For now...

...this is gonna have to do, vis a vis blogging.

I've been preparing for a week long writing workshop that starts tomorrow and working on a side project that I'm comfortable describing as research for my bicycle race book, so I've fallen off the pace here a bit, sorry. I'll see if Gwenda will "guest blog" while I'm gone. I'll leave her all the links she'll need to bring you any important breaking news.

Tonight is the reading at Malaprop's in Asheville with Kelly Link and Maureen McHugh. If you're in the area, please come and check it out. They both have important new books that will be available for purchase. As for me, well, I promise to keep it short.

Other people are posting their WorldCon schedules, but I think I'll save that for when I get back.

Don't forget the big Say... subscription drive and its attendant fabulous prize. I beg the patience of folks who've placed orders in the last couple of days; I'll get your zines in the mail once I'm back in the Commonwealth.

Summer's arrived in the northern hemisphere. If you're in the northern hemisphere, go outside.

Gelukkige verjaardag, Eddy!

The greatest professional athlete of all time, the Flandrian Eddy Merckx, is sixty years old today. VeloNews offers this reprint of a 2000 article that gives a nice overview of who the man is, and makes an attempt at the impossible task of putting his accomplishments into some kind of perspective. Give it a read.

Go read this!

Anecdotal data suggest that my readership consists pretty much entirely of people who also read Shaken & Stirred, but just in case you don't, go read this cool story that Gwenda has posted as part of sort of online anthology. It's fantastic, in at least two different senses of the word.

Pretty Magic Subscription Drive Prize

As you may have read elsewhere, if you subscribe to Say... by the end of the month, your name will be entered into a drawing. The big prize is this:



And what that is, is an extremely limited edition chapbook that we produced a few weeks back. Just six numbered copies exist, and this one is signed by all the contributors (I believe it's number 2 of 6--I don't have it at hand to check; if I'm wrong I'll come back in and correct this so that nobody will ever believe you if you claim I said something else). Gwenda described it like this:

"It contains the work of Scott Westerfeld (first chapter of Peeps, due out in September), Justine Larbalestier (first chapter of Magic Lessons, the second volume in the Magic or Madness trilogy, due out next year), Ysabeau Wilce (an excerpt from a new short story "The Unkindest Cut") and me* (first chapter of new novel-in-progress Roanoke, hopefully due out at some unknown point in the future). It's signed by all the contributors and it's beautiful."

You can subscribe to Say... via PayPal, which you can use even if you don't have an account because they also basically act as a credit card processing service. Just click the appropriate button below. Alternatively, you can use Project Pulp.

If you already have the latest issue, please let us know and we'll start you with #6, Say...what's the combination? which is due out later this year. If you're already a subscriber, we can add another two issues to your current subscription so you'll have a shot at the prize.

By subscribing (or extending) now, you also lock in the $5 per issue price for two more issues. We will be raising the individual issue price starting with #6 and two-issue subscriptions will go up in price as well.

Say...has there ever been a clearer time to act?

In the US, only 10 dollars:

In Canada, only 11 dollars:

Other countries, only 12 dollars:

Winner to be chosen by random drawing on July 1.

* Her.

What's it about, Larry Hammer?

With his contribution to Say...have you heard this one? writer Larry Hammer adds to the cycle of folklore surrounding a well known businessman from the American West. Here's an extract from "Paul Bunyan and the Photocopier."

"Now just between you and me, there's nothing on this green earth that scared Paul the way that photocopier scared him...that big plastic box, all white and humming, with its ten thousand buttons and twenty thousand lights, the sole purpose of each one to tell him that he'd fogotten to select an output tray--that sent the cold blue heebies down to his feet, through the soles of his boots, and into the basement boiler room."

Larry's most recent stories and poems have appeared in The First Heroes, edited by Turtledove and Doyle, Abyss & Apex, and Light. He lives in Tucson with his wife, Janni Lee Simner.

He has a Pretty Good Home Page, a Pretty Good LiveJournal, and would like you to know the Straight Dope about his subject matter.

