Eric James Stone

AnthologyBuilder is having a 50% off sale until noon EST today.  That means it’s the perfect time for you to get my new anthology, Eric James Stone & Company, Volume II. (And if you don’t have Volume I, you can get both volumes for the price of one.)

Here’s the introduction:

Like the previous volume, this book contains stories by me and by some of the great authors who also happen to be friends of mine.

"Tabloid Reporter to the Stars" is by me.  I first submitted it to the Writers of the Future contest, but I got disqualified by winning with another story.  The original title was "The First Ambassador."

"The Box of Beautiful Things" is by Brian Dolton, whom I have never met in person, but I know him from the Hatrack River writers’ forum (and later from the Codex Writers.)  But my first direct communication with him was emailing him after reading this story to tell him how much I liked it.

"I’ll Gnaw Your Bones, the Manticore Said" is by Cat Rambo, whom I know through Codex.  We’ve met several times at conventions, and I’m never sure what color her hair is going to be.

"Taint of Treason" is one of mine. I originally wrote this as a craft writing exercise: show, don’t tell, dignity.

"The Adjoa Gambit" is by Rick Novy, another Codex writer.  I met him at the Nebula Awards in Phoenix a few years ago.  We share a love of puns and hard SF.

"Premature Emergence" is mine.  I wrote the first draft in 24 hours at the 2005 Writers of the Future workshop.

"Through the Obsidian Gates" is by Aliette de Bodard, a Codex writer living in France.  I got to meet her at a Writers of the Future workshop when she won.

"Accounting for Dragons" is mine. I wrote it at the Odyssey Workshop on the morning before we had the Odyssey Slam–where I had to read it aloud at a Barnes & Noble.  It holds the record as my quickest sale: Edmund Schubert, editor of IGMS, bought it about three hours after I sent it to him.

"The Sell Your Soul to the Devil Blues" is by Tom Pendergrass, a Codex writer I met at the 2004 Writers of the Future workshop.  He used to work for the CIA.  (Don’t let him know I told you that.)

"Salt of Judas" is mine.  I wrote the first draft in 24 hours at the 2004 Writers of the Future workshop.

"Rival of Mars" is by David Walton, a Codex writer I got to know because he had the title story in the final Phobos anthology along with one of my stories.  I don’t think we’ve ever actually met.

"Loophole" is by me.  It’s my only clearly Mormon story that has been published.

"The Big Ice" is by Jay Lake and Ruth Nestvold.  I know Ruth through Codex.  Jay is not on Codex, but I first met him and his Hawaiian shirts at the 2004 Writers of the Future workshop, and I’ve seen him various times since.  I occasionally respond to the blatant liberalism on his blog.

"The Six Billion Dollar Colon" is a story I wrote for a special anthology after Jay Lake was diagnosed with colon cancer.  (He’s okay now.)

"The Prophet of Flores" is by Ted Kosmatka, a Codex writer I finally met at WorldCon in Denver.

The final story, "The Ashes of His Fathers," is mine.

So why are you still here?  Go read the stories.

My friend James Maxey is giving away free copies of his latest book to people who donate to support breast cancer research:

Followers of my blogs, and the readers who read the acknowledgement pages of my books, will know that I lost my partner Laura Herrmann to breast cancer in May 2005. I’ve been interested in cancer research since then and have privately made contributions to cancer related charities, but I’ve never put out any sort of appeal on my blogs to solicit for this cause, until now.

Last week, I received several cases of my latest book Dragonseed. One of the ongoing themes of Dragonseed is the idea of healing, both from physical and spiritual wounds. Within the book there’s a miraculous object called a dragonseed: Eat the seed, and all your injuries will be healed. Even your oldest scars will vanish.

