Clearly I'm a big fan of metaphors that'll be lost on those from the colonies, or at least those that had an issue with taxation without representation... Only kidding, you guys across the Pond. I know you understand and appreciate satire. From here, we can only assume most of what your leadership is up to is performance art...
For those for whom baseball is the bat-and-ball game of choice, in cricket a batsman scoring a hundred runs is known as 'a century' and is regarded as a 'good thing'. A bowler conceding a hundred runs is not really known as anything at all, but is thought of, if it is thought of at all, as a 'bad thing'. Please take any discussions of declaration bowling offline, thank you.
My personal bowling century was brought up by my one hundredth rejection from Clarkesworld. Yes, one hundred. Go, me! I'd like to pretend I've got close to pitching something through Neil C's transom but, looking at my figures on the Grinder, the longest he's taken to laughing me back into the street was eight days. I've had near misses from most of the big beasts of short speculative fiction, but not Clarkesworld. I keep trying.
Meanwhile, my batting century is that, in an idle moment I thought I would see how many stories I've placed (my boilerplate cover letter had a vague "ninety-odd"), and found, with my appearance in last month's Utopia, that I was up to one hundred. As a picture of me raising... what? a laptop? would look silly, here's somebody far, far better at cricket than me showing how it's done in the traditional manner.
Actually, I thought I was up to one hundred and one, but "The Other Brother Grimm", my fantasy about the bungling youngest Grimm brother lost to history, which had been destined for Mystery and Horror LLC's Strangely Funny series, has just been released back to me with the series on hiatus.
This isn't in itself newsworthy - publishers and publications come and go - but I would like to shout chapeau! to Sarah Glenn and Gwen Mayo, who collectively make up Mystery and Horror LLC, who, in returning previously held stories, have paid their authors as per contracts. Given the press's hiatus is despite their best efforts, standing by their contracts is a decent and honourable thing, which they could easily have dodged (what was I going to do? sue through the American courts for the price of a couple of pints?).
It's also in stark contrast to, say, the actions of Carrie Cuinn (and, lest we forget, I'm not the only one who's had a gripe about her unprofessionalism) or Roxie Voorhees. How I wish I'd said what I really thought in that post...
My Thoughts are with You. Your Thoughts are with the Authorities for Calibration Against Societal Norms
Meet a man mistaken for a robot, a robot which learns the meaning of irony the hard way, a Frankenstein’s monster with a future in tailoring, a talking cat, a talking car, several time travellers, and a host of other characters.
Award-nominated science fiction and slipstream author Robert Bagnall’s second anthology of twenty-four stories, variously bleak, funny, bleakly funny or – very occasionally – optimistic.
2084. The world remains at war.
In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.
The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.
Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.
Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.
24 0s & a 2
“Brilliant stories, well written!” (five stars, Amazon).
