Out of the Debauched Sloth

Chaz Brenchley's Fortnightly Newsletter

“We are the good news that we have been looking for.”—Amanda Gorman

The good news: it’s out, it’s released into the world, it is free! (That’s “free” as in “free speech”, not as in “free beer”, sorry.) TOWER OF THE KING’S DAUGHTER, vol 2 of the Books of Outremer, may now be found—or at least ordered—wherever good books are sold, in both ebook and paper editions.

Online links may be found here; otherwise, ask your favourite indie. If it’s an SFFH indie, so much the better, for we love those with a love transcendent, so we do. (And you never know, they might order an extra copy or two for stock.)

In other news, my Sherlock-Holmes-on-Mars novella, HITHER, PAGE, AND STAND BY ME, proceeds apace. I am having ridiculous amounts of fun with this, and really don’t want to have to do anything else until it’s finished, though I must. People need to eat, apparently? (“People” in this case very much, very very much including cats and turtles, apparently.)

Anyway, if you want to keep the ball rolling on HITHER, PAGE, [etc], stop by my Ko-fi page and buy me a coffee. One coffee, one page: this is the rule. (See previous newsletter #11 for a more detailed description of what the story’s about and so forth... What’s that? You don’t save and archive my every written word? For shame, I say, for shame!) (But you can still find previous issues of the newsletter on my Substack page, so you actually have no excuse.)

Meanwhile, my story “Soon May The Weatherman Come” is available now in the delightful BRAVE NEW WORLDS anthology from Zombies Need Brains, edited by S. C. Butler and Joshua Palmatier. It’s a collection of space-pioneer stories at heart: departures and journeys and arrivals, generation ships and strange meetings en route and in situ. My own story treats with a colony spreading outward from its first base, looking to both populate and terraform their new world...

Relatedly: the Kickstarter for ZNB’s next tranche of SFFH anthologies—four of them, this year!—has just gone live. If you’re in a position to contribute to that, please do. I have myself been invited to submit a story for one of them (like a mighty tease, I am not yet saying which, mwahaha), and doing so is one of the highlights of my year, every December. I love writing to a theme, because it takes me out of my comfort zone and into pastures new; it stretches me, particularly where actual science is called for, and there’s nothing like a good stretch, if you know what I mean.

(To learn more about Zombies Need Brains and the whole processor of Kickstarter-funded publishing, check out our Writers Drinking Coffee podcast interview with Joshua Palmatier, founder of ZNB, fine writer in his own right and all-around good egg...)

And that’s plenty enough links for now. Go chase those down, enjoy each and every one of them, and I’ll report back in another fortnight.

Chaz