Where I Brag On My Girl

My daughter, Ivory, graduated eighth grade yesterday. She was valedictorian in a class of one-hundred and nineteen students. She won a reading award from her teacher, another award for a perfect score on the reading part of the FCAT (Florida's Comprehensive Assessment Test), and she won a Presidential award supposedly signed by the O-man himself. She's been accepted to a magnet school for the arts and she's challenging herself by taking on the toughest course of classes they have. This is all by her own initiative. The girl goes through books like other people change socks. I'm not only proud, I'm impressed.

My Sofanauts episode is up here: http://sofanauts.com/sofanauts/the-sofanauts-no-8 if you watched, you know the attempt at video went awry. If you didn't watch, you know the attempt at video went awry.

I mentioned two of my stories during the show, so if you've come here looking for them, here are links:

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Diplomat at Blood Blade and Thruster (I know, I posted it yesterday. Won't kill me to post it again.) : http://bbtmagazine.presspublisher.us/articles/THE_LONELINESS_OF_THE_LONG_DISTANCE_DIPLOMAT_06,3,

For the Love of Ceelie at Fusion Fragment:
http://www.apodispublishing.com/fusion/pages/09_ceelie.htm

I'm a bit pissed at myself for not entering the nanoism contest I mentioned the other day. I completely forgot about it. Hopefully one of you guys didn't forget and can wave some prize money in my fat face. But here's another contest: miniWORDS 2009. You can submit up to three 50 word stories by August 10th. The winner gets £250! Cor blimey! Don't forget this one, Matt!
http://miniwords2009.sharedspace.org/index.php

All Better Now!

Yay! Please enjoy my ridiculous story, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Diplomat, at Blood Blade and Thruster right now!
http://bbtmagazine.presspublisher.us/articles/THE_LONELINESS_OF_THE_LONG_DISTANCE_DIPLOMAT_06,3,

Once again, if you're around the Internet today (June 5th) at 11:30 AM Eastern Standard Time, check me out at http://www.starshipsofa.com/live/ as we record episode 8 (I think) of The Sofanauts, the audio of which you can enjoy on Saturday or anytime thereafter at http://sofanauts.com/

600!

No, not story 600, but blogpost 600.

Here's the link to my nanoism story: http://nanoism.net/stories/25/

I wanted to link to my story in Blood Blade and Thruster, but there's still some kinks to work out. See, I had some aliens communicating with each other telepathically and to distiguish telepathic thought from other stuff in the story, I put these greater than, less than brackets < > around the words. Here's the problem: html also uses those, and when you try to print a story with those brackets, nothing inside of the brackets shows up, because the stoopidheads at the Internet Board think those are secret instructions not to be shared with the public at large. And so, in my story right now at Blood Blade and Thruster, you get passages such as this:

Zek thought to his two companions.

thought Vron.

Krogar asked.

Which may lead whomever is reading it today to think, "What the fuck? This is some surreal shit!"

I sent an e-mail, alerting the staff to this and even sent another version of the story using square brackets [ ], so hopefully it will be fixed tomorrow and I can post the link here.

Here's a link I can safely post. Fiction Crawler 7 is up at StarShipSofa. Check it out:

http://www.starshipsofa.com/20090603/aural-delights-no-87-adam-troy-castro/

And on Friday we'll be recording the latest episode of Sofanauts. You can watch us, while we're recording, at the new LIVE page: http://www.starshipsofa.com/live/ at 11:30 AM Eastern Standard Time on June 5th. Check it out. It'll be unedited, so maybe someone will say a swear word!

Writers! Time's almost up for the nanoism nanofiction contest. Check it out:

http://nanoism.net/meta/nanoism-nanofiction-contest/

And John Joseph Adams is looking for stories to fill his anthology:

http://www.johnjosephadams.com/?p=1760

Good luck to all of you! That's it for now. Sleepy time is heading my way.

Maybes And Might Bes

I'm finishing up a flash fiction story called A Body is for Driving though I may change the title. I'm also still fooling around with chapters eleven and twelve of TIWOTAM. And I want ice cream.

Not much else is going on. I'll be on The Sofanauts in about a week and a half. I may be on Aural Delights next week with Fiction Crawler 7.

Also, I'm working on getting all my posts tagged here because there is a small but ferocious group of people following me who are only interested in the flash fiction I used to post here. So when I get that done, I'll let everyone know, then they can just search for the flash fiction tag and all of that will come up. I think I have over two hundred pieces of flash tucked away here. Golly!

