Intermission: Writing!
Been doing a lot of writing for other folks. A brief recap of that.
A couple of quick updates for all of you still opening newsletters and opening links! It's been a busy few months for me and most of my writing has been happening elsewhere.
To kick things off, I'd like to share an account I wrote yesterday of my experience at Saturday's #NoKings protest and march in the downtown loop for my pals over at The Racket News:
The Racket News
On the fiction front, we're hard at work at Weird Fiction Quarterly getting our "spring" King in Yellow issue out, and we are now receiving submissions for our Artificial Intelligence issue coming out after that.
My King in Yellow story is about a poor couple who sees the cursed play at one of Chicago's far-flung storefront theaters on a cold winter evening. Folks familiar with that scene during the Aughts will recognize the story as a quiet love letter to the House Theatre of Chicago and their first home at The Viaduct in Roscoe Village.
My AI story is an homage to Lovecraft's Pickman's Model, where the horror isn't a nest of ghouls in the smuggler tunnels underneath Boston, but collective id that festers beneath humanity that AI surfaces through extensive training and statistical correlations.
The fine folks at Underland Press invited me to contribute to their upcoming "Kozy Krampus" collection, and I wrote them a New Mexico holiday tale involving ever-more-stringent Santa Fe energy efficiency standards, tamale sauces, luminarias, and a tribe of local preternaturally intelligent mutant chuapacabra from one of Los Alamos National Lab's nuclear dumping sites. I haven't heard back if that's accepted yet, but it got good reviews from my beta readers.
I have a new piece that I just started researching this weekend for Eighth Tower Records with a late July deadline. We'll see to what extent I can channel my inner Clive Barker. They passed on my last piece for their upcoming H.R. Giger collection - which is perfectly fine, as what I ended up writing was a bit of a reach for their theme. (I'm saving it to submit to another sci-fi or horror collection as soon as I have time to find the right home for it.)
In the Real World, I also have a ton of technical documentation I need to complete for The Behavioral Innovation Center. Late last month, we presented a Passive Data Kit workshop to the WEBSCI'25 conference at Rutgers and I need to get some manuals and code documentation out, stat!
In general, life's kept me busy, including my first voyage across Lake Michigan on the first Saturday of June to transfer Valhalla from her winter home in St. Joseph, Michigan back to her summer racing berth at the Chicago Yacht Club in Monroe Harbor. We motored most of the way (a little over 56 nautical miles, or 65 land miles), as we made our way across on a full Saturday.
I'll be back on the boat racing this next weekend from Chicago to Waukegan on Saturday, and back to Chicago on Sunday. I'll see if I can pen a dispatch about that race, but if you want more up-to-the-minute stuff, following me on Bluesky is your best bet for notes and photos:
I hope everyone's doing well and I look forward to getting back in touch here when I have some mental breathing room to do so.
