• 07:36 reading and critting, with coffee. and a rose. #
• 07:38 @ragnarwalton dude. thank you. you dind't have to; I was just joking about christmas, as I am wont to do. but greaty pleased. #
• 07:38 @ragnarwalton also, great way to keep me stuck in my room and away from your tv :) #
• 10:55 please retweet: Send a coathanger to pro-choice Dems who voted for #Stupak Amendment: www.sendacoathanger.com #

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I have 3 ARCs to give away in exchange for a blog review. One is already claimed. I have 2 more left. I will ship anywhere in the USA.


If anyone wants one please email me at zs.sophy@gmail.com with your snail mail address.



Cover Art by Edward R. Norden

Introduction by Z.S. Adani and Eric T. Reynolds

No Jubjub Birds Tonight by Sara Genge

The Embians by K.D. Wentworth

Ambassador by Thoraiya Dyer

Edge of the World by Jonathan Shipley

Games by Caren Gussoff

The Hangborn by Fredrick Obermeyer

One Awake in All the World by Robert T. Jeschonek

Alienation by Katherine Sparrow

Dark Rendezvous by Simon Petrie

Monuments of Flesh and Stone by Mike Resnick

Hope by Michael A. Burstein

Watching by Sandra McDonald

Encountering Evie by Sherry D. Ramsey

Memento Mori by Sue Blalock

The Gingerbread Man by James Gunn

The Angel of Mars by Michael Barretta

When You Visit the Magoebaskloof Hotel Be Certain Not to Miss the

Samango Monkeys by Elizabeth Bear

Rubber Monkeys by Kenneth Mark Hoover

Jade Flower by C.E. Grayson

The Light Stones by Erin E. Stocks

Mars Needs Baby Seals by Lawrence M. Schoen

Coming from Hadley Rille Books in 2010


ONE MORE LEFT

ALL GONE

I started out sending stuff to Critters. This was years ago; I was STUNNED that Karl Frederick recently remembered reading a story there. I don't remember what he said about the story or even if he critted it; the story has sold, after suffering many MANY rewrites.

One of the guidelines at Critters tells you that you might receive 20 crits, and that some will be ridiculously negative and some will be unbelieveably positive. Trust the MOR ones.

That advice has stood up well during convention critiques and online critiques and workshop critiques. But in person critting is a different cow altogether.

First, they have to be friends. Someone who doesn't like you or doesn't care to know you will damn you with faint critique: "You used a comma splice" is grammatically helpful but not a full reading. And sometims that's all the critter is capable of saying. (I recall rumors of a pro crit group that once was able to say only, "You've written a story! Congratulations!" as the full crit.)

Anyway, friends will try to say something cogent. And possibly intelligent :). And they won't fear being harsh (though negative is seldom useful) if they know the receiving end understands no harsh feelings. It's all in pursuit of story, right?

One of the best things about friends' crit comes in the form of trust. You trust the harsh crit and know it's accurate because you aren't so emotionally rattled that you just discount the crit entirely. And you also trust when the friends say, "This is good," that they aren't blowing smoke.

So yeah, right at the moment, I'm feeling chuffed. :)

No new writing since finishing Siege, but that's all right. I needed a little break, anyway.

For those who haven't read it already, or who prefer your fiction in audio form, Starship Sofa's Aural Delights #108 contains my flash story "Virtuoso", as well as poetry by Samantha Henderson and a short story by Michael Bishop.

The entire podcast is fun and upbeat, and I loved the narration for my story!

In other news there's lots of water on the moon. This links neatly back to my post about the future of space exploration... No longer any need to transport tons of water from earth!

Just now catching up on my Interzone reading. Enjoying the Domonic Green special, in particular his story 'Glister'.

Since I've applied myself to critiquing I've come to notice that in terms of on-line groups, the On-line Writers Group tends to have a much higher standard off submissions and critiques than Critters. I still appreciate the help I've had through critters, and I'll still use them, but I'm starting to feel more at home on the OWW. The good thing about Critters is the folks there who will give me detailed spelling and grammar corrections on my manuscript. At OWW, people will generally pick me up about plot points and/or other structural things which is very important too. I'm enjoying being promiscuous, in other words.

In other news, I've completed a hard slog of a rewrite on a short story, and have another one which I'll start on what most likely will be a hungover sunday. After that, I have several mild rewrites to complete and then I'll take a look in my notebook to see if any of the late night fragments I've written here and there need to be dug up and brushed off and sent out into the real world.

Still not happy with the Halloween flash piece.

Next year I want to consciously take a break from the kind of stories I've been writing and see if I can hit a sweet spot elsewhere. More exotic milieu's, more ambition in terms of world building. This year has been mostly about admiring M. John Harrison and Ramsay Campbell and being very English, and several stories feel like progressions on a broad theme that frankly I've pretty much plundered.