A Bunch Of Things

Welcome new follower and fellow Twit, Meika! The army grows. Meika's a sculptor from Tasmania. Yes, that's a real place, Americans. If you follow him on Twitter (@meika) you know that he has a strange fondness for wallaby dung (no, really).

Here's some great music you can listen to online at NPR.org, probably for a limited time. It's a collaboration between Danger Mouse, Sparklehorse and David Lynch with lots of nifty guests like Iggy Pop and Frank Black among others. David Lynch sings! It's called Dark Night of the Soul. Just click the title, you'll get there. My favorite track is Star Eyes. Cool stuff!

Sent out story 111 yesterday, The Circle of Life. I took another stab at the novel (The Inner Workings of the Artificial Mind) today, reworking chapter 11 which was a confusing mess. I think I originally wrote it twice, with two different foci in mind and today I mashed it all together into one narrative string. I want to go back to it and reread it in a couple of days to make sure it doesn't completely suck, but it's done for today.

Also, I'm digging around in my head for a flash fiction idea for this contest. You writers out there may want to take a crack at it yourselves. There's money to be had! Yay, money! Not that I'm a whore, or anything. We prefer to call ourselves Ladies of the Night.

A nifty Sofanauts this week. Amy's on with Tony, Jeremy and Paul Raven. They talk Orson Scott Card, Star Trek, mundane science fiction and other geeky things.

That's all for now. Tomorrow, I'll post a poem for Memorial Day. Not my poetry, but some good stuff by a dead guy. You look at all the poetry out there and most of the good stuff seems to be written by dead people. Discrimination? You decide.

Real Enough

This is kind of a pisser. I can't embed this video. I guess I'll just link to it. Back in the days before MTV, HBO had a half-hour show called Video Jukebox on which they showed music videos. This was so long ago, we didn't even know what to call videos. I'd say to my friends, "Did you see that . . . You know those movies they play with the songs in them? That one for Blondie?" I was glad once they were named. It made things faster and I didn't sound like an idiot (at least not for that particular reason). Anywho, I first saw this video on Video Jukebox and I saw it enough that it hooked me and although I've hardly seen it at all since then, it's stuck with me. It's Real Enough by Doug and the Slugs. It starts off sounding like a Doo-Wop song, then gets kinda Ska and then they throw in some solo guitar you might hear in a hard rock tune and what it winds up as is very eighties. I still like it, maybe you will as well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6cGPpVGaQw

And here's the link to the first ever Sofanauts show. I'm happy to have been a part of it. Tony cleaned it up a bit in editing and Martyn's intro and outro are wonderful. Enjoy:
http://sofanauts.com/sofanauts/the-sofanauts-no-1

Sofa So Good

Guh.

Feel crappy right now. My one hour walk with the dog was cut to a half-hour due to rain. We got soaked. Now I'm blowing my nose a lot. I don't think I caught a cold or anything, we got back from the walk just twenty-five minutes ago, but the nose-blowing sucks.

Listen up for the first episode of The Sofanauts tomorrow. I'm on the show along with Tony, Jeremiah Tolbert and Damien Walters, yapping about the week in science fiction news. I'll post a link when the show pops up. It felt a bit more like work than I'd expected. maybe that's because I'm not used to working without a script. And Tony asked me about hitting that magical One-Thousand mark at fifty and I basically talked about how slow I've been and how it was a reasonable goal, which doesn't make sense at all. I neglected to mention that I'm picking up speed. But you make screw-ups. That's the fun of what's basically a single take. Anyway, I hope you guys like the show. Tony's already saying that he'd like me back sometime in the future so that's good. Hopefully I'll relax a bit more in the future.

I haven't mentioned stories 100 and 101 so let me do that here and now: Unhappy Day and The Boat are the newest members of the family.

Give a listen the latest Aural Delights on StarShipSofa. At the tail end you'll hear Fiction Crawler No. 6, a special on flash fiction online as suggested by obstinate non-follower Church.

Aural Delights No 80 James Lovegrove

Editorial: Sofanauts by Tony C Smith

Poetry: Epochs In Exile by Mike Allen & Charles Saplack

Fact: Science News by Jim Campanella

Main Fiction: Wings by James Lovegrove

Fact: Fiction Crawler by Matthew Sanborn Smith

Narrators: Nicola Seaton-Clark Kate Baker

This podcast is brought to you by Audible.com. Download a free audiobook of your choice today at audiblepodcast.com/sofa

Links to Fiction Crawler:

Colonists by Barry Napier
Homecoming by Jessica Melusine
Prairie Star by Cat Rambo
They Called Her Larry by Steve Duffy
Thaumatrope
Outshine
Nanoism
Six Word Stories