I have just discovered that the Contact Form on this site had shed the destination address to deliver. This apparently means that anyone trying to send me a message has basically been putting it into a Star Trek teleporter set to wide dispersion at maximum range.
So, I’ve fixed that. Anyone trying to drop a message can do so now and it will actually get to me. The silence anyone may have met with has been a result of unawareness, not sullen ill-manners.
Living Skies, like most non-microscopic living things (yes, even capybaras) occasionally feel ungovernable rage.
This should have appeared on Christmas Eve. Or Christmas itself.
Or even Boxing day.
Alas, I have blown a deadline. But, as I characterized the story in a previous entry as “gestating”, it perhaps is allowable for the delivery to be slightly delayed. Here it is, then, “Nothing in the World is so Irresistibly Contagious.”
OH, ALSO– I find that an anthology I had thought was on the verge of printing actually got printed almost a whole month ago. Not only a late story, but a late notice of a story: Monsters in Spaaaace! contains, in addition to several other stories, my own “The Moon Forest”. It’s science fiction about as hard as I’ve ever done… and there’s also werewolves. I had a lot of fun writing it.
Good heavens, I let the whole of February slip past without posting a story. It was a rather distracting month on The Regular Job, and when I was thinking about writing, I was either doing it or submitting it to other people. It’s also a short month, despite having lasted a subjective seventeen weeks.
Let me not let another month slide past, though. Like the previous story, this one is about travel– I understand there’s something called March Break for some people, and because I write horror I’m here to spoil it for them with a look at the Screening Process.
A new Current Story up today, “All the Old Familiar Faces.” The inspiration for it was rattling around in my head for years, coming from a passing thought of Ellie Arroway towards the end of Contact, of which I will say the movie is good, but if you don’t read the book, you’re missing a large quantity of good stuff. There’s no requirement to know the novel to enjoy the story, and indeed even if you know the novel you may well not recognize the bit that stuck in my head.
I’ll also say that my use of the tag “ghost” on this entry is extremely broad application of the term. I very nearly didn’t use it at all.
I was gearing up to release a new story for tomorrow, when a voice came into my ear. I’m not sure if it was Sloth or Wisdom, but what it said was reasonable.
“You damned fool– everyone will be having a party or plotting, Grendel-like, the destruction of everyone who is having a party. No one will have a moment to look in at a new story, however short.”
I thus abandon the time-table only I know about, and prepare for the next release to appear not tomorrow, but in the new year itself, shortly after the hang-overs fade (all but mine, which shall never be born– woe, woe, the lot of the driver).
Dirck de Lint's Missives from the Living Skies 