New Story: “In the Cloud” available on Amazon (40K Books)

Posted on | January 27, 2012 | 1 Comment

I’m pleased to announce that my novelette, “In the Cloud” is now available on Amazon, put out by 40K Books. This is the second story of mine that 40K has put out. The first story, “If By Reason of Strength…” recently received a positive review in Analog.

Here’s the cover for the new story, done by artist Roberto Grassilli:

in the cloud.jpg

The story is currently available on Amazon’s Kindle store for $0.99. I hope you enjoy this story should you decide to check it out.

Category: story sales, writing career
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RIP Robert Hegyes (Epstein)

Posted on | January 26, 2012 | No Comments

I remember watching the show as a kid living in New Jersey. And doing poor impersonations of some of the characters. RIP Robert Hegyes.

Category: personal
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Index of stories appearing in Analog for the 2011 AnLab awards

Posted on | January 26, 2012 | 1 Comment

Time is almost up to vote for the 2011 AnLab awards for Analog Science Fiction. Ordinarily, you can vote for these awards from their website, but it seems their site has been having some difficulty lately. You can’t vote there and the index of last year’s stories is not listed. So I have gone ahead and reproduced the list of stories and articles that appeared in Analog in 2011 below. For those of you who haven’t voted in the AnLab yet, review the list below and then go vote. You can email your ballot to analogsf at dellmagazines.com. You can also send your votes via regular mail: AnLab, Analog, 267 Broadway, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10007.

Vote for up-to-three items in each category: Novellas (na); Novelettes (nt); Short Stories (ss); Science Fact (fa) and Cover. Ballots are due by February 1, 2012.

The full index is listed below the cut. I apologize in advance for any typos below. Let me know about any corrections and I’ll try to get them in.

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Category: science fiction

And to perk up your spirits on this dreary day… (NSFW)

Posted on | January 26, 2012 | No Comments

Here is a rather funny video Kelly sent me this morning. Having lived in L.A. for nearly 20 years I can attest first hand that this is 100 percent true. Although why someone would order “Grilled Cheese Animal Style” from In-n-Out is beyond me. Double-Double all the way!

Category: personal
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Sick

Posted on | January 26, 2012 | No Comments

We are all under the weather. On Tuesday, the Little Miss’s daycare called to tell us that she was throwing up all morning and probably has a virus. I left the office at 2:30 to pick her up. When I arrived there she was a happy little girl. She hasn’t thrown up since. To be safe, we called the doctor and they said to bring her in. They gave us a 3:45pm appointment. The doctor, fortunately, is just down the street from our house and I was there with the Little Miss at 3:35. A nurse took us into an exam room where we proceeded to wait a little over an hour for the doctor to come in. The Little Miss did a great job, considering the circumstance. She handled it far better than I did, I’m afraid. The doctor checked out the Little Miss and everything was normal. Go figure.

The Little Man had been sick the week before, runny nose, cough, and an occasional fever. He’d stayed home from school a couple of days last week. He’s been better since although the runny nose and cough have lingered. Kelly began to feel yucky a few days ago and I began feeling it yesterday. I woke up this morning (in the bleary darkness, to the Little Man’s voluble voice saying, “Daddy, need to go make a pee-pee in the potty.”) feeling mostly awful. But I’m so far behind in project work for the month that I had no choice but to come into the office and try to catch up.

I added 700 words to the novella yesterday and it was like pulling teeth. Each one of those 700 words is in the wrong place but I’m not going to worry about it now. I did manage to get out to the writers group last night. I wrote another 100 words or so while I was there but it was on a different story and it was so miserably bad I’m not even going to count it.

I made my second story submission for 2012 on Tuesday. That was story #2. Still need to work on the third draft of story #1. A pretty major rewrite, and I considered starting it yesterday but there was no time.

And I’m about 100 pages into A Feast For Crows.

Category: personal

Is it cheating to pay for a book review?

Posted on | January 25, 2012 | 12 Comments

A few days ago, I arrived home from work to find a package from Amazon. I didn’t recall ordering anything, and when I opened the package, I discovered it was book I’d never heard of by an author I’d never heard of. Included was a gift receipt and a note from the author. The note indicated the author was a member of SFWA and then asked for me to read the book and give it a Nebula nomination. It noted further that the book received high praise from a prestigious review outlet. As I’d never heard of the author, I checked the SFWA directory and found the listing.

I don’t know about you, but it doesn’t sit right with me, being sent a book and being explicitly asked to consider it for Nebula nomination. Everything I’ve ever been told about this business is that an award season post, letting people know what you are eligible for is acceptable. You do not ask people for a nomination. Certainly you don’t send them a book unsolicited. If I give the author in question the benefit of the doubt, the book was sent to me as a gift with no obligation whatsoever. But the note clearly had a purpose and whether or not it was intended, it made me feel really uncomfortable. And why send it to me? Simple research would show that I am not a book reviewer. Was it because I am a SFWA member? Does that mean a book was sent to every SFWA member? I imagine that if a Nebula nomination was being sought, SFWA members would be the people to go to.

I’d pretty much forgotten about it until today when I was reading a newsletter from a prestigious review outlet and discovered the book I’d been sent featured rather prominently in the newsletter. Curious, I read the review and clearly the reviewer liked the book. But I also discovered that the program under which the book was reviewed was geared toward independent authors. An author can pay nearly $600 to have their book reviewed and then use that review for whatever purposes they like.

