Wed 16 Jul 2008 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Cons, Zines | Comments Off on Get The Homeless Moon | Posted by: Gavin
Here’s a fun thing for Readercon: pick up your copy of Michael J. DeLuca et al.’s new chapbook, Homeless Moon, which these crazy kids will be giving away for free. Free. Don’t they know that no one has any money in this crap economy and they can’t afford books…. Oh yeah, free.
Wednesday John Kessel will be showing the kids a good time in New York City at the KGB Bar (can’t be there, boo!) with JoSelle Vanderhooft. Order a Baltika for us. Then John goes to Readercon outside Boston next weekend (more on that below), and on Tuesday the 22nd he (and David J. SuperSchwartz) read at Odyssey Books in South Hadley (near Northampton). He should be on the local radio, will link to it if and when.
That Readercon thing:
We’re on some panels.
So are you.
We’ll have a table (and maybe a surprise) in the dealers room.
So will you!
We’ll have LCRW 22 (and some old ones, The Best of, etc.) as well as Dr. Kessel’s mighty collection—get it signed here!—as well as all the usual good stuff. We’ll have galley give aways and pre-ordering opportunities.
One of them involve one of next year’s Guests of Honor. (Check the programming book!)
Geoff Ryman will be reading from The King’s Last Song on Saturday at 3 PM. We will have galleys around to look at but the book won’t be on sale until September
Benjamin Rosenbaum’s book hilariously ships on Tuesday July 22, just after the convention. Ha. Cough.
Fri 11 Jul 2008 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Books | Comments Off on Manana: The Kendra and Allan Daniel Collection of Children’s Illustration | Posted by: Gavin
There’s a reception for this new exhibition at the Eric Carle Museum in Amherst tomorrow so off we’ll toodle on the horse and cart (um, car) to cheese it up in front of some beautiful art.
There’s supposed to be a catalog available from the exhibit, if so, will procure a copy poste haste. The Eric Carle has a fantastic book shop — tons of kids books, art, stuff, Eric Carle postcards (everyone needs a paper dragon), &c.
there would be pictures of books received today (Greg Frost’s second Shadowbridge novel Lord Tophet &c.), hellos to Dear Aunt Gwenda up there in Vermont, loving meditations on the chocolate bars we are considering for the LCRW subscriptioneers, a link to the fantastic fundraiser Matt et al. have put together for the KGB Reading Series, daily calls to action on the Bush disaster (hello to all wireless tappers), and, wait, there was a reason for this….
Oh yea. We boomeranged the page proofs of the next Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (#21!) back to Jim Frenkel this morning and by the magic of the internets, it’s aready online! Wow and Yay!
This year Powell’s has the book listed under Kelly’s name, maybe Ellen and Gavin are invisible? Who knows? Who cares? ‘Tis done! And Thomas Canty’s cover is brighter than the last couple of years, so that’s cool. Um, recommendations for the 2008 edition always welcome!
