Mokka mit Schlag

For the last ten years or so, the real markers of the holiday season for me are the annual Christmas Bird Counts. I try to get to as many of these as I can. Yesterday was Kings County’s (which actually includes part of Queens County for reasons of convexity). This year I counted at Jacob Riis Park and Fort Tilden on a beautiful cloudy winter day. Conditions were ideal for sea watching, and we had a lot of great birds including all three scoter species (maybe more than a thousand Black Scoters), hundreds of Red-throated Loons, and eight Common Eiders.

However for me the highlight was three Common Waxwings that Joshua Malbin and I found in the woods at Fort Tilden. Shockingly, these were the only Cedar Waxwings anyone saw anywhere in the count circle yesterday, which makes them a save. They usually aren’t that hard to find, and we didn’t think much about them when we did see them. If we hadn’t bushwhacked the overgrown trail behind the West Battery, or been a few minutes earlier or later when we did, the entire count would have missed Cedar Waxwing this year.
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My flash piece, “To The Point”, is now available in the January/February double issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine:

You can find it at most newsstands, as well as Amazon and Google Play.

This is my first official Mystery Writers of America qualifying pro sale so I’m pretty psyched. :-)

My latest short story, Refusing the Call, is now available in Third Flatiron’s Abbreviated Epics for Kindle, DRM-free ePub, or just plain paper.

It wasn’t easy figuring out how to write an epic in only 3,000 words. In the end I just started at the beginning, and stayed there. Enjoy!

This was a really easy category to vote in. I was already familiar with all the nominees here, and had really clear preferences. They’re all good, but ranking from first to last (not that last is bad in this group) my choices are:
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This is a tough vote. The best movie among the nominees is clearly Gravity (though you could make a case for Frozen) but my concern is that it’s not speculative. This is set in the present day, with present day technology. If it had been done 40 years ago it would have been SF. Today it isn’t. IMHO, merely being set in space does not qualify a movie as SF, so as good as it is, it doesn’t get my vote.
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The Novella category has some good nominees and one probable example of ballot-box stuffing. My first place vote goes to “The Chaplain’s Legacy” by Brad Torgersen. This was the only one of the group I’d read before the nominees came out. It’s solid, post-Vietnam, military SF. It’s a really good story and worth the nomination. Usually I don’t remember 90% of what’s published in the magazines two months after I’ve read them, but I remembered this one.
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