anthologies news

A couple of bits of Anthologies News have come in from two different sources over the past few days -- I stress the "two different sources" aspect because the news items share much in common.

First off, Vera Nazarian's (norilana's) much heralded anthology Sky Whales and Other Wonders now has a firm publication date of December 2009. Among the authors in the line-up are Tanith Lee, Anna Tambour, Erzebet YellowBoy, Linda J. Dunn, Sonya Taaffe, Mary A. Turzillo, Mike Allen (time_shark) and, er, me. The story in question of mine is "Breaking Laws", an attempt to deconstruct -- as it were -- urban fantasy. I love this story to pieces, and very luckily Vera likes it too!

Vera passed along a preliminary cover visual for Sky Whales and Other Wonders. Done by Ahyicodae, this apparently still lacks a decorative cartographical border. It looks pretty stunning nonetheless, in my opinion:





A couple of days later I heard from Dave Hutchinson (hutch0) about a quite different anthology in which I have a story, the story being my short novella "The Beach of the Drowned" (another personal favourite) and the anthology being what was once called New Writings in the Fantastic #2 but had to be retitled when Pendragon Press, publisher of New Writings in the Fantastic (which I edited), declared an indefinite moratorium on new releases in response to the economic climate. Now called Under the Rose, the book is -- like Sky Whales and Other Wonders -- to be released by Norilana Books (norilanabooks); it's scheduled for October. I'm not sure who the other authors are in the ToC; as soon as I find out I'll add the info.

Meanwhile, I have to prepare myself to have my carotid arteries ultrasounded this morning -- their annual checkup. This is by no means as much fun as it might seem, since it involves someone sticking a blunt object very, very firmly into sensitive bits of my neck for protracted periods. Still, it's definitely better than my ultrasounding experience last fall, when one of the stenting wounds was causing problems and consequently what was being ultrasounded was my groin. It makes me limp just to think about it . . .

if you'd like to know who this is . . .

. . . it's nine-year-old Brisenia Flores, who the other night was shot dead in her bed in Arivaca, Arizona, by anti-immigration vigilantes anxious to eliminate witnesses to their murder of her father and (as they thought) of her mother.

You'll recall the histrionic outrage purveyed by our rightist bloviators a few weeks ago when a Department of Homeland Security report (commissioned under the Bush Administration) indicated there was a serious threat of domestic terrorism from extremist groups on the far right. While clearly the reference was to neo-Nazis, racial supremacists and all their loathsome ilk, the rightist punditocracy and political establishment chose to emasculate the report's impact by claiming it represented a leftist attack on conservatives.

Net result: not much was done.

It would be (almost certainly) ridiculous to suggest that Brisenia Flores paid the price for that spin campaign, but unless our conservative commentators, in or out of Congress, begin to take their human responsibilities a bit more seriously there are going to be lots of other Brisenia Floreses.