News-Flavored Snidbits

Ahoy, human readers!

Note I said human readers. Don’t you come around here, robots. Spilling oil everywhere. Barking your anti-human propaganda through tinny speakers.

Some quick updatey things:

First up, if you were like, “You know, what I really want is a new Miriam Black short story before The Cormorant drops,” well whack-a-dang-doo, do I have you covered. A new Miriam Black short story, “Birds of Paradise,” is in the Malfeasance Occasional: Girl Trouble, which also features stories by Hilary Davidson, Travis Richardson, and Patty Abbott.

The new Miriam story begins with the following few lines —

Five women walk into a dildo shop.

Sounds like a joke. It isn’t.

Because only four of them are going to walk out alive.

Second, if you were thinking on pre-ordering The Cormorant, the price just dropped.

Third, if you ever thought, “Hey, somebody should do a Kickstarter for an anthology of fictional Kickstarters,” I’d say hey, somebody already beat you to it! With the combined power of Keffy and John Joseph Adams, the campaign has launched: Help Fund My Robot Army! You may note some very impressive names attached to that Kickstarter (Seanan McGuire, Tobias Buckell, Daniel H. Wilson, Mur Lafferty, Mary Robinette Kowal, and more), and you may also note one slightly less impressive name: hey, it’s me! Fund it, we write it. Get in there.

Fourth, hey, not only is Under the Empyrean Sky still only $1.99 for the Kindle book, but it’s also only $1.99 for the audio book. Go see!

Finally —

After tomorrow, I take flight on an Iron Bird and disappear up into the clouds for 24 hours of travel in order to hurl my butt onto the Australian landmass. I am there for GenreCon, a genre-blending writing conference which looks wildly exciting.

While there, I will be wrestling koala, karate-kicking cassowaries, spreading vegemite on my naked form and hunting humans for sport, and engaging in the forbidden elven sexual act known as the “Tim-Tam Slam.” I’m pretty sure I have all that right.

I’ll be in Oz for seven days, but gone for 10 days because time travel. (Seriously, when I come back I leave Australia at 10 AM on Thursday, and land at LAX at 6 AM on the same day, thus arriving before I ever left. Australians know the future and they’re just not telling. I’m going to go there, get some intel, and report back. This is provided that customs doesn’t arrest me at the border for trying to sneak a cornucopia of venomous creatures back into the States.)

This here terribleminds should not experience any great outages — you should get steady content until I return. A mix of cool guest posts and hastily-scrawled Wendig posts await! If I can carve out wi-fi while there I’ll try to be present on social media, but no guarantees.