Is posting your publications for the year a sign of insecurity? Like, "Look, everyone, I wasn't just sitting around counting my thumbs all year, I was typing with them."

2009 Sales & Publications

Novels published:

• NORSE CODE (Ballantine)

Novels Sold:

• KID VS. SQUID (Bloomsbury Children's USA), scheduled for release May 11, 2010


• LAST (Bloomsbury Children's USA), scheduled for spring/summer 2011

New Stories:

• "The Holy City and Em's Reptile Farm" - in Other Earths (DAW)


• Last Son of Tomorrow - Tor.com


• "Temp" in Tumbarumba

Reprints and Podcasts:

• Taco - Escape Pod


• Carnival Park - PodCastle


• Change - PodCastle


• Chi - Drabblecast


• Frequent Flier Miles - Drabblecast


• "Far As You Can Go" - 9 (Greek)

This past weekend brought the privilege of a visit by the estimable Tim Pratt, aka tim_pratt, who came to march down beaches and eat pizza and burgers and large breakfasts and drink barley-hops and watch superhero cartoons and Spencer Tracy movies, among other things. By happenstance, my lovely friend Bobzilla had brought his brood to San Diego for a weekend visit, and he managed to get away for a Saturday night sit-down at an Irish bar overrun with karaokers, which was a great opportunity to see two strong representatives of different friend-o-spheres meet one another. A very lovely weekend.

There's a Thanksgiving ham in the fridge and I believe I deserve some credit for not having yet eated it.

I've got a flash piece up at PodCastle, Change, read by the estimable Dave Thompson. Dave does a very fine reading, and with the improvements his voice and inflections lend the story, I prefer this audio production to the original text version. It's a very short story, with a fairly simple idea: People can get used to anything. Sometimes this is a good thing, and sometimes, not so much.

I have not one but two eye doctor appointments today. One will be akin to harsh interrogation, in which they'll look to see if diabetes is eating my eyes. The other will be a more common test to determine if I still know the alphabet, and it will probably result in new glasses, as I've been wearing my current pair for something like six years and I ain't gettin' any younger. I don't even know what hep glasses are anymore. Are the square plastic frames still cool?

OMG I HAVE THE MOST AWESOME PUBLISHING NEWS BUT I CAN'T TELL YOU!!

(Actually, that's not true. I don't currently have awesome publishing news, and if I did, I would tell you. I just always wanted to type one of those awesome-but-can't-tell-you posts.)

(Actually, thinking about it, maybe I have posted one of those kinds of posts in the past, but being the internet exhibitionist blabby mouth I am, it would have been uncharacteristic of me, and I sometimes blot out my own uncharacteristic behavior.)

(Actually, that's not true. I agonize over my own uncharacteristic behavior just as much as I agonize over my characteristic behavior. I agonize a lot. I'm like a poet.)

Anyway.

I may not have awesome publishing news, but I do have some nice publishing news: My story, Carnival Park, is now up at PodCastle. It originally appeared as part of "Tales From the City of Seams," a sequence of flash stories in Polyphony 4.

Now's a great time to buy books (such as the acclaimed Polyphony series of anthologies, among other things) from Wheatland Press. A relative of publisher Deborah Layne (and an indie bookseller in her own right) lost her house in a fire, and Deborah is donating $10 from every Wheatland book sold this month to help her out. A good cause, and you can get some good books out of it. Details here.

Remember when I used to talk about my life a lot here? Well, I still live. It's been a busy October. Saw an NBA game outdoors in the middle of the Mojave Desert, went to a Moby show, and have several more fun and social events coming up in the next couple of weeks. I've also been writing and waiting for awesome publishing news.

ETA: Forgot to mention another bit of nice news: The Greek newspaper Εννέα recently published "Far As You Can Go," my story about a boy and a broken robot being adventurous and brave and poignantly broken. You can buy it in its original form from Tropism Press and help the publishers get through some challenging economic circumstances.

I think I forgot to mention this here, but Mur Lafferty interviewed me for her I Should Be Writing podcast: Listen to more of my blabbing.

There's this taco stand in LA at Sepulveda and Washington Place: Tito's. It's always been there. It always will be there. You stand in line on the sidewalk, banter with other sidewalk standers if that is your thing, order your order (which in my case is a beef and bean burrito with cheese, big bag of chips, medium cup of salsa), eat the goods while watching Pink Floyd's The Wall with your friends, and then possibly hallucinate a little bit.

That's one kind of Tito's experience.

Here's a flash piece at Escape Pod about a different kind of Tito's experience: Taco

A podcast of my story, Anywhere There's a Game, just went up on Podcastle. It's about a basketball player and some of the strange teammates he's played with. It touches on some of the great old sports themes, such as desire and redemption, just to name a couple, but it's also got voodoo and precognition and possibly radioactive mutants. I hope you like it if you give it a listen.

Podcasting is the first time short fiction has been presented in a format that takes advantage of suburban sprawl and boring cubicle jobs.

"The Osteomancer's Son" just got posted on PodCastle, in podcast form: here.

Writing that makes me think of Milhouse saying, "Remember ALF? He's back. In POG form!"

And, no, I never have noticed that I bear a resemblance to Milhouse Van Houten, thank you very much for asking.

