The Segment by Genevieve Valentine
After the Cure by Carrie Ryan
Valedictorian by N.K. Jemisin
Visiting Nelson by Katherine Langrish
All I Know of Freedom by Carol Emshwiller
The Other Elder by Beth Revis
The Great Game at the End of the World by Matthew Kressel
Reunion by Susan Beth Pfeffer
Faint Heart by Sarah Rees Brennan
Blood Drive by Jeffrey Ford
Reality Girl by Richard Bowes
Hw th’Irth Wint Wrong by Hapless Joey @ homeskool.guv by Gregory Maguire
Rust With Wings by Steven Gould
The Easthound by Nalo Hopkinson
Gray by Jane Yolen
Before by Carolyn Dunn
Fake Plastic Trees by Caitlin R. Kiernan
You Won’t Feel a Thing by Garth Nix
The Marker by Cecil Castellucci

Early in the year, my story “The History Within Us” was reprinted in The People of the Book.  An excellent anthology of Jewish-themed science fiction & fantasy, I was pretty darn happy to share a table of contents with Neil Gaiman, Peter Beagle, and many other talents.

Another Jewish-themed story (do you sense a pattern?), “The Hands that Feed” appeared in Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories.  About an aging Jewish woman in a steam-punked Lower East Side of 1895, this story was a lot of fun to write.  People seemed to like this one quite a bit too, which made me very happy.

My big publication of the year was “The Bricks of Gelecek,” which appeared in Ellen Datlow’s urban fantasy anthology Naked City. Ellen said this story “blew me away” when she first read it.  And Shelf Awareness called it the “true gem in the collection.”  I’m quite proud of this story, especially since it takes place in the same universe as my novel in progress.  Over on the SFWA.org boards, Ellen has posted a copy of the story for SFWA members.  If you care to check it out, please let me know what you think!

GUD Magazine purchased my small-town tale “One Spring in Cherryville,” a story about a close band of twenty-somethings who discover something buried in an abandoned factory basement that changes their lives forever.  I don’t have a publication date for this one yet.

Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling purchased “The Great Game at the End of the World” for their YA dystopian anthology, After.  This was the first time that I’d written a story that put children in real harm, and I found some scenes painful to write.  But I think this is one of my best stories, and I’m excited to hear what people think of it when it comes out this fall.

Sean Wallace purchased a reprint of “The Hands that Feed” for The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, which will be out in June of this year.

Sadly, there was no issue of Sybil’s Garage in 2011.  Though I really wanted to do a new issue, a number of other projects have prevented me from finding the time.  This is not the end of the magazine, however.  It will return!

For my work on Sybil’s Garage and Senses Five Press I was nominated for a World Fantasy Award in the category of Special Award, Non-Professional.  Though I did not win, it was a great honor to be nominated.  Even better was sharing the ballot with my Altered Fluid mates Mercurio David Rivera and N.K. Jemisin.  Go team!

This year I did several readings of my work.  In February I read along side Rick Bowes at the Wold Newton reading series.  In a crowded bookstore in Cambridge, MA I read with other contributors of Naked City, and I participated in three more readings at Readercon.  At the San Diego World Fantasy Convention, Jeff Ford and I both read our stories from After.  Jeff was awesome by offering to merge our separate readings into one large one.  Overall I believe I did about eight different readings this year, which seems like a lot now that I think about it.

At Readercon I hosted a popular panel called “Dybbuks, Golems, Demons, Oy Vey!: Jewish Mythology and Folklore in Speculative Fiction.”  I had a lot of fun talking about the many great stories of Jewish fantasy and science fiction with the panelists, and the overcrowded room was testament to the panel’s success.

So, you may be wondering, what’s with all this Jewish-themed stuff?  Well, I’ve been working on a novel based on the Jewish myth of the Lamed Vav, the Thirty Six just men who sustain the world.  I finished a draft in August, the same day (no actually the same minute) that the northeastern U.S. was struck with a minor earthquake.  I had been writing about minor earthquakes in the final scene, so when the world actually shook, I was like, whoops!  Next time I’ll write about rainbows and universal harmony.  Anyway, I have recently begun revisions on the novel and I am about 25% of the way through.  I hope to have a final draft by the end of February.

