Ah-hah, not really. Bit of a slump coinciding with a great deal of copyediting and design work and, this week, the rhinovirus from hell.
BUT. Last week I saw a nearly final proof of The New People and it seems plausible M-Brane Double #1 will hit the presses next month.
AND. A year and a half or so ago, I wrote a longish story about whirling dervishes (caution: music on autoplay) and Rumi and a young Turkish hustler, “Like Spinning Stars, Like Flowers.” I intended to enter it in a short fiction competition sponsored by the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival in New Orleans but, in a moment of crashing idiocy, blew the deadline. A year later I managed not to miss the second iteration’s deadline, and today comes word that “Spinning Stars” is one of fourteen finalists, along with stories by a few names I recognize. They’re being coy about when they’ll announce the final results, chosen by the author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, John Berendt, but one assumes it will be before 12 May when the Festival launches an anthology containing winner and (some? all?) finalists.
So there’s that.