Here’s the table of contents (as Ellen posted a while back) in alphabetical order — actual order and all the extra bits to be found in the book when it hits the bookshops this autumn:
“The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics” Daniel Abraham
“The Gray Boy’s Work” M.T. Anderson
“Troll” (poem) Nathalie Anderson
“The Monsters of Heaven” Nathan Ballingrud
“The Forest” Laird Barron
“Reversal of Fortune” Holly Black
“The House of Mechanical Pain” Chaz Brenchley
“The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” Ted Chiang
“Scenes of Hell” (poem) Billy Collins
“Toother” Terry Dowling
“The Drowned Life” Jeffrey Ford
“The Last Worders” Karen Joy Fowler
“Monkey” (poem) Eliza Griswold
“Up the Fire Road” Eileen Gunn
“Winter’s Wife” Elizabeth Hand
“A Perfect and Unmappable Grace” Jack Haringa
“The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change” Kij Johnson
“The Boulder” Lucy Kemnitzer
“The Hill” Tanith Lee
“The Ape Man” Alexander MacBride
“Lovers (Jafaar the Winged)” (poem) Khaled Mattawa
“Hum Drum” Gary McMahon
“A Thing Forbidden” Donald Mead
“England and Nowhere” Tim Nickels
“Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz Go to War Again” Garth Nix
“Valentine, July Heat Wave” Joyce Carol Oates
“Mr. Poo Poo” Reggie Oliver
“Fragrant Goddess” Paul Park
“Holiday” M. Rickert
“Vampires in the Lemon Grove” Karen Russell
“Rats” Veronica Schanoes
“The Fiddler of Bayou Teche” Delia Sherman
“Village Smart” (poem) Maggie Smith
“The Tenth Muse” William Browning Spencer
“Follow Me Home” Sonya Taaffe
“The Swing” Don Tumasonis
“Closet Dreams” Lisa Tuttle
“The Seven Devils of Central California” Catherynne M. Valente
“Splitfoot” Paul Walther
“The Hide” Liz Williams
I admit I had to sweat to uncover any “literary” justification for the use of hot chile peppers in beer. I’m always on the lookout for something to top that fragment of Egyptian myth about beer-as-blood and the transformation of Hathor. Trouble is, belief in the mystical power of chiles originates with the Inca, who never bothered writing their myths down. So the best I can find in these latter days are third-hand retellings of the legendary founding of Cuzco, the Inca capital, by an ancestor god known as Ayar Uchu, Lord Chile, or vague hints that Inca priests forbade the use of chiles during funereal rites and initiations, doubtless out of fear that the warding power of chiles would prevent dead souls from reaching the next world.
None of which particularly deters me, the stubborn literary homebrewer, from doing as I darn well please. I like chiles. I like beer. Ipso facto.
Tomorrow: more literary beer (chili-style) from Michael. Later this year; a book that looks like fun: Red, White and Brew, some guy writes about visiting lots of breweries. Smart guy!
LCRW, out there fending for itself in the real world, paying those fuel surcharges and flying by zeppelin instead of by plane, gets the once over from SF Revu where various stories are named “fascinating” and “disturbing” and other strong words.
A couple of interesting photographers, Yasuyuki Takagi and Patrick Lyn, came by to take pictures of Kelly for the Japanese edition of Esquire magazine. Huh!
In our first Clarion special show, Kelly Link joins us to discuss workshops, MFA programs, writing short fiction, and more. Then Lou Anders of Pyr SF stops by to analyze the purpose of cover art.
Tomorrow: more literary beer (chili-style) from Michael. Later this year; a book that looks like fun: Red, White and Brew, some guy writes about visiting lots of breweries. Smart guy!
LCRW, out there fending for itself in the real world, paying those fuel surcharges and flying by zeppelin instead of by plane, gets the once over from SF Revu where various stories are named “fascinating” and “disturbing” and other strong words.
A couple of interesting photographers, Yasuyuki Takagi and Patrick Lyn, came by to take pictures of Kelly for the Japanese edition of Esquire magazine. Huh!
In our first Clarion special show, Kelly Link joins us to discuss workshops, MFA programs, writing short fiction, and more. Then Lou Anders of Pyr SF stops by to analyze the purpose of cover art.
Earlier this week Henry Wessells and wife took the space elevator up to our Independence Day Viewing Platform (best place to watch thousands of firework displays all at once) and showed us a thing of two about publishing books.
Wessells’s Temporary Culture puts out some of the most carefully and well-made books that we’ve seen in recent years—including (pictured) a hand bound edition of John Crowley’s Endless Things, which is one of the most beautiful (and surprising) books we own.
Henry’s next project is a book of etchings by Judith Clute to go with a poem by Joe Haldeman, “Forever Peace. To Stop War” (first published as “ Endangered Species ” in Vanishing Acts, edited by Ellen Datlow).
