Ancient Logic

Arisia 2019 is over! It’s back to the real world this week after an entire weekend in Arisia 2019. I go to this convention every year, but this one will definitely be special to me. For one thing, this is the year that felt, at least for a moment, like it wasn’t going to happen. If the debacle with the e-board wasn’t enough, there was the strike at the Westin. The convention felt slimmer this year for sure. A lot of people self-selected to not come this year and honestly with the smaller, more confined venue of the Boston Park Plaza, that was a decision enormously beneficial to my enjoyment of this con. I had a blast. I was more invested in the panels this year because I wrote a portion of them. It’s one thing to go to a panel and listen for reading suggestions, or new ideas, or people to follow on social media, but it’s quite another to put together a panel of people to create a very specific conversation and then get to sit back to see how the discussion plays out. I loved that asp...

I am happy to announce that I have a flash fiction piece appearing in the new A Murder of Storytellers anthology, "The Book of Blasphemous Words." The story, "Killing the First Gods," is about a woman in the upper Paleolithic trying to survive in world filled with the ghosts of slaughtered gods. This is one of my favorite flash pieces, and I am very excited to have it appear in such illustrious company. Pre-orders available now. The book will ship Jan. 31st. Thank you to Adrean Messmer for choosing this story! https://www.amurderofstorytellers.com/shop/pre-order-the-book-of-blasphemous-words Table of Contents: A Hole in the Head Reveals the Secret Nature of All Things by Joseph Shelton Sack Race To The River by Chris Kuriata Holy Fire by Tracy Fahey The Order of the Night Moose by Jonathan Raab Hare Hill by Kristin J. Cooper The Holy Filth by Tom Breen Madness by Morrison Hero Worship by Adrian Ludens An Adventure in Wootton by Colin Harker Meant to Be by Kelly G...

As mentioned last week, I do have a bit of happy news to share. I am excited to announce that my story, "The Yuru-chara of Hector, NY," will appear in the next issue of the Electric Spec Magazine at the end of the month. I am tremendously excited about this for a few reasons: Electric Spec is simply awesome. I've been reading this magazine for awhile and never been disappointed by a single story. To have one of my stories selected is beyond humbling. I can only give an earnest thank you to Lesley L. Smith for choosing the story. I love this story dearly. It has one of my favorite protagonists and shows in the clearest way I've managed where I'd like to go with my fiction.  Electric Spec also gave me the chance to reflect on this story and its meaning in a guest blog which I am sharing below. Without being spoilery, this blog expresses some of what resonates about "The Yuru-chara of Hector, NY," with me.  Guest Blog at Electric Spec At the moment, ...

The 40th chapter of "Agent Shield and Spaceman" is now available . This is a bit of back story chapter although it does advance Spaceman's narrative a teensy bit. In any case, thank you for your continued readership and support. *** In my last post I mentioned some happy news I might be able to announce soon. And that happy news...has been joined by still more happy news!!! Unfortunately I can't really announce either right now. I'm still waiting for confirmation on the first and a reply on the second. But rest assured, I am super-excited about both and will post updates here as soon as I have them available. November is shaping up to be a very encouraging month on a personal level. I hope the good news continues tomorrow.

It's tough to believe that it's already November! I will be grateful to see the other side of Tuesday as my mood right now is cautiously optimistic. The polls have stabilized and the early voting patterns encourage. If you haven't already - remember to vote! Besides a few anthologies worth of short stories, I got to review about the expected number of current short fiction. I'm selecting a few that really stuck with me this month. A Diet of Worms by Valerie Valdes. The best Twilight Zone episodes, the scariest ones, revolved around worlds just slightly out of step with our own. They were like traps or snares. Take the wrong door or stop at the wrong town and there you'd be, stuck forever. That's what this story is like. The narrator keeps going to see a movie called "The Queen in Red" which somehow sucks the life out of the narrator. The terror here is of that dread that once time has gone it can't come back.  The Key to St Medusa's by Kat H...

As part of a writing workshop I've joined, I'll be participating in a public reading of my work on June 25th, 2015 at the Woburn Public Library. The details are a little hazy at the moment, but it will be in the evening and I will be joining Nick Mancuso, a writer leading the Woburn Writing Workshop. Hopefully other participants of the workshop will also be reading, as I've had the good fortune to join of group of truly talented writers! I'll give a quick shout-out to Andrea Bunker, the Assistant Librarian at the Woburn Library, for being so receptive to this idea. As I've mentioned before, reading my work before audiences has been one of my absolute favorite aspects of writing so far. Hopefully there will be other possibilities to announce in the near future.

I got my panel assignments this morning for  ‪#‎ Arisia‬  and I'm very pleased to announce I'll be on the True Detective panel. This was my top pick for the convention and I can't wait to have a good conversation on the weird fiction influences on this show. I also got on the Speculative Fiction: Year in Review panel which I intend to use to talk up a banner year in electronic publication of short fiction. I also got on a panel on running great (RPG) games, which is timely because I'm currently in one of my absolute favorite campaigns. I'm also hoping that I get a chance to read some of my work so hopefully in the next few days I can report  good news on that front.

My story "Drop-ins" was published this week in the "Yesterday You Said Tomorrow" anthology released by Burnt Offerings Press. I'll include links to buying a copy if you are interested below but let me just say a quick word about this story. "Drop-ins" was originally conceived as the third chapter in a much larger work on time-travel. I got into my head the idea of non-paradoxical time-travel, the question of how could you have time-travel that didn't cause some kind of logic busting paradox. With Drop-ins that idea coalesced around the notion of time displacement. Basically, we are already time-travelers. Every day we travel exactly one day into the future. What if you could put the conscious mind to sleep for a period of time, say a year, or ten, or thirty and then wake it up inside your own body. While your primary self was asleep, your life would be carried by a "stand-in" personality, basically a dimmer, slightly less-than-versi...

It has been, to say the least, a busy week. With the capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the events seem to be heading towards the inevitable long epilogue of legal proceedings and analysis. I haven't really had time to process all of this, but obviously, for someone with simultaneous interest in history and technology, there was a lot to ponder about this week. I have been in shock for my city since hearing the news about the bombing on Monday. The images and suffering from the attack are hard to wrench from my mind. The deaths of a small boy and two young people so filled with promise and life is an enormous tragedy. The number of casualties  maimed, lives forever altered, is profoundly disturbing. This is terrorism. This was done to subvert our sense of meaningful lives and replace it with a crushing scene of senseless murder. But in the more than 10 years since 9/11, one gets the sense things have changed in America. While the media quickly started chasing its own tai...