collab

The photo above is of John Rose, owner of Bakka Books, the best science fiction bookstore in Toronto (598 Yonge Street). Michelle works there part-time, and I dropped by yesterday before we went off to a nearby coffeeshop to work on the short story.

When our laptop batteries started running low, we packed up and went to her place to work instead. Had fun hassling Michelle's brother Gary before we started writing again. Gary was mocking Michelle and me for our...er...enthusiasm for Boromir as played by Sean Bean in Lord of the Rings. Both Boromir and Aragorn were just "a couple of scraggly white guys in beards", as far as he was concerned. :-D

Michelle and I went through the whole story and worked on bits that needed adding or changing or rewriting. We used her iPod to transfer text files back and forth, which I thought was pretty cool...I never thought to use the iPod for anything other than MP3 files.

Working on this short story collab was much more fun and educational than I expected. Thanks so much to Michelle for inviting me to be her collab partner in this project! :-) The fantasy anthology (working title: FAIRY TALES) is slated for publication by DAW sometime in 2004.

On other topics, I couldn't resist the recent intriguing e-mail invitation:

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You were nominated by an anonymous mw participant to sit in the Hot Seat and talk about what you do, how you first started inkspot, how you got your gig as a columnist, etc., and to offering pearls of wisdom to the unwashed masses.

We know you're busy, and we will take "no" for an answer, perhaps, but not without calling you poopyhead. If you say yes, we have a spot open next week. It would only require a day or two of checking the newsgroup to answer questions. (Unfortunately, but predictably, there've been a couple of flames--but not as many as we'd anticipated. We ignore them and let them die.)

So if it sounds like something you can stomach, and you can offer a little of your time for free, we'd love to interview you.



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So hey, I'm in the misc.writing "Hot Seat" today. Feel free to drop by the newsgroup to witness my public humiliation. :-)

Filk News:

OVFF conchair, Lori Coulson, has asked me to spread the word that the deadline for the Pegasus Award nomination ballots has been extended to MAY 31st becauase the OVFF PR reports were sent out so late. You can find the Pegasus Awards page and nomination ballot here.

Merav Hoffman has asked me to spread the word about the Mike Rubin Tribute Concert which she is organizing for Contata. She is still looking for performers to participate. If you are interested, please see this page for more information. Mike Rubin was a New York SF fan who died of cancer in March 1995.