If you’re going to Readercon you can see the mock-up Henry knocked us over with. It’s just slightly out of our price range but you can acquire one if you get elected to state office in the US or the UK, so quick, go run for office:
After publication of Forever Peace , a photocopy edition will be distributed to members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives and of the House of Commons in London.
Forever Peace. To Stop War
Poem by Joe Haldeman
Nine Etchings by Judith Clute
11 x 14 inches, [4] pp. + 9 original etchings (each signed by the artist).
30 copies on fine paper, letterpress printed by David Wolfe, with aquatint etchings printed by the artist from the original plates (two with added color), numbered & signed by the artist in pencil, hand bound in patterned paper over boards.
Twenty five copies, numbered 1 to 25, signed by the artist and author ; and five copies lettered A – E. The lettered copies are reserved for the artist and author.
An advance copy will be available for preview at Readercon (July 2008).
Please note the above images are reduced in size from the original etchings.
ISBN : 0-976-46604-X / ISBN 13 : 978-0-976-4660-4-8
By subscription only : $1000 (includes shipment).
Inquiries and orders to: Henry Wessells
P.O. Box 43072, Upper Montclair, NJ 07043-0072 USA
Electronym : wessells@aol.com
Tue 1 Jul 2008 - Filed under: Not a Journal., LCRW | Comments Off on Trying to give stuff away! | Posted by: Gavin
LCRW subscribers, if this is your ticket, email us! Or, maybe we should have taped the ticket to the zine? Or we will try again next week? Or, we will just pick someone at random off the subscription list!
Robert Hoge—one of the extraordinary team of organizers (and a World Fantasy Award judge this year, poor guy!)—reminds us that the deadline for applications to the Clarion South Writers Workshop is June 30 (Monday!). This is the 2009 tutor line up:
Hey, you’re a winner! We put little red tickets in to all the subscriber copies of LCRW #22 that just went out (and John Klima lost his so we added a new one to the stack for him) and randomly picked a winner who will receive galleys of Ben Rosenbaum’s The Ant King and Other Stories and Kelly Link’s Pretty Monsters. So if you received ticket 2970067, send us an email with your address and these will be off to you!
We’ll give the winner a week to contact us. If this doesn’t work, maybe next time we will tape the labels to the zine. Picking out a random ticket was fun. Maybe we will pick some more.
Thu 26 Jun 2008 - Filed under: Not a Journal., the world | Comments Off on If we don’t answer your email today | Posted by: Gavin
it is because we are fat old executives who are soon going to be filled with team spirit (and covered in paint) so we may be at home recovering after this:
Thanks to Ben P. we now have a new thing (functionality!) on this page. (But nowhere else on the site. Ha!) During our gremlins’ tea break we installed a “Subscribe to Comments” plugin so that you, the commenter can choose to receive an email when someone else comments on your comment. It’s not just a Facebook wall for graffiti, people are reading! Cough.
Another thing: a little while ago Michael* took some pics of some of our books and now they are online. At some later point there may be more. In the meantime:
* Michael’s got a solstice gardening story here — with a picture linked in the comments that is just right for you, Mr. Rowe.
Google and Vistaprint (cheap postcards!) sent us $100 credit for Google Adwords so we’re looking for suggesting for which words* we should use. The words should apparently be enticing, or, er, seductive (perhaps filthy-as-all-get-out would be the way to go?), and something which will encourage people not at all like you (ie they have no idea who either you or us are) buy books.**
Suggestions in the comments, please. Best suggestion(s) within the next couple of days will receive an uncorrected proof of Ben Rosenbaum’s The Ant King and Other Stories.
*or: keywords!, so much more important and sexy than regular words.
** The Small Beer HQ was rocked by laughter at this point as thousands of editors, designers, typesetters, etc., chuckled heartily at the thought of people buying books. Who does that anymore? Ha ha ha.
