If you’re in the Seattle area, please join me and Nicola on May 8 at a reading of Lambda Literary Award finalists at Elliott Bay Books. Nicola will be MC’ing the event, and we’re looking forward to an evening of great fiction and poetry, and a chance to spend time with readers and writers. It’ll be fun!

It’s been three months since Small Beer Press re-published Solitaire, and I’ve been thrilled by the response. When the book first came out in 2002, blogging wasn’t as widespread as it is now, and bloggers certainly weren’t as influential in building buzz. I adore bloggers. Adore. And I’m most grateful to everyone who has taken time to read the book, think about it, and talk about it online.

Here’s an interview at The Daily Monocle, which I very much enjoyed doing — it includes a question I’ve never been asked before!

Edited to add, in the spirit of completeness: you can also find recent interviews at The Big Idea and Lambda Literary.

Here are some recent reviews, for those who are interested:
• Fishmuffins of Doom (my favorite blog title evah!)
• Dreaming About Other Worlds
• Read Irresponsibly
• Bibliophile Stalker
• Calico Reaction
• Phoebe North
• Ravenous Bookshelf (Cobalt, if you are reading this — I tried to leave a comment but wasn’t able to access the Captcha field…)
• Off the Mark and Roaming
• birth of a new witch
• Fluidity of Time
• Penguin Girl
• Mumble Herder
• The Future Fire
• my3books
• Eve’s Alexandria

Enjoy your day.

Nicola and I kick things off at 5:30 with readings and Q&A. Science Fiction Museum curator Jacob McMurray (who designed Nicola’s beautiful memoir) hosts a showing of video interviews with SF authors. Blöödhag plays literary heavy-metal music and then MCs a fashion show.

See those words “All Ages” on this poster? Ignore those words (grin). Of course all are welcome, but it’s billed in the library events calendar as an adult show, and if you’ve read my work or Nicola’s, you know we’re not exactly kittens-and-bunnies (or rocket-ships-and-rayguns) storytellers.

Should be fun. Join us if you can!

It’s a joy to help people with their work. I love to mentor and coach, and the most valuable part of that isn’t explaining theory or technique: it’s working with a writer on a piece of text to make it cleaner, deeper, brighter, more true. Seeing the oh! moment when the writer leaps from a specific suggestion to an understanding of how their work can always be better.

Nicola and I have been helping friends and students this way for more than 20 years: and one day this summer, we looked at each other and said Well, let’s expand our horizons. Let’s help anyone who needs it. And from that — its own kind of oh! moment — came Sterling Editing.

We’re here for everyone from new writers to professionals; we’re here for all genres, for stories, novels, essays, collections, and memoir. It’s all exciting, and it’s all a chance to help writers find their place in writing, or find the path to the next place they want to take their work.

Our marvelous website is created by writer and web designer Karina Meléndez, and on it you’ll find a description of our services, an example of our editing, and an ever-growing list of articles and resources to help writers. We hope you’ll like it.

Good editors don’t just fix text: good editors strengthen writers by giving them skills, understanding, specific examples, and the confidence to keep on trying. That’s what I love. And that’s what Nicola and I plan to do with Sterling Editing.

I’m so excited!

The Foundation presents the annual Lambda Literary Awards and offers a variety of services and support to quiltbag (LGBT and otherwise queer) writers and readers. They have a committed and enthusiastic board. And I’m especially excited that Nicola has this opportunity to help queer writers grow and prosper and find their place at the literary table — there is no one in my experience who better combines clear-headed pragmatism about the business (and its bullshit) with absolute passion for writing, and the talent to help others make their work better.

My sweetie is made of awesome. I’m glad she’s sharing it with LLF!

My thanks to the SFWA members who have supported the story — the approval of other writers is very special to me, and I appreciate it more than I can say. This is my third time as a Nebula finalist, and the thrill never goes away. Congratulations to all the finalists. I’m honored to be in your company.

And my special thanks to Aqueduct Press for publishing the collection and giving me the chance to tell another tale of Mars, of all my characters the one who most compels me.

The Nebula Awards will be presented the weekend of April 24-26 in Los Angeles. I hope that Nicola and I will be there — it would be lovely to meet new people and reconnect with old friends. Speculative fiction writers know how to party (grin).

I invite you to read “Dangerous Space” (in PDF format), and let me know what you think. And thanks to all of you who have let me know in the past that you enjoy my stories: this moment in the spotlight is lovely, but nothing compares to the immense pleasure I get knowing that I’ve told you a story that has touched you.

“Dangerous Space” has qualified because during the 12 months after its publication, at least 10 members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) recommended it for the award. Thank you to those who took the time and trouble to recommend it — I appreciate your support and am glad you liked the story.

I’ll post the final ballot when it’s, you know, final (smile).

If you’re interested in the arcana of it all, here are the rules. And if you’re interested in the story, you can download it right here and read it for yourself. Enjoy.

I am excited, a little scared, and also feeling very satisfied on a deep level — because after many, many years of thought and more than two years of development, Humans At Work, LLC launches today.

I’ve talked about this before, but here’s a recap:

In my corporate life, I built and led teams, developed and managed process, facilitated meetings of 2 to 250 people, taught effective communication and effective meetings classes, served as a company ombudsperson, and learned everything I could about organizational development and dynamics.

