“Starship 44” by Robin Boer
Hello readers!
These past weeks have been full. I won’t say I’ve been “busy” or that things have been “hectic” because that’s not true–I’ve chosen the tortoise pace for this year and I’ve been sticking to that plan fairly effectively. I’m cramming less in each day, and that’s working for me. But even so, there hasn’t been a dull moment.
The Sky Woman is available for preorder.
About five years ago I started work on a novel based on ideas that had been germinating for at least a few years. People close to me knew I was working on a new book, but I didn’t tell anyone what it was about. I’d learned (the hard way) that when I spoke about my fiction ideas, I somehow lost the drive to develop those ideas in writing. So I had fun working on my secret project.
Last year when visiting our journalist friend Eve Conant in D.C., I asked Eve for advice in getting my own writing career started. She passed on some advice that had been given to her at one point by a mentor, and that advice stuck with me. While I don’t remember her exact words, the gist of it was to think about building my writing career on three pillars:
I have a new short story in Issue #11 of Compelling Science Fiction called “Targeted Behavior.” It’s about a tech startup in San Francisco attempting to “solve” homelessness via pharmaceutical means (which, as you might guess, doesn’t go quite as planned). It’s free to read online, but please consider subscribing or purchasing the Kindle edition anyway. Editor Joe Stech is doing great work.
Like anyone who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, I think about homelessness everyday. It’s impossible not to, given the current state of the housing crisis. Thousands of people live on the streets without permanent shelter, some of them quite visibly in tents or sleeping rough, others (who might sleep in their cars, or couch surf) much less so.
I just returned from the 2018 Nebula Conference in Pittsburgh. It was my first writing con of any kind, and going in I was nervous. When I signed up (and reserved my hotel, and purchased my flight) I knew literally zero people who would be attending the con. Some I followed on Twitter (and some of those even followed me), but in terms of people I’d actually met in person–none. I was that unconnected with the sci-fi/fantasy writing community. And I knew that was something I needed to fix.
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