Norwescon 36

I will be attending Norwescon 36 this year. 
Read more for my schedule:

Another sweeping pronouncement by a non-expert

To a biologist, the term quorum sensing in nothing new. Perhaps it is familiar to all, but just in case,  Wikipedia article  on it is very nice and detailed. Let me define it nonetheless: quorum sensing has nothing to do with voter turnout or voting machines, it is a particular phenotype, or behavior, that certain living organisms begin to show when their population reaches a certain density in a certain environment -- such as bacteria in a carton of milk, for example.  This threshold of  "crowdedness" of bacterial individuals in a milk carton is called a quorum. Apparently, they have a way of knowing that they reached a quorum: they sense it (and there is nothing mysterious as to how -- they have ways, and the point of the story is not about those ways).
At any rate, having sensed the quorum, bacteria begin to display a new behavior, or activity.

Confessions of a Once-a-Year Movie-goer

I liked the movie Argo.
I am all for quietly evocative moments and subtle filigree of story-telling.
I wonder if the following is in everybody and their critic's blog post, but I'll write it down nonetheless (spoiler alert applies):

It's a novel!

I am excited to announce that my novel The Age of Ice is scheduled to come out in the summer of 2013. Its listing on the Publisher's site is here Scribner/Simon and Schuster

New story due out in August

A new science fiction short story, Deus Absconditus, will be coming out this August in GigaNotoSaurus
A list of things one can come across in this story includes island living, massage, drug addiction, and creationism.

Clarion West Write-a-thon

I am late to report that I am participating in the Clarion West Write-a-thon, an annual event in which the community of Clarion West alumni, friends, supporters and other speculative fictions enthusiasts rally to practice their writing magic to raise money for Clarion West. My goals are modest: to make steady progress revising my novel, The Age of Ice. If I also manage to revise and finalize one short story (it has been waiting for its turn since almost two years ago, the poor thing), I can call myself superhuman.

New story out

My short story Galileo Day is out online in Albedo 2.0
It is a story from an alternate history line that forked from ours in 1633, at the acquittal of Galileo. Seventy years later, Catholic monasteries are centers of research and higher learning. Christopher, a Theobaldian monk, is working hard on his contagion theory when... he meets Jacob Brucke, his newly-discovered half-brother.