Bradley P. Beaulieu

The Winds of Khalakovo is now listed on Night Shade's site. I'm now an official member of the posse! Comment excitant!

Coming April 2011 

Among inhospitable and unforgiving seas stands Khalakovo, a mountainous archipelago of seven islands, its prominent eyrie stretching a thousand feet into the sky. Serviced by windships bearing goods and dignitaries, Khalakovo's eyrie stands at the crossroads of world trade. But all is not well in Khalakovo. Conflict has erupted between the ruling Landed, the indigenous Aramahn, and the fanatical Maharrhat, and a wasting disease has grown rampant over the past decade. Now, Khalakovo is to play host to the Nine Dukes, a meeting which will weigh heavily upon Khalakovo's future. 

When an elemental spirit attacks an incoming windship, murdering the Grand Duke and his retinue, Prince Nikandr, heir to the scepter of Khalakovo, is tasked with finding the child prodigy believed to be behind the summoning. However, Nikandr discovers that the boy is an autistic savant who may hold the key to lifting the blight that has been sweeping the islands. Can the Dukes, thirsty for revenge, be held at bay? Can Khalakovo be saved? The elusive answer drifts upon the Winds of Khalakovo… 

Trade Paperback – 978-1-59780-218-5 
500 Pages – $14.99 

I just got word from my editor, Ross Lockhart over at Night Shade, that the artist that's been assigned to work on the cover for Winds is Thomas Scholes. Not knowing terribly much about Mr. Scholes, I quickly googled him and came across his blog (love the name: Crayon Box of Doom) and his corner over at CGHub. He apparently likes doing environments and landscapes and such. And I can see why. He really excels at it. I love the orange and ochre landscape below with the clouds above it. He also uses light and darkness very well. Many of his pieces have this dark and serious tone that perfectly matches Winds. He does these livestreams of his artwork where you can watch him work on some of his artwork. I think he believes in the chaos theory of artwork, trying a million things on for size and seeing what works. It's very interesting to watch.

I have no idea if I'll be involved in any of the decision making. I'm perfectly fine if I'm not. Night Shade and Mr. Scholes certainly know what they're doing. But I'd also be perfectly happy to help if I can. If there are character's in the finished piece (which is not a given), I have a lot of pictures I've dug up while researching the costumes, etc. If it's purely a landscape shot, there are several places in the world that would match up well with Tom's strengths. The eyrie is one such. It's a massive cliff face where there are dozens of stone perches on which the windships of the Grand Duchy can berth.

Here are a few of my favorites:

My friend, Mary Robinette Kowal, has a book, Shades of Milk and Honey, that released today.

Mary is a wonderful writer, and I'm excited for this milestone in her growing and no-longer-so-budding writing career. We went to Orson Scott Card's Literary Bootcamp in 2005. She's come a long way since then, and it's been gratifying to see her star rise, in the same way that the indy band you love makes good. I was lucky enough to read some early chapters of Shades, and I'm very much looking forward to reading it in its entirety. Here is but one of the many glowing reviews for Mary's debut novel:

 

If Jane Austen had written a fantasy novel, Shades of Milk and Honey would have been the result. Written with painstaking attention to detail, Kowal’s prose is serenely evocative of the time period, and the fantastic elements are a seamless fit. The characterization is extremely well done and Jane is a sympathetic, strong and intelligent heroine whose devotion to her family trumps nearly every other concern. Give this one a try!

In an alternate Regency England where magic exists, young women practice manipulating glamour in their quests to land eligible bachelors. Both Jane and her sister Melody are well-practiced in this womanly art, and Jane’s ability in particular is remarkable. However, it is Melody who is fair of face and who gets most of the masculine attention while Jane, at the age of 28, is on the shelf. When Jane realizes that one of Melody’s suitors is up to no good and is getting into position to take advantage of her, she pushes her skills to their very limits and, quite accidentally, finds her very own happy ever after.