• 09:04 rt @gudmagazine psst. want some GUD? some _great_ GUD? Pay what you want! tr.im/gudpwyw // let's see what micropayments can do! #
• 12:44 off to work. did you know that pearl jam covered "Last Kiss"? ("where oh where could my baby be...") #

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Kansas City and Lawrence area peeps:

Tomorrow, Saturday, November 14th, 1:00pm, Nathaniel Williams about_sf and I will be signing copies of Footprints at Barnes & Noble at Oak Park Mall in Overland Park.

This anthology idea originally came from this quote by Jay Lake:

"Long after humanity and all its works have turned to dust, the bootprints left by the Apollo astronauts on the Moon will still be as fresh as the day they were left. What would visitors from the stars make of that? They should last longer than the fossils at the Olduvai Gorge."

Come by if you can and support Hadley Rille Books, the Kansas City area's Science Fiction, Fantasy, Historical, Archaeological book publisher.





OH, AND THERE IS WATER ON THE MOON!

• 07:52 @jkcheney yeah *sigh* #

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Boy do we need this. Not just for inexpensive electricity, but for spacecraft engines too. And we need it yesterday.


www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091102103327.htm

The low level of lithium in sun-like stars is a new marker astronomers can use in search of planetary systems. That's cool; we need all the tools we can get.

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091111130944.htm

Notes augmented

We've enhanced and de-bugged Notes. If you haven't tried it yet, now's the time! You can create a private note when you ban multiple users. You can also delete multiple notes at once. Lastly, paid users have the option to add a note (visible only to you) whenever you add or remove a friend (guaranteed to avoid embarrassing social mishaps). If you don't currently have a paid account, you can upgrade now! It only takes a few minutes and costs less than a bad shopping mall haircut (plus, it's way more fashionable)!

Product tweaks and bug kill

1. In another effort to zap spam, comments containing links from domains LiveJournal deems untrustworthy are now automatically screened
2. If you sign up to get notifications of the Writer's Block question of the day, you'll now see the daily question in the email notification, so you'll have a little extra time to ponder before you post. You can subscribe to Writers Block notifications here
3. The issue causing random comments to vanish has been fixed!
4. If you visit a LiveJournal page and get prompted to log in, you'll be returned to the same page after you sign in (Thanks, Dreamwidth)!
5. If you don't edit the timestamp for an entry at all, the entry timestamp will indicate the time the entry was posted instead of the time the Update Journal page was loaded
6. Comments with paddings/backgrounds render correctly within the comment box (and will no longer wrap outside the box and break frames/margins)

New FCK fixes rich text editor!

1. We've updated our RTE (Rich Text Editor) to FCKeditor version 2.6.5
2. When switching from the RTE to HTML editor, links for syndicated feeds are no longer broken
3. RTE now functions properly in Safari 4.0
4. An extra line/space will not be auto-inserted whenever you switch from RTE to HTML editor
5. The insert image link now works correctly in all browsers

LiveJournal Cares

We’re pleased to introduce you to lj_cares, a new LiveJournal community dedicated to raising awareness and funds for U.S. charitable organizations that improve the health and well-being of people around the world. Each month, we’ll spotlight a nonprofit that is making a significant global impact through medical research, public outreach, and/or humanitarian social programs. Charities will be selected in accordance with the U.S. calendar of national health observances based on a high rating (of over 60%) on Charity Navigator and global scope of impact.

In this, our inaugural month of November, we will celebrate national adoption month by offering a charitable virtual gift (priced at $2.99) to support Love Without Boundaries, an organization that saves the lives of orphans with life-threatening diseases and places them in loving homes around the world. LiveJournal will donate 100% of the proceeds from the sale of charitable vgifts (we'll cover the cost of credit card transaction fees). To learn more about Love Without Boundaries, please visit lj_cares and read about how they helped save Baby Kang and the Rainbow Twins from fatal illnesses, who are now thriving in nurturing families. You can purchase your Love Without Boundaries gifts in the Virtual Gift shop.

Papered in postcards

A couple of weeks ago, we asked you to send in postcards to surround us with LiveJournal community. Thanks for coming through! We've received postcards all the way from Germany, Finland, and Canada and from all over the US, including Texas, Florida, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Indiana, Hawaii, and Oklahoma just to name just a handful. We're thrilled with our improved decor.

Please keep the love coming for one more week by writing to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. Be sure to include your username, since we'll be drawing the names of ten random contributors next Thursday to win paid account credits!

Photos of the week

We have more dazzling images posted by talented LiveJournal photographers from around the world. We're hoping to span the entire globe, so please continue posting and tagging. Of course, you can also sit back and enjoy the view at lj_photophile.

You can see a sample of this week's gorgeous photos and check out spotlight communities and awesome user content after the jump!

( Read more... )

Curtains

We thank you, once again, for joining us. See you next week!

I got my contributor's copies of Ennea, the Greek magazine/comics in which my story, "The Head of Saint Mark" appeared.

I'm impressed with the magazine - my story received three illustrations, and things happened fast over in Greece. From submission to acceptance, translation, illustration, publication, it took them a little less than four months. And I already got paid too.



The page where my story begins




One of the aliens



The other alien



And Saint Mark

I plugged the final 4000 words into Siege last night.  And now, the novel is done, coming in at 98.4 K words!

