M-BRANE MAG UPDATE

I have very little time to report tonight (that stupid, stupid day job getting in the way in a horrific fashion these past few days), but a couple of major milestones with M-Brane SF have been attained lately: 1) I feel I have enough decent material in hand to make issue #1 a respectable first outing; and 2) I have begun to receive actual paid subscriptions to it! &nb...

FREAKY-DEAKY KIDS and THE O-BOMB

Reading Paul of Dune reminded me once more of how often one runs into freakily intelligent and scarily capable young children in the sf genre. In Dune, of course, one starts with Paul Atreides who cheated death repeatedly and overthrew a galactic empire while still in his teens....

PROGRESS REPORT

One of the things this blog is good for is making me keep track of and stay on task with my many projects. Since I claim publicly that I am doing stuff with with my time, I feel some positive pressure to keep making claims to that effect on this blog...The last few days have actually been reasonably productive for me on all fronts: I got some more work done on the magazine, including acquiring a little pile of new fiction submissions to read over...

Neil Gaiman

The other day I mentioned China Mieville--new to my reading list as of this week--and remarked that I had not gotten around to his well-regarded books yet because they are generally considered to be fantasy and that's not my genre of choice, even when the stories are supposedly...

M-BRANE MAG UPDATE

Work on the mag is proceeding slowly, but that’s okay. I don’t want to rush it along too fast and have it be a mess. I have increased somewhat my ambition for the quantity of material in issue #1, and am now actively seeking some new submissions for the very first outing. I am about to post calls for submissions on some sites, but have been trying to decide on what exactly I want my listings to say. I guess it’s simplest to just direct everyone...

READING LIST

I have really piled up a reading list for the coming couple of weeks. My friend Pat lent me his copy of KW Jeter’s Farewell Horizontal after I mentioned that I was between books and looking for something to read. That was yesterday, but just this morning I visited the library and...

CLONEPOD!

Everyone needs to immediately check out clonepod (there’s a link way down below in my list of some fave sites; the artwork to the left is from their site and depicts, presumably, the "clone pod" itself). It’s sort of an sf webzine except they present the stories in audio form as...

CURRENT PROJECT UPDATE

The novel, still known as Current Project, is now in a state where I think I can reasonably claim that all of the major scenes and events are at least represented somehow in the manuscript. What is still missing, however, is a lot of detail in some segments and some back-fill concerning some of the characters and how they got to be the way they are. I have a couple extra days off from work in the coming week, and am setting a goal of having the...

FOMALHAUT b

Though the confirmed existence of planets outside our own star system has long been one of the coolest things that astronomy has had to offer to the lay person, it has always been somewhat unsatisfying that their detection was always by very indirect and complicated methods beyond...

The All Thing

A subject on NPR’s Talk of the Nation show this afternoon was the internet and its role in politics during the recent general election campaign and what its importance might be going forward. President Obama, for example, will have, as result of his amazing grass roots and internet-assisted...

SLAN HUNTER

I read this a few weeks before I started this blog, so it's not current reading exactly.  Nonetheless, we all need to take a step back and take a look:  SLAN HUNTER!  On the front cover of this amazing book is an endorsement from Harlan Ellison which says something...

This Week's Reading

I set down Delany for a few days (in the midst of Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand). I generally don't take a break from a book midway but I had two other pressing priorities.  The first was that I needed to catch up on the old horror movies that I had DVRed on TMC on...

Current Project update

Yeah, the novel is still known only as Current Project.  I'm not sure why a title still eludes me this late into the work.  It now stands at about fifty thousand words and is fully plotted and it seems like its title should have exposed itself by now. No big deal: it will probably crop up amid the next fifty thousand words.  Like with the magazine, progress has been slow during the last two weeks though not negligible.  I have...

MAGAZINE UPDATE

The problem right now--as if evident from my lack of postings since before Halloween--is the fact that outside life has been intruding too much and I have gotten nothing done on the zine yet.  Well, I have done one thing: I moved its launch date from January to February.  I am determined that this will the last delay.  My projects right now are to get more word of it out to other sites and resources and get a few more submissions of...