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Oct. 30th, 2023 03:51 pm
Catching Up...
Things pile up when you never write blog posts. So here’s some news and things, in no particular order.
1. My short story “In the Fox’s House” is in the September/October issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, what editor Sheila Williams calls the “Slightly Spooky Issue.” Mine isn’t as scary as some of the others, but I haven’t read all of them yet. (I always read magazines or anthologies with my stories, secretly hoping it’s the best one.)
2. I sold another short story, “Howard and the Golem,” to IZ Digital, an offshoot of Interzone. It’s humorous — well, at least I hope it’s humorous. There don’t seem to be many funny stories out there these days, and I wonder if that’s because the future looks so grim. If I was in my twenties or thirties, which is when most people start writing, I wouldn’t be very cheerful either.
Gareth Jelley, the editor, says it will probably be published in the first week of December.
3. Here’s the weirdest fact I heard in a long time. The Smith in this story is John Smith, the one in the history books with Pocahontas: “Before coming to the New World, Smith worked as a mercenary for a Transylvanian prince. In 1602 he cut off the heads of three Turkish soldiers in single combat.” For this service the prince gave him “a coat of arms of three heads arranged in a triangle on a shield.”
I’m not terribly fond of vampire stories, but if anyone needs a plausible way of bringing Eastern European vampires to the New World, here it is. (This is from Goodbye, Eastern Europe, An Intimate History of a Divided Land, by Jacob Mikanowski. There’s no possible way anyone can write the history of Eastern Europe in a book of 376 pages, so this is mostly vignettes of various times and places. Still, most of them are pretty interesting, like this one.)
1. My short story “In the Fox’s House” is in the September/October issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, what editor Sheila Williams calls the “Slightly Spooky Issue.” Mine isn’t as scary as some of the others, but I haven’t read all of them yet. (I always read magazines or anthologies with my stories, secretly hoping it’s the best one.)
2. I sold another short story, “Howard and the Golem,” to IZ Digital, an offshoot of Interzone. It’s humorous — well, at least I hope it’s humorous. There don’t seem to be many funny stories out there these days, and I wonder if that’s because the future looks so grim. If I was in my twenties or thirties, which is when most people start writing, I wouldn’t be very cheerful either.
Gareth Jelley, the editor, says it will probably be published in the first week of December.
3. Here’s the weirdest fact I heard in a long time. The Smith in this story is John Smith, the one in the history books with Pocahontas: “Before coming to the New World, Smith worked as a mercenary for a Transylvanian prince. In 1602 he cut off the heads of three Turkish soldiers in single combat.” For this service the prince gave him “a coat of arms of three heads arranged in a triangle on a shield.”
I’m not terribly fond of vampire stories, but if anyone needs a plausible way of bringing Eastern European vampires to the New World, here it is. (This is from Goodbye, Eastern Europe, An Intimate History of a Divided Land, by Jacob Mikanowski. There’s no possible way anyone can write the history of Eastern Europe in a book of 376 pages, so this is mostly vignettes of various times and places. Still, most of them are pretty interesting, like this one.)
