Christopher Rowe

@christopherrowe.bsky.social

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Writer, reader, cyclist, cook, traveller. THE NAVIGATING FOX, starred review in Publishers Weekly, out now from Tordotcom Publishing.

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Today's OED Word of the day is âme damnée: "A person slavishly devoted to another, and willing to carry out onerous (and sometimes disreputable) services on his or her behalf; a puppet; a tool." Happy Independence Day. May we live to see another.

Okay, yes, I will allow that I need to clean the apartment. But YOU have to allow that there is a perfectly reasonably explanation for this.

Last night I read Conan: Black Starlight by John C. Hocking and just loved it. You can read my review here: swordandsorceryreviews.blogspot.com/2024/07/this...

Conan: Black Starlight by John C. Hawkingswordandsorceryreviews.blogspot.com This second entry in Titan Books’ Heroic Legends series, which chronicles new adventures of Robert E. Howard’s many fantasy characters, is...

I wonder how many issues of @fiyahlitmag.bsky.social J. Michael Straczynski read when he was assembling his list of invitees for The Last Dangerous Visions. I wonder if he even did enough research to become aware of the magazine's existence, of for that matter, many other contemporary sf magazines.

Do I just give him an option D? Or keep moving through the alphabet?

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Haven’t received a shiny little star for my work since grade school. Thanks, Library Journal! www.libraryjournal.com/review/the-n...

Ancillary to the Straczynski afterword situation, apparently in the formatter, it's revealed that Ellison suffered from bipolar. I felt moved to write something about that on my Facebook: "Bipolar, Harlan Ellison, and Me," and I hope you'll read it. www.facebook.com/permalink.ph...

Log into Facebookwww.facebook.com Log into Facebook to start sharing and connecting with your friends, family, and people you know.

It belatedly occurred to me that it was (just barely) within the realm of possibility that Straczynski actually ASKED these eleven authors if he could, well, do what he did here. So I asked some of them and can report that is not the case (at least among those I asked).

J. Michael Straczynski naming names in the afterword of The Last Dangerous Visions for…reasons? This seems wildly irresponsible and self-serving at the very least. Redacted are the name of eleven “diverse” writers.

"Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons..." --1 Timothy 4:1

These are the four books I’m reading right now. I am increasingly of the opinion that fantasy thrives best in the 250 page range. The John collection is 253 pages, the Moore collection 201 pages, and the Anderson novel 271 pages. Hocking’s Conan book is 507 pages but it’s an omnibus of two novels.

I recommend the new sword & sorcery collection To Walk on Worlds by Matthew John. Enthusiastically. (Aside: I love the s&s community's commitment to bringing back the mass market paperback!)

I was just checking my mail and the woman at the front desk in my building kind of shrieked and said, "My God, you shaved your beard! You look twenty years younger!" Um, thanks?

According to this transcript, I took a course in Contemporary Irish Literature in grad school. I have no memory of this. I got a B. I sure like Roddy Doyle's Barrytown Trilogy but I read those decades ago.

I'm applying for teaching jobs and thus need to order unofficial copies of my college transcripts. Which means I need to contact six different colleges and universities. To paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holmes, in my youth, my heart was filled with fire.

A friend asked if any of my books are available at her public library, so I searched "Rowe, Christopher" in the author field of the website of the Warren County Public Library in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

More on this closer to the date, but I hope New Yorkers can make it to the Wednesday, August 14th edition of the Fantastic Fiction at KGB Reading Series, where I'll be appearing with horror writer James Chambers. www.kgbfantasticfiction.org

Fantastic Fiction at KGBwww.kgbfantasticfiction.org A monthly speculative fiction reading series in New York City, hosted by Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel

George Armstrong Custer died on this day in 1876 at Little Bighorn. It was a day marked by tragedies, the greatest of which is that they didn't figure out how to kill the son-of-a-bitch twice.

Here's a story I wrote a long time ago. smallbeerpress.com/free-stuff-t...

The Force Acting on the Displaced Body | Small Beer Presssmallbeerpress.com The little creek behind my trailer in Kentucky is called Frankum Branch. I had to go to the courthouse to find that out. Nobody around here thought it had a name. But all the little creeks and branche...

For those of you who would consider supporting a Christopher Rowe Patreon: what sorts of "content" would you most like to see?

Someone approved this.

And that's that for the first draft, at least. 5,300 words of...something...

One time I was being kind of a whiney smart ass about writing and Ted Chiang turned to me and quoted this verbatim. I write it down in my daybook anew about this time every year, as I finish my story for the Sycamore Hill workshop (which starts Saturday so why am I on social media?)

I'll tell you this. If you're gonna try and hypnotize a chicken you better get it right the first time.

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Congratulations to our short story writing friend, Ted, the latest short story writer to receive the PEN/Malamud Award! www.penfaulkner.org/2024/06/11/t...

Ted Chiang Wins the 2024 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story | The PEN/Faulkner Foundationwww.penfaulkner.org

Thank you quora dot com, whoever you may be.

My favorite song lyrics change roughly on the quarter hour. Right now, it's these lines from Guy Clark's "Dublin Blues:" Now I have seen the David, mmmhmmm, I’ve seen the Mona Lisa, too, And I have heard Doc Watson play Columbus Stockade Blues.

Well this kind of thrills me!

It's Best American Day! Here are the table of contents and the notable stories for Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024 ed. by @hughhowey.com & I: Series: www.harpercollins.com/pages/bestam... TOC: www.johnjosephadams.com/projects/bes... Notables: www.johnjosephadams.com/projects/bes...

I read a ridiculous amount of contemporary short science fiction and fantasy, so I think this is an educated observation. It's an opinion, sure, but one based on twenty-plus magazine subscriptions. Appalachians (and their proxies) are the last people in the world it's okay for genre writers to mock.

“You can’t let the little pricks generation-gap you.” —Molly Millions, Neuromancer, William Gibson, 1984