Eric James Stone

This is the annual convention to honor Phil. No, wait, it’s a convention held in Philadelphia. I’ll be attending, as will several members of the Codex Writers.

I got my contract from Analog today for the story I sold them a couple of months ago. I’m glad to see it, because I had this paranoid fear that the sale would fall apart somehow.

This is technically my third professional sale — I’ve been given the prize for my 2nd-place Writers of the Future story, but I haven’t actually sold that story for inclusion in next year’s anthology. (There’s no doubt that I will. They just haven’t sent me a contract yet.)

With this sale, I am now eligible to become a regular member of SFWA: Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. I’ll be sending in my application soon.

Apparently emails sent to me have been vanishing into a black hole in cyberspace caused by some problems related to a change in where this site is being hosted. If you sent me anything since December 6, I didn’t get it.

But you must think in Russian!

I’m extremely annoyed right now — some spammer is using my Yahoo e-mail address as the return address for spam. That means I’m getting all the bouncebacks from the e-mail. It probably also means my e-mail address will end up on some blacklists. Fortunately, I use that e-mail address mainly for receiving mail from businesses, not sending. But it’s still infuriating.

It’s ridiculous that sender authentication for email isn’t standard. I’m not saying that all email addresses need to be registered by the government or anything like that, just that in order to send an email from a particular address at a domain, there should be authentication from that domain. So, for example, if someone wants to send an email from jqpublic@example.com, it could only be sent through example.com’s mail server (or by checking a password with example.com.)

Spec-fic writer Scott Roberts is one of my classmates from Orson Scott Card’s Literary Boot Camp in 2003. Scott was clearly the most talented writer in our class, and we’ve all been wondering why he hadn’t been published yet. Well, now he will be: he just won second place in the third-quarter 2004 Writers of the Future Contest.

That means next year’s volume of the anthology will contain two stories by Boot Camp 2003 graduates. (At least — judging for the fourth quarter is not complete, so some of our classmates still have a shot at joining us.)

If that’s not enough coincidence for you, how about this: Scott and I both served LDS missions in Italy (though not at the same time.)