And what I learned boils down to this: managing people is the most important job in business. And it’s the job that no one ever really teaches us to do.

Management is behavior. It’s my experience that bad managers are not evil or insane; mostly, they just have no idea how to be good managers. When we get our first management job, no one sits us down and tells us that the most important thing we can do to be successful is to deal well with the other humans in the building — to communicate clearly, build relationships that help everyone be more effective, share information, collaborate on decisions with the people whose work will be affected, and give people control of how they do their jobs. No one teaches us how to do these things. If we’re lucky as managers, we eventually figure out how to be better… generally at the expense of the people who work for us.

And so we’ve all got a Boss From Hell story (some of us have several). We all know the damage that bad managers do to the people they work with. And it’s not just people — business suffers too, because people who are badly managed become angry and disengaged and unproductive. That’s not good for anyone.

It doesn’t have to be this way. It really doesn’t. So I’m going to change it.

I’ve developed an intensive training program called Humans At WorkSM. It teaches basic human management skills to new managers. I have never seen anything quite like it, and I think it’s solid and… well, it’s good. Not just that it’s put together well, but that it feels like I’m doing some good in the world by putting it out there.

Because here’s what I’m doing — think of it as the 21st century approach. First, I’ve written A Leader’s Manifesto, which describes the core skills of good managers, and gives me the chance to testify about why it matters to people and to business that every manager leads from those skills. The manifesto includes unabashed table-thumping and talk of revolution, very fun to write (and, I hope, to read). I hope the manifesto will spread far and wide around the internet, and that people will feel as passionate about its ideas as I do.

Second, I am making the entire Humans At WorkSM program content available free under a Creative Commons License — because I believe so strongly in these ideas that I want everyone to have access to them, whether they can afford to pay for the program or not. There are nearly 400 pages of lesson plans, teaching notes, tools, materials lists and tips for people to set up the program in their own companies. It costs a lot to have me teach the program — my time and my brain are not cheap to hire — but anyone who is willing to do the work themselves will be able to create their own version of the program (for non-commercial use). And I’m available as a consultant to help people do that at a lesser cost than a turnkey program.

I believe that enough people will respond to the ideas of Humans At WorkSM that there will be more than enough work for me. And if I’m wrong, then the ideas that I care about will still be out in the world helping people. No matter what happens with the business, it’s hard to think of that as failure.

My ambitious goal is that every working person on the planet reads the manifesto, becomes aware of the program, and finds at least one idea that helps them make their own work experience better. If you’d like to help with that, I’d be very grateful indeed — because the only way it happens is if people spread the word. So check out Humans At Work, and if you like what you see, please tell everyone — because everyone can benefit from what’s there.

If you’d like to hear it, you can find your local station here, or use this direct link to the mp3 of the show. My segment starts at about 38:30.

And in the spirit of it all, here’s a little something I’ve always loved. You don’t have to go far to find the wild side — it’s right there between your ears. Have fun with yours today.

(Click here if you can’t see the audio player.)

And now Matt’s published his first book — U2 – A Diary. It’s a comprehensive history of the band in diary format, interspersed with stories, rare photos, and interesting factoids. And it’s not just a collection of details — Matt’s a journalist by training, and he’s always looking for the connections, for the way that events have shaped the overall story of U2. He’s done a fantastic job, and I believe the book will become a must-have for every serious fan, and a cool-to-have for anyone who’s interested in how four creative people manage their relationships and make their music for more than 30 years.

And it’s a very 21st-century book in a particular way — Matt established a website for the book while he was researching and writing, and encouraged fans to participate by helping ferret out details. He’s already generated tons of excitement in the U2 fan community just by giving people a window into the process.

We’re all totally jazzed about it over at @U2, and I’ve just done an interview with Matt in which he shares many stories of how the book came together. In interviews and in person, Matt is real and funny and very self-effacing (the staff had to pretty much bully him into letting us support the book on the site, but hey, we’re just that ornery so it all worked out). Enjoy the interview, and do feel free to buy the book (grin).

And while you’re over at @U2, let me also point you to an interview I did with Michka Assayas (whose book I excerpted in yesterday’s post). He’s a great interview subject, smart and curious and very accessible. (Michka, if you happen to be googling yourself and end up here, do you remember this interview? I enjoyed our conversation very much, and it’s fun to revisit it today.)

I like doing these kinds of interviews. I spend a lot of time crafting the questions, looking for a tone and approach that I hope will connect with the subject, based on what I know (or perceive) about them. You’ll see a tone difference in the questions in these two interviews, but also, I hope, a consistency of focus. I’m interested in people’s process and their experiences of being creative, and I try to make my questions potentially expansive, the kind that give people the chance to talk about the truth of their feelings if they wish to. It’s a real joy for me when people take the questions seriously, and respond as thoughtfully as Michka and Matt. I hope you’ll enjoy reading them.

And now I am off to the rest of my day, ending with salad and spaghetti and alcohol and, I very much hope, Barack Obama’s acceptance speech. I think I may burst into tears at that point, but it’s okay, Nicola is used to it.

A lovely day to you all.