Congratulations

Very big congratulations go out to Paul Hosek, over the publication of his story "Made" in On Spec. Paul was one of the other participants in the University of Toronto summer SFF workshop in 2005, where he workshopped "Made" and I workshopped "Lifebuoy," and I'm pleased as anything to see his story in print.

Rejection is a funny thing

It's never much fun to have a story rejected, but I got an amusing rejection earlier this week -- amusing because the same story was rejected a while back, by a different market, for the complete opposite reason: the more recent market because the editor thought it didn't contain anything new, the older one because they considered it "experimental fiction." I don't doubt that one of them is right, but I'm not sure how both could be...

Of course

I just received word that Tesseracts Ten will be included in the syllabus of a course being taught at the University of Toronto this summer and winter. "Closing Time" is not one of the stories specifically being assigned (probably because the course is specifically on SF), but it's still cool.

Irregular is best

I'm pleased and humbled to say that "Irregular Verbs" is going to be included in Best New Fantasy 2 from Prime Books, alongside stories by such writers as Holly Phillips, Cat Rambo and my fellow On Spec contributor Leah Bobet (whom I had the pleasure of meeting not long ago at Bakka-Phoenix Books in Toronto). The full table of contents is available here.

Triangulating my position

I just received the TOC for the anthology "Triangulation: End of Time," in which my story "When We Have Time" will be appearing this summer. There are some pretty impressive names there, so I don't think I have to worry that this will go unseen and unreviewed (as Ten Plagues and Deathgrip seem to have). Check it out:

"In the Belly of the Desert" by Jared Axelrod
"The Bridge" by Michael Stone
"A Job for Life" by Ian Creasey
"Late" by Idan Cohen
"Defender" by Scott Almes
"This Is The Way The World Ends" by Trent Walters
"America is Coming!" by Dario Ciriello
"Think Kindly On Our Fossils" by Sue Burk
"When We Have Time" by Matthew Johnson (that's me!)
"Eshu and the Anthropic Principle" by Geoff Thorne
"Ice Age" by Jessica E. Kaiser
"Surface Tension" by Kurt Kirchmeier
"Morris and the Machine" by Tim Pratt
"Final Episode" by Katherine Shaw
"Near Absolute Zero" by Jetse de Vries
"The Shopping Cart People" by Terry Hayman
"That Ain't A Mosey" by Jeff Parish
"Hurricane Watch" by Rebecca W. Day
"Time's Arrow is Not Your Enemy" by Ashley Arnold
"Conversation in an English Pub" by Darren Latta

Pretty cool...

Local boy makes good

A very nice review of Tesseracts Ten in Ottawa's own Storyteller magazine, which says "'Closing Time' may be the best and most charming ghost story I have ever read, but don't read it if you're on a diet."