It’s out in the world! Print book is forthcoming next month but you can snag the e-book for only $3.99 or read for free of you have Kindle Unlimited.
FUNNY FANTASY e-book published
April 20, 2016
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Posted by Alex Shvartsman
The Hook: The Maids of Wrath by Josh Vogt
April 15, 2016
The Hook:
Dani yelped and stumbled backward as the squeegee bounced off her forehead. A knee knocked the mop out of her hands, followed by a rubber boot which connected with her stomach. This racked up her butt’s twentieth rendezvous with the floor of the supernatural sanitation company’s training room.
The impact jolted her spine and forearms as she tried to catch herself. It also prompted a plastic crunch. She groaned and eyed a pants leg pocket, where a wet splotch started leaking through the material.
She undid the zipper and pulled out the cracked remains of a small bottle of sanitation gel . Barely a handful remained inside, and she dribbled this into her palm in the hopes of salvaging something from the mess.
Then she stilled as another squeegee whipped into the floor beside her—except this one sliced through the concrete like an axe splitting a particularly unlucky watermelon. She glowered at this as her attacker spoke.
“Your opponent is not about to pause and let you tidy up after every hit, Miss Hashelheim.”
She grabbed the squeegee handle, thinking she could snap it back in a surprise attack. But her gel-slicked fingers didn’t give her a solid grip on the embedded Cleaner weapon.
Between tugs and grunts, she tried to formulate a decent excuse. “I was … trying to … coat my hands … with a substance that’d keep … any Scum back.”
Huffing and admitting defeat via squeegee, she lay back and tried to let her exasperation ebb away. Sweat trickled down her neck as she took inventory of her latest bruises.
Josh Vogt writes:
Sequels are tough to write, especially when you’re trying to keep the series accessible to new readers, whether they’ve read the first book or not. With The Cleaners, now that we’ve moved beyond the events of Enter the Janitor, the opening to The Maids of Wrath had to pull a bit of extra weight.
I wanted it to do quite a few things at once. I needed to establish the central context of the story—that being people working for a supernatural sanitation company. I also needed to introduce a main character—Dani—and give a sense of her character from the get-go.
At the same time, I wanted this opening to raise a lot of questions in the minds of new and returning readers alike so they’d continue on to discover the answers. Why does this sparring match involve cleaning equipment? What are Scum? How did that squeegee slice into the floor? Will Dani ever find a fresh bottle of sani-gel again? (Okay, maybe that last question isn’t so important.)
Plus, since The Cleaners is an urban fantasy series with more humorous elements than most, I wanted to introduce that comedic tone as early as possible so expectations could be set as to what the rest of the story will be like.
In the midst of everything else, the immediate setting quickly becomes ground zero for the major crisis of the book, catapulting Dani and friends into a race against time to save the whole company. In Enter the Janitor, she underwent a rough-n-tumble initiation into this weird world of magical janitors, maids, plumbers, and more. Now she has the chance to be more proactive, take even more control of her powers, and discover just how much of a mop-wielding badass she can be.
Assuming she survives her first official job in the field, of course.
Buy The Maids of Wrath on Amazon
About the Author:
Author and editor Josh Vogt’s work covers fantasy, science fiction, horror, humor, pulp, and more. His debut fantasy novel is Pathfinder Tales: Forge of Ashes, published alongside his urban fantasy series, The Cleaners, with Enter the Janitor and The Maids of Wrath. He’s an editor at Paizo, a Scribe Award finalist, and a member of both SFWA and the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers. Find him at JRVogt.com or on Twitter @JRVogt.
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Posted by Alex Shvartsman
“Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma” play returns to Portland
April 13, 2016I’ve been keeping busy: UFO5 submissions are in full swing, Funny Fantasy is done and will be released later this month as an e-book and in May as a paperback, and I turned in the manuscript for Humanity 2.0 to the publisher. So I hope you will excuse my silence here on the blog. I should be done with most of my editorial duties for the year in the next couple of months and then I can go back to writing more, and procrastinating on here more as a result.
