This is a picture of Little Dog. We found her running in the street seven years ago. We were driving though our neighborhood when we used to live in Cleveland Heights, and my wife stopped the car yelling, look at that dog. There was a small brown Beagle/Dachshund mix strolling Read more…
I’m in yet another anthology, this time it’s the heavy hardback The Best of Jim Baen’s Universe, which, in addition to being a memorial to the late Mr. Baen, promises to be an annual event. You should also check out the web-zine that birthed this anthology. Within you will find Read more…
People trolling in the genre mines of Science Fiction and Fantasy often harbor some resentment towards “mainstream” authors who manage to write books with heavy genre elements and get them to be taken seriously by people whose job it is to take books seriously. (The Road being one recent high-profile Read more…
While I was gone I got my copy of Man vs. Machine, the latest Marty Greenberg/John Helfers anthology.I mentioned my contribution, “The Historian’s Apprentice”, earlier. I honestly think that it’s my best short-form work to date. Again, my story is singled out in a Harriet Klausner review. Unfortunately, her summary Read more…
As you probably gathered from the last post, our return from Germany was made less than pleasant by the incompetent nimrods that are US Airways. To show exactly what me and my wife went through at their hands, and hopefully to cost them as many reservations as possible, I am Read more…
Apparently, our vacation karma was confiscated by customs upon our return to the states. I have a travel tip for all of you. If you are given a choice between being sodomized by a rusty farm implement, and making a US Airways connection at Philadelphia International Airport, you are better Read more…
I’ve been gone for a while. Me and my wife combined our 10th wedding anniversary trip with the trip my wife’s German brass band was making to play around Germany and Austria. We rented a car, and drove around Bavaria and points south: Munich, Nuremberg, Vienna, Salzberg, Innsbruck, Füssen, and Read more…
Here’s a tip, if you can’t be bothered to write your own query letter, what makes you think your writing is salable? Writing a query is writing, this is the skill you are attempting to sell. If you can’t sell your skill at writing by writing something, that should tell Read more…
A comment about my post about the query letter spam I received suggested I make a few comments about what a good query letter might look like. Now, since I’m not an editor or an agent, I only have direct experience with two successful query letters. Both my own. I Read more…
I just sold another sort story, “Family Photos,” to yet another Marty Greenberg / John Helfers anthology (The same people who put together Man vs. Machine it’s out now, you should buy a copy) titled Future Americas. The story is a meditation on crime, victimization, art and celebrity— which has Read more…