The Fantastic Fiction reading series at KGB has been going strong all throughout 2011, with many excellent guests and regular large crowds.  The fundraiser from 2010 has allowed Ellen and I to continue to run the series throughout most of 2012.  I noticed a lot of new faces in the audience, which suggests that the series is expanding in popularity as well.  2012 is already shaping up to be amazing with January’s guests, James Patrick Kelly and Kelly Link.  In March, we will also have Terry Bisson, the series’ founder.  It’s going to be a good year.

Overall 2011 was a very good year for me, and I’m working hard to make sure 2012 continues that trend.  On that note, here’s hoping your New Year’s was a happy one and that 2012 brings you all the success you deserve.  Bye, for now.

Or this song from Sigue Sigue Sputnik, “21st Century Boy”:

Anyway I’m not so much trying to relive an earlier period of my life, but to discover artists who are exploring similar areas of sound today.  This “retro-future” soundscape hasn’t been explored as much as it could have been, I believe, and as an amateur musician I hope to one day be able to write something that I wouldn’t be ashamed to play in my bar.

Too much happens at a con to summarize easily.  So I’ll try to summarize my thoughts before they all fade into a blur.

I met Charles Tan in person, who was flown to the U.S. all the way from the Philippines based on a fund that Lavie Tidhar set up. We were all strangely enough nominated for a World Fantasy Award in the same category (Special Award, Non-Professional), but the award went to Alisa Krasnostein for her work with Twelfth Planet Press.  Yeah, I’m not going to lie, it would have been cool to win, but I really wasn’t expecting too, and I was happy to see Alisa go home with the Lovecraft bust.  Charles is also twice as nice in person as he is online.

On Friday night I had dinner with Kit and Joe Reed and Jeff Ford and a few of Jeff’s former Clarion classmates.  (One was Rebecca Rowe and forgive me but I can’t recall the other’s name.)  Kit was her usual charming self and Jeff was awesome as usual.  When I told Jeff he and I had a reading at the same time and I was sad to miss his, he graciously offered to merge our readings into one.  Jeff is one of my favorite writers, so this was pretty damn awesome. Turns out we both are in Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s After anthology, so we both read our stories from that.  Jeff’s piece was about a high school where all the kids pack guns and wear them as accessories.  It was amazing as usual.

The parties are kind of a blur, but highlights for me include hanging out with the Canadian ChiZine Press crew, Brett Savory and Helen Marshall, and Robert Shearman of the UK who wrote the Doctor Who episode “Dalek.”  I don’t think I’ve laughed that hard in years.  Had a lovely chat with Leanne Renee Hieber, spoke politics and future WFCs with Jetse de Vries, awards with Gordon Van Gelder, and economics with Rani Graff from Israel.  Also lots of fun hanging out with the Australian crew, who may perhaps be the snarkiest people on the planet (I like snark.)  Friday night we were on the lawn chairs at 3 a.m. talking Australian football with DoSelle when the security guard shut us down.

Saturday, N.K. Jemisin threw her pajama party, where there was Twister, sippy-cups, the game Operation.  I got to see Ellen Datlow playing Hungry Hungry Hippo like it was nobody’s business.  I wore my PJs, but just for a little while.  World Fantasy has never been keen on costumes.

(Pillow fights on the other hand are encouraged.)

I also did a reading for JoSelle Vanderhooft’s Steam-Powered series.  A little more intimate than a conference room, we staged the reading in one of the suites, and I got to hear a lot of young, talented writers, like C.S.E. Cooney read excerpts of their stories.  I read the beginning of my piece “The Hands That Feed.”  Also got to spend some time talking novels with JoSelle and Eric Vogt, who both are working on novels where the gender disparity is much greater than our 51/49.  The ideas were so cool, I smelled a James Tiptree award on the breeze.

