Mystery Monthly was a topnotch digest that published the likes of Ed McBain, Ron Goulart, and Harlan Ellison. But not me.

The first issue came out in 1976, and the last (or so I believe) in 1977, long before I figured out how to create a short story that would get an editor’s attention.

Or get me anything more than an impersonal rejection slip such as this.

Luis Ortiz, publisher of NonStop Press, has a problem. The booksellers don’t care for the cover of his upcoming anthology, Why New Yorkers Smoke, which features short stories by the likes of Paul Di Filippo, Carol Emshwiller, Barry Malzberg, Don Webb … and me.

So he wrote asking me which of three alternate covers I preferred, and now I’m asking you. Luis will randomly select 10 people who give their opinion a copy of the final book. That’s worth an email to nonstop@nonstop-press.com, don’t you think?

But before you look at the possible covers, check out how Luis describes the anthology, which will be released on September 11.

The stories in WHY NEW YORKERS SMOKE blend both the real and the fantastic in a topical mix that illuminates the full range of some of the best speculative writers working today: Paul Di Filippo, Scott Edelman, Carol Emshwiller, Gay Terry, Lawrence Greenberg, Barry Malzberg, Don Webb, Aligria Luna-Luz and others. From “Grey Area”, the story of a taxi driver who bears witness to 9/11 by becoming the Wandering Dutchman of lower Manhattan, to “Why We Talk to Ourselves”, where Osama is still alive, living in NYC, and getting into speed dating.

Got it? Good.

Here’s the cover that Luis had planned to use but which he now says the booksellers didn’t “get.” We’ll call this Cover D.

Now let’s take a look at the alternate covers, one of which you can have a voice is making the final cover. (more…)

I guess I was tweeting my dreams before Twitter was even invented.

I’ve been sharing my dreams online since I started blogging in 2007. And once I got hooked on Twitter, I continued the practice there, which made sense, since not every dream deserves more than 140 characters.

Some nights the picking are slim, but other nights I’ve remembered as many as eight dreams. I’ve been asked whether I’ve always been able to recall my dreams, and I think I have. As proof, here are some dreams I scribbled down from January through March of 1970, when I was only 14.

Some of you have told me that you look forward to learning each morning what I dreamed the night before. You might enjoy this blast from the past.

Others have told me they wonder why I share my dreams at all. You won’t.

I’d read a paperback about lucid dreaming—this was a period when I was reading a lot of Edgar Cayce—and so I decided to attempt it. I was never successful at it; that is, I was never able to control where I went in dream. But when I woke, I was able to bring back many surreal moments. Here are a dozen of the most interesting ones from that period.

I was walking on ceiling in an anti-gravity atmosphere. Filled with seats like from a movie.

Two men are pushing a rock down a ditch. Their boss comes along and kills one of them but spares the other one.

I am doing experiments on mice. The mice are spelling words by crashing through holes with letters on them.

A stuntman in a motion picture is being whipped. Something goes wrong and the whip really works. He becomes completely deformed somehow. A boy turns him into a monster in a comics shop.

Person floating down river covered with a plastic shield or force field.

I get a phaser. We get in car and I try using it but it doesn’t work. We go to Coney Island. … When we are leaving, I phaser a radio that is in front of dad. It all disintegrates but one metallic part.

Reading Fantastic Four comic book.

There is a fight between Hulk, Dr. Strange and me (Thing). The front door gets knocked off. At the end, Hulk is in my room and throws stuff (books) all over the place.

Someone stole a script from me while I was on another planet and became famous on it. To get revenge I come to earth with evidence. While getting out of spaceship had to run so that we could destroy it so no one could learn her secrets. We stole a miniature tank from the army and destroyed the ship.

One of my friends dies but a man living with us brings him back to life.

I go back into the past with [REDACTED]. We never leave the car. We meet a caveman. An ostrich takes something of ours and runs away. He tries to get it back. I open the window of the car and the ostrich tries to stick his head in and I close it on him.

A man tries to kill me because I killed his son on Pearl Harbor Day. He then sees a stamp that stated the time that it started and realized that he killed his son, not me.

I guess I haven’t really changed that much at all in the past 41 years.

Back on February 14, 1972, I sent two poems—one of which I later published in my high school yearbook—to the Poetry Editor of Ramparts. (Hey, I never said this series was going to be devoted only to genre magazines!) Ramparts was known mostly for its political content, but it published poetry, too, so I foolishly figured I’d give it a shot.

I never had a chance. And if you should ever happen to read those poems (which I hope you never will), you’d agree.

Balticon 45 ran from Friday through Monday, but as usual for this local con, I only attended for a single day, Saturday. But on that day, I managed to squeeze in three panels, a reading, an autograph session, and on top of that—a durian feast!

My 1:00 p.m. panel, “Fantastic Books Presents,” was hosted by Ian Randal Strock, owner of (you guessed it) Fantastic Books, which published my collection of science fiction short stories, What We Still Talk About. While Ian explained why he does what he does, a few of his authors (me, Walter H. Hunt, and Daniel Kimmel) talked up our books, and actually managed to sell a few copies.

