new york

And then what happened…?

This evening, I took the subway uptown to attend a reading and panel discussion at Columbia University’s Teacher’s College to promote the brand new Neil Gaiman/Al Sarrantonio-edited collection Stories. In attendance were several of the writers from the collection, namely Gaiman himself, Lawrence Block, Walter Mosley, Kat Howard, Joe Hill, Kurt Andersen, and Jeffery Ford. They each talked a bit about their work and genre and storytelling, and they each (with the exception of Mosley) read a section of their individual stories. They were really quite good, and I look forward to reading the book in its entirety. I bought an autographed copy there, from which I read Howard’s story (her first ever sale!) before the panel took the stage and then Andersen’s on the train ride home.

Before the show, I had dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant about a block from the auditorium, which was okay but not exactly my favorite. (I wasn’t in love with the spongy and mildly sour injera, though overall the food was okay.) And then, walking home from the train station, I stumbled into a scene of about half a dozen police cars and an ambulance outside the local plastics manufacturer. I still have no idea what happened — the cops were getting into their cars and the ambulance was pulling away as I approached — but it was an interesting end to an exciting evening.

Tuesday various

Saturday slush pile

I spent a lot of the day reading Kaleidotrope slush on my iPad, trying to get caught up on older submissions. I’ve actually been burnt a few times in the past couple of weeks on submissions that turned out to have been accepted elsewhere by the time I replied to accept them. I’m not a big fan of simultaneous submissions, and do in fact explicitly state in my guidelines that I won’t accept them, but I do understand why it’s a popular practice among writers. Writing a story takes considerable time and effort, so the natural impulse is to cast as wide a net with it as possible. Still, reading a story is not an insignificant investment of my time, especially when it’s a story that I like, that I might need to read more than once before accepting, and it’s very aggravating to learn that my investment was for naught. I do my level best to reply to all submissions within a three-month window, and I welcome queries from writers when I fail to reply in that time, but I realize that’s not enough of a guarantee for some people. I don’t necessarily hold it against writers when I find out their stories have been submitted elsewhere, but I also hope they realize that not every editor is going to be as forgiving. It depends on the venue, and their rate of response, but if they have a specific policy against simultaneous submissions, it might be best not to ignore that policy.

Beyond reading some stories — and accepting a few that I hope I’ll actually be able to accept — I watched a little television and played a little with the dog, a pretty typical Saturday. This evening, my parents and I went out to dinner to celebrate my father’s birthday, which is this coming Monday. We had a perfectly nice dinner at a local Italian place recently written up in the New York Times.

And that was my Saturday.

Herds of free-roaming local swine

Today wasn’t exactly like yesterday, but close enough that it raises questions about loops in the space-time continuum. Or maybe that’s just the Star Trek I watched this evening talking.

I spent a lot of the day thinking about Kaleidotrope, about maybe doing another three issues (instead of two) again next year, about maybe changing up how I split those issues across the twelve months to more evenly distribute them (something like January, May, and September), and about how doing four issues a year would probably kill (or at least bankrupt) me, even if right now it seems like maybe I have enough accepted material to fill all four. The sensible thing might just be to re-institute a reading period, a set time for when I’m open and closed to new submissions. The slush pile, while constant, is manageable, but I’m hesitant to accept new stories that I won’t be able to print for a year and a half or longer. (The next two issues, regardless of when they appear, are definitely full, with a third near-approaching.) Cutting off submissions for a little while — I’m thinking maybe July to October — could give me the breathing room I need.

Anyway, that’s what constitutes excitement this Thursday — unless you count the couple of taxis that came marginally close to hitting me this afternoon, and the drivers who gave me dirty looks for getting in the way of their illegal turns or running red lights. Heck, yesterday, a van rode up on the sidewalk just a few feet from me, when the driver got tired of waiting for the cars in front of him to make a left turn. Of course, things could be worse. According to my Forgotten English desk calendar, in the 1800s, New York City was rife with “herds of free-roaming local swine.” To wit:

“I had hoped to find on my return from Canada that this public nuisance, by means of papers and strictures of different authors, had been abated, but was disappointed on finding that it was as great as ever. The lawyers and judges dare not prosecute negligent herdsmen with existing laws and many people have conspired to transgress them. They, like gentlemen of other professions, are the creatures of the mob and have not the hardihood to offend it by rigorous adherence to their duty.”

So, no cholera-spreading pigs, which is always good. But also not much else. I’m glad, at least, that tomorrow’s Friday.

Thursday various

  • Looks like I fall on the “trustworthy” end of this Trustworthiness of Beards scale. How to use that to my advantage? Muhahahaha! [via]

  • When I first read this story, about another Ring movie in the works — this time in 3-D and reinvented for a teen audience, whatever that means — I thought it was about another Lord of the Rings movie. As ridiculous as that remake sounds, I wouldn’t put it past Hollywood. Give in another couple of years.
  • Some stories just to great not to be true: surfer rides shark after it bites his surfboard. [via]

  • You can take Freudian concepts too far.

  • And finally, here’s New York two ways you’ve probably never seen it before. First, made out of staples. And second, pixelated [via]: