Tobias S. Buckell's Blog, page 5

Product Recommendation: Hot and Cold Icepack Wrist Braces

I’ve been hitting the word mines pretty seriously of late, and my wrists have been less than thrilled. I started to think that maybe there was a better solution than just holding an ice pack to my wrist, maybe there was something I could strap on.

Sure enough, I found this on Amazon:

Wrist Support Brace with Gel Ice Pack for Hot and Cold Therapy | Adjustable Wrap, Multi-Purpose, Microwaveable and Reusable (if you click and buy I get a small commission, fyi).

The cooling reduces inflammation...

Labor Day Cleanup

Today was mostly a day of cleaning up some stuff around my office. Since I put the standing desk in the back has been a mess of cables.

I purchased a cable run tray for under a desk off Amazon and screwed it in today, then started work last in the morning on organizing my million or so odd USB cables and power cables.

The goal was to get them off the floor. I really like the basement office and what I’ve done with it:

Office project 95% complete. From middle of basement by divider. I need mo...

Shoggoths in Traffic is now available in the September issue of Lightspeed Magazine

So this is cool. Lightspeed Magazine has my first ever Patreon reprinted short story running in their September issue out now. It’s April’s “Shoggoth’s in Traffic.”

This is the story that Rich Horton reviewed in Locus Magazine and called “a clever Lovecraftian crime story” in a complimentary review and call out of my Patreon. He also said “you’ll not think of cloverleafs and other traffic patterns quite the same way after this!”

Holy shit, also in this Locus, Rich Horton reviewed a story fr...

August Patreon Short Story: Sunset

Patreon lets me run a monthly short story subscription service for readers. Over 100 of my readers have subscribed to have a short story a month delivered to their inboxes for as little as $1.

The August Patreon short story came out last night, a 6,300 word long classic science fiction story about a headstrong young boy who encounters a starship bent for retirement on his out-of-the-way world.

Here’s a snippet of the story for you:

Sunset

The starship crash-landed somewhere in the dark a...

My Whirlwind July: NASFIC 2017, Puerto Rico Vacation, and then teaching at Shared Worlds

Sometimes life moves so fast you look up and a whole month has passed. Sometimes you look up and then you realize two whole months has gone by and you haven’t posted a single blog post. And then your mother is like ‘is your website dead?’ and you realize you have neglected the site.

I’m still alive!

In the last couple of weeks of June I tried to clean on the other side of the basement across from my office with intent to turn it into a gym when I got back from my July travels. I even rented a...

Not sure if crowdfunding is so much ‘resorting’ as pivoting

There’s a review of Xenowealth: A Collection floating around that’s nice to the stories, but starts off being saddened about the fact that many authors have to ‘resort’ to using crowdfunding, or Kickstarter, to get their work into print.

Of course I instinctively flinched that this was the framing around the review from the start. I felt it decentered the focus on the stories, the art around the book, or the quality of the book itself, and might have put off some readers by focusing on the na...

I traveled to Bermuda to launch ‘The Stories We Tell: The Bermuda Anthology of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror

Back in late September of 2014 I was the Writer in Residence for the island of Bermuda, where I taught a 3 week long science fiction and fantasy workshop for island writers. Dr. Kim Dismont-Robinson, Folklife Office from the Department of Community and Cultural Affairs invited me to head this up, and it was one of those amazing life moments. I got to bring together both my Caribbean roots and experience and my genre writing credentials all together. It was like ‘this is the moment I’ve been w...

The First Time I Had Pneumonia I Thought I Was a Medical Miracle

This essay came to me while I was feverish and unable to sleep at some point over the last week and a half. I woke up the next morning convinced that I’d written it, as I could remember the outlining, the main points, and the title.

Alas, I had not actually written it.

But, having remembered writing it in such vivid detail, I thought I’d give a stab at rewriting it and fulfilling a feverish prophecy, as such.

The first time I caught pneumonia I was somewhere between 1st and 3rd grade. I suspe...

Feedback: what would you like to see me talk about at a convention?

So the nice folks at NASFIC have asked if there are any panels or events I’d like to do. They asked this a while back, so I’m criminal here in that I am just now unburying myself from months of backlog and then being sick the last 10 days or so, but, I thought I’d throw this out there in case I’m missing something obvious before I reply with some ideas.

Anything you’d like to hear me talk about? Or chair a panel on? Or have heard me chair a panel on and enjoyed? I’d love the feedback…

Yes Virginia, It’s Highly Probably ACA Cut Bankruptcies in Half. Possibly, actually, even more!

Yesterday I posted a link to a Consumer Reports article that suggested that the implementation of ACA likely cut US bankruptcies half.

I posted the following tweet:

Headline: ACA drove bankruptcies down by HALF. 1.5 mill to 770k.

Half. https://t.co/q7BmanYCK6

— Tobias S. Buckell (@tobiasbuckell) May 2, 2017

That leads to a Consumer Reports article that has this chart of consumer bankruptcies:

And the internet blew up for me. At first I was impressed with the clip of retweets, over a coupl...