome, and the stories sound quite interesting!

Strange anecdotes. :) Hmm. The better stories that I have to tell are not mine, but my parents'. Actually, I know a heck of a lot of people in Alaska who have had really strange things happen to them, although most of these people are, let's say, of a certain generation. A certain generation that is widely associated with mind-altering substances. The two may be related, is all I'm saying. The strangest thing that happened to me (which I'll get to in a minute) is not even a patch on some of my parents' odder stories.

For example, my mom's first apartment was in the wedge end of one of those flatiron-shaped buildings, so it had only three walls, and two of them came to an acute point. There was nothing useful that could be done with that corner, plus she was an itinerant college student and didn't own much anyway, so the only thing in the corner was a spare tire leaning up against the walls. One day, she was sitting on it, and something pushed her, very hard, in the back. It threw her forward, knocked her sprawling. Unsurprisingly, she moved out of the apartment shortly thereafter -- when the ghosts start taking swings at you, it's time to move on.

After she hooked up with my dad, one winter they rented an old schoolhouse in a little town on the highway. The neighbors all told them the place was "bad" and most people didn't stay there very long. My mother said that it wasn't long before they started noticing a general feeling of malice in the house. It was as if something there hated them. It was worst in one of the rooms, localized in the vicinity of the ceiling. I think I remember something about that room being colder than the other rooms, or maybe just the area near the ceiling, but I'd have to check with her; I wasn't born yet, so I've gotten all of this second-hand. Anyway, one evening they were at home and they looked up and realized someone was on the porch. All they could see was the silhouette and the shadow that it was casting on the porch, but it was someone huge, so big that they couldn't see his head. My dad eventually nerved himself up to go over and open the door. There was no one there, and nothing that could possibly have cast a shadow like the one they'd seen.

Some time after that, my mom went into the "bad" room and told it that it could have that room, and they'd close the door and leave it alone, if it would let them have the rest of the house. She shut the door and they kept their bargain, and she said that the ominous feeling of malice and hate pretty much went away.

The whole area was generally pretty weird. My mom claims to have encountered a place in the woods near the old schoolhouse where time ran slower -- she was walking in the woods and came upon a clearing, and began to cross it. But as she did so, she slowed down, and kept moving slower; she was terrified that she'd be stuck there forever, but eventually managed to reach the opposite side.

Running out of comment space; oops.

[sholio]

So yeah. My one personal story of weirdness is not much compared to that. It concerns the first house that my husband and I bought, a small ranch-style with basement and attic which we called the Serial Killer House because of certain peculiar modifications that one of the previous owners had made. The basement had the oddest half-bath: it consisted of a drain in the middle of the concrete floor with a shower head above it, and a toilet, all exposed with no stall around them or anything. Upstairs, the trap door leading to the attic could be bolted from the underside, for no apparent purpose except, one imagines, to contain something in the attic. So it was the Serial Killer House -- tongue in cheek, of course.

Except ... the entire time we lived there, I felt vaguely nervous, creeped-out and unsafe in that house. I hated turning my back to doorways, especially when I was the only person home. I was particularly weirded out by the basement; I had this ongoing, completely irrational fear that something was going to come out of the basement when I had my back to it. When I'd get up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, I'd dart quickly from bathroom back to bed, because I had to cross a hallway and I couldn't get over my irrational fear of crossing that hallway in the dark.

I'm perfectly capable of letting my over-active imagination creep me out. After I watched The Ring, it took weeks before I could walk past a TV without eyeing it nervously. And I get jumpy at night. Logically, I know that it was nothing more arcane than a combination of general unhappiness in my life at the time, and probably engaging in colorful fantasies about the house while I was first forming my impressions of it. But none of the places I've lived before or since made me that nervous. I certainly don't feel that way (thank goodness) in the house where I live now. So ... I don't know! Over-active imagination, or creepy lingering psychic vibes from something bad?

Re: Running out of comment space; oops.

