Melissa Scott Writes

It’s pretty typical of 2023 that I should be writing my usual year-end review several days later than planned. It was a year of great highs and horrible lows: I went in with friends on a shared property that will give me a house of my own plus a separate studio/office — and then saw those same friends lose their older daughter in a car accident. Other close friends battled serious and unexpected health problems, and I had some, um, interesting issues of my own. (All fine now.) I got back to some conventions — and, oh, how I had missed cons!

I’m delighted to announce officially that the Points books — Point of Hopes, Point of Knives, Point of Dreams, Fairs’ Point, and Point of Sighs — will be moving from Lethe Press to Catherine Lundoff at Queen of Swords Press, and the reissue will culminate with a brand-new novella, currently scheduled for the end of 2024. While I remain grateful to Steve Berman at Lethe for persuading me that I could continue the Points books after Lisa’s death, Lethe has been winding down its business for the last couple of years, and it’s time to move on.

The idea that became Night Sky Mine had its origins in a piece of legal boilerplate. At the time, I was working part time for an older lawyer who was winding down his practice; he needed someone to answer phones, type letters, and prepare a few documents for his remaining clients, most of whom were elderly. (It was through this job that I learned how to read and verify Medicare statements.) In this case, I was typing a statement of trustee powers, and got to the point where the trustee was allowed to sell, buy, mortgage, or hypothecate [the covered property].

I started writing queer characters and themes for the reason that I hear many other LGBTQIA+ writers cite: these were the stories that I wanted to read. When I sold my first novel, in 1984, most of us added, these were the stories I wanted to read, and that I couldn’t find anywhere else. These days, I hear that less, and there has certainly been a boom in queer SF/F. You don’t have to be part of a whisper network to hear which books have queer content, or learn to interpret publishers’ coded references.

I recently stumbled across an inexpensive ebook copy of Arthur C. Clarke’s Dolphin Island, which is a book I read to destruction when I was a young teenager. (Literally. The paperback eventually fell apart, which is why I no longer had a copy.) Going back to those books is always an iffy proposition, or at least it is for me. Tastes change, styles change, and you never know what unremembered dealbreaker is going to appear in the text. But I still had very fond, if blurry, memories of the book, and it was, as I said, inexpensive, so…

The new edition of Death by Silver will be out this month from Queen of Swords Press, and to celebrate I thought I'd post a brief excerpt. To set the stage: Ned Mathey, a University-trained metaphysician with a brand-new practice, has been hired by the father of a former schoolmate to remove a curse from the family silver. He didn't find one, but shortly thereafter the client was killed by a blow from one of the family's silver candlesticks.

I have always been a plotter — that is, in the great debate between the plotters, the people who work out their plot in advance of the writing, and the pantsers, the people who work out their plot as they are writing, I’ve always come down firmly on the side of the plotters. It’s not a moral judgment, or even an aesthetic one, it’s what’s always worked best for me.

I’m delighted to announce that Amy Griswold’s and my gay Victorian fantasy-mysteries, Death By Silver and A Death at the Dionysus Club, are being reprinted by Queen of Swords Press. Death By Silver will be available later this spring, and A Death at the Dionysus Club will be out in 2024. They’ll be available in both ebook and trade paper, and we’re looking forward to the relaunch of the series. 

It’s that time again, between the Solstice and the New Year, when the sun stands still in its rising point and the holidays come thick and fast. It’s the one time of the year when I make some effort to cook “properly” — to have more than one side dish at a meal instead of the stir-fries and one-pot recipes I rely on most of the year. This year, I’ve been given a Petit Jean ham (well, a half-ham, which is still a remarkable hunk of pork; it’s from an Arkansas smokehouse and the name is pronounced “petty-gene”).

So now that Twitter’s new owner has set the place on fire, I have established a new outpost on Mastodon — @blueterraplane@wandering.shop. This instance has quite a lot of SF/F people on it, and so far seems free of drama. (Of course, the minute I post this, something is bound to happen. But I live in hope.) I’ve already had a nice chat about sock knitting patterns, though.