Quick Notes n Updates

It's a beautiful day here so I'm probably going to get out and do some walking, but I thought I might mention a couple of quick things.

Unified SciFi Forums is no more. I was the horror moderator for several years at the site and met some good folks and made some good friends. Visits there had been declining for some time and when they ended up with a software problem that would be costly to fix they decided to shut down. I've taken them off my links. I'll miss 'em, but nothing hangs around forever.

The March issue of Niteblade is out, with a poem by me called "Recompense Reprise." I believe you can click on the link below the cover and get to a page where you can read some of the material for free, including my piece. This is a great magazine, though, something like 133 pages of material, so if you like Fantasy, Horror and SF check it out.

I'm thinking about a post I want to do on "Front Loading" versus "Back Loading." In a novel one can spread the needed "explanations" of plot across the entire book, but in short stories this material often clusters at the beginning or the end. For example, the story I'm working on right now has more back loading than front, and want to give this pattern a bit more thought.

In the meantime, I hope it's gorgeous where you are. If so, get out and breathe.

New Year Day 5: Update

Mostly an update today. I’ve been working on getting ready for school, and found out yesterday that a textbook I was going to use for a class has had its publication date pushed back from November 2007 until March 2008. That will leave me scrambling for a book since classes start in about a week. The University bookstore is supposed to let me know about this kind of thing, but alas. I should have had enough sense to check earlier.

Other than that, I did get an acceptance on a story from Flashing Swords. The tale is called “Worms in the Earth,” and is one of the few humorous stories I’ve attempted over the years. Humor is popular with editors, though. This is actually a reprint sale. The story sold first time out and was published, then I resold it a couple of years later to an anthology that ended up never seeing print, then resold it again this week. It’s actually been submitted four times and sold three of the four. The other submission was for a “best of” anthology so it had pretty stiff competition there. Below is a brief excerpt from the piece, but I’ll be sure and let everyone know when the piece is published.

Deep into his palace Farthane stalked, making his way to what he called his "black" room (though a visiting imp had once been heard to remark, "why doesn't he call it his 'blacker' room since his whole castle is most wholesomely black?"). Drawing from his fastidiously immaculate shelves his most ancient and potent grimoire--the Necronudicon (older than the Necronomicon and with better pictures besides)--he turned the laminated bat-wing pages until he found the one spell he sought, the one cantrip that he had never used in his rather short long life.

I hope to have a post on writing humor in the next few days. I generally find it difficult to do, but when it works I really enjoy it. How about you? Any humor writers in the audience? Do you find it easier or harder to write humor? Do you enjoy reading humorous works?

Finally, I know most of you are not in this area, but if you are or know anyone who is, I’m going to give a talk on writing and publishing, and hopefully sign a few books, on January 14, at 6:30, at the library in Slidell, Louisiana. That’s a Monday night. Would love to see anyone there who could make it. But I can’t pay for your plane tickets if you live in, say, New Zealand or Canada or England or Detroit or Chicago, or some wild and wooly place like that.