The Mumpsimus

I have been busy and have neglected this blog. I forgot to make a post here about some of the most exciting news of my year: I have a story in the current issue of my favorite literary magazine, Conjunctions . It's titled "Mass" and it is about, among other things, a mass shooting. Early this morning, at least 50 people were killed and 53 wounded in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. The New York Times  is currently calling this the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. I'm not going to write about the gun politics of this. For that, please read the work of Patrick Blanchfield , particularly "So There's Just Been a Mass Shooting" , "God and Guns" , and "The Gun Control We Deserve" . (He's excellent on Twitter , as well, if you want his most recent thoughts.) I have sputtered on about the topic in the past , not always coherently. Patrick is better at it, and better informed, than I. Thinking through the complex, contradic...

  The first book written for adults that I ever coveted and loved and read to pieces was a short story collection: Stephen King's Night Shift , from which my cousin read me stories when we were both probably much too young, and which was one of the first books I ever bought myself. Ever since then, short story collections have seemed to me the most wonderful of all books. I started publishing short stories professionally with "Getting a Date for Amelia" back in 2001. I barely remember the kid who wrote it (in the summer of 2000). I'm not a prolific fiction writer; I've been lucky enough to publish most of the stories I've written in the last decade or so, but I average only two stories a year. Fiction is the hardest thing in the world for me to write. Some stories have taken many years to find a final form. The kid who wrote "Getting a Date for Amelia" also managed to write a novel; it was mostly terrible (or, rather, not terrible , which might...

The Clarion Blog has an ongoing feature, Spec Tech , where real, live scientist people write about science in a way that might inspire aspiring science fiction writers.  This week, Eric Schaller , who has written here at The Mumpsimus about Stanislaw Lem , contributes a post about zombies the "bleeding edge" of science .  Bloody good stuff!