Woo! The fantasy podcast site PodCastle is buying "The Osteomancer's Son," my story about bone magic in Los Angeles. It'll probably run sometime next month.

And today I got my contributor's copies of Spin, a Finnish science fiction/fantasy magazine, containing "Kirjailijatalo," a translation of my story "Authorwerx."

The podcast of "Authorwerx" was in Escape Pod last year.

Now I need to get "The Osteomancer's Son" translated into Finnish ...

***

We in the USA are now assaulting teens with ultrasonic noise weapons. Because if there's one thing teenagers can't do, it's retaliate by making noise of their own. And it's always a good idea to antagonize those who will be responsible for our care in a few decades, isn't it? Our nursing homes will be pits dug in the ground. At least we'll be able to gum our earthworms.

I'm an old man with the knees of Geezer McCreakster, but I have the hearing of a young adult. I'm immune to these assaults, but not by much. I did have the Lakers game on when I took the test, though, so for all I know these emitters will melt my geriatric brains.

You are about 20 years old

The teen repellent will no longer foil you, but you can still hear some pretty high tones. The highest pitched ultrasonic mosquito ringtone that I can hear is 16.7kHz

Find out which ultrasonic ringtones you can hear!

About two weeks ago I met up with writer and podcaster Shaun Farrell, to record an interview for his podcast, Adventures in Scifi Publishing. We drank coffee and hung out and chatted about writing and personal finance and traded a little gossip, and it was a lot of fun. At one point Shaun hit the record button and shoved a mic in my face and I blathered for about ten minutes and then we went back to using profanity.

My interview's appears in a new segment, Out of the Slush, which features writers who've just signed their first book deals, and I come on at about the 37-minute mark, after the main interview with Cory Doctorow.

Listen here.

My short-short, "Chi," is up at Drabblecast, the weekly flash fiction podcast magazine.

Norm Sherman did a really great reading and production. Listening to it, I felt as if I were being read a story I'd never heard before. I liked it much better than my print version.

And while I'm on the hype, I'll mention that "C-Rock City," a short story I wrote with jaylake (Jay Lake) made the Locus Recommended Reading List.

Also, I have no underwear so I must do laundry.

I'm not sure why this panel from Atrox Comics cracks me up so much. But, really, I can't think of a better thing to do with yarn.



***

Speaking of yarn, I sold podcast rights to a flash piece, "Chi," to The Drabblecast. The text version is here, but I edited it a bit before sending it to The Drabblecast, and I think the podcast version will be superior. For one thing, the who in the first sentence should be whom.

It's 15 minutes 'til midnight where I am, but I just got an early present from Escape Pod by seeing my Christmas story, In the Late December, just now posted.

Wishing you comfort and joy, and to all a good night.

Steve Gould (you know his YA book Jumper is coming out as a major motion picture next year, starring Hayden Christensen, Samuel L. Jackson, and Diane Lane?) has posted his Podible Paradise interview with me, and I have to say, he did a really fine editing job, especially considering what he had to contend with, including but not limited to a pair of horrendously loud Harleys that cruised by in mid-conversation.

If you're even remotely interested in the Viable Paradise writers' workshop, you should keep coming back to Podible Paradise as Steve posts more interviews with students and instructors.

***

Shortly after posting yesterday's entry, I did a bunch of situps, which of course didn't make me less fat, but it did allow me to convince myself that any discomfort was due to having worked my abs rather than abdominal distension from overeating. I'm such a genius.

Today's coffee beverage was made with skim milk. You can practically see all the way through the cup!

Surpassed 98k words this morning. When I'm finally done adding words, much chopping of them will follow.

I'm going to be guesting on online talk radio show The Dork Forest, hosted by stand-up comedian Jackie Kashian, tomorrow between 4:30 and 4:45 Pacific Standard Time. The show will be archived, but don't you want to catch it live to hear me say "um" and "er" a lot? I think you can even call in if you want, like I'm Anne Coulter or one of the Car Talk guys. (Only I'm less virulent and less knowledgeable, respectively.)

Yeesh, it's warm here today. I think it's, like, a billion and six degrees. The weather websites say not, but I say it's a billion and six, and I'm actually here, whereas I don't know where the hell these weather websites are actually located, so I think I'm a more credible source of local weather information.

***

Meat-loving calf eats chickens

The family decided to stand guard at night on Monday at the cow shed which also served as a hen coop, after 48 chickens went missing in a month.

"Instead of the dogs, we watched in horror as the calf, whom we had fondly named Lal, sneak to the coop and grab the little ones with the precision of a jungle cat," Gour Ghosh, his brother, said.

[via my brother]

***

For a while now, the esteemed sf podcast site Escape Pod has been posting stuff from their archives on a separate site, Escape Pod Classic. The most recent posting there is my flash piece, Slicing, which is about street hucksters and, like, physics or something.

I will say quickly that when we talk about how to attract new readers to science fiction, we should remember Escape Pod, which delivers much of what's good about short fiction in a way that's more convenient and palatable to some people who don't or won't pick up magazines and anthologies. Steve Eley and his crew are making a very valuable, non-redundant contribution to our field, and they oughta get a trophy or something.

***

State of the novel: Just a big, bloody mess of words.