Happy Friday! I’ll try to keep this short, just a few quick updates and things to think about over the weekend.
1) My fellow Altered Fluidian, Devin Poore, has his first fiction sale up at Eschatology: The Journal of Lovecraftian and Apocalyptic Fiction. It’s a very short but powerful story called “Before the Wind” that I hope you’ll check out:
The newscaster’s voice came faint and agitated from the speaker above the water fountain, going through the motions, repeating it all over again. It was the same news I had been hearing for days from different sources, but maybe this time I would pick up something missed before. Something to point me to the north or south. Something to give me a hint of those I’d left behind.
There, you’ve already read 15% of the entire piece, and you can find the rest here.
2) As The Thing might say, “It’s nominatin’ time!” OK, he would probably never say that, but it is nomination time for the Nebula Awards. To make it easier for everyone to choose which of my piece’s to support, I only published one short story this year (so far): “My Father’s Eyes” in Sybil’s Garage No. 7. If you are a SFWA member and you read and enjoyed my story, this is one way to show your appreciation. I hope to have it available online in one form or another before the nomination period closes on February 15, 2011; sadly, I am not yet a SFWA member, so I can’t include it in the members-only discussion area. You can of course still order the magazine and read it. You also can still buy tickets for the Carl Brandon Society raffle for the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship (until November 22, 2010), to win one of four eReaders that comes with my story and many others from writers of color pre-installed.
3) I have more I wanted to share, but this post is already running long, so I’ll leave you with this: our Star Trek Re-Watch on “The Day of the Dove” is now up at The Viewscreen. The episode–which concerns a sparkling, hate-sucking, vampire alien that pits the Enterprise against a crew of Klingons in bitter swordplay stage combat–is probably best skipped, but if you read my recap you can still participate in the ongoing discussion of its heavy-handed indictment of war and racism. There are a lot of uncomfortable things going on in this story, but at least it makes for lively and thoughtful conversation, which is one reason we enjoy doing these reviews so much.
I’m planning on spending the next several days in focused writing and revising, which I’ll probably elaborate on a little in my next blog post. In the meantime, enjoy the weekend! How will you spend it? I suspect a lot of people will be going to the movie theater to see the eagerly-anticipated The Next Three Days, which finally opens today. Are there any other interesting film releases this weekend?
