How people change—but you were never like the others

At the end of a long, exhausting, and frankly demoralizing day, the mail brought me my contributor's copy of Wilde Stories 2015: The Year's Best Gay Speculative Fiction, edited by Steve Berman. It is a very elegant hardcover and I am honored to have "The True Alchemist" reprinted alongside stories by Chaz Brenchley, Craig Laurence Gidney, Alex Jeffers, Sunny Moraine, and other people I should read more of. I dreamed one night in December 2013 that I was writing a story for ashlyme, so like a reasonable person I stayed up the next night and wrote it. The title comes from a line in Mattie's "A Portrait in Rust," one of the best autumnal stories I have read in recent years—appropriately, both stories were eventually published in Not One of Us #51. This is the second time "The True Alchemist" has been reprinted this year and I am delighted. Seriously, check this collection out. There is a lot of lovely weirdness in it. Tom Cardamome's "The Love of the Emperor Is Divine" is another one for the classics list.

I am in the middle of reading George Gissing's Born in Exile (1892), Sylvia Townsend Warner's Mr Fortune's Maggot (1927), and Ray Monk's Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (1990), so that's how I'm doing.

[edit] Speaking of emperors: the director of I, Claudius (1976) has died. Herbert Wise. I hope someone deifies him.