According to the Writers of the Future blog, this year’s awards ceremony (previously to be held in a Masonic temple, from what I understand) will now be held at Cal-Tech’s private club in Pasadena, The Athenaeum.

From the website it looks pretty swank. To be expected, I suppose: I do have to get all tuxed-up for the affair, after all 🙂

The club’s website says that:

In Ancient Greece, the word Athenaeum referred to buildings dedicated to Athena, the goddess of wisdom, and in particular to a temple in Athens where poets, philosophers, and orators gathered to read and discuss their work.

Cool.

The website also touts that it has held private dinners in honour of Nobel Prize winners Albert Einstein, Robert A. Millikan, and A. A. Michelson, so I suppose it will be good enough for our event 😉

And according to an organization called Club Leaders Forum, The Athenaeum is recognized as a “Platinum Club of America” and “stands among the top four percent of America’s 5,000 private clubs in terms of perceived excellence.”

I don’t know exactly what any of that means…but it sure does sound impressive 🙂 Check out the club’s website for some photos of the place.

– S.

Well it’s been a while since I let you all know where things stand with my submissions:

* Hushed Voice – still with Holy Horrors (since 12 Feb 07)

* Gagiid – back with the Missouri Review (since 30 Apr 07) after changes made in light of a re-write request. I hope they like the revisions–it would be fantastic to be published in a literary journal!

* Festival of Toxcatl – is out with a great little magazine of historical and alt. historical fiction called Paradox (since 8 June 07)

* Shipbreaker – is my little triumph of the month. It’s out (since 01 May 07) with Interzone, the British SF mag, and is being held for a second reading.

I’ve had some very pleasant dealings with the editor who, with Herculean endurance, handles their twice-yearly electronic slush, Jetse de Vries (who, incidentally, gets my vote for SF editor with the coolest name…Gordon Van Gelder is a close second.) While Jetse politely declined the last two stories I’ve sent him (on the grounds that something with a similar theme had recent appeared in IZ) on both occasions he’s had some very encouraging things to say about the tales, seems to have genuinely enjoyed them, and I’ve subsequently been able to sell the stories elsewhere.

So I was quite pleased when Jetse e-mailed to let me know he was holding SHIPBREAKER for a second reading. This is always a nice feeling–kind of like getting through the first round of the playoffs and into the quarter-finals–but even more so because of what he later posted on the IZ discussion board regarding the May submission period.

He apparently received 499 submissions, with a whopping approximate word count of 2.5 million +. Yikes! He says:

Finally, with the number of submissions rising, the number of high quality stories is rising, as well, meaning competition is getting fiercer by the day. So sending in a nice, competent story isn’t going to do the trick: I get loads of these. What is needed are highly ambitious, strongly compelling, and increasingly inventive stories.

Luckily, I’ve seen a couple of those already (I’m talking 4 from the first 200), but this means that only your very best stories stand a chance.

Only 4 from 200–and one of them was mine; a “highly ambitious, strongly compelling, and increasingly inventive” story. That’s the kind of stuff what keeps me going 🙂

From here, Jetse says he holds 25-30 for second reads (quarter-finals), and passes between 12-20 up the line (semi-finals), and IZ accepts around half of those (Stanley Cup).

Fingers crossed.

I hope I get to meet this guy at World Fantasy in November (the website says he’ll be attending). Which reminds me I need to mail my membership form…

(As an aside: I’m concerned that my SASE sent to the Missouri Review and Paradox are short on postage now that the US Post has raised their rates for letters from the US to Canada by 6 cents. I always supply an e-mail address, too, but I wonder if the responses might be mailed without a second thought and get turned back… If it seems like I haven’t heard for a long time I’ll just have to e-mail them. But you’d think if they wanted a story and hadn’t heard back from the author they’d try a phone call or e-mail or something, right?…Right?)

– S.

So in an effort to make the most money with the least amount of work I’ve decided to give Google’s AdSense a try. You’ll see it above the top post on the main page. I’ve tried to make it blend in and this seems okay for now…barring public outcry, of course 🙂

I’ve also added a traffic counter waaaaay at the bottom of the right-hand sidebar. I’m curious to see how many people happen upon my little outpost in the wilds of the digital frontier. I know there’s a least three of you.

