I realize it’s been months since I last posted. My computer HD died sometime in September, causing me to lose a month’s worth of cool mushroom photos, Hen of the Woods, Giant Puffball etc, which I would otherwise totally have put up here otherwise. But it’s cool, no need to pretend like you noticed—who reads blogs anymore?

I’ve been tweeting some, that’s got to count for something. Maybe I should port my tweets over here so the skull doesn’t look so dusty.

Anyhow, I have not been idle in the interim. Weightless Books is tearing right along; this month we’re running an Apex subscription drive, 25% off, plus some freebies for participants and a game of Nook Tablet roulette. The Homeless Moon put out a special edition best-of chapbook for World Fantasy, which you didn’t hear a thing about unless you were there; it was all very hush-hush. We used the space octopus cover castoff from chapbook 4, I thought it came out quite nice.

And, the real reason for this update, Small Beer intern and audiophile Julie Day has started a podcast series, the current episode of which features me, yes me, talking a bit about Weightless, a bit about beer, then reading aloud “The Hour of the Fireflies” by Karen Chacek, one of the stories I translated for the forthcoming SBP anthology Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Stories of the Fantastic. Which is a lovely story, a brief, crisp confection with a darkly bitter center, into the translation of which I put much effort, just so that you, non-Spanish-speaker, could enjoy it. So please go listen. Then in a week or so, I believe there may be another podcast episode wherein Gavin, Julie and I sit around on a late Thursday morning drinking beer and rambling about beer on tape. Fun!

And that’s about it from me. I have another of my own stories upcoming on Pseudopod—I’ll let you know when it happens. In the meantime, be well. Don’t lick any toads you haven’t first positively identified.

My story “The Eater”, about the guy at the beginning of time whose job it is to taste everything and decide what will kill us and what will keep us alive, (which originally appeared in Apex back in July), is live today at Pseudopod!

Pseudopod, should you have been unaware, is a weekly horror fiction podcast, sister to Escape Pod and Podcastle, a triumvirate I have been struggling to break my way into for quite some time. I love reading fiction aloud, and hearing fiction read aloud, and “the Pods”, as they are affectionately known, are some of the best places to do that. For a reader, I am lucky enough to have netted Laurice White. I haven’t had a chance to listen yet—will do so on my ride home—but I expect it will be great.

Pink Lady’s Slipper orchid, Cypripedium acaule, mixed deciduous woods, Bull Hill, Sunderland, MA
(AKA/e.g., the replenishing pitcher flower of legend.)

Jay Ridler’s first novel, a noir wrestling thriller (!), is up now at the Kindle store:

I’ve been waiting for an opportunity like this. Amanda Hocking and Konrath have been made much of (and have made much out of themselves) as the poster/tentpole children of a brave, new, exponentially expanding market for self-published ebooks, raking it in hand over fist, generating buzz and dreams and misconceptions wherever they pass. But they appeared on this stage fully formed. They were already successful, hugely so, before most of us heard anything about them. We can go back and read about how they did it (as much as they’re willing to share), but we won’t be getting the whole story, and what we do get will be all distorted by the rah-rah haze of success. (So, nephew/son/grandson/husband/cousin/brother, when you going to write the next Harry Potter? Bleh!) And by now it’s completely unclear whether what they did will work for anyone else, because the market they’re selling through is so new and changing so rapidly. Nor does it make any sense to compare them to grassroots print self-publishing successes like Christopher Paolini (and certainly not to Rowling), because there was barely any market in place for them to target/advertise to/gladhand.

All of which makes me very excited indeed to watch Jay’s epublishing debut, because it gives me (and you, too!) the great advantage of observing from the ground up, from the inside. Yes, of course, I’m rooting for him because he’s my pal and I’m already vested in the whole ebook thing. But I also know (because I read all that stuff about Hocking and Konrath ad nauseum) he’s got a lot going for him. I know how much thought Jay has put into this. He’s a brilliant, lovable guy who keeps an entertaining blog and knows everybody. He’s incredibly prolific. He knows how to spin a yarn. I know how much heart he puts into his writing, and it shows. I guarantee Death Match will be fast-paced and gritty with a gripping emotional core. Frankly, he’s a better writer than Hocking and Konrath put together. Which may or may not mean a thing in this context. But it will be fascinating to watch. I can’t wait to see what happens–not just in the next couple of weeks, but when he puts out the next book and the one after that.

Should you care to watch him too, Jay’s blog, where I hope he will regale us with further news of his forays, is at ridlerville.wordpress.com.