Tue 24 Jun 2008 - Filed under: Not a Journal., YouTube | Comments Off on Like being at at reading | Posted by: Gavin
without having to think up a question (“Um, someone or other says science fiction is pap for the weak-minded masses who can’t deal with the present, um, what’s your favorite color?”).
Ed Park—whose first novel Personal Daysis not only dark and funny but is a must for writers to see someone pull off some incredible virtuoso writing—gets search-engined:
I’m reading a book called Opera Offstage by Milton Brener (Walker & Co NY 1996) which is about the stories behind, around and among the great operas: love affairs and other things which led to their composition; extraordinary stories about premieres, the shadowy and sometimes shady characters who moved through the 18th and 19th C. opera worlds.
For instance: the Paris premier of Tannhauser (1861) by Wagner; the biggest fiasco in Paris music history until Le Sacre du Printemps by Stravinsky (1913), was all because Wagner wouldn’t put an act-opening ballet in the second act.
Why, you ask?
Well, when being told he had to have one, Wagner said logically, that it made no sense dramatically, especially after the bacchanal in Venusberg in Act I. It doesn’t matter, said everyone, there must be a second act opening ballet. “No,” said Wagner. “Well, the Jockey Club won’t like that!” they said.
The Jockey Club was a bunch of aristos and upper-middle-class ne’er-do-wells who slept all day, lolled around, dined late and showed up at the opera in time for the second-act opening ballet, danced by, usually, their and their buddies’ girlfriends and mistresses. Anyway, they showed up to see lots of leg, the one place they could do that in a semi-cultured setting in 1861.
Well, Wagner didn’t put in a ballet. Opening night, the Jockey Club poured itself in after the first act with their police whistles and cowbells. The second act opened up on some guy center-stage singing. Out come the whistles, cowbells and catcalls. You couldn’t hear jack shit out there onstage but them.
The rest of the audience tried to yell them down. That added to the problem. The Jockey Club would quiet, the music would start again, the singer stepped forward and Clanga-danga-danga-wheet! they’d be off again. So it went.
Not only opening night, but for the next three performances. Fists flew around like cake at an Irish wedding.
Wagner withdrew the opera and left (as usual) in a cloud of debt.
Similarly with Puccini and the opening night of Madame Butterfly—not, this time, noise and scandal, but silence. I mean dead.
It was from a one-act play by David Belasco. Puccini and his co-librettists turned this into a (against convention) two-act opera (the second act being more than 90 minutes long). Before, Puccini had always had opening-night jitters; he knew Madame Butterfly was his best, so he wasn’t worried at all. He expected another triumph. He brought his whole family, which he’d never done before. The cast, orchestra and technical people were the best. (The stagehands had cried during rehearsals, so moved were they by the singing and the story.)
Here’s what happened to Puccini: hubris. And the sound of hubris, like in a Daffy Duck cartoon, is the sound of crickets chirping in the back of a packed theater . . .
The book’s full of stories, not just about disasters, but about snookered librettists, plagiarism suits, blackmail, censorship (for reasons you’d not guess in a million years, in some cases . . .) and sharp practices.
It’s a neat book, whether you know anything about opera or not.
But all this is prologue. I want to tell you about the time I performed with the New York Met in 1996.
But, Howard, you cry. The only thing you can play is the radio. You only know two tunes, like General Grant said; one’s the drum solo from “Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida” and the other’s not. What are you doing with the Met?
Well, one of my minors was in Drama at UT-Arlington (I’d been Nick Burns in A Thousand Clowns that semester, the Barry Gordon kid’s part). I was the only one who could do the Peter Lorre voice called for in Act I. I was a pretty normal-sized sophomore playing a supposedly 12-year-old kid. In one of the most surrealistically-performed plays in American college theater history, they used the simple expedient of casting giants in the grown-up roles. I was (and am) 5′ 6″. The Jason Robards Jr role was by a 6′ 7″er. The other 3 guy roles were between 6′ 1″ and 6′ 3″. The leading lady (the Barbara Harris role) was 6′ even.
