non illi imperium pelagi saevumque tridentem

My very short story "Imperator Noster" has been accepted by Jaym Gates for Genius Loci: Spirit of Place. Check out this table of contents! I know people in it; they're great! I'm looking forward to reading the people I don't know! I believe this sudden access of exclamation points is fully justified!

Seriously, I am very happy about this: it looks like a brilliant lineup and I've never been in an anthology with original interior art before. There will be a Kickstarter to fund the authors and the artists, so I will announce those details as soon as they exist. My story is not in Latin, but it is set in imperial Rome. The title is on the model of Mare Nostrum.

(In the meantime, did you know that Stone Bird Press' An Alphabet of Embers is 80% funded with just two weeks to go? Five dollars, ten, twenty for the pair of e-books. Don't let it stall before it can spark to flight.)

There is good art in this world. I am glad to be reminded.

[edit] Speaking of which! Does anyone know if the Pet Shop Boys' Turing opera is live-streaming anywhere tonight? I am not well-versed in the ways of listening to radio on the internet. (If not, all is not lost: rosefox, blessed among dandies, has just sent me the link to the eventual video. Thank you!)

[edit edit] BBC Radio Three. I am currently listening to some sitar music, which the internet informs me is Jasdeep Singh Degun. This might work after all.

Alan's brain, like a wireless set, resonated to a signal from the unseen world

Apologies for the jumble of the previous post; I had known about the Pet Shop Boys' A Man from the Future, but not that I would have any way of listening to it, and I exploded into go-mode. I am still quite happy about the acceptance. But I just spent the last hour listening to an electronic concert work about Alan Turing and it was really wonderful. Libretto written in close collaboration with Andrew Hodges, Juliet Stevenson narrating. There is Morse code woven in among the synths—the announcer, describing Turing in advance of the performance, parenthesized him "without whom quite a lot of the equipment onstage wouldn't exist tonight." A choral setting of a stanza of "The Ballad of Reading Gaol." A violin plays "Cockles and Mussels" over the facts of Alan's trial. It went farther into the present day, politically, than I thought it would. I didn't make notes for myself; I'd rather just listen. Some lines that stuck with me as they went by:

Chris was waiting outside the labs. He took me out to see the stars.

They were having a wonderful time, seeing the history of the future.

Whenever I recall some past epoch, Alan said, I think of whoever I was in love with at the time.

Thinking and doing—the logical and the physical.
It was the problem of his theory and the problem of his life.

Never far beneath the surface lay the traditional equation of sodomy, heresy, and treachery.

A man from the future, Alan had imagined a world with intelligent computers
Where homosexual life is normal.

The law killed and the spirit gave life.

I wish I could pick out fragments of the music in the same way. You should be able to listen to the recording here. I'm so glad someone wrote this. I'm so glad it was the Pet Shop Boys. (They heard of Alan first through Breaking the Code! It wasn't just me!) Someone point me at a CD or a DVD and I will hand money over. This was an excellent thing to do with an evening.

P.S. I had not realized until it was announced that the first part of the concert was going to be orchestral versions of songs by the Pet Shop Boys, arranged by Angelo Badalamenti and performed by Chrissie Hynde. Result: OH MY GOD IT'S THE TORCHY LOUNGE VERSION OF "RENT." HUZZAH EVERYTHING.