Marooned, which is devoted to science fiction about Mars, took note today of my short story “Mom, the Martians, and Me,” which was published in 2002 in Pete Crowther’s anthology Mars Probes.

The blogger calls my tale “a clever short story” and shares what he describes as “a cool passage describing how Mom turned her bedroom into an astronomical museum and space library.”

I’m happy to see that an older story of mine is still getting some attention!

In what as far as I know is its first review, Aliette de Bodard tackles Postscripts #15 over at The Fix and has this to say about my story:

In “A Very Private Tour of a Very Public Museum” by Scott Edelman, the robot narrator was once the curator-in-training of a museum but was promoted to curator when the Visitor, an alien robot, arrived and decreed that robots should not be the subject of art. While a clever story, I remain not quite convinced by the ending, which felt too easy to me.

The Living Dead—a reprint anthology consisting of more than 230,000 words of zombie fiction, including my Stoker finalist “Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man”—has just been published.

To promote the book, John Joseph Adams has launched a Web site coinciding with the release. Go there to find complete text of the introduction and four of the anthology’s 34 stories, plus excerpts of several of the other stories.

You can read the opening of my story there, which represents its first U.S. publication, as it originally appeared last year in Pete Crowther’s UK-based magazine Postscripts.

But I’d also like to point you toward one of my all-time favorite stories by another, Adam-Troy Castro’s “Dead Like Me,” which is available online in its entirety.

I first read that story in Castro’s collection A Desperate Decaying Darkness, and I’ve probably read it at least a dozen times since. It’s a powerful and moving tale, and if you’ve never read it, you should go and do so now.

After which you should buy the entire book, of course!

Check out the cover to The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction: Volume Three, which will be published March 2, 2009. Along with stories by the esteemed authors listed on the cover, you’ll also be able to read my short story titled “Glitch.”

If you don’t feel like waiting eight months for it to be released, then come to my reading August 7 at 4:00 p.m. at the World Science Fiction Convention in Denver, when I may just read it aloud. It will be either that, or my upcoming Postscripts story.

You decide!

John Joseph Adams has just posted the final cover to his zombie-themed anthology The Living Dead, which will reprint my Stoker-nominated novella “Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man.”

As you’ll note, this is yet another cover on which I appear under my famous pseudonym “many others.” This time, I am share that pen name with such writers as Dan Simmons, Michael Swanwick, Jeffrey Ford, Douglas E. Winter, Joe Lansdale, Adam-Troy Castro, Andy Duncan, Harlan Ellison, and Robert Silverberg. Not too shabby!

Pete Crowther has just released the final cover to Postscripts #15, which will debut next month at the Denver Worldcon. The cover illustration is by EC great Al Feldstein.

I appear on the cover under my famous pseudonym “many others,” a pen name which is being shared this issue by the likes of Brian Aldiss, Terry Bisson, Paul Di Filippo, Jay Lake , Robert Reed, Mike Resnick, Steve Utley, and, well, many other writers.

What a killer cover!

Some writers, when attacking their first drafts, condense them, and their stories shrink as they mature, like fruit becoming jam. Other writers have a different method, and for them, first drafts grow like coral reefs.

I learned along ago that I was one of the latter sort. In fact, over the years, I’ve discovered that my process has very clear parameters.

Though my editing consists as much of cutting out as of adding in, my second drafts tend to be approximately 50% larger than my first drafts, and the second draft I completed yesterday was no exception. A first draft of 14 pages, or 2,642 words, had been massaged into a second draft of 22 pages, or 4,638 words.

Other recent short stories had the following leaps in word count from the first to second draft: 2,598 to 4,991; 3,901 to 7,975; 5,236 to 7,515.

As for subsequent drafts, I usually never end up adding more than a few hundred words to the length as I edit the third draft, and the fourth and further drafts either maintain the same length or are slightly shorter than the third. I realized long ago that’s just the way my brain works, and have noticed very few exceptions to this.

So—what’s your method? Are you a taker-outer or a putter-inner?

A writer recently contacted me because he’s in the midst of researching a book on comic-book stories which have been adapted for movies and television. He wanted information on an episode of the series Tales from the Darkside titled “My Ghost Writer the Vampire,” which had been adapted from one of the many short horror stories I’d written for DC Comics back in the 1980s.

That story appeared in the April 1980 issue of The Unexpected, and was featured on the cover, which you can see at right. As a fan of The Twilight Zone and EC Comics, I loved getting the chance to turn out some short horror stories of my own for various comics, such as House of Mystery, House of Secrets, Secrets of Haunted House, and others.

When it came time to tell the writer the history of the story and the events surrounding the adaptation, I decided (as usual) to give my memory a jump start. Searched online, I was surprised to find not only the information I needed, but also that someone had put the entire Tales from the Darkside episode based on my story up on YouTube in three parts. (more…)

Publisher extraordinaire Pete Crowther has just announced the complete contents of Postscripts #15, which will debut in two months at the Denver Worldcon.

Contributors to the double-sized, all science-fiction issue will include such heavyweights as Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss, Ray Bradbury, and Michael Moorcock, multiple stories from featured author Paul McAuley, plus tales from Terry Bisson, Jack Dann, Brian Stableford, Robert Reed, Ian McDonald, and many others—including me, with a story titled “A Very Private Tour Of A Very Public Museum.” (I’ve already shared a word cloud for that story here.) This will be my second short story to appear in Postscripts magazine.

The cover will be by classic EC Comics writer, artist, and editor Al Feldstein.

For a complete list of stories and writers for this special issue, click on the link above.

Using Wordle, I’ve created a tag cloud for my short story “A Very Private Tour of a Very Public Museum,” which will appear soon in the special WorldCon issue of Postscripts.

I have no idea whether this distillation makes the story seem more or less interesting to potential readers, but being able to see the bare bones of my story is certainly intriguing to me.