Sun Seem Hotter Today?

Is it just me, or is the sun hotter than it used to be?

It's April and I've already had two sunburns. What used to take all day in a boat on a lake now seems to take just a couple of hours outside playing badminton or mowing the lawn. It's April and it feels like mid-June. It's the end of April, and it's hardly rained. If April showers bring May flowers, looks like May is going to be a colorless haze of a month. Apart from the tornados, we haven't had any clouds at all. Well, no natural clouds. Plenty of chemtrails.

A New Form of Cowardice

Rant Time.

To all you writers out there, allow me to enlighten you to a new form of editorial cowardice.

If it weren't bad enough to receive a form letter rejection that offers no hint to the real reason your story was rejected other than the editor really has no time to deal with your shattered ego...

If it weren't bad enough to receive a semi-personal rejection letter that flat out lies to you...

Now we have editors who simply don't respond at all. "If you don't hear from us within three weeks, you can assume we weren't able to use your work."

Thanks for nothing.

If I take the time to write a story, to read through your website to find out what you publish, to follow your ticky little submission guidelines as to format and where you want the page numbers and what font you prefer, and not send you a simultaneous submission or something that has been published somewhere else, and then wait three weeks to hear from you, the least you can do is send me two lines of bullshit why you can't use my story at this time and good luck with it elsewhere.

The Mystery that is Harry Potter

I probbly should na say this, but here goes. (SPOILER ALERT)

What is so great about Harry Potter? I've read all six books now, seen all four movies, and I still can't figure it out.

I'm not saying they suck, because they don't. They are extremely engaging stories. But like the very worst secret agent and superhero films, the plots are for the most part laughably unlikely.

Take the Goblet of Fire, for instance. If you are powerful enough a wizard to defeat and capture an ex-Auror like Moody and take his place, fooling everyone including Dumbledore, why in God's name do you need to go through the whole elaborate Tri-Wizards Tournament and risk the million different ways it can go wrong and you be discovered and your identity revealed, if all you really want to do is kidnap Harry Potter and take him to Voldemort? It's ridiculously complicated. Catch him in Hogsmeaded and teleport him out! Problem solved.

But Goblet of Fire is one of the best of the series! It's a great story, but the plot makes not a lick of sense. That's not supposed to happen!

Now take Chamber of Secrets. Tom Riddle wasn't really after Harry Potter. Jenny Weasley made a much better target. Harry only found the magical diary by accident, and the accident made sense in the plot. The story is much more plausible. And it sucks. It's not the worst of the series, but it is second worse.

The worst is definitely Order of the Phoenix. If ever there was a filler book in a series, that was it. Two chapters at the beginning of Half-Blood Prince would have been sufficient to cover everything in Order of the Phoenix, and it would have spared us from having to watch Harry Potter act like an obnoxious 15-year-old for 500 pages. The whole thing was dreadfully tiresome, and nothing but a set-up for Half-Blood Prince. Again, if all Voldemort needed was for Harry to get the prophecy, why the elaborate set-up? Just do it, man!

So why is it that the series is so good? I have very discriminating tastes in fiction. I recently read two of the giants of spec fic - Ringworld and Ghost Story. I was impressed by neither. I'd say Ghost Story was relatively awful. But Ringworld is considered one of the great all time sci-fi novels, Ghost Story one of the scariest horror novels ever written (whatever!). Not to me, they weren't. So when I say the Harry Potter series is good, I mean it.

But I can't, for the life of me, figure out why they are good.

Toot for Tuesday

The last few of days, along with their usual parade of rejection letters passing through my mailbox and inbox, have also brought two trumpet blasts of good news.

My story, "Intermission Between the Opening of the Sixth and Seventh Seals," will be published at Bewildering Stories on May 15th. This is a bit of humorous (I hope) religio/political flash fiction.

My poem, "I Know a Man Who Drank Himself to Death," will be published at Ritro.com on June 9th. The poem uses the classic form of an epitath of four rhyming lines.

I'll post updates with direct links when they are available.

Stop Smoking in One Easy Step

A journey of a thousand miles begins.

I quit smoking over ten years ago using what I call the "Forrest Gump Method." I left the house one morning without my smokes, by accident. Rather than buy a pack on my way to work, I thought I'd see if I could make it the whole day without a cigarette. I did. When I got home, I thought, I've gone this far, let's see if I can go all night without a cigarette. The next morning, I thought, I've gone one day without a cigarette, I wonder if I can go another day. And then another and another. It's been over ten years now.

Here's the secret. Any stop smoking method will work. But if you want to really stop, you have to follow one fundamental rule - no matter what, you can never allow yourself an excuse to smoke one single cigarette (or use any tobacco product) from the moment you quit until the moment you quit this earth.

I don't care if you are out walking the dog and you run into the president and you crap your pants in front of him and his daughters and they catch you in the act on CNN and play it over and over all day and while you are running away your dog runs out into traffic and when you jerk him back you rip his little head off and they arrest you for animal cruelty and while you are in jail awaiting trial you have to share a cell with a 300 pound gay biker named Rainbow Eagle who used to have a good life until some jerk ripped his dog's head off and life's been a downward spiral of meth and sex addiction ever since - you can't tell yourself that you deserve a cigarette just this one time, because there is no such thing as "just this one time."