Christie Yant

The first issue of Fireside has been reviewed by Keith at Adventures Fantastic. He liked it! Of my story he says:

The third story, and my favorite, was a science fiction story by Christie Yant, “Temperance”. It’s a time travel story with a flawed protagonist. It could easily become the inaugural story in a series, and I hope it does. I’d like to know what happens next.

That is convenient, actually, because the story was written as a prequel to a novel I’m working on! “Temperance” is an origin story, if you will, about the Temperance Society for Historical Preservation. The novel will largely focus on the women of Temperance, one hundred and (due to the nature of the town) 150 years after the events of the short story. Both the story and the novel require a lot of research. Much of the world-building and even one of the events in the story–the bust-up at the hotel–riffs off of local history. My little town has some fascinating and terrible skeletons hiding in its closet.

If you get a chance to read “Temperance,” you may recognize a couple of names: Anthony Cardno and Mike Epple both elected Kickstarter prizes that included having a character named after them, which made it even more fun to write.

Thank you for the kind words, Keith! I’m glad you enjoyed it.

FogCon was fun! Great programming and great people. I was delighted to make some new friends and connect with some old ones. I think we’re going to add it to our list of annual must-go cons.

If you haven’t heard, John is once again up for two Hugos this year–one as Himself, for Best Editor, Short Form, and once for Best Semiprozine, as the man behind the entity that is Lightspeed. He’s in good company. It’s a great ballot this year, with many people doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling up on it.

On my end, “This Rough Magic” went to Daily SF subscribers last week, and should be available on the website soon. “Temperance” will make its appearance in Fireside Issue 1, which goes out to Kickstarter backers in electronic form tomorrow, and will be available for all to buy on April 17. You can read excerpts of all five stories and check out the artwork at Firesidemag.com.

And finally, it looks like a very busy summer for us, because we have bought a house! I should say “almost,” because you know how tricky house-buying can be, and this one is even trickier because it’s undergoing a complete renovation before we can officially enter escrow, but nobody has detected any red flags and we are proceeding accordingly. We went by today to take measurements and figure out what we can actually take with us, since the common areas are quite a bit smaller than our current house. But I like that, I like not being too spread out and away from my family–though one big bonus to this house is that John and I will each have our own offices. Also the number of edibles on the property makes me happy: lemons, apples, apricots, artichokes, rosemary, mint, and grapes have been discovered so far. And the roses! My gods, the roses.

The writing hadn’t been going so well for most of March and the first week of April, but as stuff like housing resolved I think I turned a corner. Making things up doesn’t seem quite so hard now. I’d better get as much done as I can before life strikes again!