A man was walking in a city when he spotted a restaurant with a big sign in the window that said, "Order anything you want. If we don't have it, we'll pay you $500." Thinking it would be an easy way to make $500, the man walks in, sits down, and tells the waiter he wants an elephant-ear sandwich. The... read more »

I drove down to San Diego last week to see my sister Carolyn in the Alan Ayckbourn play "Relatively Speaking." The play is a very funny comedy of mistaken identity, and if you get a chance to see it sometime, I'm sure you'll enjoy it. Carolyn did a fantastic job in the role of Sheila; there were times she got... read more »

When I got back from my trip to San Diego, I found a rejection letter from F&SF. I'm not sure whether it arrived on Thursday, Friday, or Saturday, so I'm splitting the difference and calling it a total of 18 days, which is ten days longer than my previous submission. The rejection letter was from the editor, not the slush... read more »

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... read more »

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,... read more »

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... read more »

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... read more »