I will take a few days to feel very pleased with myself, dance a little jig and howl at the moon for a bit before the polishing and rewriting begins.

So, anyone want to beta-read an uncorrected first draft?  I generally try to get all comments in before I begin the process of polishing the novel.  Drop me a line here or at gbondoni (at) hotmail (dot) com.

• 09:20 at Starbucks, looking at a Tustin motorcycle cop with a knife in his calf-high leather boots. #
• 11:14 @TustinNews nope, Starbucks at 17th/Tustin. Good looking guy. #

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The street sounds to the soldiers' tread,
     And out we troop to see:
A single redcoat turns his head,
     He turns and looks at me.

My man, from sky to sky's so far,
    We never crossed before;
Such leagues apart the world's ends are,
    We're like to meet no more;

What thoughts at heart have you and I
    We cannot stop to tell;
But dead or living, drunk or dry,
    Soldier, I wish you well.

-- A. E. Housman

EDIT@08:16 UTC/GMT. Wow. That was ugly. I expected it to go for 30 minutes and have maybe 1 minute of broken connectivity. Instead it lasted over 4 hours and we had 10 minutes of downtime directly related to the load balancer upgrades and then another 5-10 minutes of downtime when our primary Pingback database server crashed and the secondary couldn't take over; which could have been indirectly caused by the network upgrade missing a self-VIP.

Anyways, we're up, we're working, the load balancers are barely breaking a sweat right now and I need some food and a shot of whiskey. I don't even *like* whiskey!!

Thanks mhwest and dnewhall for helping out!

---

On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.

Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.

We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!

As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.

I've had a pretty decent publication summer.

In July I wrote the editorial for Abyss&Apex: 40 Years, about the initial man on the moon landing.

For August I had first an appearance in Defenestration: Hellbend For Leather, a light-hearted romp through Hell.

The end of September had my editorial at 10Flash, Size Matters, about the special challenges of writing flash fiction. KC Ball, brilliant editor and writer, invited me to give my thoughts. Bless her.

And then October opened with my story at 10Flash, Slim and Benny-Be-Damned Take It On The Lam, a zombie apocalypse story.

October 25 saw my slipstream romance at Quantum Kiss: Orthogonal To The Astral Plane, (not a story about new age math, as one editor once feared!) where it has garnered 7 comments, the last a bit of poetry that I hadn't seen before that fits the theme of the story.

Nothing seems tap for November, darn it, but there's all of 2010 with promises of big news and who knows what else in terms of story sales.

So hey, mckitterick, that challenge you gave me at the Campbell Conference to have my name out there 12 times by next summer? Dude. I'm almost there.

(btw, any all y'all want to go put comments out there on my work, please do. I like hearing from ya.)

One of the main reasons (other than the talent of the writers here and the interesting posts) I like my flist is that we can have discussions of things in which we disagree, sometimes strongly and keep them civilized.  Thanks to everyone who chimed in on yesterday's post.  Had a great time exchanging opinions with everyone - I kne when I wrote it that not everyone would be happy with it, and I'm glad you came forth in the comments!  We can all learn from each other.

On the writing side, I got 2400 words done last night.  This got me to the end of chapter 24 of Siege and a third of the way through chapter 25.  The novel should be done in 6K words or less!  So close!

• 01:57 this dream brought to you by the letter "b" - beetle, bitten, butt, bed. #
• 08:59 editor squee: we got a submission from... no, can't tell you, but hahahaha! squee! #
• 09:46 tazo gibberish fortune of the day: "you will soon find great love, money, joy, beauty, yadda yadda yadda" #
• 10:37 line in gmail advertising a novel: "speculative fiction can be optomistic." well. glad they think so! #
• 10:38 my spelling error, not theirs; one of my stumble-words, optimism. #
• 11:26 stupid journeys into the subconscious; it's gonna be about abuse :( #
• 12:35 did I talk to someone at WFC about a bird anthology? #
• 12:38 rt @BoingBoing Buzz Aldrin: Honorary Consul General to the Moon bit.ly/3RNWdO #
• 12:46 what Clockwork Orange (the movie) has done to me: I'm seriously creeped out by the song "Singin' In The Rain" #
• 12:54 @gymhaag nope, I'm down with the Ludwig van :) #
• 13:32 why did tmobile .com just send me a message telling me my password? #
• 13:52 antibubbles. #
• 14:48 there's a woman here working very hard to share her joy of mastication with us in this Starbucks. oooh, and a loud slurp of water! #
• 15:55 www.organictransformations.com/gourds/canteengourdpurses.html oh my golly wow. christmas gift will soon be here! #
• 15:56 two people just walked into Starbucks with these lovely gourd purses... not a lot of space inside but loads of style. #
• 16:44 3k words on a new, extremely autobiographical short story. Need to cut 1k words for the market or maybe try again and slap a lid on my id. #
• 16:46 @jay_lake you talkin' trash about me, lake? #
• 16:56 still high from completing a story. is there a study of letdown endorphins in writers? #

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