Hello friends!
My first article of 2018 is already out, and it’s only January! (Well, it’s February, but it was still January when it was originally posted.)
This time I got to talk about military science fiction for Book Smugglers, a venue I love a LOT and a topic I can basically talk about forever.
The five points in this one are mostly about the way fictional militaries represent gender, sexuality, attraction, and the politics and sociology around it all.
The novella is available as an ebook and also as a free read on my website, posted in chapters.
iTunes | Kobo | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
Map of where the story takes place
Behind-the-scenes of naming choices in the story
For updates about future stories sign up for the New Release Mailing List.
Guys, I can’t believe June 1st is only a few days away. Which means I’m about to start posting Three Keys in the Desert, which still seems unreal somehow. Even though there’s a cover (which you can see right next to this text)! And an ebook file! And like, a public record that this will actually happen!
Anyway, if you’ve read my previous posts you already know the story behind how this novella was written, so it’s probably time you knew what it was actually about. I’ve spent a lot of the last decade tinkering with a potential summary for this thing, since like a lot of authors no single-paragraph description seemed adequate.
But I finally settled on one! So, without further ado:
On a remote planet, a military boarding school is about to get a new headmistress. Her charges will include Ebie, a girl desperately trying to keep a secret, Kim, a boy desperately trying to keep his friends from dying, and Vrei, a girl who just wants to make it to the end of the day. Will any of them get what they want? With only a week until Transfer Day, the biggest and most important event of the year, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
😀 😀 😀
If that sounds interesting, here’s a short excerpt from said headmistress’ point of view:
“The girl in front of Claudia took a deep breath, as if trying to come up with more reasons to argue. She clearly hadn’t anticipated Claudia’s resistance. She’d thought the morning bulletins would turn Claudia into a cowering idiot.
“If there’s anything–” Ebie began, but the door interrupted her, opening with a chime and revealing the head doctor’s face.
Claudia was already tired of the woman’s perpetual cheerfulness. She wasn’t looking forward to prison, or wherever they sent her next, but at least she could be certain that after this posting there would be fewer annoying underlings to deal with.
Susanna looked from Ebie to Claudia. “I’m sorry, should we postpone?”
“No,” Claudia said, and then looked at Ebie. “Your ten minutes are up. Get out.”
The girl grabbed the edge of Claudia’s desk. “Colonel, please, let me just–”
“Get out,” Claudia said again, in the tone it had taken her a decade to perfect, the one she used to discipline her officers.
The girl got up, surrounded by a halo of violence. Claudia watched her carefully, almost hoping she’d do something, give Claudia an excuse to burst.
But no further response came. The doors slid shut and Susanna sat down. Claudia pretended to look at the numbers on the sheets Susanna pulled up and nodded along.
This day would be without end.”
What’s got Claudia in such a foul mood? Will Ebie actually punch someone? Should someone protect Susanna the head doctor from all this negativity? Tune in on June 1st to find out! 🙂
Tell me more!
Gladly! If you want to be notified when the novella finally goes live, the best way to do that is to sign up for my New Release Mailing Listd For more updates on cool stuff I’ll post before and after June 1st (yes, I have at least one more thing planned for May!) you can follow me on twitter or facebook.
In any case, thank you for reading this far, and oh my god this is really happening isn’t it?
Don’t answer that.
It’s a little over two weeks until I start posting my science fiction novella Three Keys in the Desert online, and I figured now was a good time to introduce everyone to the cover!
It took a lot of work and fiddling, but I’m pretty happy with how it came out 🙂
To recap: the story is set on a remote planet where girls (and boys) live at a military boarding school. I’ll start posting it on June 1st! You can read my previous post to find out how it’s all gonna work.
And now, without further ado:
Hi everyone! I’ve been waiting to make this announcement for a while and now I finally can: next month I’ll finally get to put something I’ve written up for free on this website!
Specifically, I’ll be posting my science fiction novella Three Keys in the Desert starting June 1st!
What is the story about?
There will be a lot more details forthcoming in the next three weeks (including a cover!) but the short summary is: it’s a story about a bunch of girls (and a few boys) living in a military boarding school in space, trying to navigate bureaucracy, romance and adventure. The action takes place over the course of a week, when the school experiences some dramatic upheaval.
Why are you posting it on this website?
I originally wrote Three Keys in the Desert in 2007 and put it aside for a few months, intending to finish working on it later. A few months turned into a few years, and before long I fell into a ritual of pulling it out every few years and telling myself that I couldn’t Really Be A Writer until I finished it and managed to get it traditionally published.
But then about 18 months ago I decided to take a deep breath and instead focus on creating new material. Which was a good move! I now have two short stories and a poem published in various venues, which would never have happened if I hadn’t let the novella go for a while.
