Sorry

I’m way behind on some reading I need to do, and I’m not even going to tell you about it, not even later. Them’s the breaks, sometimes.

Re: Eugene

I do love me some talking dog stories. They’re such fun! And you don’t even have to take them for walksies. Just listen to a reading of “Eugene,” by Jacob Sager Weinstein. Eugene is a dogman serving as a police officer. There’s such an immense amount of charm in his narration. The story itself is […]

Mystery shears

You never know what you’re going to find. These gardening shears actually turned up a couple weeks ago. I was digging up weeds and thought I had found a really big rock. Turned out to be really old shears. They have got to be at least twenty years old, as they’re not mine. Anybody looking […]

Re: Chinatown

“Chinatown,” by Greg Van Eekhout is the sort of amusing flight of fancy you might have while enjoying your favorite bowl of soup noodles in Chinatown — if the broth has been simmering for 800 years. And evil Belgians might send their attack monkeys at any moment. And there’s way more than five Chinese brothers. […]

How to get rejected

I’ve been slacking on the hard work of gathering rejections lately. Those recent brushes with selling a story kind of threw me off my game. And it didn’t help that two of them had fallen into black holes, so I had to look up how to withdraw them. And write notes of withdrawal. And work […]

Beer and … Bees?

We had beautiful warm weather for NERAX North, so nice the honeybees were buzzing around these chrysanthemums growing in planters behind the Tap. But two of them weren’t bees.

Reading Frank McCourt

Way too long ago, I heard a great interview with Frank McCourt which made me want to read Teacher Man. He told how he noticed that the most creative writing he was getting out of his students were their excuses. So he assigned them to write excuses for great historical figures. I guess I’m not […]

Re: Stereogram of the Gray Fort, in the Days of Her Glory

Usually a cool idea alone doesn’t do it for me. Sometimes I’m content with a story that encourages me to explore a cool idea. But what I really want with a cool idea is an awesome story. Like “Stereogram of the Gray Fort, in the Days of Her Glory,” by Paul M. Berger. It’s the […]

Re: A Programmatic Approach to Perfect Happiness

You have to wonder what’s the point of making android robots, if not to, um date them. In “Eros, Philia, Agape” a robot suffers emotional abuse from a woman he’s designed to love, but he questions that. In Tim Pratt’s “A Programmatic Approach to Perfect Happiness,” a robot suffers sexualized abuse, but he’s programmed himself […]

Red Falls Near and Far

I’m still picking raspberries! Maybe not quite a bowl full, but they’re bearing quite a respectable collection every couple days.