I have some science fiction hoodoo underlying the dragonseed. The technology to create a pill that will both diagnose and cure any illness is pretty far out in our future, if it exists at all. But, the part of this that isn’t science fiction or hoodoo is that I believe that technology has the power to work miracles. We have MRI and PET scans that can look into a human body and see it working in minute detail. We have developed surgical tools and techniques that can remove diseased tissues from a human body without doing undo damage to healthy tissues. My father had a heart attack recently, and the doctors had to place stents in his arteries. The incision to perform the operation was small enough to cover with a band-aid. And, right now, there are researchers who are taking apart cancer cells molecule by molecule to understand the genetic engines that drive them to a degree unimaginable only a few decades ago.

We live in an age of miracles because we live in an age of knowledge. Modern computers are finally powerful enough to process all the complex data contained within a human cell. The only barriers remaining between our present understanding a cure for any disease you can name are time and money.

These are not insignificant barriers. New technologies are always expensive. And, to be blunt, the world has a limited supply of really smart people, and a nearly unlimited supply of problems for them to solve. For better or worse, money is one of the most important driving forces of where the smart people focus their energies. In the sixties, it was decided we would put a man on the moon. We threw money at the problem, and produced a glut of rocket scientists. In the eighties and nineties, computer technology was fed enormous sums of money by the stock market, and smart people focused their energies on designing hardware and software, and with the result that today my cell phone has more memory than I do. There is a lot of money today flowing into health care, but only a fraction of this money goes to research of any given disease. I’d like to invite you to increase the fraction going to breast cancer research, both due to my personal connection to the cause, and because I think that this is the right moment in history to truly make a difference. I firmly believe this is a disease than can be cured within our lifetime. I don’t know if one day we will simply swallow a magic pill and be healed, but I do know that the day will come when we will be able to profile any cancer cell and match it with the appropriate drug to wipe it out.

To help bring this day closer, if only by a minute or two, I’d like to announce my "Books for Breasts" promotion. Anyone who contributes to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation through the "Team Dragon" fundraising page will get a free signed copy of Dragonseed.
You can contribute to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer foundation by clicking here. This will take you to my personal fundraising page; just click the button that says "support James." Then, to get your signed copy of Dragonseed, just email me your mailing address to nobodynovelwriter@yahoo.com. I’ve set aside 50 copies for this cause; if I give them all away by the end of July, I’m pretty sure I can get my hands on another 50.

I’ve set up a modest goal of raising $300 through this promotion. This means I need to average contributions of $6, which is less than you’d pay for the book on Amazon. However, I’ll send you a book for a contribution in any amount, even if it’s just a buck. Spend a buck, get a book, save some breasts. Who’s with me?

Best SF’s review of my story in the April issue of Analog has spoilers for the plot of the story.  But I can easily forgive that, because here’s how the review begins:

In the short biog that goes with the story, Stone mentions being brought up on Golden Age SF, and having fond memories for The Early Asimov collections.

I too have fond memories of that collection, which I read in the early 70s in my early teens. And thusly (if I make speak in Good Doctor mode) Stone provides a story that could have been penned by Asimov. [Emphasis added.]

That’s one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received on a story.

Those of you who read my blog on my website may have noticed something in the sidebar that says “Translator” and has 42 flags underneath it. (Those who read my blog elsewhere will not have noticed.)

That is the Global Translator plugin for WordPress, which I consider to be one of the most awesome plugins ever made.  Behind the scenes, it goes out and automatically translates the pages of my blog into 41 languages, and stores the translations on my website.  So if you’re on any of my blog pages, you can click on the flag representing a language and see the page in that language.  (If the plugin hasn’t had a chance to translate the page yet, it automatically sends you to Google’s translation website, where the page is translated on the fly.)

So, for example, if you want to read my story “The Six Billion Dollar Colon,” which I recently published on my blog, in Finnish, now you can.

The plugin will translate from English to Italian, Korean, Chinese (Simplified & Traditional), Portuguese, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, Russian, Greek, Dutch, Bulgarian, Czech, Croatian, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Polish, Romanian, Swedish, Norwegian , Catalan, Filipino, Hebrew, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Albanian, Estonian, Galician, Maltese, Thai, Turkish, Hungarian.

