are you already on that bus and gone?
And that's the thing. That never? Means never. Which includes the good stuff as well as the bad, goddammit. It bothers me when I see the focus of my genre more and more sliding to unrelieved bleakness.
Real life has some of both, you know?
Which is one of the reasons why I'm in on a new podcast: the SFF Squeecast!, debuting soon. My co-podcasters are Catherynne Valente, Paul Cornell, Lynne Thomas, and Seanan McGuire, with occasional guests.
And in this podcast, we talk about shit that rocks. In upcoming episodes, look forward to squealing about The Middleman, Nnedi Okorafor, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and other awesome stuff what are awesome.
Speaking of squealing, there's a new annual scholarly journal devoted to Christopher Marlowe.
My story "The Inevitable Heat Death of the Universe" has been reprinted at Chizine.
She cuts him from the belly of a shark.
If this were another kind of story, I should now tell you, fashionably, that the shark is not a shark. That she is not a she and he is not a he. That your language and symbology do not suffice for my purposes, and so I am driven to speak in metaphor, to construct three-dimensional approximations of ten-dimensional realities. That you are inadequate to the task of comprehension.
Poppycock.
You are a God.
The shark is a shark. A Great White, Carcharodon carcharias, the sublime killer. It is a blind evolutionary shot-in-the-dark, a primitive entity unchanged except in detail for―by the time of our narrative―billions of years.
I took some amazing photos of the raggedy bit of Canada when we were flying over it on the way home from Stockholm. I'll be updating my flickr stream as soon as I wash off the sweat from running this morning.
Also, 4th Street Fantasy Conversation was awesome. If you like nerdy talk about books with writers, you should totally come next year.