How to raise a turtle’s cholesterol

When the weather is nice (which means, not scorchingly hot and humid), I like to take my lunch on a bench in a little park not far from where I work. The offices around this park are all abandoned and there’s a nice big pond that is stocked with a gazillion fish that has also been adopted by numerous turtles. The pond is bi-level, with a small “falls” that pours over a retaining wall to keep things from becoming stagnant. All in all, it covers at least an acre.

Today, I was sitting there reading Brian Keene’s upcoming Terminal when I dropped a french fry on the ground. Rather than leave it under the bench for the crows, I chucked it into the pond. It was immediately attacked by a horde of unseen fish, reminiscent of a scene from Piranha. The fry fairly danced as the water boiled beneath it. But a small turtle cleared a path through the fish and snatched up the snack for himself. He ended up with a couple of more fries before I was done (so absorbed in this gripping novel that I wasn’t paying close enough attention to what I was doing otherwise), and I got to thinking later that maybe I shouldn’t be feeding junk food to the amphibians. I don’t know if they were cooked in animal fat or not, and I don’t want to be responsible for raising the poor creature’s cholesterol level.

The new issue of Accent is online. I have reviews of I Am Charlotte Simmons (Tom Wolfe), Prime (Poppy Z. Brite), The Limits of Enchantment (Graham Joyce) and Double Homicide (Jonathan and Faye Kellerman) in this issue.

My flash fiction story “Your Shoes” is now up at the Twilight Tales web site. This is the tale that tied for second place at the World Horror flash fiction contest, as judged by Ellen Datlow, F. Paul Wilson, and the Clarkes (aka Michael Slade).

I turned in my CD #53 column today and cleared my desk of pending reviews, so now it’s time to turn my attention to other matters. I have a stack of submission guidelines for current anthologies that I may peruse, but I’m also percolating another novel (I think I mentioned this last time) and I wrote the opening two pages this weekend, based on something that came to me (where else) in the shower one morning.

My wife and I are going to attend the Stoker banquet in LA in June. We decided that just being nominated was a big enough deal to go out for a day or so. I’ll probably have a reading on Saturday morning (June 25) and participate in the signing at Dark Delicacies (that’s worth a trip by itself, I think!) on Saturday afternoon. Time to drag out the tux and make sure it still fits.