Ancient Logic

Well, it's here! My story "Again and Again," included in the recent Dark Hall Press Ghost Anthology along with many other more talented writers, is available now through Amazon in both e-book and paperback. I feel very lucky to have my work find a market and I hope everyone enjoys reading it. I have not had a chance to read any of the other stories included, so this will be a chance for discovery for me as well.

August has never been my favorite month. While I don't expect many tears to be shed for me as a poor teacher trudging back to school after two months of vacation, resuming my professional duties does represent an adjustment. Suddenly I don't have the time I had to exhaustively research and write my stories, I've got squeeze in an hour or two in the evening. I have resumed my double existence as a literary fugitive. While I wasn't able to finish all of my projects, two months of basically uninterrupted writing bore a lot of fruit. To shift my writing into a lower gear (even by a step or two) hurts . I was able to get drafts done for five stories and get two to a state fit for submission. One thing I tried this time around was not bogging myself down on one story. I wrote a draft for one story and then put it aside in favor of another. Eventually I got back to the previous versions and slowly worked up each, improving it each time.  I tend to obsess over my stories...

I got big news earlier this week when the winner's for the Dark Hall Press Ghost Story Contest were announced . My story "Again and Again" is going to be published as part of the anthology. The story is about the struggles of an agent in a covert occult organization trying to balance of demands of work and family when family is the one thing members of this organization aren't allowed to have. I'm honestly still trying to wrap my head around the notion of one of my stories being published. I don't have all the details yet, but as things develop I'll put up more details. What I do know is that I feel very lucky. Dark Hall Press has been turning out quality novels and short stories for a few years and it makes me very proud that the editorial staff would want to take a chance on a new, very green author. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to find something to drink in celebration!

LOST is a show for, by, and about cons. I don't think I'm the first person to point this out, but the series really operates on a very simple premise, how long are you willing to watch something on the basis of faith alone? It might say a lot about you depending on how long you watched the show when it was first on. A skeptical person watched the first couple of teasers way back in 2004 decided the show was a bunch of hokum and left it at that. At the other end of the scale, you have the completely credulous person, addicted to the show from the first episode, watching every episode religiously, pouring over the theories and web discussions, never losing faith that the show was finally going to be about something . Characters in the show are generally either perpetrators of cons or victims of cons. John Locke is taken in by his parents' insistence that he is special, eventually losing his kidney to his grifter dad. James Ford (Sawyer) becomes a con-man after that same guy...

Call it the anti-Cloverfield. Monsters was released in 2010, on a frayed shoe-string of a budget with two unknown actors (Whitney Able and Scoot McNairy) and an intriguing premise. Six years earlier a NASA probe returned from space with some sort of fungus sample. These fungoid life-forms grow to prodigious size and wreak so much havoc in Northern Mexico that the entire border is eventually sealed, half of the country turned over to the 'monsters.' Andrew Kaulder, a photojournalist, is ordered by his boss to escort Samantha Wynden (boss's daughter) from Mexico before the "migration season" starts. Andrew, a selfish, self-involved bohemian takes a fancy to Samantha during a bender on the night before they leave. This leads to some poor decision making and the eventual loss of his and the daughter's passport. The rest of the movie follows this pair as they travel north, hoping to cross over into America through the enormous wall built to keep the monsters ou...

This summer I set myself the goal of finishing five new short stories and as the end of July approaches I'm halfway there. I haven't updated Ancient Logic in a little while so I thought this was a good time to record some progress on the writing front. The first story is called "Drop-ins" and it's my attempt at a 'realistic' time-travel story. Realistic because it doesn't involve paradoxes and crazy flux-capacitors but rather a bunch of people using a neurological hack to fast-forward through their lives. Okay, semi-realistic. I don't think this story is the last word on this concept but I think the central metaphor, of sleepwalking your way to the future, is a strong one. I submitted that story this week, I'll see how it works out. The second story more less showed up, fully formed sometimes in May.  Seeing as how I was still elbow deep in the process of bringing "Drop-ins" to life, I couldn't really stop and figure out what ...

One result of going to a convention devoted to the love of speculative literature is you wind up collecting a few titles to read. Let's say more than a few. Most of these were mentioned in panels that I attended, and where appropriate I'll mention what interested me about the book. Others are just titles recommended by people I met or book descriptions I found interesting. If you've read any of these, feel free to endorse or warn me away! I'll start of by a list of books I wrote down from the multiple panels on Utopian fiction. First I have two classics of the genre: "Modern Utopia" by H.G. Wells and "Looking Backward" by Edward Bellamy which sounded surprisingly readable from John Crowley's description of a class he taught to undergrads. In that same class, students read "Pacific Edge" by one of my favorite authors, Kim Stanley Robinson and in looking for that book on Amazon I discovered it was part of a trilogy on Southern Cal...