Ethan, #20: Congratulations, Patrick and anyone else on that list who might be reading!
Thanks!
And congratulations, Patrick!
There's a small error in the novelette category. "The Djinn's Wife" was published in Asimov's, unless I'm mistaken.
Josh Benton has created a check-in site at http://www.katrinacheckin.org.
Doesn't he look kind of squamous to you guys?
My wife and I went to a Daily Show taping last night, where Jon Stewart made the point that Bush is the only president who looks better 4½ years into his presidency than he did when he took office.
Laura and I voted this morning at 7:30. I swear to God, standing in line in front of the voting booth felt as close to going to church to me as I've felt since ... well, since I believed in going to church.
In reference to queries about what the dog may or may not have done in the backyard, we've come up with a shorthand designation at our house: "Number Three." This, of course, encodes success for both "Number One" and "Number Two," which are themselves bits.
A completely unproductive session is "Number Zero."
Xopher, an explanation is not an apology. Not that I was looking for or expecting the latter.
About a year and a half ago, I stumbled across the web site of a SFWA member I had never heard of but who had published big piles of potboilers. On his page of writing advice, I encountered the following:
Contracts are unnecessary for articles or short stories.
Startled, I wrote to the fellow and offered my option that he might just be spreading bad and even dangerous advice around to inexperienced writers. He assured me that he had published a dozen short stories in big mags and had only signed a contract once.
So I took the question to a SFWA newsgroup that I knew the fellow read. I did not identify him by name but simply asked if anyone else thought it was good advice. The response was overwhelmingly what you might expect, though one or two of the pros there allowed as how that wasn't always the case.
Note, I did not use the fellow's name in any public post. He outed himself. He posted to the newsgroup and said, in essence, "My slip is showing. I wrote those guidelines a dozen years ago and it looks as if I failed to update them when I posted them to the web. Now I have."
In private correspondence to me he said this:
When people that I know, and respect, like [so and so], [this and such], [whatshername], etc., all so firmly disagree with me on a writing matter, whether it is business or artistic, it only makes sense for me to listen to their more knowledgeable opinions.
Grrrr. Thanks for letting me get that off my chest.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 1 |
| 2007 | 1 |
| 2005 | 2 |
| 2004 | 4 |
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