Lots of story-related good news and fun activities happening 'round here. First off, as my Comments section may have already tipped you off, I had some good news from Tim "The Mole" Pratt about some of my stories from last year.

I had THREE Honorable Mention stories for 2002! The stories were listed in the upcoming Year's Best Science Fiction antho, edited by Gardner Dozois. I'm quite ecstatic to report that these stories made the list: “Working the Game” (Future Orbits), “Natural Order” (Asimov’s), and “Wantaviewer” (Strange Horizons). Very cool -- last year I was stoked just to get one HM.

Now I need to get some more stories published in '03. Though I'm interested in the possibilities from the Honorable Mention section of the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror antho as well...

I'm really pleased to see Strange Horizons getting more and more attention, from Gardner and other editors and people in the field. And my fellow writing pals Tim Pratt and Greg van Eekhout got their share of Honorable Mentions -- Tim for "The Witch's Bicycle" (Realms of Fantasy) and "Little Gods" (Strange Horizons), and Greg for "People Stuff" (Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet), "Show & Tell" (Strange Horizons), and "Will You Be An Astronaut?" (F&SF). Huge congrats to them. I'm just psyched that I got a chance to collaborate with both of them before they got too big! ;)

I'm also putting together some stories that will be going up at the reprint site Fictionwise, which has been fun, if a little tedious. I had to put together a 30-page doc of story descriptions, excerpts, review quotes, and a bio. It'll be great once it's all set up, but I'm not crazy about the non-fiction writing involved with my fiction. It's hard as crap to write my own bio, much less 2-3 sentences describing a short story, and not be dull as used sandpaper...

Speaking of stories getting published, "The Deck" was accepted by The Windhover, the literary journal for NC State here in Raleigh. I'm looking forward to seeing this one, because they have great design aspects in their anthologies. It's also a nice bit of circularity (almost as good as my last-day-of-the-paper-route-delivering-my-own-story story), as I got my MA from NC State 6 years ago, and that journal was the place where I published my first-ever story -- "The Fifty-Minute Nietzsche." Also, that Deck story was written way back in '95, and it helped get me into Clarion, so I'm happy for it to see print. Thanks to Jason for the tip about the Windhover accepting stories, by the way.

And finally, as the first set of story submissions start to trickle in for Intracities, I find myself thinking about a story of my own to write for it. I may not publish it in there, but I may use the rules of the antho to do a story and send it elsewhere (I really don't like it when editors publish themselves!). But I'm going to write it all in my head first, get all the plot down and the main character, and just jam it out in a couple hours one day soon. Should be fun...

And now, we're off to a hockey game, thanks to some FREE tickets! Later.

Now Playing:
"Best of 1980-1990," U2

Now Reading:
Neuromancer, William Gibson

Stories out to Publishers:
21