Over the years we — that’s Sharon Lee and Steve Miller — have done a pretty fair amount of traveling for our fiction. We’ve been Guests of Honor at conventions around the country, we’ve been to riverside hotels and motels in Canada and a pondside geese-infested hotel in Kansas City. We’ve crossed international borders in a Blazer loaded down with books and in a Subaru carrying a small box with all of our awards, ending up in Montreal, Fredericton, Toronto before returning home to Maine. We’ve traveled AMTRAK to dusty Salt Lake City, to beautiful downtown San Jose, to busy Atlanta, to Reno and to Minneapolis and Baltimore and Chicago and … well, you get the idea.
Around all the traveling, in and among it, before it, between it and during it, we’ve been writing. Those of you who come here to Splinter Universe have likely seen more of that writing than others. Some few of you recall our early short stories in Amazing, Dragon Magazine, and Fantasy Book. Some were with us already, with Kinzel under their reading belt when Agent of Change came out, and others didn’t meet us until Plan B. Then there were some of you who came to us when we started the adventure of Fledgling and later Saltation, live on the web.
What’s true is that we now have readers who are searching out the rare stuff, and others waiting for the next novel, which is in progress. Yet that’s a wait and one thing we hear over and over again is that our fans are waiting for more from Lee & Miller — sometimes the day after the latest book is just out.
So we’ve been thinking about the heady days of Fledgling, when something new was always just around the corner for our fans, and we’ve decided to expand the mission of Splinter Universe to include at least a new story a month. Not just the bits and pieces we’ve set aside as we were writing others things and displaying here hit or miss as we have been (so yeah, we WILL SO be putting up the other alternate Klamath start RSN!) but at least one new Lee & Miller story here, each month.
Not all of the new monthly stories will be Liaden stories, not all of them will be science fiction — but they will be new from Lee & Miller. While we like writing our novels, we discover over time that writing short fiction helps keep the novels fresh as well, and so rather than working on two novels simultaneously, for the near future we’re going to be collaborating more closely on one at a time. The short fiction idea backlog has grown tremendously over the years and now is a good time to take to odd day off and flesh out or finish these starts.
In addition to our own work here we expect to continue with our previous experiment of having the occasional guest story, so you’ll have an additional reason to come by frequently.
How can you help? First, by reading and enjoying the fiction we post here. If you really like something you can even tell your friends or nominate it for an award. Second — you can donate directly on a story page if you like it (thus giving us useful and particular feedback) or you can use the sidebar donation button to support Splinter Universe as a whole. For now donations for guest stories will go entirely to the author of those stories by their chosen paylink, so you’ll donate at the end of their stories.
Speaking of travel, I should mention that we’ll use upcoming Splinter Universe donations to help pay for our trips to our next several conventions. In our sights right now are Boskone, which we travel to most every February, and DetCon in July, and on the distant horizon, a cross country train trip to SasQuan, in Spokane, come August of next year.
Thanks for stopping by, and thanks for all the support.
Sharon and Steve
