Eric James Stone

Yesterday as I was driving home I passed a recently-built office building that has a big electronic sign out front. It said the temperature was 455°F.

As many of you know, that’s higher than the temperature at which paper burns.

I’m just glad it wasn’t 455° Celsius, because that would really have been too hot.

It’s been a while since I posted one of my favorite poems. So here’s one:

Ozymandias of Egypt
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:

I’ve pretty much taken the month of April off from writing, but I plan to get back to work again for May.

Yesterday my contract from Phobos arrived in the mail. So, if all goes according to plan “The Man Who Moved the Moon” will be published this fall in the anthology, which will be called All the Rage This Year.

Today my prize check from Writers of the Future for “Betrayer of Trees” arrived. It’s kind of funny: “In Memory” will be in their anthology this year, but I haven’t yet been paid anything for it (payment will be on publication.) “Betrayer of Trees won’t be in their anthology until next year, but I’ve already been paid something.

Yep. This is how it starts. We’re on the path to “favored minority.”

Public law schools and universities in Ohio, Missouri and Illinois will start giving Mormons extra points toward admission in order to remedy past discrimination, while vehemently denying any sort of quota system.

Mormon characters will start popping up on sitcoms. At first they will be fairly sterotypical, used for comic relief. Then they will be used to protray the unfair prejudices in our society against those who are different. As Mormons become more accepted, eventually they will become the “cool” characters. Finally, one of the networks will produce a sitcom where one of the main characters is Mormon.

Then Mormon culture really begins to be a major influence. Mormon Eye for the Atheist Guy. Who Wants to Be a Missionary? Mel Gibson makes a Joseph Smith movie. The Osmonds produce the Super Bowl halftime show. The M in MTV stands for “Mormon.”

BYU’s football team will be more popular than Notre Dame. Monday Night Football will be moved to Tuesdays so as to not interfere with Family Home Evening.

It’s all pretty much inevitable, now.

Over the past couple of months I’ve seen a few movies in the theater. Here’s what I think of them:

Against the Ropes - Meg Ryan plays a boxing promoter. The film is adequate. To my untrained eye, the boxing sequences were good, and the plot isn’t as predictable as I thought it would be.

Hellboy - I’d never heard of the comic book this movie was based on. Some good action & effects sequence, but the plot was somewhat thin. Ron Perlman does a very good job in the title role.

Walking Tall - I went to this movie expecting some mindless entertainment. It lived down to my expectations. Some fun mayhem, but nothing that really stood out.

Starsky & Hutch - I never really watched the original TV series, so I had to judge the movie on its own. And the movie on its own is very funny. Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson really make a good comedic pair. And it even had a plot.

Of the four movies, Starsky & Hutch is the only one I will probably ever bother watching again in the future. The rest were an entertaining way to kill a couple of hours, but not really memorable.

I revamped my home page today. Most people come to the blog directly, because that’s where most of the links come in. But I felt I needed to spruce it up a bit for people who might type the address in.

Late last night, my server reverted to a backup from December, so I turned off the server rather than have it look like it was working properly when it wasn’t.

Apparently, the sysadmin was moving sites around on the server. For a couple of hours today, I thought I’d lost data from the past few weeks, but in the end the sysadmin found the correct version and restored it.

Whew!

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My muse returned this morning as I was taking a shower. (Get out! I yelled. Can’t you tell I’m taking a shower here?) I had to wait until this evening, though, to officially break my writer’s block. I wrote a 118-word short story called “Quarantined Planet.”

I also had some good ideas related to my novel, so maybe I’ll be able to get back to work on it again.

In other writing news, I’m starting to get into breath-holding mailbox-opening mode over a story I sent to Analog — several people who submitted stories after I did have already received rejections.

And, although it’s still far too early to get really excited about it, I have now gone eight days since submitting a story to F&SF without receiving a rejection. My only previous submission to them was rejected on the eighth day, so at the very least I’ll set a new personal record. (For those who don’t know much about the markets for speculative fiction, the Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy is known for its very quick turnaround time for submissions.)

For those of you who are aspiring writers who live in Utah:

Caleb Warnock, my creative writing teacher, is teaching a free workshop about “Creating Strong and Compelling Characters in Fiction.” The workshop will be held on Monday, April 26, at the Barnes and Noble on University Parkway in Orem at 7 p.m.

If you have the time and are in the area, I’m sure it will be well worth your time, as Caleb knows his stuff and is a very good teacher.