I print rough drafts on the back of old manuscripts, as a way to reuse paper. Last month when I was down at my folks’ house, I brought back several packing boxes full of manuscripts from the unpublished spy novel I wrote senior year in high school / freshman year in college.

Wow–so much has changed since then. I found four or five full copies of the manuscript, the extras made by a copy shop. Many of them were in SASE envelopes sent back from publishers, several with brief comments. Nowadays of course, with laser printers most writers print their own full manuscripts; most send disposable copies instead of paying to get the whole thing sent back in a SASE; and big publishers don’t even take unsolicited subs, let alone hand-scrawl a note on the form rejection.

I also found eight or nine copies of the synopsis and sample chapters, and I read through bits of it all. So much has changed there too. :) The loose omni military-novel POV was pretty rough, the Sans-Serif font was hard to read, and my sample chapters were Ch. 2, Ch. 5, and Ch. 10.

I kept one full copy of everything for sentimentality’s sake, then stacked up the rest in my scrap paper pile. It’s taller than a five-ream box of printer paper, so I think I’ve got about 3000 sheets there. Which should keep me set for printing rough drafts for a long time!

The Fix, an online SF/F review zine from the publisher now behind the British SF/F magazine Interzone, recently posted a review of Weird Tales #347, including my story “Excision.” The review has a brief summation of the story and makes some good general observations, but never expresses a firm opinion one way or the other. The reviewer does call another story “one of the few failures in this issue,” so I’ll go out on a limb and infer that mine was not among them. :)

I saw John Scalzi’s famous Ten Things You’ve Done Other People Probably Haven’t blog post linked off Andrea Kail’s blog a couple weeks ago. Many people’s lists I read were full of encounters with celebrities, or crazy (and drunken!) feats.

I’ve never met any big celebrities, and when I drink my coordination gets even worse than usual, so I don’t have many neat escapades that few other people have done. My uniqueness I think comes from inside that strange enclave of my own mind. So I came up with a better list for well-read, uncoordinated drunks like me. :)

Here are Ten Things I’ve Read That You Probably Haven’t:

Ulysses
Light in August
Suldrun’s Garden
The Dragon Waiting
The Armageddon Rag
The Military Revolution of Sixteenth-Century Europe
The Guts to Try
Hornblower and the Hotspur
Where Eagles Dare
Your Code Name Is Jonah

Well, maybe not that last one. :) And I haven’t finished Armageddon Rag yet. But I bet few people out there have read more than two or three off this list.

I’d love to see other peoples’ lists, and see how few of their electic ten I’ve read. If you read them while performing a drunken stunt, all the better!

I got a very nice note recently from Dave Kirtley. Dave and I both attended the Viable Paradise SF/F Workshop in the fall of 2004, but I was a callow rookie with a bloated epic F novel and he was a rising neo-pro with several sales to top mags like Realms of Fantasy. He’s continued to sell at that level, and I’ve finally broken through with my recent story in Weird Tales.

Dave saw the Table of Contents for that WT issue and remembered me, and sent me a nice congratulatory note. I hope he gets a chance to read the story, but it was still very cool to be remembered after three and a half years. Thanks, Dave!