In addition to screen tradecraft, I’m maintaining a slim tether to two things many people seem to think I’ve left behind: podcasting and fiction publishing. I have a short story featured in the new anthology The Sovereign Era: Year One set in the universe of author Matthew Wayne Selznick’s novel Brave Men Run (Swarm Press, 2009). You can find it in print form and for the Kindle on Amazon, and Selznick is also making an eBook bundle available that plays for nine different formats. Because the only thing you fuckers love more than your shiny gadgets is having nine other shiny gadgets to turn up your hip haughty tech noses at.

My contribution to the antho—a violent and semi-biographical crime piece with a fantastical edge called “Sangre del Surenos”—has never been previously published anywhere. It was read live once, and I’m at least 99% sure you weren’t there to hear it. So if you’ve been scrolling through your aggregators looking for new fiction from me, there’s a new bone from which to suck my sweet and savory marrow (take that metaphor as you will. Just don’t tell me about it). And you even get to put a few ducats in my pocket in the process. We all win.

After many Bill Hicks-esque appearances (in my fucking dreams), I’ve also become a fixture on my total BFF Mur Lafferty’s award-winning podcast I Should Be Writing. In a new segment called “Good Cop/Bad Cop” Mur and I answer your submitted writing queries from opposing viewpoints, those being that she is helpful and insightful while I think you’re a fucking moron who shouldn’t be allowed access to e-mail, much less word processing software. And I tell you so, for your own good. We’ve done two segments so far, and questions keep pouring in.

Which leads me in an awkward segue to the announcement that I will be attending Balticon 44 in Baltimore, Maryland next month. I have all but given up con life. I’ll hit Comicon, but only when it’s on the panel of a flick I wrote and/or directed. But Balticon offers me something unique. I like maybe five people in the entire fucked up world, none of whom live near me, and all of them attend this convention. I’m not on the guest roster this year. Which means I’m not officially on the clock. So leave me the fuck alone.

However, since I’m going to be in the house, Mur has mandated I appear on her ISBW panel for a live segment of Good Cop/Bad Cop. So show up, bring your questions, and prepare to sit in the hot seat. I’ll also be there for the final episode of Variant Frequencies, which is a bigger landmark in the field of speculative fiction podcasting and podcasting in general than I’m sure anyone will give it credit for. I wouldn’t miss it, and neither should you.

I’ve wanted to talk at you guys about podcasting and about my fiction for a while, but I just haven’t had the time to do the subject justice. The window between my decision to relocate to LA and actually moving was more like a porthole through which I had to rearrange my bones like a fucking snake to fit. Since then it’s either been a kaleidoscopic freak show outside or a hardnosed grind inside. I still want to put out that dialogue, and I still intend to, but the moment has not come yet.

So if you’re still out there, and you still give a shit, stick around. We’ll get it all sorted. Eventually.