161

Catching up. Story 161 of the One-Thousand was completed and shipped out a month ago. It's called, An Unwanted Distribution of Souls. A Mall in Las Cruces, and it came about when Cerberus was tossing around thoughts for a magazine submission. For one reason or another, things didn't turn out the way we planned (which could be said about all lives everywhere). The mandate from Grant Stone was to do a mash-up of Michael Moorcock and Hunter S. Thompson. Unwanted Distribution was my initial contribution to the project (which may still happen, but later than planned). With the okay of the other two heads of Cerberus, I pulled mine out, made a few tweaks and fired it off.

The Fun Side Of Cannibalism

Cover art copyright © 2014 Galen Dara

Hey there! Because of a little technical difficulty yesterday, you'll be getting a Dritty doubleshot from New Zealand today! The first is Steve Sepp, Tasty! Tasty! (number 128 of the One-Thousand) which you'll find at Grant Stone's blog here: http://d1sc0r0b0t.blogspot.co.nz/2014/11/the-dritty-doesen-is-here.html 

The second comes later today, barring more technical difficulties. Can you manage your anticipation? Well, act like you can't!

Dada's Home

Edited 9-26-14: Changed "employer" to "owner" below, which is not only more correct, but more interesting.

If I haven't mentioned it before, I am now: I'm a member of an authorial conglomeration known as Cerberus, along with Dan Rabarts and Grant Stone. Cerberus' first piece of fiction is now available in issue 60 of Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, which you can buy here, at least for a month or so after I've posted this. Because the link refers to the latest issue, rather than issue 60, I assume the link will get you to future issues someday.

The story is called Dada (number 141 of The One-Thousand). It's dieselpunk mixed with a bit of the surreal. Set in the seventh year of an alternate World War I, the story takes place during an invasion of England by German forces. Our hero, Dada, is a robot who must rescue his kidnapped son with help from the lad's human mother, who is also Dada's employer owner. Yes, you've got it right. The story explores the role of an intelligent robotkind in a madly destructive human society. Check it out. An e-copy is only five Australian bucks, whatever that comes to. I hope it doesn't come to seven-hundred and thirty-two American dollars. It probably doesn't. That's rather specific.

The Story Behind Three Kingdoms

Happy Independence Day, Americans!

My story, Three Kingdoms was just published at Kaleidotrope. It's number 95 of The One-Thousand. Go read it here: http://www.kaleidotrope.net/home/three-kingdoms-by-matthew-sanborn-smith/ and then come back and read what went into the making of the story after the jump.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

147

I got 147 off while it was still January, but I sometimes forgot, sometimes didn't feel like mentioning it here. Now it's 3:45 am, I'd really like to sleep, but that's not happening. I don't feel like creating and I don't even feel like consuming, so here I am.

147 is only partly mine. It was another joint effort by Cerberus, and I am part of that joint. That's all I have to say about that .

The Novel, She Is Done

I just finished my first novel, By Any Other Form, and shipped it off to New York to find its way in the world. This is number 139 in The One-Thousand, and boy, does it feel good to change that tally again. This was the longest thing I've ever done (90,000 words, a year and a half of my life) and I feel the best thing I've ever done. Grant Stone tells me I should throw a party. At the moment, I'll settle for a shower.

In the immortal words of Ned Flanders, "Godspeed, little doodle."

Everything's Coming Up Stones

Which are much more dependable and durable than roses. I'm talking about friend-of-blog (sounds like something the Hulk would say. Blog Smash!) Grant Stone, who had one hell of a month and I'm here to pass along the fruits of his hard work, to your good fortune.

I already told you about his story at Strange Horizons, Young Love on the Run from the Federal Alien Administration New Mexico Division (1984) and I just told you again.

Plus, issue #2 of his awesome fanzine, b0t, came out. You can download it as well as #1 here: http://b0tzine.com/

And then after that, his steampunky story, A Ruby in Rain appeared in audio at The Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences. Listen here, you! http://www.ministryofpeculiaroccurrences.com/2011/05/17/tales-from-the-archives-six/

What's more, Grant's story, When Her Wings, is part of the Tales for Canterbury anthology to help New Zealand earthquake relief efforts along with stories by heavy hitters like Neil Gaiman, Gwyneth Jones, Jay Lake, Jeff VanderMeer and Sean Williams. But of course, you'll want it for Grant. Buy that (cheap) here: http://randomstatic.net/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=1_10&products_id=51

By this point I feel like I'm writing hearts all over my notebook with Grant's name in them. But wait, there's more! Can you believe it?

