I received my contributor copies of the anthologies The Dead That Walk and Postscripts #19 this week, and since those contain the last two stories of mine slated to appear in 2009, I figure it’s time to update you on this year’s output.

I had seven short stories published in 2009, which marked my best year yet. I don’t think I’ve ever before published more than five in a single year.

Here they are, broken down by genre:

“Glitch”
The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction: Volume Three

Fantasy Book Critic reviewed the anthology and gave my story, which is about robot sex in the future (did that get your attention?) 4 1/2 stars … which I hope was on a scale of 1 through 5. Reviewer Liviu C. Suciu also called my story “interesting, funny and dark at the same time.”

“The World Breaks”
Postscripts #19

I’ve read this tale of a small town’s struggle to survive in a post-apocalyptic U.S. aloud many times, and it’s one of those that chokes me up, as you know if you’ve heard me try to get through it. I made the mistake of reading it at Nippon 2007, having somehow forgotten the various references to nuclear weapons being dropped, and felt odd coming upon them and suddenly remembering in the midst of reading the story to a Japanese audience. (more…)

A sentence I wrote was just cited in The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English: Volume II. Or to put it more accurately, I just learned that I’d been cited, since the book seems to have come out in 2005.

It’s a thrill, of course, to make your mark like that, but I was surprised by what, out of all my writing, has now worked its way into a reference book.

Was it a sentence from one of my short stories? Or a passage from a poem? Or a pithy quote from one of my essays or editorials? (more…)

I’m organizing a collection of my science fiction short stories to be published by the Fantastic Books imprint of Wilder Publication (that is, Warren Lapine), and would like your help as I try to decide the order of the stories. (Well, the help of those of you who’ve actually read any of my stories, that is.)

The best theory I’ve heard for assembling collections and anthologies has been that the two strongest stories should go at the beginning and end of the book—the opening story to reel the reader in, and the closing one to let the reader leave on a high note.

The book, to be titled What We Still Talk About, will contain the following 95,000 words of stories, which aren’t arranged here in any thematic order, but just in reverse chronological order:

“Glitch” The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction Volume Three (Solaris)
“A Very Private Tour of a Very Public Museum” PostScripts (PS Publishing)
“What We Still Talk About” Forbidden Planets (DAW Books)
“My Life is Good” Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic (Tor)
“Together Forever at the End of the World” Men Writing Science Fiction as Women (DAW Books)
“Choosing Time” Angel Body and other Magic for the Soul (Back Brain Recluse)
“Eros and Agape Among the Asteroids” Once Upon A Galaxy (DAW Books)
“The Only Thing That Mattered” Absolute Magnitude
“Mom, the Martians, and Me” Mars Probes (DAW Books)
“True Love in the Day After Tomorrow” Treachery and Treason (Penguin Roc)
“The Last Man on the Moon” Moon Shots (DAW Books)

If you’ve read my fiction, or heard me read any of it aloud at a convention, please let me know which ones you think would best act as bookends to the collection. I know which ones I’d choose, but you know how it is with writers—we’re not always the best judges of our own material.

Thanks!

I received a contributor’s copy of Talebones #38 yesterday. My expected copies had already shipped via a slower rate of postage and will be forthcoming , but editor/publisher Patrick Swenson was kind enough to mail me one first class when I told him that I wanted to wave it about at Readercon next week. I figured that since the story “The Only Wish Ever to Come True” made its first public appearance at a Readercon when I chose it for my reading a couple of years ago, some of the people who come to this year’s reading might be interested in knowing that it’s finally out.

This marks my third story to see print this year, and it suddenly occurs to me that it’s in my third genre.

My first short story out this year, “Glitch,” appeared in February in The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction: Volume Three. It’s pure science fiction, with robots both earthly and alien, an invasion of Earth, and ruminations on whether it’s possible for an artificial intelligence to understand art.

Then came The Hunger of Empty Vessels, a novella which was published in April as a chapbook by Bad Moon Books. It’s a dark story containing an unusual haunting and emotional vampires. There’s no mistaking it for anything but horror.

Now, in July, comes the Summer issue of Talebones, in which I share the Table of Contents with Mary Robinette Kowal. “The Only Wish Ever to Come True” is pure fantasy, with wishes coming true over thousands of years, and even an explanation as to why we tend to get three of them.

And as I look ahead to the other stories coming out this year, I see a zombie tale titled “The Human Race” out shortly in Space & Time, the metafictional post-apocalyptic meditation on war “The World Breaks” in Postscripts, a ghost story titled “Here Choose I” in the lettered limited edition (and only in the lettered limited edition) of The Hunger of Empty Vessels, and then perhaps one more zombie story, the title and anthology to be named later.