Meantime, I’m popping in to report that Matt Haynes is producing an evening of short SF/F plays, featuring works based on the short stories of Tina Connolly. Nancy Kress, Jeff Carter, Briak K. Lowe, and my own “Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma.”
The performance will take place on April 21 and the details can be found here:
https://www.facebook.com/events/869594576499644/
And now, back to the slush mines with me. POOF! *Disappears.*
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Posted by Alex Shvartsman
Funny Fantasy Cover and Table of Contents
March 22, 2016
Funny Fantasy is a reprint anthology of humorous fantasy fiction — from amusing to hilarious — originally published in the past decade. It follows on the heels of our very successful Funny Science Fiction anthology, which similarly collected stories from that genre and was published last year.
From evil overlords to bumbling henchmen, talking cats to lovelorn fishermen, mad queens to wise opossums, the collected stories subvert popular fantasy tropes in surprising and delightful ways. The following fourteen stories will be included in Funny Fantasy, which is slated for May release:
“Dave the Mighty Steel-Thewed Avenger” by Laura Resnick (Urban Fantasy, 2015)
“Crumbs” by Esther Friesner (Fantasy Gone Wrong anthology, 2006)
“Fellow Traveler” by Donald J. Bingle (Fantasy Gone Wrong anthology, 2006)
“A Fish Story” by Sarah Totton (Realms of Fantasy, 2006)
“Another End of the Empire” by Tim Pratt (Strange Horizons, 2009)
“Giantkiller” by G. Scott Huggins (Heroes in Training anthology, 2007)
“A Mild Case of Death” by David Gerrold (Galaxy’s Edge, 2015)
“Fairy Debt” by Gail Carriger (Sword & Sorceress 22, 2007)
“A Very Special Girl” by Mike Resnick (Blood Lite anthology, 2008)
“The Blue Corpse Corps” by Jim C. Hines (When the Hero Comes Home anthology, 2011)
“Librarians in the Branch Library of Babel” by Shaenon K. Garrity (Strange Horizons, 2011)
“The Queens Reason” by Richard Parks (Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, 2010)
“The Best Little Cleaning Robot in All of Faerie” by Susan Jane Bigelow (Apex, 2015)
“Suede This Time” by Jean Rabe (Magic Tails anthology, 2005)
Please visit the UFO Publishing booth at Balticon 50, where the print edition of Funny Fantasy will be launched.
Funny Science Fiction, Funny Fantasy, and the Funny Horror volume scheduled for later this year are all available as part of the backer rewards for our ongoing Kickstarter campaign for Unidentified Funny Objects 5.
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Posted by Alex Shvartsman
Lunacon 2016 Program
March 17, 2016
I’ll be at Lunacon this weekend. Here’s where you can find me:
Friday
4pm – The Opening Page – Westchester Ballroom D6
Saturday
9am – Magazines and Other Outlets – Westchester Ballroom D4
11am – Currency of the Future – William Odelle
2pm – Fanzines on the Internet – Westchester Ballroom D4
3pm – Writers of the Weird Reading – Bartell
Sunday
12pm Touching the Face of the Cosmos – Westchester Ballroom D5
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See complete list of Lunacon panels here.
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Posted by Alex Shvartsman
Albacon 2016 Schedule
March 3, 2016
I’ll be in Albany this weekend, attending Albacon. Here’s where you can find me:
Friday
1pm – The Ways to Publish panel (Troy)
3pm – What Editors Want panel (Troy)
6pm – Best SF TV of 2015 panel (Troy)
Saturday
1pm – Why Doesn’t Darth Vader Slip on a Banana Peel? panel (Troy)
3pm – Autographing session (Lobby)
4pm – Reading (Room 101)
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Posted by Alex Shvartsman
Unidentified Funny Objects 5 Kickstarter Campaign and Cover Reveal
March 1, 2016
Here it is! Another excellent cover by Tomasz Maronski. Stories are coming in at a steady pace from the invited headliners and we’re only a month away from the open submissions window, so read the guidelines and get your funny fiction ready!