Somehow it worked.
Anyway, the drama teacher told us The Met was coming to Dallas and they needed people. They were doing 3 operas in two nights and a matinee. The deal: you worked in one; you got a little pay and tickets for the other two. The call was going out to all the drama departments in all the colleges in the DFW area.
The three operas were, I think, Turandot, Otello, and Falstaff.
A bunch of us decided to do the Sunday matinee, Turandot.
We drove over to Dallas (@ 20 miles) in a couple cars on a blazing hot May afternoon. Where we were going was to the Texas State Fairgrounds, next to the Cotton Bowl, which had all been built for the 1936 Texas Centennial, 30 years before. The operas were in the Texas State Music Hall, a great Pennsylvania Dutch-looking 6-story barn, the kind with two balconies which actually had seats with pillars in front of them (you could hear but you couldn’t see). It had the acoustics of a 6 story kazoo.
Anyway, it’s an hour till showtime. They call about 30 of us out back. “In a minute, you’ll go in and get costumed,” said an assistant stage manager, who had on a suit, in a heat wave, in May, in Dallas.
“After that, we’ll give you some spears and flags and stuff. You’ll march in from each side, turn, go through the gate, and go up the two stairs and line up on top of the wall. There’ll be a guy already there in the middle—try not to bump into him when you line up. He’ll sing a lot of crap for a long time, then he’ll yell something that sounds like “HiYA!” when he runs out of wind. Turn to your left and march off the wall.”
It was the most succinct stage directions I ever got in my career.
Well, by the time they got us dressed and slapped some Oriental #3 makeup on us, it was time for us to go on.
What I’m dressed as is a Mongol @ 1300 A.D. I am in a goatskin vest and tunic. I have on a helmet, 1/2 authentic Mongol and 1/2 picklehaube, like the Hun wore in the Great War. We line up on both sides of the stage, march in, meet, turn toward the upstage gate, go through it, and climb the stairs in back of the wall. There’s a guy up there in the middle and we don’t bump into him much when we line up. Then he sings a lot of crap for a really long time.
I told you it was a heatwave in May. Out in the audience of the Music Hall it’s about 95°F. On stage, on the wall, under the Fresnels and Leicos, it’s like 147°F. I’m dressed in goatskins. I can feel the heat rash coming up all over me like Jiffy-Pop® on a stove.
I manage not to fall off the wall in a dead swoon.
The guy in the middle runs down after awhile and says “HiYa!” We turn to our lefts and march off down the stairs.
Intermission: the assistant stage manager meets us.
“Next part’s easy,” he said. “You march from stage left to stage right across downstage, run around quietly behind the set, and march across again. If you had a spear the first time across, trade out with someone with a flag. Do it till the guy with the fancy costume climbs the steps and the music changes. If you’re onstage when that happens, try to act interested in what he’s singing. Also try not to scratch your butts. When he’s through, march off stage right. Meet me out back after you get out of costume and make-up.”
Well, we do that. It’s hotter onstage than a recently-fornicated waterfowl. As soon as we march off the last time and take off for the dressing rooms, I grab my helmet by the earpiece and whip it off, forgetting about the spike.
“Yowwwch!” yells someone behind me, a real Met person, “careful with that thing, hombré.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Sonofabitch was cooking my brains.”
They ran us into the dressing room; they pulled off our goatskins and slapped cold cream over the Oriental #3 on our faces and arms and toweled it off and we dressed and they pushed us out, and we went out back.
We met the assistant stage manager out there, where it was at least 10° cooler.
He handed us $5 cash each and tickets to the two other shows and thanked us.
I think we gave him a round of applause.
So, that was my day with the Met on tour.
