When Alice and I got married last autumn, we received many wonderful gifts from our friends, but one of the absolute standouts came from John McDaid and his family. John — a brilliant, award-winning science fiction writer — wrote a story for us called "(Nothing But) Flowers," a sad, haunting, hopeful post-apocalyptic tale that we both read with delight and wonder on our honeymoon. — Read the rest

One of my favorite sf stories of the past ten years has been shortlisted for this year's Nebula Award, and is being made available for free download during the final balloting season.

Last December, I blogged about John McDaid's "Keyboard Practice, Consisting of an Aria with Diverse Variations for the Harpsichord with Two Manuals," I story I workshopped with John in Toronto a few summers ago. — Read the rest

Madeline Ashby (previously) writes, "This is a protest song in the vein of Woody Guthrie or Pete Seeger, written by the wonderful John McDaid (previously, and it's great."

More on yesterday's story about a nasal-wedged maggot scare in Portsmouth, RI's middle school (refresher: the Portsmouth Middle School sent parents a terrifying letter warning of a student Smartie-snorting epidemic and predicting that children would end up with maggots in their noses that feasted upon the sugar residue). — Read the rest

Parents in Portsmouth, Rhode Island got a letter from the Portsmouth Middle School warning them that students may be snorting and smoking ground-up Smarties candies. The letter warns of risks of cuts, lung infections, nasal passage scarring, nose-wedged maggots (!), and future cigarette and drug use. — Read the rest

Ned Berke, editor of the Sheepshead Bites site — which provides comprehensive local news for the neighborhood of Sheepshead Bay — has a great manifesto about the delights and rewards of making hyperlocal news.

I believe local journalism, local government and local economies are the linchpins of a vibrant, healthy nation.

Citizen journalist John McDaid looks at RI Republican Senate candidate Barry Hinckley's campaign spot in which Hinckley's five-year-old son gives a lecture on economics and gas prices. The spot resulted in some pretty weird stuff (McDaid describes the "bizarre followup interview he and his son gave with Fox's Neil Cavuto, where Hinckley appeared to be lip-synching his son's responses like Fats in Magic"), but really takes issue with the frankly misleading gas-price chart shown in the ad. — Read the rest

Congrats to the nominees for the 2011 Hugo Awards, to be presented at this year's World Science Fiction Convention in Reno, NV. I'll be there and rooting for my favorites!

Best Novel
Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis (Ballantine Spectra)
Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen)
The Dervish House by Ian McDonald (Gollancz; Pyr)
Feed by Mira Grant (Orbit)
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K.

Xark's Dan Conover, evidently a newspaperman, writes in "The newspaper suicide pact" about the mountain of bullshit that has entered the discussion about the future of newspaper business-models. This is some of the clearest, most interesting, best-referenced criticism of the newspaper industry's thrash-and-FUD I've read:

Newspapers that are turning to paywall plans today are gambling on a risky revenue stream that even the experts aren't predicting will provide a replacement to their lost advertising revenues (their biggest financial problem is the rapid decline in advertising rates, not the slow decline in print circulation).

John McDaid's amazing, Nebula-shortlisted science fiction story "Keyboard Practice" is now available as a free MP3.

Earlier this month, I blogged about how John had posted a free electronic edition of his groundbreaking story "Keyboard Practice, Consisting of an Aria with Diverse Variations for the Harpsichord with Two Manuals," which I had the good fortune to workshop with him some years ago. — Read the rest

COCOA is a silly organization that is pushing for Amazon, Google, and other services that provide indexes and excerpts from books to abandon this perfectly legal notion in favor of a cumbersome process whereby any author could demand that scanned page images of parts of their
books not be shown — for example, you could say to Amazon, you can only show pages one through 23 of my book. — Read the rest

Three years ago, I had the privilege of workshopping John McDaid's brilliant story "Keyboard Practice, Consisting of an Aria with Diverse Variations for the Harpsichord with Two Manuals" (see the all-too-short excerpt here). I have never read a story that was its like, before or since. — Read the rest