Sonya Taaffe pointed me toward a review of "Romanticore" in the latest issue of review 'zine The Fix:

"A writer I've always admired is Tim Pratt, and 'Romanticore' did not disappoint. Tim Pratt's writing is bittersweet, dark, laugh-out-loud funny, thrilling, cynical and romantic by turns, and it's a wonder just how he keeps the quality level so high with every story. Yet he does, again and again. His contribution to a magazine is fast becoming a guarantor of purchase, and that is very much the case here. His immensely likeable yet deeply flawed protagonist is a man who is -not functional, not awake -- if I'm not pursuing, or being pursued, or in the midst of an affair,' and of course, with an attitude like that, he becomes embroiled in a love triangle. Unfortunately for him, it's a love triangle involving a manticore and a half-gorgon reincarnated oracle... A superb story, shot through with Pratt's easy-going, effortless talent." --Nelson Stanley

I like the "half-gorgon reincarnated oracle" bit, even if it's not 100% accurate; it catches the right flavor, I think.

Little Gods got a long, in-depth, extremely positive review in the newest Science Fiction Research Association Review. It's too long to quote here, but reviewer Philip Snyder calls the book "a major harbinger of good things to come" and says "with Little Gods, Tim Pratt becomes a writer to watch." He also has some quite nice things to say about the stories and poems in the book, so it's not all hopefulness for my future work! SFRA archives its newsletters online in PDF format, but this issue (#268) isn't there yet. Once it appears, I'll point y'all toward the full review.

I've got a poem online at Strange Horizons this week, "Soul Searching". There's a sort of thematic companion piece to this poem, a story called "Life in Stone", which will be in the new online magazine Lenox Ave. in a few months. It's been a while since I've done a story-and-poem diptych, looking at an idea from different perspectives (though there are a few such poem-and-story pairings in my collection), and of course it's rarely if ever possible to publish such pieces together -- but at least both of these are appearing online, and in the same year, so I can point you toward them as a pair in a few months.

Fishnet, the new pro-rate paying erotica magazine edited by my own bestbeloved in her guise as H.L. Shaw, has been live for about a week, but I wanted to wait and read the stories before mentioning it in an entry, so I could say something more constructive than "Lookit! Whoo-ee!" The magazine is not work-safe if you've got co-workers who like reading over your shoulder, but there's no nekkid pictures or anything there. On to the stories:

Nick Mamatas has a great story there, "Withdraw, Withdraw!" -- it's an intelligent, hot, S&M-tinged story that actually works as a piece of fiction (rather than as a sexual vignette, which is a failing of much erotica). "One Size Fits All" by Jules Jones is well-written, sweet gay porn, again S&M-tinged. Mike Jasper's "Repeat Performance" is also sweet and rather funny, about that titillating-but-potentially-humiliating combination of sex and cameras. "What Really Happened" by A.J. Horlick has a great conceit, the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears recast as an Internet-era D/s fantasia, and it's good enough that I'd finished reading it before I realized that it was, technically, furry porn... Imagine putting, say, Judith Berman's "Lord Stink" or Theodora Goss's "Sleeping With Bears" or even Koja & Malzberg's "Ursus Triad, Later" in a blender with The Story of O or Carrie's Story, and it might read something like this.

Heather has a quirky and far-ranging editorial taste, and I think Fishnet is likely to become a place to reliably find first-rate erotic fiction.

Not a lot of interesting movement, writing-wise. I've picked up a rejection or two in the past couple of weeks, and sent the stories back out again. I've been writing a few pages a day on the Bridges novel. And since today is my once-fortnightly Wednesday off, I expect to write more than a few pages there today. I've been checking the mailbox impatiently for a couple of checks that I'm expecting any time now (a biggish one for Little Gods royalties, another for a story, and a couple more for poems) -- it would be nice to have some extra money for the trip to North Carolina at the beginning of August. My literary life is just the usual routine of reading, writing, and waiting, and I like that just fine (except, of course, for the waiting).