A Summer of Writing: Fiction, VanderMeer Creative, Upcoming Events

If you've followed me on twitter or facebook, you know I've had a fair number of gigs already this year, including a great one at the Arthur C. Clarke Center for the Human Imagination in San Diego last week. I also saved a toad at my sister-in-law's wedding in San Antonio and that same night learned I'd won the Nebula Award for Annihilation (the first for my publisher, FSG)--this after recently selling my new novel Borne to FSG, with the UK rights going to Fourth Estate and Canadian rights to HarperCollins Canada. Today, too, I learned the Southern Reach trilogy has a Portuguese publisher.The biggest news, though, comes from Ann, who is stepping down from her day job to focus on her editing. Here's the full announcement:

Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning editor Ann VanderMeer has stepped down from her IT job in Tallahassee, Florida, after thirty-plus years of juggling software management and fiction editing. VanderMeer will manage VanderMeer Creative, Inc., a business that handles Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s speaking engagements, workshops, and book projects—while also spending more time on new editing projects. Ann VanderMeer is an acquiring editor for Tor.com and the editor or co-editor of over a dozen iconic anthologies of science fiction and fantasy—including The Big Book of Science Fiction, forthcoming from Vintage.

In support of VanderMeer Creative, we now have a new web page that gives you a list of all of upcoming events as well as an overview of the kinds of masterclasses, keynote speeches, and other events we do.Not a bad start to the summer. But now it begins to heat up. Ann and I are teaching at the Yale Writers' Workshop and also at Shared Worlds. In addition, Ann accompanying me to a festival in Sardinia that looks like a lot of fun. I also just added Brown to the schedule, in December. Again, just check out VanderMeer Creative for the info.I've also gotten a lot of writing done, despite distractions. Besides finishing up Borne, I've completed "Bliss," a novella about a rock band on what I can only call a trip downriver gone wrong, with elements of humor and Grand Guignol. It features a song about cockroaches. In addition, two related but self-contained novellas, "Drift" and "Depth" have begun to suggest themselves--tons of notebooks full of scene fragments--so this might wind up being a book.On the plane to San Antonio, I wrote a science-fiction story set in the far future titled "Always Home" and I'm also making progress on "The Bird Watchers," a Southern Reach novella featuring Old Jim and set a day before the Area X border came down. I've also committed to contributing an end-of-the-world story to Steve Erickson's Black Clock magazine, and it's possible my GWB 9/11 story will appear as a reprint on a major online venue soon. This in addition to writing a review for Slate.com and hopefully placing a revised version of the speech I gave at the Clarke Center as well as an essay on the CIA torture program.It's been an incredibly rich and productive year so far and I'm really happy to be writing a lot of fiction again, in a lot of different modes. But because of all of this, I'm not likely to be very active online the next few months. I'm hopefully there'll be quite a few weeks I'm not online at all. But you can always check out this blog or VanderMeer Creative for information on what's going on.