Well, I was just alerted by my pal Maura McHugh that my story, “Of Melei, of Ulthar” (which appeared in Clarkesworld‘s October issue, #37) was honored with a place among the many wonderful works (at least, the ones I’ve read were wonderful!) on the Locus 2009 Recommended Reading List. Yay, Melei! I’d get into a detailed analysis of the list, except that I have other crap to do, so I’ll navel gaze momentarily instead, and note that I just realized that both of the stories I published laast year featured female protagonists with names ending with the letter i. Two’s …
Category: GENERAL
True Story…
UPDATE (5:45 am, local time): BLAM! BLAM BLAM BLAM! Die, you zombie project! Die! BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM. BLAM. BLAM BLAM. There, I think it’s dead. Off to bed. ORIGINAL POST: True story: the paraphrased correspondence between one freelancer and his so-called editor (as patiently translated, or at least paraphrased, by his collaborator): (A few months ago.) Editor: This passage, about the chess game. We like it, but… can someone really win a chess game in five moves? Freelancer: Yup. Apparently you can win in just two moves. I Googled it. I’m a pro, okay? Here’s a link. Editor: (Without …
Not to be Draconian, But…
There really should be a death penalty for having a car alarm and not running out to turn it off when it’s set off. I think a deadline of two minutes is probably fair. Soon enough, people would rig the car alarm to call the person’s phone and it could be reset remotely. (Since usually a car with an alarm doesn’t end up getting stolen, right?) Okay, it’s draconian — a death penalty is over the top in this case and should be reserved for things like murder or pedophilia or drunk driving or being a pop star comparable to …
Apex Story of the Year Poll — Last Weekend to Vote!
For those who read Apex this past year, but haven’t voted yet in the first annual Apex year’s best story poll: this weekend is your last chance to vote for whichever story you liked best. Which may or may not have been my short story, “Cai and Her Ten Thousand Husbands” but if it was, I sure appreciate your vote! (The full list of stories is here, in case you want to check out the rest…)
Good Enough for Nancy Kress…
While I was still ill, last week, I noticed an email had come in from someone at Asimov’s SF. It was concerning a request for permission to license “Dhuluma No More” to DailyLit, to do that thing DailyLit does. (And what it does is, it lets you read bite-sized chunks of a text by email or RSS feed on what is, obviously, a daily basis.) My first reaction was, “Huh?” followed sudden memories of rants by friends who follow Harlan Ellison on the idea of never giving anything away for free. Then I thought of people like Cory Doctorow and …
Webster’s Is a Threat to Children Everywhere: Burn Down the Libraries; Ban the Internet; Return to the Dark Ages!
Making the Twitter rounds: Moronic parents demand Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary be banned from schools. Moronic school board complies. (Okay, maybe just temporarily.) (Another link here.) Yup, it seems some parent noticed a definition for “oral sex” in the dictionary, freaked out because their fourth/fifth grader might look up that word and see something “graphically sexual,” and then asked the school to ban the book. The thing about people like this is that banning one book is never enough. If they manage to ban one book, the next thing you know they’re going to be making blacklists and rooting through …
If it’s going to be stuck in my head I refuse to suffer alone…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVjhwgoYc3U … because stuff one liked in high school should never be revisited without at least a little virtual support. And to think my friend Mike let me blast that in his mom’s car as we drove through the cold prairie night.
Soraya Intercine Films’ UFO
Yup, this is what was on TV tonight: A prime time comedy SF TV show in Indonesian about a UFO and some people who retrieved it and made friends with the aliens inside. Miss Jiwaku also picked out what seems to be (maybe!) some kind of plot thread involving some kind of device (a drug, maybe?) that makes people smart, and which was malfunctioning, or misrouted, or something, and the “dealer” of that tech who seemed to be in some sort of trouble. I found it bewildering, to be honest. It seems to be a 2010 production, from the one …
There Goes the Neighborhood
In the Starbucks where Miss Jiwaku and I hang out in Depok — she studies, I work on stuff — demographics have finally hit, like shit on a fan. The demographics I’m talking about are micropopulation dynamics: the national demographics of enrollment in her Bahasa Indonesian language program at University of Jakarta have shifted, such that there’s a lot more Koreans at the university, in the neighborhood, and… at our Starbucks. (Which prompted this advice from Miss Jiwaku to a new Korean student who enrolled this semester, a friend of a friend already enrolled last semester: “DON’T hang out with …
A History of Modern Burma by Michael W. Charney
I read A History of Modern Burma as part of the research for my current fiction project, and as histories go, I’m happy with what I learned as well as the perspective I gained from the text. Charney is clear, thoughtful, and quite balanced: he tries to at least make clear the kinds of thinking and motivation that underlied the military rulers of Burma in ages past and present, differentiating between them and their policies, as well at working to show what effect those policies had on the common people of Burma. Another point of strong interest is the role …