Larry sent this answer when I asked what his story is about:

"'Paul Bunyan and the Photocopier' is about how capitalism attempts to harness the mythic to its own purposes, while the folk process continues to liberate it. Well, you kinda have to squint past Mazy to see the last part. Babe made me write that, and having a Big Blue Ox whuffling over your shoulder can be mighty persuasive."

Thanks, Larry Hammer!

Please consider subcribing to Say... via PayPal--just click the "subscribe" link appropriate to your nation of residence in the righthand column.

One night only

Sorry to have dropped off the pace a bit this week. As noted earlier, June's got a lot of activitization, but here's a couple of quick things.

First, again, if you wanna, come to this tonight.

Second, here's me doing you a favor. Karen Joy Fowler came to our town last night and you should check this schedule to see if she's coming to your town, too, 'cause going to see Karen Joy Fowler is a very rewarding thing to do.

Update: The fabulous Erin Keane, High Queen and Supreme Hacker DreadKnight of the InKy Reading series, points out that tonight's Strange Fiction reading is a pick of the Louisville Courier-Journal's "One Great Date" column this week, and a staff pick on the events calendar of Louisville's weekly indie rag, LEO. Thanks, Erin!

Sci-fi World Taken by Storm! Names Dropped Like Hail!

Actually, it's just an interview with me.

That link goes to straight to the interview, which is published in the online version of Apex Digest. A couple of months back Gwenda and I were startled to see a sign beneath a magazine at a local bookstore that read "Locally Produced Science Fiction Magazine!" and it wasn't ours. (Actually we would have been startled to see Say... at this particular bookstore since we haven't dropped off copies there.) We met up with the publisher and his family for a nice lunch and this interview is one result. Another result is a series of upcoming board game steel cage death matches, but those have yet to be scheduled.

Anyway, take a look at Jason Sizemore's magazine, and read that interview! I put something in there especially for you.

Admit it...

You wish you'd thought of this, don't you. (Biggish, loudish video).

Notebook lust

According to Ed, Moleskine now has a line of topbound reporters notebooks. Sweet, sweet notebooks...

"June is bustin' out all over."

I read something the other day about the problem of unattributed quotations on the internet. So, just in case, that subject line is a song lyric (and title, come to think of it) by Hammerstein. From Carousel, which is a pretty quotable musical.

Anyway, I thought I'd take a minute to update all y'all on where I'll be this month (all times are Eastern).

Thursday, June 9th: Karen Joy Fowler is appearing at Joseph-Beth Booksellers at 7 pm right 'chere in Lexington. She'll be talking about her fabulous best selling novel, The Jane Austen Book Club, as it's the current selection the Herald Readers Book Club. That doesn't really have much to do with me, but I'll be in the audience, and so should you if you live within easy driving distance (or even if you live within moderately difficult driving distance, hello Raleigh!). Joseph-Beth Booksellers, 161 Lexington Green Circle, Suite B1, Lexington. 7 pm.

Friday, June 10th: I've mentioned this one before. Mark "Full Unit Hookup" Rudolph, Gwenda "Shaken & Stirred" Bond and Christopher "PayPal Buttons Over There on Your Right" Rowe read "Strange Fiction" at this month's edition of the InKY reading series. The venue is a great bar, The Rudyard Kipling on Oak Street in Louisville. The time is 7 pm. There's a band. And it's a bar. The Rudyard Kipling, 422 W. Oak Street, Louisville. 7 pm-9 pm.

Sunday, June 19th: I'll be joining Michael Williams, Jason Sizemore, and Samuel Travis Clemmons at the Borders on Hurstbourne Lane in Louisville for a panel discussion titled "Why Write Science Fiction & Fantasy?" Details are still developing on this one, and the event may include a signing afterward. Borders Books & Music, 2520 S. Hursbourne Gem Lane (corner of Hurstbourne Parkway and Taylorsville Road). 2 pm-5 pm.

