Category: News of Note

That’s Paisey up there, sitting in my office window, enjoying the air conditioning as the street outside my house bakes in the sun. We broke all the heat records on Sunday. In Salem, Oregon it hit 113F, beating the previous recorded high of 108F (which we last hit back in 1981) by a long ways. Then we beat that record on Monday, hitting 117F. You read that right. Even some of the hottest cities in the United States have never reached that temperature, which an extremely rare “heat dome” allowed to happen here in the rainy pacific northwest.

The next Karen Pantelli book is now with the copy editor. I’ll have more information about that soon, including a cover, which is almost done. Really had a lot of fun with this one.

My story, “Exchange Policy,” about a widower who wants to exchange his android wife for a different one for a very unusual reason, just appeared in issue twelve of the new incarnation of Pulphouse magazine. The issue is chocked full of great stories. You can buy an individual issue in both print and ebook, or subscribe to the magazine.

I’ve had the good fortune to have my stories appear in many wonderful publications over the years, but this one means quite a bit to me. I “sold” my first short story to the editor, Dean Wesley Smith, back in 1994. I put “sold” in quotation marks because the magazine ceased publication before the story could see print or I could be paid for it, but it didn’t take away from the satisfaction of that first sale, especially since Dean bought it at the life-alternating writer’s workshop I frequented for a few years when I was in Eugene attending the University of Oregon. I learned more about writing at that workshop, which included such luminaries as Dean, his wife Kristine Kanthryn Rusch, Ray Vukcevich, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Jerry Oltion, and many others that came and went over time, than I ever learned in my college writing classes. We met every Tuesday in the banquet room of the greasy G Willikers Neighborhood Bar & Grill (which went out of business long ago) and it was generally open to all writers, which made it all the more amazing. Michael J. Totten, a fellow student at U of O who would later became a prize-winning journalist, novelist, and editor (and lifelong friend of mine), stumbled upon the workshop when he was working at a convenience store across the street and one of the attendees wandered in and saw that Mike was reading a copy of F&SF. This writer said something to the effect of: “Hey, did you know the editor of that magazine is across the street right now?” (The editor being Kristine Kathryn Rusch, of course.) That was how Mike first attended, and how he invited me to the same workshop a few weeks later.

That first “sale” to Pulphouse, an extremely short piece called “With Dignity,” was later published in Buried Treasures, an anthology put together by Jerry Oltion of orphaned Pulphouse stories. However, I was always sad my work never got to appear in the magazine, since it was just the sort of genre-bending periodical that I loved. (I remember scouring Escape While There’s Still Time Books, a genre bookstore in Eugene run by the late Bill Trojan back then, for back issues, which I believe I still have somewhere.)

Anyway, Dean brought Pulphouse back to life a few years back, in different form but still with the same basic spirit, and I’m pleased as punch to have a story appearing in its pages. It’s extra special because over the just shy of 30 (!!!!!) years I’ve known them, Dean and Kris have been mentors, teachers, co-teachers, and finally friends, so that makes the story’s publication even more special to me. (And please keep in mind that I was eighteen years old when I walked into that writer’s workshop, so don’t think I’m ready to start collecting Social Security checks or anything.)

Incidentally, Dean also bought my first real short story sale as well, for the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds anthology, but I will save that tale for another time.