Blogowych - Stephen Kotowych's Weblog

Awards Season 2012 - For Your Consideration...

2012-02-01T06:30:00.000-05:00

Hello all -

At this time of year it's not only award season in Hollywood but in the SFnal world as well! That's right--it's time to think about your Hugo, Nebula, and Aurora Award voting for the 2012 science fiction award season.

Normally I'd post my stories for people to read online...but for contractual reasons it looks like I probably can't. So, for anyone who might be nominating or voting for the Hugo, Nebula, or Canada's Aurora Award please SEND ME AN E-MAIL and I'm happy to provide you with a copy in your preferred e-format for your consideration.

So, what do I have eligible for awards this year?

NEBULA AWARD - Nominations due by Wednesday, February 15th, 2012, 11:59pm PST
Novelette category:

Kotowych, Stephen. "Under the Shield." InterGalactic Medicine Show, Issue 24, August 2011

Short story category:
Kotowych, Stephen. "A Time for Raven." Interzone #236, September/October 2011

HUGO AWARD - Nominations due by Sunday, March 11, 2012, 11:59pm PDT
Novelette category:
Kotowych, Stephen. "Under the Shield." InterGalactic Medicine Show, Issue 24, August 2011

Short story category:
Kotowych, Stephen. "A Time for Raven." Interzone #236, September/October 2011

PRIX AURORA AWARD - Nominations due Saturday, March 31, 2012, 11:59:59 PM PST
Best Short Fiction - English:

Kotowych, Stephen. "Under the Shield." InterGalactic Medicine Show, Issue 24, August 2011

Remember: if you're considering nominating and/or voting for the Nebulas, Hugos, or the Aurora Awards SEND ME AN E-MAIL and I'm happy to provide you with a copy in your preferred e-format for your consideration.

Thanks for your consideration!

- S.

Overheard at the Stop-Watch Gang Meeting - 22 January 2012

2012-01-24T06:58:00.000-05:00

"Usually when someone says 'Johnson' it means they're uncircumcised. Did you know that?"

A: Christmas, an orgasm, and then a big shit? One of these things just doesn't belong here.
B: Christmas?

"Instead of mittens give her a muff. Then you can say: 'She's hiding it in her muff!'"

"Lesbians? That purple chick? Lesbian stuff--that's HOT!"

X: "Some of your names bothered me. 'Nether' made me think of 'nether regions' and got my mind thinking of something else."
Y: "Mittens?"

"Synch, synch a song..."

The First: "It's an arcology."
The Second: "Oncology?"
The Rest: "ARCOLOGY."

"I was going to write 'IT WAS' on an 8x11 piece of paper and make you eat it at the meeting because it was bothering me so much."

My Movember Appeal

2011-11-23T21:26:00.001-05:00

Hello all -

It occurs to me that I’ve gone almost the whole of Movember without hitting you up for a donation! Well, with only 8 days of mo’ seasonleft that changes now!

During November each year, Movember is responsible for the sprouting of moustaches on thousands of men’s faces, in Canada and around the world. With their “Mo’s”, these men raise vital funds and awareness for men's health, specifically prostate cancer.

While I’ve participated in Movember before, this year it has special personal significance for me: a close family member was diagnosed thisyear, just before our wedding. But he’s doing well and has responded to treatment—treatment (and research) made possible in part by fundsraised through events like Movember.

I’m part of Oxford University Press Canada’s mo team again this year, and I’d like to beat my personal best fundraising total of $100. I’mat $80 now, with 8 days of mo’ to go.

I’m also second place on my team, and I would surely love to be King of the Mo this year. The first place guy is $70 ahead of me—plus he’sa red head. You’re not going to let a ginger beat me, are you!?!?

So will you help me?

Please go to http://mobro.co/stephenkotowych for pictures of my mo' (his name is Aramis) and consider a donation: even a $5 donation willgo a long way in helping me reach my goal by the end of the month. If you forgot to get me a birthday present last week (yeah, you know youdid) then a quick donation to my mo’ fund would be a perfect belated gift.

Thank you all, and may the mo’ be with you!

Stephen (and Aramis)

Anne McCaffrey (1 April 1926 - 21 November 2011)

2011-11-22T22:26:00.001-05:00

I have very distinct memories of the spring when I was in Grade 7.

My Grade 7 teacher would hold trivia tournaments at the end of every week and would hand out prizes. Being trivially minded, I won more than my fair share of such prizes (I still have the thesaurus I won as a prize).

One week, bored of the books on tanks and fighter jets that usually seemed to be on offer, I selected a giant bag of Twizzlers which I then spirited home, so that for once I didn't have to share with my three brothers. I hid them in the top drawer of my blue desk, and for years afterward that drawer smelled of Twizzlers whenever I opened it.

What I don't remember as well was where I acquired two other very important items from that spring: a copy of Paul Simon's album The Rhythm of the Saints on cassette, and a hardcover copy of Anne McCaffery's Dragonsdawn. I can still recall the ragged, untrimmed edge of the pages, the first time I'd encountered these in a book. I remember thinking that perhaps whoever had given it to me had got it cheap, as some kind of printer's error copy.

Each night I would read Dragonsdawn until I couldn't keep my eyes open, and then I'd fall asleep listening to 'The Obvious Child' on my knock-of Walkman (listening with the volume almost at pain-inducing levels, so that the drums filled the universe).

But the strongest memory from that spring were my school lunch hours. See, I lived right around the corner from school so I went home each day for lunch. And for that spring when I was reading Dragonsdawn I would inhale my lunch and then, rather than watch cartoons, I would run up to my room, grab a couple of Twizzlers from my secret stash, and flop down on my bed to read Dragonsdawn in the sunshine (I'm sure it must have rained but I only recall sunshine). I would read for as long as I possibly could, often so long that I was late for afternoon classes. More than once I can recall arriving in the school yard, having run full tilt from home, to arrive just as the last student in line was entering the school.

These are wonderful memories, and I still recall how engrossed I was by the book, the smell of Twizzlers, the feeling of the warm sunshine on my bed...

Anne McCaffrey died yesterday, I've just discovered. She was a judge of the Writers of the Future contest and I regret that I was never able to meet her during my trips to the contest week. I would very much like to have told her what that book meant to eleven-year-old Stephen, longing to be a science fiction writer himself.

Thank you for that book, Anne, and for the happy memories I associate with it. I only hope that someday some book of mine can mean as much to someone as yours did to me when I was young.

Sliocht sleachta ar shliocht bhur sleachta.

- S.

2011 Prix Aurora Award Winners

2011-11-20T20:27:00.001-05:00

SFcontario was this year's host of CanVention, the annual national Canadian sci-fi convention. That means its where Canada's national award for works of the fantastic--the Prix Aurora Awards--are handed out, and it was a lot of fun to finally get to attend one of these award ceremonies.

Congratulations to all the winners! Special mention should be made of Derwin Mak and Eric Choi, who won for their editing of The Dragon and the Stars, from DAW Books. Derwin and Eric were founding (now emeritus) members of The Stop-Watch Gang and we're all thrilled for them!

And a special congratulations should be given to Suzanne Church, a fellow member of the Stop-Watch Gang, who came within 5 votes of winning herself an Aurora Award. Great work, Suzanne!

Winners are listed below, highlighted in bold italics.

- S.

Best English Novel
Black Bottle Man by Craig Russell, Great Plains Publications
Destiny’s Blood by Marie Bilodeau, Dragon Moon Press
Stealing Home by Hayden Trenholm, Bundoran Press
Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay, Viking Canada
Watch, by Robert J. Sawyer, Penguin Canada

Best English Short Story
The Burden of Fire by Hayden Trenholm, Neo-Opsis #19
Destiny Lives in the Tattoo’s Needle by Suzanne Church, Tesseracts Fourteen, EDGE
The Envoy by Al Onia, Warrior Wisewoman 3, Norilana Books
Touch the Sky, They Say by Matt Moore, AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review, NovemberYour Beating Heart by M. G. Gillett, Rigor Amortis, Absolute Xpress

Best English Poem / Song
The ABCs of the End of the World by Carolyn Clink, A Verdant Green, The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box
Let the Night In by Sandra Kasturi, Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead, EDGE
Of the Corn: Kore’s Innocence by Colleen Anderson, Witches & Pagans #21
The Transformed Man by Robert J. Sawyer, Tesseracts Fourteen, EDGE
Waiting for the Harrowing by Helen Marshall, ChiZine 45

Best English Graphic Novel
Goblins, Tarol Hunt, goblinscomic.com
Looking For Group, Vol. 3 by Ryan Sohmer and Lar DeSouza
Stargazer, Volume 1 by Von Allan, Von Allan Studio
Tomboy Tara, Emily Ragozzino, tomboytara.com

Best English Related Work
Chimerascope, Douglas Smith (collection), ChiZine Publications
The Dragon and the Stars, edited by Derwin Mak and Eric Choi, DAW
Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead, edited by Nancy Kilpatrick, EDGE
On Spec, edited by Diane Walton, Copper Pig Writers Society
Tesseracts Fourteen, edited by John Robert Colombo and Brett Alexander Savory, EDGE

Best Artist (Professional and Amateur)
Lynne Taylor Fahnestalk, Brekky cover art, On Spec Fall
Erik Mohr, cover art for ChiZine Publications
Christina Molendyk, Girls of Geekdom Calendar for Argent Dawn Photography
Dan O’Driscoll, cover art for Stealing Home
Aaron Paquette, A New Season cover art, On Spec Spring

My SFContario Panel Schedule

2011-11-18T07:47:00.001-05:00

SFContario begins tonight (Ramada Plaza Hotel, 300 Jarvis Street, Toronto) and runs for the weekend. Here's my schedule:

Targeting the Appropriate Market – Sat. 11 AM Parkview

Often selling a story is all about finding the right market. How doyou label what you're selling? How do you find out about markets andidentify the right one? Our panelists discuss sources of calls forsubmission, networking methods, using rejections to refine yourtargeting strategies, and other techniques of getting your story infront of the person who will buy it. (Madeline Ashby, Karen Dales,Stephen Kotowych, Jana Paniccia (M), Mike Rimar)

Reading – Sat. 12:30 Gardenview

Writer's Groups Behind the Scene – Sat. 8 PM, Solarium

Ever wonder how a writer's group really works? Come and seeToronto-area writer's group The Stopwatch Gang in action! The membersof SWG will hold one of their no-holds barred critique sessions atSFContario this year and want you to come watch and see how it's done!A short reading of a first draft story will be followed by aroundtable critique by the SWG members. An audience critique will alsobe encouraged, and questions and tips for setting up your own writer'sgroup will follow. (Brad Carson, Suzanne Church, Costi Gurgu, IanKeeling, Stephen Kotowych, Tony Pi, Mike Rimar)

This year SFContario promises to be a great one. Guests include Karl Schroeder, John Scalzi, Gardner Dozois, David G. Hartwell, and Kathryn Cramer.

In addition, SFContario is also this year's Canadian National Science Fiction convention (“the CanVention”), and the Aurora Awards will be presented there. Good luck to all the nominees, but especially to my fellow Stop-Watch Gang member Suzanne Church, who's nominated in the Best Short Fiction category.

See you there!

- S.

Judging a Book By Its Cover in the Era of Amazon.com

2011-10-11T18:04:00.000-04:00

I love that moment when you hear something which makes total, perfect sense but which wouldn't ever have occurred to you in a million years.

I also hate those moments because they make me wish I was smarter, more observant, or just plain cleverer.

One such moment occurred today when I was reading an interview with Tim Powers on the JohnnyDeppReads website.

Tim was being interviewed about his book On Stranger Tides being adapted into the latest Pirates of the Caribbean juggernaut. There was a question about the various covers the book has had in its several print versions:

Tim : The first edition, from Ace Books, back in 1987, and then the paperback from Ace in 1988 and a limited edition from Subterranean Press, two or three years ago all used this one painting by Jim Gurney which is a gorgeous painting, I’ve got a print of it on my wall, of a skeleton in pirate garb with a parrot on his shoulder, holding a sword, and he’s on the deck of ship and you can see that one of his forearm bones is broken and tied up with a rag and there’s coins and a skull around his feet and a broken sword hilt and behind him you can see the rigging and forecastle of the ship, kind of receding in mist. It’s just a beautiful painting! And I think whatever success the original printing had was probably because of the picture. I mean you walk past that book in a book store and think “Damn, I have to read THAT! I never heard of this writer…but look at that picture!" Now a days, I think publishers don’t want that kind of painting, [emphasis added - ed.] the kind that needs to be eight or ten inches tall, and five inches wide to be comprehensible because I think publishers are calculating that the majority of customers DON’T see books in bookstores. [emphasis added - ed.]

The majority of customers see books as thumbnails on an Amazon page on their monitor and a giant cool picture like that will simply be a blur if it’s a one inch high thumbnail. And so I think the style is changing, the style in the cover art to be most effective seen one inch tall. [emphasis added - ed.] Sort of postage stamp standards, I think this is kind of a shame because there have been some book covers that every now and then you can put your finger in to hold your place in the book and you turn back to look at the cover again and think Yeah WOW ...COOL. It’s sort of like record albums when they used to be the 33 1/3 real records. The album was a good foot square. On "Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band" or "Big Brother and the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills" or Jimi Hendrix’ "Axis", all of which were just gorgeous pictures. But now “albums” are little four inch square CDs and those big old pictures are not really the style anymore.

Of course! This makes TOTAL sense! And yet this is the first time I've heard it mentioned anywhere, despite my having been following several on-going discussions over the last several months about the rise of the self-published ebook and the desperate need for a good looking cover to accompany even an ebook (as in, don't let the author slap something together with crappy type in Photoshop, but rather still pay the cost upfront to have a good looking cover designed so that readers--who, let's face it, ALWAYS judge a book by its cover--will feel that this is a work of quality, rather than something somebody just cranked off and threw up on Amazon or Smashwords.)

Now, I feel like this is an absolute and total victory for science fiction and fantasy author. Why? Because, let's face it, a great many sci-fi and fantasy books have had, and continue to have, some pretty garish covers. You can wander through any sci-fi/fantasy section in any bookstore and see dozens of high fantasy books with cookie-cutter covers (often by the same very famous artist) trying to look like (and I suppose fool readers into buying as a result) some other bestselling, on-going Epic High Fantasy Series. These days you don't often find the barbarian-saving-the-chainmail-bikini-clad-damsel-from-the-necromancer-type covers that were for so long the mainstay of the genre, but you can pick up dozens of deep space hard sf books written and printed in the last 5-10 years that have hand-painted space ship covers that might easily have been from the 60s or 70s.

Now, I know that there's a segment of the market that likes (and perhaps even insists upon) these kinds of covers. When they're done well they can work--I, for one--am a HUGE fan of Stephan Martiniere's work (and not just because he provided the amazing cover for Writers of the Future XXIII...), though I confess that's an exception. But let's face it: the demographics have changed. More women buy books than do men (so chainmail bikinis out right there) and fantasy outsells science fiction by a healthy margin (bye bye acrylic space ships). And we live in an age of slick minimalism in graphic design: just look at any of the most popular websites for proof. Book covers need to keep pace.

The Harry Potter series notwithstanding, what have the cover designs of the most popular fantasy titles looked like over the last 5-10 years? The strong, central conceptual images of the Twilight series (which appeal heavily to who--oh, yes, the female book buying public!) If you look at a number of Kelly Armstrong's reissued books, the new covers are shameless Twilight ripoffs. And the Game of Thrones series has slick new--what?--strong, central conceptual images for the reprints of back list and the newest volume in the series. Gone are the sweeping mountain vistas and hand-drawn depictions of Smaug on the latest editions of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings that came out around the movie: everyone I saw on the subway had the tone-on-tone black covers (well, those who didn't have the editions with Elijah Wood on the cover, I mean.)

All of these covers will look good in that little thumbnail on Amazon, and will appeal to the large group of people who might like to read a fantasy or sci-fi book but who can't get over the stigma of reading a book with a cover that looks like some installment of the Dungeons & Dragons rules guides. Think of books that have had crossover success--The Time Traveller's Wife; Oryx & Crake, etc.--and you'll see that "mainstream" books that deal with sci-fi ideals get a grown-up, sophisticated cover, and are instantly taken more seriously.

Yes, of course, a great book can overcome a bad cover, but if we're talking about ebooks and anybody-can-do-it e-publishing through Amazon you need some way, ANY WAY, of rising above the chaff and get your book noticed. I think that giving your ebook a strong, central conceptual image that will scan well visually at Amazon thumbnail-size is a step in the right direction.

You can read the full interview with Tim Powers--chalked full of good stuff--here.

- S.

Guest Post on IGMS Blog Available Now

2011-09-13T08:43:00.001-04:00

Hello all -

Just got word that my guest post on the OSC's Intergalactic Medicine Show blog, Side-Show Freaks, is now live.

Each month, IGMS asks the authors in the current issue to write a short essay about the creation of their story, the inspiration behind it, the process of writing it, etc. I wrote up a little something about how I came up with the idea for "Under the Shield."

It's funny when writers write about writing. I've always assumed that they go out of their way to make it seem that the process of coming up with ideas is really intensive and mysterious, that the execution is a combination of deliberate thematic planning and the workings of an inscrutable muse who either deigns to visit, or not, leaving them paralyzed and unable to work.

Now, I certainly think that some writers go out of their way (*cough*"literary"authors*cough*) to make it seem this way, but in writing about the process behind "Under the Shield" I found that just describing the process in a linear fashion might give it this kind of pretentious appearance.

I was at least honest about the themes appearing to me as I planned and wrote the story (this was always what Tim Powers said should happen, not the other way around). But what I didn't mention in the blog post (but perhaps should have now that I think of it) is that the "process" as such didn't really exist. I just sort of knew all this stuff about Tesla and one day the whole story (or, at least, the earliest version of it--which involved Tsarist agents killing a girl to keep Tesla quiet, and which didn't make sense upon further reflection) kind of flashed in my mind.

Now, I don't know that I call that "the muse" at work, because that was just the idea and a VERY rough plot and those are a dime a dozen, those are easy. The writing itself, and the reworking of the plot (hashed out in part at my dining room table with help from Tony Pi and Costi Gurgu during our Stop-Watch Gang 24-Hour Write-a-thon), was bloody hard work.

There was no waiting for inspiration to get to work. Just me at the keyboard, trying to figure out why this girl ended up dead in the subway, and what on earth it had to do with Tesla's death-ray. And at least genre authors are honest and will tell you that it's 99% hard work.

Doesn't sound quite so sexy now, does it?

You can find the post at the IGMS blog here.

- S.

Sneak Peak at "A Time for Raven" Artwork

2011-08-31T10:28:00.003-04:00

Sweet!

Andy Cox just emailed me the artwork that will accompany "A Time for Raven" in an upcoming (September?) issue of Interzone. I think it looks great, and it certainly captures the main elements of the story.

I've been very, very luck with all the artwork that's been produced to accompany my various publications. Someday I want a whole wall covered in framed art inspired by my stories...

- S.

Tangent Online Reviews "Under the Shield"

2011-08-23T07:34:00.017-04:00

Tangent Online--one of the web's premiere review venues for short SF--has reviewed IGMS #24, and with it "Under the Shield". Some of the highlights from the review:

You never know what to expect, and that intrigues...

This story develops well as a mystery and I found myself intrigued by the plot, the clues and the protagonist. I liked it well enough to keep reading and not to skim – and that’s something...

What keeps the reader sidetracked and distracted in a clever way is the mix of futuristic science and the pre-world war history. Steampunk – I like it...

I enjoyed the steady tension in this tale. The author captured the fear and dread imposed on a society under a government’s heavy thumb that controls every aspect of daily life...

One thing I hadn't expected was that the reviewer classifies the story as belonging to the steampunk sub-genre, something I hadn't considered. When I think of steampunk, I think my mind is drawn primarily to the costumers I've encountered at various conventions--all gear-driven computers and goggles (which seem to me to be the de rigueur steampunk fashion accessory). But thinking about it, I suppose steampunk isn't all brass nozzles and mechanical dragons. And though there are no corsets or steam-powered tophats to be found anywhere in my tale, I guess I can see how one might categorize "Under the Shield" as a part of this SF zeitgeist.

Huh. I wrote a steampunk story. Whodah thunk it?

The full review (by Sherry Decker) can be found on the Tangent site, but a word of caution: the full review contains SPOILERZ!

- S.

LOCUS Likes "Under the Shield"

2011-08-20T05:59:00.000-04:00

Very pleased to discover this morning the first review of "Under the Shield." A big thanks to my friend and fellow WOTFian Stephen Gaskell for the tip!

The review (written by Lois Tilton) appears on the Locus Magazine website. Here's the highlights:

A fascinating and thought-provoking scenario, bringing to mind such diverse events in our own timeline as the initiation of WWI, the Alien and Sedition Acts and the Department of Homeland Security, and the birth of the atomic age. It’s a story of conflicted loyalties and the eternal threat of totalitarianism in the name of security, as well as a murder mystery. This is all good stuff. The scenario, however, is complicated and takes the author a while to set it up; the result is dense and over-compacted. I could definitely see it expanded into a cracking good novel, with all its elements given room to fully work themselves out.

Pretty happy with that! I've heard from a few other readers already and I'm very pleased that people are getting what I was going for with this one. Now, about that novel... ;)

The full review (which includes a plot summary) can be found here.

- S.

'Under the Shield' Now Available at IGMS!

2011-08-09T06:50:00.000-04:00

Hello all -

Very pleased to report that "Under the Shield" is now available on the Intergalactic Medicine Show website. Thanks for the small army of people who emailed to let me know. I'd been checking constantly, but somehow you beat me to it... :)

And seriously--check out the artwork, too, right? Totally rad!

You can find my story here, or by following the image link in the right-hand bar of the blog--the one with Tesla's face on it.

Enjoy!

- S.