Friday, June 24th: A non-Kentucky appearance! Kelly Link, Maureen McHugh and I will be reading at one of my favorite bookstores, Malaprops in downtown Asheville, North Carolina. Says here that we're "Modern Fabulists." Malaprops, 55 Haywood Street, Asheville. 7 pm.

For the last week of the month, I'll be holed up on a mountain top with eleven of my writing buddies for this year's edition of the Sycamore Hill Writers Conference.

In a few minutes, I'll be mowing the lawn.

Tomorrow, I'll be at my job, shuffling large quantities of papers concerning forklift repair jobs and reminding my mechanics that they're talking to a modern fabulist.

Glamorous, ain't it?

What's it about, Karen M. Roberts?

"Within This Present Time" is just a few pages long, but in it Karen M. Roberts gives us a rich science fiction story populated with some characters you'll not soon forget. Here's the narrator, the quirky, powerful Sereela, considering her unusual system of navigation:

"No time, no time." I flex my fingers, tapping from strand to strand. "A destination. The pink is always friendly, and the yellow is like sailing on a sheet of ice. Blue is intolerable. Spiky, improbable. Blue."

Karen lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two young children. Previous to this, her work has appeared in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine.

I asked Karen what "Within This Present Time" is about and she said, "It's a cautionary tale about the hazards of traveling without first consulting Yahoo Maps."

The story appears in Say...have you heard this one? and you can read it by subscribing now (just look for the PayPal buttons on the right side of this page, or e-mail cvrowe at gmail dot com for details). Thanks, Karen M. Roberts!

Not a WisCon report!

So, reports and photos and "technorati tags" about the big goings on up in Madison this past weekend abound all over the place. I invite you to go look at all of them and be envious if you weren't there and a little teary eyed if you were. That's all I'm doing on WisCon.

The "what's it about?" mini-features will ramp back up in this space tomorrow, in celebration of the newly physically extant Say...

Other upcoming blog posts will cover our reading next week in Louisville, the Sycamore Hill Writing Conference, news about the next issue of Say... and details about my new teaching gig (sneak preview: I'll be leading a class on writing speculative fiction short stories at Lexington's Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning starting in September).

It only looks like content!

Humor is contextual...

...and a lot of y'all won't be familiar with the context for this joke. Feel sorry for those of us who are.

But, without further ado, wacka wacka wacka!

What do you get when you cross a coelacanth with an ostrich?

A living fossil with its head buried in the sand!

Thank you! Thank you!

What's it about, David J. Schwartz?

The woman in the traffic copter, the sales rep, the anthropomorphic tortoises who staff the toll booths at exit 46, QTYPY22. These are some of the people around you while you're happily stuck in the traffic of David J. Schwartz's poem, "Jam."

Here's a few lines:

He's got accounts
from N'Orleans to Kalamazoo,
Bowling Green to Boulder.
He's thinking about the
snowplow in the next lane.
He wants it all to be over.

David J. Schwartz's fiction has been appearing on the backs of subway posters for nearly seventy years now, which has led to speculation that he is either a sandhog, a rat, or an electrical conduit. The truth is far more terrifying. Recently his fiction has appeared in more reputable publications such as Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Talebones and The Third Alternative.

David keeps a web journal called Mumble Herder. You can read some of his work online, such as Iron Ankles at Strange Horizons and The Colossus Vignettes at The Fortean Bureau.

When I asked him what this poem is about, David elected to answer with nothing less than the truth, unvarnished and unadorned. The poem, he said, is:

"[a] series of human interest pieces written for the short-lived cable news channel Spoken Word News. The anchors recited their copy from stools in a smoky bar while a trio of local high school kids played wank jazz in the background. All the reporters were required to wear berets and drink vermouth. My beat was Interstate 13, which runs between Zirma and Palomar. Interesting side note: the head meteorologist for SWN was a malevolent spirit from the lower planes who delivered the forecast in limerick form. It needed bodies to inhabit, though, so we went through a lot of on-camera temps. After the network folded it went back to its old job at Fox News."