– Romantic Times, 4-1/2 Star Top Pick

Have you seen this yet? I write like… It's a new website that's "taking the internet by storm." Normally I wouldn't bother, but hey, it's writing, and I was sort of curious. So I opens up the web page, and it has a very straightforward interface. You just plops your writing into a text field and you clicks the button. I was all ready to have it blurt out something like: You write like Nora Roberts or Allen Ginsberg. Fine people, I'm sure, but I don't write like them, and I didn't want some silly internet gizmo telling me otherwise.

So imagine my surprise when it came up with the following:

I write like
J. R. R. Tolkien

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

This is me smiling…

For some reason, even though I would have written this off without another thought had it been some obscure author, I'm immensely satisfied with this verdict. Tolkien's influence on not just my writing, but the very decision to become a writer, vastly overshadows all others.

I got back from WisCon yesterday afternoon. It was a fun con, as usual, and the weather was absolutely gorgeous. I didn't mind the heat at all. Things have been cold in WI all spring, so it was nice to have a small heat wave. At least it wasn't raining.

The con seemed sparse this year. Someone thought that it was down 100 or so people from its cap of around 1,000, but if I were a betting man I'd say it was a bit more. And in terms of industry presence it seemed like low attendance. Publishers are continually looking for places to cut, and it seems like the travel budget is one of the latest casualties these last few years.

I hung out with a number of my Starry Heaven and Clarion classmates. Shveta Thakrar and Chris Cevasco from Clarion. Jenn Reese, Sandra McDonald (see, I got it right, Sandra!), Jon Hansen, Bill Shunn, and Greg van Eekhout from Starry Heaven. Plus tons of others.

I went to a total of zero panels this year. Not because I didn't want to. It was just that other things came up. Starry Heaven is right around the corner, and I've been working hard to get my ms done so I can start reading the SH mss heavily. So my mornings were taken up with that–getting writing out of the way. And then there were people reading that I wanted to see. Shveta Thakrar and Amal El-Mohtar teamed up for a split-tongues reading, a reading from authors that have multilingual and multicultural upbringings. Shveta's story about her nani was great. And I adored Amal's reading of her Rhysling award-winning poem, A Song for an Ancient City. Amal read it in both English and Arabic, and I loved both. I've never really just sat an listened to Arabic, and I have to say it was beautiful to hear.

Bill Shunn gave a reading from his latest novel. That was cool to hear, since I'd read the same opening at Starry Heaven last year. And then on Sunday, just before I left, I went to a reading with five YA authors: Rae Carson read from her soon-to-be-released THE PRINCESS AND THE GODSTONE, Karen Healey read from GUARDIAN OF THE DEAD, Jenn Reese read ABOVE WORLD, Sarah Prineas read from THE MAGIC THIEF: FOUND, and Greg van Eekhout read KID VS. SQUID.

Among all the other hats he wears, John Joseph Adams has just started editing a brand new magazine called Lightspeed. Its first issue is due any day now, and four of the authors read stories from the first issue: Vylar Kaftan, Alice Sola Kim, Cat T. Rambo, and Genevieve Valentine. The stories and the readings were great, though Alice's attempt at sipping bourbon after every scene break was the most amusing thing in the session. Thankfully she abandoned the tactic after a shot or so.

I caught up with Mary Robinette Kowal on Saturday, which was really nice. We talked about her next project after her Shades of Milk and Honey, and it sounds fascinating. Terribly challenging, and most likely difficult to write, but fascinating. We went out to dinner with Chris Cevasco and Liza Trombi, the editor of Locus (I felt like such an insider).

There were the usual parties at night, though like I said, they were subdued this year, and they cleared out early. That was ok, though. I had to get to sleep so I could get up and write some more. I was sad on Sunday when I had to leave. It's always so much fun speaking with people in the same boat that you are, trying to navigate the same waters. But luckily Starry Heaven is right around the corner. Can't wait for Flagstaff!