New Sale! - "A Time for Raven" to appear in Interzone

2011-08-06T22:57:00.000-04:00

I'm thrilled to announce that my story, "A Time for Raven", has been accepted for publication by Interzone.

That's two sales inside three weeks--a personal best!

I know you're not supposed to have favorites, and that you're supposed to love all your children equally, but I confess that "A Time for Raven" has a very special place in my heart, and I'm stoked that it's found such a good home as IZ.

"A Time for Raven" felt like a big break-through for me, craft-wise, when I wrote it (even though it had another title at the time that it turned out no one liked but me), and I still think its some of my strongest work. It's set in British Columbia, and while I wrote it before I'd ever been to BC, I felt like I was returning to BC the first time I ever visited--I found that a pretty cool experience (though maybe I'd absorbed enough BC scenery and atmosphere watching all those sci-fi TV shows that have been filmed in Vancouver and environs over the last 20 years...)

"A Time for Raven" is also the most fantastical of all my stories, in that everything else I've published thus far has been some variation on science fiction (even "Borrowed Time", which tried to dress up stealing time with quasi-rational pseudo-scientific explanations.) This story is straight-up fantasy, though hopefully not in the way you'd expect.

I've been a fan of Interzone for a long time: they publish fantastic stories (and I'm not just saying that because now one of those is mine...) and stuff that often has a very different sensibility from the kind of stories you find in the American magazines. It's also an absolutely gorgeous magazine physically, probably the best looking in all SF (seriously--it's measurements are 36-24-36.)

For those of you who don't know, Interzone is Britain's longest running science fiction and fantasy magazine, and since 1982 has published the likes of Brian Aldiss, Michael Moorcock, Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, M. John Harrison, Stephen Baxter, Iain M Banks, Jay Lake, Kim Newman, Alastair Reynolds, Harlan Ellison, Greg Egan, Geoff Ryman, Charles Stross, and (a personal fav of mine) John Brunner, amongst others. They've also previously published stories by friends and fellow WOTFians Aliette de Bodard and Stephen Gaskell, and it's great to be in such company.

Not sure what issue the story will appear in, but look for updates here!

- S.

w00t!

2011-08-02T08:01:00.000-04:00

Found out this weekend that my story "Under the Shield" is going to be the cover story for the August issue of Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show.

The story will have a FANTASTIC full-colour illustration to accompany it. I got a sneak peak and it looks AMAZING. I'm not allowed to share until the issue comes out (which should be later this week), but it was drawn by M. Wayne Miller, and you can find samples of his work here.

Great way to start the week!

- S.

Overheard at the Stop-Watch Gang Meeting – July 24, 2011

2011-07-27T06:21:00.001-04:00

“I almost really liked this story.”

A: “Raspberry JELLY!?! That’s how much it bothered me!”
B: “I’m not married to the raspberry—I can change it...”

“Did you leave your scythe in your other pants?”

“Did you say ‘will’? Or ‘pool’? You need to use more four-letter words in your stories.”

“It needs a comedy communist twist.”

“Getting murdered with a lollipop is @#$%ing awesome!”

“Something happened, and it wasn’t until Lenin and Marx were talking that I realized I was bored.”

1: “This is the @#%$ing coolest story you’ve ever written! The world is really, really @#$%ing cool!”
2: “I’m giving him more coffee...”

X: “There’s a lot of stuff ‘at the end of the world.’”
Z: “It’s kind of a crowded place.”

“That’s fine by me—I like my clichés.”

“This is kinda like ‘Jaws’ on weed.”

“Stop stroking the wood!”

Cosplay

2011-07-25T06:25:00.002-04:00

I confess, much like the author of this article, I don’t understand the cosplay thing.

Perhaps it’s a sign of the geek ascendancy in our culture that people with such...predilections can prance freely about in their outlandish costumes without fear of social ostracization or physical retribution. Though, I'm pretty sure everyone still hates LARPers.

My old roommate, a medieval studies PhD, was getting increasingly frustrated by the people showing up in Lord of the Rings costumes at the annual International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He felt it cheapened his chosen area of study, and I’m not sure that I disagree with him. He also hated the Society for Creative Anachronism. He once openly mused about applying for a SSHRC grant to hunt them.

Even in the five years I’ve been attending the Ad Astra con here in Toronto, the number of people in costume (particularly scantily clad 15 year old girls tarted up as this or that anime steampunk girl--ah, where were they when I was a 15-year-old nerd?) has grown by leaps and bounds.

The 501st Legion (Vader’s Fist) costuming guild--people whose primary hobby is to make and dress up in their own STAR WARS armor/costumes, usually of the villains--is a regular attendee, and there is now even a whole programming track for costumers/cosplayer.

Where it used to be the SF literature that drew people to the field and to the cons, its more and more about the media side, and for a great many young people it seems to be about the cosplay. I wonder what this means for the genre as a whole.

Just old I guess.

- S.

NEW SALE! - "Under the Shield" to appear in Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show

2011-07-18T06:49:00.006-04:00

Folks, I'm going to The Show! The Intergalactic Medicine Show, that is. I'm THRILLED to say that I heard back this weekend from the editor at Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, who will be taking my story "Under the Shield" (an alternate history featuring Nikola Tesla) for the August issue.

I've now joined the proud fraternity of fellow Stop-Watch Gang members Tony Pi and Mike Rimar in publishing at IGMS, a goal I first set way back in 2007 when I met the editor at World Fantasy in Saratoga, NY.

This marks my 3rd pro sale so I can consider joining SFWA now. I'm also jazzed because the story is 8700 words and the longer a story is, the harder it is to sell. I likely say this about every story I sell, but I really feel like "Under the Shield" is representative of my best work and really didn't want to have to cut big chunks out to fit markets that don't look at stories over 7500-8000. I'm thrilled that I'll get to share it with readers in my preferred form.

Now: no resting on laurels! Off to finish my submission for the next SWG meeting!

TTFN

- S.

Kickstarter and the Democratization of Patronage

2011-05-26T06:31:00.005-04:00

Scott Gaines, author

So I only heard about Kickstarter the other day but I've already seen several appeals for various things, though none of them so noble (thus far) as a novel.

A friend sent me Scott Gaines' Kickstarter page and since its the first appeal I've come across for funding a novel I thought it made sense to mention it here.

Gaines is the author of two previous books (The Total View of Taftly and Waiting for April) and is currently working on an MFA while finishing his new book, Gaines Green.

He makes an interesting case for support: that we're moving back to an era where artists will need patrons to write and make a living. I've often wondered this myself, given the kind of flux the publishing world is in (or entering into) at the moment. Now, this may or may not end up being the case, but I certainly think its as relevant a hypothesis as any other in the current era. Until it all shakes out we just won't know. (Anyone who tells you they know 100% how publishing and the continued potential for authors of fiction to make a living off their writing is going to turn out is a liar, and is probably trying to sell you something.)

Gaines' point is interesting: that Kickstarter allows the democratization of patronage, by harnessing the internet to allow a cloud of patrons to help fund a work.

I think I'm going to cough up $25 to help him out. See what you think:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2012019408/a-novel-that-wont-quit-needs-one-more-boost

- S.

2011 Aurora Awards

2011-05-16T13:00:00.000-04:00

The finalists for the 2011 Aurora Awards have been announced and a BIG congratulations goes out to my fellow Stop-Watch Gang member, Suzanne Church, for her nomination in the Best English Short Story category! That makes 4 out of the 7 of us who have been Aurora Award finalists now, and marks the second year in a row that The Stop-Watch Gang has had a member on the Aurora ballot. w00t!

Voting will begin in early June through a newly streamlined on-line forms or by mail-in ballot. All ballots must be received by October 15, 2011, Midnight PST.

For complete details visit the Prix Aurora Awards homepage here.

The full list of nominees are:

2011 Prix Aurora Awards

Professional Awards

Best English Novel

Black Bottle Man by Craig Russell, Great Plains Publications

Destiny's Blood by Marie Bilodeau, Dragon Moon Press

Stealing Home by Hayden Trenholm, Bundoran Press

Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay, Viking Canada

Watch, by Robert J. Sawyer, Penguin Canada

Best English Short Story

"Destiny Lives in the Tattoo's Needle" by Suzanne Church, Tesseracts Fourteen, EDGE

"The Burden of Fire" by Hayden Trenholm, Neo-Opsis #19

"The Envoy" by Al Onia, Warrior Wisewoman 3, Norilana Books

"Touch the Sky, They Say" by Matt Moore, AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review, November

"Your Beating Heart" by M. G. Gillett, Rigor Amortis, Absolute Xpress

Best English Poem / Song

"The ABCs of the End of the World" by Carolyn Clink, A Verdant Green, The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box

"Let the Night In" by Sandra Kasturi, Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead, EDGE

"Of the Corn: Kore's Innocence" by Colleen Anderson, Witches & Pagans #21

"The Transformed Man" by Robert J. Sawyer, Tesseracts Fourteen, EDGE

"Waiting for the Harrowing" by Helen Marshall, ChiZine 45

Best English Graphic Novel

Goblins, Tarol Hunt, goblinscomic.com

Looking For Group, Vol. 3 by Ryan Sohmer and Lar DeSouza

Stargazer, Volume 1 by Von Allan, Von Allan Studio

Tomboy Tara, Emily Ragozzino, tomboytara.com

Best English Related Work

Chimerascope, Douglas Smith (collection), ChiZine Publications

The Dragon and the Stars, edited by Derwin Mak and Eric Choi, DAW

Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead, edited by Nancy Kilpatrick, EDGE

On Spec, edited by Diane Walton, Copper Pig Writers Society

Tesseracts Fourteen, edited by John Robert Colombo and Brett Alexander Savory, EDGE

Best Artist (Professional and Amateur)

(An example of each artist’s work is listed below but they are to be judged on the body of work they have produced in the award year)

Lynne Taylor Fahnestalk, "Brekky" cover art, On Spec Fall

Erik Mohr, cover art for ChiZine Publications

Christina Molendyk, Girls of Geekdom Calendar for Argent Dawn Photography

Dan O'Driscoll, cover art for Stealing Home

Aaron Paquette, "A New Season" cover art, On Spec Spring

The Terrifying Power of Nature

2011-03-14T06:20:00.001-04:00

I never really appreciated the raw, uncontrollable power of nature until I tried going surfing in Australia. I went on a calm, sunny day...and nearly drowned. I learned that the sea was more powerful and unforgiving than I could comprehend, and that this was but a single manifestation of nature's power.

And so it was last week with the terrible earthquake and tsunami off the coast of Japan. Untold death and destruction, the collapse of so much modern technological infrastructure that we take for granted. I saw pictures this week that absolutely bogged my mind: freighter ships lifted and deposited in the middle of towns miles inland from the sea; whole villages scoured from the face of the earth; hundreds of shipping containers piled helter skelter like blocks of Lego...

But what perhaps stunned me most, and truly demonstrated for me the incredible destructive power of the event was news that the earthquake appears to have shifted the Earth on its axis and permanently moved Honshu, the main island of Japan.

Reports from the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Italy estimated the 8.9-magnitude quake shifted the planet on its axis by nearly 4 inches (10 centimeters), CNN said. The whole planet.

Kenneth Hudnut, a geophysicist at the US Geological Survey, told CNN: 'At this point, we know that one GPS station moved (8 feet), and we have seen a map from GSI (Geospatial Information Authority) in Japan showing the pattern of shift over a large area is consistent with about that much shift of the land mass.'

- S.

Duffonomics

2011-03-09T06:37:00.022-05:00

No, this isn't a post about Duff Beer. But it about something nearly as cool.

I’ve posted before about the later-day incarnation of Guns N' Roses-—a pale imitation, at best. But reading this article about Duff McKagan’s new wealth management firm for musicians, I was brought momentarily back to the glory days of G’n’F’n’R, of how edgy Appetite for Destruction sounded to my 9-year-old ears (kids would bring the tape—remember tapes?—to school and we would trust someone who knew all the songs thoroughly to turn the volume down whenever there was swearing so we wouldn’t get in trouble from the teachers. Sometimes if we were feeling rebellious we wouldn’t turn the volume all the way down, or we’d Axl get to fuh- before spinning the volume knob on the ghetto blaster—remember ghetto blasters? Rebels, huh?).

My memories of the summer of 1991 are dominated by the single “You Could Be Mine” from the Use Your Illusions albums and the movie Terminator 2. And my Grade 9 year was a sonic competition between Use Your Illusions I & II and Nirvana’s Nevermind, as the waning of sleaze rock and the ascent of grunge dueled for my rock and roll soul.

Now, 20 years later, McKagan--former bass player in Guns N' Roses--is starting his own wealth management firm for musicians. The company, called Meridian Rock, will be headed by McKagan and Andy Bottomsley, a British investor. Their goal is to educate rockers about their finances instead of pandering or lying to them.

In 1994, while sobering up after years of sex-and-drugs-and-rock-n-roll, Duff realized while looking through G N’R financial statements that he had no idea what any of it meant. So he did the most unlikely thing a rock star could do: he went to college. First to Santa Monica Community College, and later to Seattle University's Albers School of Business. He went from not knowing a thing about finance to becoming actively involved in managing his portfolio, which includes everything from stocks and mutual funds to property.

And since word started to circulate in the rock community that Duff actually knew something about all this stuff he’s offered informal, and now formal, advice and representation for the fortunes of rock stars.

Duff realized that most rock stars know nothing about their finances. Some don't want to know -- but others are kept in the dark, or are too self-conscious to ask simple questions. And yet, they were comfortable talking about money matters with McKagan, who was one of their own -- so what if he could bridge the gap between the musicians and the suits?

About a year and a half ago, McKagan met Andy Bottomsley, a venture capitalist, former banker, and music aficionado (he counts indie acts Sonic Youth and Sebadoh among his favorites) and the two hit it off immediately, so much so that they decided to form Meridian Rock together.

What makes Meridian Rock different, McKagan says, is its understanding of the industry.

For example, he says, most bankers overestimate the "window" in which music acts are guaranteed income, which he places at three to five years. The musicians themselves are equally clueless, he adds. "You think the money is going to keep coming," he says. "When you get that big contract, or your record goes platinum and you're selling out concerts, you don't see that it's going to end."

Anyone who's ever seen Behind the Music or Cribs knows that rock stars aren't generally frugal creatures. But they are rarely told, in blunt terms, when they need to cut back, which is one reason why so many go into debt.

"A lot of business managers and attorneys are nurturing that, saying, 'You're the greatest, this is never going to end, the next album is going to be greater,'" says Rick Canny, who manages McKagan's band. "A manager's responsibility is not to tell you, 'In a couple years, you're done.' That's the best way to lose a client."

Musicians tend to surround themselves with intermediaries who make their financial decisions for them. McKagan says Meridian Rock's advisors will talk directly to the talent, in plain and simple terms. The company's three tenets, he notes, are righteousness (i.e., not screwing people over), transparency, and education.

While he admits that not all rockers will be interested in the service, he believes that many want to learn more about finance, but are afraid to admit how little they understand.

I’ve been trying to decide what I find cool about this. Clearly, there's a need for this kind of company. How many musicians have been fleeced or left completely broke by swindlers and/or their own excesses? Just off the top of my head I can think of Sting, Leonard Cohen, James Brown, Michael Jackson, Elton John, Billy Joel...

But I think what appeals to me is the juxtaposition of the two contrasting side to Duff: hard partying, irresponsible rocker and educated financial planner to fellow rockers. Funny where life and circumstance lead sometimes. Seems like he’s doing a bit better than Axl...

- S.

Paleontologists Have Lied to Us!

2011-03-07T06:32:00.002-05:00

Okay, maybe the headline is a little harsh. I'm sure it wasn't intentional, and I'm sure they were doing the best they could. But, once again, I'm reminded of the chief lesson I learned studying the history of science: the history of science is the history of people being wrong about things.

A fossilized sauropod bone, dated by a team of Canadian and U.S. scientists to 64.8 million years ago, appears likely to force a serious rethinking of the demise of dinosaurs, which were supposed to have been wiped out in a catastrophic meteorite strike no later than 65.5 million years ago — 700,000 years before the death of the giant, vegetarian beast that left its femur behind in present-day New Mexico.

A study of the bone in the latest issue of the journal Geology, co-authored by University of Alberta paleontologist Larry Heaman and two U.S. colleagues, "confounds the long established paradigm that the age of the dinosaurs ended between 65.5 million and 66 million years ago," states a summary of the findings.

The study also represents a landmark achievement in the use of a uranium-lead dating technique — developed at the University of Alberta — that allowed the team to pinpoint the age of the bone directly from a fragment of the specimen, not just indirectly from the layer of rock in which it was found.

The bone was unearthed near the New Mexico-Colorado border by U.S. paleontologist James Fassett, one of the study's two American co-authors.

In the past, Fassett has controversially proposed that the region may have been a refuge for some dinosaurs that survived the colossal meteorite strike widely believed to have ended the dinosaur age between 65.5 and 66 million years ago.

The new findings appear to support Fassett's theory that at least some dinosaurs survived the catastrophic impact and persisted for hundreds of thousands of years.

"For some time, there's been other evidence that suggests dinosaurs survived," he said, at least in some small pockets, after their supposed extinction.

But it hasn't been "ironclad evidence," he noted. "What was missing was some way to directly date the bone itself. Up to now, it's just never been possible, so this is the first real success."

Heaman said confirming the New Mexican sauropod bone as 64.8 million years old "opens the door to all kinds of questions," including the validity of the theory that a single meteorite strike destroyed all dinosaur habitats around the world in a very short time.

Recent studies have challenged that theory including some suggesting a series of meteorite impacts caused the dinosaurs to disappear and others positing massive volcanic eruptions that triggered deadly, planetwide climate disturbances.

So here's what I've never understood: if birds are descended from dinosaurs...then doesn't that presuppose that at least some dinosaurs survived after the extinction (however caused) of the majority of the form? I would think it would be hard to evolve from a life form that was 100% extinct.

- S.

Giant Underground Chamber Found on Moon

2011-03-03T06:55:00.000-05:00

Wicked cool news!

The Indian Space Research Organization has discovered, with the help of the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, a "giant underground chamber" near the Moon's equator, in the Oceanus Procellarum area.

Naturally, my first thought was this:

But in actuality, this chamber is far neater.

More than one mile long (1.7 kilometers) and 393 feet wide (120 meters), it is big enough to contain a small lunar city.

The Indian researchers have published a paper detailing their findings and talking about the possibility of making this giant underground vault as a future human base. The settlement would be protected from radiation, micro-meteor impacts, dust and extreme temperature changes by the lava structure that provides a natural environmental control with a nearly constant temperature of minus 20 degrees Celsius (which is what the temperature was yesterday here in Toronto, where I live), unlike that of the lunar surface showing extreme variation, maximum of 130 degrees Celsius to a minimum of minus 180 degrees Celsius in its day-night cycle.

In addition, lunar explorers would only need minimal construction, without the added cost of having to use expensive shields against the hazardous lunar environment.

Maybe they'll call it Clavius Base...

- S.

Things Overhead at the Stop-Watch Gang Meeting - 20 February 2011

2011-02-21T09:50:00.000-05:00

"I'm going to assume your comment about Hungary was a jab at me."

=-=-=-=-=

"Well, they took all my comments. So I'm just going to read--I've got five minutes!"

=-=-=-=-=

"The balloon is a balloon. They're not stupid!"

=-=-=-=-=

"Sometimes shit just drops from a clear blue sky."

=-=-=-=-=

A: "I loved the Angle of Death."
B: "What?"
C: "It's a typo."
A: "For me that's right up there with the Circle of Life."

=-=-=-=-=

"'He had dark, evil eyes.' Then there are three more evils on the page. It was to the point that I wrote STOP THE EVIL! in the margin."

=-=-=-=-=

X: "See? I know you guys are going to hate this..."
Y: "Nah, we already told you what we hate."

=-=-=-=-=

"Right now we're re-writing stuff we haven't even read."

=-=-=-=-=

"Borrowed Time" Available Online at the World SF Blog

2011-02-15T06:34:00.000-05:00

My story “Borrowed Time”--originally published here--has just been reprinted on something called The Internets. I understand that it’s a series of tubes...

Yes, you can now find “Borrowed Time” available freely online here.

It’s part of the Tuesday Fiction series at the World SF Blog. Every Tuesday, WSB publishes short fiction by international authors, including contributors from South Africa, Israel, Brazil, India, the UK and elsewhere.

Many thanks to Lavie Tidhar, editor of the The World SF Blog, for liking the story and putting it online. Thanks as well to Aliette de Bodard for introducing me to WSB in the first place.

Enjoy!

- S.

Things Overhead at the Stop-Watch Gang Meeting - 30 January 2011

2011-01-31T06:37:00.003-05:00

It was a good meeting yesterday...

- S.

=-=-=-=-=-=

A: "I don't think anything in nature could grow genitalia that fast."
(5 second pause)
B: "Huh huh huh..."

=-=-=-=-=-=

"On page 5 I wrote 'scrotum--WHAT!?' because you can't just throw a scrotum in there casually."

=-=-=-=-=-=

"I feel kinda bad because I didn't see any of these problems. Now that I've heard them, I agree."

=-=-=-=-=-=

X: "You hint that the neuromancer has figured it out."
Y & Z: "Necromancer."
X: "Necroma-- Whatever. Fucking nerds."

=-=-=-=-=-=

"It felt like the story stopped to read a map."

=-=-=-=-=-=

1: "Your last line sucks."
2: "They always do."

=-=-=-=-=-=

She: "You mention the 'bonewand', but I have two teenage boys, so..."
Him: "That's awesome! I didn't even see that one!"
She: "You might want to lose the bonewand."
Him: "I'll pay you not to!"
Other Him: "A whole table full of guys miss that, but she gets it?"

