Help needed here

Bad news from chum Ed Morris. His parents' dryer flamed out and blew up Saturday afternoon. Their house is nearly totalled. "They are both wickedly disabled," says Ed. The mayor of the central Pennsylvania town and many, many other folks have stepped up to the plate. "The insurance will cover it," says Ed, "but this is some serious s***."

Anyone who wants to help, give Ed a shout: dante3000@gmail.com

Here is the address of the story on the local paper's web site:

http://wearecentralpa.com/content/fulltext/news?cid=136802

Nice mention

Will's Texas Parlor - a website run by Will Howard of Houston - is a casual bibliography on Texas life, history, and literature - books, movies, maps, websites, blogs, government publications, academic or ephemeral papers, databases, journalism, libraries, museums, archives, etc. - mostly recent stuff. It's a filing cabinet or note file of facts, opinions, inquiries, criticism, quandries. It resembles talk between Texana librarians.

He featured my web sites - this one and the one for "Fantastic Texas - on Friday, Nov. 27. Thanks for the mention, Will.

http://texasparlor.blogspot.com/2009/11/fantastic-science-fiction-lou-antonelli.html

"Smoke Gets in Your Eyes"

The rollicking AH homage to Ernie Kovacs penned by Ed Morris and myself just hit at the December issue of "The Fifth Dimension", one of the magazines published by Sam's Dot Publishing. It's loads of fun:

http://www.samsdotpublishing.com/fifth/cover.htm

Meanwhile, John Scalzi - upon reading about Black Matrix and its miniscule pay rate - went into some kind of meltdown on his blog. You might want to go read:

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2009/12/01/in-the-spirit-of-the-pulps-and-paying-even-less/

Next story

On Nov. 23 I had an interview with Tom Pauken, chairman of the Texas Workforce Commission. I wrote it up for Monday's newspaper. During the course of the interview, which focused a lot on Pauken's assertion of the need for job creation to really pull us out of the recession, we touched on the subject of shipping jobs overseas.

Something struck a chord, and a few hours later I called Tam Thompson down in Blanco. Back in 2004 she brought a story to a Turkey City Workshop, called "Bangalore Blues," where outsourced jobs is a crucial plot element. I told Tam I had an idea I wanted to try. She emailed me a copy of the story.

I started working on the new version tonight, which I am renaming "Business as Usual". I think adding my strengths to stuff sher knows may really work out,

Tally

"Bindflestiff's Daughter" is the 88th story short story I've written since in seven years. Since "Stairway to Heaven" is my 45th publication, I'm batting .511 lifetime, and that average should go up with my pending publications.

Back from the break

Have taken a small hiatus here for the holiday, but I'm back. Work has been going on in the background. I've sent off five stories in the past few days, and "Bindlestiff's Daughter" is almost complete and I'm sure will be off in the mail next week.

The record

I said in yesterday's post that "Stairway to Heaven" is my first publication in a magazine's debut issue. I went back and checked my bibliography to confirm that information (it's true).

"Berserker" was published in the second issue of OG's Speculative Fiction in Sept. 2006, and "Avatar" was in the second issue of "Darker Matter" in April 2007.
"Good News for the Dead" was in the third issue of M-Brane sf in March of this year.

Thanks go to Ed Morris for knowing about Encounters and getting our joint production published.