I suppose there is money to be made in the business of reviewing books, but to me, it seems kind of like cheating to pay for your own book review. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe paying for reviews is the new way of doing things, but if I get recognized, I want it to be because of the buzz my stories generate, not because I paid someone to review them.

I have not read the book I was sent. It may well be as good as the review indicates. But if it was really that good, why did it need a paid review in the first place? Wouldn’t I be hearing other people talking about it? And yet, I haven’t seen any buzz anywhere, not on Twitter, Facebook, not in the usual SF news and review outlets.

I come away from this whole thing feeling dirty for reasons I can’t quite explain. Both practices–asking for Nebula nominations and paying for book reviews–seem like cheating to me. If you want to be a writer, be a writer, work at it, earn your nominations and reviews, don’t pay for them. I would think you’d be more satisfied in the end.

Am I totally off base here?

Category: books, opinion
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Returning to the Iron Islands: restarting A Feast for Crows

Posted on | January 24, 2012 | No Comments

Back in September, I took a break from my reading of George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series. At the time, I was almost halfway through A Feast For Crows, but my mind was beginning to wander and needed other forms of entertainment. Also, my time for reading had been compressed down to almost nothing with a newborn in the house.

But one of my reading goals for 2012 was to catch up with the rest of the series. Two days ago, I picked up A Feast for Crows again and started reading. I read a few pages from where I’d left off and realized that I’d completely lost the threads so I started over from the beginning and I’m pleased to say that I’m very much enjoying the story, even through I’ve read these parts already

I’m not sure I’ll breeze through these last two books as quickly as I did the first three because I’ve got a fair amount of other reading to do–particularly keeping up with short fiction. But one of the reasons I was able to start reading the book again is because at the moment, I’m all caught up with the stories that I wanted to read in the magazines I subscribe to–and in some cases, like Analog, that takes me through April 2012.

So I’m back in the Iron Islands and you can probably count on a few posts related to these books as I get through them.

Category: books

Lost on the science fiction landscape

Posted on | January 24, 2012 | No Comments

In this week’s Wayward Time Traveler column over at SF Signal, I discuss being lost on the vast science fiction landscape. So much to read and so little time. How best do you fill those gaps that you’ve missed over the years? Head on over to SF Signal to check out the column.

Category: blogs
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A good analysis of the United States v. Jones decision

Posted on | January 23, 2012 | No Comments

Over at Freedom To Tinker, my friend Paul Ohm has a good analysis of the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Jones. This is the “GPS privacy” case that’s been in the news today. Paul is a lawyer and law professor at the University of Colorado Law School and one of the smartest people I’ve ever met.

Category: opinion
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Epic “spoof-mail” FAIL

Posted on | January 23, 2012 | 1 Comment

I was browsing my spam folder to see if there was anything snagged as spam that was actually legitimate and I came across this PayPal spoof mail attempt. Unfortunately, the spoofers make it way too obvious the message is spoof mail. I’ve circled the two salient parts of the message in the image below:

SpoofMailFail.png.jpg

Click to enlarge

Epic spoof mail FAIL!

 

Category: observations
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My Vacation in the Golden Age is one year old today

Posted on | January 23, 2012 | 1 Comment

It was one year ago today that Episode 1 of my Vacation in the Golden Age made its debut. In that time, I’ve read 31 issues of Astounding and produced 31 Episodes of my Vacation, totaling over 118,000 words.

To me, it seems rather incredible that a year has already gone by. I remember just before I started reading the July 1939 issue what a daunting task this projected seemed to be. Fun, but daunting. And now, 31 episodes later, I feel like I’ve hit a kind of groove with it and I’m really enjoying every bit of it.

Thanks to everyone who has come along on this Vacation with me. I hope you’ll stick around for more.

(And don’t forget, Episode 31 is hot off the virtual presses.)

Category: extras, vacation in the golden age

Fiction-writing progress, 2012, week 3

Posted on | January 22, 2012 | 2 Comments

This was a pretty poor week for fiction-writing. On only one day–yesterday–did I get any writing done. Combined with last week, that makes for 9 consecutive days of no new fiction-writing. Not a very auspicious start. But I did learn a few things. Given my schedule, and how full my days are, it just isn’t possible for me to write new fiction and work on second or third draft material in the same day. My primary writing slot is early in the morning and I’ve got to use that slot to its fullest. That means that when I work on the second or third draft of a story, I need to take a break on the new fiction, if only because I need the time slot. This means, that it will be nearly impossible to achieve my goal of 500 words every day, but it might help with greater consistency going forward.

In that sense, this week wasn’t a total loss. I worked received additional feedback on the second draft of story #1 and it is clear that a third draft will be required. I already have ideas for this but I still need some more time away from it. I also got a second draft of story #2 completed this week. The draft came in at 4,500 words and I’m waiting to get Kelly’s feedback on it. It’s a seasonal story–a Christmas story set a few hundred years in the future. Once I’ve gotten her feedback I’ll move forward with it.

Yesterday was the only day that I did new fiction writing. But I think it is the start of something good. I started story #3 which I intend to be a novella. At present, I estimate the story to come in around 16,000 words. At 500 words/day, that will keep me busy for the next 32 days and I’d wrap up the first draft on February 22. If I write 500 words a day. Yesterday I did 750 and today I did 850. And I like the direction the story is going so far.

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Category: writing
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