"Jam" appears in the new 'zine, Say...have you heard this one? which you can purchase via the PayPal links at the right. Thanks, David J. Schwartz!

Any day on a bike...

...is a good day.

Yesterday morning Gwenda and I met up with our friends Nathalie the actress and Bill the conductor for the Bike Lexington event I mentioned a couple of days ago. We rode our hybrid Treks, while they were on their very sweet tandem that even the local hammerheads and bike shop guys were drooling over. It was a good ride, a lot of fun for everyone except that we eventually discovered that the reason that Gwenda couldn't really get going was that her rear brake was engaged and dragging for the first five or six miles. "Hey, that's just like what happened to Lance Armstrong on the Col du Telegraphe/Col du Galibier double climb in Stage Eight of the 2003 Tour," you say. Which is funny, reader, because that's exactly what I said.

It was all made up for, though, by the fact that in the raffle after the ride, Gwenda won a new bike! Actually, they just gave her a coupon, which worked out great since the sponsor of that particular giveaway was the other very cool Local Bike Shop we frequent, and Wendy (one of the owners) told us to just come out to the shop and Gwenda could pick the color and style herself (I refrain here from pointing out that it did not turn out to be me who made this a six bike household, or that I still think we need mountain bikes). Oh, and Nathalie won a pair of cool cycling sunglasses--pretty good luck for our group given that there were several hundred people there.

Then we rode around the corner for brunch at Alfalfa's, then Bill and Nathalie wanted to check out the sales at Pedal Power, then we went to our main LBS, Scheller's, so they could fix Gwenda's brake, then we went to a tasting at Wines on Vine, then finally we rode home. After I mowed the lawn, we went out to Pedal the Planet to pick up G's new cruiser, a Phat Sea Breeze in aqua that I'm sure she'll post pix of later, then home to watch yesterday's epic Giro d'Italia stage.

After all that, I spent a few hours laying out a special limited edition chapbook for Gwenda, Scott Westerfeld, Justine Larbalestier and Ysabeau Wilce. They're going to be giving away one copy of it at their reading next weekend at WisCon, and since we're only producing six, that'll be a rare prize indeed. It contains a short story by Ysabeau and the first chapters of upcoming novels by G, Scott and Justine. The swank cover for "Pretty Magic Butlers of Roanoke" is by the same mad and madly skilled rock goddess that did the cover for the latest issue of Say...

Speaking of WisCon readings, I suppose I should now write something for the one I'm doing. Any ideas?

All afire, all atwirl

1. The person (or persons) who passed the baton to you.

Shezah mah wife now!

2. Total volume of music files on your computer.

Whatever the total volume of the songs you can download from Lipkandy is. Ask, and it shall be given to you.

3. The title and artist of the last CD you bought.

Um. Um. The last Mountain Goats record, maybe? Gwenda buys the music.

4. Song playing at the moment of writing.

Nada. But the last music I heard was the the score behind the trailer for the Narnia movie that I just downloaded. December 9th, baby!

5. Five songs you have been listening to of late (or all-time favorites, or particularly personally meaningful songs)

"Tour de France Etape 1," Kraftwerk
"I Ain't Ever Satisfied," Steve Earle
"I'll Fly Away," traditional (preferred version by the Rich Family)
"Goin' Back to Harlan," Emmy Lou Harris
"Shower Medley," Christopher Rowe


6. The five people to whom you will 'pass the musical baton.'

Alice B. Toklas
Professor Moriarty
R5-D4
The First Slayer
The Pirate Jean Lafitte

Bicycling Entry! (With Gilmore Girls tie-in)

Because it's been too long...cycling links!

First of all, for those of you who follow the Gilmore Girls and the apres Gilmore Girls discussions over at Shaken & Stirred, you should know that the bicycle "race" that was a feature of the season finale Tuesday night was a nod to the real deal Tour of Connecticut, one of the bigger stage races on the domestic cycling scene. The real race starts today with a 70 kilometer crit in New Haven. In cycling, as opposed to writing, crit is short for "criterium," the fast, twisty, spectator-friendly circuit races that are the backbone of US competitive cycling.