As you can see, my output is all over the map. Perhaps not the wisest thing to do in a day when novelists are being urged to pick a niche, or else use a different pen name for each genre so as not to confuse readers.

I don’t buy it. I remember the days when Fredric Brown could write science fiction and mysteries and not have to hide it.

Or maybe it’s that I just don’t care. What matters to me is writing the stories that demand to be written, in the order they demand it, even if that doesn’t make the best marketing sense. (Hey, there are those who would say that writing short stories instead of novels in the first place doesn’t make much sense!) If I don’t do that, then it’s just a job.

And I hope I never come to think it as only that.

I woke up one week ago today and immediately started writing a new short story. Forty hours later, at 10:00 p.m. Sunday night, I had a completed first draft of 5,000 words.

That’s never happened to me before. Based on my usual speed of writing, words accruing like a coral reef, a story of that length would usually take from a week to 10 days to achieve finished first draft stage. (What can I say? I’m no Jay Lake.

Perhaps the reason the story poured out of me so quickly was that I’d been carrying the basic concept around for years, and my attendance at the Stokers a few weeks ago acted as a catalyst.

Would you like to read it? Good!

Because there it is.

Hope you enjoyed it! (more…)

I learned yesterday that my short story, “Petrified,” which was published last year in Desolate Souls, the souvenir program book for the 2008 World Horror Convention, made HWA’s final Stoker ballot in the category Superior Achievement in Short Fiction.

This marks my fourth such nomination—my first was back in 1998 for 1997’s story “A Plague on Both Your Houses”—but this nod differs from all the rest in that it’s my first Stoker-nominated piece not to contain zombies. So all of you haters of the shambling undead can finally relax.

Here are the finalists in my category:

“Petrified” by Scott Edelman (Desolate Souls)
“The Lost” by Sarah Langan (Cemetery Dance Publications)
“The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft” by Nick Mamatas and Tim Pratt (Chizine)
“Evidence of Love in a Case of Abandonment” by M. Rickert (Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction)
“Turtle” by Lee Thomas (Doorways)

You’ll note that this is the second consecutive year I’m competing against Lee Thomas, and we all know what happened last year in Salt Lake City … (more…)

Over at the Horror Drive-In, reviewer Mark Sieber writes:

“The first thing I want to point out is how well written The Hunger of Empty Vessels is. The language is rich and each sentence is a beautiful construction. Clearly Scott Edelman is a solid professional.”

Though the horror turned out to be a little too vague for him, he still went on to write that “I urge readers to give The Hunger of Empty Vessels a chance.” What more can I ask for?

Meanwhile, Don D’Ammassa calls The Hunger of Empty Vessels “another nice chapbook from Bad Moon” and deems my tale to be “nicely done.”

If you’d like to discover the reason for these kind words, copies are still available over at the Bad Moon Books site.

A review by John Seavey over at fraggmented takes a look at the Scarecrow stories I wrote for Marvel Comics more than three decades ago and finds them wanting.

Luckily, Seavey is so hilarious in his description of the plot that I couldn’t help but laugh.

Besides—when I wrote those comics, I was just a tadpole. He’s probably right about everything!

Here’s my favorite part of his review:

And finally we get “The Scarecrow.” No, no, not that Scarecrow. No, not that Scarecrow either. This is an entirely different Scarecrow, who is … um … he lives in a painting, and there’s this cult that hates him, or maybe he hates them, and he’s getting revenge on them for, um … something, but they want the painting, and there’s a demon, and this guy keeps vanishing, and he’s got the power to … do stuff, I guess, and … it’s all actually more than a little confusing.

There’s more, which you can find here.

Whether he loved them or hated them is almost beside the point. The fact that anyone is still bothering to think about these at all so many years later is flattering enough!

I have been deemed “deep, disturbing, and emotionally draining.”

Well … not me personally. Rather, it’s my about-to-be-published novella The Hunger of Empty Vessels which has been judged so, in its first review.

The reviewer also states that “Edelman really knows how to pack a knockout into a literary jab.”

If you’d like to find out why, The Hunger of Empty Vessels is available for sale over at the Bad Moon Books site.

Over at Fantasy Book Critic, Liviu C. Suciu reviewed the entire contents of The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction: Volume Three, edited by George Mann.

Why do I care?

Because my short story, “Glitch,” earned 4 1/2 stars … which as far as I can tell, was on a scale of 1 through 5. (If I’m misinterpreting things, and it was instead on a scale of 1 through 100, please … keep that to yourself.)

Here’s what Suciu had to say:

Prim S-Tr resists the attempts of her bonded partner X-ta to have “animal-like” human intimacy. Then things go out of control… Interesting, funny and dark at the same time. The style was a bit flat but otherwise very good.

The anthology will officially go on sale tomorrow.