If you’ve ever been curious about what it’s like driving through a tunnel in Pittsburgh, here’s a shot of going through the Squirrel Hill Tunnel.

If you’ve ever been curious about what it’s like driving through a tunnel in Pittsburgh, here’s a shot of going through the Squirrel Hill Tunnel.

Go, Dog. Go! by P.D. Eastman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
When I was a little kid, this book seemed to be more my older brothers’ speed. It was longer. It was more complex, and it had a sense of danger about it that I didn’t truly understand as a young reader. When I finally did read the book, I thought it was really cool. I felt like I accomplished something, and I couldn’t understand what had made me apprehensive about reading it in the first place.


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