Since my last post, there have been a few developments in things I mentioned. The first of these is that I’m no longer going to be attending World Fantasy in San Jose. Things with my mother have become progressively worse so much so that traveling at this time, and being away from the family for more than a day at most is ill-advised. It’s a shame – I’ve been looking forward to it all year for many reasons, and I’ll miss seeing all the distant friends I was hoping to see, but some things trump all else.

In the positive category, however, the Shadows of the Emerald City, which some are probably sick of hearing me mention, is now available to buy, both from the publisher, Northern Frights Publishing, and from Amazon. Links are below:

Northern Frights

Amazon

There seems to be a good amount of buzz for this anthology, as seen in the reviews I posted last time. I’m looking forward to reading the other stories in the volume and seeing how people like it.

Okay, that’s enough pimpage for now. More news when it comes.

Between work and the situation with my mother, I haven’t had much time to even compose a blog post lately. But I have some writing news to share, despite not being quite as productive lately as I’d like to be. The next few months look like a good time for my fiction.

Most recently, I found out that I sold a story to Steampunk Tales, the digital magazine for steampunk fiction that launched for the iPhone with a rather attractive application and is also available in Mobireader and PDF formats. I did a review of Steampunk Tales Issue One for Tor.com and I was impressed with it. When I found out they accepted fiction submissions, I knew I had to submit to them. I’m really excited about the opportunity, especially as it’s a different form of distribution than I’ve seen.

Prior to this news, I received word that my pirate story, “The Furies”, previously in Shimmer’s Pirate Issue will appear as a reprint in the Skulls and Crossbones anthology due out in January 2010 from Mindancer Press.

My story in Shimmer’s Clockwork Jungle issue, “The Emperor’s Gift”, should see print some time in November along with the rest of the issue.

Then there’s the Shadows of the Emerald City anthology which includes my story, “Pumpkinhead”, which should be releasing any day now. The anthology has been getting a number of good reviews (some of them collected below) and I’m looking forward to seeing the final product.

M-Brane SF Review

Senses Five Press Review

Apex Book Company Review

Innsmouth Free  Press Review

Strange Weird and Wonderful.com Review (PDF download)

Wanderings Review

Finally, I will be attending the World Fantasy Convention in San Jose, California next week. I’m looking forward to reconnecting with old friends and meeting new ones. Maybe I’ll see you there.

I haven’t updated for a while. Which isn’t necessarily anything new. But this time there’s a good reason for it.

I believe I’ve talked about it here, but last year my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. Over the course of the last year and a half she’s been receiving treatment for that – first with chemo, then radiation, ending up on a treatment of Tarceva, a daily pill that has actually helped to reduce the tumors in her lungs drastically.

Unfortunately, she also has metastases in her bones. This hasn’t responded to the treatment and has spread as her lung cancer has dwindled.

Since July she has been having spells of headaches and nausea that eventually became so bad that she was barely active and couldn’t eat on a regular basis. The initial MRI showed nothing suspect, but her condition continued to deteriorate.

All this led to last Thursday (when she was supposed to get another MRI) when she had a seizure. In a stroke of amazing luck, my father was there with her when it happened and he helped her otherwise I don’t know what would have happened. Since then she’s been in the hospital.

Another MRI showed that she had hydrocephalus. Cerebrospinal fluid was accumulating in her ventricles and pressing on her brain.

This past weekend was tough as she was heavily medicated as they tried to stabilize her seizures. Thankfully, on Monday they were able to start treating her with radiation therapy and with a spinal tap which helped to reduce the fluid accumulation. Since then her headaches have stopped and she’s been feeling much better, though her stomach is still a bit touchy (which would seem natural after weeks of not being able to eat solid food).

It looks like she will be able to come home tomorrow. Things will have to change, of course. She can’t move around like she used to. She’ll most likely have to sleep on the ground floor because of this. But she is coming home and she’ll be out of the hospital and she’ll be better able to have something approximating a normal life.

To say that this has been hard on the family is a massive understatement. I can’t think of many things worse than watching someone you love deeply, someone who has always taken care of you, subjected to something as horrible and as painful as this. But we’ve been doing our best to be there for her and with her and we will continue to do that for as long as it’s needed.

In the meantime, if I’m a little quiet, or unresponsive, you know the reason why.

Thank you to everyone who has expressed their sympathies and have offered their thoughts, prayers and well wishes. In a time like this, it’s humbling to realize how much love and support I have and it’s something I continue to be awed by. I suppose it’s one of life’s contradictions that in the middle of terrible misfortune, you can be simultaneously confronted with how lucky you are.

Paul Di Filippo looks at the new series of Roger Zelazny collections from NESFA Press at the Barnes and Noble Review site. I’m a huge Zelazny fan and I’ve acquired the first four volumes in the NESFA series. The last two are due out at the end of the year. I have yet to delve into them, but I’m looking forward to it. While I’ve read some of Zelazny’s short fiction, I’m looking forward to some of the more obscure stories and tracking his evolution as a writer. Maybe I should make 2010 the year of Zelazny.

A while back, after I’d downloaded Stanza for my iPhone, I came across a free sampler of ebooks from Random House. While these mostly consisted of science fiction and fantasy books, it also contained three of Charlie Huston’s novels – Caught Stealing, Six Bad Things, and A Dangerous Man. I knew Huston had written Moon Knight for a while, and I knew his name, so I downloaded them to check out later.

So, one day, while I was waiting for the subway, and in need of a new book, I loaded up Caught Stealing and started to read. I have to say that at first I had my doubts. For much of the beginning, the story, as told by the 1st person narrator, seemed mired in mundane life tasks. It seemed to boil down to sentences like – “I bundled my laundry up. Dumped it into the basket. I took the basket down to the laundry room. I loaded the colors into the machine. Added detergent.” Etc. I don’t mind slow beginnings, setting the stage, but nothing was really happening, and I wanted it to. * But as the novel continued, and as I worked my way into successive novels, I realized that what Huston has done here is capture the motion of a snowball rolling down an arctic mountain. At first it moves slowly, but soon it gathers speed and mass until at the end it’s hurtling along toward a massive collision.

And that’s what these books do. Hank Thompson starts as a normal guy with a bit of a shadowed past. But when he finds a key, all hell starts breaking loose. As the books continue, the hole he finds himself in gets deeper and deeper. Huston’s writing is extremely engaging and it pulls you in. Hank is a strange animal, too – likable and yet not completely. Someone you root for and despise at the same time. Together with the heaps of abuse that Huston piles on him, I could barely tear myself away. I went through all three books in record time.

As to making me sick, he very nearly did. One afternoon I was in the Jay St. subway station waiting for a train and reading A Dangerous Man. A particular scene in the book involves scarring from plastic surgery ** mixed with a description of multiple drug doses. Somehow this all combined to make me literally nauseous, to the point where I thought I was going to throw up. I see that as the mark of a good writer if he can provoke such a strong physical response.

I highly recommend Huston’s work and I intend to read more of his work in the future.

* This may be partly because of where I read it. Waiting for a subway can make one impatient.

** Plastic surgery is one of the few things that makes me queasy. Blood doesn’t bother me, I can watch eye operations up close, but plastic surgery or even talking about plastic surgery – boob jobs, facelifts, whatever – make me nauseous.