#StoryEachNight is One Year Old!

#storyeachnight, a project started by Nicole Cushing to read a short story every night and then tweet about it, with a mini-review if you like, is now one year old! Read more about it and about short stories in general in a series of blog posts, including a guest post from me, in the next week on Nicole Cushing’s blog: Laughing at the Abyss.

Ante's Inferno - Book Review

Ante’s Inferno, by Griselda Heppel, tells the story of 12-year-old girls Ante and Florence, as they journey through the Underworld with a boy called Gil who died a hundred years earlier. Following a path that leads to the centre of Hell, they face strange dangers and mythical monsters, while at the same time learning more about each other. For Ante, worse than the dangers of the Underworld are the fears that Florence may actually be dead, and that she, Ante, may have killed her.

Short Story Sunday - Clarkesworld to go Pro?

A quick piece of short story news for this Short Story Sunday. Clarkesworld, one of the bigger speculative fiction online magazines (and probably my current favourite) is aiming to go pro! That means they would like to pay pro-rates to their writers as well as a reasonable wage to their staff. This is great news, and I hope Clarkesworld is successful!

Updates - My Week in Woolly Retro Goodies, Needles and Milestones

I've been a bit quiet on here and on Twitter this week; things are a little crazy! A sudden opportunity has come up to go to India with my mother, so I've been racing about like a mad thing trying to get passport and visa sorted out, and getting far too many needles poked in both arms. The injection count is up to 8 different diseases and viruses at the moment - my body is extremely unimpressed with me.

In other news, I now have a Kindle, and so I will be able to accept books in Mobi as well as Epub formats to review! It currently has 158 Tor ebooks loaded on it, but I can't say that I haven't already been browsing through the Kindle store, wondering what my first purchased ebook will be... I think I'm leaning towards a short story collection from an indie publisher. Any recommendations?

The Hugo Award 2012 Short Stories - Review

Today the 2012 Hugo Awards will be presented at Chicon 7 (WorldCon), the ceremony beginning at 8pm CDT. And, since it’s also Short Story Sunday on my blog, I thought I would take a closer look at this year’s nominated short stories.

Homecoming, by Mike Resnick

This is probably the most ‘sci-fi’ of the bunch, though none of them are particularly focussed on SF/F genre tropes – with the obvious exception of John Scalzi’s story, which I’ll talk about below. Homecoming was originally published in Asimov’s.