Monthly Archives: January 2013

January Madness!

Good news for the new year:  Mad Scientist Journal accepted my story “Evolutionary Tendencies Observed in the Callentradian Snare.”  

Publication date is TBA.  I’ll announce here as soon as I know.

I’m grateful to editors Jeremy Zimmerman and Dawn Vogel for helping me start 2013 off on a positive note.

About the story:  it’s a flash piece so I won’t say too much, just that I had a first person character/narrator bumping around in my head, but I didn’t yet have a story.   I discovered Mad Scientist Journal while pondering Duotrope’s responses.  I bopped around the site for a bit reading the “scientific papers by mad scientists” and noting some familiar author names.

The idea of writing such a piece sounded like much good fun, so in the spirit of mad science, I decided to embark on an experiment.  Not all experiments end so well, but within a short time I had free-associated myself into the notion that my orphan character/narrator was in fact a scientist.  And that his own brand of madness had visited him.

The “mad” twist threw the switch on my nascent idea and the story rumbled to life.  Thanks again to Jeremy and Dawn.

I suppose there’s a lesson in here somewhere under the heading “writing for [a particular] market.”


Tweet Tweet

My first 2013 resolution was to get this site up and running. My second was to set up a Twitter account. That one’s in the done column as of today.

In the span of just two weeks, I’ve gone from no web and social media presence under my pen name to two. Yay me.

The Twitter sign-up made me pick some folks to follow. I started with a handful, only a few of whom I know (virtually, not personally). My colleagues in my day job don’t do Twitter, or if they do they haven’t fessed up to it. My personal friends are mostly Facebook users, and my professional network uses LinkedIn. Whenever I’ve dipped into Twitter to this point it’s been out of sheer voyeurism to see what folks I admire are saying.

I don’t know how much I’ll tweet, if at all. I signed up mainly because it seemed another way for people in the SF/F world to find me should they so desire.

So here’s the obligatory link if you want to find me on Twitter.  My son helped me pick my avatar.  It’s a shot I took from inside a sea cave in Hawaii, which I think has a speculative feel.  Here’s a bigger version of it:

Now that I compare the larger version with the miniscule avatar one, I’m thinking I should have this as the banner instead and pick another avatar.  One that wears tiny a bit better.

And now for something completely different. I picked up a copy of The Sweet and Sour Tongue by Leslie What the other day and literally couldn’t put it down.  I carried it with me everywhere from the kid’s Kung Fu lesson to lunch out with the fam. I only managed to peel it from my hot little fists after I’d consumed the entire thing.  I kept thinking, yes!  I want to write stories like this!

A while back, a workshop classmate mentioned that UCLA Extension had a worthwhile magical realism workshop online.  I went to the UCLA Extension site to see if that class was available (I was too late to sign up this session) but I came across Ms. What’s name in the roster of teachers.  Unfortunately, she isn’t listed as teaching any upcoming workshops.

I hope that changes soon.

ETA:  My avatar is now my actual face with an unusual blue cast from the room’s lighting when I was futzing with the web cam.  Seemed to go with the sea cave so I kept it.  Heh.

JJRoth