Starry Heaven is a writing workshop modeled after CC Finlay's Blue Heaven. It's held in Flagstaff, AZ. It's not led by anyone. Rather, it's a peer group of professionally published writers (twelve of us) who get together to critique one another's manuscripts. I'm looking forward to this year, but I'm a bit stressed as well. The novel idea I had for the workshop was a bit more raw than I thought it was, and I'm having trouble fleshing it out sufficiently so that I can get to the business of knocking out the first draft. I have 30 or so pages now, most of it good, but I can't go much further without knowing a lot more about the story. The tentative title is Xioka. You can think of it as Nausicaa meets the Coldfire Trilogy (C. S. Friedman). It's a post-holocaust science-fantasy about a teenage girl summoned as a ghost back into the world two hundred years after she left it. I made some good progress these last few days, so hopefully I'm back to writing tomorrow or the day after.

I'm fortunate enough to have three stories coming out in the next three months (including November). "Sweet as Honey" just came out in Issue 15 of IGMS, "Good Morning Heartache" is coming out next month in Spells of the City, from Daw Books, and "In Memory Of" is coming out in January in the Spells & Chrome anthology from Catalyst Game Labs. As a way to promote these stories and the markets they appear in, and also to share a bit of my early work, I'm going to be putting up one piece of free fiction when each of these stories come out.

The first is "Flotsam", which appeared in Writers of the Future volume 20. Check back next month for another installment. You can also find this page in the Free Fiction Online tab on my home page.

Enjoy!

My story, "Shadows in the Mirrors," (which appeared in DAW’s Dimensions Next Door anthology) was mentioned recently in Ellen Datlow’s list of stories for her Best Horror collection. Pretty snazzy…

Better late than never?

Last year at GenCon, Cathy Johnson, known to some as CathyBoy, gave each of the Writers Symposium writers a water color portrait. I really love how mine turned out. The rest of them are really cool, too. My favorite is probably Pat Rothfuss, the garden gnome. Thanks, Cathy!

Well, I’m finally back from the Starry Heaven novel workshop. It was held in Flagstaff, AZ, and was largely organized by Sarah K. Castle, one of my Clarion classmates from way back in 2006. We had a great group of authors there. Sarah K. Castle, Greg van Eekhout, Sarah Prineas, Deb Coates, Debbie Daughtee, Rob Ziegler, Eugene Myers, Jon Hansen, Sandra McDonald (not MacDonald!), Bill Shunn, Gary Shockley, and, well, me! The basic criterion for inclusion was that you had to have sold at least one story to a professional market, though I think nearly everyone surpassed this by far. The format was stolen from the Blue Heaven workshop, and it roughly goes like this: Days 1, 2, and 3, the writers all critique one another’s first 50 pages. Everyone crits everyone else’s stuff. It’s a brutal, free-for-all bash fest, and many a time the evil incarnation of the nice authors who showed up on Welcome Night appeared and gave wicked reviews. That’s tough, to sit there and get reviews from people that have all earned their stripes. Days 4, 5, and 6 were less demanding. You had to critique two other novels, and two other writers had critique yours. Lots of work to get ready for these few days (reading and preparing comments for two novels), but once they arrived it was fairly smooth sailing. The sessions were alotted two hours, but they lasted more like and hour and a half.

For my part, I learned a lot. As with any workshop, you learn as much about writing from listening to others critique something that you’ve also read and critiqued as you do from people critiquing your own work. It’s always eye opening for me to hear what other people have to say about something I’ve tried really hard to find all the faults in. Invariably there are things that I missed, and it’s in those moments that you can grow as a writer if you internalize those thoughts.

