Category Archives: Junk Thought

Are you a gut-shot explorer dying quickly on the edge of a collapsing star, your last few relativistic seconds spent dreaming of a sound and quiet life, or are you a sound and quiet life dying slowly on the edge of a gut-shot planet, your only few seconds spent dreaming of exploration?

We’ve made something stupid that may amuse you if you’re a fan of NIN and/or Bob’s Burgers.

You may have noticed the rise of increasingly long book titles (that often sound like sentence fragments.)

What you may not be aware of is that we’re simply running out of one or two word combinations that haven’t already been claimed. Everything from The Martian through to The Big Sleep has been used. You can’t chuck a noun without hitting an Isaac Asimov novel, a Margaret Atwood poem, and two Stephen King short stories before it touches the ground.

To those wondering why this is a problem – to those wondering why we shouldn’t just proudly claim 1984 for our Pac-Man-centric period-piece* murder mystery – I say: Try searching Goodreads for Possession.

(*I just made myself feel old, but if I were reading about about 1967 in 1997…)

Of course, in this regard the Victorians might have been a step ahead. It’ll be a long time before we come back around to needing to re-use The Life and Extraordinary Adventures, the Perils and Critical Escapes, of Timothy Ginnadrake, That Child of Chequer’d Fortune

Having received an absolutely-expected rejection letter from Baen has brought mixed feelings.

Tossing a work into the slush pile of one of the major publishers is – given the number of submissions they receive and the amount of time they have to consider each work – an utter lottery. Art is subjective, even pulpy art, and good work can simply miss the right set of eyes.

That said, I got a nice little personal note (beyond the standard form letter copy/paste) indicating there was genuine interest. It may not have made the final cut, but someone over at Baen flagged my first attempt at a novel as a real possibility for publication, and, as we stagger out of 2016, that’s enough to feel like a minor victory.

It’s that dream again. He’s wielding the sword in wide loops, and it feels comfortable in his grip, its hilt so familiar in his hands that he almost believes it his friend. The damned smiling man is also there. He does not seem impressed. He never is. In a single motion the smirker draws his pistol, fires.

His slumbering death is quick, and he awakens again in the bar. He’s got a job to do; not a pleasant one, perhaps, but he’s got mouths to feed and Jabba doesn’t like lost cargo. It’s him though – that damned smiling man – and again he draws and fires before the sleeper might enact his own murderous intentions.

The man awakens to a dark room. What will stop these dreams? He must wipe the smile from that damned face – and he thinks he knows how. Pulling at the rigging that holds his prosthetic arm in place, he reviews his plans for Kimble’s wife.