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Slavery-Free Chocolate
Just in time for Valentine's Day, my favorite anti-human-trafficking organization sent me its ratings of the various chocolate brands. I found some surprises, as well as some confirmations of both favorable and unfavorable assumptions I'd made about different companies. Poke around, see which of your favorites avoids using child labor on the plantations, and then go forth and eat yummy things.

In Case I'm Your Main Personal Interpreter For The Publishing Industry
This week I'm making a big push on the anthology, so I'm not going to work up a big post on the Amazon/Macmillan spectacle. So many people have already done good, smart work trying to figure it out and explain it.

annathepiper, for instance, has a fine introduction to the issue and an enviably complete roundup of links.

The short version is that Amazon tried to drag Macmillan into a round of especially undignified jello-wrestling, only to discover that Macmillan was boxing just fine by the Marquess of Queensbury rules, and that the authors whose books were affected added up to an army of PR ninjas.

John Scalzi's several posts on the unfolding conflict are both entertaining and illuminating. My favorite, and the least snarky, is his suggestion for how we can make something good happen for authors who got caught in the middle.

My Son The Fabulist
"When you waked up you jumped out of your crib and ran to a most extraordinary animal who was a monster who bited your socks!"

Two Short Surprising Notes
Marvelously: Zach, whose chemo went well, now has a liver that is more than 50% healthy tissue.

And, anticlimactically: Teaching with laryngitis is almost as hard one-on-one as it is with a full classroom.

Fight Cancer, Get Cool Book. (Plus Zach Update)
The magnificently multi-talented Phil Rossi--author, podcaster, and giant on the D.C. music scene--is devoting all the proceeds for the next six weeks from Crescent, his biggest book, to cancer research. Why? Two reasons: Phil is a great guy, and Zach is his best friend. Details on the book, information about the cancer charity, and one of my favorite photos of Zach with the girls, can be found here.

I listened to Crescent in its first published incarnation, as a podcast, and it lives up to its blurbs:

Crescent is the ultimate sci-fi / horror mashup. It's a wicked blend of the claustrophobia seen in Ridley Scott's Alien, and the viral demonology of Carpenter's Prince Of Darkness with the hard-drinkin' bad attitude of Battlestar Galactica added for good measure. The future has never been so frightening. Phil Rossi brings it. --J.C. Hutchins, author of Personal Effects: Dark Art and 7th Son: Descent

Phil Rossi has crafted a space station tale with sex, horror, and vibrant attention to tech and human detail. Evocatively served, highly recommended. ---Paul Levinson, author of The Plot to Save Socrates

If you read this blog a lot, you know horror's not normally my thing, but I will just add that Crescent is good stuff, and you should read it.

The short version of the Zach report is that there's a new plan that doesn't require the Big Scary Surgery. We all like this plan better. It requires a lot more chemo and some quite significant surgeries, but at each step, Zach's odds of making it to the next step will be much higher than his odds of surviving the Big Scary Surgery were.

Thursday morning the new plan goes into action. Dr. Bigwig is trying a new chemo regimen, one that we can hope will be more unpleasant for the tumor than for Zach, but my goodness, the side effects Zach's been told to expect are awful. It's going to be a hard, hard time, and the request has gone out for prayer support. If that's a thing you do, Thursday morning would be a great time to do it.

What I'm Offering At The help_haiti Charity Auction
I'm offering some writerly goods and services to raise funds for disaster relief in Haiti.

help_haiti is an auction based in the science fiction and fantasy fan community, so it's a bit heavy on offers of fanfic written to order, but there are many other things up for auction there, too. Poke around, amuse yourself, read the FAQ, and, if you feel moved, bid on or offer something.

It's a slightly more unwieldy format than other livejournal-based charity auctions I've participated in before, but time is much more of the essence, and I do admire the speed with which this format allows offers to be posted and money to be raised. Right now the organizers are working on a master list of all writing-related offers that will be more easily navigable. Meanwhile, if you're interested in any of my four offers, just click on the relevant link below and scroll until you see my familiar icon.

You can find two of my posts near the bottom of this page: a coaching session for college or grad school application essays, and a coaching session for fiction.