All of which is to say, I still adore this story and its characters and what it has to say about the world, but I’ve been carrying it around on my hard drive for so long that at this point I just want to have it out in the world, for people to enjoy. There’s a bigger market for novellas now than there was in 2007, but I decided not to try and pitch it to publishers, even now that it’s as close to perfect as I know how to make it.
The main reason for this is that I’m a pretty slow writer (for example: a decade spent on this one novella) and none of the stories I’ve managed to sell so far are available online for free, and I really wanted there to be something of mine people could just read in their spare time, without necessarily spending money.
So how is this gonna work?
Well, Three Keys in the Desert is about 39,000 words long (that’s about 130 pages in a printed book) and I’ll be posting it in parts over the course of June. Because of the structure of the story, the parts will actually be fairly self-contained and no chapters will cut off in the middle of a conversation or anything like that.
The whole story will also be available as an ebook, if you wanted to get the whole thing on June 1st, or if you’d rather have it in that format.
Cool. So what now?
Now I’m probably going to go crawl under a table and breathe into a paper bag (it’s been a DECADE with this story, okay, I don’t even know who’ll I’ll be once it’s out in the world!) while you can do a bunch of things to make sure you don’t miss any Three Keys in the Desert-related updates.
You can sign up for my New Release Mailing List (I’ll send an email when the first part of the novella goes live) and follow me on twitter or facebook to get updates about the cover reveal and other cool things I might post in the run up to June.
Sounds good! Are you okay?
Yes! Mostly. I’ll just go eat an entire cake and have a glass of something alcoholic. I’ll be right back.
I can honestly say I never thought I’d make a post like this. Although I’ve been writing poetry for years (officially since that epic poem when I was 9 that took up half a notebook), I’ve never submitted it anywhere or shown it to anyone. It was my private little thing, just some fun with words for my own enjoyment.
So, imagine my shock when the first poem I’ve ever submitted anywhere was accepted for publication! And a venue like Strange Horizons, a publication I’ve been a huge fan of for years. It’s been… slightly surreal.
Read “Odessa” at Strange Horizons
If I had to give this poem a summary (do people do that? is it a thing?) I’d say it was about time-traveling Jewish ladies. I hope you read it and enjoy it! It was written during a fairly difficult time in my life when I was too sick to write anything longer than a poem, and I’m so immensely excited to see it posted publicly for all to read.
If you’d like to get email updates whenever I have a new work out, you can sign up for my New Release Mailing List.
My short story “Life and Death in the Frozen City” has now been published in a real book that you can really buy!
The story is about a traveler who has to survive on an occupied planet where gender is binary and It’s part of FUTURISTICA 1, an anthology of really great scifi stories I still can’t believe I’ve really been included in.
It’s especially “wait, is this really happening?” for me because “Life and Death in the Frozen City” was the first original short story I ever wrote, about 7-8 years ago, and the version in my final draft from that time is almost identical to the one in the book. I’m a very different writer these days, but I still love that story, and am so, so happy to be able to share it with people at last.
You can get FUTURISTICA on Amazon, Smashwords, Kobo and Barnes & Noble.
And of course, if you do end up picking it up, please consider leaving a review on Amazon or Goodreads. (As a reviewer I am… ridiculously excited about the possibility of there being reviews of something I wrote.)
Fashionably late, here’s my review of the first season of “Jessica Jones”! I actually wrote this the week the show came out, but for various reasons it took a while to get it it ready for publication.
“Jessica Jones is without doubt the best TV show Marvel has produced to date, and possibly the most original main character they’ve brought to the screen since introducing the world to Tony Stark as Iron Man. The show is not without flaws, but everything about it feels fresh, unusual, exciting. Partly it’s because a show about a female superhero, especially one who drinks whiskey and crushes cockroaches with her bare hands without flinching, is tragically rare amid a sea of morally gray superpowered men. But partly it’s because Jessica Jones genuinely has an engaging yet disturbing story to offer.”
I am so (so!) excited to announce that a short story of mine will be published in the first half of 2016!
The story is called “Life and Death in the Frozen City”, I wrote it many, many years ago, for an anthology on prostitution in science fiction, and only recently decided to try to send out to publishers again.
Happily, it was accepted! It will be published in April, in the anthology FUTURISTICA, VOLUME ONE.
I am pretty much overjoyed by this, as this is both the first short story I wrote as an adult, and the first story I’ve ever managed to sell to a publication.
Watch this space for further details in the coming months!
Ashby’s second novel, a sequel to her first, is engaging and better written than her debut, but it doesn’t address many of the flaws of the original. Ashby’s novels are set in a universe where humanity has created human-like robots, called “vN,” designed to carry out the tasks that human beings are no longer interested in undertaking. The technology was originally developed by New Eden, a cult that ostensibly wanted to create companions for all the sinners who would be left on Earth after Judgment Day.