I’m not sure how long that whole process will take, but while we wait, check out the cover below (which might not be the final design).

Here’s the complete Table of Contents:

“Index of Placebo Effects,” Carol Guess
“Memoryville Blues,” John Grant
“The Kid at Midnight,” Mike Resnick
“Gapping,” Darren Speegle
“Red-Roofed Temples in the Mountains Beneath Me,” Forrest Aguirre
“Buried Eyes,” Lavie Tidhar
“This Time of Day, This Time of Year,” Lynda E. Rucker
“Dreaming Kandresphar,” Darrell Schweitzer
“The Providential Preservation of the Universal Bibliographic Repository,” Andrew Drummond
“Cleavage,” Peter Hardy
“What We Do,” Robert Reed
“Selections From The Expectant Mother Disinformation Handbook,” Robert Guffey
“Kodokushi,” Andrew Hook
“The Valley of Wonders,” Amber D. Sistla
“Blue Vs Red,” Sebastien Doubinsky
“Things That Never Happened,” Scott Edelman
“The Key to Harry,” Allen Ashley and Douglas Thompson
“Behind the Doors,” Ramsey Campbell
“The Rapture,” Jack Dann and Barry N. Malzberg
“The Bell,” Jeremy Adam Smith
“The Lobby,” Alastair Reynolds
“Man’s Ruin,” James Cooper
“The Revelation of Jo Givens,” Nancy Jane Moore
“Wherein We Enter the Museum,” Kit Reed
“Marks and Coconuts,” Anna Tambour

When the issue becomes available, you’ll be able to order it here.

But how is that possible? I haven’t written any comics in decades. How could I possibly have anything in a comic handed out on Free Comic Book Day?

Blame Thanos!

Bill Hall of The Daily Kirby let me know today (beating out Marvel Comics, who’s yet to alert me) that my back-up story from Logan’s Run #6, which starred Thanos and Drax the Destroyer, will be reprinted in Infinity, Marvel’s giveaway for Free Comic Book Day. All because Thanos is now a big deal due to his appearance at the end of The Avengers movie.

The freebie is described as follows:

This May for Free Comic Book Day, prepare yourselves for the greatest battle for survival ever waged in the Marvel Universe as Marvel marches towards Infinity! In this all-new story by the blockbuster creative team of Jonathan Hickman and Jim Cheung, witness the opening shots of the war that will be heard around the galaxy. Plus, get a sneak peek behind a major Marvel release that hasn’t been announced yet and relive Thanos’ first solo story.

“Thanos’ first solo story”?

That turns out to be mine.

But on Free Comic Book Day, it can possibly be yours. So get thee to your local comics shop, which might just have a copy.

And don’t forget to thank Thanos!

Now that you know what we all look like, I’m sure you’ll try real hard to be there. You wouldn’t want to be the one responsible for making those faces sad, would you?

Mad City Coffee in Columbia, Maryland will host a gathering of SFWA authors Saturday from 7:00-9:00 p.m. … and if you’re not interested in writers’ writing, why, you can always ignore us all and just listen to a writer singing, because Catherine Asaro will be performing with her band.

Check out the complete details below.

Copies of two of my short story collections—What Will Come After and What We Still Talk About—will be available for purchase. And autographing, too. Though whether that will make the books more valuable or less has yet to be determined …

Hope to see you there!

And, oh, will you look at that? One of those stories is mine!

If you’re not already familiar with “What Will Come After” from its first appearance in my collection of the same name, now’s your chance to catch it in the company of zombie stories by Joe R. Lansdale, Albert E. Cowdrey, and Karina Sumner-Smith.

A Clutch of Zombies seems to be available everywhere, including iTunes and kobo, so … what are you waiting for?

First up, on Thursday, August 30, Adam-Troy Castro read his short story “My Wife Hates Time Travel,” recently published in Lightspeed. Since you weren’t there, you don’t get any of the chocolate chip cookies he was handing out in support of his new novel Gustav Gloom and the People Taker—which should teach you to show up in person next time.

And then, on Monday, September 3, I read “A Most Extraordinary Man,” a sequel of sorts to Saki’s “The Open Window,” which will be published in the anthology The Monkey’s Other Paw: Revived Classic Stories of Dread and the Dead from NonStop Press.

I wish I’d known that I’d left my soda between me and the camera. I hadn’t intended to provide product placement for A&W Diet Root Beer!

There was other readings I’d hoped to attend and then share with you if the writers would permit—among them stories by Jo Walton, Paul Cornell, Geoff Ryman and Mary Turzillo—but my time somehow got away from me, as time must when you’re surrounded by hundreds of people you know—so you’ll have to settle for just these two.

So there’ll be only one more Chicon7 video forthcoming, and it will show Adam taking on the Bricks Painful Pizza challenge. That’ll have to wait, though, since some editing is involved. But check back if you want to see a man turn red and sweat hot sauce!

And I see I my first appearance in Space and Time was back in 1982. Gulp!

As for what’s next—expect to see “The Trembling Living Wire” at Electric Velocipede, “Thing That Never Happened” in an upcoming issue of PostScripts, and “An Extraordinary Man” in the anthology The Monkey’s Other Paw: Revived Classic Stories of Dread and the Dead.

And that’s it for my pipeline of unsold and unpublished stories … so I’d better get writing!

One of the most unusual zombie stories I’ve ever read is Scott Edelman’s “What Will Come After,” which I just read as the lead story in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror #22 …

“What Will Come After” got under my skin and into my blood faster than any zombie virus ever could. It’s a live human and undead zombie story all mixed together. Actually, it’s more of a meditation on inevitability than anything else. I found it both frail and strong at the same time—all very affective and certainly unforgettable.

If you can’t find a copy of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror #22, you can always catch up with the story in my all-zombie collection of the same name, either in a print edition or as an ebook.

The review is credited only to “DC5,” so I don’t know quite whom to thank, so whoever you are, all I can say is—you’ve got … BRAINZ!

First out, on February 22, is Marvel Masterworks: The Uncanny X-Men Volume 8, which will apparently reprint my solo Angel story that originally appeared back in 1980 in Marvel Treasury Edition #27.

Next, on May 16, comes Avengers: The Private War of Dr. Doom, which seems to be reprinting my solo Vision story from Avengers Annual #6.

I say “apparently” and “seems to be” because I didn’t learn any of this from Marvel itself, but rather from seeing the announcements for the books pop up on Amazon. (Which is usually how I first hear of these reprints.)

In any case, if you’d like to step into my time machine—now’s your chance.

The show is currently run by Mike Zipser and Kathi Overton (who recently dug out the video you’re about to see). John Pomeranz conducted the 21-year-old interview. How has time changed us? Well, here’s what John and I looked like together 17 years later at the 2007 Worldcon in Japan.

What did I learn when looking back at the episode (during which I share the stage with writer Judith Eckerson)?

First, that I sure said the phrase “and so forth” a heck of a lot! Sure glad I broke myself of that habit.

Also, that I’m still just as protective of my prose as I ever was, continuing not to play well with others. (At least not on the page.) My world of words is not a democracy. You’ll see what I mean below.

Now that this has surfaced, the only bit of video that’s missing from my past is the Guest of Honor speech from Ad Astra in 2000, a few weeks after Science Fiction Age was cancelled. I threw away my prepared speech and instead gave my best recounting ever of the birth, life, and death of SFA. I know it was filmed, and I’m still hoping it will turn up. Hear me, universe?