a stranger here myself

Yes, I'm still here, even though I haven't been visiting my LJ much lately.  More on that in a bit.  But I must drop in this morning to let you know that there's a wonderful new story by Theodora Goss up at Strange Horizons!  It's in two parts and both are up now, beginning here:

"The Mad Scientist's Daughter"


If you are a fan of the elegant Ms. Goss, or if you would like to become one, I highly recommend you check it out.

Hooray for Theodora Goss, whose Strange Horizons story "Pip and the Fairies" is on the final Nebula Award ballot!  This is the third story we've published that's made it onto the final ballot (the previous being Tim Pratt's "Little Gods" and Greg Van Eekhout's "In The Late December"), so we're extremely pleased and proud.

And congratulations to all the other Nebula and Norton finalists!  Looks like a terrific lineup this year.  I'm kvelling for all of you, bubbelehs.

This seems as good a moment as any to quote something Dora wrote in her journal a couple months back:

"The difference between the writer and the critic is that the critic is concerned with large things, like The Conflict Between Desire and Faith, The Place of the Intellectual in Our Century, and The Consequences of Totalitarianism on the Human Soul, while the writer is concerned with small things, like how one particular woman held up her hand to wave goodbye, or how the sea looked from a particular dune on a summer morning, or what a father said to his son and whether it was true, and why not. What a prisoner imagined in the minute before his death, or what breakfast smelled like in a kitchen in southern Virginia, half a century ago.

For the critic, a flower is a symbol. For the writer, a flower is a flower."