What else?  As you can tell, I haven’t been talking too much about the panels.  I didn’t go to many.  Devin Poore sat on a panel with Harry Turtledove about ships and sailing in speculative fiction, and it was cool (and frightening) to hear stories of some of the panelists describing the sensation of being lost in fog, or watching bioluminescent creatures approaching.  Devin’s Navy experience, as well as the other panelist’s varied and knowledgeable backgrounds made the panel a highlight.

I also got to see Genevieve Valentine, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Mercurio D. Rivera and Rajan Khanna read.

At the awards banquet I got to sit next to the fabulous and fabulously dressed Kate Baker, where we talked Sybil’s Garage and novel writing as her glittery dress dropped sparkly powder over everything she touched.  We said the dust were tiny dead fairies.

Connie Willis gave a hilarious toast, and Neil Gaiman was his usual charming and audience-flattering self.

And, no, as I said, I didn’t win.  I was rooting for Mercurio and Nora too, but alas they didn’t win either.  Still, I was happy just to see my friends nominated, to see their hard work recognized, and I’m really happy for the winners too.  There’s always next year, and the most important thing to take home from any con is the desire to keep doing what we love: reading and writing.  And that, despite the New York noise, I did.

(You can see a few photos I took of the con here.)

(Also be on the lookout for a huge Sybil’s Garage announcement this weekend.)

Shut up before your god!

In the Book of Job, the titular Job suffers all sorts of maladies, boils, burning, utter agony, the loss of loved ones.  He cries out to God, “Why?  I have been a good man all my life.”  For the next several hundred lines or so in beautiful, timeless prose, Job’s friends try to convince him of the superiority of God’s ways, and though God’s ways are hidden from humanity, Job should just accept his fate.  It’s all part of God’ plan.

But Job is not one to roll over easily.  It takes the presence of God himself to cow him down into submission.  Many people take this to mean that Job finally accepts God as the ultimate power, and that Job ultimately rediscovers his fate.  But Carl Jung in his book Answer to Job, believes differently.  Jung posits that God is just a schoolyard bully, who says to Job, “Obey me, otherwise I’ll cause you more suffering! After all, I created the mountains and the sky!”  Job finds his faith only for fear of God’s terrible wrath, which Jung says isn’t faith at all because it’s not based on a choice.

A half-century after Jung’s thesis came the film Blade Runner, with its band of replicant humans seeking more life.  And it occurred to me this morning that Roy Batty, the leader of the replicants, can be thought of as Job.  He has been created by a force he doesn’t understand (he is essentially a cloned soldier).  He has to suffer unfairly (replicants die after only four years) and watches his loved ones die, one by one.  But instead of waiting for God to come to him in a whirlwind, Roy goes to his God, the CEO of the Tyrell corporation, Dr. Eldon Tyrell.

“It’s not an easy thing to meet your maker,” Roy says to Tryell in his gigantic bedroom.

And Tyrell, with all the arrogance of the Hebrew God says, “And what can he do for you?”

Roy complains to his maker.  I am half-made.  You did not give me a chance to flourish.

And Tyrell says, “The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy.”

The platitude is not enough for Roy, who finally understands that he has transcended his God.  He has become “more than human.”  He kisses Tyrell, then kills him by crushing his head.

And what is this, but Job’s story with a twist?  Instead of falling to his knees, Roy confronts his God and wins.  I think that’s why the story of the replicants in Blade Runner is so powerful.  Without consciously realizing it (or perhaps scriptwriters Hampton Francher and David Peoples did know) they were retelling a biblical tale.

Authors put their blood, sweat and tears into their work (I know, I’m one of them), and it can be horribly frightening and demeaning to see someone take that hard work and pass it off as their own, without permission, without credit.  The act is despicable, especially since it seems this offender — I dare not call him an “author” for he is nothing of the kind — has done this multiple times.

