
Anyway, ZZ died a few months shy of his 19th birthday, about six months after the photo of him was taken.
I’ve just been thinking about the little guy today and missing him.


Anyway, ZZ died a few months shy of his 19th birthday, about six months after the photo of him was taken.
I’ve just been thinking about the little guy today and missing him.


So this is cool.
The good people at Crossed Genres have released the Cover by Julie Dillon and the Table of Contents for the anthology Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, which includes a story I wrote specifically for the anthology.
I am really honored and excited to be in the same book as all these writers, many of whom are big-name award-winners and all-around awesome people.
The anthology is edited by Rose Fox and Daniel José Older, and is slated for publication in May 2014.


Scientists say they’ve uncovered the secret to writing a bestselling novel. By using a process called “statistical stylometry,” which basically means data mining an overload of printed matter — in this case 40,000 books and film scripts — to find patterns of wood usage.
The Stony Brook University researchers say that books that used more conjunctions (and, or, but) and thought-processing words, such as “recognized,” did better than books that had a higher percentage of verbs, adverbs and foreign words.
Do you believe them?
Here’s a quote from one of the researchers, which gives a sense of what it means to write about research (and maybe a good example of how not to write a bestselling sentence (look at those action verbs and a verb of being, but then again there’s that all-powerful “and”).
“Based on novels across different genres, we investigated the predictive power of statistical stylometry in discriminating successful literary works, and identified the stylistic elements that are more prominent in successful writings.”
This morning’s ear worm is crickets, slowed way down:

Bears on Wheels by Stan Berenstain
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A classic. Lots of tension. Defies physics and logic. Great ending.
This just in #truedetective #signofakiller should I be scared? #hbo pic.twitter.com/h7lkeRle3c
— Michael Janairo (@mjanairo) January 6, 2014
The New York Times twitterers share some of their lessons of 2013 on the Nieman Labs:
During 2013, we began consistently scheduling multiple runs of tweets highlighting some of our best enterprise material, especially during weekend hours and overnight, when @nytimes is mostly automated. It goes without saying that if you tweet more, you’ll get more traffic overall. But what we found when we scheduled tweets on Saturday and Sunday was that the average click per tweet grew substantially.
One thing that this means is that Twitter users who follow all sorts of media accounts (and not just the national media), can expect to see tweets repeated.

The problem: Remote-car starter appears nonfunctional after having my dead battery replaced
The solution: The remote-car starter company’s FAQ
Time on task: 10 minutes to look things up on the Internet; less than a minute to implement
Lesson: This remains one of the best gifts from my wife