=-=-=-=-=-=

Law and the Multiverse: Superheroes, Supervillains, and the Law

2010-12-27T06:33:00.002-05:00

This is too awesome not to share:

The Law and the Multiverse blog is a geek-meets-lawyer funfest, looking seriously at the legal challenges and ramifications of superpowers, superheroes and villains, and the battles they wage against each other.

WATCHMEN often receives praise for taking a 'realistic' look at how society would deal with superpowered creatures and vigilantes who leap from rooftop to rooftop in their masks and capes. But Law and the Multiverse looks at how such questions would play out with the actual laws on the books today in the United States.

Questions like: is Superman’s heat vision a weapon? If so, would the Second Amendment protect his right to melt pistols and cook hamburgers with it?

Now, admittedly, it looks at the issue from a US-perpsective, but since most comic book heroes seem to protect American cities and citizens it only makes sense. It's great fun for those of us who have ever read about an epic battle between superheroes and supervillains and really, really want to know who should be found liable for the broken buildings and shattered streets.

Kicked off on Nov. 30, it addresses questions like: “What if someone is convicted for murder, and then the victim comes back to life?” And whether mutants are a legally recognizable class entitled to constitutional protection from discrimination.

Other topics include the admissibility of evidence obtained through mind reading by Professor X of the X-men and whether the RICO Act could be effectively used by prosecutors against the Legion of Doom.

The answers are dry, technical and funny in their earnestness. The Second Amendment, the bloggers suggest, would protect many powers, but “at least some superpowers would qualify as dangerous or unusual weapons (e.g., Cyclops’ optic blasts, Havok’s plasma blasts)” that are “well beyond the power of weapons allowed even by permit.” Those super-duper powers would be tightly regulated, if not banned outright.

Then there’s this jurisprudential nugget: When Batman, the DC Comics hero, nabs crooks, is the evidence gathered against the bad guys admissible in court? Not if he is working so closely with Commissioner Gordon that his feats fall under the “state actor” doctrine, in which a person is deemed to be acting on behalf of government and thus is subject to the restrictions on government power. In fact, he might be courting a lawsuit claiming violations of civil rights from those who were nabbed.

Enjoy!

- S.

Merry Christmas!

2010-12-25T06:28:00.000-05:00

Overheard at the Stop-Watch Gang 24-Hour Writing Challenge

2010-12-08T06:00:00.001-05:00

"That's a lot of pressure."

1: "I'm on a totally new story now. That's my...fourth?"
2: "At least."

"And then a dog-headed man shows up, and..."

"You need to write faster."

"I'm all full of pretzels."

"39 words in an hour--attaboy!"

The Stop-Watch Gang 24 Hour Story Challenge!

2010-12-03T18:00:00.037-05:00

MySpace-Countdowns

Yes, the first Stop-Watch Gang 24 Hour Story Challenge!

From 6pm tonight until 6pm tomorrow, a bunch of us are holed up at my house for a 24-hour writing challenge modeled on the 24-hour writing challenge at Writers of the Future.

The process:

a) Random word and image prompts have been distributed to the members of the Stop-Watch Gang. While not limited to the idea presented, the goal is for the prompt to start you thinking in a direction you might not have thought of before. You then run with it.

b) Between receiving the prompt and Friday at 6 p.m., is research time. Random books from the library or bookstore (or online sources) that are consulted to teach you something you didn't know before. Try to take enough notes about interesting stuff that you can use in the story.

c) Also interview or talk to a stranger without letting them know you're writing a story. Find some aspect of the person that might inspire a character or chain of events that you can use in the story.

d) The goal is to have a completed, original story (zero draft, as good or bad as you like) in 24 hours. It must have a plausible beginning, middle, end (i.e., a real story).

If you want to read more on the process, check out my Writers of the Future journal for full details.

And what do we have to fuel our writing frenzy?

$300 in cash. Two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheet of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-coloured uppers, downers, screamers, laughers...and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.

Actually, that's a lie. We'll probably have Doritos. Maybe some Pepsi. Not very Hemingway, I know, but there you are.

See you on the other side.

- S.

REALMS OF FANTASY is dead! Long live REALMS OF FANTASY!

2010-11-15T06:54:00.001-05:00

Seemingly no sooner had I heard that Realms of Fantasy was going out of business again, and read the farewell messages from the publisher and the editors (here and here), than like a phoenix RoF has risen again, er, again.

Word came last week that Realms of Fantasy Magazine has been sold to Damnation Books LLC. Damnation Books LLC publishes dark fiction as Damnation Books. They also own and operate Eternal Press, which does romance and mainstream fiction.

The press release indicated that the December 2010 issue will go to print with the new ownership publishing the February 2011 issue. All subscriptions already paid for will be honored.

Future plans include expanding digital editions for ebook and desktop readers. The April 2011 issue will be themed ‘dark fantasy’ to coincide with World Horror Convention 2011 where Damnation Books will be hosting a party, and a booth in the dealer’s area.

The June 2011 issue is the 100th issue of Realms of Fantasy Magazine. Plans for a larger ‘birthday bash’ issue are already in place to celebrate this milestone.

Yay!

Posted below is a re-post of an all-call from Douglas Cohen, a RoF editor, for help in tracking down authors of submissions to RoF that were sitting with the fiction editor Shawna McCarthy when RoF closed up. If you're in that category (as I am) be sure to email and let them know how you'd like your story handled.

- S.

ROF: Fiction: Help Me Internets!

by Editor Douglas Cohen on November 11, 2010

Hi Everyone,

I’m about to ask for your help with something. As I noted when I announced that Shawna and I would be coming back, there are a number of submissions that were in various states of consideration when the magazine announced its closure. The only right thing to do was release these manuscripts from consideration. Now, the manuscripts I had that were going to be passed along to Shawna were discarded. In the interests of goodwill, I’ve subsequently contacted all of these authors and invited them to resubmit their manuscripts to me via email if they’re so inclined. (PLEASE NOTE: this is a special exception made just for them under the circumstances–we’re still at this time just accepting submissions via snail mail).

However, there are also quite a number of submissions that are sitting with Shawna, enough that I thought it would be a good idea to post this note. Here’s the thing: Shawna is going to have a lot of reading ahead of her as we build the magazine’s fiction inventory back up. Since I don’t have the manuscripts, it would drive me rather insane to hunt down all of the email addresses to all of the authors who have stories with Shawna. And it would be rather time consuming for Shawna to email all of these people to see if they’d like their manuscripts to still be considered. Then she’d also still have to wait to hear back, which eats up more time. I’d rather Shawna be able to use this time to read stories as we get the magazine caught up. Some folks have already told me they still want their stories to be considered. But I’d like to hear from the rest of you. If you had a story that was with Shawna and would still like it to be considered, please email me (slushmaster@gmail.com) and tell me the name of your story. It will save Shawna the trouble of reading a story that has since been withdrawn. It also wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to let me know you’re officially withdrawing your story or that you’ve already sold it elsewhere.

So here’s where you come in, Internets. Blog about this. Tweet about this. Facebook about this. Help us out. As Picard would say, “Make it so.”

Thanks all.

ETA: Please don’t contact me regarding general slush submissions. Not that those stories aren’t important, but it will just create too much confusion. We’ll figure this out a little later, thanks.

***

NaNoOutRiMo Word Count: November 13, 2010

2010-11-14T18:54:00.000-05:00

Yeah, yeah, I know. Shut up. ;)

- S.

NASA’s Deep Impact Fly-by of Comet Hartley 2 or The Revenge of Deep Impact

2010-11-08T06:39:00.022-05:00

As if it wasn't cool enough that NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft passed within 435 miles of Comet Hartley 2 about 10 a.m. EST on Thursday, November 4, soon after it turned its high-speed antenna toward Earth to beam back the photos it had taken.

And now some enterprising YouTuber has made what's described as a "morph animation" of the close approach images. The comet approaches slowly and in perfect silence, just as if you were there with it in deep space.

The Deep Impact spacecraft officially completed its mission in 2005 after it visited the comet Tempel 1, letting loose an 800-pound piece of equipment that crashed into that comet as it passed by. The collision allowed scientists to identify some of the minerals beneath the surface of Tempel 1.

But the spacecraft still had plenty of maneuvering fuel left, so NASA approved a second mission, called Epoxi, that included a visit to a second comet. Three years ago, the mission had to shift course when the comet it was aiming for, Comet Boethin, could not be found. The backup target was Hartley 2.

This is animation of a comet is very cool, especially because in the novel I'm outlining this month two comets play very important roles...

- S.

NaNoOutRiMo Word Count: November 6, 2010

2010-11-06T09:49:00.000-04:00

A strong first week! But...I'm thinking that was the easy part. See, what I worked on this week was just the stuff that I've had rattling around in my head for the last year or more. So I've outlined all those scenes and events that immediately leaped to mind when I starting thinking about this novel.

But there's only the vaguest hints of order. Still missing are all the little connective bits, like sinew that hold muscle to bone. The great yawning chasm of The Middle is still unknown, and while I think I have a denouement I don't yet have a climax.

Hmm...I'm wondering now if 30,000 words is going to be long enough for this outline. I'm beginning to worry about just how long the book itself may end up being.

Oh well. Nothing to do but keep calm and type on.

I'm anticipating the next several weeks being more difficult than this one...

- S.

Star Trek Cited by Texas Supreme Court? eyebrow arches

2010-11-03T06:38:00.009-04:00

Texas: my new favorite state in the Union.

The Texas Supreme Court has cited Mr. Spock in their opinion in Robinson v. Crown Cork and Seal. The quotation (taken from dialogue in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan) is in reference to Texans' "distrust of intrusive government and a belief that police power is justified only by urgency, not expediency."

This effectively makes Spock a legal authority for interpreting the Texas Constitution.

Fascinating.

Full details here.

- S.

NaNoOutWriMo Begins!

2010-11-01T06:37:00.056-04:00

What's that you say? You've heard of NaNoWriMo--National Novel Writing Month, the kamikaze approach to writing a novel that begins November 1 with the goal of writing a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30--but you've never heard of NaNoOutWriMo?

"What is NaNoOutWriMo?" you ask.

NaNoOutWriMo is National Novel Outline Writing Month, a contest of my own devising and of which I am (thus far) the sole participant. Anyone similarly inclined is welcome to join me. Whoever loses has to buy drinks for the winner(s).

I've been working endlessly on getting the research transcribed and the outline written for my long-awaited First Novel. Having finally made the journey to New York City (where the book is set) I no longer have any excuses (you know, besides friends, family, a love life, work, household chores, this blog, etc.) So given that November is NaNoWriMo, I've decided that it will also be the month in which I choose to make a sprint and finish my outline.

"But Steve," you might say (as my writer's group did this past weekend), "why not just use NaNoWriMo to write the actual book?"

Fair question. The answer is: well, that's just not how I work, sadly.

I have bits and pieces, sure. I have some scenes that popped into my head immediately when I started thinking about writing this book. But for most of what happens...well, so far I don't know any more about it than you do.

Whenever I try to sit down and write without an outline, some firm idea of characters, plot, subplot, themes, direction of the story... Well, it ends up a terrible mess. It takes forever while I try to figure out what happens next and that delay stresses me out, makes me angry, frustrated, doubtful of my ability and talent, and usually devolves into heavy drinking. I get very little done and almost never go back to finish whatever it was I was working on.

But whenever I've had a whole outline the process is so much more enjoyable and doesn't seem like such bloody hard work.

The way I work things out (scene by scene, on little cards) is very similar to the way Tim Powers described his process to us at Writers of the Future. And I remember Kathy Wentworth saying that she's one of the 'sit down and start writing' kind of authors. When she gets stuck, she says, she kills a character and sees what happens. She said she wasn't able to do the kind of detailed outlining that Tim did and that to do so required a deep connection with and trust in your subconscious.

To me, though, it seems the opposite: it's much easier to know where you're going if you have a map. Just sitting down and starting without knowing where you're headed is relying tremendously on how connected you are to your subconscious. You have to trust that without your conscious self knowing, you'll somehow 'get' what the story is about, where it's going, and what happens next.

So NaNoOutWriMo begins! As you'll see from the counter above, I'm guestimating that my completed outline will end up being around 30,000 words. Maybe more, maybe less. But either way, I'm going to have a completed outline for the novel by the end of this month if it kills me.

Updates every Friday in November. See you on the other side.

- S.

Death Star PUMPKIN!

2010-10-31T06:58:00.003-04:00

Amazing!

In celebration of Hallowe'en, and definitely in the treat rather than trick column, I give you and incredible sci-fi jack-o-lantern: THE DEATH STAR!

You can find complete carving instructions for the Death Star Pumpkin here.

Happy Hallowe'en!

- S.

Aurora Awards Nominees' Pin Presentation Ceremony at SFContario

2010-10-29T06:51:00.000-04:00

Image of Aurora Pin courtesy

Prix Aurora Facebook Group

(you should join!)

Sweet!

I've been invited to receive a Prix Aurora Award Nominee's pin at a presentation ceremony to be held at SFContario, the new Toronto SF convention. I'm thrilled to be getting a pin!

Nominee pins are a long-standing tradition for both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards (you can see the little rocket ship-shaped Hugo pin attached to this WorldCon badge, and you can see one of the Nebula pins about halfway down this post by nominee Sarah Beth Durst), but they're a new thing for the Auroras.

At the Prix Aurora Awards ceremony at the 2010 KeyCon, special pins for the winners and nominees were awarded for the first time, an initiative sponsored by Conadian A. The Canadian Science Fiction & Fantasy Association (CSFFA, sponsor of the Aurora Awards) Board of Directors has decided to award these mementos to all past winners and nominees at conventions across Canada this year.

The new pins take as their shape the primary element of the Aurora Awards, from the design by Frank Johnson. The gentle curve is intended to evoke the waves of the Aurora Borealis, for which the award is named.

The presentation of Nominee pins will continue in future years, as well, starting with next year’s nominees during the Awards Ceremony at Canvention 31, when it is hosted by SFContario in November of 2011.

For people who are not a member of SFContario and weren't planning to attend (but you know you want to), a membership in SFContario is not required to attend the Presentation Ceremony. In other words, if you are in Toronto that weekend and would like to come see yours truly along with many of the bright lights of the Toronto SF community recieve the pin but don't want to attend the con, you should be able to get in for the ceremony.

There are 30 years of short-listed Aurora Nominees that are being honoured at five Conventions across the country this fall. The Nominees’ Pin Ceremony at SFCONTARIO will be held Friday, 19th of November at 9:00 PM in Ballroom BC, at the Ramada Plaza Hotel, 300 Jarvis Street, Toronto ON.

See you there!

- S.

Warner Bros, New Zealand Reach Deal on ‘The Hobbit’

2010-10-27T13:05:00.000-04:00

Well, it looks like Middle-earth is staying put after all.

Having secured, at long last, the right director and the right Bilbo, it looks like the right locale is now secure as well.

As reported in today's New York Times, Warner Brothers has agreed to keep Peter Jackson’s production of “The Hobbit” in New Zealand after the government promised to change local labor laws and offered extra financial incentives.

The deal came after two days of talks between Prime Minister John Key and other government officials and executives from Warner and its New Line Cinema unit.

Filming of the two “Hobbit” movies, which is expected to start in February, had been threatened by a dispute over whether a New Zealand branch of an Australian union could engage in collective bargaining on the Hollywood films, which they have not been able to do in the past.

A New Zealand actors union, backed by a larger union, the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance of Australia, had demanded collective bargaining for work on the films, but both Warner and government officials contended that collective bargaining with actors was barred by New Zealand law.

You find all the details of the new law and the various financial incentives the Kiwis are offering Warner Bros to film 'The Hobbit' in New Zealand here.

Now they just have to get the rest of the principles onboard and actually make a great movie that stands up to the LOTR. That should be the easy part, right?

- S.

Things Overhead at the Stop-Watch Gang Meeting - 24 October 2010

2010-10-27T06:40:00.013-04:00

X: "Five minutes!? I thought it was three?"
Y: "How long have you been in this group?"

=-=-=-=

A: "What's the horror?"
B: "Cannibalism."
A: "I guess that's sorta horrifying..."

=-=-=-=

"You want the treasure? Eat this. You're the fourth guy we've got this year. We're running out of families..."

=-=-=-=

"Why? Because it was a TV show I saw."

=-=-=-=

1: "When I found out the protagonist was a mug I was...disappointed. Just a personal thing, I--"
2: "He hates mugs!"

=-=-=-=

Blue: "That's what I wrote: object sex!"
Purple: "After she's done she's filled with Earl Gray's double bag..."

=-=-=-=

Water, Water Everywhere...on the Moon (or at least the Moon's south pole)

2010-10-25T06:56:00.018-04:00

According to findings reported in the New York Times there's relatively abundant water at the bottom of a very deep, very dark crater near the moon's south pole. There's so much water, in fact, that this region of the moon appears to be wetter than the Sahara.

"Well, that's not very wet," you're saying.

Okay, yes, it's pretty dry. But, given that the assumption until recently by many planetary scientists was that the moon was utterly dry this is considerably damp.

The Sahara sands are 2 to 5 percent water, and the water is tightly bound to the minerals. In the lunar crater, which lies in perpetual darkness, the water is in the form of almost pure ice grains mixed in with the rest of the soil, and is easy to extract. The ice is about 5.6 percent of the mixture, and possibly as high as 8.5 percent of it.

That's so much water, in fact, that if astronauts were to visit this crater they might be able to use eight wheelbarrows of soil to melt 10 to 13 gallons of water. The water, if purified, could be used for drinking, or broken apart into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel — to get home or travel to Mars.

This discovery was made by NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite — or Lcross, for short — which made the observations as it, by design, slammed into the Moon a year ago.

The $79 million Lcross mission piggybacked on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which was launched in June last year and has been mapping out the lunar surface for a future return by astronauts. Lcross steered the empty second stage of the rocket, which otherwise would have just burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere, onto a collision course with the Moon.

Last October, as it neared impact, the Lcross spacecraft released the empty second stage and slowed down slightly so that it could watch the stage’s 5,600-mile-per-hour crash into a 60-mile-wide, 2-mile-deep crater named Cabeus. A few minutes later, Lcross, quickly transmitting its gathered data to Earth, met a similar demise.

You might recall that for people who watched the live Webcast video transmitted by Lcross, the event was a disappointment, with no visible plume from the impacts. But as they analyzed the data, scientists found everything they were looking for, and more. Last November, the team reported that the impact had kicked up at least 26 gallons of water, confirming suspicions of ice in the craters.

The new results increase the water estimate to about 40 gallons, and by estimating by amount of dirt excavated by the impact, calculated the concentration of water for the first time.

A series of articles reporting the Lcross results appeared in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

- S.

Photos of THE HOBBIT Cast

2010-10-22T21:16:00.000-04:00

Now, when I first heard the news on the radio this morning that an actor had been cast to play Bilbo in the upcoming live-action adaptation of THE HOBBIT I was, admittedly, two-thirds asleep. So I thought at first that Morgan Freeman had been cast in the role.

Then, when I realized the news reader was saying Martin Freeman I thought: "Who?"

A quick look on the internets revealed a familiar face behind the unfamiliar name: "Oh, Tim from the British THE OFFICE! Arthur Dent from THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE movie! Oh, cool! He TOTALLY looks like a hobbit!"

My friend Dana, in fact, has been hoping against hope that Martin Freeman would be Bilbo since it was announced that they were finally filming THE HOBBIT.

So, much as I did when the STAR TREK reboot movie was announced, I've put together a photo line up of the announced cast (incidentally, that STAR TREK page was for a long time the most visited page on my blog. Curious to see whether the experience repeats with this post...)

The hobbit his self: Martin Freeman will play the role of Bilbo Baggins

Richard Armitage as Thorin Oakenshield

Aidan Turner as Kili (is it just me or does this guy look a lot like Michael Chabon?)

Rob Kazinsky as Fili

Graham McTavish as Dwalin

Stephen Hunter as Bombur

Mark Hadlow as Dori

Peter Hambleton as Gloin

Appearing as Oin will be John Callen, who apparently doesn't exist on the internet...

Now some of these guys clearly look like dwarves already (I'm looking at you Stephen Hunter...) but I'm sure the rest will look the part once the prosthetic and beards are applied. It might help for now to imagine them looking more like this:

I, for one, can't wait to see how they handle the dragon, Smaug.

Part 1 of THE HOBBIT is tentatively scheduled to begin making a fortune in December 2012.

- S.

Saturn's Largest Moon Has Ingredients for Life OR 'Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky!

2010-10-22T06:01:00.005-04:00

Continuing with this week's Saturnine theme, the chemical "letters" used to write the basic code for life on Earth might exist on Saturn's largest moon, according to new research presented earlier this month. The findings suggest the building blocks of life on Earth may have originated in the air, not only in primordial "soup" on land.

Based on lab experiments, scientists concluded it's possible the thick atmospheric haze on Titan contains the five so-called nucleotide bases used in DNA and RNA, as well as some simple amino acids—the building blocks of proteins.

That's not to say Titan is any more likely to host birds, fish, or even microbes like those on Earth, emphasized study co-author Sarah Hörst, a graduate student at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.

"If there's life on Titan, it probably—for a lot of different reasons—would not use the molecules that life on Earth uses," she told National Geographic News. For starters, Titan is much colder—an average of -180 degrees Celsius.

"Also, life on Earth is based on water, and there's no liquid water on Titan's surface available for life." Though Titan has lakes, they're believed to be filled with liquid methane.

Instead, Hörst and colleagues think their results might mean that earthly life arose in part from atmospheric components, suggesting the popular idea of a primordial soup on Earth's early surface might be joined by an image of a primordial haze in the sky (a purple haze, if you will...)

"One of the reasons we think this is exciting is that Titan's atmosphere gives us a window into what kinds of molecules a similar atmosphere is capable of producing," Hörst said.

"With Titan, we can study the process, because it's ongoing right now. But there's lots of evidence now that early Earth might have had a Titan-like haze, and there's probably a lot of exoplanets that have similar chemistry going on."

