• theantking.com should now take you to my publisher's site for The Ant King and Other Stories. Yay!
• The entire collection is now under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license and you can download it here in a variety of formats.
• If you produce any new formats, let me know and I'll try and have Small Beer post them on that page.
• You can remix it, and create derivative works. In fact let us have a little contest:
  Contest Rules

  1. Create a derivative work of any story in The Ant King and Other Stories
  2. Place it under the same license (you do this just by including a declaration to that effect on the work in its published form)
  3. Post a link to the work (or some kind of recording or representation of the work, like a youtube video if it's a live performance, or a picture of it if it's, like, a vase or something) in the comments to this blog entry.
  4. Derivative works can be translations, plays, movies, radio plays, audiobooks, flashmob happenings, horticultural installations, visual artworks, slash fanfic epics, robot operas, sequels, webcomics, ASCII art, text adventure games, roleplaying campaigns, knitting projects, handmade shoes, or anything else you feel like.
  5. On March 3, 2009 (that gives you six months), I will send signed (and extensively doodled-upon) hardcover copies of The Ant King and Other Stories to the creators of the three derivative works that I like the best.
  6. Obviously, other than what's covered in the CC license, you retain all rights to your works, so if you've made, you know, House-Beyond-Your-Sky-themed coasters, you get to sell them or put drinks on them to keep rings off your coffee table or whatever. And if you want to actually sell the rights to reproduce the derivative work commercially, I will in all probability tell you that you can, unless you're, like, a Hollywood studio. :-)
  Sound good?

• At some point I'll do something a little fancier with the URL theantking.com, but I don't want to get too distracted from Resilience at the moment... I'm having a return to productivity since Worldcon (thanks to all the stimulating conversations I had with all the wonderful people whom I have as usual completely failed to acknowledge in any kind of con report), and I don't want to get derailed...!

Chime in, eh? If so inclined.

In the meantime, some photos by Karen Rosenbaum (alias mom):

Pool (we went every weekday morning)
Reading at Stacy's
Departure (I had already left for the con)

(You will note that there was an interval -- of about six months -- between the composition of the first half and the last half.)

And now, without further ado...

The schedule has changed:

Thursday

4:00 PM

Kaffeklatsch (Convention Center, Korbel 4E)

Friday

10:00 AM

Clarion West Writers Workshop: How it Helped My Career (Convention Center 604)

1:00 PM

Open Source Software and Intellectual Property (Convention Center, Korbel 1C)

2:30 PM

City Building: from Ankh-Morpork to Ambergris (Convention Center, Korbel 1C)

Saturday

11:30 AM

Clarion West Student Readings, the 21st Century (Convention Center 604)

12:30-4:00 P.M.

Strange Horizons Tea Party
followed by
Lake/Rosenbaum Book Launch
SFWA Suite (in the Sheraton plaza -- the shorter building -- on the SIXTH floor in room 3654 )

Launching:

• The Ant King and Other Stories

2:30-3:15 PM

Book Signing (Convention Center, Hall D)

Yes, I actually have to leave the launch party to go to the signing. :-(

Whee!

And Amazon and B&N are now listing the book as "in stock" (though it still says "preorder" at Powell's...)

Photos by Karen Rosenbaum, of fabulous book models Noah, Aviva, and cousin Zula.

(Disclaimer: The management has redacted certain spaghetti sauce stains, chocolate smears and scabs which were deemed not to be "on message" for this promotional exercise. Why bathe your children when there's Photoshop?)

More photos at flickr.

• The Washington Jewish Week has a profile discussing my indubitable Yiddishkeit
• The Arlington Sun-Gazette interviewed me for this profile
• Tomorrow this profile of me (registration required for that link) will run in the "Sunday Source" section of The Washington Post.

I boggle.

The interviews were a lot of fun to do. The Gazette reporter was a high school intern who was very diligent and infectiously excited. The Jewish Week reporter seemed, over the phone, like an old pro who was amused by my freakish surreal ideas ("I've never said this to an interviewee before," he said, "but you're really weird." It was clearly meant as a compliment).

