Jason Sizemore (LJ: jasonbsizemore), who is the publisher of Apex Books, has a very funny short story appearing online in a contest run by the die, monday! blog. I didn't know much about the blog or the contest, but I read the story and enjoyed it immensely. Jason explains what the contest is all about in his post Rallying the troops: Unwarranted Serendipity. Essentially, "die, monday!" is a humor blog for people needing levity in their workday, and the contest was for work-related stories. The ten best stories are currently appearing on the blog, and readers are being asked to vote for their favorite.

Jason's entry, Unwarranted Serendipity, is a fictionalized (I hope) account of his first convention experience. Anyone who's ever been to a science fiction, fantasy, or horror convention will find a lot of familiar humor in his story. And if you haven't been, it's an...interesting introduction.

If I was asked for a tag line for the story, it would be, "See the wacky hi-jinks ensue when a brand new horror publisher attends his first convention!" Or something like that.

Anyway, I highly recommend it. It'll take a few minutes to read, and it'll give you a good laugh. And if you like it, you can vote for it.

And if you're interested in the rest of the stories, the list of the top ten stories can be found at die, monday!: Top 10 Stories! for the Best Story Contest.

(Disclosure: Apex Books is the publisher bringing out I Remember the Future this fall.)

Tags: conventions, science-fiction, stories

Congratulations to Danny Burstein, who was nominated for a Tony this morning in the category Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Musical for his role as Luthor Billis in Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific! Danny was previously nominated for a Tony for playing Aldolpho in The Drowsy Chaperone.

Tags: personal

Back in December, I mentioned to some friends that I was thinking of enrolling in the Boston University Certificate in Book and Magazine Publishing program. The program consists of eight courses. My dilemma centered on whether I should have taken one or two courses at a time, and in the end, I decided to go for it and attempt to complete the program within the space of a calendar year.

So far, I've completed half the program, and taken the following four courses:

PUB 101. The Business of Publishing

PUB 102. Publication Design & Print Production Strategies

PUB 103. Editorial Principles & Practices

BK 104. Book Publishing Overview

This has been an extremely valuable program for me and a program I would highly recommend to others. Even though I've been working in publishing for about three years, I discovered that the courses had a lot to offer me.

( Read more... )

I received a call today to let me know that the enrollment for the July-August session of BK 107 is low, and that they might have to cancel the session and ask me to move my registration to a later offering of the class. If that happens, I'll end up having completed seven out of eight courses to earn my certificate, and I won't be able to finish up the program until next year. There's also the possibility that the next offering might conflict with other aspects of my life; I managed to carve out the time for the courses in 2008, but I'm not sure how easily I'll be able to carve out the time for even one course in 2009.

So here's my plea. If anyone out there reading this has taken the prerequisite courses and is ready to sign up for BK 107 starting in July, please consider doing so. If enough students sign up, I'll be able to stay on schedule to get the certificate that I've been working very hard to earn since January.

If you're interested in reading about the class, you can click on the link to learn more about BK 107 – Book Workshop. And if you decide to look into taking some of the courses in the program, tell them that I sent you.

Tags: books, personal

I came across this story in the news yesterday: Country star Gretchen Wilson, at 34, finishes high school. The crux of the story is that Wilson, a wealthy award-winning singer-songwriter who had dropped out of school in ninth grade, has passed the GED exam and will be getting her high school diploma next week.

The money quote that she gave to the Tennessean in their story on Wilson, which the AP article cites, explains that Wilson got her GED to be a model for her 7-year-old daughter. Wilson says, "...I certainly don't want her to think you can be this successful without an education."

While I laud Wilson for both her attitude and her actions, and I agree that everyone should get an education, I find her comment a bit ironic. Because the simple fact is that Wilson became as successful as she did without an education. Later on in the Tennessean's article, she even says that she doesn't think she would be where she is today if she had stayed in school:

"I don't think I'd be where I'm at today if I had stayed in school," she says. "What I mean to say is I think I would have never followed the path that I followed. I may have been in the music business, but I don't think I would have been an artist. I don't think I'd have been pushy enough. I kind of had to get out there and start fighting and clawing my way through the world, and that started really early and I think that's a lot of what it took for me to finally get that record deal."

So I'm thinking that maybe the example she should present to her daughter is a different one – not that a person needs an education to be successful, but that a person ought to have an education to be complete.