Full article is here.

- S.

You Only Live Twice: Realms of Fantasy Dead Again

2010-10-19T13:13:00.000-04:00

Blofeld: They told me you were assassinated in Hong Kong.
James Bond: Yes, this is my second life.
Blofeld: You only live twice, Mr. Bond.
- You Only Live Twice

Sad news (again) for authors and fans of short SF: Realms of Fantasy is defuncted again after a brief, 18-month revival.

According to Warren Lapine it was the economy that did RoF in again:

"Ultimately, I believe Realms failed because of a terrible economic climate. When I purchased the magazine I did not believe that the worst economy since the Great Depression would actually get worse; that was a mistake."

But, things have been shaky at RoF again for a while. Earlier this year, Lapine sent around a letter urging people to buy submissions or else the magazine would fold again.

Guess they didn't get enough...

I had a story under consideration at RoF, a story I'm really proud of and which had made it past the slush reader. I was waiting, hoping expectantly, that Shawna McCarthy might buy it and thus give me my first magazine sale.

Alas.

Now it's time to send my brave little story off to another market. The way things have been going lately, let's hope there are some left to buy it...

You can read the farewells of RoF editors Shawna McCarthy and Douglas Cohen here and here, respectively.

- S.

Icy Tsunamis Perturb Saturn's Rings

2010-10-18T06:45:00.002-04:00

Saturn, as a planet, has been very good to me. In fact, after the Earth it's probably my next favorite planet. So naturally I'm always interested in new discoveries about my #2 planetary body.

The Cassini probe--orbiting Saturn since July 1, 2004--continues to make remarkable discoveries about Saturn. The latest is that the gravitational pull of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, causes giant, circling "tsunamis" of icy particles in Saturn's faint, inner C ring.

NASA's Voyager 1 probe--observing Saturn's rings from a single, shallow angle--first recorded a rippling region within the C ring during a November 1980 flyby.

Scientists working on the project suggest that if you were standing next to this tsunami, it would be large--with each peak just under a mile (1.6 kilometers tall)--but very slow moving, at only about 250 meters [820 feet] a day.

So cool!

Full article is here and pictures are here.

- S.

Gulf Oil Spill Follow-Up

2010-10-13T06:14:00.121-04:00

Some of you might recall that a few months ago I posted about the Deep Horizon Gulf of Mexico Oil spill and the gonzo idea to use a seafloor nuclear detonation to plug the leak.

So why the follow-up? Why, because of reader demand, of course! Specifically, one reader: the poster known only as Anonymous.

Ah, yes, my friend Anonymous. Or should I say Dr. Harbique LaCourt. At least that's the name he gave himself in one of his responses, though I can find no mention of such a person online anywhere and he's gone back to Anonymous in subsequent posts. He also didn't mention what he's a doctor of. But hey, let's give him benefit of the doubt.

As you'll see from the comments he's left on the original post, I've clearly hit a nerve. He pops up every few weeks to scold me and demand that I post something more about the oil spill. After all, as he writes: "Several months after the breach, they can't find any more oil and the leak is plugged. For this, you were advocating that God (or someone of equal authority) close down the entire BP enterprise."

Hmm...I don't recall bringing God into this at all. I'm pretty sure the only invisible hand that I discussed bringing about the end of BP was that of the free market (and perhaps the US legal system, should BP be sued into oblivion).

So, setting aside the Deity for a moment, let's consider the poster's claim that they can't find any more oil and the leak is plugged.

I will grant the second part of that: they have indeed plugged the leak and no one could be happier than I about it. However, it's the first part of that (over)statement that we need to consider.

Is the oil really all gone?

I have to answer a resounding 'NO' to such a claim.

You needn't look far for the evidence (ah, there's that tricky thing again, doctor--evidence).

I encourage everyone to read the wonderful and lengthy article on the Gulf Oil Spill and its potential long-term consequences on the National Geographic website. This article appeared in a recent special issue which I was able to read, and it sheds a lot of light on the spill, the hubris and lax regulation that spawned it, and the current and potential future environmental impacts of the spill .

If you want to know more you can also look here, here, here, here and here. Like I said, the evidence isn't hard to come by.

The good news is that the worst possible outcome--millions of gallons of oil washing up on sensitive coasts and wetlands--doesn't look like it will come to pass. The naturally occuring oil-eating bacteria that live in the Gulf have kicked into overdrive to eat the oil, but that too poses hazards should the ballooning bacteria population lead to vast swathes of low-oxygen water. Such zones would be deadly to fish and the smaller parts of the ecosystem.

We should also be concerned about the amount of chemical dispersant sprayed in the Gulf during the spill. The dispersants are meant to prevent huge slicks from coating beaches, and they do just what they're supposed to: disperse, not destroy, not clean up or remove. The chemical dispersant itself is largely untested for environmental impact, especially at the kinds of volume that were being dumped into the Gulf for several months. So no easy answers.

And as this article points out, there's evidence to suggest that the dispersant simply forced huge quantities of the oil downward, into the middle of water column, where huge slicks remain trapped, while others settle on the seafloor as giant mats of oil, inches thick, that kill all life as they block off and starve the seafloor and its countless biological components from precious food and oxygen.

The National Geographic article does a good job of pointing out just how superficial the recovery of some reefs and wetlands has been from oil spills (in that the oil is a couple of inches below the sand, as fresh and sticky and poisonous as the day it washed up from the well...)

So why go to all this trouble to refute the claims of a blog troll? Well, I'm curious about just why this fellow is so pissed off by my little blog post about environmental disaster. I mean, this is Blogowych, not BoingBoing. And once he found the post, if he felt I was just some hippie wingnut, why all the venom? I suppose some people, when angry, are just the kind who need to vent. But hanging on to the rage this long and making periodic return visits to post comments on a post that didn't get many views and which doesn't even appear on the main page anywhere?

The reason I asked about his real identity (a request he seemed perplexed and infuriated by) was because I'd like to know what his biases and credentials are. Is he simply a concerned citizen, like I am? Is he an engineer in the field of petrochemicals? Is he in the employ of a petrochemical company? Has he been hired by BP or some lobby group as a paid apologist, or to slag every post he can find that speaks ill of the spill and the corporate response? (If I were BP, I'd sure as hell hire somebody to flame away on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc.)

Doubtless, I'm letting my imagination and paranoia get the better of me but you see where I'm going with this. Biases matter, and I feel they should be declared if we're going to have a frank, honest debate. I was happy enough to list my credentials, education, etc. when asked.

However, I clearly expected too much of this poster. While I wanted to engage with the issues and marshal evidence to support and refute, Anonymous seemed intent simply on name calling. He's accused me of ad hominem attacks, as well as being a "fascist idiot". I'm pretty sure he doesn't know what either an ad hominem attack or a fascist is.

He has also called me a "mule-riding, petrophobic, Earth-worshipping Druid with an 7th-grade education" (direct quote).

Oh--I take it back. Clearly he does understand what an ad hominem attack is.

Well, I'll spend no more time trying to reason with the unreasonable. This mule-riding, petrophobic, Earth-worshipping Druid with an 7th-grade education will simply take solace in knowing that he's in the right.

- S.

Morality and Irony

2010-08-30T06:22:00.000-04:00

So, it is just me, or does that fact that a well-known Harvard researcher who studies the evolutionary basis of morality has retracted a paper because he might have lied about how his experiment was conducted strike you as ironic?

- S.

I've Heard of Alligators in the Sewers...

2010-08-24T06:53:00.004-04:00

...but this is ridiculous ;)

Things Overhead at the Stop-Watch Gang Meeting - 25 July 2010

2010-07-26T06:28:00.000-04:00

"This is a Jennifer Lopez movie that I've seen."

=-=-=-=

Q: "Who says?"
A: "I do."

=-=-=-=

"He's HUGE in Romania!"

=-=-=-=

"I couldn't remember a damn thing about the story after I put it down. Sorry -- I'm not holding back on this one."

=-=-=-=

"He's not THAT big in Romania."

=-=-=-=

"It's like trying to read a map inside a car full of clowns."

=-=-=-=

"He's been to Romania...or knows how to spell it."

Rise of the Machine Books?

2010-07-21T06:22:00.000-04:00

The New York Times reported yesterday that Amazon.com has announced that for the last three months, sales of books for its e-reader, the Kindle, outnumbered the sales of hardcover books through their website.

In that time, Amazon said, it sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books, including hardcovers for which there is no Kindle edition.

The pace of change is quickening, too, Amazon said. In the last four weeks sales rose to 180 digital books for every 100 hardcover copies.

The figures released by Amazon.com do not include free Kindle books, of which there are 1.8 million originally published before 1923 (they are in the public domain because their copyright has expired), nor did Amazon give figures for how paperback sales compare with e-book sales (paperback sales are thought to still outnumber e-books).

One expert in the Times article goes so far as to predict that within a decade, fewer than 25 percent of all books sold will be print versions.

Hmm... That seems a bit extreme to me. After all, the dead-tree version of the book still has its appeals (not least of which is never running out of batteries or crashing and losing your e-book just as you're about to find out what happens to Ahab and the Whale*)

But it seems clear that the e-book is, at last, here to stay. And I certainly see the appeal of buying the e-book version rather than the hardcover version: hardcovers are heavy, not usually bus- or subway-friendly reading, and they are usually $30+ dollars, whereas you can get the e-book version for your preferred reader for somewhere in the neighborhood of $12.99 most time. Sometimes less.

So what does this mean for publishers and authors? Well, that's a bit harder to say. It may end up being a good thing for everyone: working in publishing I can tell you that one of the biggest first costs for a printed book is the paper, print, and bind (PP&B) costs.

We routinely send our books to the printer as hi-res PDF files. If we didn’t have to actually bother printing the physical books...

And (at least so far) publishers look to be paying authors a much higher percentage royalty on the e-copies of their books (anywhere from 25-50% of net) than they get currently on paperbacks (around 40 cents) or hardcovers (maybe $2 from every hardcover sold)

So what does the future hold? Difficult to say. Always in motion is the future. But I, for one, welcome our e-book overlords...

- S.

* PS: I peaked at the end of Moby Dick--Ahab and the Whale sort out their differences and become friends. Who knew?

I Write Like

2010-07-16T06:55:00.008-04:00

Came across a neat little website thanks to a link from Rob Sawyer: it's called I Write Like and it's a statistical analysis tool that analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them with those of the famous writers.

So I ran samples from the various stories I've had published and here's what came out (note: these are listed in order of publication):

BORROWED TIME

I write like
Dan Brown

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Not really sure I write like Dan Brown I decided to do a little test and try a couple of different sections from one story:

SATURN IN G MINOR
Opening section...

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

The middle technobabble exposition bit...

I write like
Arthur C. Clarke

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Okay, that's making more sense! So I stayed away from dialogue heavy sections for the test (on the theory that dialogue is what tripped the Dan Brown analysis--though I went back and tested a non-dialogue section of Borrowed Time and it still came out Dan Brown, so...)

CITIUS, ALTIUS, FORTIUS

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

CLADISTICS

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

So everything I tested was published stuff and it seems like I was growing in skill (yes, I realize this is hardly a scientific or necessarily reliable test, but still it's nice to think...) so I decided to test something unpublished, something I've just recent finished work on and which is now out for consideration:

UNPUBLISHED STORY

I write like
Ursula K. Le Guin

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Cool! Could it be that I'm making actual progress?? ;)

- S.

On Rejection

2010-07-13T06:50:00.000-04:00

Writing is being rejected.

Or at least that's the best that I can figure.

Because no matter how much you sell, odds are that you have multiple rejections for each of those pieces that some editor somewhere has finally understood the ineffible genius of and paid you for. Tens, dozens, maybe hundreds of rejections.

Writing is a weird kind of masochism.

And then there's the phenomenon my friend and fellow WOTFian Steven Gaskell has dubbed 'rejectomancy': that is, "the dark art of analysing a rejection letter" and the endless parsing of phrases like while there's some nice writing and just didn't work for me.

So it's always reassuring to hear stories about great, successful writers and artists who were rejected out of hand multiple times before hitting it big. Just remember that the same guy at Decca Records who rejected The Beatles rejected The Rolling Stones two years later (how did that guy keep his job!?!) And how many publishers was it rejected Harry Potter again?

While getting rejected is never fun (sometimes I'm fairly cavalier about getting turfed, other times--depending on my day at work, the phase of the moon, what I had for dinner, etc.--I take it harder than that) after seeing this article in The Guardian I can take heart that while the likes of Andy Warhol and Gertrude Stein also got rejected, at least I never got a rejection letter as, umm, explicit? as the one Jimi Hendrix got from Uncle Sam...

- S.

The Music of the Spheres

2010-07-05T06:56:00.002-04:00

A very cool find today thanks to Sean Williams: the music of the spheres.

So, my interest in music derived from space and/or the planets is well known. Now, some inventive programmer has come up with a Flash animation that provides some very cool ambient music derived from the orbital periods of our own solar system...including Pluto! Yay! Much as my Canada includes Quebec, my solar system includes Pluto. Listen to the whole thing and hear Pluto sing!

Reminds me a bit of an interstellar music box...

And be sure to notice at the bottom the ticker that calculates how many orbits/years of each planet pass by as you listen.

Check it out the post here and the music program here.

- S.

All Signed Up for World Fantasy 2010

2010-06-16T06:10:00.001-04:00

Well, from World Cup to World Fantasy: I've just signed up to attend this year's World Fantasy in Columbus, Ohio. It runs October 28-31, 2010 and I'm really looking forward to it! I attended WFC in Saratoga Spring, NY in November of 2007 right after my Writers of the Future win and had a great time. My only regret? Not having the guts to go talk to Moebius (too intimidated, and though he spoke English one of the times I wish I'd stuck it out with my French classes...) and that I didn't buy one of the prints he had for sale in the dealer's room. D'oh!

The best part of WFC this year? It really only cost my $15. I had $110 US in my PayPal account that I had forgotten about so it cost me almost nothing to register. The hotel will be a different matter, however...

My goal in attending WFC this year is to have the first draft of my novel complete by then, so as to better to schmooze with editors and agents. So there's no hiding and no shirking now. Just time to buckle down and get writing.

Speaking of which, I should get back to it...

See you in Ohio!

- S.

Why I'm Cheering for North Korea in the World Cup

2010-06-11T14:35:00.003-04:00

I make no secret of the fact that I believe soccer (or football, or footie, or whatever you want to call it) the most boring sport in the world...with the possible exception of NASCAR, but at least things can crash and catch on fire in NASCAR. So far as I know, Pele never exploded mid-field (and the 'beautiful game' is the lesser for it).

In any case, I do realize that this very strongly held opinion puts me in the vast minority of the global population, especially around World Cup time.

Here in Canada our national broadcaster, the CBC, has gone completely gonzo for all things World Cup (mostly, I think, because they also happen to be broadcasting most of the games here in Canada...) The CBC has even advocated picking a country--any country--to cheer for, just so you can join in on the madness.

So I'm picking North Korea.

Oh sure, it's not the popular choice and it would be easy to support some other more likable nation, particularly here in Toronto. I could pick Italy and head down to the bars on College St., or pick Greece and grab some souvlaki on the Danforth.

But I think supporting North Korea could be soooo much more interesting.

Now, I don't know how the bracket will ultimate work out (see my above comments about not giving a rat's ass about soccer) but here's what the writer, the storyteller, the dramatist in me wants to happen:

North Korea vs. South Korea for the World Cup.

Ehh? Pretty good right? Could you imagine what would happen? The entire world--even people like me who don't care--would come to a grinding halt and be glued to the TV to watch the outcome.

More than that, since the Korean War isn't officially over, I say that not only do they play for the World Cup (which, by the way, is not remotely cup-shaped, unlike the supreme trophies in other real sports...) but I say the two Koreas double-down and agree that whoever wins the game also wins the Korean War and gets complete, immediate control of the troubled peninsula!

SERIOUSLY. How is this not already happening? The idea is THAT GOOD.

Go North Korea!

You're welome,

- S.

Seafloor Nuclear Detonation to Plug Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill OR How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let the Bomb Solve All My Problems

2010-06-03T06:46:00.003-04:00

Is this what James Cameron has wrought?

When I heard that a Hollywood director was consulting with BP and the US government on outside-the-box solutions to the Gulf Coast oil spill and how to plug that damn well I knew we'd entered the Twilight Zone. (Now, Cameron does have legitimate underwater cred from his underwater film work on The Abyss and Titanic--both the movie and the later documentaries he produced--but still...)

But confirmation that we'd crossed over into the Bizarro world came today with The New York Times reporting that nuclear detonations are being advocated by some "armchair engineers" (but not Cameron, at least so far) as a means to seal the oil spill.

The theory behind this "plan" (and I use the ironic quotes advisedly) is that the extreme heat an exploding atom bomb generates--temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun--when detonated under the sea floor can turn acres of porous rock into a glassy plug, much like a huge stopper in a leaky bottle.

Decades ago, the Soviet Union reportedly used nuclear blasts to successfully seal off runaway gas wells, inserting a bomb deep underground and letting its fiery heat melt the surrounding rock to shut off the flow.

The plan is being backed by "all the best scientists", according to the blissfully, ignorantly optimistic Matt Simmons, a Houston energy expert and investment banker, who filled Bloomberg News in on his plan last Friday.

The only scientist who likes this idea is this guy:

Could you imagine pitching this idea to Obama?

Obama: Is this plan really a workable option, folks?
Strangelove: It would not be difficult Mein Fuhrer! Nuclear weapons could, heh...I'm sorry--Mr. President...

With the failure of the so-called “top kill” effort to plug the leak with mud, BP has moved on to a plan that involves cutting and removing a damaged part of the crippled Deepwater Horizon drill rig (which will temporarily increase the flow from the leak by 20 PERCENT!) and putting a cap over the cleanly cut pipe. Has anyone wondered what happens if they cut the pipe and can't then get the jimmy hat on? We have a 20% bigger problem...

This is all an effort to stop the leak temporarily while BP drills relief wells which will siphon off the oil and stop the leak, but such a plan won't be in place until August and presents its own problems.

The drilling of those relief wells creates a whole new set of worries, including unintended fractures that would create additional leaks.

“If the rock formation that holds the oil has been cracked or compromised in any way, that pressure is going to find another way to get out,” said one official. “And if it comes up through a crack or a seam, it could come up anywhere. And that's what they are trying to avoid.”

What frightens me most is that the oil industry cares so little about the possibility of emergency situations that there is no contingency plan for these kinds of catastrophes. Every time one of the BP stooges steps in front of a microphone to explain what the next attempt will be to staunch the flow they always include the caveat that none of what they're proposing has ever been tried in 5000 feet of water and has a limited possibility of success.

So perhaps you shouldn't drill somewhere you can't fix the problems you might create. And really, BP's every solution has sounded downright laughable: pumping heavy mud into the pipe in hopes of sealing it? Something called a 'junk shot'--which I even heard one spokesman say was "far more hi-tech than it sounds"... Really? Because it just sounds like your going to try and cram shit down the pipe in the hopes you might block the tube. (And when the process was described that's pretty much what the "plan" consisted of).

How was this kind of problem never foreseen and planned for? What scares me is that it probably was foreseen and planning for it would simply have cost too much money so it was ignored, assuming (as these companies always seem to) that it would never happen anyway...

Hoping everything just goes well all the time (pardon the pun) is called 'hubris'. And you know what the gods do to those who suffer from hubris, don't you?

Buggered. Every time.

I sincerely hope that the process of sealing this well (which has apparently already cost BP more than $1 billion), the hit that BP stock will continue to take because of this tragedy, and the combined costs of the civil and criminal liability they will face drive this corporation into bankruptcy. Only then, in the face of a similar fate should one of their drilling projects have a catastrophic incident, will others in the petroleum industry take seriously the need to plan ahead for contingencies, anticipate worst-case scenarios, and actually be prepared to take responsibility for their corporate actions.

- S.

The 2010 Prix Aurora Awards Winners

2010-05-25T17:15:00.000-04:00

Kudos to Edward Willett for posting the results of the 2010 Prix Aurora Awards ceremony, held last night in Winnipeg at KeyCon, Manitoba's annual sci-fi convention and this year's host of the Canvention (which includes the presentation of the Auroras).

Congratulations to all the winners, especially Rob Sawyer, who won the Aurora for Best Novel in English for Wake. Alas, my fellow Stop-Watch Gang member Brad Carson didn't win in the short story category, so he now joins Tony Pi and me in the "it was an honor just to be nominated" club.

Surprisingly, Ed's website was the ONLY place online that I was able to find the results, even a full 24-hours after the presentation. Hmmm. Curious. Was it because it's a long weekend here in Canada that word wasn't spread immediately?

If I were part of the Aurora committee and wanted to raise the profile of the premier Canadian award for science fiction and fantasy, I would have a press release ready to go to all media and fan organizations as soon as the award ceremony was done, and I would also have the official website updated ASAP with the results. As of this posting (9:15pm EST on Monday) there is still no information on the awards available on the official site.

Better yet: in this age of Twitter, why not have someone tasked with tweeting the results as they happen?

You know, just sayin'...

UPDATE (25 May 2010): You can now also find the complete list of winners at the Canadian SF Works Database

- S.

Have aliens hijacked the Voyager 2 spacecraft?

2010-05-14T16:07:00.003-04:00

There aren't even words to describe how much I want this to be true:

The Voyager 2 spacecraft, launched by NASA in 1977, is (along with its twin Voyager 1) the most distant human-made objects. They are approximately 10.5 billion miles from Earth and in about five years they are expected to pass through the heliosphere, the bubble the sun creates around the solar system, and be the first man-made objects to enter interstellar space.

For the past 33 years NASA has been in contact with these probes as they have been sending streams of data back to Earth for study by scientists. But on April 22, 2010, the stream of information from Voyager 2 suddenly changed. The spacecraft's science data was received from 8.6 billion miles away in a changed format that mission managers could not decode.

