Let Me Write A Story About YOU...

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As the Indiegogo funding campaign for Stories For Chip moves into its last days, editors Nisi Shawl and Bill Campbell have unveiled more rewards for the well-heeled, including three bespoke short-short stories (or flash fictions, as they're called nowadays) written by me.

I'll explain what a bespoke story is in just a second.  First, a little background:

Stories For Chip is a festschrift (a book of writings honoring a worthy individual while that person is still alive) celebrating the life and works of Samuel R. Delany, who commonly goes by the nickname "Chip."  Chip is one of the best and most influential writers in the history of science fiction.  He's also cut quite a swath in the circles of criticism and gay pornography.  Anyone reading this blog probably knows quite a bit about the man.

Despite the title, the book contains a mixture of fiction and non-fiction.  My own contribution is an essay titled, "On My First Reading of The Einstein Intersection."  I also appear as a character in a reprint of Eileen Gunn's semitrue metafictional "Michael Swanwick and Samuel R. Delany at the Joyce Kilmer Service Area, March 2005." Here, in near-alphabetical order are all the other pieces:

Introduction by Kim Stanley RobinsonChristopher Brown – Festival
Chesya Burke – For Sale: Fantasy Coffin
Roz Clarke – Haunt-type Experience
Kathryn Cramer – Characters in the Margins of a Lost Notebook
Vincent Czyz – Hamlet’s Ghost Sighted in Frontenac, KS
Junot Díaz – Nilda
Geetanjali Dighe – The Last Dying Man
Timmel Duchamp – Real Mothers, a Faggot Uncle, and the Name of the Father: Samuel R. Delany’s Feminist Revisions of the Story of SF
Hal Duncan – An Idyll in Erewhyna
Fabio Fernandes – Eleven Stations
Jewelle Gomez – Be Three
Eileen Gunn – Michael Swanwick and Samuel R. Delany at the Joyce Kilmer Service Area, March 2005
Nick Harkaway – Billy Tumult
Ernest Hogan – Guerilla Mural of a Siren’s Song
Nalo Hopkinson & Nisi Shawl – Jamaica Ginger
Walidah Imarisha – Walking Science Fiction: Samuel Delany and Visionary Fiction
Alex Jennings – Heart of Brass
Tenea D. Johnson – Each Star a Sun to Invisible Planets
Ellen Kushner – Delany Story
Claude Lalumiere – Empathy Evolving as a Quantum of Eight-Dimensional Perception
Isiah Lavender – Delany Encounters
devorah major – Voice Prints
Haralambi Markov – Holding Hands with Monsters
Anil Menon – Clarity
Carmelo Rafala – Song for the Asking
Kit Reed – Kickenders
Benjamin Rosenbaum – The First Gate of Logic
Geoff Ryman – Capitalism in the 22nd Century
Alex Smith – Clones
Sheree Renee Thomas – River Clap Your Hands
Kai Ashante Wilson – Legendaire

So... bespoke fiction.  Like bespoke shirts, bespoke fiction is custom-made to fit you. I've contributed up to three stories of roughly 500 words length, certainly no more than a thousand, based on information that the buyer provides about himself, herself, or a loved one.  The buyer gets the original typescript, signed and dated by me.  And I'll throw in the right to post it on your Web page, copy it into your Christmas letter, write it on the side of your barn -- and/or any other non-commercial use that may occur to you.

It's kind of like a Tuckerization, except without all the parts of the story that have nothing to do with You.

These are, I should mention, pricey little things.  They're going for two hundred dollars a pop.  But the money is going toward the creation of a book I devoutly wish to read, so I think it's all in a good cause.

You can find the site, order a copy of the book, maybe go for one of the many special donor perks here.

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