This week I started reading Damnificados, by J.J. Amaworo Wilson, in which terrorists attack a Christmas party in a skyscraper and … No, wait, sorry, wrong story. The actual plot is that a group of “damnificados” — defined by the book blurb as “vagabonds and misfits” — takes over an abandoned building and basically turns it into a vertical city. If this reminds you of the Oakland Bay Bridge from William Gibson’s “Bridge” trilogy, then, uh, you may be me. Or you may be Elizabeth Hand.
So this week we were watching Pacific Rim: Uprising, the sequel to Pacific Rim, Guillermo del Toro‘s film about giant robots (AKA jaegers) battling giant monsters (AKA kaiju) in and around the Pacific Ocean. Guillermo del Toro, sadly, did not return for this film, but the jaegers and kaiju did, oh yeah, you betcha.
It’s been quite a while since I reached into my giant pile of rejection letters, so today I spun up random.org and it told me to pick the third letter from the “L” folder. As it turns out, this is a rejection from the magazine The Leading Edge for my short story “Draw”, a science fiction Western, previously excerpted in a Teaser Tuesday.
Continue reading “Random Rejection: The Leading Edge, “Draw””
Recently I upgraded my eReader to one with a larger screen and, like other eReaders I’ve owned, this one came with a selection of public domain works. In this case, one of the works was The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, by some guy nobody has ever heard of.
Continue reading “Teaser Tuesday 3/19/2019: “The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe””
So the other day I decided to check out The Umbrella Academy, Netflix’s new show about a (sort-of) super-hero team slash (definitely) dysfunctional family that is reunited by the death of their adoptive father and then has to avert an oncoming apocalypse, which is scheduled to occur in a week or so.
So this week I was reading Range of Ghosts, an epic fantasy by Elizabeth Bear, which — unlike most epic fantasies I’ve read — is set in what appears to be an analogue of the Mongolian steppes rather than an analogue of Western Europe, which is enough all on its own to make it interesting. Fortunately I also enjoyed the story.
So not long ago, I watched the first season of the new Netflix series Kingdom, a zombie thriller that also happens to be a Korean period piece set at the very end of the 16th century.
So this week I was reading Threshold, by Caitlín R. Kiernan, a horror/fantasy novel in which a geology studen gets mixed up with sinister fossils. Or something like that.
So in last week’s post, “Safe/Scary“, I dredged up an ancient kind of creepy-looking sort-of Venn diagram from elementary school from the pile of old papers my folks sent me years ago. This assignment was to list things that were “safe” on one side and “scary” on the other. One of my “scary” items was “Going to get stitches”. This prompted an email from my folks with a photo of my first “Going to get stitches” episode, in which I tripped and fell on my face on the sidewalk at my grandparents’ house:
It’s been a while since I reached into the giant stack of old schoolwork and other papers that my folks sent out to me a few years ago, so I thought it was time to do that again. And what did I fish out? This vaguely creepy little pseudo-Venn diagram:
Viscosity 