NASA claims that it's a software problem with the flight data system was the cause of the change, but German academic Hartwig Hausdorf believes that because all other parts of the spacecraft appear to be functioning properly, the change could be due to work of aliens.

He told the German newspaper Bild: "It seems almost as if someone has reprogrammed or hijacked the probe – thus perhaps we do not yet know the whole truth.”

Voyager 2 carries a gold disk with greetings in 55 languages on it in case the craft encounters other life forms. Is how the aliens have responded?

Keep your tentacles crossed that it is!

- S.

Brad Carson for the Aurora!

2010-05-03T06:35:00.000-04:00

Okay, all you Canucks out there:

It's time once again to submit your votes for Canada's top SF prize, the Prix Aurora Awards!

This year, I'm very pleased that my good friend and fellow Stop-Watch Gang member, Brad Carson, is a finalist for Best Short-Form Work in English category. His nominated story, "Here There Be Monsters", was his first professional sale and is part of the anthology AGES OF WONDER (which is, itself, nominated for an Aurora in the Best Work in English-Other category) edited by Julie Czerneda and Rob St. Martin.

I was lucky enough to get a chance to read "Here There Be Monsters" in draft form and I knew it was something special. Now, all of you have the chance to realize that too!

You can read the full text of "Here There Be Monsters" right now on Brad's blog here.

Read it. Love it. Vote for it!

You can find the complete list of nominees and instructions on voting here.

- S.

Tony Pi: Made of Awesome

2010-05-02T10:00:00.000-04:00

w00t!

It's been a big week for my good friend (and evil twin) Tony Pi. Not only does he have a great story, "A Sweet Calling" (which the Stop-Watch Gang got to read in draft), coming out in Clarkesworld (UPDATE: Tony's story is now online at Clarkesworld and can be found here), but he has also just been highlighted in a Publishers Weekly starred review!

Publishers Weekly is the trade journal for the book business and a "starred review" is their highest honor; starred reviews "denote books of exceptional merit."

You can find the review on their site or below.

Nice work, Tony!

- S.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Alembical 2 Edited by Lawrence M. Schoen and Arthur Dorrance. Paper Golem (www.papergolem.com), $28 (228p) ISBN 978-0-9795349-7-3; $16 paper ISBN 978-0-9795349-8-0

According to Walter H. Hunt’s introduction, the novella is the hardest form to get right, but editors Schoen and Dorrance have found three authors who nail it perfectly. In Tony Pi’s “The Paragon Lure,” an immortal thief investigates an elegant and occasionally nerve-racking mystery about a flawless pearl. David D. Levine packs powerful emotion into “Second Chance,” a tale of resurrected scientists in a space research station that has lost touch with Earth. In J. Kathleen Cheney’s “Iron Shoes,” a handsome young male of the Fair Folk is either the greatest problem or the greatest hope for Imogen, a half-fae in danger of losing her home. Cheney’s narrative lingers while the others are faster-paced, but all three have plenty of story for readers to sink their teeth into. (June)

Elemental, Dear Watson!

2010-04-07T06:26:00.000-04:00

A team of Russian and American scientists has discovered a new element that has long stood as a missing link among the heaviest bits of atomic matter ever produced. The element, still nameless, appears to point the way toward a brew of still more massive elements with chemical properties no one can predict.

The team produced six atoms of the element by smashing together isotopes of calcium and a radioactive element called berkelium in a particle accelerator.

Data collected by the team seem to support what theorists have long suspected: that as newly created elements become heavier and heavier they will eventually become much more stable and longer-lived than the fleeting bits of artificially produced matter seen so far.

If the trend continues toward a theorized “island of stability” at higher masses, said Dawn A. Shaughnessy, a chemist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California who is on the team, the work could generate an array of strange new materials with as yet unimagined scientific and practical uses.

When asked about a possible name for Element 117--temporarily named ununseptium--Dr. Shaughnessy said that while "it’s so fundamentally cool” to add a square to the Periodic Table of the Elements, there's been no discussion of a name.

“We’ve never discussed names because it’s sort of like bad karma,” she said. “It’s like talking about a no-hitter during the no-hitter. We’ve never spoken of it aloud.”

- S.

Things Overhead at My Writers Group Meeting

2010-04-05T06:12:00.002-04:00

Hi all -

While I've been away from the blog for a while, I've not been entirely out of the fiction game: I've joined a new writers group. It's going extremely well, we all seem to want the same things out of the group (even if that's where most of our similarities end) and we've even got a kickass name and motto:

The Stop-Watch Gang -- "We will cut you!"

Before you ask: no, we're not looking for new members and, besides, we have criteria. You have to have at least one professional sale, as defined by the SFWA rules for membership. We're actually a pretty impressive group, if I do say so: our collective credentials include four published novels, an Aurora Award, two Aurora nominations, three Writers of the Future wins, and between us perhaps a couple of dozen short story publications.

One of the great things about writers groups is the odd and hilarious things overheard during meetings as we critique each others stories. I know that Clarion does a t-shirt every year, and I kept a running tally of bon mots from my Writers of the Future workshop week, so I thought that I'd share some of the ongoing hilarity of the Stop-Watch Gang. These are all comments that illustrate an individual's reaction to a particular story under consideration (note: attributions have been removed to protect the innocent...)

"It's like Piers Anthony on speed."

"It's Agatha Christie-punk!"

"Omniscient? That's not good enough."

"Just call it a big @#%$ing wall!"

"Spirits are a pain in the @#%$ing ass..."

"Sorry Stephen--there's even more snark in yours."

"Blah blah blah--just erupt the volcano already!"

"Oh! Alliteration! Yeah, you don't want that."

"I like $@#% like this...I don't do it, but I like $@#% like this."

More quotable quotes as they become available...

- S.

Knock on...Bone?

2010-04-02T06:10:00.001-04:00

This...from this?

A truly amazing discovery: a means of transforming rattan wood into--wait for it--a replacement for human bone grafts.

Scientists in Italy have developed a way of turning rattan wood into bone that is almost identical to the human tissue. Simply, rattan is heated, carbon and calcium are added, the wood is further heated under intense pressure in an oven-like machine and a phosphate solution is introduced.

After about 10 days, the rattan wood has been transformed into the bone-like material. Within months, the real and artificial bone will have fused, as rattan has porous properties which enable blood, nerves and other compounds to travel through it. Eventually you don't even see the joint where the graft was inserted.

Just amazing. Get all the details here.

- S.

CALL FOR PAPERS: "Social Science on the Final Frontier" August 23 - 25, 2010, Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario

2010-03-30T06:40:00.004-04:00

Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, has issued a call for papers for an academic conference entitled "Social Science on the Final Frontier." Guest authors at the event will include Robert J. Sawyer, Karl Schroeder, and Julie E. Czerneda.

Paper proposals of roughly 250 words should be submitted to Tim Nieguth by May 15, 2010.

Full text of the call for papers follows. For more information see the conference website: http://inord.laurentian.ca/SF.html

Call for Papers:
Social Science on the Final Frontier
August 23 - 25, 2010
Laurentian University Sudbury, Ontario

MIGRATIONS: THE LAURENTIAN ASSOCIATION FOR SCIENCE FICTION is pleased to invite paper proposals for a conference on science fiction and society.

As a genre, science fiction entails implicit or explicit assumptions about social ontology, societal values, norms and traditions, the operation of power, the production, distribution and consumption of goods, the motors of social change, and the nature of social laws. It therefore offers a rich field of inquiry and a valuable heuristic device to social scientists. We welcome any proposals that aim to explore the terrain of science fiction from the perspective of political science, economics, or other social sciences.

Given the conference location in Northern Ontario, we are especially (but by no means exclusively) interested in paper proposals that address the “Canadian dimension” of science fiction, internal colonialism, the relationship between frontier and utopia, or the nature of resource extraction societies.

The organizers will consider selected papers for publication in an edited collection.

Please submit paper proposals of roughly 250 words to Tim Nieguth by May 15, 2010.

Proposals should be accompanied by a brief author bio and full contact information (including email). Please feel free to contact the conference organizers for additional information about the conference.

Conference organizers:

Tim Nieguth Department of Political Science Laurentian University Sudbury, Ontario Canada P3E 2C6 Tel.: (705) 675-1151, ext. 4329 tnieguth@laurentian.ca

David Robinson Department of Economics Laurentian University Sudbury, Ontario Canada P3E 2C6 Tel.: (705) 675-1151, ext. 4285 drobinson@laurentian.ca

The Rings of Earth

2009-12-23T06:49:00.002-05:00

This is amazing:

The view from Ecuador is what I always pictured the Ringworld looking like... Can you imagine New York illuminated by the Earth's rings at night? I can't help but wonder how human civilization would be different if our planet did have rings. Don't know how Earth would ever have acquired rings in the first place. A dwarf moon that broke up in orbit? Hmm. Maybe a story in there somewhere...

- S.

Octopuses Master Use of Tools. World Domination to Follow.

2009-12-16T06:45:00.000-05:00

Apparently the veined octopus (Amphioctopus marginatus) has mastered the use of tools: members of this species have been observed in the wild using coconut-shell halves as faux shells and as hiding places.

You can find articles here, here, and here.

The veined octopus selects halved coconut shells from the sea floor, empties them out, carries them suctioned under their bodies up to 20 metres, and assembles two shells together to make a spherical hiding spot, like so:

The video on the National Geographic website (here) is just incredible to watch.

Note, though, at the end of that video the octopus demonstrating its natural hatred of man and instinct to attack him. Have we learned nothing from Capt. Nemo and the tragedy of the Nautilus?

I've long thought that if humans were wiped out on land, cephalopods would evolve the ability to breath air and take our place as the dominant species on the planet. They have massive brains relative to the size of their bodies, they can change shape and colour, they have eight prehensile limbs, an ink jet... Sounds like a super organism to me.

Now that they are beginning to master tools it's only a matter of time until homo sapiens' existence as a species is threatened. How are we supposed to compete with a creature that has four times as many arms as we do? What if they learn jujitsu? Can you imagine how unstoppable an eight-limed ninja would be!??!

I, for one, welcome our octopus overlords...

- S.

Movember Week 03

2009-11-21T05:41:00.001-05:00

Movember Week 02

2009-11-16T06:59:00.000-05:00

Here's the current state of the 'stache. I'm happy to report that as of this past weekend, my Movemeber Team has raised over $1000 for prostate cancer research! Woohoo! And it's only the middle of Movember.

Four teammates have raised over $100 each (and one guy has over $200 just by himself). Want to help me reach the $100-mark in donations? Yeah, I thought you would.

Go to this link http://ca.movember.com/mospace/300982/ and click on the 'Donate to Me' button right under the photo of me and D'Artagnan (that's my mo') to make your donation under my name--don't worry: I promise it ALL goes to the charity :)

- S.

Movember Week 01

2009-11-13T06:36:00.001-05:00

The 'Mo: Week 1
I've decided to grow a style I'm terming 'The Musketeer'--a moustache accompanied on the lower lip by what is alternately known as 'the soul patch', 'the tickler', or (more disturbingly) 'the George Strombolopolous.' In keeping with the French theme, I have therefore named my facial hair D'Artagnan.

Hello all!

I have decided to join a global movement that is bringing much needed attention to prostate cancer. I’m doing this by growing a Moustache this Movember, the month formerly known as November. My commitment is to grow a moustache all November and I am hoping that you will support my efforts by making a donation. The funds raised go directly to Prostate Cancer Canada.

What many people don’t know is that 1 in 6 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime. Prostate cancer is the most common cancer to afflict Canadian men with 25,500 diagnosed and 4,400 dying from the disease each year.

Facts like these have convinced me I should get involved...that and the fact that I think I'll look awesome with a 'stache ;)

To make a donation, you can either:
• Click this link http://ca.movember.com/mospace/300982/ and
donate online using your credit card or PayPal account , or
• Write a cheque payable to ‘Prostate Cancer Canada’, referencing
my Registration Number 300982 and mailing it to: Prostate Cancer
Canada, 145 Front Street East, Ste. 306, Toronto, ON M5A 1E3, Canada.

All donations are tax deductible to the extent permitted by law.

Prostate Cancer Canada will use the money raised by Movember for the development of programs related to awareness, public education, advocacy, support of those affected, and research into the prevention, detection, treatment and cure of prostate cancer.

For more details on how the funds raised from previous campaigns have been used and the impact Movember is having please go to http://ca.movemberfoundation.com/research-and-programs/

Thanks to all, and feel free to pass this info along to anyone who you think
might want to donate!

Oh, and I promise 'mo update photos on my blog so you see what you dollars are paying for!

TTFN

- S.

LIGHTSPEED - A New Science Fiction Magazine

2009-10-16T17:08:00.003-04:00

Some cool news today: John Joseph Adams will be at the helm of a new sci-fi magazine starting next year, and (even cooler!) my friend and fellow WOTFian Andrea Kail will be involved as the non-fiction editor. Congratulations Andrea and JJA!

I've only met JJA once at World Fantasy, but he was a really nice guy and Andrea is just great, too. This will really be a magazine to keep your eye on, folks!

This is the press-release that went around today:

Prime Books Announces Lightspeed, a New Science Fiction Magazine

ROCKVILLE, MD, OCT. 16 -- Prime Books, the award-winning independent press and publisher of Fantasy Magazine, announced today that in June 2010 it will launch a new online magazine called Lightspeed (www.lightspeedmagazine.com), which will publish four science fiction short stories every month, along with an assortment of non-fiction features. Lightspeed will be edited by John Joseph Adams, the bestselling editor of anthologies such as Wastelands and The Living Dead, and Andrea Kail, a writer, critic, and television producer who worked for thirteen years on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Adams will select and edit the fiction, while Kail will handle the non-fiction.

Lightspeed will focus exclusively on science fiction. It will feature all types of sf, from near-future, sociological soft sf, to far-future, star-spanning hard sf, and anything and everything in between. No subject will be considered off-limits, and writers will be encouraged to take chances with their fiction and push the envelope. New content will be posted twice a week, including one piece of fiction, and one piece of non-fiction. The fiction selections each month will consist of two original stories and two reprints, except for the debut issue, which will feature four original pieces of fiction. All of the non-fiction will be original.

Lightspeed will open to fiction submissions and non-fiction queries on January 1, 2010. Guidelines for fiction and non-fiction will be available on Lightspeed's website, www.lightspeedmagazine.com, by December 1, 2009.

About John Joseph Adams
John Joseph Adams (www.johnjosephadams.com) is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as By Blood We Live, Federations, The Living Dead (a World Fantasy Award finalist), and Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse. He has been called "the reigning king of the anthology world" by Barnes & Noble's Unabashedly Bookish blog and his anthology The Living Dead was named one of the best books of the year by Publishers Weekly. In addition to his editorial work, he is also currently a reviewer for Audible.com, a blogger for Tor.com, and the co-host of the podcast The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

About Andrea Kail
Andrea Kail (www.andreakail.com) is a graduate of the Dramatic Writing Program at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and has spent the last two decades working from one end of New York's television spectrum to the other: HBO, MTV, A&E, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, as well as thirteen years at NBC's Emmy Award-winning Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Her fiction has appeared in Fantasy Magazine, and her novella, "The Sun God at Dawn, Rising from a Lotus Blossom," was a first-place winner in the Writers of the Future contest and appeared in Writers of the Future Vol. XXIII. Since 2005, Andrea has also been writing lively film criticism for such venues as Paradox Magazine and CinemaSpy.

About Prime Books
Prime Books (www.prime-books.com), edited and published by Hugo Award-nominee and World Fantasy Award-winner Sean Wallace, is an award-winning independent publishing house specializing in a mix of anthologies, collections, novels, and magazines. Some of its established and new authors/editors include John Joseph Adams, KJ Bishop, Philip K. Dick, Theodora Goss, Rich Horton, Nick Mamatas, Sarah Monette, Holly Phillips, Tim Pratt, Ekaterina Sedia, Catherynne M. Valente, and Jeff VanderMeer.

Contacts
Sean Wallace, publisher, sean@lightspeedmagazine.com
John Joseph Adams, fiction editor, john@lightspeedmagazine.com
Andrea Kail, non-fiction editor, andrea@lightspeedmagazine.com

What Kind of a Name is 'Steve' Anyway?

2009-09-09T12:39:00.002-04:00

I'm offended on behalf of Steve's everywhere...

Captain America vs. Mickey Mouse

2009-09-02T06:05:00.001-04:00

Is this the fresh hell that awaits us?

Disney bought Marvel this week and a little piece of me died when I heard the news.

The Mouse will spend $4 billion in cash and stock to acquire Marvel's catalog of 5,000 characters--a library that includes some of the world’s best-known superheroes, including Spider-Man, the X-Men, Thor, Iron Man and the Fantastic Four.

I think that works out to an average of about $800,000 per character (though if you were to break it out doubtless some--like those listed above--would be worth far more than, say, Ant-Man...)

Marvel has forcefully exploited its most popular characters through motion pictures, video games and consumer products. But Disney sees an opportunity to plug Marvel into its vaunted global marketing and distribution system.

“Marvel’s brand and its treasure trove of content will now benefit from our extraordinary reach,” Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, said in an interview. “We paid a price that reflects the value they’ve created and the value we can create as one company. It’s a full price, but a fair price.”

Certain Marvel characters can be immediately integrated into Disney’s theme parks in California, Paris and Hong Kong. (For now, Walt Disney World in Florida is off limits because of a pact Marvel has in place with Universal Studios there.) Disney’s cable channels, in particular Disney XD, will have new intellectual property to mine. And the potential in consumer products is huge, especially overseas.

The brooding Marvel characters tend to be more popular with boys — an area where Disney could use help. While the likes of “Hannah Montana” and the blockbuster Princesses merchandising line have solidified Disney’s hold on little girls, franchises for boys have been harder to come by.

Acquiring Marvel makes Disney a partner with Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment and 20th Century Fox, all of which have long-term deals to make or distribute movies based on superhero characters. Sony holds the film rights to Spider-Man, for instance, while Fox has the X-Men and Fantastic Four — in perpetuity.

Paramount, a unit of Viacom, has an agreement to distribute five Marvel films, including two “Iron Man” sequels, over the next few years. Disney said it would honor the contract, but the goal is clearly to bring Marvel’s movies in-house.

Reactions to news of the deal lit up the tweetosphere Monday, with tons of Marvel-Disney crossover jokes pouring forth, with fans pointing out that Donald Duck and Howard the Duck might now be related.

Said K. T. Stevenson: “Disney buys Marvel. The first X-Mouse comic I see will make me hurl.”

Marvel Comics Editor in Chief Joe Quesada also took to Twitter in an effort to reassure comics fans about the deal.

“Welcome to this moment in history,” Quesada tweeted Monday morning. “Everyone relax, this is incredible news and all is well in the Marvel U…. Everybody take a deep breath, all your favorite comics remain unchanged and Tom Brevoort remains grouchy.”

Quesada pointed to the creative and business success that followed Disney’s purchase of Pixar for evidence that all is well within the House of Ideas.

“If you’re familiar with the Disney/Pixar relationship, then you’ll understand why this is a new dawn for Marvel and the comics industry,” he said.

Meanwhile, acclaimed comics writer Warren Ellis, who has worked for Marvel in the past, cracked wise about the pending deal.

“Why is everyone at Marvel making quacking noises today?” Ellis tweeted. “It’s horrible.”

Congratulations to Emery Huang and All the Writers of the Future Winners!

2009-08-30T21:12:00.003-04:00

Just got back from Writers of the Future XXV where I had an absolute blast. It was great to catch up with old friends and to make some new ones, too.

I'll post my photos and stuff later on this week (hopefully) but for right now I jut wanted to congratulate all the winners of this year's Writers and Illustrators of the Future. In particular I want congratulate Emery Huang, this year's Grand Prize winner! That's him in the picture below--the one in the green shirt. Welcome to the club, Emery!

But get this: in addition to the award, the adulation, and the money, as this year's Grand Prize winner Emery gets a trip on the Cairo leg of the World Airship Race 2010--he's going to be racing to the Giza Plateau in a zeppelin! Suddenly, he's a character in a steampunk tale! Reminds me of something Michael Moorcock wrote...

That's him in the green:
Emery Huang, Warlord of the Air!

My special thanks also go out to Jordan Lapp--a First Place quarterly winner and fellow Canuck, who I was lucky enough to be roommates with from Wednesday onward--as well as to Fiona Lehn, also doing Canada proud in Writers of the Future.

But really it's hard to single out any of the winners above another--they were all a tremendous amount of fun and very energizing to be around. Made me want to redouble my efforts to get this book done! And I think its nice how welcoming WOTF classes are to returning winners--there's a real comradeship and a club-like feeling between WOTF winners, I find. Anyway, an absolute first-rate bunch to hang around with. Can't wait to tuck into the Writers of the Future XXV antho and read their stories.

Now off to bed! For tomorrow, the Real World intrudes again...

- S.

Writers of the Future XXV Here I Come!

2009-08-26T18:23:00.001-04:00

Well, it's a bit last-minute (what isn't with me these days?) but I thought I'd let you know that I'll be away for a few days in Hollywood, attending Writers of the Future XXV, the Silver Anniversary Edition :)

I'm just going as a guest/spectator this time, so it will be nice not having the butterflies of anxiety about making a speech later in the week...This is to make up for having to miss WorldCon AGAIN because of other committments (that's TWO Canadian-hosted WorldCons I've missed...Grr...)

The event this year is being held at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, site of the first Academy Awards. The folks at Galaxy Press are already blogging about the week over on the Writers of the Future Blog.

