Month: May 2015

April 2015

In April, I again read just two books.

With Terry Pratchett’s passing in March, I decided to finally read all of the Discworld novels, as sort of my project for the year. Sadly, that’s completely do-able, now that it’s a finite number of books, the 41st and last out due out this fall. At the rate I’m reading, though, it’ll likely carry me over into 2016. Thus far, I’ve re-read The Colour of Magic and read for the first time The Light Fantastic. I liked both books, despite all the people say those are his weaker ones, and that you shouldn’t start there. That just means I have the really good ones still to look forward to. I started Equal Rites this morning, but that’s May, and will have to wait for next time.

I watched four movies.

First, the generically titled Animal, which I link to not to encourage you to watch it — don’t — but because it’s so generic a title I need to explain which movie it actually was. This was a terrible 2014 horror movie, only made enjoyable but watching (and mocking) it over Twitter with friends, chosen because it was looked so terrible.

Better movies for the month included the rather appropriately titled Blue Ruin, which starts with a strong, simple premise: what if you took one of those “man uses specialized skills to exact revenge” movies and took away the skills? It also included Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, which was odd — the only Martin Scorcese movie that was ever spun-off into a sitcom — and Furious Seven, which, honestly, was one of the most enjoyable movies I’ve ever seen. Pure ridiculousness on every level, but so much fun because of that.

I read thirty-four short stories, not including those I’m reading for Kaleidotrope or for my on-going writing workshop. Favorites include:

  • “All That We Carry, All That We Hold” by Damien Angelica Walters (Fantastic Stories of the Imagination)
  • “I am Graalnak of the Vroon Empire, Destroyer of Galaxies, Supreme Overlord of the Planet Earth. Ask Me Anything” by Laura Pearlman (Flash Fiction Online)
  • “Stay” by Daniel José Older (Fireside Fiction)
  • “When the Circus Lights Down” by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny)
  • “Ishq” by Usman Malik (Nightmare)
  • Among the Thorns” by Veronica Schanoes (Tor.com)
  • “Come My Love and I’ll Tell You a Tale” by Sunny Moraine (Shimmer)
  • “Among the Sighs of the Violoncellos” by Daniel Ausema (Strange Horizons)
  • “The Sorcerer’s Unattainable Gardens” by A. Merc Rustad (Daily Science Fiction)
  • “Dr. Polingyouma’s Machine” by Emily Devenport (Uncanny)

And as always I listened to some music:

April was a pretty ordinary month, otherwise. In retrospect, from the tinged-with-sadness place I am right now at the very start of May, it was actually pretty damn good.

New fiction: “The Raven”

In happier news, my short story, “The Raven” was published this week in Lakeside Circus:

In a warehouse in Manhattan, there is a raven that can talk, and if you ask it a question, any question at all, it will tell you the answer, no matter how strange or impossible that might seem to be.

This is actually my first piece of published fiction since 2010 — that kind of is for lack of trying — and I’m really happy to be in the issue.

I hope you’ll check it out!

RIP, Tucker

tucker

[cross-posted to my Facebook wall]

My family’s dog, Tucker, passed away in the middle of the night. So yeah, I’ve had better days.

He’d just turned 12 at the end of March and had been struggling some for maybe the last year or so. His legs hurt him, he’d gone at least partially blind, and very recently struggled to breathe, coughing and hacking a lot thanks to a mass on his lungs. He was very much himself, though, a loving and friendly (if sometimes anxious and needy) dog, almost right up to the very end. I’d just seen him wagging his tail happily a few hours earlier.

But he’d been having a bad couple of nights and was clearly uncomfortable. My parents woke me up in the middle of the night to let me know he was really struggling. We went downstairs to be with him, but it was clear he was having trouble breathing and that there was nothing we could do but try and make him as comfortable as possible. He passed away a little before 5 am.

So yeah, this hasn’t been the Saturday I was expecting, or that I ever would have wanted. But he didn’t suffer much, and he had a long good life. We’ll miss Tucker — Mr. Dog, Old Mr. Brown, Taco — more than I can say, but we had more than 12 great years to know him.