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Death and that other thing

Well that’s what I get for not doing my taxes sooner…

Actually, they’re all but done, except that now the TurboTax software we have installed refuses to update — and the program refuses to open unless I allow it to update, which sort of leaves me stuck in an impossible middle. I can’t even open it up to look over my near-finished return. I guess I’ll be filling out forms from the IRS website later this week. Luckily my taxes are pretty simple this year, and the 15th is still a few days away.

But seriously…sometimes, I think they might be right when they say this whole procrastination thing’s a bad idea.

Kaleidotoropical

[cross-posted to the Kaleidotrope weblog]

The fourth issue of Kaleidotrope is finally at the printer, and with luck copies will start flowing out within the week. So that seems like as good a time as any to finally reveal the full table of contents.

Fiction
“Molting” by Andrew Howard
“Word Count: Negative 1” by Ashley Arnold
“The Three Wishes of Miles Vander” by Bill Ward
“Premature” by Mark Rich
“Paradise” by Adam Lowe
“White Sheets” by Mike Driver
“Rome (a Metrophilia)” by Brendan Connell
“Half-Sneeze Johnny” by Kurt Kirchmeier
“My Cthulhu Story” (a comic) by G.W. Thomas
“Furrier” by Flavian Mark Lupinetti
“She’s a Hearth” by Paul Abbamondi
“The Life and Times of a Hungry World, Told Briefly” by Alex Dally MacFarlane
“The Transparency” by Michael Obilade

Poetry
“Househunting on Mars” by Bonita Kale
“Praise for What I Don’t Know” by Thomas Zimmerman
“Cracked Shells” by Beth Langford
“Spring in the Lab” by Alyce Wilson
“Farm School” by Marcie Lynn Tentchoff
“A Manual For Good Housekeeping in the Age of Global Warming” by Miranda Gaw
“Ivanikha” by Dana Koster
Two Poems by Franz K. Baskett
“Worldviews on a Desert Trail” by Jason Huskey
“Towards the Afterlife” by Aurelio Rico Lopez III

Plus!

“Who Goes There,” Betty Ragan’s interview with Marc Schuster and Tom Powers
“The Rise of the Fembots: A Brief Introduction to Female Android Sexuality in Film” by Eric Borer

Artwork from Remi Treuer, Rod Walker, and Lisa Willis — and assorted other fun! I hope you’ll consider picking up a copy. For just $4 ($6.50 international), it’s a steal — and all that money goes directly back to my contributors, keeping them happy and fed!

And, amazingly enough, two years of this hasn’t quite deterred me yet! I’m accepting submissions for issue #5.

March Music Madness

This, give or take, is what March sounded like for me:

  1. “Get the Party Started” by Shirley Bassey
  2. “One of These Mornings” by Moby
  3. “Sway” by the Puppini Sisters
  4. “Iko Iko” by the Dixie Cups
  5. “Oxford Comma” by Vampire Weekend
  6. “State of the Union” by David Ford
  7. “We’re Not Gonna Take It” by Twisted Sister
  8. “Chelsea Dagger” by the Fratellis
  9. “Master of the House” from Les Misérables
  10. “Seventy-Four, Seventy-Five” by Shearwater
  11. “Jarhand” by Immaculate Machine
  12. “Cleveland Rocks” by Ian Hunter
  13. “Great DJ” by the Ting Tings
  14. “Broken Ship” by Immaculate Machine

That’s my mix from the month, at any rate. It takes sort of a weird turn there in the middle, I know — Twisted Sister? Les Mis? — but that’s what I’ve been listening to. As always, mix trades are welcome.

Sing it with me now

Well, two days and however many dollars I spent in New Orleans short, here’s the “Friday” Random Guess 10:

  1. “Better Things” by the Kinks, guessed by Bryan
    Here’s wishing you the bluest sky
  2. “Meanwhile, Rick James…” by Cake, guessed by Wormbrain
    Fawn, Jo, and Tootsie are out on a wire
  3. “Chicago” by Sufjan Stevens
    We sold our clothes to the state
  4. “Beautiful Night” by Paul McCartney, guessed by Kim
    Seems to me the perfect way to spend an afternoon
  5. “Abilene (The Eisenhower Waltz)” by Peter Mulvey, guessed by Kim
    And, sir, it is a sight just to behold
  6. “I Can’t Decide” by Scissor Sisters, guessed by Betty
    If lies were cats you’d be a litter
  7. “The Show Must Go On” by Queen, guessed by Kim
    My makeup may be flaking
  8. “On to You” by the Constantines
    Here the men walk like pigeons
  9. “When You Ain’t Got Nobody” by Tom Waits
    And the story never changes, history tells it so plain
  10. “Learning to Fly” by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, guessed by Kim
    And the sun went down as I crossed the hill

It went down like this last week, if you’re inclined to check your answers. As always, no prizes will be awarded (beyond maybe your name and a link), but best of luck is wished all around.

Anyway, New Orleans was fun, even if I didn’t get to see a whole lot of it beyond the hotel where the conference was being held. And even if I did wind up at the wrong venue the first day (across the street at the convention center), carrying about 30 pounds of books for the length of one very long city block. I did get to meet a few of our authors and eat a few really nice meals while I was in town. (Seriously, even the shrimp po-boy I had at the airport while waiting for my flight home was pretty decent.) My thanks again to Kim for showing me around on Thursday evening. I’m not sure I’d have had the courage or the energy to wander around the French Quarter all on my own. I’m not sure I’d really call New Orleans my kind of town, but it was nice to visit for a few days.

The big easy

In just over an hour, I’m headed to the airport and my flight to New Orleans. It’s for business, and I expect to be pretty busy hawking books while I’m down there, but overall there are worse ways to spend a birthday. I’ll be without a computer and internet access the whole time I’m down there, however, so expect things to be pretty quiet around here, at least until I return late Saturday night. Which means that, if there is a Friday Random Guess 10 this week, it’ll likely come on Sunday.

Have fun while I’m gone!