The Post guy, Dan Zak, was very hip and a really great interviewer, seizing on things I would say and asking intelligent followup after followup, drilling down until I was saying things that surprised me. He also did not ask any of the questions that I'm used to hearing (like "why genre?"). It was a two hour conversation, and he did a fantastic job synthesizing a coherent Q&A out of those two hours of intense ramble -- stitching together comments taken from wildly disparate parts of the conversation and managing to preserve the sense of it. (Though I do look, in the photo, like I am indeed single-parenting on a jet-lag-filled international trip, and there are the usual little content quibbles (like I would never say "Sam", as opposed to "Samuel R." or "Chip", Delany... :-) ))

Note also the reference to the blogospherical greatness discussion (I want y'all to know I did namecheck Nick, but that got cut).

Actually there's plenty of my writing from when I was a kid that I don't find embarassing; I rather like, for instance, the "poems" my parents transcribed for me when I was two and three years old. (One went like this: "Some are happy / Some are sad / Others take flight". The "take flight" thing is, I believe, the influence of de Brunhoff. I feel like that one works pretty well, yes?)

However I also happen to have unearthed on this here computer a poem I wrote the summer after high school; and it quotes a lovely friend of mine who just got married this past weekend to a lovely guy (in a very lovely wedding, in which Aviva was one of a vast river of white-clad day-lily-bedecked flower girls)... and the serendipity of that is irresistable.

The title may have been added somewhat later.

Arlington, Summer 1988
Last time I saw her we sat with the moon
on her roof.
Pipes stuck up like stumps
and barbed wire grew in hedges,
and all around Manhattan had heaved itself up
to a great height over the sea.

Yesterday I saw her here, in lawns and dogwood
where
(she says in wonder)
"the trees are bigger than the houses."

Little houses, with little shadows in the almost-summer sun.

(...Mazel Tov & many happy returns, Maus & Ed!)

Thursday

4:00 PM

Kaffeklatsch

Friday

10:00 AM

Clarion West Writers Workshop: How it Helped My Career

1:00 PM

Open Source Software and Intellectual Property

2:30 PM

City Building: from Ankh-Morpork to Ambergris

Saturday

11:30 AM

Clarion West Student Readings, the 21st Century

2:00-5:00 P.M.

Strange Horizons Tea Party
followed by
Buckell/Lake/Rosenbaum Book Launch

SFWA Suite (in the Sheraton, on a non-party floor)

Launching:

• The Ant King and Other Stories
• Sly Mongoose
• Escapement

Perhaps I shall see some of you there?

It may be a good kind of stuck. At any rate, I'm trying not to panic. I have been just rolling along without a plan, gamboling and makin' stuff up, and I think this is the point at which I go "holy crap WHAT IS GOING ON HERE??" I'm about midway through and I often hit this point midway through longish short stories. (Indeed arguably I've hit it more than once with this novel, and each time figured out just enough to keep me going a bit longer).

So this Tuesday when Aviva and I sat down to write together (she finished a picture book entitled GRUMPY POOP, which is awesome), I couldn't really get any more words down so instead I made this pretty chart which shows the book so far. Each box is a chapter, and each page occupies twenty squares of graph paper.

I sure hope it helps.

Noah was out riding trams with his grandfather at the time. For like three hours. Noah likes riding the tram.

• Publisher's Weekly has a very nice review of the Ant King and Other Stories (you have to scroll down to the bottom of the SF/Fantasy/Horror section). It's rather nice to find oneself there along with Toby, Bear, and Scalzi.

• Kirkus also gave it a largely positive review: "an imaginative debut collection". The only thing they didn't like was the "Other Cities" (you have to be a subscriber to see the review)

• I'm doing another reading at Stacy's Coffee Parlor:
  Friday, August 1st
  7:30 pm
  Stacy's Coffee Parlor
  709 W Broad St (a.k.a Route 7)
  Falls Church, VA
  703-538-6266
  
  Bus from West Falls Church metro: 28B.

  Come!

• I was going to put this in its own entry unter the title "Holy crap, Michael Chabon knows who I am!"... (anyway, we put the whole quote in the hardcover book jacket inside flap)

• I am having a kaffeklatsch and a book launch party of some sort at Worldcon in Denver -- details coming soon.
  

I'm excited. I'm all abuzz and aquiver and stuff.

Book getting realer every day! Lordy!

SH is the longest-running and arguably the premier venue for online speculative fiction, pro-rate-paying, all-volunteer, donation-supported, and a really great bunch of folks.

For instance, if you are only using it in the evening but happen to have it available in the early afternoon to sublet for a joint book launch party and perhaps, oh, I don't know, tea party?

Or do you have contact info for anyone who would? (Other than Tor, who was the obvious suspect but who will not work out in this case.)