Tags: teaching

This will probably mostly interest those of you who live in Brookline, Massachusetts, and those of you interested in local politics in general.

Tomorrow is the annual Brookline Town Election, and it's a vital one. We have an actual race for the two contested positions on the Board of Selectmen, and two Proposition 2½ override questions that, if they fail, would require some significant cuts from the budgets of the police and fire departments and the libraries and schools.

If you need to learn more about tomorrow's election, the ballot is currently available from the Town Clerk as a PDF file here. If you don't know who is running in your precinct for Town Meeting, it's a good place to look.

A list of polling places (again, provided by the Town Clerk) can be found here.

And for more nonpartisan information, the League of Women Voters Guide to the election can be found here. (That's a link to a page that includes the guide as a PDF.) Every year, the LWV sends a few questions to all the candidates and prints their responses in the Guide; it can be instructive to see who responds and who doesn't, and how they answer the questions.

As for my own recommendations, I've made the following endorsements.

First of all, in the Selectmen race, I've endorsed incumbents Gil Hoy and Nancy Daly. In my opinion, both have been very good as Selectmen. Gil, in particular, has been a fierce advocate for the town's libraries. As a member of the Board of Library Trustees, I have seen first-hand how Gil's advocacy has aided our library system. (My letter supporting Gil can be found, along with many other letters supporting Gil, here.)

Secondly, when it comes to the override vote, I have endorsed Question 1A, the $5.4 million override, which would fund everything except the World Language program in the elementary schools. Please note that although I have not endorsed Question 1B, I am not advocating against it either. I still think the World Language program is an excellent idea; I'm still not sure if the town can afford it. I'll probably make my final decision tomorrow morning in the voting booth. Yes for Brookline is advocating voting in favor of both override questions, and I should note that both the Boston Globe and the Brookline TAB have endorsed both questions as well.

If you're looking for any other guidance, I urge you to check out the Brookline PAX May 2008 Town Election Endorsements. In my own case, whenever I'm in doubt or uninformed about a candidate or an issue, I can usually rely on the PAX endorsements to guide my vote. (If you want to know what PAX stands for, read Brookline PAX Supports.)

Wherever you stand on the issues, if you live in Brookline, please vote tomorrow. Democracy is a fragile thing, and must be encouraged to thrive.

Tags: boston, brookline, politics

(This seems to be my week for recommending books for science fiction writers.)

Last night, Nomi and I went to the Museum of Science to hear a talk by Dr. Michio Kaku.

Dr. Michio Kaku, Michael A. Burstein Photo copyright ©2008 by Nomi S. Burstein. All rights reserved.

Kaku is a theoretical physicist who has written a few very popular books on physics and what he thinks the future will bring. His current book is Physics of the Impossible, in which he discusses a variety of technologies that most of us think of us as science fiction, but which Kaku speculates will happen for real, some of them very soon.

In the book, he lays out three different classes of impossibility, as follows:

Class I Impossibilities, such as teleportation, telepathy, and invisibility, are consistent with the laws of physics as we know them and might become real within the current century.

Class II Impossibilities, such as time travel and travel faster than the speed of light, lie at the edge of known physics.

Class III Impossibilities, such as perpetual motion machines and precognition, defy the laws of physics as we currently understand them.

His talk skimmed some of the topics in his book, including invisibility and teleportation. He also discussed robots and artificial intelligence, and my favorite topic, time travel. He showed a few clips from a BBC series he's hosting, Visions of the Future, which is supposed to be broadcast in the United States sometime in 2009, but I'd love to track down a copy earlier if I can.

Kaku is clearly a fan of science fiction; his lecture slides were sprinkled with pictures from Star Trek, 2001, Terminator, and other media SF, and the cover of his latest book clearly shows a TARDIS as the time machine plunging through the wormhole. At one point, in an attempt to explain the paradoxes inherent in time travel, Kaku described a scenario that I quickly realized was the plot of Robert A. Heinlein's short story "All You Zombies–" (F&SF, March 1959). I wish he had identified it as such, though, as that might have inspired people in the audience to track it down.

When discussing the rise of the Internet and the shrinking of the computer chip, Kaku showed an artist's representation of a pair of contact lenses with chips that would give you immediate access to the Internet directly in your field of vision. The lenses would also help you identify people's faces, and I started to think about a former student of mine who has prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces. With contact lenses such as these, no one would ever have to know.