Today we also launch the Kickstarter campaign for this book. The entire series wouldn’t have been possible (at least at its current quality and quantity of stories) without the support of our Kickstarter backers. It has provided me the freedom to pay writers, artists, and other professionals involved fair rates and to do everything I can to make the books look and feel like they were published by a major press rather than some guy from Brooklyn. Any faults are my own, but the success of the series belongs entirely to the amazing authors and artists I find myself so fortunate to collaborate with on these stories.
Which is a very long-winded way of saying please support the Kickstarter campaign. Even if you can’t afford to pledge (which is okay), you can help by letting your friends who might want this book know about the campaign. Please spread the word far and wide on social media.
Kickstarter link:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/776571295/unidentified-funny-objects-5
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Posted by Alex Shvartsman
Cover reveal: Funny Fantasy
February 29, 2016Here’s your first look at the cover for FUNNY FANTASY. Art by Tomasz Maronski and layout by Emerson Matsuuchi.
Submissions for Funny Fantasy are closing tonight. (Guidelines.) You can send stories while it’s still February 29 anywhere on the planet, but anything received later than early tomorrow morning Eastern time will not be considered.
Tune in at 10am tomorrow, when the cover for UFO5 will be unveiled (and other exciting things will happen!)
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Posted by Alex Shvartsman
Notable SF/F TV series, early 2016 edition
February 26, 2016I spend way too much time watching television. Time that could be better spent writing, editing, or venturing to what most people call “outside.” However, I’m aware of my vices and I might as well share the outcome of all the research I thus conducted with you. Late last year I participated on the Mind Meld about best genre TV shows of 2015 and I had a fun time writing my portion of that post, so I decided to update it here with the shows that have launched in early 2016:
You, Me, and the Apocalypse
Like FOX’s Last Man on Earth from last year, this show starts off with an apocalyptic premise. The show is part comedy, part horror, and part soap opera. It’s full of crazy twists, but it manages to make the combination work.
You, Me, and the Apocalypse uses the device popularazed by Breaking Bad: they open each episode with a scene that takes place moments before an asteroid is about to destroy humanity. We see the narrator in a bunker with a group of very unlikely characters (including a monkey and someone trapped in a wooden box) while the opening credits roll, then each episode tells the story of how all of them managed to end up there (some from half a world away.)
This is a limited run series. The show, co-produced by NBC and Sky 1, already completed its run in the UK, so I cheated and got my hands on a complete set. It was very satisfying, even if the show lost some of its comedic elements and grew progressively darker in the later episodes. The show’s plot is rather susceptible to spoilers, so don’t spend too much time or effort looking into the details about it online or you might ruin some of the fun for yourself.
It’s unclear whether another series will be produced (there are plenty of intentionally unresolved and tantalizing bits in the finale) but even if the ten-episode run is all there ever is to the series, it is definitely worth watching.
The Shannara Chronicles
This one is a mixed bag. It really doesn’t live up to the Game of Thrones, the success of which it is so clearly trying to emulate. It seems clearly designed to appeal to the MTV demographic, which is definitely not me. Having said that, there’s precious little epic fantasy on TV. If you enjoyed The Sword of Truth or Xena: Warrior Princess, you will probably like this one as well, but don’t expect complex plots, complex characters, or complex anything. Just a bit of well-produced, mindless fun.
The Magicians
As I wrote at SF Signal last year, I really enjoyed the pilot. I only managed to catch a couple more episodes so far, but I’m really digging the show. It’s sort-of a gritty Harry Potter for the ’90s generation, with the action taking place in New York City and a school of wizardry university that teaches magic in upstate New York. I like both the vibe and the characters, and look forward to watching more.
Overall I’m pretty happy with what SyFy’s been doing over the course of the last year.
Lucifer
Based on the comic book character created by Neil Gaiman and others, and eventually a star of his own Vertigo comic book, Lucifer becomes bored with reigning in hell and decides to spend some time hanging out in Los Angeles.
