Read the tale that David Gerrold (the guy who invented Tribbles!) called “a very disturbing story”!
In “The Traveling Salesman Solution” a wheelchair-bound veteran of the “War on Terror”—now working in the IT department of a Big Ten university—starts investigating suspicious marathon results, and ends up face-to-face with an absolutely chilling mathematical conundrum.
My latest novella—”Where There is Nothing, There is God”—is a Finalist for the this year’s Asimov’s Award. Asimov’s has posted all of the finalists for free download; nab ’em and read up! (HOT TIP: Karl Bunker’s “They Have All One Breath” is an especially worthy read.)
Here’s a direct link to the PDF of “Where There is Nothing, There is God”
FYI: This novella is a standalone, and there are two other standalone stories set in this universe (both have appeared in Asimov’s, and one won the 2013 Asimov’s Award). Check ’em out:
Just a quick note: I’m on the faculty of the Michigan Writing Workshop this year, doing fantasy and science fiction critiques (I still have a few open slots, they tell me). Lots of interesting speakers this year (I’m especially hoping to drop in on D.E. Johnson’s thriller/mystery/crime writing sessions; I dug his book The Detroit Electric Scheme).
My time portal novella, “Where There Is Nothing, There Is God” is eligible in the novella category of the 2017 Asimov’s Readers Awards. If you dug it and wanna cast a ballot, rad! If not, no skin off my back. Thx!
My latest Time Portal novella— “Where There Is Nothing, There Is God” —is in the current issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, on news stands now! (Most Barnes & Noble locations stock it, as do many indie bookshops).
Our blockbuster December 2016 novella, “Where There Is
Nothing, There Is God” by David Erik Nelson, is a rollicking Time Portal tale. It’s filled with a cast of unsavory characters who operate as though Cotton Mather’s favorite TV show was Breaking Bad. In this vastly entertaining story, it’s hard to know whom to root for so just make sure your inertia dampening system is on and enjoy the ride!
The other two stories in the series— “The New Guys Always Work Overtime” and “There Was No Sound of Thunder” —can be purchased for Kindle (click those links), or you can get that first story in many DRM-free formats for free(!!!) when you sign up for my newsletter using this link:
In celebration of their 10th anniversary Pseudopod—a consistently solid horror fiction podcast—is running a kickstarter:
Pseudopod has an excellent track record—both in terms of delivering the goods and doing right by their contributors—and impressive longevity (10 years of weekly operation publishing fiction for free is hard going; I know from experience). Their goal is to raise funds to increase what they pay artists and ensure their longevity. These are Good Things™
Kick in a few bucks; the 21st Century is nuts, and perhaps the nutsiest thing is the jaw-dropping array of free arts & letters we each enjoy every day—but it can only be free on the daily if we all kick in now and again. This is one of those moments.
Add bonus: there are some really nifty backer premiums, including this rad-as-hell mug and their first ever anthology, For Mortal Things Unsung—which features both reprints of pieces they
bought for the podcast (including mine), as well as new work A.C. Wise, Jim Bihyeh, and others.
This takes a pretty wonderful turn at 5:30 (which shouldn’t be that surprising, given what we know of artistic formula—and especially my hobbyhorse: three-act with 45/45/10 distribution):
Continue reading ““Smartpipe, Inc., is a registered sex offender””
This arrived in my mailbox on Friday, August 12:
Lemme zoom in on the first graff:
And just one more time:
A postal truck “experienced a fire.”
My God, I love that! We have sentient postal trucks, out there having new and interesting experiences, and yet they don’t have the damned sense not to play with fire. It’s a self-aware 80,000 pound truck with the executive function of a toddler; O brave new world that has such people in’t!
At any rate, this does tend to explain the errant check for several thousand dollars I’ve been waiting for. *sighs* Guess I’ve gotta call a client later today.
Anyway, for the curious, here’s my mail burning up last month:
(source)
This is a little video about dropping the pretensions and just returning to using “They/Them” as the singular non-gendered pronoun. It’s a fun video, but the Big Picture is this:
English is a fantastically error-tolerant language. You can construct fantastically agrammatical sentences and still be sufficiently understood to get things done. Optimizing around tiny matters of correctness (e.g., “unique can never take a modifier,” “never end a sentence with a preposition,” and so on) usually fails to bring any substantive increase in the clarity of your speech or writing. Insisting that others do so as well–especially when there is no legitimate confusion created by their chosen construction–usually means you are acting like a classist dickweed (plausibly because you are one).
THE TAKEAWAY: At best, perfect “grammatical correctness”—like taking a good long shit—is (and should be) an entirely private pleasure. It’s not for polite conversation among civilized people like you and me.
If nothing else of substance, the last couple days of RNC Trump Speech brouhaha have offered a pair of very important business lessons.
My initial impression was that we were looking at this kind of fantastically gobsmacking paradox:
A candidate renowned for his wealth and business acumen is either unable to afford or incapable of selecting competent help.
But according to this article, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Skilled workers are perfectly happy to hold their noses and accept Trump dollars, but their employer is totally unable to actually use the tools he purchases.
This puts me in the mind of a business aphorism (which I believe I first heard from Ramit Sethi):
A students hire A students; B students hire C students.
To mansplain: An A student knows what good work looks like, that good work is hard, and is confident that they can reliably produce good work through the judicious application of hard work. A students want to see good work, and do not want to look like putzes, so they choose subordinates who are as capable as themselves (if not more so). B students may occasionally do good work, but since they don’t know this other stuff (about how to judiciously apply hard work to reliably produce that good work), they can be pretty insecure. They hire down the ladder to shore up their ego.
But, of course, Trump is proving to not even be a B student; the B student is insecure and frustrated because he or she knows what good, consistent work looks like—they just can’t produce it.
Trump is a C student wallowing in the depths of Dunning-Kruger Syndrome.
So, to revise:
A students hire A students; B students hire C students. C students hire an A student, a B student, two C students, a guy on Craigslist, their cousin, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Mike Tyson, six doctors, and a personal trainer, follow none of their advice, and then scream at them when they get the C they earned.
Hard to believe it’s just 185 days until a middle-school “Plagiarism” essay entirely copied from Wikipedia is inaugurated President.🇺🇸🔥
— David Erik Nelson (@SquiDaveo) July 19, 2016
