Reminder: I cannot respond to LJ comments right now, but will do so once I am back in the United States. A reader reacts to METAtropolis , and specifically to "In the Forests of the Night" pabba draws authors he loves to read Battlestar Sumpsonica — Um. Wow. Sonoma XP — Bad Astronomy Blog on the reality behind the Windows XP screen. I always thought it looked like the Teletubbies...

ZOMG I'M A CARTOON! (And so are a bunch of my friends!)

Thanks to pabba  yesterday, I learned that issue #6 of Fictitious Force is out with my story "The Rendezvous" in it. Today my copies arrived. Because of the staple binding, when you open this 64-page zine it automatically opens to page 32. Guess whose story begins on page 32? Sometimes being in the middle is a good thing. *g* I got two checks along with my contributor's copies. One as payment...

raecarson and I had a great time in New York this past weekend. We stayed in the Washington Jefferson Hotel because, given the time period of my books, how could we not? But it ended up being a great decision: we could walk to the convention, we could walk to Times Square and the Del Rey offices, and there were blocks and blocks of fabulous restaurants everywhere we turned. We ate at a Thai...

I just made my 700th submission in the grand scheme of things. (Meaning, in the last three years since I got serious about subbing.) I'll put up my 2008 stats here soon, but I currently have 26 subs out there vying for oxygen in the slush pile. Though this time of year things are slow. Got my first personal rejection from Analog today. I'm a bit dubious as to calling it a personal reply as it didn't...

People like to share this stuff, so I thought 'Why not bore the masses with my own resolutions?' But here's the twist, I'm not going to bore you with resolutions of a personal nature. After all, who wants to read my promises to stop cyberstalking Cherie Priest , to stop writing ' Gus ' stories, and to leverage myself into a Paul Abbamondi comic strip ? Instead, I will make this directed to writers...

Making ordinary life interesting can be a rough job. For every lamely written elf battling a cutout orc, there are dozens of unfinished, unpublished, or published-but-crappy thinly fictionalized tales about how the author got cancer/found Jesus/nursed a dying parent/got in touch with immigrant roots/had a psyche-crumbling same-sex encounter/whatever. The authors who do create meaningful stories out...