I’m considering getting T-shirts printed celebrating the fact that “I’m #25!”  I’m serious. My little Abyss & Apex story, “Snatch Me Another,” continues to chug along, finishing at #25 on Locus’s Year-End Recommended List for 2008.  The # 25 spot is quite an honor considering the total number of genre stories published in 2008 and the formidable cast of all-star writers that occupy the top 24 spots.  So thanks everyone for the support!  It’s much appreciated.

“Snatch Me Another” also made the StorySouth Million Writers List of Notable Stories for 2008 and recently received an honorable mention in Gardner Dozois’s Year’s Best SF Annual Collection 26th Edition (along with my two Interzone stories “The Scent of Their Arrival” and “The Fifth Zhi”).  It will be  appearing in Unplugged: The Web’s Best Sci Fi and Fantasy, Download 2008, edited by Rich Horton (Wyrm Publishing), which is available for pre-order at amazon.com.  

I’m #25!  Yee-hah!  Now where can I get those T-shirts made …?

I finally managed to see The Toxic Avenger Musical on the Fourth of July for the bargain promotional price of $17.76. I thought it was a lot of fun, whether you’ve seen the Troma films or not. I think you’ll probably like it if you enjoyed The Evil Dead: The Musical. If you’re curious about the show, check out my review over at Tor.com.

I recently received my contributor copy of the Hatter Bones anthology, edited by Paul Jessup. Chock full of creepy, cutting edge fiction, I devoured the book in two days.

Paul Jessup asked, in his guidelines, for “contemporary, strange, broken things” and “stories made from bird bones, broken bits, cobbled together out of things spoken in the rain.” What resulted from that prompt was my short story, “The Girl in the Basement,” told in brief vignettes about a girl who spends her life locked in a basement by her parents. It is one of my favorites, and I’m glad it has seen print in such a fine publication.

And what a great Table of Contents to be on too! I’m alongside such talents as Matt Cheney, Darin C. Bradley, Ekaterina Sedia, Cat Rambo, Jason Sizemore, Lavie Tidhar, Forrest Aguirre, Becca De La Rosa, and lots more. Many of the stories are dark, unforgettable things that punch you in the gut without remorse. Some are science fiction, some are horror, some are fantasy, and many are in that interstitial place where a lot of excellent new fiction is taking place.

And I’d be remiss to not mention the artwork. Artist Jesse Lindsay does a fabulous job illustrating each story. (Click on Hatter Bones and then “The Girl in the Basement” to see the artwork for my story).

So check out Hatter Bones from ENE press and let me know what you think!

Altered Fluid appeared this Saturday on Jim Freund’s Hour of the Wolf radio program and Rajan Khanna read a new story live on the air which we subsequently critiqued.  For those interested, you can listen to a recording of the show here.  And you can see some photos from the show here.

Altered Fluid will be appearing this Saturday on Jim Freund’s radio show “Hour of the Wolf.”  We will be critiquing a story by Rajan Khanna live on the air.  The program airs from 5-7am on WBAI, 99.5 FM in the NY Metro area, or can be heard live and after the show anywhere in the world at http://stream.wbai.org.  Here’s a link to the Facebook Event.  You can read about our previous on-air hijinks here.

Addendum: Jim Freund says: “While the show can be heard live at stream.wbai.org, afterwards people should go to the Facebook Hour of the Wolf group or to the hourwolf.com Web site, where it will reside for about 6 months.”

I’ve been administering the Write-a-thon FaceBook page for the past few days (go and become a fan!) and my goal has mainly been to post links to all the participants there at regular intervals so that folks can get a chance to see a bit about each writer. This has lead to some awesomeness and hilarity.

Kate gave everyone a set of areas to fill in — excerpt, bio, describe your writing, describe your goals — and the things people sent in for the writing description and goals reveals some really cool stuff. I think my description is a bit boring, especially compared to “zombies woo small-town housewives and magical porn teaches life lessons” or “the story of a priest who becomes a vampire in Klondike gold rush era Seattle” or “small stories about queer characters in near-future SF settings or in contemporary settings with supernatural elements, but occasionally break out with actiony romps and chicklit space opera.”

I want to read all of that!

If someone asked you to describe your writing, what would you say? Or even to describe your novel or latest short story. Not the plot, necessary, but to describe what it’s like.

(oh, P. S., several Altered Fluid members are participating in this write-a-thon. Check out the complete list of participants here and sponsor one of us!)

My very brief (< 140 characters) prose poem is now up at Jetse de Vries’ Outshine Twitter ‘zine.  Go read it. It’s very short.

The fiery phoenix is best known for its ability to regenerate itself from its own ashes.  Consider this: last week I noticed that the famous Virgin Megastore at Union Square is closing (it probably has been closed as I write this).  In the dozens of times I’ve wandered that store I’ve never seen it empty.  It’s been wall to wall with customers buying CDs (or, at least, browsing).  But the death of the CD and the rise of other forms of media (iTunes, mp3, etc.) have caused CD sales to drop precipitously so that giant megastores like Virgin cannot survive.  That same day I had spent several hours browsing the giant Barnes & Noble bookstore across the park at Union Square.  Its five stories of books seems, at first blush, as permanent as the Virgin Megastore once seemed.  The aisles are crowded with book browsers.  But with the rise of the e-reader and other forms of content distribution, it’s pretty much inevitable that the paper book will soon be an obsoleted thing.  I remember my friend’s brother’s eight track tapes: bulky, strange, antiquated things.  Refuse from another generation.  My niece and nephew (7 and 3) might one day think the same way of paper books.

Then today I read this Wired post from Bruce Sterling and the supposed challenges contemporary literature will have to face.  If print is soon to be dead, what new, wondrous things might arise like the phoenix from its ashes?  The convergence of media, from video games and television and online content into one vast electronic whirl of noise, might lead into new forms of creative expression we have yet to imagine.

But where does that leave us, humble writers of traditional short stories & novels (traditional in the sense of being told purely in text)?  Personally, I do not believe that the written word will vanish simply because of the glut of available media.  Stories are a part of human culture too and will never go away.  But the way in which such stories are delivered will undoubtedly change, and do so rapidly in the next decade.  Wise and prescient storytellers might capitilize on this new model, but what if I want to be old-fashioned and write a textual novel?  In 2050, will people sit down to read their favorite book by e-reader?  Or will content be so balkanized, rehashed, user-generated by then that the novel as we know it will be essentially dead?  Someone tell me please because a part of me is quite scared.  The other part is quite excited.

Due to a mix-up, Rachel Swirsky over at Podcastle ended up with two readings of Jeffrey Ford’s, “The Dreaming Wind”. One by Paul Tevis, the other by me. They are both up at the site now.

You either know that Jeffrey Ford is one of our finest writers, or you are due to find out.

But that’s not all. Podcastle has also featured works and readings by more of our members. Here’s a quick list:

“Change of Life” by K. Tempest Bradford (read by MA in PA)

“Elf Aware” by K. Tempest Bradford (read by Marguerite Croft)

“The Annals of Eelin-Ok” by Jeffrey Ford (read by me)

“Hell is the Absence of God” by Ted Chiang (read by James Trimarco)

“All Flee the Vocab. Quiz” by Kristine Dikeman (read by Alasdair Stuart)

“Red Riding-Hood’s Child” by N.K. Jemisin (read by me)

“The Grand Cheat” by Hilary Moon Murphy (read by me)

If you have the time, check them out.

Kris Dikeman’s “Nine Sundays in a Row,” has made the top ten list for the storySouth Million Writers Award. Congratulations, Kris!

Voting is now open for the best story of the year.  Go there and vote now (for Kris)!