I received the latest PS Publishing Weekly Newsletter this morning, and in it, the full Table of Contents for Postscripts #36/37—which has been given the subtitle “The Dragons of the Night”—has been revealed.

Which means I now feel free to share the title of my story therein—one of my longest titles ever—as well as the names of the other writers and the titles of the other stories which will be surrounding mine.

And here they are!

Darkness, and Darkness by Robert Freeman Wexler
S.K. by James Cooper
A Reverie of Time by Allen Ashley
The Wedding Photographer by Robert Guffey
Machinists by Andrew Jury
The Second Runner by John Grant
Surfacing by Lisa L. Hannett
In Passing by Robert Reed
The Dragons of the Night by Darrell Schweitzer
Last Post by Robert Edric
Texas by James Cooper
Untanglement: The Leaving of the Quantum Cats by John Gribbin
Karen Coxswain, or Death as She is Truly Lived by Paul Di Filippo
Rewrites by Keith Brooke
Everything Finishes by John Grant
The Day My Heart Stood Still by Andrew Hook
Madam, I’m Adam by Gary Fry
In the Macabre Theatre of Nightshade Place by Cate Gardner
Happy Sands by Stephen Bacon
The Man Without the Blue Balloon and the Woman Who Had Smiles Only for Him by Scott Edelman
Blesséd by Bruce Golden
The Hutchison Boy by Darrell Schweitzer
Abundances Above by Brian Aldiss
The Beachcomber by Lavie Tidhar

What wonderful company I’m keeping!

Since it’s not self-evident from my title, “The Man Without the Blue Balloon and the Woman Who Had Smiles Only for Him” is a post-apocalyptic tale set an unspecified number of years in the future. Should you read it, I hope you enjoy it.

While I don’t yet see a link so you can order a copy of Postscripts #36/37, you can reach the full PS Publishing site here, where I’m sure purchasing information will be listed once it’s available.

If what I’ve been told by various editors and publishers comes to pass, I may have more stories published in 2016 than any single previous year. Fingers crossed!

UPDATE: This workaround is no longer required, as Eating the Fantastic has been accepted and added to the iTunes store. You can check it out and subscribe here!

My food-centric science fiction podcast Eating the Fantastic launched yesterday, and though I provided an embed via which you could listen on your computer, I know many will instead want to download the episodes to their iPhones. Since it’ll likely take a few weeks before the show will be available there, I’m glad I was able to figure out a workaround for those who’d like to listen while away from their keyboards.

Actually …

I didn’t figure out anything.

Gil Roth of the Virtual Memories podcast explained it to me, and now I’m explaining it to you. Though I suspect many of you are far more advanced than I am, and could do without any of this, needing only the url of my RSS feed. But for anyone else out there who’s as clueless as I am …

First, find the Podcast app icon. You know, the one that looks like this—

Once you’ve clicked it and are in, click the plus sign in the upper left corner of your screen. (more…)

Are you ready to have lunch with me and writer/musician Sarah Pinsker? Because the first episode of Eating the Fantastic is now live!

If you want more details about what the Eating the Fantastic podcast is all about, check out my earlier post.

But if you’re a TL;DR type of podcast listener, then simply click play below and join Sarah and me for lunch at Baltimore’s Family Meal.

I hope to eventually get Eating the Fantastic into the iTunes store so you’ll be able to listen on the go, but until then, I think you should still find the episodes enjoyable enough to listen to here.

UPDATE: Eating the Fantastic has been accepted and added to the iTunes store. You can now check it out and subscribe here!

And if you’d like see what the two of us were putting in our mouths on Sunday rather than just being teased by our descriptions (and quite audible groans), check out the photos below. (more…)

As I announced Monday, I’ll shortly be launching a podcast titled Eating the Fantastic. Only two things stand in the way of posting the first episode, which I hope to do before the end of the week—deciding whether or not fair use allows me to include a seconds-long food-related audio snippet from a movie—and settling on the iTunes-appropriate image which best represents the show.

I’m working on unraveling the mysteries of fair use to better understand the former, but as for the latter—I previously shared two possibilities and asked for your opinion.

But this morning, when I posted a photo to celebrate Pancake Day from my visit to Portland’s Stepping Stone Cafe, I realized I had far more choices than just those two.

If you have a moment, I’d appreciate it if you checked out the other images below, which I haven’t yet mocked up, and let me know if you think any of them would be a better fit.

