John Joseph Adams is announcing that he’ll be editing a new online science fiction magazine called Lightspeed.

The short story “After the Age of Giant Sundials” by recent Alpha grad Haris is today’s #1 Sci-Fi/Fantasy article over on Teen Ink. Congrats!

The Dell Magazines Award has a slick new website. Check it out.

Locus is reporting the thrilling news that the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean flick will officially be an adaptation of the Tim Powers novel On Stranger Tides.

So they sat me down in a room. They had these two people dressed in their military Sea Org uniforms, and they had a man and a woman, and the man was somebody I had previously met in Scientology, so I kind of had a buddy-buddy relationship with him, and then the woman was, you know, an extraordinarily beautiful woman, and she was flirting with me and telling me how great it would be if we could be in the Sea Org together, and she was like from Louisiana, she had this really charming Southern accent, and they’re working me. There would be times when she would get up and leave and I’d be alone with the guy, and I’d be bonding with him, and then he’d leave and she’d come back. This went on for five hours, and I now know that the woman had been at the Long Island center where I’d worked previously, and so certainly would have had access to my auditing files. Because when I was talking to them I was amazed at how much these people seemed to know about me, it was like they could see right into my soul, you know? They say the files are confidential, but obviously they’re not. So they’re like pushing my buttons and getting me to be upset, and I’d be crying, and then they would calm me down, and then get me to cry again, calm me down. This is torture, this is psychological torture, for five hours they’re doing this, and now I’m like an emotional wreck, my head is spinning, and then they say, because, you know, I didn’t want to drop out of school, so they say, “Look, suppose you stay in school, and you have a good education, and you get a good job, in fifty years you’re going to be dead, what’s the point? But if you join us, you’ll live forever.”

Here’s a fascinating lecture by Yale professor Donald Kagan on the organization of Spartan society. This is a culture that really upends a lot of our notions about human nature and propriety.

The Candy Man Can: Or Why John Joseph Adams is Genre Fiction’s Willy Wonka. Barnes & Noble.com’s Paul Goat Allen calls John Joseph Adams “the reigning king of the anthology world.” He adds, “Every anthology this guy is associated with seems to turn to gold: and by gold I mean jaw-droppingly brilliant anthologies with no weak links that I’ll not only read again and again but treasure until the day I die.” Wastelands is “arguably my favorite anthology of all time,” The Living Dead is “the best collection of zombie fiction stories ever collected,” and By Blood We Live is “another masterful – dare I say perfect – anthology.”

I’ve blogged before about how text to speech software is the greatest new tool for writers since the invention of the word processor. This software makes it vastly easier to catch typos, and you can sit back and close your eyes and listen to your story being read aloud, which greatly aids in polishing. But nobody I talk to seems to know about or use it, even people who have Macs, which have text to speech capability built right in. So I’m going to show you how to use it. It’s really easy. Give it a try. Seriously.

First click on the Apple icon and select “System Preferences”:

Next select the Speech icon:

Select “Text to Speech” and make sure you choose the Alex voice, which sounds much better than the others:

Select “Set Key” and pick a key combo for reading text aloud. I use Control + S:

Now just highlight any text in any program or document (emails, your story) and hit Control + S (or whatever). Your computer will start reading. Hit Control + S (or whatever) again to make it stop.

And that’s all there is to it.