Don’t get me wrong. I got a ton out of my first-50 crits and my novel crits as well. I have an issue with likeable protagonists. I try to paint them as people that need to grow. I show them with weaknesses early on so that the reader can see that they’re not perfect, that they have room to grow. That they’re regular people, basically. But the way I go about doing it is a bit off, I think. First impressions really count in fiction. It’s important to show them with heroic or admirable qualities early so that later, when they do see the bad stuff, they’re already predisposed to like them. The exact same person could be portrayed in an opening scene, but if the bad stuff comes first, then that’s what sticks with the reader. Not that my characterization was exactly on the money, either. I was a bit off the mark with Nikandr, the Prince and windship captain who the story is largely focused on. He came across as infantile, whiny, petty. I certainly wasn’t trying to portray him that way, but that’s certainly the way he came across. So I need to work on that. I think (hope) that those traits begin to fall away as the book progresses, and so the majority of the rework is going to come in the early parts of the novel. But I’m sure those changes will lead to other changes later on.

So I have my work cut out for me. I’ve got a long way to go and a short time to get there (at least by my self-assigned schedule), but I’m very hopeful that the end product is in sight now. I’m going to shoot for having Winds done by the time World Fantasy rolls around.

Well, a bit of good news to go along with the not-too-bad-but-certainly-disturbing news. I just got the word from IGMS that they’d like to publish my story, "Sweet as Honey." This is a story I wrote at Clarion back in 2006. It was a cool idea for a story, but a bit raw after Clarion. I rewrote it and sent if off, but it still didn’t quite hit the mark. The editor, Edmund Schubert, was kind enough to work with me to get the story into shape, and today he let me know he’d like to publish it. It will hopefully be out in the December issue.

So, I’m nearing the end of my experiment with Steve Gaskell. We’re writing a novella together, tentatively named “Skimming the Sun.” It was planned as a short story, perhaps a novelette, but it’s grown. We decided not to put any artificial constraints on it, and as it grew, we just let it — no conscious effort to reduce size, other than being open to reducing the size if it seemed warranted. It didn’t. It felt like this was the right size for this story. We’re currently at 32k and it’ll probably end up being about 35 by the time we’re done. It feels, oddly enough, like a tight 32k at the moment. Not much fat (though there is some).

I’ve been thinking about collaborations in general the last few days. This was my first try as a seasoned author. I know that collaborations will be handled in all sorts of different ways. For me and Steve, we divided the story into two parallel tracks, one “past” storyline and one “present”. Those also happen to correspond to the two main characters in the book, each of us focusing one of those characters, though I write about Steve’s character in my thread and he writes about mine in his.

Other than the difficulty of matching our schedules (he lives in Brighton, UK, I live in Racine, WI, USA), it’s gone surprisingly smoothly. I think one reason is that we have similar writing styles (though I will confess that I tend more toward plot-driven story — something I’m constantly working to mitigate — and Steve tends more toward character-driven story). I don’t think I have the right temperament to work with someone whose writing style is wildly different from mine, at least writing in this manner. (More on that in a moment.) I think another reason it’s gone well is that both of us have been very open to change, and I mean that in two ways.

First, we’re both open to allowing changes in the ideas that we’ve come up with or the things we’ve written. This is entirely necessary, I think, to a successful collaboration. You have to be able to give, even if it’s not quite how you would have done it alone. It may not even necessarily be better than what you would have done by yourself, only different, and that’s a different kind of benefit: you expand your horizons by allowing things to enter the story that you coudln’t have thought of on your own. That’s not to say that most of our suggestions don’t make the story better. Many of them do. But there are some where it’s almost a coin toss as to the benefit to the story. It’s more about personal tastes, background, tendencies, etc. And then it’s a matter of negotiating and trying to figure out which stays most true to the story and the characters.

The second way of being open to change is to have the chutzpah to recommend changes. I think we’ve both been very forthcoming about this, not being worried about offending the other. You can’t, assuming you really want to include someone else on a writing project, close yourself off to ideas. There have been a few cases where we’ve both had to just sit on an idea for a few days, mull it over, before coming to a decision. But, of course, you have to be able to stand up for something you believe in as well.