So I propose we celebrate original fiction.  I kindly ask that you please support Livia by reading her story “Jetsam” here and writing a comment in support of her and in support of original fiction. Please help spread the word that originality matters.

Today, I came across more ammunition for this ancient argument.  This morning as I was reading Pakn Treger, a Yiddish culture magazine my father subscribes to, I saw this micrograph:

It’s hard to see here in this reduced-size image, but this is a penned image of Karl Marx assembled from the text of the Yiddish translation of the Communist Manifesto.  Tiny Yiddish words in alternating light and dark strokes creates the likeness of Marx.  It reminded me a bit of ASCII art.

The article goes on to say, “This exquisite form of calligraphy is centuries old. From the Middle Ages onward, Jewish scribes turned Hebrew texts into virtuoso religious artworks, decorating amulets and wedding certificates with elaborate scenes and portraits.”

Here’s the article, if you’re curious.  And another web source on the art of the micrograph (with another image.)

I’m not sure I’d want the likeness of Marx hanging on my wall (I much prefer nature scenes!), but I think this type of art is wonderful!

I wish I could remember that professor’s name so I could email this to him. 

• The Segment by Genevieve Valentine
• After the Cure by Carrie Ryan
• Valedictorian by N.K. Jemisin
• Visiting Nelson by Katherine Langrish
• All I Know of Freedom by Carol Emshwiller
• The Other Elder by Beth Revis
• The Great Game at the End of the World by Matthew Kressel
• Reunion by Susan Beth Pfeffer
• Faint Heart by Sarah Rees Brennan
• Blood Drive by Jeffrey Ford
• Reality Girl by Richard Bowes
• Hw th’Irth Wint Wrong by Hapless Joey @ homeskool.guv by Gregory Maguire
• Rust With Wings by Steven Gould
• The Easthound by Nalo Hopkinson
• Gray by Jane Yolen
• Before by Carolyn Dunn
• Fake Plastic Trees by Caitlin R. Kiernan
• You Won’t Feel a Thing by Garth Nix
• The Marker by Cecil Castellucci

The anthology is set to come out in 2012.

People also want to know what I think about this.  The short answer.  I don’t think it sucks.  I’m actually quite excited.  I’ll admit, when I first heard about Purefold several years back, how it was to be used as a vehicle for advertising, I cringed and wrote my feelings about it here.  When, a few months ago, I’d heard Alcon Entertainment acquired the rights to the Blade Runner franchise and would make a new film, I rolled my eyes.  We all know how Hollywood can take a brilliant concept and add so many cooks that the end result is pablum.  I was skeptical, to say the least.

But then I heard Ridley Scott is coming on board.  All over Facebook today, people are red with rage and skepticism.  But despite my doubts about Hollywood, I still believe good films can be made.  And let’s face it, Ridley is a great director.  I like to believe he understands the huge reverence fans have for his film, that he would treat any sequel with the same reverence.  And let’s remember, it’s his film.  We all know that Hampton Francher’s & David People’s script was brilliant, but it wouldn’t have been the immersive and haunting Blade Runner film we love without Ridley, who threw himself fully into the production of the film to escape the pain from the death of his brother.  Of course, we don’t wish any such pain on Ridley again.  But if anyone can make this prequel/sequel a good film, it will be him.

But upon my reading of the Book of Job, I came across this passage. (Job:31-32)

Canst thou bind the chains of the Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou lead forth the Mazzaroth in their season? Or canst thou guide the Bear with her sons?

The Pleiades and Orion are well-known constellations across many cultures.  The Bear is most likely Ursula Major, the Great Bear, also known as the Big Dipper.  But what, I wondered, is Mazzaroth?  The annotated text I was reading from said the true meaning was unknown.  But surely in this day of instant information, someone had an opinion on it, right?  A very similar word, I soon discovered via Google & Wikipedia, occurs in the book of Kings (23:3-5), where it is translated as “constellations.”