On top of all that, Grant's story, Wood, has been chosen to appear in the first volume of The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror! No link yet, but when there is one, you'll see it on this blog.

Shit, man, you knocked it out of the park with this month. Here's wishing you scads more like this one!

And if you guys, hadn't figured it out yet, this is a writer you'll want to follow. Say, "Hi," here: http://d1sc0r0b0t.blogspot.com/

Young Love on the Run from the Federal Alien Administration New Mexico Division (1984)

I'm in the middle of scheduling a new Mango post, but I have to drop that and everything else for the moment, because I just discovered that friend of mine and The One-Thousand, Grant Stone, has a new story up at Strange Horizons! Whoo! If you don't know science fiction, let me just say that Strange Horizons is, in my opinion, the best online text science fiction magazine there is. Of all my Fiction Crawler recommendations, I've chosen more stories from Strange Horizons than any other source. That's an awesome win for him.

Go read it and be entertained! http://www.strangehorizons.com/2011/20110509/younglove-f.shtml

Helping Christchurch

As of this writing, the numbers I'm seeing on the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand are 113 dead and hundreds still missing. If you want to lend a hand, here's the website for the Red Cross http://www.redcross.org.nz/ . Make a donation, help some folks out.

Also, If you're a geek and want something cool in exchange for your donation, check this out: Drive Thru RPG is offering up something like 41 role playing pdf files for just $20.00 to help out the Red Cross. Grant Stone tweeted last night that they've raised $10,000 so far. If you're interested, go here: http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=88713&it=1&SRC=Newsletter

A Body Is For Driving

Go read my latest story, A Body is for Driving, in Grant Stone's sparkly new fanzine, b0t. http://b0tzine.com/ Its beautiful cover is by Ashley Storrie.

b0t is published as an epub file, meaning you can read it on the plastic reading device of your choice. If that device happens to be a big-ass computer, Firefox has an add-on called, strangely enough, EPUBreader, which works pretty well.

Now go enjoy and you can tell me how wonderful I am later.

The Ones That Got Away

You can listen to my latest story, The Ones That Got Away (64 in the canon), on this week's episode of StarShipSofa. It's narrated by my golden-voiced chum, Grant Stone. There's other good stuff on the show that you can also listen to.






Aural Delights No 158 Jason Sanford & Jeff Carlson

StarShipSofa Stories Vol 2

Coming Up This Week

Announcements: StaShipSofa Stories Vol 2

Flash Fiction: The One That Got Away by Matthew Sanborn Smith

Interview: Jeff Calson

Main Fiction: Meme by Jeff Carlson

StarShipSofa Interrogations: China Meiville

Serial: Sublimation Angels Pt 1 by Jason Sanford

Narrators: Mike Boris, Josh Roseman

Now I Am A Gazelle

If you missed my prancing, see here: http://theonethousand.blogspot.com/2010/07/prancing-through-bookstore.html

A couple of days ago, a guy at the store asked for something and as we walked back to get it he said, "Man, you must have been an athlete. You move like a gazelle!" Certainly the first time I've ever heard those words. And I'm quite confident that he wasn't hitting on me. If this keeps up, people will demand to see video of me walking around.

The magnificent Harlan Ellison says that he is dying: http://www.isthmus.com/isthmus/article.php?article=30610 Which makes me a sad gazelle. You can listen to my open letter to Harlan Ellison on this subject here at the very beginning of the latest episode of StarShipSofa's Aural Delights: http://www.starshipsofa.com/20100929/aural-delights-no-156-robert-reed/

If you want to read my latest published work, head over to Twitter where Grant Stone's embryonic fanzine, b0t, is tweeting my Twitter serial, CITY1. One part is being released each day in October. Look: http://twitter.com/b0tzine If you're not familiar with Twitter, you'll have to read those posts (marked with the hashtag #CITY1) from the bottom up.