In a May heatwave, in Dallas TX, in a goatskin and boiling helmet, carrying a spear or a limp flag.
over here where they have neat stuff. Yes, it’s Strange Horizons and their yearly fund drive. We were late to the party sending them prizes but they should be added this week. Looks like this year there are even more ways to get prizes: bonus prizes as certain totals are reached, prizes for blogs who link to it (come on LA Times, you know you want the 5 CD Escape Pod set too!), and, you know, for sending money.
If you’d like an advance reading copy of Ben Rosenbaum’s debut collection, The Ant King and Other Stories, or Kelly’s new collection, Pretty Monsters, or would like the chocolate-bar LCRW subscription, go donate and maybe these prizes will become yourn.
John Kessel just finished a round of readings in North Carolina with Greg Frost. His next reading is at KGB Bar in New York in July, then he’ll be at Readercon. Here’s a few perspectives on John Kessel’s The Baum Plan on the web and in the papers this week:
Updated with this possibly contentious line from Seattle’s The Stranger: “A pleasant callback to the days when science-fiction authors read more than just science fiction.”
Strange Horizons: “It is a testament to Kessel’s skill that my criticism is so specific and, really, not an indictment so much as a statement of preference.”
The Fix: “Invest. Invest now…. Your returns will be multitudinous.”
And just posted tonight, Time Out Chicago: “Anyone who thinks genre writing can’t be literary deserves to have Kessel’s hefty new collection of stories dropped on his or her head.”
We’re off traveling — with lots of exciting things in hand (will try and post pics!) — for a couple of weeks.
The zine is at the printer—Paradise Copies here in Northampton who are in the middle of moving into a great new building and yet are managing to keep juggling all the jobs thrown at them.
However, if you want to read LCRW now, you can download it from Lulu—and soon on Fictionwise—or order the nice perfectbound version. Preview it here. (By the way, everything on Fictionwise is on sale).
We’ll be picking up the zine tomorrow then flying out at some godawful early time on Thursday to Wiscon where we’ll be celebrating Maureen F. McHugh and L. Timmel Duchamp, dancing, drinking, wandering the farmer’s market, and going to see some readings and even an occasional panel.
Subscribers will get their copies in June—after our Book Expo extravaganza. More on that sooner to it—jus, if you’re going, stop by our booth to get a key to many exclusive freebies from many cool presses!
Thanks to Angus MacAbre (Scotland’s Funniest Zombie Comedian!) this will no doubt be the place to visit during WisCon.
Sadly they do not seem to have haggis on the menu. But we trust the chef can put one together. Best part of the menu is the beer list: all the usual suspects (with a complete lack of Scottish beer, but, they do have their own Tilted Kilt lager!) as well as the well-loved Franchise Options 1 to 4. Mmm!
Tue 13 May 2008 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Kelly Link | Comments Off on The Specialist’s Hat short film | Posted by: Gavin
Here’s a relaxed and mellow seven-minute cartoony version (with title cards) of Kelly’s story “The Specialist’s Hat” made by a team of student artists for “ENC1142 final project at FSU”:
John Kessel and Greg Frost are on the road this week (no this isn’t an APB) reading at three great North Carolina bookshops (damn, wish we were there! but they’ll be up here are Readercon which will come soon enough):
Washington DC is rightly excited to have a new bike rental program up and running. But if you live in or visit Lexington, Kentucky, for the second year in a row you take part in the program for a mere $10 (or free if you paid your $10 last year). Rumors that Christopher Rowe takes part in this just to ladies wearing little black dresses and heels “pedaling one down Main Street” are unsubstantiated and would not be repeated in any journal worthy of the public trust.
Shake Girl, a collaborative graphic novel based on real life experiences of Cambodian women attacked with acid.
Jacob MacMurray not only posted his annual Clarion West poster, but also—and this is wild (although it would be even better if VW were making a new hybrid/greaserunning van)—pics of his design for a VW van. (So now we will go buy Pacifico beer because any company that does this kind of thing has to make good beer.)
