A Story in Estonian

My novelette "Dream of Venus," first published in 2000, is now out in Estonian (the first translation of any of my work in that language) in a special Venus issue of Täheaeg Magazine. Some good news for a change!

Soap Strata

My mother, a child of the Great Depression, was thrifty in a way I often found absurd. She wasn’t stingy and could be extremely generous, but she hated waste. She could make a meal out of scraps of food that we more careless people would have tossed before ordering take-out. Whenever a bar of bath soap had been worn down to a sliver, it ended up in a soap dish. Sometimes these pieces were pressed together and shaped into a ball, but more often they accumulated in a pile that soon looked like a miniature model of geologic strata.

When my mother died in 2018, I found myself collecting my own slivers of soap in what now seems like an unconscious ritual of mourning. “You never know when you might need this,” my mom used to say about some battered old pot or other worn out artifact. Now that I’m almost constantly washing my hands with a thin stratum of soap, I know how right she was.

In case anyone is curious....

.... I am well and staying at home, living as hermetically as possible, as is my partner, George Zebrowski. As it was a pleasant spring day yesterday, I took a short walk then, the first for some time, of a couple of blocks to my bank and then to the grocery store for a bunch of bananas, but made sure to keep the requisite six feet away from my pals, the bank manager and produce guy, putting up my hands palms out to show them I had my protective gloves on while they nodded at me and feeling as though we were all simulacra, or zombies, going through our usual greetings. Don't plan to go out for a while now and don't really have to---there's nowhere to go anyway with just about everything shut down--unless the weather is good enough to take a walk around the neighborhood while keeping well away from anybody else who's out. To everyone out there, stay safe and healthy.

"His Two Wars"

A new story of mine, "His Two Wars," is available in Short Things, an anthology of stories based on John W. Campbell's classic novella "Who Goes There?", the basis for both the 1951 and 1982 movies entitled The Thing. My story brings two of that story's characters, MacReady and Norris, to Hawaii on December 6, 1941. A Kindle edition of Short Things is out from Amazon and the trade paperback edition can be ordered from Wildside Press here (in the U.S.) and here (for international orders).

Odds and Ends: An Update

A writer I know describes posting on a blog as "speaking into a void," but in the hope that someone out there might be listening, here's an update. I finished a new story of some 8,000 words, "His Two Wars," and it's been paid for and scheduled for an anthology that hasn't yet been published. I also wrote an introduction to a new collection of short fiction by my friend and fellow writer, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. If you're unfamiliar with Quinn's writing, here's what Peter Straub has to say in praise of her work: "Chelsea Quinn Yarbro is one of our finest writers and craftspersons, incapable of a sloppy sentence, a slack paragraph, or a fuzzy thought." 

And my novelette "Dream of Venus" (2000) is apparently going to be translated into Estonian, my first publication in that language. More about these bits of news when I have more details. In the meantime, I'm writing what may turn out to be a piece of short fiction, although I've had short stories grow into novels in the past.

As for news that isn't so vague, Open Road Media, which has almost all of my fiction available as e-books, has launched an "author follow" feature, so if you are interested in following me there, go to this page and click on "Follow" for news from them about my books and writing. All three volumes of my Seed Trilogy are still available from Tor.