Actually, just reading the WOTF blog and looking up the blogs of some of this year's winners has me all giddy about going, reminding me of my WOTF week in 2007... I'm really looking forward to meeting the new cohort of winners--I know a couple of them read my journal of the WOTF week and have been in touch (including Mike Wood who, bless his heart, actually became a follower of my blog...one of only two, I might add ;) And it will be great to meet up with guys like Kevin Anderson, Sean Williams, and Steve Saville again, too. I gather Rob Sawyer will be there this year, as well, which is cool since (though I see him fairly often) he wasn't able to attend in the year I won.

And from what I understand there are a couple of Canucks amongst the winners this year, too. It will be nice to make some new Canadian SF friends :)

Not sure what the schedule for the week is like (not sure when the 24-hour writing marathon takes place, for example) but I know that the meet-and-greet BBQ is Thursday night and that the award ceremony itself is on Saturday night. Can't wait! I plan to take lots of photos and I'm sure some will find there way here at some point, once I get my act back together...

So, if you'll excuse me, I have a plane to catch...

- S.

I Wish I Were a Mutant...

2009-08-17T06:21:00.001-04:00

Oh man--talk about winning the genetic lottery: science has discovered a genetic mutation in some human beings that allows them to function on far less sleep than average.

Researchers have found a genetic mutation in two people who need a mere 6 hours of sleep a night. The finding, published in the Friday issue of Science, marks the first time scientists have identified a genetic mutation that relates to sleep duration in any animal or human. The discovery could open the door to understanding human sleep patterns and lead to treatments for insomnia and other sleep disorders.

Although the mutation has been identified in only two people, the power of the research stems from the fact that the shortened sleep effect was replicated in mouse and fruit-fly studies. As a result, the research now gives scientists a clearer sense of where to look for genetic traits linked to sleep patterns.

The gene mutation was found by scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, who were conducting DNA screening on several hundred blood samples from people who had taken part in sleep studies.

The scientists were searching the samples for variations in several genes thought to be related to the sleep cycle. In what amounts to finding a needle in a haystack, they spotted two DNA samples with abnormal copies of a gene called DEC2, which is known to affect circadian rhythms. They then worked back to find out who provided the samples and found a mother and daughter who were naturally short sleepers. The women routinely function on about 6 hours of sleep a night; the average person needs 8 to 8.5 hours of sleep.

When scientists bred mice with the same mutation, the animals slept less and recovered quicker from periods of sleep deprivation compared with regular mice.

What distinguishes the two women in the study and other naturally short sleepers is that they go to bed at a normal time and wake up early without an alarm. The two women, one in her 70s and the other in her 40s, go to bed around 10 or 10:30 at night and wake up alert and energized around 4 or 4:30 in the morning.

Our bodies, we're always told, need 8 to 8.5 hours of sleep a night. Could you imagine how much you could get done in a day if you woke up rested and alert at 4:30am every day? I'd have like 3 extra hours a day to write before I had to do anything else...

The genetic mutation appears to be rare, though. Out of 70 families with known sleep problems studied at the university, only one family carried the mutation. The study suggests fewer than 5 percent of people appeared to be naturally short sleepers.

One of the researchers on the study said her “fantasy” was that the finding might eventually lead to a safe treatment for people who wanted or needed more awake hours and were looking for a way to get by on less sleep without harming their health.

How awesome would that be? Because as it is, I think I suffer from the opposite genetic trait: I think I'm in the 5 percent of people who need like 10 hours a night to function and feel human in the morning...

- S.

While My Guitar Gently Weeps: Les Paul, 1915-2009

2009-08-13T17:31:00.004-04:00

I was saddened today by news of the death of Les Paul, pioneer of both the solid-body electric guitar and multi-track recording. He was 94.

While he was a jazz and country guitarist by inclination, Les Paul's semi-hollow body and later solid body guitars (especially the line of Gibson and Epiphone electrics that bear his name) became a mainstay of rock and roll. They have been played by everyone from Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton to Slash and Lenny Kravitz. My own short-lived first job (4-months at McDonald's) was undertaken with the sole intention of buying my own electic guitar, a Les Paul Custom.

His name is Zaphod...

But more than his inventive and musical accomplishments, you know what always impressed me about Les Paul?

He once broke his right arm and elbow; doctors told him that the nature of the break meant he would never again be able to bend his arm. Rather than moan about permanent disfigurment he simply asked the doctor to set his right arm--his picking arm--at a 90-degree angle so he could continue to play his guitar.

They don't make 'em like that any more.

The AP obituary follows.

- S.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Guitar legend-inventor Les Paul dies at age 94
By LUKE SHERIDAN (AP)

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. — Les Paul, who pioneered the solid-body electric guitar later wielded by a legion of rock 'n' roll greats, died Thursday of complications from pneumonia. He was 94. According to Gibson Guitar, Paul died at White Plains Hospital. His family and friends were by his side.

As an inventor, Paul also helped bring about the rise of rock 'n' roll with multitrack recording, which enables artists to record different instruments at different times, sing harmony with themselves, and then carefully balance the tracks in the finished recording.

The use of electric-amplified guitars gained popularity in the mid-to-late 1940s, and then exploded with the advent of rock in the mid-'50s.

"Suddenly, it was recognized that power was a very important part of music," Paul once said. "To have the dynamics, to have the way of expressing yourself beyond the normal limits of an unamplified instrument, was incredible. Today a guy wouldn't think of singing a song on a stage without a microphone and a sound system."

"Without Les Paul, we would not have rock and roll as we know it," said Terry Stewart, president of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. "His inventions created the infrastructure for the music and his playing style will ripple through generations. He was truly an architect of rock and roll."

A tinkerer and musician since childhood, he experimented with guitar amplification for years before coming up in 1941 with what he called "The Log," a four-by-four piece of wood strung with steel strings. He felt a solid body would give the instrument a different sound from a traditional hollow guitar with an electrical pickup added to it.

"I went into a nightclub and played it. Of course, everybody had me labeled as a nut." He later put the wooden wings onto the body to give it a tradition guitar shape.

Leo Fender's Broadcaster was the first mass-produced solid body electric on the market in the late 1940s. In 1952, Gibson Guitars began production on the Les Paul guitar.

Pete Townshend of the Who, Steve Howe of Yes, jazz great Al DiMeola and Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page all made the Gibson Les Paul their trademark six-string.

Over the years, the Les Paul series has become one of the most widely used guitars in the music industry. In 2005, Christie's auction house sold a 1955 Gibson Les Paul for $45,600.

Guitarist Joe Satriani called Paul "the original guitar hero," saying: "Les Paul set a standard for musicianship and innovation that remains unsurpassed."

In the late 1960s, Paul retired from music to concentrate on his inventions. His interest in country music was rekindled in the mid-'70s and he teamed up with Chet Atkins for two albums. The duo were awarded a Grammy for best country instrumental performance of 1976 for their "Chester and Lester" album.

With Mary Ford, his wife from 1949 to 1962, he earned 36 gold records for hits including "Vaya Con Dios" and "How High the Moon," which both hit No. 1. Many of their songs used overdubbing techniques that Paul had helped develop.

"I could take my Mary and make her three, six, nine, 12, as many voices as I wished," he recalled. "This is quite an asset." The overdubbing technique was highly influential on later recording artists such as the Carpenters.

Released in 2005, "Les Paul & Friends: American Made, World Played" was his first album of new material since those 1970s recordings. Among those playing with him: Peter Frampton, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton and Richie Sambora.

"They're not only my friends, but they're great players," Paul told The Associated Press. "I never stop being amazed by all the different ways of playing the guitar and making it deliver a message."

Two cuts from the album won Grammys, "Caravan" for best pop instrumental performance and "69 Freedom Special" for best rock instrumental performance. (He had also been awarded a technical Grammy in 2001.)

Paul was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2005.

Paul was born Lester William Polfuss, in Waukesha, Wis., on June 9, 1915. He began his career as a musician, billing himself as Red Hot Red or Rhubarb Red. He toured with the popular Chicago band Rube Tronson and His Texas Cowboys and led the house band on WJJD radio in Chicago.

In the mid-1930s he joined Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians and soon moved to New York to form the Les Paul Trio, with Jim Atkins and bassist Ernie Newton.

Meanwhile, he had made his first attempt at audio amplification at age 13. Unhappy with the amount of volume produced by his acoustic guitar, Paul tried placing a telephone receiver under the strings. Although this worked to some extent, only two strings were amplified and the volume level was still too low.

By placing a phonograph needle in the guitar, all six strings were amplified, which proved to be much louder. Paul was playing a working prototype of the electric guitar in 1929.

His work on taping techniques began in the years after World War II, when Bing Crosby gave him a tape recorder. Drawing on his earlier experimentation with his homemade record-cutting machines, Paul added an additional playback head to the recorder. The result was a delayed effect that became known as tape echo.

Tape echo gave the recording a more "live" feel and enabled the user to simulate different playing environments.

Paul's next "crazy idea" was to stack together eight mono tape machines and send their outputs to one piece of tape, stacking the recording heads on top of each other. The resulting machine served as the forerunner to today's multitrack recorders.

In 1954, Paul commissioned Ampex to build the first eight-track tape recorder, later known as "Sel-Sync," in which a recording head could simultaneously record a new track and play back previous ones.

He had met Ford, then known as Colleen Summers, in the 1940s while working as a studio musician in Los Angeles. For seven years in the 1950s, Paul and Ford broadcast a TV show from their home in Mahwah, N.J. Ford died in 1977, 15 years after they divorced.

In recent years, even after his illness in early 2006, Paul played Monday nights at New York night spots. Such stars as Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, Dire Straits' Mark Knopfler, Bruce Springsteen and Eddie Van Halen came to pay tribute and sit in with him.

"It's where we were the happiest, in a `joint,'" he said in a 2000 interview with the AP. "It was not being on top. The fun was getting there, not staying there — that's hard work."

Dr. Quake's Genome

2009-08-13T06:03:00.003-04:00

Okay, so news that a technique has been found to sequence a genome for less than $50 000 US--a process which used to cost billions--is pretty cool. The fact that the Stanford engineer who came up with the idea's name is Stephen R. Quake? Priceless.

Dr. Quake says that the technique--which he first used to sequence his own genome on the cheap--“will democratize access to the fruits of the genome revolution” by enabling many labs and hospitals to decode whole human genomes. Affordability no doubt moves us one step closer to the age of genetically-tailored medical treatments.

So, like I said, all very impressive and an advance that will doubtless help countless people...but can anyone tell me why a guy named Dr. Quake is working in the field of genetics?

Don't get me wrong--he's obviously very talented and quite skilled in his chosen field. But Dr. Quake? Shouldn't he be designing doomsday machines to fight Superman? Some kind of ray that will crack the Earth in two or something?

I mean, the guy's name is Dr. Quake--you couldn't come up with a better supervillain name if you tried...

- S.

Aliette de Bodard Rules the World!

2009-08-05T06:56:00.003-04:00

I’m beyond thrilled to congratulate my friend and fellow WOTFian Aliette de Bodard on her three-book publishing deal with Angry Robot, a new imprint from HarperCollins dedicated to the best in modern adult science fiction, fantasy and everything in between.

Aliette has turned her WOTF-winning story "Obsidian Shards" into a novel, titled Servant of the Underworld--a fantasy mystery set in Aztec times. In this alternate world, the gods are real and stalk the temples, demanding sacrifice. Amidst the bloodletting, a serial killer appears to be getting away with murder--but how do you find a murderer in a world where the streets themselves are awash with blood? Aliette promises that the book contains “ghostly jaguars, bloodthirsty gods, and fingernail-eating monsters.”

Servant of the Underworld will publish in the UK, Canada, the United States and Australia in Spring 2010. The other two books, both set in the same world, will follow in due course.

Perhaps the wildest thing about the deal is how it all came together:

Stuck an extra day in at the Calgary airport after last November’s World Fantasy, Aliette happened to meet fellow strandees John Berlyne and Marc Gascoigne. They got talking and the pair had Aliette pitch her novel right there. Well, in the best traditions of a Hollywood movie it worked, because she landed an agent--from the new literary agency Zeno--and a publisher in Angry Robot thanks to that meeting.

I couldn’t be more thrilled for her. If you’re attending WorldCon in Montreal this weekend (alas, I have a friend’s wedding and can’t go) be sure to look for her--she’ll be the one walking on air :)

- S.

Toronto Book Launch for "Winds of Dune" by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson

2009-08-03T06:09:00.002-04:00

Some cool news for Toronto SF fans:

Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson will be doing a book launch for their latest Dune book, Winds of Dune, at the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy on Tuesday, August 18, 2009.

"Winds of Dune" is the second book in the four-part Heroes of Dune series, which chronicles events between Frank Herbert's "Dune Messiah" (1969) and "Children of Dune" (1976).

Books will be available (courtesy of Bakka-Phoenix Books) for signing by the authors.

Kevin Anderson is a super nice guy, so I recommed attending the launch. I'm looking forward to meeting Brian Herbert, too. He's one of the Writers of the Future judges I didn't get to meet the year that I won.

The Merril Collection is on the 3rd floor of the Lillian H. Smith library, 239 College St., and the book launch starts at 7 PM.

And remember: for those of you who can't wait until the 18th to buy your copy at the launch, Winds of Dune is available through booksellers everywhere as of tomorrow, August 4.
See you at the launch!

- S.

Charles N. Brown, 1937-2009

2009-07-14T07:09:00.001-04:00

I've been too lax in posting of late to return with such sad news: Locus publisher, editor, and co-founder Charles N. Brown, 72, died peacefully in his sleep July 12, 2009 on his way home from Readercon.

Like many a Writers of the Future alum before me, I got to know Charles briefly during the awards week in 2007. Charles knew something funny and/or incriminating about everyone is SF and was a featured speaker each year at WOTF, giving each new class insights into the SF field from his decades of first-hand experience of the genre (he was, after all, there in New York when it all began...)

The year I was at WOTF, Charles was recipient of the Hubbard Lifetime Achievement Award. He gave what I later found out was his traditional speech about what it takes to succeed in the industry and warning this newest crop of SF writers away from a life spent toiling in the sci-fi mines...

"Most of you will fail. Most of you won't make it," he said, to some nervous chuckling from the writers.

Sean Williams and Steve Savile later told me that reactions amongst their cohorts had been the same, with many people shocked by what Charles had to say. They said we'd actually had kind of a gentle version of his usual speech--perhaps he was tempering things this year given his impending award.

While this continued to trouble some over the next few days, others (myself included) were able not to dismiss it but, in essence, be determined that we'd prove Charles wrong.

Charles was very generous with his time at WOTF, hanging out with the writers long after many others had gone to bed. He spent many hours by the pool with us that final Saturday night, telling jokes, sharing stories...

I saw and spoke to him again briefly a few months later at World Fantasy--he spoke of looking forward to his knee-replacement surgery--but my personal favorite experience with Charles in the brief time I knew him was the Friday night of WOTF, after the award ceremony.

We'd returned to the hotel and I, still shell-shocked from my grand prize win, wandered down to the bar...only to discover it was CLOSED!

Charles Brown and Amelia Beamer (also of Locus) were there, and just as we arrived Rome and Sean Williams retired to their rooms. "Come have a seat by me," Charles said to me. Cool.

Though the bar was closed, Amelia turned out to have snuck in a micky of Hennessey, which Charles poured into a dirty glass for me.

It might have been the best drink I'd ever had. It tasted like victory. It was a very sweet gesture on his part and I will always remember that night and that moment when I think of him.

Charles Brown receives the 2007 Hubbard Lifetime Achievement Award.(Photo courtesy Galaxy Press/WOTF)

- S.

The Book of Exodi Now Available!

2009-06-08T07:39:00.003-04:00

I'm very pleased to announce that The Book of Exodi, a collection of nineteen stories on the theme of mass exodus, which includes my new story "Cladistics", is now available.

This collection (to which Harry Turtledove contributes an introduction and story) is the first print-on-demand book I've ever been involved in. It's been a very pleasant experience working with Michael Eidson, the editor/manager of the publisher, Eposic Diversions. And since I keep hearing that POD and the so-called "long tail" is the future, well, I thought I'd get in on the ground floor :)

Order your copy direct from the printer, CreateSpace, here or get it via Amazon here.

Enjoy!

- S.

The Manchester Fiction Prize 2009

2009-05-13T08:59:00.001-04:00

<b>The Manchester Fiction Prize 2009</b>

First prize: £10,000
Deadline for entries: 7th August 2009
Entry fee: £15

Under the direction of Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, the Writing
School at Manchester Metropolitan University is launching The
Manchester Fiction Prize - a new literary competition celebrating
excellence in creative writing.

The Manchester Fiction Prize is open internationally and will award a
cash prize of £10,000* to the writer of the best short story
submitted. The competition is open to entrants aged 16 or over; there
is no upper age limit.

A bursary for study at MMU will also be awarded to an entrant aged
18-25 as part of the Manchester Young Writer of the Year Award*.
Eligible entrants are asked to indicate on the entry form if they
would like to be considered for the Manchester Young Writer of the
Year Award in addition to the main prize.

All entrants are asked to submit a complete short story of up to 5,000
words in length. The story can be on any subject, and written in any
style, but must be new work, not published or submitted for
consideration elsewhere. The competition will be judged by
distinguished novelists and short story writers Sarah Hall, M. John
Harrison and Nicholas Royle.

The Manchester Fiction Prize celebrates the substantial cultural and
literary achievements of Manchester, building on the work of MMU's
Writing School and enhancing the city's reputation as one of Europe's
most adventurous and creative spaces. The prizes will be awarded at a
gala ceremony, held as part of the 2009 Manchester Literature
Festival.

You can enter online by going to: http://www.manchesterwritingcompetition.co.uk

If you would like a printed entry pack for postal submission, or if
you have any queries, please contact:

James Draper
Project Manager: Writing School
Department of English
Manchester Metropolitan University
Telephone: +44 (0) 161 247 1787
E-mail: j.draper@mmu.ac.uk

*Terms and Conditions apply. See
http://www.manchesterwritingcompetition.co.uk for full details.

Dan Brown's Print-run to Block Out the Sun

2009-05-11T07:24:00.000-04:00

I posted recently about Audrey Niffenegger getting a $5 million advance for her new novel and thought that was pretty impressive.

Well, not to be out-done, news that Dan Brown's new book, The Lost Symbol, will have a first printing of 5 million copies, a record for his publisher, Doubleday.

A FIRST PRINTING of 5 million copies! Good grief. I assume that means the unit cost on each book will be about an eighth of a cent... Don't worry--you'll still have to pay $35 for the hardcover ;)

- S.

Amazon.com: Arbiter of Publishing Success?

2009-05-06T07:15:00.000-04:00

Further to my earlier discussion about the importance of Amazon.com reviews to the success of a book, another article from The Globe and Mail about Amazon.com as humanity's de facto repository of all book knowledge. It makes one wonder: if a book falls in a bookstore and Amazon.com isn't there to hear it, does anyone know the book exists?

- S.

The Science of Horoscopes?

2009-05-04T07:13:00.000-04:00

Apparently, a growing body of research--gathered essentially as a by-product of other research into everything from pesticides and flu viruses to sunlight and vitamin D--suggests that the month a baby is conceived in can have serious health consequences later in life. Infants conceived in June appear to suffer from birth defects at a higher rate than others, for instance. But babies born in the fall (conceived in November or December) tend to have more asthma. Even a baby's gender can be influenced by timing that's out of parents' hands: research has shown the birth of baby boys dips nine months after stressful world events such as Sept. 11.

As researchers busy themselves filling in this veritable new zodiac, parents-to-be wonder how closely they should study the calendar.

Check out some of the other weird correlations based on month of conception:

* Research out of Indiana suggested a link between American babies being conceived between April and July and a higher risk of birth defects, including spina bifida, cleft lip and Down syndrome.

* A study out of Bristol in Britain, released in February, found that late-summer and early-autumn babies in Avon were on average slightly taller (5 millimetres) and had thicker bones (12.75 centimetres squared) than those born in winter and spring.

* A team in Nashville found a 30-per-cent increase in the risk of asthma for children born four months before flu season, in late fall and winter.

* An Israeli study found that babies born in June and July had a 24 per cent greater chance of becoming severely myopic than those born in December and January.

* Many studies have found that babies born in the Northern Hemisphere in February, March and April have a 5 to 10 per cent higher risk of schizophrenia.

The full article can be found here.

- S.

My Suggested New Name for Swine Flu OR Give Pigs a Chance…

2009-05-01T07:23:00.004-04:00

Juliet:
"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."

- Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

There’s been a lot of talk this week amongst politicians and various interest groups about needing a new name for the swine flu currently spreading across the planet.

The first I’d heard about a desire to, of all things, rebrand a sometimes-lethal potential pandemic flu strain was on Monday, when the Israeli Deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman said that swine flu should be re-named "Mexican flu," because reference to pigs is offensive to Muslim and Jewish sensitivities over pork. While I understand the religious ban on pork in both faiths, I confess I don’t really understand why the term “swine flu” is that offensive—after all, it’s not exactly something you’re hoping to get anyway, right?

I can understand why some things that people want but might not like to call by their proper name get the cushion of a euphemism or catchier sounding name. Take Botox, for example. Lots of people want it for cosmetic reasons; so many now, in fact, that there’s really no stigma associated with getting Botox treatments (unless you go all Nicole Kidman, that is…) But what is Botox a short form trade name for?

Botulinum toxin. Yeah, that’s right. A potent neurotoxin used for cosmetic purposes. Now what sounds better: “You look great since your Botox treatment!” or “Wow, those injections of botulinum toxin in your face really worked great!”

My point exactly.

But with swine flu isn’t it the other way around? You want to avoid getting the disease, so why dress it up in a bland-sounding name? “Mexican flu” sounds like a euphemism for a tequila-induced hangover. “Swine flu” sounds ugly and nasty and, well, it is. If you do come down with this flu strain you have a lot more problems to worry about than what it’s called, don’t you think?