You can find the other two posts near the top of this page: a character named after you (also known as a Tuckerization) in my current work in progress (the 3rd Rugosa Coven novella), and the two published Rugosa Coven novellas in the available format of your choosing. (I specify available format, because otherwise some beloved smartass or another on my friends list will bid on the Book of Kells treatment.)

(And thanks to

marthawells for the link! I knew there had to be a livejournal charity auction out there, but I didn't know where to look.)

How Did It Not Occur To Me?
Somehow I didn't think to look in the usual reviews of short fiction to see if anybody noticed New Jersey's Top Ghost Tours Reviewed and Rated. Probably I had my nose to the grindstone on the Ria story. Now that The Internet Review of Science Fiction is about to suspend publication, it finally crossed my mind to check the archives and see if they'd read my story in Jim Baen's Universe. And they did!

Since non-subscribers may not be able to read the reviews, and my relatives definitely don't subscribe to The Internet Review of Science Fiction, here's the relevant bit:

Jim Griggs is working hard to get his ghost tour ready for the reviewers as the fall season approaches. The ghosts don't work for free.
"Nobody, but nobody, appreciated how hard the current economy pinched the small businessman. Time was when the ghost tour's weekly take would allow Jim to pay some high school kid to catch the rats and endure the dirty looks from the tourists."
Jim has acquired a new ghost for this Halloween tour season, a union organizer named Zelda Timmerman, but her demands are high and she knows how to lead a strike.

This is a fun read, as ghostly afflictions pile up on Jim Griggs.

RECOMMENDED

Thus saith Lois Tilton, who may (or may not) be the most widely read reviewer to recommend my work so far.

So now I'll have to backtrack through all the usual short fiction review sources (there aren't that many of them) to see if anybody else noticed the Ghost Tours story.

In other news, I seem to be completely caught up on slush reading for the Trafficking in Magic anthology. Well, that won't do. Send us more manuscripts!

Dinner Conversation At Our House, Honest And Truly
GARETH:
Sing twinkle twinkle quack quack quack!

ME:
Twinkle quack? I don't know that version.

GARETH:
Daddy to sing it!

DAN:
Twinkle twinkle quack quack quack
All the ducks are painted black
Even mallards, which are green
With an iridescent sheen
Twinkle twinkle quack quack quack
All the ducks are painted black

ME:
Nice! Did you come up with that one just today?

DAN:
No, it's the password of an ancient brotherhood long thought extinct that's been quietly gathering power for a thousand years.

ME:
The Rolling Stones?

Talking Shop, And How Books Get To The Shop In The First Place
Cathy Clamp's explanation of the differences between distributors and wholesalers in the book trade is important stuff for anyone who's chasing a writing career. I've been doing my homework about the industry for a long time now, but I'd never been clear on the distinction before, mostly because, as she points out, Ingram does both things and is the biggest player in either field. Hooray for Cathy Clamp, who makes it all clear and even a bit entertaining.

Anthology Deadline Extended to February 28th
We started getting a glimpse of the anthology as it could be, and it occurred to us that it really was possible to put together a book in which every piece was as strong in its way as the best pieces we'd accepted. Maybe all we had to do was extend the deadline.

So now we'll find out if we're right.

To quote at length from David's post about what we're hoping to find in the slush pile at this point:
We're looking for well-written stories and poetry for both halves of the antho, but at the moment we have more "Trafficking in Magic" stories than we do "Magicking in Traffic." We'd love to see other kinds of traffic besides just cars, so if you've got a story (or an idea) in which a major part is played by a train, airplane, bicycle, dirigible, footpath, ornithopter, or rickshaw, we'd love to see it. If you've got something involving a type of traffic we don't see on this list, better yet.

Things we've seen too much of include film noir styling, crime stories, and bargains with dark forces.

So far we've received one poem that we're going to publish. I'd like to up it to two, if I can, but the second one has got to be brilliant as well.

We've had some wonderful submissions so far, and we could go to press with what we've got, but we're extending the deadline because we want this anthology to be the best it can possibly be.

If that late February deadline entices you, the guidelines can be found here.

Okay, You Got Me
The first leg of our journey, Rochester to Corning, saw even the locals slogging along at 30mph on the interstates, with terrible visibility and a road surface that had littered both shoulders of 390 with collisions and rescue equipment. Even when we got south of the storm, we passed through intermittent patches of light snowfall all the way home.