Even worse than recommending changes is actually rewriting certain sections of prose that the other wrote. When you’re reviewing, you’ll often suggest things, give examples of change. But this is out-and-out changing what someone wrote. I don’t mind when Steve does it with my prose, but I feel like I’m walking on eggshells when I do it with his. It’s a constantly changing landscape, doing this. It’s like walking inside one of those bouncy carnival tents: you never quite have your balance, no matter how sure-footed you are on solid ground. It’s a tightrope act. You have to get over your fears while not acting like a bull in a China shop.

I mentioned above about not wanting to work with someone whose style was wildly different than my own. What I mean is that I couldn’t tackle a story in this way: both of us writing, both editing one another’s prose. But I could envision another way of working, and I know collaborations that have worked this way: both writers plot the story and create the characters (see, there I go again — I put plotting first…), but only one person writes. Then both edit, and one person (usually the same person again), incorporates the edits. Lather, rinse, and repeat until the story’s finished. That way, the story comes out with a single voice. Otherwise you might end up with a Frankenstein story that has clearly different writing styles in different sections. (That might be pretty cool for the right kind of story, but those stories are vastly outnumbered by those that would benefit from a single voice. Plus, both writers would have to be really good to pull something like this off. It’s not something I think I’m ready for yet. Maybe someday.)

So far, it’s been a great experience. And I think the story’s going to be a good one. Time will tell…

Last year, I joined the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. I made it past two rounds, as I recall, but didn’t make the quarterfinals. It was a good experience, though I’ll admit I got too wrapped up in trying to get people to review the thing. My belief is that user reviews made very little difference in who made subsequent cuts, so although I entered this year, and although I’ll be posting updates here and there, I’m not going to obsess over anyone actually reviewing my entry. Not that I’m discouraging it, mind you, just that I don’t particularly feel like using up small favors for something that, in the end, will probably not make a difference.

I entered my last novel, The Tears of Tendali. It’s a much more polished book than was Captured by Crystal, last year’s entry, and hopefully it’ll make a splash. We’ll see…

Oh, and for those of you that have a novel that you’d like to enter, they opened submissions this morning and will be accepting them through 2/8/2009. There’s a 10,000 entry limit as well, so if you’re thinking about entering, do it sooner rather than later.

A while back I got hooked up with Catalyst Game Labs, who bought Shadowrun (though I don’t know all the details of that purchase). They’re coming out an anthology of fiction called Spells & Chrome, set in the Shadowrun universe, and I got tagged to write one of them. The story I wrote ended up being pretty cool. It’s about a netrunning Grannie with a Thermite-grenade-packing poodle. Now how can you go wrong with a protagonist like that? I don’t have a release date, but I’ll post more as I have it. Woo hoo!

Rich Horton is a prolific reviewer of speculative fiction. He keeps a blog, and at the end of the year, he posts summaries of the short fiction markets that he’s read. Well, he tagged my story, "Cirque du Lumiere" from the Fellowship Fantastic DAW anthology for special mention. I highly respect Rich’s views, and so I’m excited to be mentioned.

I heard only last night that Realms of Fantasy will soon be defunct. I’m really bummed by this news. For years Realms has been at the top of my list for places I want to break into. The finished product looked great, and the fiction they published was what I liked to read and write. I’ve had a subscription for some years now, five or six. I did manage to publish a story there last year, and for that I’m glad. There’s an upswelling of support for the magazine, a call to save it from what looks like a sure demise. I’ll probably participate however I can, but I’m skeptical that it will do any good. It’s owned by a relatively large company, and I don’t imagine a promise to subscribe from several hundred writers is going to change their mind. And outside of that, I don’t know what can be done. Outside of some tiny uptick in sales, we can’t make newsstand sales any more profitable for them, especially, I fear, in the long run.

It’s a sad day, not only because I liked the magazine personally, but because it is another part of a trend of declining sales in the short fiction market. Hopefully other promising magazines like Fantasy will move in to take up the slack. And hopefully more magazines will begin to crack the code for publishing success in the 21st century. But I fear many more long-standing markets will die before this happens. And that’s too bad.

