It’s been a heck of a busy month, dear readers, which is why this newsletter is late. Not only is November/December the traditional busy season for my day job, but I also just turned in copy edits for The Final Chronicle of Yeneh, and I’m about to dive into copy edits for Tea & Treachery at the Infinite Pantry. That’s on top of travel and all the usual busy-ness of the holiday season.

Most excitingly, Tea & Treachery now has a cover!! Keep scrolling and you’ll be the first to see it.

I’ve seen the cover art for Yeneh, too—and it’s spectacular! I can’t wait to share that with you. Soon!

I do love this time of year, despite all the work and stress: the cheerful lights, curling up with a cup of hot tea and reading a book, snuggling into sweaters and warm blankets. I hope you’re staying warm and cozy, and reading some great books. 

Books make great holiday gifts

A little reminder that the best way to support your favorite authors this holiday season is to gift people books! Better yet if you buy them at your local indie bookstore, or online at Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookstores and not Jeff Bezos’s yacht fund.

Also, to give you fair warning, prices will be going up on the Brennex paperbacks come January. Paper and printing costs have been rising, and I need higher cover prices to compensate. (Ebook prices won’t be changing.) So if you’ve been wanting to pick up Warped State, Dissonant State, and Ravenous State in paperback, or gift them to someone, now is a very good time to do that! 

Cover reveal!

The cover for Tea & Treachery at the Infinite Pantry is ready for the world, and I wanted to share it with you first:
 

I think it really captures the coziness and warmth of the book with the cinnamon buns, bread, and tea (all important to this food-centered story), the mischief of the Pantry’s cats, and hints of foreboding (the “treachery” part of the title).

I hope it whets your appetite (pun definitely intended)! I’ll have more to share about the book next month. Pre-orders will be ready soon, too, and I’ll let you know as soon as they are.

For now, though, I have a few other bits of news:

Story sale!

I’ve officially sold my story “Worlds Bloom Through the Cracks” to the TRUNK anthology! “Trunk” is writer jargon for stories that need to be set aside for the long term. Sometimes it’s because those stories aren’t working, but often it’s because that story hasn’t been lucky enough to find the right publisher, and the writer is giving up on it, e.g. “I really love this story, but I can’t sell it, so I’m afraid it’s destined for the trunk.”

Editors reject stories for all sorts of reasons. It might not be to their personal taste—editors are humans, too, and humans have different opinions about art, even great art! Or it might be a great story that’s not the right fit for the magazine’s vibe, or it’s a story about zombie mermaids and they just bought a different zombie mermaid story, or (too often) they had to decide between several stories they loved but only had the budget for one.

So I love the theme for this anthology. The only requirement is that stories have received a certain number of rejections from other publications. I suspect it will be full of diamonds in the rough, like this one of mine. The editor, B. Morris Allen, is very hands on, really putting in the work to make sure each story shines its brightest, so I went through several rounds of edits on the story before signing the contract. The story is definitely stronger for it!

And a hard-won contract signed

I rarely mind going back and forth with editors to make a story better, like with the one above. What I don’t love is back and forth for negotiating contracts. Unfortunately, I’ve done that recently, too.

Earlier this year, a new publisher called Must Reads Media (MRM) bought all of the “big three” legacy print SFF magazines—Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, and Analog—among other non-SFF magazines. Analog is a frequent publisher for me, and I waited trepidatiously alongside other writers to see how MRM would manage these venerable magazines.

By the time I got an acceptance from them—my 4th from Analog!—it was clear the answer to that question was “not great.” Their boilerplate contract was terrible, grabbing lots of uncommon rights for themselves and giving as little as possible to the writers. P. A. Cornell, Scott Edelman, and Benjamin Kinney have written publicly about their unpleasant negotiations for their contracts, which Patty and Scott ultimately couldn’t resolve to their satisfaction and, heartbreakingly, had to walk away. Patty Cornell in particular deserves huge kudos for drawing attention to their problematic behavior, and I’m 100% sure her efforts put me at a better starting point by the time my turn came around.