One thing Kaku mentioned does have me a little worried. Over the past few decades, astronomers have observed many gamma ray bursts (GRBs), short-lived bursts of high-energy photons, the most energetic events occurring today. GRBs are often caused by two energetic stars orbiting each other, occasionally emitting a burst of these photons across the sky. (For more information on gamma ray bursts, check out NASA's website on Gamma-Ray Bursts.)

Why did Kaku bring these up? Well, apparently, one of the potential gamma-ray bursters out there, WR 104, is only 8000 light-years away and, um, pointed right toward us. Should it send a burst of gamma rays in our direction, it could conceivably fry the planet we live on. Since I'm the type of guy who already worries about collisions from near-Earth asteroids and the eventual heat death of the universe, now I have something else to worry about. Thanks a lot, Dr. Kaku. :-)

Like "The Coming Convergence" by Stanley Schmidt, which I recommended earlier this week, "Physics of the Impossible" is a great read for both science fiction writers and people interested in what the future will bring.

Tags: books, science, science-fiction

This past week, I got hold of a copy of Stan Schmidt's new book, "The Coming Convergence," and I'm delighted to recommend it to others.

Just to remind those of you who might not remember, Stan is the editor of Analog magazine and therefore the editor who has published most of my stories. He's also writing an introduction to my book, "I Remember the Future." As editor of Analog, Stan has had a chance to see a lot of other writers imagine the future, but he's also a writer who has done his own share of imagining where current trends might lead. And he's done this before, in both his fiction and nonfiction.

In this case, the convergence he refers to in the title of the book is the convergence of technologies. Stan points out that a lot of technologies that originally seemed unrelated ended up working together to create something new. A few examples include the Internet and 3-D medical imaging. Stan looks at the way technologies converged in the past to speculate on how they will converge in the future; throughout the book, he explores subjects like biotechnology and nanotechnology, and he posits a variety of "metaconvergences" that will lead to dramatic changes.

If you're a science fiction writer like me, I suspect you'll come up with a lot of neat ideas for stories from reading the book. And even if you're not a writer, I think you'll find the book thought-provoking. We're going to be living in the future Stan describes, and reading his book is a good way to prepare yourself for it.

Tags: books, science, science-fiction

On another discussion forum, I brought up the question of what one might do with lottery winnings. We quickly determined that a $1 million lottery isn't really all that much; if you take it as twenty annual payments, after taxes it works out to roughly $35,000 per year. Not exactly "quittin' money," as a colleague of mine would put it.

I proposed $200 million as the amount I would want to win to live as comfortably as I would want while still being able to make the large charitable donations I would enjoy making. And as an exercise for a story once, I worked out a "lottery plan," that is, what steps I would have to take if suddenly winning one of the huge $200 million lotteries.

It made sense to think of myself as the winner, since it's more fun that way. :-)

And, actually, that's one of things lotteries sell, the chance to dream.

So, anyway. The first part of the plan includes switching the answering machine from the listed number to the unlisted number, calling the local police department to hire a 24-hour detail and an escort to lottery headquarters, and then enlisting an accountant, lawyer, and financial advisor for immediate assistance.

But the best part of the plan includes the list of charities that I wish I could donate more money to, and how much I would give to each one. (After buying a large house, mortgage-free, with enough room for a library and comic book collection, of course. And yarn for Nomi.)

I can immediately think of a few theater companies and museums I'd love to fund, as well as a few synagogues and schools I'd like to help out. After that, though, my imagination fails me.

So I pose the question to anyone who wants to play. To where would you donate money if you won the $200 million lottery?

Tags: personal

This past weekend was one of the most relaxing ones I have had in a long time. gnomi and I went to her parents' house for shabbat, followed by the first two days of Passover. We ate, we slept, we read, we enjoyed the two seders, we slept some more, we spent time with friends and family, we slept some more...

You get the idea.

And now, of course, back to the real world. If anything happened over the weekend, assume I missed it...

Tags: jewish, personal

Last night, after I got home from class, Nomi and I performed the traditional search for chametz one does just before the Passover holiday. And, as you can see in Nomi's post At Chez Burstein, Everyone Helps Search for Chametz, we always get a little extra help from our friends....

Tags: jewish, silly