Category Archives: Daikaijuzine

March 2021 Goals

Well, my good friend T. M. Baumgartner (whose fiction you should definitely check out) has put up some March 2021 goals, so you know what? I’m going to do that too. Maybe make it a thing: a monthly goal post to keep myself honest.

I’m pretty busy (even without the kitten pics), so I guess I have goals in three main arenas:

  • Daikaijuzine: Publish the new release on the 21st. That means making sure all the contracts are in place and the authors are happy with the layouts of their stories and poems and what-not. After that, take a breather before reopening submissions sometime in April.
  • School: Weekly blog posts on my research topic for the month (information-seeking behaviors of cryptozoologists), plus a couple of small papers. Research! Writing! Fun!
  • Writing:
    • Finish up revising the outline for And the Devil Will Drag You Under. I’m using the Save the Cat Writes a Novel method to do so. It’s worked out pretty well so far.
    • Revise two short stories for submission.
    • Keep submitting 2-3 stories per week.
    • Finish reading and critiquing Top Secret Novel for writers’ group meeting on Thursday the 11th.

I also picked up a book called The Craft of Science Writing, so I’m going to be reading that, because the dream lives on.

That’s all I got for now. If my readers are especially nice to me, I might send out a newsletter as well.

Various Updates

I keep forgetting that I have this blog. Well, no, it’s not that I forget about it; it’s more like, in this world of Twitter and Facebook, it’s much easier to just post 140 characters and forget about it. Blogging seems like so much more work.

So here’s some updates.

First, before I get to the writing updates, here’s an important one: I’m changing domains. I’ve had mossroot.com for over ten years and I’ll feel sad to leave it behind, but underpope.com seems so much more appropriate since I’m “Underpope” everywhere else on the Intertubes. A domain that reflects that just seemed natural. It’s all about growing the brand, you know? So go and change your links, your bookmarks, your feedreaders, etc.

Plus, this clever old-time photograph of the monkey at the typewriter seemed very appropriate for me. After all, it’s a monkey! And it’s typing! How friggin’ cute is that! And since my very own personal slogan is “Code monkey by day, word monkey by night”, the image could not be more fitting.

And now for some writing updates:

Code Monkey! Originally I had planned for this novel to just be a throwaway project for National Novel Writing Month. I had fun writing it, and fun putting it on line, chapter by chapter, for my friends to read. But then enough people (that is, more than one) suggested I actually push forward with it because it apparently has some potential. So I’m in the process of heavily editing it for possible submission to somewhere in the future. And I’m talking some serious edits. I swear, on some pages there is more red ink than black. (This is the reason I took down the original novel online. I could no longer stand the thought of people reading the original crap version.)

Also, My short story, “A Most Heinous Man”, which was published in Issue 33 of Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, will be published in their second “Best of Horror” anthology. I don’t have a publication date for it yet, but I will be sure to update here once I find out.
My short story “Night of the Frozen Elf” (available in a slightly typo-ridden version here) will be collected in a new anthology, The Undead that Saved Christmas. You can probably guess from the title that it’s a collection of Christmas-themed zombie stories. All proceeds from this anthology will go to support the Hugs Foster Family Agency. It’s a good cause, so when the book becomes available, please go and buy many, many copies.
And, finally, if you’re thinking about contributing to my speculative fiction webzine, Daikaijuzine, we’re now open for submissions again. It’s a great ‘zine, with great content, if I do say so myself. Check it out and spread the word.

For now, that’s about it. In the future, I plan to actually post more actual content. But, then, I always say that, don’t I?

A Wee Daikaijuzine Update

Although Daikaijuzine is still on hiatus, all of the old content is back online.  Unfortunately, in the process of moving databases and code around, the old links and bookmarks have changed.  If you had a story or article or poem bookmarked on Daikaijuzine, please double check to make sure it still works, and update it if it doesn’t.  I promise I will do my best to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

Oh, and wait until you see the great artwork that Art Director Keith Phemister has lined up for us!

Daikaijuzine Update

For reasons technological, personal, and logistical, Daikaijuzine is going on hiatus for the next few months.  All current submissions will be returned to the authors, and we are closed for submissions from now until June 21, 2008.  Release 4 of Daikaijuzine, code named King Ghidorah, will come bursting forth from its radioactive meteorite on September 21, 2008.

That is all for now.

Daikaijuzine News – 9/10/07

Daikaijuzine has apparently been targeted by that lowest form of life, the spammer.  Apparently a good deal of spam has been sent through our submissions form, and some corruption or other the the database has occurred, causing the site to break completely.

At this point I’ve done the following:

  • Disabled anonymous submissions; and
  • Restored enough of the site to at least show a "Daikaijuzine is down" message.

The good news is that all of the articles and stories that have been published are still in our database and thus easily recovered.  The bad news is that, according to my research, the prognosis is not good.  Other sites which have run Xoops and encountered such problems were not able to recover fully without starting over completely from scratch.

I was pondering moving Daikaijuzine away from Xoops to a new platform anyway.  This may be the best time to do that. 

Daikaijuzine Update

Shortly before the move, my main desktop computer crashed.  It didn’t crash in a major way; the filesystem is, as far as I can tell, mostly intact, but the executables which drive KDE are hosed, so the computer now refuses to boot into a GUI.  And, unfortunately, almost all of my email related to Daikaijuzine resides on that computer.  This shouldn’t have been a problem, since I should have been able to simply boot that computer, then SSH into it and use Pine to get at the mail, but since I’d been using KMail, the mail was being stored in a format which Pine couldn’t understand.

Finally, last week I figured out how to import the old Daikaijuzine messages from that computer onto my laptop so I can begin the process of catching up on submissions I need to review and also — ahem — sending out payments for published stories.  This is good.  However, all of the messages that I imported onto my laptop were saved as unread, new messages.  This is confusing, and now I need to go through them and see which ones I need to retain and which ones I can safely dump.

Oy.  This is a job for Godzilla.

Hopefully, soon I’ll have this complete and the September (and one year anniversary) issue of Daikaijuzine will be published as planned.