My writing colleague Justin Howe has just posted the first in a series of regular columns he will be writing for Tor.com. They have lots of great other columnists, including Electric Velocipede editor John Kilma, so I’m delighted to see Justin’s unique and savvy voice among them.

His first column is on Count Jan Potocki, a Polish soldier fascinated by the occult and secret societies, who wrote a manuscript influences by The Thousand and One Nights. Enjoy!

I received word last week from Space and Time Editor-in-Chief Hildy Silverman that my short story “Ebb,” which they bought last fall, will be appearing in Issue #107, out in April.

I’m very excited! I hadn’t expected it to be out so soon. This story has had a long and tortured journey to publication, perhaps made even more torturous by the fact that I think both the setting and the story itself are very, very cool. So in April, all of you will have a chance to see if you agree. :)

I know for me it’s often like squeezing blood from a stone. And the debate over whether to outline or not is one of those classic, eternally ongoing discussions like “less filling” versus “tastes great.”

But for neat answers to the question of “how do you devise your plots,” check out this new post on the Odyssey Workshop Blog. It includes not only my answer but also those from Lane Robbins, author of the novel Maledicte, Rita Oakes, who has a story forthcoming in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Matthew Rotundo, who won Writers of the Future last year, and other Odyssey grads. Interesting answers, all, even though their processes are all very different.

Space and Time magazine, which will be publishing my story “Ebb” later this year, has a spiffy new website that looks really cool. The publishers are really going all out to make the magazine look great, and I’m happy that my fiction will be a small part of it.

Also, the Odyssey Writing Workshop, which I attended four years ago, just recently started an Odyssey LiveJournal blog. It has updates on graduates’ sales and publications, links to new episodes of the Odyssey Workshop Podcasts that I edit, interviews with famous novelst grads like Carrie Vaughn, and lots more.