It took me two hours, but I’ve got a helluva lot of content lined up for you guys. Beginning next week, you’ll have an article or story posted automatically here every Monday and Thursday. Some of them are miscellaneous juvenalia, and some are genuinely good gems. I hope you enjoy them. I’m going to bed. Then to Malaysia.

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Tomorrow we’re off to Seoul. We’ll screw around there for a few days, enjoying foreign foods and going to the Science Museum - I hope it exists this time - and generally just enjoying the city. Then we’ll fly to Japan for ten days. We’ll go to Hakone and ride a pirate ship in the shadow of Mount Fuji, and go to Nikko to enjoy peace and quiet. We’ll go to Akiba to look sidewise, discretely, at the nude anime sculptures, and we’ll see a sumo match! I’m pretty excited.

And then we’ll get back August 5th; an hour after we land, our friends Ben and Vivienne will arrive for a two-week visit. We’ll go back to Mokpo the next day, and hang out here for a few days; visit an island, have a cookout, hit the town, et cetera. Then we’ll go to Jeju for four nights, back to the ‘po, then up to Seoul for a few days. I like playing the tour guide - “What?” you say, “You like showing off your vast knowledge to an eager and captive audience? I don’t believe it!” Believe it.

And then we come back to the ‘po on the 20th of August. Randi returns to work, but I’m off until September 1st, during which time I’ll be reading a giant stack of books in preparation for my next novel. It’s going to be a full, exciting summer, and it’ll go by in a flash.

But, you wail in despair, what of the website? Worry not, dear reader! I’ve queued up an amount of material to auto-publish in my absence; if anything, there will be even more content than usual. First is a journal of my conversion to agnosticism. It’s the most intensely personal thing I’ve ever written, an exploration of faith and significance in the modern era. There are some good jokes, too. The first installment will go up Friday. Then I’ll post, in installments, some stories that have been published in print, and the rights of which have reverted to me. Which, I don’t know yet. But you’ll love ‘em.

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I’ve updated the publication list, there on the right, and added a contact page. Now you know my secrets.

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If you’re coming to this site for the first time, I direct you to this, the most useful entry you could hope to find here, or, indeed, anywhere.

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Some of the searches that lead people to my ethereal Internet door:

• “a mask was forced over her face” That’d be from my story, “The Death-Mask,” available via that link to the right - I’m guessing that the searcher had bondage in mind.
• “a serious person”. What can I say? I’m a serious person.
• “penis print jens”. I honestly have no clue. I wish I knew which search engine these people are using, because “penis print jens” doesn’t link here for the first ten pages, and I really can’t be bothered to search further. Someone really wanted their penis print jens.
• “sex jens arab”. Well, that makes sense.
• “strained look on her face”. Gratifying for its blandness. Who knows what they were after?
• “the angry wife pearl buck”. From my critique of that book. Hey, this one shows up in the first page of Google hits. I am preeminent among scholars of this particular book!
• And, my favorite, simply the word: “titillate”. Who would sift through eight pages of “titillate”? Someone on the Internet, that’s who. Undoubtedly this refers to my Tales to Titillate.
• And, while looking back through my page for this post, I re-discovered this very helpful and necessary dispatch that you might have missed, but sorely need.

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I’ve been thinking about fun things I’d like to do with this journal should I publish a novel and acquire a readership, and I’m going to jot them down here lest I forget.

• Communal Art. It’d be fun to have weekly or monthly projects wherein everyone creates a piece of art of some sort, be it a story, a drawing, a song, or *ugh* a poem, based on a word, phrase, or idea. Then I could post the winners on the page. Joel and I very briefly tried something like this last year.
• Reading race, or the Great Annual Breakneck Read-Hurdle Steeplechase. Last year, Joel and friend Donna and I read competitively. I wanted to get through the 1400 pages of Bleak House, and I wanted to do it in a timely fashion, lest I be reading that brick of a book for all eternity. So we all started at the same time and posted our daily completion percentage (page numbers don’t work unless you all have the same edition). We’re thinking we’ll do another this year. The criterion is that one selects a massive book that one would not normally get through otherwise; Joel has suggested Atlas Shrugged, for which he may be strangled. Ha, ha. The benefits of the reading race are many: you actually complete the novel - how many people have given up on War and Peace? You have someone with whom to discuss the interesting parts and commiserate on the drudging parts. The winner gets bragging rights, which are hard to come by these days. Anathem would be a good selection.

Here’s a list of the world’s longest novels. I’ve read… two.

Wow. Linked from there to the Strange Case of Henry Darger. I’d never heard of the guy, but his life and work are a powerful example of the artistic urge; he had a story within him that he to tell, and he told it over the course of six decades. Amazing.

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As a writer, it is my duty to stare into the darkest recesses of the human experience and not flinch. It was inevitable that this duty would one day lead me to write about killipedes.

Click this here link (it’s a PDF) and check out my (very) short story on this growing menace. Scroll past the juvenalia for which Space Squid is known to page 9. The story will take five minutes of your time. You’ll be a little sadder and a little wiser for it.

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The first Tale to Titillate is posted! Merely look below, or see it archived under the “Tales to Titillate” sidebar just to the right!

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So, soon I will finish the first draft of “Papillon”, and then I will jet off for three weeks on the tropical beaches of Bali, sipping mojitos, eating roasted suckling pigs, reading science-romances, and generally taking it easy! Tourism is the new colonialism!

Anyway, while I’m en vacance, I certainly can’t be bothered with the upkeep of this website, which is why I have planned a series of events united under the poetic name of “Contentpalooza.”
Scratch that. “Parade of Scintillation.” No. “Parade of SINtillation.” No. “Tournament of Titillation.” Yes.

This is a three-pronged attack on your pleasure centers. The first and deadliest prong is a series of illustrated short-short stories, featuring the artwork of the talented Katie McKraken. These will be posted on Mondays, Seoul time, which I guess is the middle of the night on Sunday for most of my readers.  The second prong will be a series of book reviews by me. I read interesting things all the time, but I rarely take the time to educate you, dear reader, as I should. That will change; look for these on Wednesday. The third prong is a series of “guest columns” by various writers of renown, to be posted on Fridays.

The Tournament of Titillation will run from August 4th, when the first story goes live, through the end of the month.

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If you click the link to “Publications” on the right, it’ll take you to a “complete” list of my published works! Except for the ones I have forgotten or that have vanished. Many are available online, so you can read them right now!

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