My story “Borrowed Time”–originally published here–has just been reprinted on something called The Internets. I understand that it’s a series of tubes…

Yes, you can now find “Borrowed Time” available freely online here.

It’s part of the Tuesday Fiction series at the World SF Blog. Every Tuesday, WSB publishes short fiction by international authors, including contributors from South Africa, Israel, Brazil, India, the UK and elsewhere.

Many thanks to Lavie Tidhar, editor of the The World SF Blog, for liking the story and putting it online. Thanks as well to Aliette de Bodard for introducing me to WSB in the first place.

Enjoy!

– S.

It was a good meeting yesterday…

– S.

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A: “I don’t think anything in nature could grow genitalia that fast.”
(5 second pause)
B: “Huh huh huh…”

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“On page 5 I wrote ‘scrotum–WHAT!?’ because you can’t just throw a scrotum in there casually.”

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“I feel kinda bad because I didn’t see any of these problems. Now that I’ve heard them, I agree.”

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X: “You hint that the neuromancer has figured it out.”
Y & Z: “Necromancer.”
X: “Necroma– Whatever. Fucking nerds.”

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“It felt like the story stopped to read a map.”

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1: “Your last line sucks.”
2: “They always do.”

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She: “You mention the ‘bonewand’, but I have two teenage boys, so…”
Him: “That’s awesome! I didn’t even see that one!”
She: “You might want to lose the bonewand.”
Him: “I’ll pay you not to!”
Other Him: “A whole table full of guys miss that, but she gets it?”

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This is too awesome not to share:

The Law and the Multiverse blog is a geek-meets-lawyer funfest, looking seriously at the legal challenges and ramifications of superpowers, superheroes and villains, and the battles they wage against each other.

WATCHMEN often receives praise for taking a ‘realistic’ look at how society would deal with superpowered creatures and vigilantes who leap from rooftop to rooftop in their masks and capes. But Law and the Multiverse looks at how such questions would play out with the actual laws on the books today in the United States.

Questions like: is Superman’s heat vision a weapon? If so, would the Second Amendment protect his right to melt pistols and cook hamburgers with it?

Now, admittedly, it looks at the issue from a US-perpsective, but since most comic book heroes seem to protect American cities and citizens it only makes sense. It’s great fun for those of us who have ever read about an epic battle between superheroes and supervillains and really, really want to know who should be found liable for the broken buildings and shattered streets.

Kicked off on Nov. 30, it addresses questions like: “What if someone is convicted for murder, and then the victim comes back to life?” And whether mutants are a legally recognizable class entitled to constitutional protection from discrimination.

Other topics include the admissibility of evidence obtained through mind reading by Professor X of the X-men and whether the RICO Act could be effectively used by prosecutors against the Legion of Doom.

The answers are dry, technical and funny in their earnestness. The Second Amendment, the bloggers suggest, would protect many powers, but “at least some superpowers would qualify as dangerous or unusual weapons (e.g., Cyclops’ optic blasts, Havok’s plasma blasts)” that are “well beyond the power of weapons allowed even by permit.” Those super-duper powers would be tightly regulated, if not banned outright.

Then there’s this jurisprudential nugget: When Batman, the DC Comics hero, nabs crooks, is the evidence gathered against the bad guys admissible in court? Not if he is working so closely with Commissioner Gordon that his feats fall under the “state actor” doctrine, in which a person is deemed to be acting on behalf of government and thus is subject to the restrictions on government power. In fact, he might be courting a lawsuit claiming violations of civil rights from those who were nabbed.

Enjoy!

– S.

“That’s a lot of pressure.”

1: “I’m on a totally new story now. That’s my…fourth?”
2: “At least.”

“And then a dog-headed man shows up, and…”

“You need to write faster.”

“I’m all full of pretzels.”

“39 words in an hour–attaboy!”

Yes, the first Stop-Watch Gang 24 Hour Story Challenge!

From 6pm tonight until 6pm tomorrow, a bunch of us are holed up at my house for a 24-hour writing challenge modeled on the 24-hour writing challenge at Writers of the Future.

The process:

a) Random word and image prompts have been distributed to the members of the Stop-Watch Gang. While not limited to the idea presented, the goal is for the prompt to start you thinking in a direction you might not have thought of before. You then run with it.

b) Between receiving the prompt and Friday at 6 p.m., is research time. Random books from the library or bookstore (or online sources) that are consulted to teach you something you didn’t know before. Try to take enough notes about interesting stuff that you can use in the story.

c) Also interview or talk to a stranger without letting them know you’re writing a story. Find some aspect of the person that might inspire a character or chain of events that you can use in the story.

d) The goal is to have a completed, original story (zero draft, as good or bad as you like) in 24 hours. It must have a plausible beginning, middle, end (i.e., a real story).

If you want to read more on the process, check out my Writers of the Future journal for full details.

And what do we have to fuel our writing frenzy?

$300 in cash. Two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheet of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-coloured uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.

