Month: January 2016

Goodbye 2015

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It’s not a big surprise I’m over a week late seeing the year off. It’s been that kind of a year, and I’m kind of glad to see 2015 go. Not that there weren’t wonderful moments, terrifying and vertigo-inducing and lovely and amazing. There definitely were, like this one almost exactly 76 days ago: And we all have a lot to be grateful for. As I write this, a few days behind schedule, our boy has been with us for 75 days, and just turned himself over, pushup style, for the first time in his life. (Mrs. Jiwaku called me excitedly …

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“Sunshine,” and other publication news…

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My short story “Sunshine” just went live on the Cosmos website, and with an excellent illustration to boot: It’s a story I wrote last year during the MERS outbreak, and it’s about a grim as you can get with a title like that. I’ve posted some notes (on the genesis of the story, trivia, background notes, and more) as usual over on my Story Notes archive. You can see them here. Other Recent Publications: Besides that, a couple of my book reviews appeared in the December issue of the digital magazine Kyoto Journal, issue 84: “Thoughtful Juxtaposition.” (A review of Phantasm Japan: Fantasies Light and Dark, …

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Sunshine

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My short story “Sunshine” was published online by Cosmos on 5 January 2016. (And with a wonderful illustration, no less!)  You can read it here. It deals with hermetically-sealed hospital demolitions in a world where antibiotic-resistant bacteria have gone out of control too many times to count, and is set in South Korea. “Sunshine” was inspired by two things: Peter Watts’ brush with flesh-eating bacteria (link very NSFW, and also NSFYSC (Not Safe For Your Stomach Contents)) the M.E.R.S. outbreak in Korea in 2015. The latter was the bigger inspiration, obviously. It was pretty terrifying for my wife and I (since she was pregnant at the time, and …

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