Short story Manumission available at Baen’s Universe

The online magazine Baen’s Universe has my short story Manumission featured this month. This story has been years in waiting to be published, but is one of my favorites.

In 2005 I read it aloud to a group of people who came to a reading at Confluence, an SF/F convention in Pittsburgh. Last year at Confluence a couple of the people who’d been to the reading asked me why they’d been having trouble finding the story to buy it, they’d not forgotten hearing it 2 years later.

My friend David Kirtley, back in 2006, also picked it as one of his favorite stories read in 2006, because I’d forwarded him a copy.

You can read the first 1/2 of Manumission at Baen’s Universe.

Another reason some of you who’re fans of the novels might be interested in reading this story, is that it’s the second ‘Pepper’ story. The first was Fish Merchant, which launched my short story career and appeared in SF Age back in March 2000, so 8 years later here is the second Pepper story!

A third Pepper story will be out this summer, in John Joseph Adams’ anthology Seeds of Change.

If I can sneak enough Pepper stories out there over the next year or two, it’ll be nice to put together a chapbook or collection of Pepper stories. I have a definite time line that takes him from the events of Fish Merchant all the way to the start of Crystal Rain, it’s just that I don’t write as much short fiction, and it doesn’t put food on the table as well as novels, so…

Filed under the topic My Writing: Announcements on April 3rd 2008 at 1:41 pm. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.