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Voting is now closed. Winner will be announced at the London Comic-Con at the end of May. Thanks for all your support!

"The Time of Reflection" was shortlisted in both categories of art and story for the MCM Expo Award For New Visionaries (sometimes identified online as "The Huntsman's Challenge" or the "Eagle Awards New Talent" competition), and came up tops for art!

As a finalist, the story (with some violence that would give it at least a PG-13 rating, FYI) will be "included in May’s MCM London Comic Con show programme, printed in conjunction with Snow White And The Huntsman from Universal Pictures, who will also provide a selection of prizes." More details here or here.

Art and colors by Silvio dB and script and letters by Alex Wilson. The contest, judged by Steve White, Tony Lee, and Mark Buckingham, required a dark fantasy story (complete with five pages of color art!) with only a month from announcement to deadline. Thanks for your support, congrats to Silvio, and congrats also to friends Paul Allor and Amy Chu, who also had work shortlisted!

Outlaw Territory 2 Available Now!

The Image Comics western anthology Outlaw Territory 2 is available now. I've seen it locally at Chapel Hill Comics in Chapel Hill, NC. Any other sightings? Ask for it!

OT2 includes "The Whores in Trinidad Need Witnessing To," my story with Rick Lacy, illustrator of the very fun Oni Press book Labor Days and character designer for the animated series The Venture Brothers.

We share a table of contents with some amazing talent, including Len Wein, Jeff Lemire, Sean Phillips, Francesco Francavilla, Sean Chen, Greg Pak, Kathryn and Stuart Immonen, Robert Kirkman, and more. Editor Michael Woods has more details, along with preview art from the other stories at his blog.

I wrote our story back in 2008 and have loved seeing Rick's character designs, then pencils, then inks, then colors (then finally letters by Thomas Mauer) trickle in over the following months between his other projects. That our "Whores" will ultimately appear between stories by the likes of Len (cocreator of Wolverine, editor of Watchmen) Wein and Sean (illustrator of Sleeper and Criminal, big influences on a project I hope to be able to share with y'all shortly) Phillips and so many other comics creators I've long admired... is a nice, strong finish.

(To guarantee availability, ask your local comic book retailer to get a copy for you; usually they only need the title, but the Diamond order code is AUG100457. Comics are nonreturnable so--if you can believe it--preorders in comics publishing can matter even more to the size of a comic's print run than they matter in the fiction publishing world.)

My near future science fiction story "Nervewrecking" will appear in the near future anthology 2020 Visions in the near future.

The anthology is edited by Rick Novy and published by M-Brane, which reprinted my 2007 novelette "Outgoing" in Things We Are Not last year.

M-Brane is offering a pre-order special for the print edition: $13.95 including shipping, plus a complimentary one-year electronic subscription to M-Brane SF Magazine.

Full lineup of the anthology:

• Mary Robinette Kowal – "Birthright"
• Sheila Finch – "The Persistence of Butterflies"
• Randy Henderson – "A Shelter for Living Things"
• Jason S. Ridler - "Showing Light"
• Ernest Hogan – "Radiation is Groovy, Kill the Pigs"
• David Lee Summers – "The Revelation of Thought"
• Jeff Spock – "Teh Afterl1fe"
• Emily Devenport - "If the Sun’s at Five O’Clock, It Must be Yellow Daisies"
• Cat Rambo – "Therapy Buddha"
• Jack Mangan – "Dead Rookies"
• David Boop - "Organ Cloning While You Wait"
• Spencer Ellsworth – "The Black Plague of Our Generation"
• Gareth L. Powell – "The Bigger The Star, The Faster It Burns"
• Alethea Kontis – "Pocket Full of Posey"
• Alex Wilson – "Nervewrecking"
• David Gerrold – "Time Capsule 2120: Actual Comments from Lunar Tourists"

"Nervewrecking" has been with me for almost a decade, begun by a general interest in the brain and the many fun things that can go wrong up there, and ending with Rick's likely correct assumption that my brain injury informed my most recent rewrite. I had as much trouble with placing this one as I had with giving up on it, so I love that "Nerve Wrecking" ends up sharing a table of contents with peers and peerless, some of whom I'm happy to call friends. The others might be perfectly nice people as well but "nice" isn't really one of the reasons we read fiction, so I don't want to cast any aspersions.

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