Needless to say, Mexico didn’t take kindly to this suggestion, feeling that “Mexican flu” was a bit more offensive to them than “swine flu”. This I actually can understand: Mexico doesn’t want to be blamed for the sickness, panic, and death so far associated with this new influenza. The Mexicans have suggested “North American flu”, but why tar all of us with that brush? Why blame people when you can just blame pigs?

But then on Wednesday we learned that groups representing the pork industry — including the Canadian Pork Council, the World Organization for Animal Health, the American National Pork Producers Council, the National Pork Board and the American Meat Institute (mmm…meat institute…) — have all been in talks with the US Agriculture Department asking officials to discourage the name "swine flu" and to reassure the public that pork is safe.

"We're discussing, is there a better way to describe this that would not lead to inappropriate actions on people's part?" said Dr. Richard Besser, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "In the public, we've been seeing a fair amount of misconception ... and that's not helpful."

It’s impossible to get pig strains of influenza from food, but nevertheless by last weekend China, Russia and Ukraine were banning imports of pork from Mexico and certain U.S. states, and other governments were increasing screening of pork imports.

Again, this need for a change makes sense: the term swine flu is leading to confusion, with people fearing they can catch the disease from pork — which is flat-out wrong.

So what alternatives are we left with?

Well, as of Wednesday the US government and President Obama had taken to calling the outbreak “the H1N1 flu virus”--which, while its correct technical scientific name, doesn’t really have any poetry to it. (And somebody should tell the Centers for Disease Control to get with the program…)

European Union officials have suggested calling the disease “novel flu.”

…NOW WAIT JUST A DAMNED MINUTE.

“Novel flu”? Are you trying to pin this on writers now? Hmmm… What kind of writers would spin a yarn about an animal virus mutating to infect humans and cause a global pandemic? Could it be science fiction writers?

You’re not pinning this one on us, bucko! No way. No how. We get enough grief and lack of respect for writing SF in the first place—we don’t need your help to be literary or social pariahs, thank you very much…

So, what are we left with?

Swine flu? Out.

Mexican flu? No mas.

North American flu? Thank you, no.

The H1N1 flu virus? Boooring…

Which brings us to my suggestion:

El Gripe.

It’s Spanish for ‘the flu’ (thus hinting at the Mexican connection without pointing any fingers) but much like ‘the Plague’ and ‘Cher’ it has that one-name-says-it-all ominousness to it.

Whaddya think? Doesn’t it just pop?

I’m glad we’re agreed.

Via El Gripe!

Err, wait, no…

- S.

SCIENCE!

2009-04-29T07:55:00.002-04:00

It's been a long-standing desire of mine (for a number of obvious reasons) to write, in essence, a science fiction version of the Harry Potter books. Perhaps the kids could be Space Cadets attending some sort of astronaut academy, etc...

I'm hardly alone in this desire and if it were so easy to do that any number of writers would already have succeeded. Which gets to the heart of the problem with the Harry Potter books and, really, any and all best-sellers: no one--not author, not agent, not editor--really knows what it is that sets them apart.

Oh, there are lots of theories and you can buy (as I have) any number of books that claim to give you the secret checklist of the kinds of things to include when building your story that best-sellers or break-out or blockbuster novels have in common.

But lots of people have these books and apply their lessons, and any number of those books get published and some of those go on to success...but none of them make it like Harry Potter made it.

And the question is why? What is it about those books--that ineffable, unteachable, unplanable quality--that makes those books (or others like The DaVinci Code, for instance) such a cultural phenomenon and massive best-sellers?

While I don't pretend to know the answer to that (if I did I'd be working on my book instead of this blog...) but I've often wondered whether the application of careful market research (and some of the math modeling, statistical analysis, and hard- and social science they use in modern marketing is downright scary) could deduce what the French call a certain "I don't know what."

Well, looks like I'm not (surprise, surprise) the only one to wonder the same thing. Scientists (in an old study that I've only just come across) seem to have identified quantifiable evidence of the anecdotal publishing wisdom that the best way to nail a best-seller is word-of-mouth recommendations.

Duh. This is one of those times where you shake your head and think: "They needed a study to tell them that?" It is, however, a step in the hard-fact, cold-light-of-science direction that we need in order to quantify this element.

But more interesting to me, in a slightly different context, is news that Disney has a whole marketing force, including a so-called "kid whisperer", dedicated to tapping into that most elusive of markets: tween boys.

Getting tween girls to jump on trends and buy whatever they're told to by the media and their peers is apparently the marketing equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel, but boys in the same 11-14 year old range remain either too savvy or too oblivious to marketing ploys to spend in the way that their female counterparts do.

Not to sound sexist, but other market data indicates that more men and boys read sci-fi than do women and girls (who tend to read more fantasy and do most of the book buying, too). So if my Harry Potter in Space series is to fly, I think I need to tap into this kind of marketing data. After all, I think it was getting young boys reading that really launched Harry Potter in to the sales stratosphere.

So if you'll excuse me I need to go turn my skateboard the other way 'round...

- S.

Cue the Terminator soundtrack...

2009-04-27T07:56:00.005-04:00

John Connor:
Can you learn things that you haven't been programed with, so you can be, you know, more human, and not just a dork all the time?

The Terminator:
My CPU is a neural net processor, a learning computer. The more contact I have with humans, the more I learn.

John Connor:
Cool.

- Terminator 2: Judgment Day

My fear of intelligent computers and Termintor-style killing machines is well known. So perhaps you can understand how my blood ran cold when I read this...

If this computer could deduce in a day what it took humanity centuries to deduce do we really want something that much faster and smarter than us running around? Hmm?

- S.

Science Fiction's Future OR Fear and Loathing in Science Fiction

2009-04-22T07:48:00.001-04:00

Further to my post from Monday, here's a few more sites (one of them a bit dated in its discusson of the Fall '08 television season...) that make some interesting points about the current state and potential future of the SF genre:

http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/007318.html

http://io9.com/5065675/why-science-fiction-still-hates-itself

http://io9.com/5050871/do-you-really-want-science-fiction-books-to-be-more-literary

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article4065242.ece

- S.

New Scientist on the Future of Science Fiction

2009-04-20T07:44:00.002-04:00

Hi all -

Missed this when it first came out, but NEW SCIENTIST had sci-fi special edition for their Nov. 15, 2008 issue, and at least some of the content is available now at their website. It includes, among other things, the usual discussions about whether SF is dying/relevant anymore. Worth checking out.

Get the full article HERE.

- S.

Which Came First: the Dinosaur or the Egg?

2009-04-15T07:56:00.000-04:00

One of the things that fascinated me most in my high school and university biology classes was study of vertebrate evolution, and specifically that sequence of photos in the textbooks showing various vertebrate embryos at different stages of development during gestation: at some point in the womb, human beings look a lot like lizards, and birds, and all sorts of other things that we used to be on our way to be primates and eventually homo sapiens.

Well, now this same principle is being considered by some scientists to create what you might call "chickenosaurus". While not exactly Jurrasic Park, some evolutionary biologists are teaming with paleontologists in hopes of genetically altering a chicken embryo to express some of the dormant traits held over from the days when birds used to be dinosaurs.

It wouldn't be a dinosaur, and while genetically chickenosaurus would still be a domestic chicken, it wouldn't exactly be a chicken, either. It might look something like Archaeopteryx--the earliest and most primitive bird known--having arms with claws instead of wings, teeth, and a tail; what science calls "atavistic structures". Chickenosaurus would be a sort of evolutionary throwback--certain genetic signaling switches would be turned off or on depending on what features we were trying to express.

The book How To Build A Dinosaur by Jack Horner and James Gorman came out last week and an excerpt of the book in the Globe and Mail can be found here.

I may have to pick up that book...

- S.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Which comes first? The dinosaur or the egg?
It may sound like a Jurassic Park sequel, but scientists at McGill and several U.S. universities are working toward hatching a live dinosaur from a regular chicken's egg. In this excerpt from their book How To Build a Dinosaur, paleontologist Jack Horner and co-author James Gorman explore why we should take this leap.

JACK HORNER AND JAMES GORMAN

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

March 28, 2009 at 12:00 AM EDT

Among the potential benefits of causing a chicken embryo to develop dinosaurian characteristics is that this is a project that could capture the popular imagination. It could be a demonstration of evolution that would be felt at gut level by nonscientists who might be uninterested in the details of genomes and embryos.

Anything that brings home to the public the reality of evolution, and its place as the foundation idea of modern biology, is important. Anything that dispels the fog of confusion about science and religion would be enormously positive.

Hatching a dino-chicken would be shockingly vivid evidence of the reality of evolution – not a thought experiment but an Oprah-ready show-and-tell exhibit. The creature would be its own sound- and vision-bite. It certainly wouldn't convince anybody who didn't want to be convinced. But it would cause discussion and thought.

Creating a demonstration suitable for sound-bite television is not, however a reason to do scientific experiments. In order to get to the point where the question “How did you do that?” could be answered, we would have to learn a great deal. And we would tie molecular biology to macroevolution. We would zero in on a significant passage in vertebrate evolution, the transition from non-avian dinosaurs to birds, and pin it down to molecular changes in embryonic cells.
It may sound like a Jurassic Park sequel, but scientists at McGill and several U.S. universities are working toward hatching a live dinosaur from a regular chicken's egg.
Enlarge Image

It may sound like a Jurassic Park sequel, but scientists at McGill and several U.S. universities are working toward hatching a live dinosaur from a regular chicken's egg.

This is the heart of the promise of evolutionary developmental biology.

Vertebrate paleontology may seem to be so remote from the daily problems of the modern world that it exists apart from society. If I were to be harsh, I might ask, “What good is it?”

There is an aspect of vertebrate paleontology that is highly useful and of great importance to us as vertebrates. That vertebrate body plan is one we share with dinosaurs, chickens, and countless other creatures.

The result of this commonality of life, in this case in the specific fraternity of four-limbed vertebrates, is that lessons we learn about the growth of any tetrapod embryos may have significance for the growth of human embryos.

If we learn about the growth factors that signal the neural tube to continue developing, it's possible that this knowledge could be useful in preventing birth defects.

In spina bifida, for instance, incomplete development of the spinal cord can leave an infant with painful and sometimes lethal birth defects.

In the 1980s researchers pinned down the importance of folic acid to the development of the spinal cord in human embryos. This discovery was made partly by gathering information about the diets of pregnant women and the incidence of spinal-cord birth defects like spina bifida, and partly with animal research. The simple remedy of adding folic acid to the diet of pregnant women now prevents countless cases of these defects.

Knowing that there are great potential benefits answers some questions about whether such research should be done. But there are others. Is it a morally justifiable act to play with life in order to go back in time? Is it cruel? Is it dangerous?

Experimentation of all sorts on chicken embryos is widely accepted and, I think, the correct assumption is that we are not causing the embryo pain. As to ultimately sacrificing the embryo, or a fully grown chicken, there are far greater injustices and indignities that billions of chickens face every day. Common sense would suggest that not allowing an egg to hatch, or humanely killing even a full-grown chicken, are actions that society recognizes as legitimate, given even the small return of a meal. The potential return is much greater here.

No one is ready to let an embryo experiment hatch yet. But when that point is reached, when the plan is to have a fully formed dinosaurlike chick hatch, then the experiment will come under review boards that deal with animal welfare. My sense is that providing a chicken with arms with claws instead of wings, with teeth, and with a tail, would not be cruel. In fact, if the atavistic structures grew improperly or were malformed in a way that would cause the animal pain, that in itself would mark a clear failure, since the whole point is to re-create functioning atavistic characteristics, not monstrosities.

There is a whole range of possible objections that have nothing to do with the health or life conditions of what we could probably call chickenosaurus. And that is fear for the environment, for interfering with the delicate ecological balance of the planet.

But if the embryo is not allowed to hatch, then it won't be out in the environment at all. If it were allowed to hatch, and somehow escaped, the only problem would be the chickenosaur figuring out how to survive. It would not be a danger to the environment or to the billions of chickens in the world, because we would not be changing its genetic makeup. By manipulating growth signalling factors we would be switching genes on and off at different times during development, but not changing the genes themselves. Genetically, chickenosaurus would still be a domestic chicken. And if it were somehow to breed with a chicken, the result would only be more chickens.

I can say what interventions I would find reasonable, but I am not the one to decide. That is for society at large.

What I and other scientists can decide is whether or not to pursue knowledge that has the potential to teach us a great deal and to provide powerful tools that could be used for good purposes and bad.

My work is all about finding things out, about learning, and I operate on the principle that we should try to find out as much as we can about the way the world works.

I don't stop and say, “Could this research find out something that might be misused, might cause more evil than good?”

I follow my nose to see what is interesting. When it comes to the question of how that knowledge is used, I am just another citizen.

Reprinted by arrangement with Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from How to Build a Dinosaur, by Jack Horner and James Gorman.

Oh, those Russians...

2009-04-13T07:55:00.002-04:00

By now, six people who were voluntarily locked into a cloister of cramped, hermetically sealed tubes woven inside a Moscow research facility the size of a high school gymnasium are entering their second week of self-imposed isolation. They are eating dehydrated food, breathing recycled air and are being denied conversation with practically everyone else but one another.

And they must stay inside for 105 days.

In a small step in the direction of Mars, the international crew is embarking on a simulated flight to the planet to test the limits of human tolerance for the isolation and monotony of interplanetary travel.

The full article from the New York Times is here. What I found most surprising about the simulated trip to Mars is the legitimately ugly simulated wood paneling inside the crew quarters of the 'space ship'...

- S.

Rise of the Twitterzines

2009-04-08T08:04:00.000-04:00

I suppose it was only a matter of time...

Saw an article in the Globe and Mail about the birth of the "Twitterzine": Twitter feeds that are used for ultra-short flash fiction.

While my stated opinion is that Twitter is silly, I do enjoy the unintended consequences of tweeting for fictional purposes. I really wonder whether the designers of Twitter ever thought there would be online storytelling via 140-character installments. Or maybe they, like many of the great internet pioneers, weren't sure exactly what all the uses of their site would be except that users would find all sorts of unique and creative things to do with the technology.

It's exploring that element of the unexpected and unanticipated where people and their technology interface that keeps me coming back to science fiction again and again...

Speaking of which, there are already a couple of so-called "Twitterzines" in the SF genre that I'm aware of (there may very well be more):

Outshine, a venue for "optimistic, near future prose poems" with Jetse de Vries (late of Interzone) as editor and

Thaumatrope, market for science fiction, fantasy, and horror presented in 140 characters or less.

- S.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Seriously short stories
On Twitter, authors are finding a new way to flex their creative muscles – and soak up instant reader feedback in the process

PHILIP MOSCOVITCH

Globetechnology.com

March 24, 2009 at 2:26 PM EDT

Arjun Basu may be Canada's most prolific author.

Since November, the Montreal-based writer has produced some 500 short stories. But this is short fiction with a twist: Follow @arjunbasu on Twitter and you'll be reading lots and lots of very short stories — all exactly 140 characters long.

"It started as a lark and relatively quickly became something I was mildly obsessed with," says Basu, the editorial director for custom publisher Spafax and author of last year's short story collection Squishy.

"In the beginning I was doing one a day. Now I'm up to four or five, if not more. And slowly but surely, like all things Twitter, people start noticing you and what you're trying to do, and they start following you and telling other people about it."

A selection of recent stories from Arjun Basu's Twitter account:

He woke up and went out to the balcony. I am love, he shouted. I am everything! Someone threw a cupcake at him. I'm also cupcakes, he yelled 1:34 PM Mar 19th

He opened the door and announced, my nipples are so cold they could cut glass. And then he saw his future inlaws in the kitchen drinking tea 2:17 PM Mar 21st

He takes a look at his feet and realizes he can't wear flip flops. I've become a girl, he tells his wife. I already knew that dear, she says 6:22 PM Mar 21st

He was stuck in that neverland between sleep and needing to pee. The night was over but the day had yet to begin. Story of my life, he sighs 6:31 AM Mar 22nd

Given the 140-character limit, Basu manages to evoke a surprising range of moods in his micro-stories. Some are wry: "The lawn reminds me of my fourth wife; feral but sort of beautiful. The grass needs cutting, my son says. Oh, it needs more than that, I say" (Basu occasionally squeezes out an extra character by dropping the final period). Many hint at loss: "They argued the merits of Roxy Music until they realized they were both old. All our tunes are commercials for unglamorous things, Joe said." And some are sheer fun: "The kid says yay I don't have to do anything today. The dad says why not? The kid says my teacher said so. She said it's the idles of March."

Basu is one of a growing number of writers who are using Twitter to create pieces of micro-fiction and to develop a more immediate relationship with readers. There are writers producing short science fiction, scenes captured in images, and even using the site to publish longer original works.

Take Clare Bell, for example. On March 14, the California-based writer began releasing the novelette Ratha's Island — the latest instalment in her young adult series about giant, talking cats living 20 million years ago — in bursts of 140 characters or fewer on Twitter.

Bell is a former electric vehicle engineer (she used to drive her electric Porsche in races in Arizona), and, with an engineer's efficiency, she carefully planned out an online campaign to support her book, Ratha's Courage, released last year.

But Twitter hadn't been part of the plan, until publisher Sheila Ruth of Imaginator Press encouraged her to create an account.

"At first I thought it was just a toy. You couldn't do a whole lot with 140 characters," Bell says. "But I began to realize that people were adapting it for all sorts of purposes. I started out exchanging messages with Sheila and others, and then I had an idea … Let's see if I can do a little prequel to the book I just published — basically for publicity and to entertain people."

In addition to posting as herself, Bell started to write tweets she called "ClanChirps" in the personas of her characters, and had them tell a story in dialogue. It ran through most of the second half of 2008.

Readers responded, and Bell and her publisher began to think about releasing a whole new story through the website.

"I wrote the draft out in fairly short pieces, but they weren't as short as 140 characters. It's a little more difficult than writing straight narrative. It takes some more engineering." Bell said in an interview the day before the story began appearing online.

"The trick is to get the entries so they fit into the Twitter format, so they're not choppy and they draw the reader into the next one. There's also much more of a focus on clarity since these posts are going to be separated in time."

While Bell's Twitter fiction extends a world she's already created into a new medium, Basu just fell into writing fictional tweets.

After a few banal tweets ("total conference call hell"), Basu posted his first twister on Oct. 28. "I had this image in my head of a kid trying to reach a cookie on a table. I don't know why, but I wrote a little scene out of it. When I got to the end, I was two characters over, and I thought 'Oh, I have to amend this.' So I got it into 140 characters perfectly. And then I did it again a few minutes later, and I thought it was kind of interesting. To write the ultimate flash fiction within the rules Twitter's established."

Now, more than 500 twisters later, he says he has signed on with a New York agent who discovered him through Twitter and is confident he can land him a book deal.

Bell also hopes Ratha's Island ends up in print. For now, she is archiving the posts for fans who come into the story partway through and want to catch up easily.

In addition to the challenge of trying to fit fiction into the 140-character limit, Basu says part of the fun of writing on Twitter "is that the feedback is almost instantaneous, and writers don't usually get that. Some twisters go out there and people start writing you within seconds. For a writer that's almost like catnip."

He adds, "I expend a lot of creative capital on this now. It's affecting the way I write. I'm thinking in these little snippets now. I was recently asked to write a short story for a magazine, and I had to wrap my head around it. It was long. Well, it wasn't long — but it was longer than 140 characters."

Snake Whacking Day...err, Toad Whacking Day

2009-04-06T07:57:00.000-04:00

The above photos are of a cane toad caught by our guide in Australia's Kakadu National Park. He explained to us what an ecological menace they are and then...well, let's just say this toad had a very bad day after that.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Australia targets toxic cane toads

KRISTEN GELINEAU

Associated Press

March 26, 2009 at 9:37 AM EDT

SYDNEY — For decades, the poisonous cane toad has plagued Australians, breeding rapidly, eating voraciously and bestowing death upon most animals that dare try to consume it.

So officials came up with a novel — some say poetic — solution: Hold a festive mass killing of the creatures and turn the corpses into fertilizer for the farmers who have battled the pests for years.

On Saturday, residents of five communities in cane-toad-plagued northern Queensland state will grab their flashlights and fan out into the night to hunt down the hated animals as part of the inaugural “Toad Day Out” celebration. The toads will be brought to collection points the next morning to be weighed and killed, with some of the remains ground into fertilizer for sugarcane farmers at a local waste management plant.

“It's just a circle of poetic justice!” Toad Day Out organizer Lisa Ahrens said. “Seventy-five years later, they're a benefit to the cane farmer.”

The toads were imported from South America to Queensland in 1935 in a failed attempt to control beetles on sugarcane plantations. The problem? The toads couldn't jump high enough to eat the beetles, which live on top of cane stalks.

The ample amphibians, which grow up to 20 centimetres in length, bred rapidly, and their millions-strong population now threatens many local species across Australia. They spread diseases, such as salmonella, and produce highly toxic venom from glands in their skin that can kill would-be predators. The toads are also voracious eaters, chomping up insects, frogs, small reptiles and mammals — even birds. Cane toads are only harmful to humans if their poison is swallowed.

“The cane toad is probably the most disgusting creature and the most destructive creature,” said Queensland politician Shane Knuth, a long-time loather of cane toads, who came up with the Toad Day Out idea. “They're killing our native wildlife, they're taking over our habitat and they're hopping all through this country.”

Mr. Knuth, who has been pushing a proposal to offer a 28 cent (U.S.) bounty on the creatures since 2007, said each adult female cane toad can produce 20,000 eggs. “So if we're able to remove 3,000 female toads, we have the potential in the long run of removing 60 million toads from our environment,” he said. No one knows exactly how many cane toads live in Australia.

Organizers are trying to woo thousands of people to take part in the hunt by offering prizes for those with the biggest toad and the highest total weight of toads. Goodies range from cane toad trophies (made of actual stuffed cane toads) to a gift certificate for a local resort.

