It Just Ain't Happenin'

As late as one month ago, I thought I could still pull off my goal of 52 stories in 2010 and a flurry of activity ensued. Then life straightened my ass out again. I won't bore you with a litany of excuses, I'm just letting you know it ain't happenin'. If I can't do that, I have no idea how I'll make my ultimate goal after which this blog is named. However, I'm not fretting at the moment. I'm still moving in that direction and If I end up being like one of those marathon runners who limp over the finish line fourteen hours after everyone else has left, I'll be okay with that.

That being said, this has still been the most successful year ever for my writing career, so you're not going to hear too much bitching from me. I haven't really gone into my health, but about a month and a half ago I found out I was zooming down that slope into all those middle-age fat diseases and decided I wasn't going to have any of it. I've dropped twenty-five pounds since then. Everybody was telling me how great I looked yesterday. Once I drop the remaining twenty-five, they'll only be talking to each other: "Jesus, Matt looks sickly!" Normal looks sickly to Americans..

Gord Zajac, the swell guy who edited my story Fluff and Buttons on the Teddy Bear Range for Chizine was nudging me about a novel the other day and I told him, "Not now," and then pulled out an incomplete novel and started digging into it. Don't anybody get your hopes up.

I'm reading some Raymond Carver right now as I have a couple of stories in suspension that could really benefit from his influence.

If you need some Fiction Crawler in your life, head over to this week's StarShipSofa. I apologize for talking so damn fast in it. I didn't realize it until I listened to it in comparison with everyone else. You also get a story by Pat Cadigan, the First Lady of Cyberpunk!

Aural Delights No 159 Pat Cadigan & Jason Sanford

Coming Up This Week

Announcements: Larry Santoro on StaShipSofa Stories Vol 2

Fact: Fiction Crawler by Matthew Sanborn Smith:

Main Fiction: Life on Earth by Pat Cadigan

Fact: Looking Back at Science Fiction by Amy H Sturgis

Serial: Sublimation Angels Pt 2 by Jason Sanford

Fact: Everything by Morgan Saletta

Promo: Schlock Magazine

Narrators: Cheryl Martin, Josh Roseman

Fiction Crawler Links:

In Pacmandu by Lavie Tidhar

Michelangelo’s Chisel by Christopher Miller

The Strega Cristobel and the Old Rattler Ken by Larry Santoro

Daughter Earth by James Morrow Pt 1

Daughter Earth by James Morrow Pt 2

Elegy for a Young Elk by Hannu Rajaniemi

Yellow Card man by Paolo Bacigalupi

Free Major Karnage E-Book!

YOU ONLY HAVE UNTIL AUGUST 25TH!

Hurry over to here: http://news.wowio.com/fb01/ Like Wowio on Facebook and get a free e-book edition of Gord Zajac's ass-kicking Major Karnage! I posted about this a few months back and I'm reposting the vid here to remind you how crazy awesome it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxRQXQCef_U

Second Mission

I always had a second mission in mind for this blog, after the flash-fiction-a-day went away, but I never got to it officially. I like to turn people on to cool stuff. When I'm not talking about my writing here, I'm going to try to link to something that I think is cool and want to share with you. A lot of people I know who have lives and don't spend them here always ask me, "Where do you find this stuff?" Which makes me happy because I know that I'm introducing them to something they wouldn't have already found.

Now you people reading this, you don't have lives and you may already have seen the cool things that I have, but it's unlikely you've seen everything that I have. So you may gain something from this. Between this and writing updates, I hope to post something new every day. We'll see how that goes.

My editor at Chiaroscuro, Gord Zajac, was kind enough to list my teddy bear story as one of his top five at Chizine. Read his post here, and by all means check out those other stories as well:

http://gordzajac.typepad.com/and_in_conclusion_i_hate_/2010/05/my-five-favourite-chizine-stories.html

That wasn't the cool thing. That was just self-serving.

The cool thing is that Gord has a new novel out from ChiZine Publications, called Major Karnage and it sounds like a hell of a lot of fun. You can buy a copy of the limited press run here: http://chizine.com/chizinepub/books/major-karnage.php And, no, the cool thing isn't going to be something you have to buy all the time. I'm not making a penny off of it. But you can enjoy the following, as I have. This is Gord reading from the first four pages of the book. It's a blast: