I bought a ukulele exactly four months ago today—which you’d already know if you saw what I inflicted on the world when I hit my three-month ukulele anniversary—so I thought I should share another one of the songs I’m noodling around with. Today’s victim, “Side by Side,” which was sung far better by Ukulele Ike.

One unfortunate side effect I’ve noticed about playing the ukulele is that my singing seems to have deteriorated as a result. I never thought of it before, but playing an instrument while singing is sort of like singing while rubbing my stomach and patting my head—there’s not much brain left over to pay attention to what’s going on with my throat. I hope that will improve as the playing comes more naturally to me. (Please tell me it will improve!)

In any event, here it is, flubs and all!

As part of my four-month anniversary celebration, I also recorded my take on George Formby’s “Why Don’t Women Like Me?”—I’ve absolutely fallen in love with Formby, have joined the George Formby Society, and am considering attending a Formby convention in Blackpool—but I haven’t decided whether to share that with any save the new uke friends I’ve made in the UK.

We’ll see.

I thought I pretty much knew everything about comics. But thanks to The Superhero Book: The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Comic-Book Icons and Hollywood Heroes, I just learned a couple of things more. And in case you didn’t know these two facts either …

Charlton Comics was created by two guys who met in jail

Charlton was the home of such superheroes as Captain Atom (co-created by Steve Ditko years before he went on to co-create Spider-Man), The Question (where I got my first taste of Ditko’s Ayn Randian pontificating long before I ever encountered his Mr. A), and others.

But it all began because someone got arrested for copyright infringement:

In the early 1930s, Italian immigrant John Santangelo, a bricklayer, was encouraged by a girlfriend to produce a magazine that printed the lyrics to popular songs. His effort landed him behind bars for copyright infringement. In jail, he got a crash course in copyright law, courtesy of fellow inmate Edward Levy, a disbarred lawyer, and they joined forces upon their release to start a legitimate publishing house, Charlton.

Which basically means, no copyright infringement—no Watchmen!
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I used the Everyday iPhone app to snap a picture of myself each day from March 23, 2011-March 23, 2012. Can you perceive me getting a year closer to death, one day at a time?

I’ll be in Salt Lake City next weekend attending the World Horror Convention, which was last in that city in 2008.

As you can see from this photo of Gary Braunbeck, Lee Thomas, Nicholas Kaufmann, and me, things got UGLY back then!

But I’m not up for a Stoker this year, so there’ll be no need to wrassle other nominees. My pal Gene O’Neill, though, who’s up for three Stokers, had better watch out.

Aside from the awards banquet, where I’ll be a co-presenter for one of the categories, you’ll be able to find me on a Stephen King panel at 10:00 a.m. Friday (will any of you be awake?) along with Rocky Wood, Jason Brock, Blake Casselman, and Michael R. Collings. I’m sure that the average audience member will know as much about King as I do, but I’ll do my best.

Where else will you be able to find me? Well, if you’ve been following my con-going exploits, then you surely already know! (more…)

I ran across two intriguing quotes over the past couple of days that have absolutely nothing in common and have no right to be rubbing up against each other like this. But here they are anyway, and make of them what you will.

First, Philip Kennicott, reviewing (well, eviscerating) “The Art of Video Games” exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum for the Washington Post, wrote:

What must a game do to become art? And when will the medium itself begin to look more like the art world than the entertainment industry?

I’d propose some of the following: We’ll know it’s art when old games are as interesting to people as new ones; when particular games play a role in changing the actual world, just as novels such as The Sorrows of Young Werther, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Jungle altered ideas of identity and politics; when the best games are richly self-referential to an accepted canon of classic games; and when the contemplation after playing a game is more pleasing than the game itself.

Which to me says more about the fact that the Post should have sent someone else to review the exhibition than it does about the exhibition itself. (more…)

Last night, Irene and I headed over to what was dubbed an Irish Fest of the Future, hosted by Tom Doyle and Beth Delany. Since we were asked to dress according to the theme, I adorned myself with little green men. As you can see in the photo below, in addition to green clothing and a brown derby, I wore Yoda, Braniac 5, and one of those cute aliens from Toy Story.

Also—you’ll note a certain green-haired wench on my arm … one who’s likely to smack me around for calling her a green-haired wench. (Thanks to Karen Wester Newton for the pic!)

The catalyst for the theme was that Tom’s a recent winner of the Writers of the Future competition, and will be heading to L.A. next month to take part in the awards ceremony. So last night, when he wasn’t leading us in singing “Fairytale of New York” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” he read the opening to his story.

St. Patrick’s Day may be over, but that’s no reason not join in the celebration now below! (more…)

Remember Richard Wilson? Some of you might, but alas, most probably don’t. Wilson won the Nebula Award for Best Novelette in 1968 for “Mother to the World” (which got him a Hugo nomination, too), and I published his “The Nineteenth Century Spaceship” in Last Wave back in 1984. He died in 1987, and is now mostly forgotten except to the cognoscenti.

John Pelan of Ramble House is publishing a series of books collecting his short stories—the first volume of which is now on sale, and he got in touch with me to see whether I still had copies of the magazine he could use to help in reprinting that latter story.

But I’d hung on to more than just that. I also had our correspondence regarding that and other submissions. So I sent John scans of a batch of letters, including the one below, which teases with information about a collection editor Terry Carr was considering, one that never came to pass. (Carr also died in 1987.)

Ah, the land of Might-Have-Been! That letter is filled with many things which never came to pass.

For more Wilson, keep up with what Ramble House‘s publishing plans.

I received a copy of Kurt Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1950-1962 in the mail the other day. The book featured a cover photo of a Vonnegut I did not recognize and an essay on science fiction written by a Vonnegut I did not recognize either.

The photo caused some cognitive dissonance because of what was lacking—the curly hair, that mustache … and where was the cigarette? And as for the essay, well, he may have liked SF writers and editors, thinking them a jovial bunch, “generous and amusing souls,” as he put it, but he sure didn’t like the words on the page.

I’m sure I read the piece titled “Science Fiction” back in 1974 when it was reprinted in his collection Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons, but I’d completely forgotten about it. Maybe you have, too. Or perhaps you’ve never read it. But in writing of the science fiction field of 1965, Vonnegut was quite dismissive:

Whatever it knows about science was fully revealed in Popular Mechanics by 1933. Whatever it knows about politics and economics and history can be found in the Information Please Almanac for 1941. Whatever it knows about the relationships between men and women derives from the clean and the pornographic versions of “Maggie and Jiggs.”

Oh, but he doesn’t hate all science fiction, though, because: (more…)

Over at the Night Land Journal, my short story “What Will Come After” was praised as the result of its recent reprinting in Stephen Jones’ latest best horror of the year anthology:

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!

One thing Science Fiction Age could do during its run that no other science fiction magazines could—since it was a large, full-color publication—was include a six-page gallery each issue, usually focused on the work of a single artist. It was inevitable that the visionary Jean Giraud, better known (well, to some) by his pseudonym Moebius, would be one of those artists.

Giraud, who passed away earlier today of cancer, was a part of the magazine from the first issue. Though we never commissioned original artwork—he was out of our league in terms of paying for anything new out of our budget, so I’d go through his vast portfolio of existing work in attempts to match up pieces with stories that suited his spirit—I enjoyed working with him.

Check out the gallery below from our September 1996 issue as you—as we all—mourn the great artist today.

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