throw another bear in the canoe

One of my email .sig files reads:



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.

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Speaking of squealing, there's a new annual scholarly journal devoted to Christopher Marlowe.

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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.

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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.

I managed 500 words on "Gods of the Forge" this afternoon, and cut about 300 words of no-longer useful notes. I have four and a half scenes left to write, and I'm thinking maybe my best plan is to sit down Tuesday or Wednesday and just do it, as it were--which means starting over from the beginning, because I changed my mind halfway through what the damned thing was about. But that's okay. I can do this thing.

I'm kind of tired out, though, and it's hard to focus.

And I have other work on even shorter deadlines. Like my crits for Odyssey, which I am guest-lecturing on Friday. And then there's Clarion in two weeks.

And OMG, the page proofs for Range of Ghosts came. It's going to be a beautiful book, and I really need to get on those, too.

So. Much. Work.

But after all this is done, I have nothing going on until Viable Paradise. Except writing a novel.

The first SF Squeecast is live! I nwhich Lynne Thomas, Paul Cornell, Seanan McGuire, Cat Valente, and I take on The Middleman, Unstoppable, Yarn, and A Dream of Wessex.

Not necessarily in that order.