On Spec

Claire Eddy, an editor at Tor, treated me and Rob Stauffer and Mary Turzillo and Terry McGarry to dinner at ConAdian in 93. I was overwhelmed to be enjoying a meal on a Real New York Editor’s expense account.

Over dinner, Rob Stauffer recounted a hilarious episode from Daniel Pinkwater’s Chicago Days/Hoboken Nights where Pinkwater licks a sarcophagus. Nonsensically, I said, “It’s all fun and games until someone licks the sarcophagus,” and Claire said, “I’d buy a story that had that as its first line.”

Well, I couldn’t make it the first line, and I couldn’t make it into a novel, but I did manage to sell it.
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On Spec

For some reason, this appeared in a Hard SF ish. I wrote it after reading a wonderful history book called Flappers, Bootleggers, Typhoid Mary and the Bomb. Gardner Dozois gave it honorable mention in his 1994 Year’s Best SF, but didn’t buy it for Asimov’s. Go fig.
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Air Fish, Cat’s Eye Press

The title comes from a sign near the streetcar turn-abouts here in Toronto, “Caution, Cars Swing.” Which always struck me as funny — cars revving it up at a juke joint, blowing hot licks.

The original publication of this was in Joy Oestricher’s small-press Air Fish antho, which got launched at ConFrancisco in 1993, the summer after my Clarion. It feels wonderful to wander around a WorldCon with a fresh publication under your arm.

This was reprinted in September 1998, in Intangible a small-press surrealist ‘zine. I haven’t gotten my contrib copy yet (I was out of town for the launch party), but Wendy Yano, the editor, was a treat to deal with.
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Pulphouse 12/13

Dean Smith and Kris Rusch brought the proofs for this to my Clarion. I’ve got a great pic of me grinning like an idiot, drooling over them. This was the second story I ever sold, and it ran in one of the very last issues of Pulphouse.

I wrote this story while I was living in Mulégé, Mexico, in the Baja. I went down when I was seventeen, to stay with a friend’s mom who was running a pizza joint. I worked for a while as a night-watchman for the pizzaria, which had been a brothel in a previous life. I’d sleep on a grimy futon on the floor with a machete nearby, surrounded by the menagerie from the petting zoo out back (goat, cats, dogs, and a pig), and tell drunks that there were no hookers to be found there anymore.

Eventually, I moved to a little house on top of a little mountain, and spent every day out in the sun, writing and watching the village below. It was a wonderful time.
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Honorable Mention, The Asimov Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Short Science Fiction

This remains one of my favorite stories of all time. It’s another one that I wrote while I was living in Mexico (see “Hell: A Cautionary Tale“). Despite its pedigree, I never sold it. I love the setting and characters, though, and they appear in my “Overture, Curtain Lights“.
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On Spec

This is the first story I ever sold. I was seventeen, and I submitted it to On Spec’s special Youth Issue.
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