I should mention that I have the cover story over at Piker Press this week. It’s set in the Tin-Caniverse, a neighborhood of the Science Fiction multiverse in which a few laws of physics have been suspended for being inconvenient. It’s the first in the series told in the third person, and the continuity issues between this and the previous installments I chalk up to conflicting memories. We won’t consider that one person is remembering something before the other person experiences it. In fact, in this case we can temporarily reinstate relativity to make traveling faster than light a form of time travel, explain away the problem, and then put that pesky law of nature back in the drawer.
I’m pretty happy with the story, but reading it now that it’s been published, I think I left a little on the table. No such worries about my story that will be published over there during zombie month. Zombie Month! Where have you been all my life? I’ll let you know when my modest submission is up; it’ll be a few weeks, yet.
I’ve settled on my NaNoWriMo story, but I really don’t know what I’m going to do with the idea. It’s a comedy based on the statement “When math is outlawed, only outlaws will do math.” In a world where governments willfully keep the populace ignorant, what would a revolutionary look like? It’s got lots of possibilities. I picture street gangs that hang out in ‘math houses’, leaving elegant mathematical clues how to find them scrawled on walls throughout the city. I think I’ll start with a scene where during a police raid the protagonists must convince the cops they were only doing drugs, and that the drugs were obtained through sanctioned sources.
This morning I put out a new release of Jer’s Novel Writer. The last version had a bug that only happened to users installing the software for the first time. Not good, and of course none of my usual testers were going to catch something like that. I’m not exactly sure how long the bad code was in there, but the problem manifested most obviously in the last release. I wonder how many odd problems people have been having over the past months were caused by the bug. Ai, ai, ai.
On Monday What’s-Her-Name sent me a message asking if I was free. I haven’t seen her since her brief tenure as a bartender at Little Café Near Home. My phone and I don’t really get along, though, and I didn’t see the message until about an hour ago – three days late. Somewhere, the capricious gods of telecommunications are laughing.
Finally, do any of you remember reading an episode about the Awkward Bowling League? I wrote it a couple of weeks ago, and now it’s… gone. There’s no sign of it. I was going to write a follow-up, and I wanted to read the original first and link to it. I’m just wondering if it vanished before or after you guys got a chance to read it.
[Late Addition!] Five cover letters tonight. I just have to assemble the parts, and I’m caught up. Got a smiley-face infested message from What’s-her-Name, so that’s cool. Getaway Cruiser is playing some good noise into my head right now. Things could be worse.
I vaguely remember awkward bowling league.
You definitely posted the episode about the awkward bowling league. I think you even rumbled about televising somehow. I had an image of Revenge of the Nerds meets ESPN4.
I remember awkward bowling league. (Awkward Bowling League hava yes?)
Catch up with woman with smiley faces, Jerry. Could be nice interlude.
Oh Kay, where is numero cinco?
Number five is a short story submission, but I decided to do a reality check on it before sending it out. It’s a story I found in my junk drawer and rather liked, although I must not have thought much of it the first time around or it wouldn’t have been in the junk drawer.
Yep read that league thing.
Where’s Zombie month on the Jer calendar?
I remember the Awkward Bowling League post, but it was a lot longer ago than just a couple of weeks — like, maybe a month or so.
Just did a search — it was Thursday, Aug. 9.
And there it is. The word “awkward” and “bowling” still don’t hit that episode in my blogging software, but it’s nice to see that FreeFind is working again. (The changes to the blog had hidden the archives from FreeFind’s spiders.)
I really liked “The Last Bottle”.
Given that the fine folks at the Mag of SciFi & Fantasy have already demonstrated their good judgement by previously paying you for your work, have you sent them anything new lately?
Four manuscripts in the mail 9/15.
Bob, I’m glad you liked it. In the Tin Can series I had often discussed the people who never came back, but never before did I try to get inside one of them.
Sometimes, when I’m writing, I think I’m insulting the reader the way I hammer things home, only to discover on later reading that I missed an opportunity. The symbolism of the last bottle, and that Emily the bartender knew it was the last bottle, is sort of there, but the line “she thought the implication was obvious, but he didn’t seem to catch it,” sums up me and the story.
I really liked the “this is my blood…” part. I think I should have given it a little more narrative space, to let the reader work on it for a while before moving on. Possibly an echo of it later.
Those issues aside, I really am pretty happy with the story. I criticize my work so I can do better. I criticize it publicly so you can tell me I’m wrong.
I like Tequila Mary. She will become legendary. (We will hear a bit more from Danger Amy as well.)
I have more from the Tin-Caniverse coming along, and I can’t help but feel that it belongs at Piker Press. I don’t want to wait for the anthology for them all to be together, and Piker Press is directly responsible for waking me up to the great vibe of the original story. I am very happy with The Tourist, the story I’m wrapping up right now, and just for fun tonight I wrote a bit completely from the point of view of the Big Eye, triggered by the events of The Tourist. It will never be a story in its own right, but it was fun to play with.
F&SF will be receiving a submission from me soon, but I hesitated and sent it to a couple of folks for review first. I’m glad I did.
Speaking of odds and ends, a looked at your page from an iPhone yesterday. I looks good on.