These suggestions come courtesy of my buddy Adam (not Ottawa Adam, Toronto Adam) who is web guru of some kind (his title keeps changing). He promised me I’d make a million dollars with this AdSense thing.

He better be right *shakes fist*

– S.

My dad is a big birder, as is his sister.

While I can’t claim that I nor any of my brothers have inherited this particular Kotowych gene, from prolonged exposure to my father we’ve picked up certain birding-related skills via osmosis and can all tell the difference between the call of a blue jay and cardinal, know what a Pileated Woodpecker looks like, and can discuss at some length the preferred nesting habits of the eastern bluebird (as well as list the many invectives my father has hurled at their murderous arch enemies, the foul European starling and the dread English house sparrow, who routinely usurp the lovely little houses my dad has built for the noble bluebird).

Now, though I might not go out of my way to ‘bird’, as it were, I will confess to having a heightened awareness of our avian friends, if only so that I can tell my dad about new birds I’ve encountered. When I was in Saskatoon recently, for example, I saw quite a number of magpies, which my dad found pretty exciting when I told him.

So when I saw this article today on the BBC News website I knew I had to send it to my dad.

The Argentavis magnificens, which I believe is Latin for “giant friggin’ bird” lived in Argentina six million years ago, had a seven-metre (23ft) wing span, and weighted around 70kg (155lbs). As you can see from the graphic at the bottom of the article it had a wingspan that rivals a Cessna 152.

That’s one bad-ass buzzard. I’d like to see my dad build a house for that thing to nest in.

Maybe, if I’m really lucky, when I go to Cali later this summer for the Writers of the Future workshop I’ll see off in the distance one of the restored population of California condors.

I think that would make me, in my dad’s eyes, the coolest son ever 🙂

– S.

I’m headed to Australia next year for the trip of a lifetime. Seriously. I’ve wanted to go since I was six.

Over the intervening years I’ve made some Aussies friends (while they were here on exchange) and wouldn’t you know it, one of them is getting hitched in September 2008 so Down Under here I come!

But after that I’ve decided where I’d like to go next, thanks to this article on geek vacations from Wired.

It’s not to Chernobyl (though I am of Ukrainian descent), and it’s not even to CERN particle accelerator (though that would be awesome–maybe if I ever make it to Switzerland), and I’ve already been to Palo Alto (well, San Jose, but Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley).

No, after Australia I’d like my next major trip to be a working vacation to McMurdo Station in Antarctica, with perhaps an extended stay at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.

I’m completely serious.

It would be an amazing experience and how many people could say they’ve been to the bottom of the planet? To my mind, it’s one of the few places on Earth (maybe the deep Sahara being another) where it would be so alien and so inhospitable to life as we know it that that would be almost like being on another planet.

Think about it–six months of sunlight, six of darkness. -60 oC temperatures, snow blindness, ice 2 km thick…It would be cool! (no pun intended).

And maybe I could get a US Antarctic Program’s Artists and Writers’ Program grant like Kim Stanley Robinson did…

– S.

Yes, it’s true. Along with everyone else on the Interweb, I too am on Facebook–I’m told “Facebook is the new MySpace” and far be it from me to neglect jumping on that bandwagon…

So, if I know (or have known) you and we’ve not already reached out across the fiber optic divide and embraced one another on Facebook then feel free to look me up, under ‘Stephen Kotowych’ of course.

If you only know me through this blog or (dare I say it?) from reading my writing then I’d be happy, nay, OVERJOYED to add you to my list. Look me up, but be sure to indicate you know me as a writer/blogger, else I’m liable to punt your friend request into the ‘Approached by Random Lunatic on Facebook’ delete bin, okay?

– S.

Well, though I haven’t yet got my contract, the cover and release date seem to have been set for Tesseracts 11, which includes my story, “Citius, Altius, Fortius.”

According to the EDGE Books website and Amazon.ca, the cover of Tess 11 will look like this:

(I’m one of those blurry names on the left 🙂

I like this cover a lot. The covers of volumes 9 and 10…well, let’s say I wasn’t such a big fan.

