A favorite anthology: 100 Great Fantasy Short-Short Stories.

Talking to a friend on Twitter... I remembered this book, the anthology 100 Great Fantasy Short-Short Stories.

Edited by Isaac Asimov, Terry Carr, and Martin Greenberg.  I miss you all, guys.  Thanks for collecting so many stories for us all!

I love this antho.  Here's the TOC.


Some of my very favorites:

• "Angelica" by Jane Yolen
• "Apocryphal Fragment" by Edward Wellen
• "But Not the Herald" by Roger Zelazny
• "Controlled Experiment" by Rick Conley
• "Deadline" by Mel Gilden
• "Final Version" by John Morressy
• "Pharaoh's Revenge" by C. Bruce Hunter
• "Some Days Are Like That" by Bruce J. Balfour

I'm fond of an awful lot of them -- my copy pops open to certain pages from frequent reading.  But the book's in storage, so I had to recollect titles from memory.  Some are dark, some are funny, some are wicked, some are clever...

I'd recommend any of these to you.  If you can read the rest, do.  :D  They're like potato chips -- can you just have one??


Thanks to Robert Sawyer for kindly having the TOC on hand!

Voting: Dirty Tricks Dept.

So, is this a triumph of OCD, or something else?


Something came in the mail marked as Absent Voter Ballot.

My family's all applied for our absentee voter ballots.  My mother was going to give this ballot application to a friend of hers...

I said she should make sure this ballot was valid first.

She called the township clerk and discovered that  it was NOT valid.  Any ballot application must say Absentee Voter Ballot.


FYI:  Both my parents work local elections.

This application claimed to be from the MEA, and it could not have been, the real MEA would have offered a valid absentee ballot application to its members.  How  do I know that?  Well, to start with, the MEA is for educators.

Welcome to defrauding the voters of America, 2012 edition.


Make sure you check when your ballot has to be in this year!  Call your township clerk, ask friends, hit Google -- do whatever you need to do.

If you haven't registered to vote, please PLEASE go do it.  Don't let yourself get cheated out of your vote.  Voting is your right; exercise it!

Some Buried Caesar

Some Buried Caesar is one of my very favorite Nero Wolfe books by Rex Stout.

I am very fond of a great deal of Caesar, but I had several spots marked in the library book as I read along. Here's three direct snippets... so you can see why! :D

Nero Wolfe

Come and help me admire stupidity.

Archie Goodwin

... whereupon I informed her that it was now working hours and that I would be moving through the throngs too energetically for pleasant companionship.  She stated that up to date she had failed to detect any taint of pleasantness in my make-up...

The throngs

They looked excited and purposeful, as if they had just had news of some prey that might be pounced on for dinner.

My fifth year.

Countering Bad Advice to Aspiring Writers.

Which I discovered through Justine, who wrote On the Differences Between Publishing Houses.

Interesting post about losing faith in creative staffing agencies from 2009.  My last temp assignment was in 2008.  Temp work is something I definitely don't miss.


This is my fifth anniversary as a freelancer.  Some days I look around and am amazed that somehow I did become an editor.

Other days I look at the stack I have to work on, and pry myself off Twitter.  :D

Thank you, as always, to all the people who helped me get here and who help me all the time:  my friends, my family, my authors, my editors and my publishers, and everyone else I may have missed here.

Happy September to you!

Nifty things I just learned about. :D

Interesting things I learned during recent research:

Exurbs.  About wind -- the Beaufort scale.

PR at OU and Van Halen: Balderdash!

There is a line.

It is fascinating that people who cry out "You are oppressing me!" often do not ever notice that they are the ones doing the oppressing. Or abusing.

Case in point: This guy.

Go ahead and quote Van Halen. But when you write an alleged "journal" of your thoughts like this, that is sexual predation. He knew it. When Corlett imagined a fictional warning from his instructor, he knew it was because he was being inappropriate and that he did this, knowing full well she would read it.

Some tidbits from Twitter, and Worldcon.

I'm back from Worldcon/Chicon 7!  Had such a fantastic, brilliant, amazing and lovely time.

No InterWeb (even Twitter!) was harmed by me during the convention either.  Amtrak did not purchase wifi for Michigan trains; so I couldn't Tweet, which is likely a good thing, as I had a comfortable coze on Thursday with friends en route, and rested a bit on my Monday train returning.