Over the weekend Galaxy Press e-mailed me the proofs of my story (typeset pages that look as they will appear in the finished book) and I went over them today at lunch. Not a single error in the whole set, and they’d even fixed some funky hyphenation I’d included in my original submission…

And kudos to Galaxy Press for keeping all my units of measurement in metric! It’s silly, true, but it’s as nationalistic as I get, I guess. I was worried they would convert my Canadian centimeters to American inches and my meters (note the spellings, though) to feet or yards or something. Born and raised in Canada after 1970 (when Canada started going metric) I can hardly make sense of the old Imperial units or US customary units. I know I’m 5′ 11″ (I’d never say I’m “approximately 1.828 meters tall…”) but if you need your temperature in Fahrenheit I’m useless.

The WOTF people tell me that the book is going to press later this week, and that it will be available 15 September 2007–a little over two months from now!

(And, just between us, I got a sneak-peek at the cover for WOTF 23 when I was at Book Expo Canada last month and it looks fabulous. I hope they give us cover flats. I’d love to get one framed. They usually keep the designs secret and have an unveiling at the award gala, but I stopped by the Galaxy Press booth at BEC and they had a giant poster of the cover behind them…kinda hard to hide 🙂

– S.

Peter from the Writers of the Future Contest contacted me last week to say he wants to do a profile for the bimonthly Writers of the Future newsletter. He’s sent me a few questions to answer and I’ll let you know when the profile is available.

Or, you could just sign up for the newsletter now and you’ll be sure know.

In the meantime, check out the first profile, that of Jeff Carlson–first-place winner in the first quarter of last year’s contest. (I won the third quarter, so we’re in the same cohort and will be attending the writer’s workshop in a little over a month from now…)

Check out Jeff’s website, too. Boy do I feel like I’m standing still next to him!

– S.

I’m a big fan of the webcomic Real Life. But I was a bit surprised when Greg Dean, the comic’s creator/star, posted a picture of himself recently.

Look at this picture of me:

And now go check out the comic for July 5 and check out Greg Dean on the far right.

Is it just me, or is there a remarkable resemblance?

Apparently my doppelganger is alive and well and living in San Francisco…

Now the only question: which one of us is the evil one? (Come on–one twin is always evil.)

– S.

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.