Brenda Cooper

Pardon my Absence

May 24th 2010 at 8:45 am

I have been quieter than usual in the Interwebs the past few weeks.  All is not well.  To be more exact, my youngest brother is not well.  He’s gone and gotten a fairly rare and difficult cancer, which has provided me with time with him (yay!), sadness that he is doing as well as I like (not yay at all), and things to do.  If you want a clue about what dealing with all that is like, drop by Jay Lake’s blog.  I’m not likely to blog that much detail so publicly, but then it’s not me with the disease.  Suffice it to say I now hate cancer in a deep, visceral way.

I have been working some from here, including day job work, working on my next novel to get it ready for a writing workshop I’m looking forward to in Flagstaff next month, and planning how to update my website for a book coming out next year from Prime that I’m very excited about.  But there are higher priorities than all of that, and way higher than tweets and blogs.  So I’m doing the most important stuff.

On the good books front, I’m reading “The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys” by Scott William Carter to my brother and reading the latest Devon Monk, and marveling at how all three of us (Scott, Devon, and me) were at the same writer’s workshops on the Oregon Coast a few years ago with no novels out between us.   For any of you wondering, that’s learning from Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch.  They both blog well (Kris about being a freelancer and Dean about publishing myths).

In the meantime, I’m guessing based on some emails that my latest “Futures” piece is out in Nature Magazine.  I recently sold a story I like very much to Clarkesworld, and I have another story coming out soon in Analog that’s set on Fremont, the colony planet from The Silver Ship and the Sea.

I’ll be back to more regular blogging soon.

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