Actually, that’s a lie. We’ll probably have Doritos. Maybe some Pepsi. Not very Hemingway, I know, but there you are.

See you on the other side.

– S.

Seemingly no sooner had I heard that Realms of Fantasy was going out of business again, and read the farewell messages from the publisher and the editors (here and here), than like a phoenix RoF has risen again, er, again.

Word came last week that Realms of Fantasy Magazine has been sold to Damnation Books LLC. Damnation Books LLC publishes dark fiction as Damnation Books. They also own and operate Eternal Press, which does romance and mainstream fiction.

The press release indicated that the December 2010 issue will go to print with the new ownership publishing the February 2011 issue. All subscriptions already paid for will be honored.

Future plans include expanding digital editions for ebook and desktop readers. The April 2011 issue will be themed ‘dark fantasy’ to coincide with World Horror Convention 2011 where Damnation Books will be hosting a party, and a booth in the dealer’s area.

The June 2011 issue is the 100th issue of Realms of Fantasy Magazine. Plans for a larger ‘birthday bash’ issue are already in place to celebrate this milestone.

Yay!

Posted below is a re-post of an all-call from Douglas Cohen, a RoF editor, for help in tracking down authors of submissions to RoF that were sitting with the fiction editor Shawna McCarthy when RoF closed up. If you’re in that category (as I am) be sure to email and let them know how you’d like your story handled.

– S.

ROF: Fiction: Help Me Internets!

by Editor Douglas Cohen on November 11, 2010

Hi Everyone,

I’m about to ask for your help with something. As I noted when I announced that Shawna and I would be coming back, there are a number of submissions that were in various states of consideration when the magazine announced its closure. The only right thing to do was release these manuscripts from consideration. Now, the manuscripts I had that were going to be passed along to Shawna were discarded. In the interests of goodwill, I’ve subsequently contacted all of these authors and invited them to resubmit their manuscripts to me via email if they’re so inclined. (PLEASE NOTE: this is a special exception made just for them under the circumstances–we’re still at this time just accepting submissions via snail mail).

However, there are also quite a number of submissions that are sitting with Shawna, enough that I thought it would be a good idea to post this note. Here’s the thing: Shawna is going to have a lot of reading ahead of her as we build the magazine’s fiction inventory back up. Since I don’t have the manuscripts, it would drive me rather insane to hunt down all of the email addresses to all of the authors who have stories with Shawna. And it would be rather time consuming for Shawna to email all of these people to see if they’d like their manuscripts to still be considered. Then she’d also still have to wait to hear back, which eats up more time. I’d rather Shawna be able to use this time to read stories as we get the magazine caught up. Some folks have already told me they still want their stories to be considered. But I’d like to hear from the rest of you. If you had a story that was with Shawna and would still like it to be considered, please email me (slushmaster@gmail.com) and tell me the name of your story. It will save Shawna the trouble of reading a story that has since been withdrawn. It also wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to let me know you’re officially withdrawing your story or that you’ve already sold it elsewhere.

So here’s where you come in, Internets. Blog about this. Tweet about this. Facebook about this. Help us out. As Picard would say, “Make it so.”

Thanks all.

ETA: Please don’t contact me regarding general slush submissions. Not that those stories aren’t important, but it will just create too much confusion. We’ll figure this out a little later, thanks.

***

Yeah, yeah, I know. Shut up. 😉

– S.

As if it wasn’t cool enough that NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft passed within 435 miles of Comet Hartley 2 about 10 a.m. EST on Thursday, November 4, soon after it turned its high-speed antenna toward Earth to beam back the photos it had taken.

And now some enterprising YouTuber has made what’s described as a “morph animation” of the close approach images. The comet approaches slowly and in perfect silence, just as if you were there with it in deep space.

The Deep Impact spacecraft officially completed its mission in 2005 after it visited the comet Tempel 1, letting loose an 800-pound piece of equipment that crashed into that comet as it passed by. The collision allowed scientists to identify some of the minerals beneath the surface of Tempel 1.

But the spacecraft still had plenty of maneuvering fuel left, so NASA approved a second mission, called Epoxi, that included a visit to a second comet. Three years ago, the mission had to shift course when the comet it was aiming for, Comet Boethin, could not be found. The backup target was Hartley 2.

This is animation of a comet is very cool, especially because in the novel I’m outlining this month two comets play very important roles…

– S.

A strong first week! But…I’m thinking that was the easy part. See, what I worked on this week was just the stuff that I’ve had rattling around in my head for the last year or more. So I’ve outlined all those scenes and events that immediately leaped to mind when I starting thinking about this novel.

But there’s only the vaguest hints of order. Still missing are all the little connective bits, like sinew that hold muscle to bone. The great yawning chasm of The Middle is still unknown, and while I think I have a denouement I don’t yet have a climax.

Hmm…I’m wondering now if 30,000 words is going to be long enough for this outline. I’m beginning to worry about just how long the book itself may end up being.

Oh well. Nothing to do but keep calm and type on.

I’m anticipating the next several weeks being more difficult than this one…

– S.