Won't be too long and we'll be taking another rail-trip, this one to KC where we'll be Guests of Honor for Conquest 43 along with Gardner Dozois and a cast of dozens. In advance of our visit, a KC area writer-guy who'll also be at ConQuest interviewed Lee and Miller ...

http://www.graspingforthewind.com/2012/04/26/sffwrtcht-a-chat-with-authors-sharon-lee-steve-miller/ please share the news!

Meanwhile, anyone out there suggest an open Sunday night blues club in KC?

Steve

The work done, Klamath, Splinter 4 is up. New software will make future installments easier. http://splinteruniverse.com/?page_id=414
Donations appreciated!

We spent part of the weekend investigating Omniscan 18 so I could more easily convert old paper into modern electrons -- it is working! Spent part of the time converting Klamath Splinter 4 ... and then we also spent some time at the ocean, investigating some housing possibilities...

What's up with you?

Things and stuff...

With the help of readers, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller's Ghost Ship was named as Best Read of the Year at SF Site .... http://www.sfsite.com/columns/best12b.htm

Also, Baen Books has a few more things up their sleeves from lee & Miller, with Sharon agreeing on a two book extension of her Kate Archer/Carousel Tides saga, due starting next year .... and the duo has signed an agreement for a multibook Liaden short story collection ....

More news, in a compact form, from Lee & Miller, on Sharon Lee's most recent blog post: http://rolanni.livejournal.com/757302.html

Dear Friends of Liad --

News here is that Necessity's Child by Sharon Lee & Steve Miller was delivered to Baen last night and is tentatively scheduled for a May 2013 hardcover edition.

We slept late this morning and will be having a basically electron free afternoon and early evening, including a drive and dinner out and we'll probably be reading some extra Heyer to unwind with a glass this evening...

There's a good chance that today's drive-and-talk will also help us sharpen the last Dragon Ship edit-letter point ... that ought to be resubmitted early next week since we're only looking at finagling three new pages or so now.

What's your weekend look like?

Sharon mentions contracts: http://rolanni.livejournal.com/755963.html

Ebay news -- last few hours on some SRM/ Lee & Miller rarities:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/251025786428?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649

http://www.ebay.com/itm/251025852438?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649

http://www.ebay.com/itm/251025855270?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649

http://www.ebay.com/itm/251025867019?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649

Thanks for reading!

I'm clearing out the SRM corners of the basement and the basement desk ....

these items are on ebay and more may follow:

Am seriously closing out last of SRM stuff: here's more
Steve Miller (twitter: @bechimo)

Among rarest printed Lee & Miller things possible -- a limited run, locally produced ARC http://www.ebay.com/itm/251025867019?ssPageName=STRK%3AMESELX%3AIT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649

Pretty book. Hardcover, hard to find. Helped pay for medical work at the time it was published. http://www.ebay.com/itm/251025855270?ssPageName=STRK%3AMESELX%3AIT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649

Less than 1000 copies of this book were printed -- outside our desk/working copies, this is last. http://www.ebay.com/itm/251025852438?ssPageName=STRK%3AMESELX%3AIT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649

We each have desk copies, and there's one in the brag shelf. Else, the last of these in the house ... http://www.ebay.com/itm/251025786428?ssPageName=STRK%3AMESELX%3AIT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649

Steve

As mentioned on Facebook, Lee & Miller went to the Maine Mathematics and Science High School to speak yesterday -- had a great time, though the 5 hour ride home was a bit iffy with the snow and rain and moosewatch. If you happen to know a school with a lecture program we might be appropriate for ... let us know, or talk to the program folks there and tell them how to get in touch with us.

We're both still getting over this darned cold (sigh!) -- I keep hearing fro m people that it holds on for 3 to 6 weeks! -- but we're moving on with the other things we do as best we can, writing, reading, and outreach.

Also, we'd like to been totally done coldishness RSN so that by the time we bring the new cat into the house he won't assume we spend half our time hacking .... that is Silversocks the Maine Coon (old photos here --- http://www.blueblaze.com/studs/ssocks.htm), and he's due in-house at the East Winslow Catfarm and Confusion factory in a few weeks.

Reminder:
New this week: Klamath story at Splinter Universe -- http://splinteruniverse.com/?page_id=414&preview=true

Liaden drinking glasses: http://www.etsy.com/listing/94362245/liaden-symbol-custom-etched-pint-glass

Please share!

inevitably someone will ask how these links help us. For one thing, if you order in Liaden Universe glasses and use them, it means you'll have to explain them to friends and perhaps make converts.... also, we get a $1 or so a glass down the road, so that's not a bad thing. The Splinter Universe sharing is less definite -- you get to see part of the what might have been, and part of the back story of Liaden universe, particularity of Miri. Also, if you donate through the Splinter Universe Paypal button, that donation comes directly to us, a definite feature for freelancers used to funds waiting for yearly payouts and side-trips to the agent's office!