At 2:30, I read my short story “Goobers,” which originally appeared in The Book of More Flesh and was collected in my all-zombie collection What Will Come After. You were probably not there, but in case you wish you were, my performance has been preserved below.

Immediately following my reading, I rushed to the 3:00 p.m. panel, “Name-Droppers,” during which I was supposed to talk about my “personal contacts with the field’s departed giants,” along with Michael Swanwick and Ian Randal Strock. I shared anecdotes about my early encounters with Gordon Dickson, Nelson Bond, and Ted Sturgeon, while Michael talked about R. A. Lafferty and Ian discussed meeting Isaac Asimov. But mentioning only the dead turned out to be a bit depressing, so we moved on to sharing our stories of the living, too. (Including an extremely embarrassing encounter I had with Chip Delany when I was only 17.) (more…)

On August 30, 1971, I sent an early, clumsy, typo-riddled, poorly written short story (there should probably be further negative adjectives, but those are all I have energy for tonight) to editor Ted White at Amazing Science Fiction.

I received this rejection slip back. Even that was more than it deserved.

When I arrive at Balticon tomorrow, I will be bearing two durian with me. If you’re not familiar with this exotic fruit, you should know that it is banned on public transportation and in many hotels in Singapore, ingesting one has been described as like “eating custard in a sewer,” and I’ve read that, “You can kill a person by throwing a durian at his head. It’s just like a ball of spikes.”

Take a look at a boy and his durian. You’ll note that due to those lethal spikes, I’m holding it with a leather glove.

What else do you need to know about durian? How about the fact that it has thrice defeated Andrew Zimmern, the host of Bizarre Foods, eater of everything from lamprey to bats to stinky tofu? Check out one of his failures below.

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On June 27, 1972, I sent a short story (which thankfully no longer exists) to editor Ejler Jakobsson at Galaxy Science Fiction. Here, in what’s the first installment in a series of rejection slips received from magazines that no longer exist, is what I justifiably got back.

Welcome to the publishing graveyard.

I had a wonderful time at the Nebulas last weekend, which I guess is kind of redundant, since I always have a wonderful time at the Nebulas. I missed last year’s, which were held in Florida, the first I’d skipped in about 20 years, because with two international trips planned for 2010—World Horror in Brighton and Worldcon in Melbourne—something had to give. So I was glad this year’s Nebula weekend was being held in my backyard.

Well, sort of my backyard. The Washington Hilton was 100 miles away, but that was close enough to make it feel local. So I hopped in the car mid-afternoon and drove to D.C., always a hellish thing to do. Once I parked and checked in, the first members of the tribe I found were a group in the bar which included Myke Cole, John Joseph Adams, and a guy I’d never met before who was scribbling away in a sketchpad. I commented that his drawings reminded me of the art of Basil Wolverton, and he was astonished, because he loves Basil Wolverton, and no one had ever caught on to that resemblance before. (Guess having been into comics since I was a bean has its advantages.)

Turns out I was talking to Barry Deutsch, who was nominated for this year’s Andre Norton Award for Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword.

We had a good, long talk about artists most modern comics fans don’t remember, such as Lou Fine and Reed Crandall, and I pulled out my iPad to show him the Eisner-esque Joe Kubert comic Jew Gangster. Meeting someone new who was also entertaining was a nice way to start the weekend.

Next it was off to dinner with John Kessel, Liza Groen Trombi, Paolo Bacigalupi, and John Joseph Adams. We went to Meskerem, an Ethiopian restaurant, which happened to be JJA’s first time with that cuisine, resulting in a lot of teasing.

The fact that an Ethiopian virgin was present led to us discussing other exotic foods, such as the guinea pig I’d had in Quito and the durian Paolo had eaten. A warning: One result of that discussion is that I’ll be bringing durian to Balticon Saturday, which Paolo and I will crack open and share with the masses. So if you’re there, and are adventurous, make sure you’re watching me on Twitter so you hear the call!

When we returned to the hotel, I happened to be discussing Michael Blumlein with John Kessel and Paul Park when the strangest moment of the weekend occurred. A woman in the lobby who had nothing at all to do with the Nebulas perked up at the mention of Blumlein’s name. It turned out that her sister is married to his brother! We chatted a bit, which might not have been such a good thing. I hope we didn’t lower Michael in her eyes by the mere fact of our knowing him!

Then came the evening reception to honor the nominees. You should have been there! Well, actually, you can be there, since I was there, and I happen to be a dangerous guy with a Flip camera. So here’s SFWA President John Scalzi, aided by Steven Silver, handing out certificates and pins to those finalists who were present. (more…)

If you’ll be heading to Balticon this weekend, and would like some advice on where to eat, I can think of no better guide than Adam Richman of Man v. Food. He hasn’t steered me wrong yet. So check out his Baltimore episode below, and think about whether you want to tag along to Chaps Charcoal Restaurant when I put out the call.

Haven’t decided whether I’ll make that trip before or after I carve up the durian, though …