Word Posse

Critical Co-op’s interview with Mark, now online! Listen here.

Here’s the table of contents for Gifts of Darkover, coming next summer. Congratulations, Deborah and Marella!

Introduction: Darkover, An Evolving World, by Deborah J. Ross (editor)

Learning to Breathe Snow, by Rosemary Edghill and Rebecca Fox
Healing Pain, by Jane M. H. Bigelow
Blood-kin, by Diana L. Paxson
The Tower, by Jeremy Erman
Stonefell Gift, by Marella Sands
Compensation, by Leslie Fish
Green Is The Color Of Her Eyes So Blue, by Deborah Millitello
Renegades of Darkover, by Robin Wayne Bailey
Memory, by Shariann Lewitt
A Problem of Punishment, by Barb Caffrey
Hidden Gifts, by Margaret L. Carter
Climbing to the Moons, by Ty Nolan

Critical Co-op has posted their podcast with Posse member Marella Sands. Take a listen!

Mark Sumner has been writing on DailyKos for quite a while now. Recently, he’s written two articles on the Posse:

Do you want to build a writers group?

With good stuff like…

Save the creativity for your writing
That’s not to say you shouldn’t have fun at your meetings. Maybe you want to have a Johnny Cash impersonator serenade an author who just sold a western or build a cake in the shape of the Temple of the Sun to celebrate the sale of a book about the Mayans (both of these things happened at AH meetings). But where you shouldn’t get creative is in how you handle reviewing material.  Print out your book. Hand a copy to everyone. Give them a month to read through it, read through it again, and mark it up. Then get together and go through it, page by bloody red-pen saturated page.

Be prepared to spend long hours. Don’t read aloud from your work. Don’t ask people to provide spontaneous reviews of works you’ve shoved in their hands minutes before. Don’t dump 100k words in their laps a couple of days before the meeting and pout because no one has made it through. Suck it up, do it right, give it time.

And…

My first novel in 15 years.

Mark tells all about his writing career and the development of The Naturalist.

By then, I had achieved a simmering low boil of frustration leading to burnout. A career that had looked promising one moment, had become an endless, thankless grind for pay so low that I could have topped it doing night shifts at Burger Doodle. I put down my metaphorical pen, brushed off a moth-eaten jacket, and went back to beg for an office job.

It took me a long time to get my “Once upon a time” back…

Yes, we really did have “Tommy Cash, Another Great Country & Western Musical Tradition” show up to a meeting, to sing the classic “Antriders in the Sky.”  Seriously.

Here’s the proof.

You can listen to some Posse members at the following podcasts:

Rett MacPherson interviewed by Critical Co-Op about her new release, Sleeping the Churchyard Sleep

Marella Sands in a Doctor Who podcast, recorded at Archon 38, along with JB Anderton and Jennifer Picker

Critical Co-op will be interviewing Mark Sumner and Marella Sands later in November, and will interview the rest of the Posse in 2015. Subscribe to his podcast channel for updates!

Just because members of the Posse are publishing through Word Posse doesn’t mean they’re not getting their stuff out there to other venues. Both Marella and Deborah will have short stories in the forthcoming anthology Gifts of Darkover, which is due out in summer 2015.

Marella’s story, “Stonefell Gift,” tells the tale of a young girl living toward the end of the Ages of Chaos, when the horrific ramifications of inbreeding lethal genes into the population became impossible to ignore.

Deborah’s story, “Green is the Color of her Eyes so Blue,” follows a man and his wife to her native Drytowns, where they get caught up in the survival of strangely gifted children.

Look for those stories, along with other stories by Robin Wayne Bailey, Diana L. Paxson, and more, next summer!