Day: December 14, 2019

End of Year Short Fiction Dash

Last week I wrote about my annual reading goal, which got me thinking about all the science fiction and fantasy magazines and podcasts I subscribe to. I support two at Patreon: Uncanny and Strange Horizons. I follow several more via my Podcast Addict app on my phone: Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, Escape Pod, Lightspeed and Podcastle. My Patreon magazines also have audio podcasts of select stories.

Most of the year, I’m heads down in full length books and novels. Only when I reach December, when my book clubs take a break for the holidays, do I come up for air enough to review any novellas or novelettes published in any of the magazines listed above. So I spent some time earlier this week, scrolling back through my Patreon posts to find all the ebooks I forgot to download for Uncanny and Strange Horizons. Then I scrolled through all the podcast episodes for authors I liked or had heard of for any works at least 40 minutes long (the length of half of my daily commute). I added several to my playlist and downloaded the ebooks to my tablet. My commute and lunch time reading was taken care of for the entire week.

Last Sunday, I read “A Time to Reap” by Elizabeth Bear (published in Issue 29 over the summer) and gave it four stars. At lunch on Monday, I read “The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye” by Sarah Pinsker (published in Issue 31 very recently) and didn’t like it quite as much as Bear’s story, so gave it a 3.5-4 star rating.

Continue reading “End of Year Short Fiction Dash”

Christmas Surprise

In the midst of my second system upgrade of the week, my son called me to warn me they had changed their minds and were planning to drive up from Texas to visit us in Kansas for Christmas. My brain halted. Upgrade on hold. What?!?!

Our house, which we’ve lived in since February 1999, has never been baby or toddler proofed. In that year, 1999, you may remember, the one where everyone was panicking about Y2K, my children were in third grade and sixth grade (starting middle school in fact). So definitely no need to protect them from getting into drawers full of knives and kitchen utensils, nor from electric outlets and chemicals stored under the kitchen sink.

I’m really trying not to panic, truly I am.

My daughter flies in from Seattle next Wednesday at midnight. She will stay for ten days. That has been planned for weeks now. She was going to have the guest bedroom. Now, unfortunately, she will be relegated to an air bed in the cavernous great room or sleeping with me and/or her dad in the master bedroom. Terry and I tag team sleeping anyway because I am a morning person and he is a night owl. And we have a king size bed that all three of us could sleep in with room to spare.

So my son, daughter-in-law and grandson will have the guest bedroom.

Today I’ll shop for my daughter at Trader Joe’s because she has an alergy to corn. Fun fact (not so fun for her): Corn is in almost all processed and packaged foods and does NOT have to be listed on the ingredients.

Tomorrow I won’t be able to shop because we are under a winter weather advisory for 2-4 inches of snow from Sunday at 9 am until Monday at 6 pm. So I’ll have absolutely no excuse not to clean and baby proof my home.

Check back on Monday and I’ll post my progress.