You Know, It's Almost Like I'm A Real Writer

In case you hadn’t heard: on Sunday, I finished the first draft of my first post-Clarion novel.  This took me nine months of effort to write, and I was surprisingly drained afterwards.  It was like I’d birthed a baby.  A really ugly baby.
(Unlike babies, thankfully, I can do a lot of plastic surgery on this one until he’s beautiful.  I’m never a first-draft kinda guy.  Though don’t get me wrong, the novel is readable, and entertaining, even in this nascent and flawed form.)
This is both good news and bad news for the Clarion Blog-A-Thon.  It’s good news because, if you’ll recall, a $10 donation will get you access to the full first draft of the novel, posted a chapter a day, complete with commentary on what works and what needs to be fixed and why.  I’d already posted 23 chapters (along with almost 20,000 words on various essays on the techniques I use in the novel), but I was concerned that I might get to the end of the Blog-A-Thon and go, “Sorry, couldn’t find an ending for you, just pretend it’s like The Mystery of Edwin Drood.”
No!  The ending’s there, and it largely works!  This is a joy.
The bad news is that the Blog-A-Thon is over this week, and LJ being fucked for a week means that I’m very behind on chapters.  So now I’m posting two, three chapters a day in order to finish it all up in time! So what I have is a completed novel that will be published to a select group of people this week – won’t you be one of them?  I know the economy sucks, but it’s for a good cause, and the beta version of the novel (plus mega-doses of writer advice!) is worth at least $10.
In other news, my divorce-through-a-magic-portal story “A Window, Clear As A Mirror” got a “Recommended” review from Rich Horton over at Locus this month!  This is my first “Recommended” review from them ever; they’re pretty hard to get.  Rich said this:

The 13th outing for Shimmer includes a very nice offering from Ferrett Steinmetz, ‘‘A Window, Clear as a Mirror’’, in which a man loses his wife to a portal to the Sunlit Lands, and finds himself in an odd way – first through a relationship with a refugee from those lands, and then by traveling there to find his wife. I suppose one might call it bittersweet, though that’s not quite right: resignedly true, I suppose.

If you’ll recall, this is my favorite story that I’ve ever written – and my money-back guarantee is still open on it.  If you buy it from Shimmer (the .PDF version’s a mere $4), and you don’t like it, I’ll refund your money, no questions asked.   I really love this story, and if you’ve liked any of my other stories, I think you’ll really dig this one.
And finally, my story “My Father’s Wounds” is due out in Beneath Ceaseless Skies next week – and it turns out it’s getting the full podcast treatment as well!  So I’m totally psyched.  I love hearing competent people read my stuff.  (I’m still learning how to read competently.  It takes a long while.)