New Forces for a Better Tomorrow

I’d like to take this opportunity to welcome a slew of new denizens to the Magic District. We the Founding Few have become increasingly busy, and most of us have, shall we say, slipped a bit on our original update schedule. We decided an infusion of new blood would be welcome — both by us, as we’re happy to expand our ranks and lighten the load, and by you readers, who’ll get to enjoy loads of new rants, meditations, observations, leaps of logic, leaps of illogic, and other such bloggy goodness by a whole new slew of up-and-coming fantasy writers. Now, play yourself a little mental fanfare, please, and I’ll introduce the new writers:

Kelly Gay

Jeannie Holmes

Michele Lang

Lisa Shearin

Kalayna Price

M.K. Hobson

Seanan McGuire

Paul Crilley

Some of those names may be familiar to you already, and some of them will be. We’ll begin a more robust update schedule soon (though I wouldn’t expect too much from us in this, that last dead week of the year as reckoned by the barbarous Western calendar… but 2010 will be a different story).

I, myself, have little of import to impart, but I thought I’d take a writerly look back over this long year.

Despite having my novel series dropped by my publisher, I continue to work a lot — I’m in the midst of a work-for-hire pseudonymous novel, which is due in a couple of months, and is about halfway done. It’s a great gig, since within the specific premise I’ve been tasked to write, I have near-total freedom to do whatever I want; the result is something that very much resembles a Tim Pratt novel, though my name won’t be on the tin. (I’ve auditioned for other work-for-hire jobs where I was literally given a scene-by-scene description of what to write, for the entire book, so this is a nice variant.)

My anthology Sympathy for the Devil is done and delivered (and has cover art). Editing an anthology was both a lot harder and a lot more fun than I expected. Putting it together and talking to authors was awesome, but some of the logistics of securing rights was difficult… I’ve never been on the editor side of that dynamic before. It was a useful and good experience, and I think the book is very cool.

Earlier in the year I published a bunch of short stories, had several reprints in various markets (podcasts, foreign magazines, etc.), got nominated for a Stoker Award, serialized a short novel for donations online (for pretty decent money, even), sold a couple of novels overseas, and had other nice things happen.

I revised a middle-grade novel, which my agent is now shopping around, and did a synopsis and sample chapters for a very cool project which she’s also shopping around, so I’ve got a lot of irons on a lot of fires. Let’s hope one of them heats up sufficiently sometime next year, shall we?

2009 was a hard year for me and a lot of people I know, a bad year in publishing and a bad year personally. And while the turnover to a new year is technically arbitrary and has no cosmic significance, I find that it does have psychological significance, and if enough people think 2010 will be a better year, then a sort of collective magic could indeed be worked in our personal lives, our industry, and our economy. Such is the might (and weakness) of consensus reality. So act as if we’re in the early moments of a better tomorrow, won’t you?

-Tim Pratt