So, yes, I concede, Rochester did not get all the snow in the world.

Rochester's perpetual snow did, however, inspire one of my favorite sestinas. Anthony Hecht is a poet I don't usually go for, but I've always liked the sestina form, and "Sestina d'Inverno" is a really fun example.

In Which I Explain My Grandmother's City As We Prepare To Leave It
DAN:
I'll check the weather forecast.

ME:
It'll be snowing. We're in Rochester.

DAN:
Yes, but I can find out when it will be snowing.

ME:
It will snow the whole time we're in Rochester, just as it has all day every day we've been here so far. It doesn't actually matter when we arrive or leave. It will always be snowing.

DAN:
Hmm. The internet agrees with you. It says 100% chance of precipitation through all the hours we might still be here. Okay, smartypants, how much snow will we get?

ME:
All of it. We're in Rochester.

Travel Weirdness, With Bonus Anthology Deadline Reminder
There was a time when visiting my parents really did mean extra writerly productivity. You can guess what watershed event changed that. Yet somehow I always expect I'll still get more writing done here than at home.

Ah, well. Still plugging away.

Speaking of holiday crimps in writing workstyles, this seems like a good time to remind folks of the January 5th deadline for the Trafficking in Magic and Magicking in Traffic anthologies. Some of you have expressed interest in submitting stories, and I'd really love to see them. I've been assuming that, come deadline day, we'll be deluged with last minute submissions. I hope so, because the anthologies are definitely not full yet. We've got some great stuff, and some stuff that might be great with a little revision, but we don't have as much of it as we want. Maybe your manuscript is what's missing.

I Find Out What I Sound Like By Listening To My Kid
It's nice when he's saying things like, "It was a pleasure to meet you," or "Thank you so much!" or "I will help you," and I recognize my exact intonations. Apparently my manners are both better and worse than I thought they were.

The good-manners anecdotes aren't nearly as entertaining as the tales of my lapses, though. So, without further ado:

There was the cold day he found a deep puddle to stomp in, and he had his canvas shoes on, the ones that soak through when he plays puddlestomp. Jumping gleefully up and down in the water, he yelled, "Dammit, dammit, dammit!" just a split second before the very same could come out of my mouth.

Then there was the time he wanted to play with the blocks, but Dan and I wanted him to join us for family dinner. "Want to build the damn tower!" he lamented.

Today his cousins arrived to play. Zoe, just a couple of months younger than he is, ran up and shouted "Hi, Gareth!" right into his face. Gareth was a little put off.

"Aren't you going to say hi to Zoe?" Dan prompted.

"No," said Gareth. Fair enough. He's two. You can't expect courtesy every time from a two-year-old.

A few minutes later, once they were all playing happily together, Dan tried again. "Are you ready to say hi to Zoe now?"

In a perfect imitation of me when I'm telling him he can't stomp in a puddle until his boots are on, Gareth replied, "I said no."

I wonder what I'll find out I've been telling him about Christmas.

Free Stuff, Mammoth Cave, And More Dangerous Writing
My short story "How the Grail Came to the Fisher King" will be one of the many free stories on offer at the Drollerie Press website during the 12 Days of Christmas, from December 25 to January 5th. There's also a drawing for a free e-reader. Details are over here.

My post from the blog tour is over here at

norafleischer's blog. (I guess my childhood visit to Mammoth Cave made an impression on me.)

Links to my blog tour co-conspirators' recollections of dangerous writing can be found here.

Revenge of Blog Tour
This month the Drollerie Press gang (not an actual press gang, mind you) are writing about the most dangerous things we've ever written. My post will be over at

norafleischer's blog soon. This month, I get to host John Rosenman, a horror writer of note who has made a name for himself in the small presses. You can find an excerpt from his Alien Dreams here.

This is one of my favorites among the blog tour posts I've hosted. John Rosenman's made his life in academia, despite having played whistleblower by writing an academic farce about a college that employed him. Now that is gutsy.

( The Most Dangerous Thing I’ve Written, by John B. Rosenman )

Annual Solstice Weekend Safety Tip, Annual Solstice Present
If you're considering setting fire to a plum pudding, read this first.

If you're planning on burning your plum pudding in effigy rather than in earnest (or brandy), we've got your back: We've made our annual donation to the ACLU as a Yule present to our Pagan community.