One of the many domestic pro squads competing in Connecticut over the next few days is Team Subway. I mention that only because one of their riders, Nate Cornelius, actually works at our LBS. More vocab! The LBS is your Local Bike Shop, and the excellent one that Gwenda and I use is Scheller's. (So, New Havenites--and I'm looking at you, Taaffe--head out to the race and whenever you see a guy in a Subway kit zoom by yell "Go Nate! Lexington represent!" Hopefully that won't cause a wreck).

Bringing it down from the heady heights of Division III pro cycling to what you can do in your town, check this out. Our fair city is hosting their annual Bike Lexington event, at which ten miles of city streets are closed down and hundreds of people like Miss G and I get to mosey 'round the town velocipedical like. Helmets are required, but a local sponsor is giving away 500 for free before the start. How cool is that?

And finally, it would be an absolute shame if those of you who have the technology didn't take a few minutes to check out the coverage of the Giro d'Italia on OLN this weekend. Yesterday's initial mountain stage was absolutely breathtaking--the Dolomites are beautiful, and with the new Pro Tour structure in place, this race is the most competitive it's been in years. (OLN's also taping in Connecticut and will broadcast a highlights show of that race on June 5th.)

Stay tuned here for a few more "What's it about" featurettes and maybe even some stuff about all the new sci fi that's getting composed up in this joint.

What's it about, E. L. Chen?

What's it about, Janni Lee Simner?

"Practical Villainy," Janni Lee Simner's instructional tale of life on the other side of the fairy tale, is one of the highlights of Say...have you heard this one?

The narrator explains himself:

"The first thing I want you to know is that I drowned those kittens for a reason. Villains rarely do anything without purpose, and I'm no exception..."

Janni tells us that her story is about "the challenges of being a single parent, and also the proper use of sinister eye patches."

She's published more than 30 short stories, including recent appearances in Gothic! Ten Original Dark Tales, Cricket magazine, and on the labels of Story House's coffee cans. Her next novel, Tiernay West, Professional Adventurer, will be published by Holiday House. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, with her husband, Larry Hammer.

Janni keeps a LiveJournal called Desert Dispatches and a website devoted to her writing. She also has a line on a supplier of sinister eye patches.

Thanks, Janni Lee Simner!

By now you know to look over to the right for the PayPal buttons you need to subscribe to Say..., right?

We have a winner...

The "My Day Job Destroys My Will and Soul at a Faster Rate than Your Day Job Destroys Yours" contest was fought out on the green playing fields of the UnCommonwealth comments section over three hard days. What we lacked in quantity of entrants we more than made up in quality, as what I'd long suspected was proven: y'all are some miserable people.

But none of you more miserable than one Scott, who wrote:

I had a job in a lead soldier factory. There were big hot machines that spewed out rings of lead soldiers. I was a "picker," who had to pick off the little soldiers from these rings and trim the "flash" (molten lead that has leaked into the mold joins) from them. This was a highly stupid task--repititious, boring, and the whole while I was breathing lead fumes. But the soul-destroying (as opposed to lung-destroying) part was that ocassionally at the end of 1000 or so soldiers, I would realize that the suspiciously similiar bit of flash I had just trimmed from all those lame-ass hats of the Prussian Fucking Light Guard was in fact a FEATHER.

IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE THERE! Didn't I KNOW that the Prussian Fucking Light Guard had feathers on their hats?

I had accomplished nothing. My lungs had been coated with lead for nothing. The men who ran the melting machines hated me, for they had accomplished nothing. And all those steadfast little tin soldiers would all be dumped back into the big garbage can to be remelted, never to make a little boy smile.

This happened quite regularly.

Scott, if you're still with us, please drop me an e-mail with your address so I can send you your fabulous prize.