OK, Gord started this meme. I'll play. What's in my liquor cabinet right now (not that I literally have an actual liquor cabinet...):

(1) A huge bottle of Captain Morgan, about half full, for use in making Rum & Coke (the local delicacy here in south Florida), and

(2) A (much smaller) bottle of 15-year-old Gen Garioch, far too good to mix with anything but an ice cube, which I've been going through at, like, a teaspoonful a week. Nutty taste, smoky aftertaste and...I don't know, suffice to say that if your idea of single-malt scotch is the 12-year-old Glenlivet which for some reason seems to be the only specimen of such served at about 65% of all bars in the United States, you have no frickin' *clue* what you're missing.

So one bottle of the cheap functional stuff, one bottle of the expensive, really good, stuff, and, at the moment, that's about it. Making, I guess, Gord the lush, out of the two of us. ;)

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This week's Strange Horizons story--Tradition by Joey Cameau--is worth reading.

If you have an phobia of anything disturbing that in any way involves people under the age of 18 not having a good time (and, to judge by a lot of the submissions guidelines I see, that's a pretty widespread story-phobia), then you should probably skip it.

If not, though, you might like it...vivid, full characters, painfully drawn set-up and exactly the kind of supernatural element that I like the best (subtle enough to make suspension of disbelief easier, but also very strange and distinctive), plus a killer last sentence. Since endings are almost always the trickiest parts of stories for me--I'm relatively good with first sentences, but last sentences come much less naturally to me--I really have to hand it to anyone who nails it like that.

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Speaking of short stories and such, I just got my World Fantasy Awards nomination ballot in the mail. (Since I was an attendee at last year's convention, I'm eligible to nominate stuff published in 2006 for this coming year's awards.) I've already decided that I'm definitely nominating Amanda Downum's excellent story Smoke and Mirrors as one of my short story nominations, but other than that, I'm not sure. (Sadly, Locked Doors was published a few weeks too late to be eligible.) Keeping in mind the published-in-2006 restriction, anyone have any thoughts on deserving choices?

All told, if I opt to fill out the whole ballot, I get to nominate up to 5 novels, 5 novellas, 5 short stories, 5 anthologies, 5 collections, 5 and 5 choices for "Special Award--Professional" and 5 for "Special Award--Non-Professional."

Not, obviously, that my vote is likely to make much that much of a difference, given the volume of short stories and novels put out last year in the genre, and the widely differing tastes among the thousands of people eligible to fill out nomination ballots (the two eligible choices in each category receiving the most nominations will go on the actual final ballot), but it's kind of fun to be able to play at having a say in this. If you didn't go to this last year's WFC and you want to play too, you can do that by suggesting stuff in the comments.