And Amazon.ca says that the release date will be 19 November 2007. But it seems to be eligible for pre-order now…

– S.

Wikitastic!

Marcel Gagné and Robert J. Sawyer have launched a new wiki for the Canadian SF community just in time for the Prix Aurora Awards season–the Canadian SF Works Database.

The Canadian SF Works Database is meant to be:

a collaborative storehouse of knowledge about everything that is Canadian SF. The raison d’être of the Canadian SF Works Database is to provide a collaborative storehouse of knowledge about everything that is Canadian SF. Why? Every year, usually at awards time, a few people scramble madly to assemble a list of the works published for that year. These lists help determine works that are eligible for those awards. Sometimes the lists are reasonably complete and accurate, sometimes they aren’t, and sometimes they are just plain unavailable thereby leaving your favourite SF story in no-award purgatory. Oh, the humanity! Who knows what to do? Who can help?

You do and you can! Here’s how?

Register, log in, and if you have the time and the information, help us build a comprehensive list of Canadian science fiction (and fantasy) published by year.

So don’t forget to update as you read!

For more on the genesis of the wiki, see Rob’s blog post here.

– S.

PS: I love the logo 🙂

I love Google Alerts.

I’ve set it up to search for any mentions of me or my writings and today it brought to my attention this review from the Not if You Were the Last Short Story on Earth blog:

Last of all, for this week, I enjoyed Stephen Kotowych’s Borrowed Time from the Daw anthology Under Cover of Darkness. I’ve been nonplussed by most of the Daw anthology stuff I’ve read so far, but this story about a relationship and a man who steals time, and what he does with it, stood out above the rest as well characterised, with a clever central idea.

Cool!

Not if You Were the Last Short Story on Earth is a project run out of Australia involving four people who have apparently vowed to read everything published in fantasy, SF, and horror in 2007…or at least as much as they can before their eyes melt from their heads like that guy at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

It’s great to know that people are actually reading and (dare I say it?) enjoying something I wrote, but even more amazing to me is that these are people I’ve never met, and likely will never meet. They’re in Australia, clear on the other side and lower half of our planet, sitting in the Melbourne sun, reading something I wrote two years ago on my sunny balcony in Toronto.

That’s a joy of writing for me–it blows my mind.

– S.

Details have arrived at last about the whens, wheres, and hows of the upcoming Writers of the Future Awards Ceremony and Workshop. (I will confess I was getting worried they’d decided to revoke my invitation 🙂

On Sunday, August 19th the winning writers will be flown to Los Angeles and conveyed from there to sunny Pasadena, California for the week-long workshop. (The winning illustrators will arrive on Monday, August 20th, but I don’t think we get to meet them until the award ceremony).

The week will consist mainly of the writer’s workshop, led (so far as I know) by Tim Powers and K.D. Wentworth. From what I hear there are lectures (the good kind, not the scolding kind ;), usually some writing exercises, and a surreptitious interview of a random stranger (to be accomplished, I think, during a trip to the Pasadena public library), as well as guest lectures by some of the various judges (I know David Brin has done them before, as has Kevin J. Anderson).

But in what has to be one of the absolutely coolest parts of the trip, we’ll be getting a special private tour of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab!

A view of the JPL campus.

The JPL is the lead US center for robotic exploration of the solar system. JPL spacecraft have visited all known planets except Pluto (my Canada includes Quebec and my solar system includes Pluto!)

I cannot tell you how my inner geek leapt for joy when I read this news. I honestly don’t know whether I’m more excited about the WOTF week or the JPL trip.

I can’t wait to see this place.

There will be a barbecue dinner on the Thursday the 23rd for all winners, arriving judges, and winners’ family members who may be attending.

The Awards Ceremony is Friday, August 24th and is open to the public, so if you’ll be in or near Pasadena that evening come and cheer. RSVP ASAP to contests@authorservicesinc.com

Saturday following the Awards event will be book signings at a local bookstore for all winners and judges (again, come and see us!)

Sunday the 26th is departure, again out of LAX.

August is looking AWESOME.

Hey–I just realized: if I’m going to the JPL will that make me a rocket man?

– S.