A reminder for the traveling fan -- while we're due in KC for ConQuest just before Memorial Day, we've also got an earlier event: we'll be speaking for an hour or so in the evening at Rockland Public Library in Rockland, Maine Thursday, April 5.

As mentioned elsewhere ....

In the interstices of the canon Liaden stories are the bits and pieces we haven't finished with yet -- some will go on, some will not. Over on Splinter Universe we're starting to present about 1/3 of a novel's worth of work that hasn't made it to print yet, though it has affected the Liaden experience since we-the-authors have written it, talked about it, thought and argued about it, lived with it as a background informing ideas that we have published as well as influencing which stories were concentrated on ...

New prep for this work involved finding, scanning, cleaning up, scanning and rescanning; call it about 10 hours to get the thing started and now about an hour per 8 or 10 pages for the formatting and fixing... if you can help us cover this time and effort, we'd greatly appreciate it. Elsewise, enjoy and be sure to tell your science fiction reading friends that they can rush off in this direction ... http://splinteruniverse.com/?page_id=414

I estimate we'll have 6 to 8 installments -- they'll come weekly, likely around the old Fledgling, Monday noon, our time schedule... enjoy!

And did I mention? We've also uncovered a good deal of an unpublished Kinzel book ... that'll take some real work, since only part of it is on modern disks... but we expect to be working on that for Splinter Universe as well ...

Sunday morning stuff, done in between breakfast, catboxes, shower, coffee, and more coffee ... the "Who do I Write Like Question" is asked from time to time, and so I went to the font this morning and discover that it depends, or maybe the truth is, it's kind of complicated....

Note -- if you have odd spacing here, please blame the folks at LJ and their interaction with others on the web...

Starting with an oldie --


That's my story "Russians in My Head" -- one of the stories you can read for free (donations acceptable!) at Splinter Universe -- http://splinteruniverse.com/?page_id=260


Then there's:


That was my recent guest blog at Eating Authors: http://www.lawrencemschoen.com/plugs/eating-authors-steve-miller/


Then I see I write like Sir Arthur ...



Which, oddly enough, was Timerags II -- my book of poems -- which is available as an ebook: http://www.pinbeambooks.com/ebooks-you-want-to-read/steve-miller/ Perhaps the poem Catkiller was the significant weight in this reading ....

Oh, and also?


Which was the reading for the stories making up Chariot to The Stars, a small collection of mine -- http://www.pinbeambooks.com/ebooks-you-want-to-read/steve-miller/

And so that's the story -- William Gibson to Poe -- I run the gamut. Enjoy!

As I'm going over a candidate script-splinter for Splinter Universe I'm brought to recall something today's young kid writers never had to go through -- printing the final draft of a novel on a 9-pin printer.

With Agent of Change, that meant we had to set the Star 9-pin on doublestrike, and stay awake for the entire 21 hours it took. The paper was a continuous form-fed, ribbon of super-fine bright white paper, expensive as all get out ... and it what it produced was a thick pile of paper that wasn't the real final draft.

By that I mean, once that ribbon of paper was collected -- sometime after we'd mollified the neighbors who'd also heard the 9 pin printer double-striking through the night ... we had to check the entire lot of 500 or so page for slippage, and burst it.

Never had to burst a manuscript? Well, see, in those days the paper had the paper feed-wheel edges that had to be carefully pulled off -- and then each sheet of paper had ot be parted from the neighbors, being reasonably careful not to tear them badly.  The cats loved tearing the side panels off, because if you did it right (with a novel manuscript) you could have a pair of paper snakes, each 400 or so feet long, for them to play in.

Yes, the fine or super finer perfs were supposed to make that .... effortless. Ayuh, kind in the way that taking a tree and making it into a cord of wood is effortless while you're sitting in front of a roaring fire. And you couldn't forget to have Band-aids and cotton swabs and antiseptic nearby, because paper cuts were endemic to the process. ...

Then just when you had a big lump of burst manuscript ... you weren't done -- because *then* you went to the copy shop and had the whole thing copied twice, at 97%, so the letter bled together better. If you were lucky, the copy shop had a box your script would fit in....

After that, you went to the PO and made their day.

All I'm thinking of this because? Because some of these pages I'm reading are still on the off-color, partial-burst original draft paper, where the edges have been taken off but the paper is still attached top-and-bottom. Ah -- yep, we wrote up hill both ways in those days, and when I was doing freelance newspaper work I wrote uphill both ways all night long, had to burst the stuff, and then get in the car to hand-deliver it!

For Splinter Universe, I'll scan this, edit on screen, and drop it into a template for the Wordpress page.

We've come a long way, baby!