This morning I found out that my abstract was accepted for presentation at the Fourth World Congress of Paraconsistency this summer at the University of Melbourne. I've never actually flown to Australia before, and I'm guessing that it's not cheap, so whether or not I actually go is going to depend heavily on how much financial support I can get on this end from the Department, my research account, etc. (The conference also starts the day before my summer MFA residency ends, which doesn't mean I can't figure something out and do both, but it will be a tight squeeze.) The paper is called "Paraconsistent Tense Logic, the Metaphysics of Change," and in the event that anyone who reads this blog is actually interested in this strange thing that I do for a living, here's the abstract:

"Graham Priest has argued that there are some true contradictions, but that the statistical frequency of true contradictions is very low, and that as such the epistemic probability of any particular contradiction being true is very low. This claim is essential to his justification for the ‘classical re-capture.’ At the same time Priest has identified some concrete extra-semantic candidates for the status of true contradictions in analysis of the metaphysics of change. Expressed in terms of a paraconsistent logic (his own LP) outfitted with tense operators like P, which can be read as ‘it was the case that,’ Priest argues for 'Zeno’s Law,' the principle that (α & P¬α) entails the disjunction of (α & ¬α) or P(α & ¬α). Despite his repeated claims to the contrary, it will become clear that Priest is so deeply committed to the tensed theory of time that his analysis falls apart once the tenseless theory is substituted. More importantly, Priest’s argument for 'Zeno’s Law' exhibits a methodology which undermines his claim that the statistical frequency of true contradictions is very low. A closer examination of this point should demonstrate that there is no good reason why arguments at least as good in more mundane contexts couldn’t turn up enough true contradictions to overturn the claim that the statistical frequency of true contradictions is very low. As such, if dialetheism is correct, we are not justified in generally assigning low epistemic probabilities to contradictory outcomes in our arguments, and the ‘classical re-capture’ fails."

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Meanwhile, I just saw the tentative workshop schedule for the summer residency at Stonecoast. It looks like I'm workshopping with Elizabeth Searle for the first week and with Kelly Link for the second. This is very cool.

One of my new classmates, Jason McCarty, posted up probably the single comment that made me most excited about going to Stonecoast. It was a response to that entry I did a while back on The Book I Want To Write Someday (a Mamatasian mash-up of Buffy & Questionable Content), and his comment was:

"Yep, you'll fit in well at Stonecoast (Mamatasian? Sheesh...). My first semester I workshopped a story about two roommates--one a goth/industrial DJ, the other a college English instructor with a PhD in Folklore--who accidentally summon a demon in the middle of a club and proceed to fight and defeat it, all through the creative use of Yeats' 'The Second Coming.' So yes, we are your people, welcome home..."

Excellent.

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Last but very far from least, yesterday I found out that my story Three Perspectives on the Role of the Anarchists in the Zombie Apocalypse won the second-place prize at the most recent contest at Tales of the Zombie War. The prize is $25, which is about the cost of three drinks at South Miami dive bars (more like two drinks on South Beach), but (a) three drinks isn't nothing, and (b) it's wicked good for the ego to get paid twice for the same story.

Since it was written pre-Clarion, I've changed a lot stylistically since I wrote it, etc., it's kind of funny to me that it's my most successful offering so far, but if these good things were going to happen to any of my older stories, this would be it. There's a *lot* of me in that story--honestly, you want to see what the-world-from-the-point-of-view-of-Ben looks like, read it--and there are still a lot of things I like about it. So...in summation....I'm proud of my little zombie offspring, and I'd like it to find new ways to keep buying me drinks.