Out of the Debauched Sloth
Chaz Brenchley's fortnightly newsletter
“What news may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil”—me & Bill (mostly Bill, on this occasion)
The actual news as I write is allll about the shufflings-off of mortal coils, individual and otherwise; but never mind that, it’s not what you’re here for. You want to hear about me, am I right? Of course I’m right. My name on the masthead and everything.
So: here are some odd bits of news for you.
First, my short story “The Station of the Twelfth” is reprinted in THE YEAR’S TOP TALES OF SPACE AND TIME 2, edited by Allan Kaster, yay!
Second, in another reprint announcement, my story from the Zombies Need Brains anthology GALACTIC STEW [a collection of stories mixing science fiction and food, if you missed it; you should totally chase it down, it’s lovely] will be coming out from Escape Pod. Don’t know yet who the narrator will be, this has only just happened. I may be unreasonably excited.
Third, speaking of ZNB, their Kickstarter for this year has (just!) funded—will it be too late for you to join the fun, by the time you see this newsletter? Probably, yeah: eighteen hours to go as I type, and I’ve never yet managed to send one of these out the same day—so I will indeed be spending this coming December writing a solarpunk story for SOLAR FLARE, one of their four anthologies coming out next year. I may have mentioned it before, but I love my ZNB commissions; they’re always a bit of a stretch for me, somewhat outside my comfort zone. I sometimes feel that my best work comes out of my discomfort zone, where I’m having to stretch a bit. Which is why I have to allocate the whole of December to one story, to be sure I’m done and happy with it by the end-of-year deadline. (Solarpunk is fundamentally optimistic in nature, and my regular stories are ... often not that. So yeah, stretchy, etc. I’m looking forward to it immensely.)
Fourth, I had way too much fun a while back talking with others over Zoom about Mars, its fictions and its realities. This was to have been an audiovisual broadcast, but there were technical difficulties with the video (most likely my tendency to flail my arms about as I speak, as I try to shape the words into consonance, like braiding the dough of a plaited loaf), so the published version is audio-only. You should totally listen. ‘Twas made under the auspices of Bristol Ideas, in conjunction with the opening of their Martian House exhibition, and featured my current and well-beloved publisher Cheryl Morgan, my old friend and wise counsel Liz Williams, and the new-to-me and delightful Lucy Kissick. You can listen to it here.
Beyond that, what? I’m still writing about Sherlock Holmes on Mars, and people have bought me so many coffees it’s pushing at the bounds of novella-length and aspiring to be a novel, which is ridiculous. If you want to support the effort, buy me a coffee on Ko-fi and I’ll post another page.
Alternatively, I’m also posting the story (in significantly larger chunks, for ease of reading) on my Patreon page, where you may read that and much, much more for the price of a coffee a month. If that’s not a bargain, I wholly misunderstand economics.
Anyway, enough pluggage for now. Thanks for reading, and we shall meet again in a fortnight’s time…
Chaz