I liked the first episode and really enjoyed Tom Ellis’s portrayal of the main character, but since then the show has fallen into a predictable procedural pattern which is less interesting. To be fair, there has only been a few episodes. Person of Interest spent much of the first season in procedural format before it became really excellent, so there’s hope for Lucifer yet. I’m willing to give it a few more episodes but if you aren’t on board already, I’m not sure I can recommend this one.
The only other new SF/F series I can think of that I tried was Second Chance. Another procedural, and pretty well made at that, but it’s almost certainly getting cancelled due to poor ratings, so likely not worth becoming invested in.
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TL:DR version:
You, Me, and the Apocalypse – Must watch!
The Magicians – Very solid so far.
The Shannara Chronicles – Meh.
Lucifer – Meh.
Second Chance – Dead show walking.
Have you seen anything good that I missed? Please post a comment. If there’s interest, I will post an update later in the year with my takes on Colony, Preacher, and any other new genre shows that I get a chance to watch.
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Posted by Alex Shvartsman
The Hook: Glitch Rain by Alex Livingston
February 25, 2016
The Hook:
Akuba needs to get rid of her client’s face if she plans on living past the week.
She sees herself from above, the image floating in front of her eyes. She’s in a gondola, high above the canal. Isaac is with her.
He tweaks something on his phone. “Getting it?”
She nods. Her new airhud keeps the video in the same spot, in the upper left of her field of vision. She slides down the bench to get a look at the city’s dark skyline, making the gondola sway. They’re too far away from downtown to see any people, but the haze of drones is just visible in the fading light. The airhud puts bubbles above the buildings, recommending places she can spend her daily.
“Can’t believe you bought that thing,” Isaac says with a petty grin. He told Akuba once that his teeth are so very white from sucking on sugar cane as a boy back in Gulu. He tells her lots of things. “What’s wrong with your phone?”
“I got a bunch of kiz from the last job. And it’ll be useful.” It won’t really be all that useful, but that’s the kind of thing people say about money. Responsible people. And airhuds are getting so popular now. They’re not as expensive as they used to be.
Isaac sniffs. “Tell that to Shaky. He’d rather you paid him than bought yourself pretty toys.”
Alex Livingston writes:
Glitch Rain is cyberpunk gone mobile. Phones, drones, self-driving cars, shipping container homes. It’s about privacy as a commodity, the nodes on the consumption chain, and the psychological effects of being broke and alone.
I love it when a first sentence doesn’t make any sense. This can be done with words invented for the story (e.g. “droogs”), but when the writer depends on unexpected word usage or an odd sentence structure, it makes a puzzle out of that initial line. And I do love to solve a puzzle.
In the first line of Glitch Rain, I wanted to accomplish two things: make the reader wonder what I was talking about and present the stakes Akuba is living with. The story starts with two people playing with some tech in a near-future city, all familiarity and easy friendship. But Akuba has to keep her cash flowing or the guy she owes is going to kill her. She and Isaac are talking like they’re planning dinner with friends, not going on a hacking mission and hoping to make enough money to keep Shaky from sending his assassins. Weird, right?
The dissonance between a dangerous situation which would be completely crippling to many people (myself very much included) and Akuba’s casual demeanor is a big part of what makes her who she is. How can someone just shrug off that kind of pressure? What kind of person lives like that? The intent is to make the reader want to find out.
About the Author:
Alex Livingston grew up in various quiet New England towns before moving to Buffalo, NY to study English at Canisius College. His fiction has appeared in Apex Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, and Bastion Magazine among others, and his interactive fiction can be found at Choice of Games and Storynexus. He self-published the novel Rhymer, an Irish wonder myth told as an exciting sci-fi space opera. He lives in an old house with his brilliant wife and a pile of aged videogame systems. Visit him online at galaxyalex.com.
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Posted by Alex Shvartsman
Alex Shvartsman's Speculative Fiction 