I’ve been spending most of my writing time over the last few months on short stories. I had a few requests for rewrites from editors, one of which didn’t work out. The other is still out, but I’m crossing my fingers. It’s one of my Clarion stories from back in 2006, a story about a woman who tends bees. She uses the wax to create candles that can help people forget about someone they know by weaving a hair from the person into the wick. But things are turned upside down when she realizes that she used one of her own candles. Now she just has to figure out who it was she forgot. The rewrite really brought out some new aspects of the story that I hadn’t explored before. So I hope it gets picked up in its current form.

I’ve also been working on a collaboration. My second. The first one of my first efforts ever, with a friend who as also interested in writing but similarly new to the craft. Predictably, it didn’t work out. Neither of us were good enough to pull something like that off, so we set it aside.

The new one is a sci-fi story about a solar power transmission platform and a pair of solar flare racers that get caught between a chance to leave their brutal existence on the station for a new life on Earth and a growing movement to overthrow the choke hold the platforms have had on the working populace for decades. I’m working on it with Steve Gaskell, one of my fellow Clarionites. Needless to say, I’m a bit more up to a collaboration than I was back when. It’s been enlightening, as Steve and I have slightly different approaches to story generation. I really admired Steve’s work at Clarion, so it’s been fun batting story ideas back and forth and also editing each other’s drafts. We’re almost done with the first draft, and hopefully we’ll have it ready for review in early Feb.

We’ve been using Skype to talk back and forth about the story (he lives in the U.K., so Skype has been very useful). And we’re using Google docs to collaborate on the actual writing. That’s been … ok. From a collaboration standpoint, it’s great. We can edit one another’s stuff, add comments, etc., without handing a document back and forth via email. I was trying to do the Word doc shuffle in the beginning, and it was a real pain in the ass. But from a pure word processing standpoint, Google docs has a way to go. It’s a beta, so I’m trying to be charitable about it, but there are quite a few quirks (bugs) and quite a few features missing that I’m used to in Word. But it’ll work for this one story, and I’m sure it’ll improve as time goes on.

The Winds of Khalakovo has taken baby steps forward. I’m going to finish up the solar story with Steve and then hit it hard. I’d really like to have the second draft wrapped up in a few months and then send it out for full review.

Ok, I really don’t have an excuse. August was busy with two conventions back-to-back. I went to GenCon in Indianapolis and participated in the writing track there. Then I went to WorldCon in Denver, which was a great time. I was really not enthused about going at the beginning of the trip, but in the end, I’m glad I went. I tackled a few critiques of friends’ novels after that, which, along with all my other writing endeavors, has been keeping me very busy.

Probably the most time consuming activity, however, (other than sleeping and work) has been politics. Hi. I’m Brad, and I’m a political junky. I can’t seem to get enough of this soap opera that has unfolded over the last nine months. And I’ve stumbled across a handful of websites that update many times per day. I’m practically glues at times, switching between them, seeing what the latest scuttlebutt is on McCain or Obama. I don’t like to foist my views on others, but in case you’re wondering, I’m pro Obama.

I’ve been working on my latest novel, The Winds of Khalakovo, quite a bit. I finished rewriting and polishing the first ten chapters so that I could send it off to my agent. That’s done, and I’m working on the rest now. I’m hoping to have a good second draft done by the end of this month. No, I’m committing to it! You heard it here first.

I’ve also had a few nibbles on some short stories, but nothing confirmed yet, so I’ll hold off posting any news for now. More info as I have it, but keep your fingers crossed for me.

This story, which appeared in the June issue of Realms of Fantasy, picked up a Nebula nod. Only nine more to go!

If you’re a member of SFWA, and you’d like to give the story a read, you can do so here.

My story, "No Viviremos Como Presos," is now live over at IGMS, courtesy of Issue 9. For my Clarionite friends out there, this was the Wall story. If that doesn’t help, you can preview a portion of the story even if you don’t buy the issue.