[niamh-sage.livejournal.com]

I don't know, but I'm totally creeped out by your stories! Seriously! My hair is standing up on the back of my neck 0_0

[rissabby.livejournal.com]

I was excited about your strange story contest because I have a very long, overly long, story about how I became the instrument of god to give a good dog a short break from a difficult life. I had been wanting to record it somewhere. I was three or four long paragraphs in when I thought, "hm, I should make a copy of this on wordpad in case my 10 year old computer jams up". I got as far as pasting a copy in a document, but when I tried to save, everything froze and I lost both copies.

I think this is sort of a strange story in itself. (Although not as good as what happened with the dog.) Maybe this story does not want to be told.

[lavvyan.livejournal.com]

While my life is full of the occasional weirdness, I don't believe in meaningful coincidences and always forget them. Thus, no strange story from me.

I'm absolutely thrilled on your behalf, though. :D

[niamh-sage.livejournal.com]

Very remiss of me not to have done this sooner, but congratulations on your two new stories! :D

My strange story concerns the Cordon-des-Druides, a Stone Age monument in the forest near Fougères in France. When I came over to see Arni for the first time, we planned to spend a few days driving around in France, and he asked me what I'd like to see there. I said I'd like to see some standing stones, so we went looking on the internet and found the CdD, which was along the route we wanted to follow.

When we arrived in Fougères, we had quite some difficulty finding our way to the road to the forest, with the result that it was early evening by the time we did. We decided we'd look at the stones and eat our dinner there, then head on to our next destination. So we got on this road. It was a big road - very wide - and completely empty. We saw exactly one other vehicle on our way to the forest: a scooter, going flat out in the other direction with the rider bent over the handlebars. Okay, no worries.

The turn-off to the stones was a very tiny road, more of a track really, and it quickly took us into the trees. We had no trouble finding the place, because there was a picnic table there. It was completely deserted, perhaps not surprising given the time of day, but also had that feeling of not being visited very often.

We decided to go and walk along the stones (it's a long row of quartz boulders that extends into the forest) while it was still light enough to take photos. It was very quiet there. Exceedingly quiet. No birds were singing *at all* - very odd for the time of day. We were also uncharacteristically quiet. We walked the length of the stones - or the length of the cleared portion - they extended further into the undergrowth, and then we turned to look at each other. One of us, I don't remember which it was, said something about it feeling a bit spooky and unwelcoming. That was pretty much enough to get us both going - we rushed back down the length of the stones, jumped into the car and got the hell out of there. When we got back to the main road, there were two enormous ravens standing there, one on each side of the road. We looked at each other and went, "Gatekeepers", and Arni put his foot down. We drove like the proverbial bat out of hell and didn't stop till we'd found the biggest, brightest, busiest gas station, where we stayed for the night, camped out right under a light.

I have never been so unnerved in all my life. There was just this feeling there, of "You are too small to be here. Go Away."

We've been to quite a few other megalithic sites since then, and have only once had a go away feeling (Wayland's Smithy - didn't even actually *make* it to the smithy before turning around and running away).

Gaaaahhhh. Now I've freaked myself out all over again. I'm going to read some Calvin and Hobbes or something, before bed. 0_0

[pixiequeen10thk.livejournal.com]

Darn it I can't think of any strange stories. No matter as I'm so going to buy this once I've paid off all my xmas credit card charges. Really really stupid question: I've never actually bought an ebook. What format does it come in exactly? Do I need to download a reader so I can read it on my ipod?

Also - Huge huge congrats!

EDIT: ah I see there's a paperback too. Might be tempted to get that instead. Though there is rather a large price difference. Hmm, let me know about the ebook thingy anyway :)

[(Anonymous)]

Crap, I don't know if you're including the 17th, but here's my late story [not sure if it qualifies as stranges or not anyways]:

So, I was out at a CVS looking for condoms. There was quite a few to choose from. I look over to my right and there was a priest. My stupid self freaked out and blurted out "This isn't the candy aile." and ran out. Later, I was wondering what he was doing there.

Yeah, if this counts as an entry and I win, which i doubt, could you send me an email at chrstnmyng@gmail.com

I don't know. It's more stupid than strange.