Hello to everyone. This month's newsletter brings a few pieces of exciting news from over the past few weeks, so let me get right to it.
The first thing I want to share with all of you is good news to anyone who has missed one of my stories in the past five years. Those of you who have been receiving this newsletter from the beginning may recall my main reason for starting it: short fiction is usually available for only about a month, and then tends to disappear off the shelf. Many times a friend would find out that a story of mine had appeared in ANALOG, only to realize that the magazine was already gone. And until recently, the only way to find those stories again was to wait and hope they would be reprinted. But with the advent of the Internet, things have changed.
Starting this month, much of my backlist is becoming available at the webpage of Fictionwise, as electronic books, readable in a variety of formats. At the moment, "TeleAbsence" and "Cosmic Corkscrew," two of my Hugo nominees, are available for purchase for under a dollar each, and before the year is out, a total of ten of my stories will be available.
Now, you can go directly to Fictionwise's webpage at www.fictionwise.com to buy my stories, but in order to take full advantage of my relationship with them, I've actually set up my own webpage as an affiliate of theirs. So if you go to www.mabfan.com and click on the link that takes you to Fictionwise, I'll get more credit (i.e. money) every time you purchase one of my stories (or any story, for that matter). It's only a few cents extra per, but like most science fiction writers, I'm a starving artist, so I'll take whatever I can get.
More importantly, I hope this will give people another chance to enjoy my work.
Of course, electronic reprints are not the only news I have to share. I'm delighted to note that I've sold two more stories to ANALOG.
The first one, "Spaceships," I wrote for my Science Fiction Writing Workshop class at the Cambridge School of Weston last May. The students in the class wanted the pleasure of critiquing one of my stories, the way I critiqued theirs, so I wrote this story with that in mind. They actually gave me some great suggestions, and the result is that "Spaceships" will appear in the May 2001 ANALOG.
The second story, "Bug Out!" is a novella which I wrote in collaboration with Shane Tourtellotte. Shane has been publishing in ANALOG since 1998, and was nominated this year for the John Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the same award I won in 1997. Back in February, it occurred to us that a collaboration might be a good idea, and it looks like ANALOG agreed. The editor has promised us the cover of the July/August 2001 double issue. If you want to learn more about Shane's work, I have a link to his webpage from my own.
Reminder: the cover story of the Winter 2000 issue of ABSOLUTE MAGNITUDE will be "The Cold Calculations," and the magazine should be out in December. I'll announce this again when the magazine is actually available.
I'll also be speaking to the Shawsheen Valley chapter of Hadassah sometime in February.
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-- Michael A. Burstein