The consensus I found after some research is that Mazzaroth is an ancient word for “Zodiac,” the belt of stars on the ecliptic and the constellations therein.  It’s also supposed that the word “mazel” in “mazel tov” was derived from this word, Mazzaroth.  So you could say that “mazel tov!” really means, “good constellations!”  And since to the ancient (and modern) astrologers, a good constellation means good fortune, the phrase “mazel tov” came into use as a way to congratulate people on their good fortune.

I’m so proud of my friends, Nora & Mercurio for making this list.  Both work so hard and it’s nice to see them getting their well-deserved attention.

There are also many fine nominees in the Special Award, Non-Professional categories, and I’m very flattered to be included among this list.  Also, I want to send my huge congrats to all the nominees!  I wish you all good luck.  Can’t wait to see everyone at WFC.

You can see the full list of nominees here.

Thursday July 14th

7pm – Naked City Reading (Off-site!)- Ellen Datlow, editor of Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy will host a reading/signing on 07/14/2011 7:00 pm at Porter Square Books, 25 White Street, Cambridge, MA, 617-491-2220, http://www.portersquarebooks.com/.  The readers for this event will be Jeffrey Ford, Kit Reed,  Matthew Kressel, John Crowley, Ellen Kushner, & Caitlín R. Kiernan.

Friday July 15

5:00 PM NH    Steam-powered I & II group reading. Mike Allen, C.S.E. Cooney, Nicole Kornher-Stace, Matthew Kressel, Shira Lipkin, Sonya Taaffe, JoSelle Vanderhooft. Contributors to Steam-powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories and Steam-powered II: More Lesbian Steampunk Stories read selections from their work.

7:30 PM VT    Reading. Matthew Kressel. Kressel reads a new short story.

8:00 PM ME    Dybbuks, Golems, Demons, Oy Vey!: Jewish Mythology and Folklore in Speculative Fiction. Steve Berman, Barbara Krasnoff, Matthew Kressel (leader), Shira Lipkin, Chris Moriarty, Faye Ringel. From Rabbi Loew’s golem of Prague to Peter Beagle’s dybbuk of Brooklyn, the literature of Jewish supernatural and fantastic has been a long and rich one. In Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic and Lisa Goldstein’s The Red Magician, the authors use magic and myth to comment on the horrors of the Holocaust and the meaning of tradition. In Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, in alternate-history Alaska, a heroin junkie might be the long-awaited Messiah. We’ll discuss the stories of Rachel Pollack, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Lavie Tidhar, Neil Gaiman, Sonya Taaffe and other writers of Jewish-themed fiction. What is it about Jewish stories of demons, golems, dybbuks and angels, many of them non-canonical, that appeals to writers of speculative fiction? What obscure Jewish myths, like the gargantuan bird Ziz or the minuscule stone-cutting worm Shamir, have yet to be mined (pun intended)?

Saturday July 16

2:30 PM NH    Beneath Ceaseless Skies group reading. Scott H. Andrews, Michael J. DeLuca, Matthew Kressel, Margaret Ronald. Contributors to Beneath Ceaseless Skies read selections from their work

Thursday July 14

7:00 PM – Naked City reading at Porter Square Books, Porter Square Cambridge, 25 White St, Cambridge, MA — Not part of Readercon proper, I hope folks can make it out to this reading, which will also feature Kit Reed, Caitlin Kiernan, Jeffrey Ford, Ellen Kushner & John Crowley.

Friday July 15

5:00 PM NH    Steam-powered I & II group reading. Mike Allen, C.S.E. Cooney, Nicole Kornher-Stace, Matthew Kressel, Shira Lipkin, Sonya Taaffe, JoSelle Vanderhooft. Contributors to Steam-powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories and Steam-powered II: More Lesbian Steampunk Stories read selections from their work.

8:30 PM VT    Reading. Matthew Kressel. Kressel reads a new short story.

