From The StrategyPage’s Military Jokes and Military Humor:

If World War II had been an online Real Time Strategy game, the chat room
traffic would have gone something like this.

Excerpt:

*Roosevelt has left the game.*
Hitler[AoE]: wtf?
Eisenhower: sh1t now we need some1 to join
*tru_m4n has joined the game.*
tru_m4n: hi all
T0J0: hey
Stalin: sup
Churchill: hi
tru_m4n: OMG OMG OMG i got all his stuff!
tru_m4n: NUKES! HOLY **** I GOT NUKES
Stalin: d00d gimmie some plz
tru_m4n: no way i only got like a couple
Stalin: omg dont be gay gimmie nuculer secrets
T0J0: wtf is nukes?
T0J0: holy ****holy****hoyl****!
*T0J0 has been eliminated.*

Read the rest here.

Thanks to Dave Kirtley
for
pointing it out, who informs me that he’ll have a slew of his short fiction
available on Fictionwise very soon.

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Simon Owens at LitHaven just posted a short interview with me, which focuses on audiobooks and reviewing.

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Caltech astronomer finds solar system’s 10th planet:

A California astronomer has discovered what he believes is the 10th planet in our solar system, a group of NASA-funded researchers said on Friday.

The new planet, known as 2003UB313, has been identified as the most distant object ever detected orbiting the sun, California Institute of Technology astronomer Michael Brown said.

Hmm…2003UB313. That’s catchy.

But I like having nine planets in our solar system. I think I’ll use my Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator to blow that sucker up. (My Death Star is in the shop.)

Water ice in crater at Martian north pole

…images, taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft, show a patch of water ice sitting on the floor of an unnamed crater near the Martian north pole.

So now all we have to do is build one of those huge melty reactors, and once we activate it, Mars will have atmosphere!

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I’m putting together a list of published SF/F/H writers who are in their
twenties, and I was hoping some of my knowledgeable
readers could add to my list.
Know of any young SF/F/H writers not mentioned here?

Also, if you know someone on the list is 30 or older, please let me know so I
can cross him/her off the list. This is for a project I’m working on that
I’m not at liberty to discuss at the moment,
but I’d appreciate any help you fine folks could offer.

Some of these authors have resumes more impressive than others, but the only
real criteria I have is that the author in question have at least one
professional sale.

Here’s a list I’ve compiled thus far:

Not sure about these:

So, again, if you know any of these are 30 or older, please let me know, and
if you know of others, of course, I’d like to hear about them, or even
possibilities (i.e. you know the writer is young, but not sure how young).

It’s kind of surprising how difficult it can be to track down the age of
someone. The ISFDB is good for some, but unfortunately, it doesn’t have the
birthdates of most young writers.

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Some of you may have gotten your start with writing markets, as I did, with a copy of the Writer’s Market. If you did, then you were probably a clueless newbie when you picked it up, and remained a clueless newbie for a while afterward…until you got around to picking up a copy of each of those mysterious magazines and started reading them, and got to really know what you were doing.

Well, in an effort to make the newbies pawing through WM a little less clueless after reading it, the editors have lately been including a bunch of informative articles along with the market listings.

The reason I mention all this is that I may be doing some writing for them, for the 2007 edition of the Novel and Short Story Writer’s Market. Now, I don’t bring that up here to brag; instead, I mention it to see if anyone has any ideas for the sort of articles you might like to see in such a book, or the sort of articles that you wish you had seen when you first were starting out.

There are many writers already associated with the book, so many of the general writing type of articles are already spoken for. But I’m being brought in specifically as an expert in SF, so SF-specific articles are more of what I’m interested in. I have my own ideas, of course, but I’d be interested in hearing what you, my dear readers, think. After all, you guys are more the audience for this book than I am, so you’re the people to ask.

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In the right column, you’ll see I added my blog description (the “Being a blog…” part). Since I wanted that to be justified so that it would look better, I went ahead and manually hyphenated two words so that the text block looked more organic. It looks fine to me on my PC in both IE and Firefox. Can someone report how it looks on other computers? Since that column is fixed width, it should look the same on every computer, but you never know.

Also, I haven’t tried to manually hyphenate something in a long time; if I did it wrong, please let me know.

And on a mostly unrelated subject, I note that the poll I posted is centered and looks fine in Firefox, but in IE, though the poll box is centered, the text within the box is also centered, which screws up the formatting. Why? Gods, why? Grrr. It’s hard enough making a website look right in one browser, let alone two.

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My review of 1776 by David McCullough appeared in PW recently, and you can now read it on the audiobook’s Amazon.com page. If you scroll down, it’s the one labled “From Publishers Weekly.”

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Incidentally, I thought I should point out that response times may continue to be a bit longer than usual as I endeavor to catch up after the delay caused by Readercon, my vacation, and Gordon’s week teaching Clarion West.

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You may remember I blogged recently about a self-published novelist having submitted a ms. to F&SF who managed to violate nearly every rule of submission etiquette. Well, lucky me! This week, there was another submission from him in the pile.

And despite the fact that I very nicely pointed out the ways in which he varied from standard procedure and provided him with a link to Vonda McIntyre’s very handy article on the subject, he ignored all of my advice and submitted his new manuscript in exactly the same way as he had his first.

Well, to be fair, he might have listened to one piece of advice (though it may have been luck of the draw); previously, he submitted, I believe, three stories at the same time. This time around, there was only one in the submission package. Hey, let’s hear it for progress!

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Check out the shiny new blog. Isn’t it pretty? If you read my blog via an aggregator, you owe it to yourself to come take a look at this.

Note that the comments have been enabled once again on the main page, but remain disabled on archived posts (to combat spam). You’re still always welcome to post on the message board too.

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