Thanks! (more…)

Over on Twitter and Facebook, I’ve been teasing a SEKRIT PROJEKT which I would only unveil once I was 100% sure I was going to proceed.

And after having had lunch with Sarah Pinsker this afternoon, I have my answer—I am going to proceed!

“What,” you may be thinking, “could lunch with Sarah Pinsker possibly have to do with a sekrit projekt?” (more…)

It’s been more than four years since I added to my set of rejection slips from dead magazines, which I began so struggling writers could feel a sense of schadenfreude.

That is:

Those magazines are gone … but we’re still here.

Earlier this week, while digging out my first rejection from Analog—which wasn’t a form, so it can’t be included as part of this collection—I came across another, so decided it was time to share one more.

Oui was an adult magazine that also published fiction, and since many of my favorite science fiction writers published in those sorts of magazines at the beginnings of their careers—Robert Silverberg in Rogue, Harlan Ellison in Gent, and Avram Davidson in Swank, for example—I thought: Hey, why not me?

But it was not to be.

Oui started up in 1972, sent me this rejection some time during the late ’70s, and put out its last issue in 2007.

I’m not saying things would have ended differently for them had they bought that story of mine … but you never know.

I made my first short story submission to Analog in 1972. Seven days later, editor Ben Bova rejected it.

Why am I telling you this?

Because 44 years and two editors later, I’ve finally sold a story to Analog!

And here’s how I got from there to here.

On June 22, 1972, when I was but a wee lad, I slid the manuscript of a story titled “No Pun Intended” into a manilla envelope and mailed it off. I no longer have any idea what that story was about, and I no longer have the ability to check. Long ago, I destroyed all evidence of my first three novels and 25 short stories. So all I know is … it included a pun, because I made mention of that fact in my cover letter, and because of, well, that title.

On June 29, I received this response.

I didn’t realize at the time, since I’d only been submitting my fiction for a year or so, how rare it was for someone as green as I was to receive anything but a form rejection slip. I also didn’t realize how many years of sending additional stories to Analog I’d have ahead of me before I’d receive a second personal response.

But even if I’d known, that wouldn’t have stopped me. (more…)

While merging photos I’d inherited from my mother after her passing with my own, I came across this one of mine, which was taken nearly nineteen years ago to the day, back when I was representing Sci-Fi Entertainment magazine at a Television Critics Association press tour.

That’s me hanging out at a party with Mystery Science Theater 3000 writers and stars Bridget Jones and Mike Nelson. We were at the Ritz-Carlton in Pasadena, probably on the night of January 19, 1997.

We’d all been brought there by the Sci-Fi Channel. Jones, Nelson, and a few more members of the MST3K cast were promoting their show’s move over from Comedy Central, while I was present because Sci-Fi Entertainment was the official magazine of the Sci-Fi Channel. (Note that I was not yet an employee of theirs, but still worked at the time for Sovereign Media, the company behind Science Fiction Age, which was publishing the magazine under license.)

Earlier that day, we—along with Glen Morgan and James Wong of X-Files fame—appeared on-stage before a packed room of journalists answering questions about all things science fiction—including the then-upcoming 20th anniversary release of the Special Edition of Star Wars.

What I found surprising (once I dug out my complete transcript of the event, which of course I still owned, and which runs 24 pages) was that one of the questions directed toward me expressed skepticism that anyone would actually bother heading to a theater to see Star Wars! (more…)

The 42″ snowfall here in Glengary, West Virginia was so remarkable that not only did I appear live on the BBC to let folks on the other side of pond know how bad things had gotten, but a photo of me lounging on a bench out back in the midst of the blizzard was featured within the first minute of Monday night’s CBS Evening News.

When I learned the image would be used, I warned friends not to blink if they wanted to catch me. But as it turned out, I was on screen long enough that blinking was permissible.

Check it out.

If you hung in for the entire broadcast, you’d have spotted my credit during the final moments—above the credit to the Smithsonian’s National Zoo for its panda footage.

I know, I know … it was purely an alphabetical decision. But let me live the dream for a little longer that I’m more important than a panda, OK?

Artificial Intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky passed away two days ago, which immediately brought back memories of the Science Forum in which he took part in the (gulp!) March 1993 issue of Science Fiction Age.

Those memories proved not to be entirely accurate, as I learned when I thought of digging out the tapes from that session to see if any of the audio would be of a quality worth posting here. (more…)