MRM agreed easily to some of my requests that others had already fought over—but they hadn’t made those changes default in their new contracts. These are things I shouldn’t have had to ask to have removed, and newer writers who aren’t familiar with standard short story contracts might unknowingly give away rights they probably shouldn’t. (I don’t doubt this is on purpose.) I’d hoped that being a repeat Analog author might bolster my negotiating position, but instead, MRM repeatedly pointed out language that was the same or similar as my 3 earlier Analog contracts. That was true! And I never challenged those parts before, because Analog was a reputable magazine and (as a much newer writer selling one of my first stories) it wouldn’t have occurred to me that they were a problem. Even with my later contracts, I didn’t take the time to argue clauses that I might have challenged from an unknown magazine, because I trusted Analog and their publisher, and knew what to expect from them.

I did not expect or plan for them being bought by a new, untrusted entity.

I’m not a lawyer, and I shouldn’t have to be. Hiring a lawyer for this would have cost far more than I was making for the story. It’s hard to decide exactly where to draw a line in the sand with these sorts of things, despite having a whole community of writer-friends discussing it behind the scenes and generously sharing their insights. Again, if I were a new writer without connections in the community, I might well have signed the first version they gave me, losing a whole bunch of rights and gaining unnecessary liability.

The end of this saga is that I finally reached a contract I was willing to sign. “A Chatbot’s Guide to Self-Respect” is scheduled for the January issue. I like this story, and I still love and respect the editorial team at Analog, who haven’t changed and aren’t involved in business decisions. I’m excited for you to read it, even though that excitement is tempered by the stress and disappointment caused by the new owners’ bad behavior.

My favorite holiday movies

After that, let’s end on a more cheerful note! Though I’m not religious, I’m a big fan of Christmas in its more secular mode; to me, it’s a celebration of the solstice and the arrival of winter with a bunch of fun pop culture trappings. It brings us warmth and excitement just when the world is getting literally dark and cold.

One tradition I love is the Christmas/holiday movie. Since about 2020, I’ve been hooked on holiday rom-coms in particular. Here are a few favorites that brighten my day every time:

A Muppet Christmas Carol: A classic, this will always be my favorite Christmas Carol adaptation and my favorite Xmas movie period. I must have watched it a dozen times, and it never loses its charm. Full of muppet goofiness while flawlessly weaving in elements from Dickens’ original, plus spot-on acting from Michael Caine who treats his muppet co-stars with absolute seriousness.

A Castle for Christmas: This is pure rom-com fluff with all the trappings, including being set in Scotland. It’s well-written enough to be the good kind of cheesy, but the main appeal is Cary Elwes (of Princess Bride fame) as a grumpy, cash-strapped duke. He and Brooke Shields have great chemistry. Bonus points for giving us a middle-aged romance!

Single All the Way: I could write a whole blog post on my complicated feelings about movies that “take X genre but make it gay,” but I thoroughly enjoy this one, especially because it has a whole ensemble cast of quirky family members with not a homophobe in sight, and everyone is rooting for the couple to get together. Gay couples deserve cheesy holiday rom-coms too!

Round and Round: I squealed in delight when my wife discovered this one: it’s a time loop Hanukkah rom-com, and it’s actually a fantastic movie in its own right. I love a good time loop, and this goes meta about solving it in a way that’s very satisfying. The characters all take Hanukkah seriously to the same degree most Christians take Christmas seriously, which I found hilarious in a good way, because the writers clearly know that no one in real life does this. It stars Vic Michaelis, who I love from Dropout, and they’re excellent here. This one somehow feels more queer to me than Single All the Way despite not being explicitly so (except for the main character’s lesbian sister; Michaelis is nonbinary afaik, but they play a cis woman here); that’s probably because it quietly overturns a bunch of cultural and genre norms. I need more people to watch one this so I can talk about it.

Die Hard: Last but obviously not least. Yes, it’s a Christmas movie. I don’t need to expend pixels extolling its virtues; if you somehow haven’t seen it, please go fix that!

And your cat picture(s)

I missed sending a newsletter in November, so here’s a two-fer. There are two cats in this picture. Can you find them? 

Charlie is the obvious one. We were doing some tidying and reorganizing, and Charlie loves a good piece of cardboard the way most cats love boxes, so he got to sit on this one for a while.

Ada, meanwhile, loves to nest, and she made a perfect one in the pile of winter gear we were trying to organize:

Here’s wishing you a warm, cozy December and a happy New Year!

Until next time,

Jo Miles

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