A story's trip through the Clarkesworld submissions queue.

On a dream-like "what if?" hope, tempered with "since they are so responsive, at least I'll be able to submit it somewhere else when they reject me, but still: what if?" I finally submitted a ruthlessly-pared-down-from-5000-to-under-4000-words story (the paring down alone took a month to get to a place which made me somewhat happy) to Clarkesworld on Tuesday morning, and found that my story was #27 in the queue. Before leaving for lunch, it was #25, and I already felt the sense of approaching doom. You can actually watch the clock tick down to your story's death; it's an interesting feeling.
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The Aether Age

I missed its conception and formulation, but I've been following The Aether Age for about a month or so now, thinking about the guidelines, openly lustful at the thought of putting together a story to be included in it. I love the concept of a concept-based anthology; I love the particular concept picked--Egyptian and Grecian steampunk? Yeah, I'm in; and I love that it's all turning into a ShareAlike licensed work and world to be built upon, remixed, enjoyed the world over.

So I finally took the time to research the setting and idea which had been slowly clawing its way out of my brain and into text, pound out a first draft over a few days, and give it a couple rounds of reading and editing. Pretty happy with it so far, and I hope it strikes a fancy with the editors over there.

There's also a Facebook Group for Aether Age along with the blog. Not much discussion going, but the world is really just getting started.
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Well, what do you know.

Well, it's finally happened. One editor was crazy enough to actually accept one of my stories. "The Man in the Mirror" will appear in the 2010 52-Stitches dark flash fiction anthology. It's very flash at 250 words, but that's about double the size of the first manuscript of the story I submitted to them. Very glad they were interested in a rewrite, and: Score one for the good guys! [More]

Go.

I'm a sucker for learning languages. So when Google released Go I jumped in and gave it a look. There's some interesting things in there, part C, part Limbo, part amalgam of new and old and new-old old-new. (Pick where GC and CSP go in that mix.)

Now, there are some growing pains; the "core" language packages include a myriad of fairly functional tools: hmac, json, http server and client, etc. Enough for me to spend a day or so putting together a quick Twitter-OAuth web app in Go.

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BULL SPEC

Against probably all better judgement, I've put a stake in the ground and hung a sign on it: BULL SPEC is open for submissions: Welcome to BULL SPEC. [More]