Maisy's Many Souls

My latest story, Maisy's Many Souls (number 75 of The One-Thousand) is available in GUD magazine's issue #6! You can score yourself a copy here: http://www.gudmagazine.com/vault/6

So you know, It's not one of my happy/funny/pleasant stories which Mango fans might expect.

I often like to do the story behind the story, which I'll do here and now. You can come back and read this after you've read the story if you want, there are some minor spoilers here.

The story behind Maisy's Many Souls

I come up with story ideas in a lot of ways, one way being to write a bunch of silly sounding phrases down and see if they inspire something. This time, one of the things I wrote was, "Maisy had jars," and I looked at that and wondered what Maisy had in those jars. I decided she had souls in those jars and then I decided they were on circuit boards.

I wanted a little conflict so I created a human rights guy (that's the technical term) who wants to protect those souls and he's got a partner. Maybe they're a different sort of partners. Then I wanted to throw one more element in to make things interesting. His partner makes sculptures out of light. And that was it. I was off to the races with four or five sentences. If you've read the story, you'll know there's one more rather major idea, but that wouldn't come to me until later.

I wrote a huge chunk of this story on my AlphaSmart 3000 while waiting around at my job while off the clock because I had ordered my iPod and had it sent there to avoid shenanigans. So one of the things I did while waiting for FedEx was to hole myself up in an office and write. This worked marvelously because there were no distractions and no internet and I wrote some great stuff. I was in a flow which was mostly dialogue. Once I get into conflict, it's usually all dialogue in the first draft and then I fill in other stuff later. I realized something was happening in this story, I had risen above the plateau I'd been on for quite some time. Something new and interesting was coming out of me and the characters were coming alive.

I realized something else. I was onto some dark shit. It wasn't horror, but I was getting inside these people and not liking what was there. The whole story made me uncomfortable and when I reread it two weeks ago, not having read it for fifteen months, it still made me feel uncomfortable. I showed it around and got some really positive reactions but everyone agreed that one of the characters made a decision near the end that just wasn't believable.

My thanks to friend and writing compadre Grant Stone who gave me the solution. I immediately forgot it, tried a couple of things and finally hit on something that worked. It was only after I went back to Grant's e-mail that I found I had done exactly what he told me.

Thanks to Colleen Leong who liked the story so much she made me believe it was really good.

Thanks to the gang at GUD magazine, a very nice bunch of people with whom I hope I can work in the future.

Finally, thanks to Mike Ramshaw who passed away earlier this year. Mike was a co-worker (Like Colleen) and a dear friend and I loved him. I wish I could have given him a big hug before he died. Mike was a great writer who never got around to sending his work out to publishers. He was the best first reader any writer could ask for. He questioned everything from the use of a particular semi-colon to the major themes of a story and everything in between. And he wasn't afraid to tell you when something was awful. His extensive notes and our ensuing discussion helped flesh out lots of little details in Maisy. Maisy's kitchen came alive because of Mike and the Kiss-Me-Quick T shirt was all his.

Thanks, Mike.

The Salt Line

Go check out The Salt Line by my friend, Grant Stone, in text or audio right here (for free!):
http://www.wilywriters.com/blog/?p=1015

I have something nifty coming up. I'll tell you about it sometime in the next couple of days.

You Tweeted Me, You Tweeted Me

Hey! I just sold The Creepy Little Mailbox Man to Everyday Weirdness! Yay! It should be up on March 22nd for your eyeing pleasure.

If you're wondering about the title of this post, first off, you have to sing it to the tune of Anne Murray's You Needed Me. Secondly, it's there because people were tweeting lots of things I wanted to share.

@paolobacigalupi linked to this excellent article: The Gospel of Consumption.
For the past couple of months I've been asking people and just plain wondering, in light of what we see in the economy, is it impossible to run a healthy economy in which people can also save their money? I had my suspicions about how it could work and this article confirms them. Our economy today is based on businesses which want to make as much money as possible and consumers who feel the need to buy way more than they need. Dump as much money as you want into the system and it will all flow to the top given our current behaviors. Of course, when we dump all the money into the top in the first place, the people don't even get their products, they're by-passed completely. So, please, if you want to save, do so. Empowering the current economic model to screw you isn't your responsibility.

