John Joseph Adams, editor of the recent post-apocalyptic anthology Wastelands, which has been receiving rave reviews, informed me late last night that he’ll be reprinting my “Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man” in his upcoming zombie anthology from Night Shade Books. The book, tentatively titled No More Room in Hell, will be published in October. Good news with which to start off 2008!

And for those of you who wanted to nominate the story for a Nebula Award last month, but couldn’t because the story’s original venue was a UK magazine, mark your calendars, because its eligibility period will begin in October with this first U.S. publication.

As the year comes to an end, I’ve just learned about a positive review of one of my short stories that appeared in The Zone. Mario Guslandi has extremely kind things to say there concerning “The Awful Truth About The Circus,” published earlier this year in Zencore!:

To me, the best story in the book is by far “The Awful Truth About The Circus” by Scott Edelman, an extraordinary, insightful tale of loneliness and despair, in which the disappointments of life affect a small-town young girl.

A nice parting gift from 2007 in the year’s final few hours.

A few SFWA members have e-mailed me recently to share that they’d nominated “Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man” for a Nebula Award. As pleased I was to learn that the story was liked, according to the Nebula rules, “a work’s eligibility period begins on the first day of the month of its first publication in the United States.” Since PostScripts is a UK magazine, that story’s eligibility period won’t begin unless and until someone decides to reprint it over here.

But that doesn’t hold true for the Stoker Awards, as HWA’s rules don’t contain a U.S. publication requirement. On the other hand, another thing that HWA doesn’t have is the 12-month rolling eligibility period that SFWA does, which means that my story’s eligibility will shortly run out, always a problem for those pieces which appear late in the year. So if there are any HWA members out there who’d like to see a copy, raise your hand.

Now that Des Lewis has revealed the identity of my Zencore! story, I’m free to compile a complete list of my fiction publications for 2007. I had five stories come out this year, which is the most I’ve seen published in a single year since 2002 (which also saw five).

Their titles are:

“Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man”
PostScripts #12
Pete Crowther, editor

“The Awful Truth About the Circus”
Zencore!
Des Lewis, editor

“A Judgment Call for Judgment Day”
A Dark and Deadly Valley
Mike Heffernan, editor

“The Man He Had Been Before”
The Mammoth Book of Monsters
Stephen Jones, editor

“Survival of the Fittest”
Summer Chills
Stephen Jones, editor

Looking ahead to 2008, I currently have four stories in the pipeline at various magazines and anthologies. Stay tuned as their release dates solidify.

I returned yesterday from the balmy 80s of Florida to the chilly 40s of home, and on my way back from the airport stopped at Sandy and Risa Stewart’s house for this year’s Writers Group From Hell annual holiday party (which included the traditional groan-inducing white elephant swap).

I’m no longer an active member of this monthly critiquing group, but I was one of its founding members back in 1989, and so get grandfathered in for the party, along with a number of other lapsed workshoppers.

The WGFH was born in Logan Airport on the way back from that year’s World Science Fiction Convention in Boston. I overheard someone utter the word “Clarion” as I waited to board the plane, and ended up wandering the gate in search of the speaker. I eventually connected with Sue Ellen Sloca, who was either a fellow graduate of that writing program, or just trying to get advice on whether or not to go in the future. We decided to try to pull others from the Maryland/Virginia/District of Columbia area into our orbit and begin a critiquing group, which started a couple of months later.

(If I’m misremembering the details, I hope that one of the other members will leap in to correct me.)

I had to abandon regular workshopping back in 1992 or 1993, when editing Science Fiction Age started to eat my life, but I still think back fondly on those several years of monthly meetings, back before anyone had thought to give our workshop a name.

It never felt like Hell to me.

Earlier this year, I published a story in Zencore!—only no one except for me and the editor/publisher knows yet exactly which story that was. Des Lewis wanted readers to encounter the stories inside with no preconceived ideas based on the reputations of the writers, and so he presented the 17 short stories with no bylines attached. A list of authors appeared on the back cover only, in random order, with no clue as to who wrote what.

An announcement will be made marrying the stories to their authors in just a few weeks, but Jetse de Vries decided not to wait, and took a stab at each story’s authorship. (more…)

My story “Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man, just out in PostScripts 12, has been reviewed—as favorably as one could ever hope for—by Val Grimm at The Fixx:

Although it is uneven, this issue is worth buying and keeping for its most promising stories, two of which, “Almost The Last Story By Almost The Last Man” by Scott Edelman and “Ghost Technology From The Sun” by Paul Jessup, show thoughtfulness and literary craft that deserve special recognition and remembrance.

The unnamed narrator (I suspect his name is Walter) of “Almost The Last Story By Almost The Last Man” is a writer doing research who seeks refuge in the rare book vault of a library, which is attacked by zombies. Walled in with his books, he struggles to comprehend what is happening by telling stories, mostly of what he imagines is happening in the world outside the library. His meta-narrative is an exploration of the impulse to write and why telling stories is human. All the vignettes our male Scheherazade formulates to forestall and forget the inevitable involve affection or dedication of one kind or another: bonds between people, or between humans and zombies. Death doesn’t part his husbands and wives in their love or hatred; mothers adore their strange children; priests attend to their flocks; and survivors seek other survivors. The unflinching mayhem of this story is heartrending rather than perverse or disgusting, as life is destroyed and, tattered, continues in unlife. Again and again, our narrator imagines a man on a mountain, who has never heard a whimper of the chaos below, poking in the dirt with a stick and talking to his son, a darkly hopeful image which recalls the torturer’s horse scratching its innocent behind on a tree in W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts.”

That’s the first time I’ve ever been favorably compared to W.H. Auden!