OryCon 2017 Schedule

From now until I decide I want to stop doing this, I will be giving out a monthly “Jennifer Award” for the best new-to-me thing I read that month. This can be fiction or non-fiction. It can be an essay/article, a short story, a novelette, a novella, or a novel. It doesn’t matter when it came out. It only matters that this is the first time I read it and I thought it was the best thing I read all month. Yes, it is completely subjective and biased towards what I like to read. The winner will receive a shiny digital badge of honor and a $5 gift card. The December winner of the Jennifer Award is “On the Day You Spend Forever with Your Dog” by Adam R. Shannon.  It’s available right now on Apex Magazine. This one is a beautiful tear-jerker of a time travel story about one...

Or how I became a six cat household on Christmas Eve. For the last seven weeks, I’ve been keeping an eye on a pair of singapuras put up on RescueMe.org. A pair of girls had been willed to a doctor who already had pets. They tried for seven weeks to integrate the kitties and it didn’t work. All the back and forth ended up with an email yesterday that came down to, “it’s not working, will you come get them tonight?” I emailed Jeff and asked if he was willing. He was. (My hero!) And suddenly, we had Operation Rescue Singas, the cutest escort mission ever. We drove 540 miles roundtrip in about 11.5 hours (holiday traffic) to pick these little loves up. The story got a little weirder. (IE: The deceased woman’s husband is still alive. He didn’t even know the kitties names. I need to contact him for...