Musings and Meanderings

fallen cedar trees
lie in a fragrant tangle
windstorm aftermath



(Just to be clear, our house and yard were untouched by the storm. This haiku was inspired by downed trees at my daughter's preschool.)

red-orange radar
images swirl on tv
tornado warning

Yes, I am very behind on my reading, but I did finally read Ekaterina Sedia's The Secret History of Moscow this past weekend and loved it. Highly recommended.

This is an in-depth and very positive review of Ben Peek's "Black Betty."

Courtesy of Darin Bradley, here is the not-yet-finalized cover concept for The Lone Star Stories Reader:




I am very happy with Darin.

Something I've heard and read many a time is that cool fiction and poetry gets read when it receives positive word-of-mouth and the electronic equivalent. So, I thought I'd choose a nifty story that can be found online and recommend it here on my blog, along with a link:

"Orm the Beautiful" by Elizabeth Bear in the archives of Clarkesworld Magazine.

So, if you haven't read it, go check it out. If you have, why not recommend it or someone else's (not your own or your publication's) creative writing, recently published or published some time ago, on your own blog? We all want to read cool stuff, and there's an awful lot of fiction and poetry to sort through online. Let's make it a little easier for ourselves by recommending pieces to one another.

I have the pleasure of announcing that Erin Hoffman's story, "Whatever Shall Grow There, Dear," will appear in the June 2008 issue of Lone Star Stories.

The June issue is now full, and here's the ToC (order subject to change):

Fiction:

1. "Death Follows Us to Restaurants" by Vylar Kaftan;
2. "Whatever Shall Grow There, Dear" by Erin Hoffman; and
3. "No Leaving New Orleans" by Josh Rountree.

Poetry:

1. "The Firework-Makers" by Sonya Taaffe;
2. "Not the Territory" by J. C. Runolfson; and
3. "Sibyl" by Jo Walton.

At the urging today of the_flea_king, I finally researched and, after much trial and error, coded an RSS feed for Lone Star Stories, which is modeled after the Clarkesworld Magazine RSS feed. I hope readers find it useful.

Update: zhai was very kind and created an LJ syndication for the LSS RSS feed, lonestarstories.

The Million Writers Award Notable Stories of 2007 list is now up. (The top ten stories will be selected and posted by the end of the month, and then readers will vote from among the ten to determine the winner.) The MWA award for best overall online publication went to Blackbird for seven works selected as notable stories of the year; the MWA for best publisher of novella-length fiction went to Jim Baen's Universe; and the MWA award for best new online magazine or journal went to Farrago's Wainscot for three notable stories (with Wheelhouse Magazine and Coyote Wild in the runner-up positions). I was happy to see that two stories by Lone Star Stories authors, "'Janet Meet Bob'" by Gavin J. Grant and "The Black Hole in Auntie Sutra's Handbag" by Samantha Henderson, made the notable stories list. I was also very pleased to see that works from Chizine, Clarkesworld Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, Helix, Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, Strange Horizons, Subterranean, Weird Tales, and other genre publications made the list. Congratulations and good luck to all concerned!

I was happy to see Samantha Henderson's "The Black Hole in Auntie Sutra's Handbag" included in Rich Horton's Virtual Best of the Year--2007 recommended reading list. Yay, Sam, and congratulations to all of the authors on Rich's recommended and best of lists!

. . . what adjectives come to mind?

I'm pondering back cover copy for The Lone Star Stories Reader. Ponder, ponder.

A backup proposal.

In honor of The Second Annual International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, I am posting "Fingered," a flash piece that first appeared in SDO Detective in 2004 and is no longer available in electronic or print format.

Fingered
Copyright 2004

Someone sent a finger to me yesterday. A man’s I guessed from the size, but I’m not a coroner, just a newly licensed lawyer.

The finger came in the mail wrapped in paper and foil, and when I opened the package, the digit fell to my office floor. The severed finger pointed up at me in grisly admonishment, and beside it lay a note with glued letters from magazines that read, “Pay up or more will follow.”

There were no other instructions or hints to help me.

After vomiting all over my desk, I called the police.

Crime scene investigators taped off my office, while a pair of detectives interviewed me. Nothing came of the questioning because I have no family or friends gone missing or kidnapped.

Someone has the wrong address.

I don’t know how much to pay or where to send it. Maybe more details will be forthcoming, but I know in my heart that another finger will come instead. I just hope it doesn’t take longer than nine more mailings for the police to figure this all out.

I hate to think what will come after the last finger.

sartorias (Sherwood Smith) has posted a list of cool online and small press links you might not know of in honor of Shakespeare's birthday. There is a lot of nifty stuff to explore over there.

Here is a painfully funny response to the breast-groping post I commented on last night. *still chuckling*

So, I read an excellent post by Jim Hines on a tough topic like rape, then I discover that some guy has written this juvenile, harassment-inciting crap. Geez. (Thanks to glvalentine for the heads-up.)

Jim Hines has posted a very thoughtful piece on rape here. Go read it and the comments that follow, particularly if you're male.

I decided to go with the name LSS Press for my new publishing venture, and I put up a basic website for the press here. It's not a custom web design, but it works for now. I even set up a preorder button via PayPal for The Lone Star Stories Reader, which was a whole new experience for me. Any feedback on the site design and content would be greatly appreciated.

Selections for the Lone Star Stories anthology, tentatively titled The Lone Star Stories Reader, are now more or less finalized, so I am comfortable posting the table of contents for the anthology (order of appearance subject to change):

1. An introduction by Sherwood Smith;
2. “Wolf Night” by Martha Wells;
3. “Seasonal Work” by Nina Kiriki Hoffman;
4. “‘Janet, Meet Bob’” by Gavin J. Grant;
5. “The Great Conviction of Tia Inez” by M. Thomas;
6. “Angels of a Desert Heaven” by Marguerite Reed;
7. “The Disemboweler” by Ekaterina Sedia;
8. “A Night in Electric Squidland” by Sarah Monette;
9. “Thread: A Triptych” by Catherynne M. Valente;
10. “The Frozen One” by Tim Pratt;
11. “Dragon Hunt” by Sarah Prineas;
12. “Manuscript Found Written in the Paw Prints of a Stoat” by Samantha Henderson;
13. “Giant” by Stephanie Burgis;
14. “When the Rain Comes” by Josh Rountree;
15. “The Hangman Isn’t Hanging” by Jay Lake; and
16. “The Oracle Opens One Eye” by Patricia Russo.

This will be an anthology of fantastic/weird fiction taken from the first 25 issues (that number boggles my mind sometimes) of Lone Star Stories that work together thematically and that have not appeared in print. As I noted in earlier posts, I've decided to save other, nifty LSS work (science fiction, poetry, etc.) for possible future anthologies.

I don't have a release date yet, as the anthology is just entering the design phase, but I'm hoping to have ARCs to send to reviewers in less than two months.

A hunger-themed poetry review that includes a discussion of Samantha Henderson's "Hungry: Some Ghost Stories" (in the current issue of LSS) is in the latest Distillations column at The Fix.