BilmBlog500

As I get ready to head down to San Antonio for LoneStarCon 3, the World Science Fiction Convention, some reminiscences of LoneStarCon 2 in 1997... First and foremost, having WorldCons in Texas is good!  Both times in the life of JABberwocky that I've gone to San Antonio for a WorldCon, I have had a Hugo nominee on the ballot.  In 1997, it was Elizabeth Moon's Remnant Population for Best Novel, and this year Brandon Sanderson's The Emperor's Soul for Best Novella.  I have to confess I wasn't expecting a win in 1997.  The competition was amazing, with Kim Stanley Robinson winning and novels by Lois McMaster Bujold and Robert J. Sawyer as well as Bruce Sterling to split the Texas vote.  (Several years later when Elizabeth was a Nebula finalist for Speed of Dark, I was rather more optimistic and told her at breakfast the morning of that I felt she has as good a chance as anyone and better have a speech ready, which was good advice!)  I'm not as up on short fict...

So the US Open has announced that the gates are going to open a half hour earlier. Why? Because, per my last post, their useless extra security procedures are almost certainly leading to much more than the "slight delays" predicted in the press release. So much wasted money, so much wasted time, so much waste and stupidity in order to add absolutely nothing other than wasted money and wasted time to a procedure in which every bag was already opened and inspected on the way in to the tennis center.

So New For 2013, as the main draw of the US Open tennis begins Monday, they have announced that this year everyone will get to be wanded and go through a magnetometer. Why? For the past ten years, you've only been able to bring in one small bag, and that one small bag has been hand-inspected as you go in.  There's no way that the Boston Marathon scenario could repeat at the US Open as it has been run, security wise, for the past decade. Adding a magnetometer adds no additional security. None. Nada. Zilch. Of course, it is a nice make-work program, because now the company that provides the security forces for the US Open gets to hire more people!  Most of these people are temps of some or another sort, and I am sure the contractor that provides this service for the Open makes a nice additional profit. Of course, it is a nice make-work program for the people who make wands and magnetometers. Of course it makes everyone feel so much more secure.  Even though it doesn't add a...

It's a really busy week, and I have started work on some detailed blog post about my annual (or as annual as I can make it) trek to the qualifying rounds for the US Open tennis tournament which begins on Monday. However, since I'm not sure when I will finish those posts, I am going to jump the gun and offer now, before the tournament starts, some thoughts on how the 2013 Men's Qualifier crop might fare.  I'll be a little broad, looking at some players I've seen in years past as well as the ones who made it in this year. And right at the top half of the draw, we have Ricardas Berankis from  Lithuania, who made it into the main draw this year but played disappointingly in the qualifying last year, playing Novak Djokovic, the #1 men's tennis player.  Um, if Berankis wins, that would qualify as an upset. Donald Young had to make it through the qualifying this year.  He has had a long career that might be as interesting for things off the court as on.  It's hard ...

Just to get on my high horse again about the ludicrousness of our allowing our government to waste so much money spying on us, bringing it back a little to the business of JABberwocky... We at JABberwocky believe in information.  We rigorously spreadsheet pretty much every piece of royalty statement paperwork that comes our way, in varying detail. Just like the NSA wants to vacuum up information because it may not know until after the fact which e-mails or which phone call metadata it may need at some future point, we can't predict exactly which information we might need at some future point.  Since modern spreadsheets allow information to flow upwards very easily, it just seems better to start out having everything in a nice spreadsheet that can flow up.  The first statement for your hardcover will flow upwards into a summary for the hardcover.  The paperback and e-book will flow upward.  They will merge with the hardcover information to give you the total sale...

I am attending LoneStarCon 3, the 71st World Science Fiction Convention in just a couple weeks, and I am putting my full schedule below followed by some comments and annotations. One important thing to mention ahead of time:  I'm not open to query letters, but both I and my assistant Sam Morgan will be at the convention, we are always excited and interested to meet people, and often do agree to open the door a bit for submissions from people we meet.  Besides getting to hear me speak on several panels with a lot of other knowledgeable people in the field, I have a Kaffeklatsch this year which means a select group of people will get some extended quality time with me.  Opportunities like this don't come around often, and I hope you'll take advantage of this. So here's the schedule: How to Obtain an Agent Thursday 14:00 - 15:00 You've written something. You're pleased with it. You're finally ready to shop it out. You think it might get published. How do you se...

It was so much fun doing an exchange of movie reviews with Bryce Moore last month for Pacific Rim that I thought it would be fun to do another one with my client Tim Akers for Elysium.  Tim has just started selling an e-collection Bones of Veridon which collects some of the short fiction that first attracted me to Tim's work,  and you can also enjoy two Veridon novels, Dead of Veridon and Heart of Veridon .  Also highly recommended -- Horns of Ruin , the first fully realized blend of steampunk and sword & sorcery. The JABberwocky page for Tim Akers Tim's Blog, main link My review , on Tim's blog. Disappointysium I want to start by saying that I kind of liked this movie, in the sense that I didn't walk out and I didn't feel like I had wasted my money and I only got blood-humming angry a couple times. But really, it was a movie of great potential that made dozens of small mistakes and one major mistake that killed it for me. I wanted to like it more, but didn...