Here’s my schedule for CONduit this year:

Friday, May 22

4:00pm – Reading (Eric James Stone, JoSelle Vanderhooft)

5:00pm – Panel: Stephen King: Is He Still King? (Michael R. Collings, Paul Anderson, Eric James Stone, Anne Wingate)

Saturday, May 23

Noon – Panel: What can writers learn from Harry Potter? (Suzy Gehring, Stacy Whitman, Kathleen Dalton-Woodbury, Eric James Stone, Jason Anderson, Brandon Sanderson)

4:00pm – Book signing (Eric James Stone, Brian Wiser, Ann Chamberlin, Jason Anderson, Rebecca Shelley)

Sunday, May 24

3:00pm – Exobiology: How alien would real aliens be?
(Nathan Shumate, Laura Swift, Eric Swedin, Helge Moulding, Eric James Stone)

4:00pm – Aspiring Writer’s Q&A. (Larry Correia, Dave Wolverton , Eric James Stone, Paul Genesse, Julie Wright, Howard Tayler)

In honor of International Pixel-Stained Techno-Peasant Day, I am posting one of my rarest published stories: “The Six Billion Dollar Colon.”  I wrote this story especially for Jay Lake: Intelligently Redesigned, a “Get Well” anthology put together by Jeff Richárd last year after Jay was diagnosed with colon cancer.  Since the anthology was published in a very limited edition, only a few people have had a chance to read it before now.  (I read it aloud at Dragon*Con last year, where it got a favorable reception.)

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For the second year in a row, I managed to make the Million Writers Award list of notable stories published online.  “The Robot Sorcerer” is one of four stories from InterGalactic Medicine Show to appear on the list.

I was surprised to find my story on the list, as I had not seen it on the lists of reader-nominated or editor-nominated stories.  However, the preliminary judges are not restricted to selecting from the nominated stories, so one of them must have liked “The Robot Sorcerer.”

Congrats also to my friends who made the list: Ken Scholes, Mary Robinette Kowal, Tobias Buckell, Eugie Foster, Jay Lake, Cat Rambo, Jim Hines, Christie Skipper Ritchotte, Aliette de Bodard, and John Brown.

I got a contract from Analog in the mail today for my story “Rejiggering the Thingamajig.”  It’s my sixth sale to Analog, and it means I now have two stories in the pipeline to get published there.

“Rejiggering the Thingamajig” is my attempt to answer one of life’s most common and enduring questions: What would happen if a Buddhist Tyrannosaurus Rex, an insane talking gun, and a nanoswarm janitor went on a quest to restore the galactic teleport network?

My birthday was a couple of days ago. I had carrot cake, which I decorated myself (which is why the lettering is a little sloppy):

And here I am, revealing the answer* in flaming characters, shortly before blowing them out:

Incidentally, my tee-shirt has a picture of a galaxy, with the words “You are here” pointing to a spot far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm.

*For those unfamiliar with the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the answer to the great question of life, the universe and everything is 42.

It’s “When I Grow Up” month for my local Cub Scouts, so they’re having guests come talk about things they do for a living.  I was invited to speak tonight about being an author.

The boys were quite impressed by my Writers of the Future trophy, and though I had to admit I wasn’t a really famous author, they thought it was cool I had stories published in Hebrew and Russian magazines.

I also showed off my stack of rejection letters and explained how important it was to keep trying even when you got rejected.  “Like Dr. Seuss,” one of the boys said.  “He got rejected 28 times.”

After talking about being an author, I took them through a ten-minute brainstorming session on how to build a story.  They were very enthusiastic (and a little bloodthirsty!) in their ideas.

Then, while they did normal Cub Scout stuff, I spent 25 minutes writing the story we had outlined, and printed it out on my portable printer so they could each have a copy.  (Frankly, this was the shortest deadline I’ve ever had to write to.)

Presented here for your enjoyment is the story:

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