Interested in how one art intersects and inspires another? This week the Interstitial Arts Foundation, celebrating the one-year anniversary of publishing the anthology Interfictions, begins an auction of jewelry inspired by the stories in the anthology. And it’s beautiful stuff.
There is a new piece going up every couple of days (auctions only last 4-7 days, so keep checking in) and the prices begin at all of $10. These are all donations to the IAF and any monies raised go to funding the recently-announced next anthology.
Participants include artists Elise Matheson, JoSelle Vanderhooft, Mia Nutick, Kris McDermott, and many more. And, most remarkably, some of the authors themselves have created unique pieces based on their own work! Keep an eye on IAFAuctions.com to see wearable interpretations of their own work by Interfictions authors Leslie What, Rachel Pollack, and K. Tempest Bradford.
What we are doing: a new catalog, galleys of 2 books for BookExpo, a game for BookExpo, a zine, a chapbook for BookExpo, Sales Conference this weekend, sending forth review copies of The Ant King, enjoying the reviews of John Kessel’s book and sending that out further, the Phil. Book Festival next weekend. Maybe other stuff? Who knows.
Coming soonish on a website, a bike, a firecracker near you: the zine known as LCRW. And what will be in it? Pomegranates! Of course. Also, mostly fiction. This will go to the printers devils in a week or two. Here’s what’s it is:
William Alexander, “Away”
Charlie Anders, “Love Might Be Too Strong a Word”
Becca De La Rosa, “Vinegar and Brown Paper”
Kristine Dikeman, “Dearest Cecily:
Carol Emshwiller, “Self Story”
Eileen Gunn, “To the Moon Alice” (poem)
Alex Dally MacFarlane, “Snowdrops”
Maureen F. McHugh, “Going to France”
Jeremie McKnight, “The Camera & the Octopus”
Mark Rigney, “Portfolio”
David J. Schwartz, “Mike’s Place”
Jodi Lynn Villers, “The Honeymoon Suite”
Caleb Wilson, “American Dreamers”
Cara Spindler, “Escape”
Miriam Allred, “To a Child Who Is Still a FAQ”
Gwenda Bond, “Dear Aunt Gwenda”
Abby Denson, Comic
Tickle your ears today with the sound of “The Ant King”—the title story of Ben Rosenbuam’s upcoming collection—the fifth in the new fantasy-flavored PodCastle (a castle in a pod: how science fictional!):
Sheila split open and the air was filled with gumballs. Yellow gumballs. This was awful for Stan, just awful. He had loved Sheila for a long time, fought for her heart, believed in their love until finally she had come around. They were about to kiss for the first time and then this: yellow gumballs.
Stan went to a group to try to accept that Sheila was gone. It was a group for people whose unrequited love had ended in some kind of surrealist moment. There is a group for everything in California.
Rated PG. Contains surrealism, involuntary cohabitation, strong language and characters with unconventional genders. Also, an extremely large number of geek culture easter eggs.
First (after we send some initial contributor names and our bios for the St. Martin’s Press catalog) we send Jim Frenkel the story and poem selections (Jim does all the contract parts, puts the book together, manages it, herds cats and sphinxes, etc.), then we send the story introductions (brief, easy!), and then the honorable mentions. Which are neither brief nor easy.
Lastly we send the Summation. This year it came in at 12,000 or so (dense, worked over) words. This is the fifth year we’ve edited this book (and the 6th year is already 1/3 over!). The Summation has ranged from 12-17,000 words as we’ve looked at different parts of the field and changed it up a little each year. The most fun part is arguing (no!) over what books go into the Favorite Books of the Year section. Researching what’s been coming out from where, who’s doing what, and so on doesn’t seem to stop. We are curious about which parts people enjoy most or whether they find anything missing (or think anything should be cut!).
Wednesday 
I admit I had to sweat to uncover any “literary” justification for the use of hot chile peppers in beer. I’m always on the lookout for something to top that 