Against all odds, there will be a Homeless Moon chapbook number four. I just sent it off to the printer. This year’s theme is a shared world generation ship, though I suspect you’d be hard pressed to guess that from the stories alone. We’re very different writers—it’s our shared hell-bent-ness that holds us together—and it’s awesome. As usual (though likely for the last time), I’ll have 200 copies to hand out at Readercon, and when those are gone, there will be ebooks on the HM site and at Weightless Books.

Here’s a cover we decided not to go with:

Space Octopus!

Readercon, by the way, is next week, and I have a ton of stuff going on. My schedule looks like this:

11:00 AM Friday – What Writing Workshops Do and Don’t Offer.
2:00 PM Saturday – Three Messages and a Warning group reading. This is Small Beer’s Mexican SF anthology, which I hyped up at last year’s Readercon. I translated two stories for it and have read a bunch of others, all fascinating, very different, surprising stuff.
2:30 PM Saturday – Beneath Ceaseless Skies group reading.
3:30 PM Saturday – My solo reading, wherein I shall read my Apex #23 story, “The Eater”.

I’ll also be at the Small Beer table in the dealer’s room quite a bit, and hopefully at Kelly and Gavin’s Kaffeklatsch, where awesome not-so-very-secret things will occur. This summer marks Small Beer’s tenth anniversary. I think there are t-shirts to celebrate the occasion. I have also brewed a beer. O it is an exciting beer I am having to struggle very hard not to crack open and drink. I wrote a Literary Beer entry about it.

And then—even then, after Readercon, it still is not done, because then I’ll be at another reading on Thursday the 21st at the NEIA Library in Brookline for the new LCRW #27, which also happens to be coming out at Readercon.

And then that same day I move.

Live Free or Undead, an anthology of New-Hampshire themed horror edited by Rick Broussard and featuring fiction by James Patrick Kelly, Jeffrey DeRego, Elaine Isaak, and many other great writers either from New Hampshire or in love with it (including, yes, me) ought to be in bookstores now-ish. I haven’t seen a copy yet, but from the cover I think I can guarantee ghosties, ghoulies, zombies, creepy-crawlies, and at least one very attractive lady with an ax.

My story, “Misty Rain”, reprinted from the British zine Murky Depths, is an atmospheric, creepy thing about a brother and sister lost in the mountains. And yes, it has a monster.

New Hampshire has been my favorite state since I was a kid, and despite all the cool stuff I’ve discovered since in all those other states, it still wins. It has Mt. Washington, Indian Head, Pawtuckaway Lake, Farnum Hill Cider, Woodstock Inn Brewery, the Flume Gorge, the Odyssey Writing Workshop, the Tufts Mountain Club Loj, the Pemigewasset River, the Kancamangus Highway, the mouldering bones of the Old Man of the Mountain, and the best state motto anywhere.

So I’m excited enough to get to be in this anthology that I’m breaking from my usual modus operandi and announcing a reading more than two days in advance! Woo!

On Wednesday, October 27th at 7:00 PM, I’ll be reading at Rye Public Library in Rye, NH along with Brendan DuBois, Andy Richmond and the fabulous Elaine Isaak. You’ll get the chance to see my sporting my super-silly Halloween moustache and what I hope will be a legitimately scary costume. And if that isn’t enough to convince you, I’ll have candy. Please come!

And if you can’t make it, there’s a whole bunch of other readings scheduled, including one this coming Friday at the Barley House in Concord, where I’d go for the beer even if there weren’t going to be a bunch of great writers.

I am really excited about them. Yes, they’ve existed for a long time and they still only account for a tiny portion of the books we buy. But their numbers are growing exponentially while the rest of the industry struggles along or declines. Ereaders get more and more abundant, flashier, cheaper, and their battery life gets longer. I think they’re where the world is going.

It’s hard to shout down those who feel nostalgia for the book. Books can be beautiful. The experience of reading a physical book will never be replaced by any ereader. But it’s not like books are going away. There are books from 1450 that still exist. There are more books printed every year, using up ink, paper, cloth. Forty percent of them get pulped every year. I love books. But you know what I’d rather have? Trees.

So I have thrown in with the ebook revolution. Weightless Books, if I haven’t hyped it up to you already, is an ebook website I built and am operating together with Gavin Grant of Small Beer Press. It offers ebooks, delivered to you instantly by email, from a small but growing set of independent publishers including Small Beer Press, Featherproof Press, Blind Eye Books, Fairy Tale Review Press, and, as of today, The Homeless Moon. Yes! All three of the Homeless Moon chapbooks are now available from Weightless in a variety of formats to suit most any ereader, at the low, low price of $0.99 (and yes, they’re still available for free as well, but we’re trying to be supportive and we hope you will too).

