Little Willow has returned with a nice list of some SF YA - check it out in the comments from one of my earlier posts on this topic. I see Scott Westerfield prominently listed - so all hail Scott for keeping the SF coming!

A copy of Eliot Fintushel's Breakfast with the Ones You Love is winging its way here courtesy Bantam. One of the folks over there noticed my post (a Bookslut fan) and wondered if I would take a look at it even though they published it for adults. The protagonist is a telepathic teenage girl and she meets a guy who is building a rocket ship in an an abandoned part of the local Sears. (Here's the SF.com review.) It sounds pretty interesting from the reviews I've read so I'm looking forward to checking it out. It's published by Spectra (div of RH) which apparently does not separate YA titles from adult titles (they have no YA division for SF). I'm wondering why they couldn't have cross listed this title in the children's catalogs as an adult title YAs might enjoy (I see this with Bloomsbury all the time.) Odd - I'll keep ya posted on how it reads.

Also, Nick Mamatas' (of Clarkesworld) Under My Roof is on its way in my direction from Soft Skull Press. This book, also featuring a YA protagonist, is "the story of telepathic tween Herbert Weinberg, whose father Daniel decides to strike a blow for freedom by building a nuclear device, planting it in the lawn jockey in his front yard, and declaring independence from the United States." Okay - near future setting, heavy on the science so clearly it is SF. Soft Skull does not market any titles strictly to YAs however (it would narrow the field too much), so I missed this one as well. Again - I'll keep ya posted.

In the midst of my great search for YA SF, I realized something when reading the newly released list of stories for the upcoming collection Best American Fantasy. If you read Jason Sanford's reasons behind creating the Million Writers Award, it is largely because literary stories published online seem to have no chance of ever making the printed "Best of..." collections. Here's the moneyshot:

However, despite publishing what I believe to be the best fiction on the internet, storySouth ran up against one big problem: Many people still believed that online publishing isn't as legitimate as anything that is printed on actual paper.

I pointed out to him that storySouth had an editorial process equal to that of print literary journals, that we published many of the same authors who also found homes in print journals, and that we had a far greater distribution than most print journals (which usually only publish between 500 and a 1,000 copies per issue). None of these points carried any weight with him.

Meanwhile, over at Best American Fantasy, here is one of the qualifications: "A work of respectable literary quality first published in a U.S. or Canadian periodical (magazines, anthologies, websites, etc.)" Right off the bat, the first story listed is from Identity Theory. Strange Horizons also has two stories listed. So is it just the strictly nongenre folks who are resistant to web publishing? It doesn't surprise me that the SFF folks would be more open - I mean really, resistance to change wouldn't do well in stories that thrive on exposing and accepting differences.

I just submitted another excerpt from my AK flying novel to an online journal - we'll see what happens. This one is all about having the Interior AK Dead Body Contract. It's one of the truer stories in the novel, but that doesn't mean it's easy to take. Some things you just have to write about though - I mean really, the dead body contract? Could anyone make that stuff up?

Come to think of it, there's probably a good SFF story in there.....