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

[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