Dispatches since 2005
The journal
Announcements, new editions, travel, diving, cooking and the working life of a novelist — 3,180 entries, all of them here in full.
April 1, 2017 · 242 words
Wild Cards on the Great White Way
Wild Cards will soon be coming to a Broadway theater near you. In a lavish musical production written by members of the Wild Cards Consortium and Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator and star of Hamilton. Miranda will himself star as Dr. Tachyon, the flamboyant alien who tries and fails to prevent the spread of the wild car
Read entry →March 30, 2017 · 478 words
Them!
They know too much about me. (You’ve heard of Them, right?) I was looking at Amazon today, and they offered me the Easy Acid Reflux Cookbook. How do They know I have acid reflux? Is the pharmacy sending Them insufficiently anonymized data? Or have They been monitoring my doctor’s electronic files? I was browsing Costan
Read entry →March 29, 2017 · 322 words
Another Goodie
Lo, I am Bundl’d! Once again my work is to be found in a StoryBundle, this one on the theme of Artificial Intelligence. And once again, you decide what you want to pay! (Assuming, that is, that you pay at least five bucks.) If you offer at least $5, you get five books: Aristoi by Walter Jon […]
Read entry →March 28, 2017 · 1,033 words
Random Acts of Violence
I’m working on the new Praxis book, and by way of getting in the mood, I’ve been reading a pack of novels about the Second World War. Not that anything I’m writing about will in any way resemble the Second World War. I’m really not interested in “World War II in Space” novels, of which […]
Read entry →March 27, 2017 · 232 words
Power Chords
I’m pleased to report that my novel Implied Spaces is now on sale for a mere $0.99 wherever fine ebooks are sold! (Which in this case would be Kindle, Nook, Smashwords, Kobo, iBooks, and Google.) The original publisher seriously bungled the release of this one, and it never found traction with readers. Here’s hoping th
Read entry →March 21, 2017 · 1,361 words
Revisiting the Classics: Podkayne of Mars
I’m not sure how many people would actually consider Podkayne of Mars a classic, but it is Heinlein, after all . . . and besides, nobody would read a blog series titled Revisiting the Flops. I’d read Podkayne when I was a teenager, didn’t care for it, and never picked it up again until the other week, when […]
Read entry →March 15, 2017 · 218 words
Victory for the Oxford Comma
I stand proudly with the Oxford comma, as it stands for reason, clarity, and mitigates against incertitude. (Try reading that sentence without the Oxford comma and see where it gets you.) I am pleased to know that the US Court of Appeals agrees with me, insofar as they ruled that a missing Oxford comma was […]
Read entry →March 9, 2017 · 302 words
Enter the Inferno
The Dopes came. We died. All the while the horror of the rite went on, swirling and reflecting off the gold leafed walls, not a cultist in sight. Peterson’s eyes stayed open and blinking. Steam-links were threaded into his still-quivering muscles, crimped through incisions into his bones; pistons and cylinders shoved u
Read entry →March 5, 2017 · 244 words
O’erwhelmed
I have been hacking my way not through a jungle, but through a half-dozen or more jungles. Jungles with names like IRS, Conservancy District, Ebooks, Travel, Training, Weed Combustion, Copy-Edits, Tractor Repair, Auto Sale, Deadlines, and others that discretion bids me not mention. And now I seem to be coming down with
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