So. Read ebooks. Consume less paper, waste less energy shipping it back and forth and then paying somebody to set it on fire when you cast it aside, read more, read better, save the world.

Thank you!

Readercon was pretty fun. It may have been the first con I’ve attended where I didn’t feel weird, awkward or out of place hardly at all. And to think, it only took five years…and some beer…to achieve! I appeared disguised in mutton-chop extensions and a false Scottish accent on a “Future of Short Fiction Markets” panel, drank a lot of fine beer (no Brick Red though, disappointingly!) with a lot of fine people, read from “Between Two Treasons” at a packed Beneath Ceaseless Skies reading, and sat sheepishly behind the Small Beer table taking credit by proxy for all their wonderful new stuff and repeatedly forgetting to give away Daily Planners and talk up Weightless Books.

We did in fact get The Homeless Moon 3 Chapbook out in time. Barely in time, but it happened! And they went like hotcakes. I printed about 200 and ended up with less than 50. And then I gave away a bunch more to the Odyssey 2010 class at the TNEO mixer. Not many left. Get one now!

Here it is in its natural habitat in our suite at TNEO:

Tomorrow night (sorry for the short notice—you know how I am with these announcement things), I’ll be reading a new William-o poem at the TNEO Flash Fiction Slam, starting at 6:00 PM at the Manchester, NH Barnes & Noble. I’ll be joined by other fine Odyssey grads including my pal Scott H. Andrews, Hannah Strom-Martin (whose story “Father Pena’s Last Dance” appears in this month’s Realms of Fantasy, Barbara A. Barnett, Rita Oakes, Ellen Denham and many others. Here’s a map. Please come by and say hello!

You thought it wouldn’t happen, we ourselves are not unsurprised that it is actually going to happen, but it is. The Homeless Moon chapbook 3 goes to the printer tomorrow, and we’re releasing it at Readercon 21 at the end of the week. And it will no doubt appear online and in ebook form a little later on.

I’m going to deviate from the usual MO and not give away the cover art just yet. We’ve done something a little different with this year’s chapbook, both in theme and subject matter, which I think you will like better if it lurches suddenly up over the crest of yon hilltop, hits you with a targeting laser and says boo.

No, I did not just give it away. That was a reference to the Chapbook One cover.

What has not changed: I did the cover, Erin did the layout, and all of us did the editing, the proofing, and the kickass eclectic fiction.

Here instead is some other thing I decided not to use for the cover:

See you at Readercon. Most likely you’ll find me at the Small Beer dealers’ table hunched over a stack of unfinished TNEO crits. Or at the pub hunched over a Sam Adams Brick Red.

Time erodes all things, and new things, harder things, spring forth from their remains.

Old Maize God was made of orange-painted plaster. I bought him for a dollar from a wandering huckster kid at the Mayan ruins of Chichén Itzá and couldn’t work up the guts to toss him in the sacred cenoté. For three years, he guarded my garden from the likes of hungry wabbits, storm-felled trees and marauding bands of centaurs. But the winter of 2010 wormed its way through his plaster flesh, and he crumbled.

Young Maize God is carved from green-black jadeite, heavy and resilient as iron. I found him among the mazelike convolutions of market day in Chichicastenango, in the Guatemalan highlands. He’s done his best to take up the mantle of the old god—but come August, he and I must bid farewell to our much-loved little communal plot in the valley and travel east, back to the city, where fecundity will be restricted to a forest of pots on the back balcony.

Who knows what other change may come? Not I. Not he.

Happy solstice.

My newest centaur story, “The Circus of King Minos’ Masque”, went live last night at midnight in Beneath Ceaseless Skies issue #41–yes, those centaurs, the ones with the hallucinogens, the whiskey cellars and the lust for human flesh.

I read a little bit from this story at Boskone in February. It’s the second set in this world to feature Periphas, a human orphan raised by the lord of the centaurs. The third is purportedly to appear in Tales of Moreauvia #4 this fall.

It’s also the first time (at least that I’m aware of) that a story of mine has appeared for sale at the Kindle store–BCS has added a new feature where you can download individual issues to your fancy ereader thing from Amazon for a mere $0.99. Woo!

So many new and interesting ways for you to enjoy ye artfully airborne jewels of flying blood! How can you resist?

I’ll tell you one way you might resist–and that’s if you are not prepared to handle the goreporn and liberal guilt. These are still the same, bad old centaurs, and they are not for the squeamish.

This is Giambologna’s Hercules and Nessus.