“Cosmic Tree” by Gillian Gandossi
I’m happy to announce that I’ve sold a new story to Clarkesworld Magazine. “The Garden Beyond Her Infinite Skies” will be my fourth story published in Neil Clarke’s excellent magazine, and I’m excited to be there as always. I was reading Alice Miller’s For Your Own Good a few months back and was shocked by the notion of institutionalized abuse, which she highlights in the cultural forces which led to the Holocaust. Could abuse be so normalized in a society that people don’t realize they are abusive and have been abused themselves? It seemed so, and when I turned that lens onto my own culture, American, Jewish, New York, etc., I began to see patterns of abuse apparent in so many things we take for granted. Now, take that premise and expand that onto a multi-cosmic scale and you have the inspiration for “The Garden Beyond Her Infinite Skies.”
TL;DR: I sold a new story to Clarkesworld about a farmer of universes.
In other news, I will soon have two translations printed in Chinese. “The Sounds of Old Earth,” which was nominated for a Nebula Award last year, will be printed in China’s Science Fiction World. Because the ink isn’t dry yet, I can’t tell you which publication, but “The Meeker and the All-Seeing Eye,” which was just nominated for a Nebula Award, will also be appearing in Chinese.
Also, Kenneth Schneyer who teaches at Johnson and Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island (and who is a fine writer himself) has assigned “The Meeker and the All-Seeing Eye” as one of the reading requirements for his class. In April, I’ll be visiting as a guest lecturer, speaking about my experience writing “The Meeker” and about writing in general. I’ve never spoken to a class about my work before, which is both exciting and terrifying. They’ll be quizzed (quizzed!) on my story.
At the end of January, Darin Bradley sent his comments on Book I of the Worldmender Trilogy, King of Shards. I spent the following five weeks deeply immersed in the manuscript. While his comments were thorough, there weren’t that many. However, it had been almost two years since I last read through the manuscript in its entirety. What developed over the next several weeks was the most intense writing period of my life. I awoke, ate breakfast, wrote for several hours, then did my IT work for my day job, ate dinner, then wrote until midnight. Lather, rinse, repeat for five weeks. I didn’t go out on the weekends, just worked straight through. It was exhausting, yes, but also exhilarating in all the ways I had imagined. Being so deeply immersed in your own work is a joy in itself, but is made all the more exciting knowing that people will soon be able to read King of Shards and share in this universe. I’m biased, of course, but I think it’s a damn good book.
Since then I’ve been working on Book II of the Worldmender Trilogy. I’m about 30,000 words in as of today, so ahead of schedule. But I know from experience life and reality often get in the way of deadlines. Anyway, I’m excited about all the good writing news happening to me lately and immensely grateful.
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