Merry First Amendment to all, and to all a good Equal Protection Clause!

What I Couldn't Get Anyone At Dan's Company Christmas Party To Believe
Thank goodness for the gatekeepers!

No, really, I'm perfectly happy to give publishing companies a chunk of my book-buying dollar.

I try to explain why to friends and relatives, and they say very kind things like, "The gatekeepers haven't published your novel yet, so they can't be good for much." And I appreciate the sentiment, but really, if you're curious about what the publishing industry is truly good for, read to the end of

barbarienne's post about what might save publishing. (This post on why ebooks are not, in fact, significantly cheaper to produce than print books, is also magisterial, in a number-crunching sort of way. If you write to publish, you should rush over to read that one and its whole comment thread, too.)

I tried to explain why to my husband's colleagues, and they offered some pieties about how information wants to be free. Not coincidentally, they also boasted about how few books they read, and how even fewer of them were fiction. (At least it was better than the year I got into an argument about Abu Ghraib with the CEO's wife.)

See, I'm willing to wade through my slush pile for these very important reasons:
1. There will be a book with my name on the cover at the end of this editorial process.
2. There will be royalties. Modest royalties, yes, but they will have the advantage of actually existing.
3. Our anthology is a small enough enterprise (as compared with, say, the entirety of Random House), that we're not getting submissions from every person in the English-speaking world who thinks s/he has something to say. Our slush pile, so far, is something that two people can reasonably hope to keep up with.

If the publishing industry's gatekeepers went away tomorrow, the whole world would be a slush pile, only without Motivating Factors 1, 2, or 3 to make it worthwhile. I don't know what you'd do in that hypothetical world, but I'd probably spend the rest of my days reading only books by people I knew personally and could vouch for, books written by authors who had been published before the demise of the gatekeepers and who were therefore vouched for, and books that had been published before the demise...you get the idea.

The publishing industry serves readers not primarily as a system for producing books, but as a system for filtering them, and that's a good thing.

That Holiday Set Piece Y'all Ask For Every Year
At holiday parties, friends ask for the impala song, and someone who's new to the crowd will say, "What impala song?" and then I have to do the little explanation. In case of laryngitis, here it is:

Several years ago, Dan and I spent most of a December in South Africa. I was giving a paper at a conference, and we figured, when were we ever going to be in South Africa again? Most of the last week of our trip, we were in Kruger National Park, which belongs mostly to its animals. There are roads that link up the sparsely spaced little human-safe encampments, but outside those electric fences, you Must Stay In Your Car, or if you get eaten by lions it's your own damn fault.

A December Solstice in South Africa is pretty disorienting for a denizen of the Northern Hemisphere. Summer's getting seriously hot, the days are long...and all the cities' streets have snow-evocative holiday decorations. The bed and breakfast where we stayed in the Swadini Valley had a seven-foot-tall cactus in its courtyard for a Christmas tree. Radio stations play familiar Christmas melodies in Afrikaans and Zulu. Happy Yule!

All those hours of driving across the savannah looking for charismatic megafauna made us a little car-crazy, so we came up with our own Kruger National Park carols:

Rhino, rhino, rhino
We've looked for you all day
Rhino, rhino, rhino
Please come out and play!

The most abundant creatures in Kruger are the impalas, whose adaptation to being herbivores sharing a landscape with cheetahs, tigers, lions, and leopards is to reproduce to the point of absurdity. Impalas are everywhere, like walking antlered MacDonaldses. If they had a call, it would be, "Would you like fries with me?" Mile after mile, easily amused as we are, we sang:

See them grazing all before us
Impala-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
More and more come out of the forest
Impala-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
Quite prolific little breeders
Impala-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
So the lions can be feeders
Impala-la-la-la-la-la-la-la

"You're Not Like Any Girl Tutor I Ever Imagined"
So said my youngest student when I cheerfully accepted his suggestion that we use the verb "to fart" as our example in an explanation of the perfect and progressive tenses. As in: The pig was farting that day where often it had farted before. Half an hour later, he could still explain back to me the differences between simple past, past progressive, and past perfect, without needing to resort to porcine flatulence. I don't care if that's his default verb for every grammar explanation we do for the next five years, as long as it works.