Saturday July 16

2:00 PM NH    Beneath Ceaseless Skies/Small Beer Press group reading. Scott H. Andrews, Chris N. Brown, Michael J. DeLuca, Gavin J. Grant, Matthew Kressel, Margaret Ronald. Small Beer Press authors and contributors to Beneath Ceaseless Skies read selections from their work.

9:00 PM ME    Dybbuks, Golems, Demons, Oy Vey!: Jewish Mythology & Folklore in Speculative Fiction. Steve Berman, Barbara Krasnoff, Matthew Kressel (leader), Shira Lipkin, Faye Ringel. From Rabbi Loew’s golem of Prague to Peter Beagle’s dybbuk of Brooklyn, the literature of Jewish supernatural and fantastic has been a long and rich one. In Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic and Lisa Goldstein’s The Red Magician, the authors use magic and myth to comment on the horrors of the Holocaust and the meaning of tradition. In Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, in alternate-history Alaska, a heroin junkie might be the long-awaited Messiah. We’ll discuss the stories of Rachel Pollack, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Lavie Tidhar, Neil Gaiman, Sonya Taaffe and other writers of Jewish-themed fiction. What is it about Jewish stories of demons, golems, dybbuks and angels, many of them non-canonical, that appeals to writers of speculative fiction? What obscure Jewish myths, like the gargantuan bird Ziz or the miniscule stone-cutting worm Shamir, have yet to be mined (pun intended)?

8:00 PM G    Dybbuks, Golems, Demons, Oy Vey!: Jewish Mythology & Folklore in Speculative Fiction. Steve Berman, Barbara Krasnoff, Matthew Kressel (leader), Shira Lipkin, Faye Ringel. From Rabbi Loew’s golem of Prague to Peter Beagle’s dybbuk of Brooklyn, the literature of Jewish supernatural and fantastic has been a long and rich one. In Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic and Lisa Goldstein’s The Red Magician, the authors use magic and myth to comment on the horrors of the Holocaust and the meaning of tradition. In Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, in alternate-history Alaska, a heroin junkie might be the long-awaited Messiah. We’ll discuss the stories of Rachel Pollack, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Lavie Tidhar, Neil Gaiman, Sonya Taaffe and other writers of Jewish-themed fiction. What is it about Jewish stories of demons, golems, dybbuks and angels, many of them non-canonical, that appeals to writers of speculative fiction? What obscure Jewish myths, like the gargantuan bird Ziz or the miniscule stone-cutting worm Shamir, have yet to be mined (pun intended)?

I’m looking for suggestions/names of Jewish-themed SF stories or Jewish SF authors that might add to the discussion above.  Please feel free to suggest some.  Thank you!

* I may also be participating in additional readings.  Schedule tba.

“The very first Naked City event will be the evening Readercon begins and will take place in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I hope some of you can make it. I’m hoping to set something up in New York during the summer or fall.

Naked City: Urban Fantasy stories edited by Ellen Datlow

Readings/signing hosted by Ellen Datlow at

Porter Square Books
Porter Square Cambridge
25 White St, Cambridge, MA
617-491-2220

Thursday 7pm, July 14th

Matthew Kressel
Matthew Kressel’s fiction has or will soon appear in Clarkesworld Magazine, Interzone, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Electric Velocipede, Apex Magazine, GUD Magazine, and the anthologies The People of the Book, After, and Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories, as well as other markets. He runs Senses Five Press, which publishes the magazine Sybil’s Garage and published the World Fantasy Award-winning Paper Cities, An Anthology of Urban Fantasy.

Kit Reed
Kit Reed is the author of The Baby Merchant, Dogs of Truth, and Thinner Than Thou. Her short novel Little Sisters of the Apocalypse, and the collection, Weird Women, Wired Women were both finalists for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. Her most recent novel, Enclave, appeared in 2009. Her short fiction has been published in various anthologies, and magazines. Her short story collection, What Wolves Know, was recently published.

