Black Dog: A Biography

Cool Things

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My parents read my blog. I’m still having trouble adjusting to that thought, as evidenced by the impulse to ring them when cool stuff happens since, in days gone by, they’ve remain unconnected to any of my primary methods of disseminating “check it out, cool stuff* happening” type news. These days they get to find out about it with the rest of you:

Cool Thing the First: Apex Magazine has announced the line-up for their forthcoming print anthology, Descended from Darkness

I’m in it, apparently. Which is pretty cool given that my story hasn’t yet made it up as a part of the magazine yet (I may show up in May, I suspect, given the trading-around of line-edits and bios we’ve been doing). The rambunctious Jason Fischer is included as well, making this the second time we’ve shared a Table of Contents.

Cool Thing the Second: Interstitial Arts Foundation Call for Artists

Back when the first interfictions anthology was released the IAF had an fund-raising auction featuring artwork/music/interstitial art based upon some of the stories within the anthology. Now they’re putting out a call to artists/musicians/etc to participate in a second one. Their Call for Artists page features fragments from all the stories in the Interfictions II anthology (including mine), plus the opportunity to grab a sneak peak at one of the stories. I tend to think this is the stuff of coolness, myself, but I’ve got a fairly obvious bias here.

*and in difference to the fact that my parents are reading, I just totally edited out the word I originally used there.

The Day-to-Day Glamour of writing…

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I’ve spent the last twenty-four hours in a line-edit quandary: should the word Frisbee be capitalised? Theoretically it probably should – Frisbee is a registered trademark of Wham-O toys – but I’m pretty sure that I’m not actually using Frisbee to refer to an actual Frisbee, instead using it as a common term for what should technically be called a flying disc (I didn’t even know it was a trademarked term prior to this, but there you go – apparently there’s even been a bit of a barney between Wham-O and other folks about this).

Since I really do need to be making a call on sending this back sometime soon, I’ve just spent the last hour capitalising and de-capitalising the F’s when they appear in the story. Consider this a desperate plea for help if you want to weigh in on either side of the argument.

Latest from the wordmines…

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Now that the TOC has been made public over on Delia Sherman’s LJ we’ve been told we can go crazy with the blog announcements: I sold my story, Black Dog: A Biography, to Interfictions 2.

The complete Table of Contents looks something like this:

Jeffrey Ford, “The War Between Heaven and Hell Wallpaper”
M. Rickert, “Beautiful Feast”
Will Ludwigsen, “Remembrance is Something Like a House”
Cecil Castelucci, “The Long and the Short of Long-Term Memory”
Alaya Johnson, “The Score”
Ray Vukcevich, “The Two of Me”
Carlos Hernandez, “The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria”
Lavie Tidhar, “Shoes”
B. F. Slattery, “Interviews After the Revolution”
Elizabeth Ziemska, “Count Poniatowski and the Beautiful Chicken”
Peter M. Ball, “Black Dog: A Biography”
Camilla Bruce, “Berry Moon”
Amelia Beamer, “Morton Goes to the Hospital”
William Alexander, “After Verona”
Alan DeNiro, “(*_*) ~~~ (-_-): The Warp and the Woof”
Nin Andrews, “The Marriage”
Theodora Goss, “Child-Empress of Mars”
Lionel Davoust, “L’Ile Close” (“The Enclosed Island” or “No-Exit Island” or something else we haven’t thought of yet)
Stephanie Shaw, “Afterbirth”
David J. Schwartz, “The 121”

<Insert a long sequence of joyful stammering and nervous hyperventilating here>