@expatpaul tweeted a link to this, and when you think about it, it fits in the last item. The media convinces us that what the government and corporations want is good for us:

Nobody tweeted this, but I think I might:
The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same. - Stendhal

@jfmarchini tied it all together in a brilliant summation by Bill Watterson (It's a Calvin and Hobbes comic so click on it already): https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiV-UaiqGZYeP1MA-4BtAqxBMCGeo4GBBG5WGX76bGITYyfL7rBQpNZjI7Kp_vfyeU_Vj0UQiFnaKLPEZ89MoyP66a-Z2WRgaVbiVGq7BjR9UuzRqoCyVtJPTe3GLOumrePS4d/s1600-h/CalvinHobbs.BM

And on a fun, non-economic note:
@steveattwitter turned me on to this yesterday. Found it on youtube through HuffPo so I could embed it today and it seems to be popping up all over the web. Steve is a trend setter:


Lastly, I worked an early shift today and my co-manager turned on the 8os Muzak before we opened the store. I heard this song which I hadn't heard in over twenty-five years and had forgotten it even existed. It's a wonderful little thing to rediscover something like that:


I've got sheep, I've got Split Enz. Grant's going to think this is all about him. I just realized I mentioned Calvin and Hobbes and Stendhal in the same post. I'm the living embodiment of Generation X.

Hoo-Ha!

91: State of Being
92: Just Another Day at the Job
93: A Question of Benefits

Hoo-Ha!

I know they're all shorties, a tweet and two flashes, but I'm having a good time. Soon I'll get back to my longer babies, I'm certain.

Congrats to The One-Thousand friend (and mine too) Grant Stone on his Julius Vogel Award Nomination! (Picture Kermit the Frog's flailing limbs. Yaaaaaaaay!)

Here's one for all the ladies. Go to 1:00 if you want to skip the annoying guy and go straight to the song:

A Thaumatropic Orgy!

I sold my two stories to Thaumatrope today. Yay! One was a Valentine's Day story. My man Church sold one as well and I think they're giving Grant his own spinoff magazine. As an aside, Church doesn't seem to want to follow me. Is it my bottom? Because if it is, I'm perfectly fine with him following me from the front.

I just wrote and sent in two more stories. They're now calling for St. Patrick's Day stories. Now understand, I don't title the stories in my submissions. Those are precious characters I cannot spare (each of today's stories were precisely one-hundred and forty characters). But for the purpose of The One-Thousand, I have to title them. To tell them apart if for no other reason. I'm not going to call them something like: Untitled (The one about the guy with the thing). Today's stories were: Again With the Green Beer (79) and Unlucky (80).

Michael Swanwick shares a wonderful anecdote about Galileo's Finger. Scroll down a tad. It's there. And Diane turned me onto Nicola Griffith's interesting new project. Check it out, you might want to get involved.

My Life's Goal Has Just Been Turned On Its Head

There's a new magazine in town called Thaumatrope and it publishes on Twitter. That's right, Twitter, the land where no post can exceed one-hundred and forty characters. I just learned about it a couple of days ago on John Scalzi's blog. He did an interview there. My compadre, Grant Stone, has pounced on this and asked me just an hour ago if I'd submitted. I checked into it and I've already submitted two stories.

Here's where it gets stupid.

Given my my rules at the onset of The One-Thousand, these stories count toward my goal. Hell, Thaumatrope is even a paying market! Given all this, I could conceivably meet my goal in a few months time, rather than ten years. By the way, for those of you keeping track: Bright Idea (Number 77) and Sweetheart (Number 78). This isn't exactly what I had in mind, but that was the goal. This changes everything. I'll have to rethink.

How does The Ten-Thousand sound to everyone?

Classin' This Dump Up

I had the weekend from Heck. It gave weekends a bad name.

Welcome, Grant! Those followers are really rolling in now. To show Grant what a classy joint we run here at The One-Thousand, I present the following:

UPDATE: Damn it! NBC must have come down on youtube. Most versions are gone and embedding on this one is disabled. For some reason, I can still link to it. Well, we'll see how long the link lasts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pXfHLUlZf4