Caitlín R. Kiernan
Caitlín R. Kiernan is the author of several novels, including Low Red Moon, Daughter of Hounds, and The Red Tree, which was nominated for both the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards. Her latest novel, The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, will be released by Penguin in 2012. Since 2000, her shorter tales of the weird, fantastic, and macabre have been collected in Tales of Pain and Wonder; From Weird and Distant Shores; To Charles Fort, With Love; Alabaster; A is for Alien; and The Ammonite Violin & Others.

Jeffrey Ford
Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, and The Shadow Year. His short fiction has been published in three collections. His fiction has won The World Fantasy Award, The Nebula Award, The Edgar Allan Poe Award, and Gran Prix de l’Imaginaire.

Ellen Kushner
Ellen Kushner‘s first novel, Swordspoint, was hailed as the progenitor of the “Mannerpunk” or “fantasy of manners” style. Its eventual sequel, The Privilege of the Sword, won the Locus Award, and was a Nebula nominee and a Tiptree Honor book. A third novel set in the same unnamed city, The Fall of the Kings, was co-written with Delia Sherman. She is also the author of Thomas the Rhymer, winner of the Mythopoeic Award and the World Fantasy Award, and many short stories

John Crowley
John Crowley is the recipient of three World Fantasy Awards (including a Lifetime Achievement Award), the Premio Flaianno “Superprize,” and an Award in Literature of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Prominent in his ouevre are the novel Little, Big and the four-volume Aegypt series (1987 – 2007). Other works include The Translator and Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land. His most recent novel, Four Freedoms was published in 2009.”

Check out this snazzy new ecard for the Naked City anthology, which contains my story “The Bricks of Gelecek.”  I’ve been asked to spread the word far and wide of its July 5th release date.  You can pre-order your copies now.

* correction: the anthology is dystopian, not post-apocalyptic.  I got all wrapped up in this apocalyptic fervor.

The anthology is chock full of fabulous authors, such as Jim Butcher, Holly Black, Lucius Shepard, Naomi Novik, Jeffrey Ford, Ellen Kushner, Richard Bowes, Delia Sherman, and many more talents.  That’s why I’m so honored to have a story published in this anthology too!  The Green Man Review says of my story, “In the poetic and haunting “The Bricks of Gelecek” by Matthew Kressel, a mysterious supernatural being becomes fascinated by a young woman in a medieval desert city.”

The anthology comes out in July, but you can pre-order it on Amazon.  And if you are in Massachusetts, you can see a few of us read from Naked City at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts on July 14th.

(click on the images for a larger picture)

Most of the orchids were perched like they might be in their natural habitat, aloft in the nooks and crevices of trees.  As epiphytes, they do not require soil to grow, and instead derive their nutrients from rain and runoff.  Here’s one I rather liked:

The next one is not an orchid, but a type of philodendron.  The name philodendron comes from the Greek, the “love of trees” and most philodendrons in the wild can be seen happily climbing up the sides of trees.  Most people at one point or another have had a philodendron in their home.  But wouldn’t it be cool to have one like this?

Here’s good old papyrus, responsible for so much trouble and literacy!

Some orchids I thought were quite striking:

We walked into a sweet-smelling chamber where this large chandelier of orchids hung over all.

And then we walked into this beautiful hallway meant to recall the New Amsterdam Theater.

And I couldn’t help but throw in a gratuitous cute picture of my girlfriend.  She’s quite the talented photographer, but left her SLR home because of the rain.  She still got some nice shots with her pocket camera.

And this post wouldn’t be complete without photos of my own collection.  On the way out of the garden, we stopped at the gift shop, where I acquired some new friends.

A venus fly trap:

And a tillandsia, a type of bromeliad and epiphyte.  I purchased the cork bark and wrapped the twine around a crevice to hold the little guy.  Doesn’t he look happy?

No orchids, however, as they require conditions my small apartment can’t yet handle.  But in the future?  Who knows?  Anyway, that’s it for now.  Thanks for listening!