An organizers' tip sheet gives advice on how to create toad traps — or “detention camps” — and recommends that participants “study detention techniques to ensure your own, as well as the toad's safety — they must be alive and unharmed for interrogation.”

Live toads brought to the collection points will be examined by experts to ensure they're not harmless frogs and then killed, either by freezing or by being placed in plastic bags filled with carbon dioxide.

Haydn Slattery, manager of the SITA waste management plant in Cairns, said he's hoping to receive about 220 pounds.

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals has applauded the effort — with one caveat. “We're only supportive of the plan if the toads are killed humanely — in other words, they're not hit with baseball bats or cricket bats and golf clubs,” said spokesman Michael Beatty.

Thai 'Spider-Man' to the rescue

2009-04-01T07:25:00.000-04:00

This is a pretty amazing story and one that touches me on a few levels: as a comic book fan and because my mom works with autistic kids.

But the main reason I was fascinated by this story: exactly why did this fellow have a Spider-man costume in his locker at the fire station...?

- S.

Cold Fusion Gets a Makeover

2009-03-30T07:42:00.005-04:00

Did you know that cold fusion--derided as quackery and even as pseudo-science for decades--has a new, less threatening, less discredited name?

"Low-energy Nuclear Reactions": that's the new name (LENR for short) for research into room-temperature nuclear reactions. I had no idea science could be so concerned with being P.C.

I bring this up because of an article I saw on the BBC recently about LENR sessions at last week's American Chemical Society’s 237th National Meeting. The ACS has organized sessions surrounding LENR research at its meetings before, suggesting that the field would otherwise have no suitable forum for debate (the main theme for this year's conference was "Nanoscience: Challenges for the Future"--a much sexier topic).

This meeting roughly coincided with the twentieth anniversary of Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons' much ballyhooed but ill-fated announcement that they had succeeded in achieving cold fusion, that long-sought-after source of boundless clean energy. Fusion is, after all, the energy source of the sun and the stars.

Attempts to replicate their experiments failed, largely discrediting the cold fusion field in the eyes of 'mainstream' science, but a number of researchers continue to insist that cold fusion is possible.

The ACS meeting heard of several approaches that claim to produce fusion power.

Many of the details of Pons and Fleischmann's original electrolytic cell feature in more recent work, including the type of metal used in the cell's electrodes and the use of deuterium, aka "heavy water".

One wholly new approach was explained by researchers from Hokkaido University, who have seen unexplained heat production in a chamber filled with compressed hydrogen and a chemical called phenanthrene.

One group of scientists (creepily enough from the U.S. Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center) described what it terms the first clear visual evidence that LENR devices can produce neutrons, subatomic particles that scientists view as tell-tale signs that nuclear reactions are occurring.

More information on the meeting can be found at the American Chemical Society’s website, where they have a nice article about some of the findings of the LENR sessions at the meeting.

- S.

But I Like the Genre’s Tradition of Hokey, Hopeful Earnestness...

2009-03-27T07:14:00.004-04:00

Okay: it's been a week so if you followed Battlestar Galactica you've had plenty of time to see the finale, so there are spoilers that follow but you've been warned.

Last Saturday in the New York Time there was an article that looked back (with some decent insight) on the run of Battlestar Galactica. You can find it here.

But it wouldn't be a review of a sci-fi (or is that syfy now?) genre show if the reviewer didn't take a swipe at the genre as a whole. The reviewer writes:

But the show could not break with the genre’s tradition of hokey, hopeful earnestness. Landing finally on a pastoral facsimile of Earth, the human-Cylon partnership vows to start anew with pledges not to let science outpace soulfulness. One hundred fifty thousand years later, a city of neon stands on the green terrain — as well as the assumption that we won’t make all of the same mistakes over again.

I guess that's why I'm a fan of science fiction but...I kinda like the genre's "hokey, hopeful earnestness." Why is that 'serious' literature need be bleak and depressing to be 'real' or 'meaningful'? Why can't serious literature examine ways in which things could (and should) be better in the human experience? Why not give us something to strive for rather than show us simply how things are?

It also makes me suspicious of whole arguments and sets of opinions when any reviewer uses Ursula K. Le Guin's “The Left Hand of Darkness” as an example of the SF genre. It's a great book and one of the few SF works that have gained mainstream literary respectability...but it did come out in 1969. When it is touted as an example of what SF is I think: "Yes, but has that reviewer ever read anything else in the genre? Have they read anything that came out SINCE 1969?"

- S.

Audrey Niffenegger Receives $5 Million Advance for Second Novel

2009-03-26T07:57:00.001-04:00

That sound you hear?

That's my jaw hitting the floor...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/books/11niff.html?_r=1&hp

- S.

Blog at Your Own Risk: Does an Author's Blog Lead to a Sense of Entitlement by the Reader?

2009-03-25T07:23:00.003-04:00

I didn't see this when it first came out but there was a great piece in the Globe & Mail a couple of weeks ago by Guy Gavriel Kay about the inherent perils for authors who blog.

He focuses mainly on George RR Martin and his long-delayed A Song of Ice and Fire series. Now, I admit I've never read any of the books in this series--I gave up on extended, multi-volume epic fantasy series when there started to be YEARS between volumes in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series--nor have I ever visited his blog, but I do recall seeing Mr. Martin at one of the room parties at the World Fantasy Convention in 2007 and thinking to myself: "Isn't he really behind in his series? Shouldn't he be hunkered down somewhere writing and not out partying at cons?"

So I suppose I'm guilty of some of the things that Guy Gavriel Kay mentions. But I do think that when an author proposes to undertake an ambitious multi-volume series--whether that's a trilogy or something longer--he does make an implicit deal with the reader that if they sign up to come on the journey the author will lead, then not only will it be compelling and entertaining but its parts will be made available with some regularity (say, like one a year) until it reaches completion. That seems fair to me, both as reader and as writer.

From my perspective, were I to attempt to 'commit trilogy' I think I'd like to have at least the first two volumes done before the first one saw print; that would give a fairly comfortable buffer while writing the third volume to make it a worthy payoff for the series and still get it done in time to have the one-book-a-year schedule I think is reasonable. Don't know if that's realistic, but that's my sort of ideal scenario.

But that having been said, I'm going to refrain from telling you that I've been watching a lot of March Madness NCAA basketball of late...

The full article follows.

- S.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Release the fans!
A writer's engagement with readers via blogs and websites creates a real relationship and unleashes the demands – sometimes angry demands – that go with it

GUY GAVRIEL KAY

Globe and Mail Update

March 6, 2009 at 5:41 PM EDT

A few recent online incidents regarding authors and readers on the Web are just too revealing to pass up a chance to consider them.

By way of a heads-up or disclaimer, I'm online myself. There's an authorized site based on my work, and I show up there at times to give news or contribute a bit to discussions. When I am on a book tour, I use the site to keep a journal from the road. I also make puns.

George R.R. Martin is the hugely successful purveyor of an ongoing, seven-volume fantasy series called A Song of Ice and Fire. Four books are done. The first three came quickly, then there was a five-year wait for the fourth. The first indicated publication date for the fifth instalment, fiercely awaited, was 2006. That has rather obviously been missed: Martin is still writing it. The natives are restless.

How restless? Well, on his blog, cutely called Not a Blog, Martin fired back two weeks ago at what he called “a rising tide of venom” about how late he is. Seems some of his loyal and devoted readers are savagely attacking him for taking holidays, for watching football in the fall, for attending conventions, doing workshops, editing a volume of short stories, even for being “60 years old and fat” (I'm quoting here, trust me) – the implication being he might drop dead before fulfilling his obligation to do nothing else but finish the damned series.
George R.R. Martin

George R.R. Martin welcomed readers into his personal life via his blog, a move he may now be regretting.

It is at least worth debating whether an author engaged in a multivolume work that readers have bought into has some sort of implied contract with his readers to conduct his life in such as way as to ensure the book gets done. But surely readers who insist that means “do nothing else” are betraying a pretty shaky sense of how the creative process works, especially when spread over what might be two decades and more.

Martin wasn't happy. “Maybe it's okay if I take a leak once in a while?” he wrote. His blog response was accompanied by a flashing “angry” icon face.

It is all too easy for another writer to sympathize, and I do, hugely, but I can't help but note that the only reason readers know about holidays and football games (and his favourite team) is that Martin has told them. On his blog.

There's a twinned story, e-mailed to me the same day I was alerted to Martin's flashing-angry-post. A younger writer, fellow named Patrick Rothfuss, made a splash two years ago in launching his own multivolume saga and he is (wait for it) way late, apparently, with volume two. Rothfuss, younger, perhaps more anxious, more inclined to appease a still-emerging fan base, nonetheless blogs – complete with cartoons – about the kind of aggressive e-mails he's getting: “your just as bad as martin i cant believe i wasted my time on your shitty book.” (Enraged fans often pass on punctuation and Spell Check; it is a well-documented fact.)

Young Rothfuss blogs that he's, well, young. That he's new to all this, that his life has been turned upside down by success. He tells us he has bought a house, a car, paid down his credit cards, and he needs to get his bearings back. He pleads for indulgence. His book is really long, he says. He also includes on his blog a Valentine's post to and about his girlfriend, discussing, among other things, how her sexiness is “like the radiation from a nuclear bomb” when she “gets naked.” Could any young author then hurry back to a difficult 300,000-word book? Really?

This leads me to the flip-side point here again, because I am really not just being cheeky about Rothfuss's blogging; there's an issue here. These days, writers invite personal involvement and intensity from their readers. In direct proportion to the way in which they share their personalities (or for-consumption personalities), their everyday lives, their football teams and word counts, their partners and children and cats, it encourages in readers a sense of personal connection and access, and thus an entitlement to comment, complain, recommend cat food, feel betrayed, shriek invective, issue demands: “George, lose weight, dammit!”

Disturbing as this is, in some ways, I find it difficult to come down hard on readers of a writer who has steadily made him or herself “available” to them. A feeling of being part of an inner circle, or even the writing process, has to flow from that. Indeed, Rothfuss ends his rueful musings on how painful it is to have so many people so mad at him by dangling readers a carrot: Seems he'll hold a lottery and the winner … gets his or her name plugged into the next book! In other words, he really is a nice guy (by all accounts, he really is). Don't bite him.

Sometimes, in fact, the biting goes the other way, the fan base functioning as a mobile attack force for the author. When Stephen King rashly opined that Stephenie Meyer ( Twilight etc., etc.) was a very bad writer, one of her readers, interviewed by the press, threatened to organize fans to bombard King's e-mail account with hate mail. (It could have been worse, I suppose.) Another reader suggested King's motivation was pure jealousy: because he wasn't as handsome as Meyer's vampire protagonist. And no, I am not making that up.

Meyer, pretty clearly, had nothing whatsoever to do with this. But loyal fans can be used, rallied to support. Tess Gerritsen, a popular writer of medical thrillers, blogged her dismay at a critical review from a fellow named David Pitt. She declared that he had “slimed” her and posted extracts from a number of good reviews to “make myself feel better.” (The offending review can be seen, and judged as to slime factor, on amazon.com.) Reader comments on Gerritsen's own site were entirely predictable, including, “We don't care what anyone else says. We all love you,” and, “Apparently David Pitt's middle name, which he doesn't use in public for some reason, is SweatyArm.” Last I checked (online, of course) reviewer Pitt has not yet scored an endorsement deal with Right Guard despite this slam-dunk set-up.

A bigger bestseller, Patricia Cornwell, was even more direct. She blogged her unhappiness that so many amazon.com reader reviews of her newest book were negative. She suggested there was a conspiracy “by someone or a group of someones” (I'm really quoting here) and she encouraged her loyal readers to get out and balance things: “Right now I need my supporters. I am not asking you to write anything you do not mean. But why should hateful people be the only ones heard?” The blog then provided instructions how to register at amazon.com, how to post reviews, even how to label as “unhelpful” the negative ones.

The game is obviously changing dramatically.

Writers are on shaky ground if they want to be upset by readers feeling angry and posting their anger when authors are widely inviting that sense of pseudo-intimacy and intensity – and sometimes even employing their reader base as a weapon. “Release the fans!” seems to be the phrase that applies.

So, should young writers stay out of the blogging biz? Some will, but in general, I don't think it is going to happen. The process is addictive, it offers lots of warm-and-fuzzy, and it is embedded by now in the culture. There is an expectation that writers will be available.

There's another aspect. Imagine a young novelist querying his or her publisher's marketing director: “So, what are the marketing plans for my book? What's the, well, campaign going to focus on?” That marketing director (or junior publicist, more likely) is going to laugh. They are eventually going to recover from laughing and say, “Are you kidding me? With today's budgets? Go blog! Get out there and blog yourself to flog your book!”

And they will. We are all online, to one degree or another, varying mainly in how much privacy we want to preserve, how much space between ourselves and our work, and between ourselves and our public. The dynamic between authors and readers is fundamentally altered by all of this. George Martin may end up having to post his daily workouts, down to calories burned, weights lifted, pulse rates before and after. With video, to prove it. It has probably been suggested to him already.

Guy Gavriel Kay's most recent novel, Ysabel, won the 2008 World Fantasy Award.

I Laughed, I Cried, It Was Better than Cats...

2009-03-24T10:27:00.001-04:00

It has often been said that since the Internet there has been less of a role for the professional reviewer, and that the democratization of opinion will render elite evaluation of the arts obsolete...But real democratization hasn't happened, and we may never see what it really looks like: The system is too manipulable. Real power, in the online reviews, is held simply by those with the greatest resources or determination.

An interesting article from the Globe & Mail last week about the importance of starred reader reviews at online booksellers like Amazon.com and Chapters/Indigo, and how easily manipulable they are for some irate reader with time and a grudge, or with authors looking to artificially inflate their rating (or combat a one-star review...)

Food for thought in the digital age. You can follow the link and I've posted the text below.

- S.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

How a one-star review can sink a title
RUSSELL SMITH

From Thursday's Globe and Mail
March 11, 2009 at 5:33 PM EDT

An e-mail went around from a colleague recently: Her book has just been published, and she would like friends to write as many good reviews on Amazon as they can, to get her star-rating up.

I remember when Amazon first came along, and authors first saw with a kind of disbelief what damage to your sales could be wrought by one aggressive idiot sitting in his mom's basement in a town you'd never heard of. That guy – and it was usually a guy; guys are angrier – that guy could decide he didn't like your book because you made some joking reference to The Lord of the Rings that insulted his entire life, or, more likely, he simply decided he didn't like you personally, because of what you were wearing when he saw you on that one stupid television show that only a bag would go on anyway (it's the host of the show who bugs him really, but really, only a bag would go on the show with that uberbag).

Before Amazon changed its policy, in 2005, to limit reviews to one per book per customer, that angry guy could actually, if he was determined, affect the sales of your book. He could post a furiously insulting one-star review of your book on Amazon, and then he could post another one, and then another one, all under the same name, all to change the average star-rating. He would do the same on Chapters-Indigo. So if you already had three five-star reviews up, he could single-handedly change your average rating to three. The fact that his attacks may have been misspelled or incoherent did not weaken their weight. In a perfect democracy like Amazon's, ability – even today, where amateur reviewers compete for greater status by posting as many reviews as they can humanly write – has nothing to do with power.

Now at first, in the nineties, most of my colleagues would have been embarrassed to say that this free-for-all disturbed them. They would have dismissed amateur book ratings on the Internet as insignificant. Surely one good review in The Globe and Mail and another one in Quill and Quire and one interview on the CBC were going to be far more influential as advertising than this nonsense from nobodies who can't spell? And we certainly didn't want to be known to be planting reviews from our friends with the crass and ego-driven idea of boosting the ratings, or worse, writing reviews of our own books ourselves. I remember being disgusted by the idea.

This turned out to be embarrassingly naive. It is hard to measure empirically the effect on sales of bookstores' star ratings, but we have all started to have the feeling that the star-ratings – the first thing you see, really, when you look up a book that you are thinking of buying – are actually far more influential than the reviews written by professionals in newspapers. Everyone in the publishing industry now agrees that newspaper reviews are less influential than they have ever been. The amateur reviews are for the most part so idiotic, so ideologically driven or otherwise missing the point, that to receive a low star-rating from them – particularly if one has had excellent reviews from professionals – has started to become offensive and maddening. So, if the star-ratings are so easy to manipulate, then we had better get started manipulating them.

And so now everybody does. You can't post multiple reviews any more (although most of the ones posted for devious purposes before 2005 are still up there, wreaking havoc), and Amazon now requires that you have made a purchase to contribute a review. But there is nothing embarrassing any more about sending out a mass e-mail – to people you know have purchased something at Amazon – asking for help. In fact, marketing consultants suggest that authors launch concerted campaigns to raise their star-ratings on book sites, by sending out review copies of their book to 300 friends and asking that they, in return, post a one-line five-star review on Amazon. You might even send out some sample lines of your glowing review yourself, to make it easier for your friends. Obviously the authors with the greatest resources available to mount such a campaign – such as the ability to hire a PR firm to do it – will be the ones with the most glowing reviews.

What this means is that the supposedly democratic reader ratings – just from normal folks – that give supposedly neutral ratings to books on large booksellers' sites are now largely meaningless. It is impossible to tell if they are genuine or the result of marketing. (Or the opposite, a smear campaign.) It has often been said that since the Internet there has been less of a role for the professional reviewer, and that the democratization of opinion will render elite evaluation of the arts obsolete. A lot of people think this is a good thing, that public opinion is a more telling indicator of value than elite opinion is. But real democratization hasn't happened, and we may never see what it really looks like: The system is too manipulable. Real power, in the online reviews, is held simply by those with the greatest resources or determination.

Which means that there will be jobs for professional critics, even in the digital age, for some time to come.

Blogowych - Stephen Kotowych's Weblog

Awards Season 2012 - For Your Consideration...

Overheard at the Stop-Watch Gang Meeting - 22 January 2012

My Movember Appeal

Anne McCaffrey (1 April 1926 - 21 November 2011)

2011 Prix Aurora Award Winners

My SFContario Panel Schedule

Judging a Book By Its Cover in the Era of Amazon.com

Guest Post on IGMS Blog Available Now

Sneak Peak at "A Time for Raven" Artwork

Tangent Online Reviews "Under the Shield"

LOCUS Likes "Under the Shield"

'Under the Shield' Now Available at IGMS!

New Sale! - "A Time for Raven" to appear in Interzone

w00t!

Overheard at the Stop-Watch Gang Meeting – July 24, 2011

Cosplay

NEW SALE! - "Under the Shield" to appear in Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show

Kickstarter and the Democratization of Patronage

2011 Aurora Awards

The Terrifying Power of Nature

Duffonomics

Paleontologists Have Lied to Us!

Giant Underground Chamber Found on Moon

Things Overhead at the Stop-Watch Gang Meeting - 20 February 2011

"Borrowed Time" Available Online at the World SF Blog

Things Overhead at the Stop-Watch Gang Meeting - 30 January 2011

Law and the Multiverse: Superheroes, Supervillains, and the Law

Merry Christmas!

Overheard at the Stop-Watch Gang 24-Hour Writing Challenge

The Stop-Watch Gang 24 Hour Story Challenge!

REALMS OF FANTASY is dead! Long live REALMS OF FANTASY!

NaNoOutRiMo Word Count: November 13, 2010

NASA’s Deep Impact Fly-by of Comet Hartley 2 *or* The Revenge of Deep Impact

NaNoOutRiMo Word Count: November 6, 2010

Star Trek Cited by Texas Supreme Court? *eyebrow arches*

NaNoOutWriMo Begins!

Death Star PUMPKIN!

Aurora Awards Nominees' Pin Presentation Ceremony at SFContario

Warner Bros, New Zealand Reach Deal on ‘The Hobbit’

Things Overhead at the Stop-Watch Gang Meeting - 24 October 2010

Water, Water Everywhere...on the Moon (or at least the Moon's south pole)

Photos of THE HOBBIT Cast

Saturn's Largest Moon Has Ingredients for Life *OR* 'Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky!

You Only Live Twice: Realms of Fantasy Dead Again

Icy Tsunamis Perturb Saturn's Rings

Gulf Oil Spill Follow-Up

Morality and Irony

I've Heard of Alligators in the Sewers...

Things Overhead at the Stop-Watch Gang Meeting - 25 July 2010

Rise of the Machine Books?

I Write Like

On Rejection

The Music of the Spheres

All Signed Up for World Fantasy 2010

Why I'm Cheering for North Korea in the World Cup

Seafloor Nuclear Detonation to Plug Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill *OR* How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let the Bomb Solve All My Problems

The 2010 Prix Aurora Awards Winners

Have aliens hijacked the Voyager 2 spacecraft?

Brad Carson for the Aurora!

Tony Pi: Made of Awesome

Elemental, Dear Watson!

Things Overhead at My Writers Group Meeting

Knock on...Bone?

CALL FOR PAPERS: "Social Science on the Final Frontier" August 23 - 25, 2010, Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario

The Rings of Earth

Octopuses Master Use of Tools. World Domination to Follow.

Movember Week 03

Movember Week 02

Movember Week 01

LIGHTSPEED - A New Science Fiction Magazine

What Kind of a Name is 'Steve' Anyway?

Captain America vs. Mickey Mouse

Congratulations to Emery Huang and All the Writers of the Future Winners!

Writers of the Future XXV Here I Come!

I Wish I Were a Mutant...

While My Guitar Gently Weeps: Les Paul, 1915-2009

Dr. Quake's Genome

Aliette de Bodard Rules the World!

Toronto Book Launch for "Winds of Dune" by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson

NASA’s Deep Impact Fly-by of Comet Hartley 2 or The Revenge of Deep Impact

Star Trek Cited by Texas Supreme Court? eyebrow arches

Saturn's Largest Moon Has Ingredients for Life OR 'Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky!

Seafloor Nuclear Detonation to Plug Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill OR How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let the Bomb Solve All My Problems