SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION: “This Place is Best Shunned” made the 2022 Locus Recommended Reading List/Ballot

My novelette “This Place is Best Shunned” made the 2022 Locus Recommended Reading List/Ballot. (Story is free-to-read online, linked from the list.)

Voting on the Locus Award is open to all. Ballot deadline is April 15, and you may come back and add to or change your votes anytime until then.

banner graphic reads "2022 Recommended Reading"

Upcoming Events: Horror Reading and Good Noise Making Next Weekend!

Just a quick heads-up for folks in Michigan: I have two events next weekend! Please spread the word, cuckoo bird!

 

1. Horror Reading!

I’ll be reading from my book There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House at the Grey Wolfe Scriptorium bookshop in Clawson, MI on October 27. Details:

I’ll level with you: This is going to be a hoot. It’s a good book, it reads well, and I’m moderately hilarious.  I’ll bring snackies of some sort.

Nonetheless, I’m totally dubious about my capacity to draw an audience.  Therefore, I’m running two contests(!!!) associated with this event:

  1. CONTEST: If you are the one and only person who shows up you get a free book, a personal reading, and a free drink at the nearest bar!
  2. BONUS CONTEST: If the number of attendees exceeds the number of fingers I have (total), I will additionally read from the novel of y’all’s choosing. No reasonable request refused!

 

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2. Good Noise in the Loud Lab!

On October 28 I’ll be the featured artist in the Sonic Workshop at the Ann Arbor Hands on Museum from noon until 4pm . I’ll be running my “Loud Lab,” which includes a special installation of the Slinky Sound Forest, weird homebrew instruments and freak-out noisetoys you can rock out on, and an opportunity to craft your own weird noise-music-thingies under my dubious tutelage.  Details:

Hope to see you next weekend!

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Dave-o showing of his “non-violins

 

I Keep Forgetting to Tell Y’all I’ll Be at Penguicon this Weekend!!!🙀

Just a quick note:  I’ll be at Penguicon 2018penguicon-LogoName-e1520635701514 all this weekend (May 4–6 in Southfield, MI).  Here’s a schedule of all the stuff I will do (mostly lit oriented; in gray) and might do (mostly games and movies; in non-gray colors).

If you’re gonna be there and you wanna high-five or something, just hit me over email or Twitter and we’ll work it out.

OMG—I’m (sorta) Big in Japan (maybe)!!!🙀🇯🇵🚀🎉

I tweeted about this a bit earlier this week, when Google alerted me to the existence of this cryptic (to me) web page, which appears to be a ballot for a “Japanese Nebula Award” with one of my stories in the running for “Best Translated Short Story.”

Basically the only page I can grok in this entire magazine
Basically the only page I can grok in this entire magazine

As it turns out, this is an actual thing, and sort of a big deal.  (It’s called the “Seiun Award” in English—and evidently has nothing to do with the SFWA Nebula Award; the Seiun Award is named for Japan’s first SF magazine.)

A quick glance at that Wikipedia entry shows that, if my story should win, I will be the least famous cat to ever get one of these awards—and by a very significant margin.  Which is to say, I’m not going to win.  Still, it’s fun to be nominated.  (Also, how the hell is it that I don’t have a Wikipedia page? This is at least the third page that mentions me and deadlinks my name.  The ISFDB, on the other hand, is hitting this out of the park.  Well done!)

Anyway, if you’re wondering what all the shouting is about, you can read the story—my first Time Portal tale, “The New Guys Always Work Overtime,” winner of a 2013 Asimov’s Award(!!!)—for just 99 cents.

 

LAST CHANCE: Support Charity and Get 20+ DIY/Maker Books!!!

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In just a few hours the Makerspace Humble Book Bundle closes.

  1. SHORT VERSION: pay what you want, support excellent charities, get up to 21 awesome DIY/maker books from No Starch Press (including both my musical instruments book and hella-rad geeky craft projects book).
  2. LONG VERSIONHere’s my spiel from before.

Get good books, support good work; it’s an easy win-win.

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Support Art and other Good Things™: Get $120 in DIY/Makerspace Books for $1!

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The Humble “Makerspace” Book Bundle from No Starch Press is live an insanely good deal!  Pay a buck, and get six rad DIY-ish books (including my first book—Snip, Burn, Solder, Shred—as well as a few of my No Starch favorites). Pay $8, and get another six books (including my second DIY book, Junkyard Jam Band).  Pay a bit more…well, you get the picture.  All in, you can drop $20 and get more than $400 worth of DIY while supporting excellent charities. HUMBLE-00ca3c278db017f39d002720c906997f81f5958d

There are so many books I love in this one! Yoshihito Isogawa’s LEGO Technic books are both amazing and agelessly inspiring, Carlos Bueno’s Lauren Ipsum has been huge for my son (he read it twice in a row when it first came out, and still hits it again a few times a year now—it’s like the Information Age’s Phantom Tollbooth), No Starch’s Scratch and Arduino books are rock solid, and Jason R. Briggs’s Python for Kids is an excellent intro to Python for everyone (i.e., it’s how I learned enough Python to work on a documentation project with a U-M roboticist last year).

Also, I’ll level with you: These bundles (and book/game bundles in general) are a huge boost to authors/creators, both in getting our names and ideas out there, and in getting money into our pockets.  When you buy a bundle like this, you’re doing a Good Thing™ for the dissemination of new art and human knowledge, in addition to getting a good deal.

Humble Book Bundle: Makerspace by No Starch Press (pay what you want and help charity)

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eBooks! eBooks! FreeBooks!!! New horror and sci-fi from Dave-o!

Three offerings today—and you can get ’em all for less than a Subway sub:

  1. My most recent novella, There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House is now available as a standalone ebook. Read the horror tinged “Non-Euclidian architectural petty-crime adventure” that’s racking up kudos and five-star reviews at a humbling clip.  (If you want backstory on the story, here’s an interview I did with F&SF about it.)
  2. Price drop on my novelette “The Traveling Salesman Solution.” A time portal story, and also a grim moral koan. If I’ve ever written a story I think everyone in America should read, it’s this one. For a limited time this lil fella—my first sale to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and only true hard-SF tale—is just 99-cents!
  3. FREEBIE ALERT!!! From now until Monday my time-travel novelette “There Was No Sound of Thunder” is free on Amazon! This is the story that introduced the Parable of Too Many Hitlers. Read the story Locus magazine’s Lois Tilton called “Stoopid” (although, in all fairness, it was also a finalist for that year’s Asimov’s Award so maybe check it out and make the call for yourself?)

I know a goodly portion of you have already read one or more of these stories; all are woeful shy on Amazon/Goodread reviews.  If you wanted to swing by and leave your thoughts, it’d be much appreciated. Thanks in advance for helping nudge the wheel!

Goodreads links:

  1. There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House (coming soon?!)
  2. The Traveling Salesman Solution
  3. There Was No Sound of Thunder