By my reckoning, today marks 100 days since I was last at my day-job office. One hundred days during which I have only been out of the house to pick up take-out (once), go to the post office (half a dozen times, almost always during the off hours), or to pick up something from the township (no human interaction required)…except for the occasional walk around the neighborhood with my wife. I’m a huge advocate for mask wearing, especially in situations where you might be trapped indoors with another person. Texas is not looking very good at the moment, and it threatens to get worse, much worse, before it gets better. So I’m glad that I have the option to work from home…as does my wife. We’re weathering this lockdown just fine.
I found out today that three stories from Por Los Aires, the Spanish translation of Flight or Fright, have been nominated for a 2020 Ignotus Award (described by Locus as the Spanish Hugos) in the “Cuento extranjero” category (“foreign short stories”). The nominees are “El experto en turbulencias” by Stephen King, “Quedan liberados” by Joe Hill and my story, “Zombis en el avión.” This comes as very much of a surprise, but news like this is always welcome!
Flight or Fright (Classe tous risques) was selected by Vogue (France) for their list: Les 5 livres de poche de l’été 2020 à lire sur la plage. Quite an honour!
My story “Expiration Date” appears in The Book of Extraordinary Impossible Crimes and Puzzling Deaths: The Best New Original Stories of the Genre edited by Maxim Maxim Jakubowski. It came out last week and is available on Amazon and, presumably, elsewhere.
Forthcoming publication news: My short story “Kane and the Candidate” appears in the anthology Low Down Dirty Vote, Volume II, which comes out on July 4th. The anthology will raise $10,000 for the Southern Poverty Law Center to help fight voter suppression. The eBook edition is available for pre-order on Amazon. We just found out this week that Scott Turow, author of Presumed Innocent and, more recently, The Last Trial, has contributed an introduction to the anthology.
I have an essay in the July/August issue of Texas Gardener magazine. I’m nobody’s gardener–at least not any more, although I spent many an hour in the vegetable garden when I was growing up–but something happened in our neighborhood that inspired me to write an essay called “Bamboozled” for the regular “Between Neighbors” feature.
Stay tuned for news about Dissonant Harmonies, the collaboration between Brian Keene and me. After many, many years, this project is finally going to see the light of day! My novella, “The Dead of Winter,” is the longest piece of fiction I’ve ever published.
Speaking of long-delayed projects, I hear that we might be getting back to work on Stephen King Revisited before too long!
My wife and I are still working our way through The Good Wife. We’re about halfway through Season 5 right now. We also recently watched the movies Da 5 Bloods (which stars Delroy Lindo from The Good Fight) and The Queen of Katwe, about a female Ugandan chess prodigy (featuring Lupita Nyong’o as her mother and David Oyelowo as her chess teacher), based on a true story. I also watched The Vast of Night, which is a really effective sci-fi film.
For TV series, I recently watched Bordertown S3 (Finland, Netflix), Killing Eve S3 (BBC America), The Valhalla Murders (Iceland, Netflix), and Reckoning (Australia, Netflix), and I’m halfway through Marcella S3 (UK, Netflix).
