Hey.  You.

*nudge-nudge*

Yeah, you.

*taps your computer screen*

*you overreact and activate your antivirus software*

*I’m attacked by scanners until…

*stops impersonating Chuck Wendig’s blog-writing style*

Ahem.

In any event, the latest issue of LampLight is out–volume 4, Issue 1.  In digital and Kindle right now, but I’m told the print shall be along soon enough.  Pretty spiffy, with stories from Tim Waggoner, PD Cacek, Chris Shearer, Jamie Lackey, and Charles Paseur, a classic piece by M.R. James, with a column by Kevin Lucia and an afterword from me (which is a truncated version, cutting to “hey, this was fun”; I may post the full essay here at some point).  This is my second time working with Tim, third working with Jamie, so it has that sense of familiarity to it.  The cover, above, is a first, which Jacob Haddon pointed out to me–LampLight has never had a figure on the cover, which is pretty sweet.

If you forgot my birthday–back on the 14th of September–you could make it up to me by picking up a copy.  Also, review it.  Rack up them Amazon hits, and all that.

Cheers!

Hey, gang – Be right back; in the midst of drafting, rewriting, teaching, husbanding, fathering.  You know–the standard.  There are things I want to talk about–the new lovely issue of Lamplight that I guest-edited, why bad reviews are okay, why your instincts suck, but there’s also a stack of student notebooks eyeballing me and, when I’m not typing this, I’m eyeballing it right back.  So, go check out my special super-duper guest edit, or read this review of Savage Beasts that I’m currently loving, or read on. 

My daughter is going to have music tastes that I’m going to hate.  It’s just the natural state of things.  I’m getting older and popular music is paying zero attention to the demographic I’m now in.  Being a teacher, I see/hear what’s popular and, yes, I’m becoming one of those old bastards who recalls the glory days.  Of course, my glory days were the mid-to-late 1990s, so how glorious could they be?

So, so glorious. Apparently.

But, for the past two weeks, my daughter, the Bug, has been demanding the “1,2,3, come back to me” song.  No goddamn clue what she was talking about.  My wife and I had narrowed it down to a female singer–but none of the female groups in my car–Garbage, theSTART!.  It wasn’t until I had the radio on one day that I discovered it was this:

And, after briefly being horrified that my four-year-old is belting out lyrics about, at some points, coming…I actually kinda dug the song.  As well as the album, when I heard it later.

Maybe I’m not too old.  Or I’m going senile.  One of the two.

Still, a catchy song.

Enjoy.