Sean Williams

Today is International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. On this day, in honour of Howard V Hendrix, everyone who wants to is giving away professional quality work online.

I've posted my Aurealis Award-winning story "The Seventh Letter" here for anyone who might not have caught it in the The Bulletin. I am a member of SFWA, so I guess that definitely makes me a scab of some kind or other. Ah well.

Thanks to papersky for choosing the 23rd for this very special occasion. That's a number guaranteed* to get me excited.

* (I turn 40 in exactly one month.)

Countdown to Astropolis: tomorrow!

The first time I read Sir Arthur C Clarke's A Fall of Moondust, I was excited to see that two of the characters, Pat Harris and Robert Bryant, shared my birthday, May 23rd. This coincidence of dates sent a little shiver through my innocent, pre-teen brain. The odds against that (I thought) must be, well, outstanding! Of course, they're not at all. That book has sold hundreds of thousands of copies and 1/365th of the readership all had experienced the same moment as me.

Anyway, today, on receiving a copy of Frank Zappa's "new" album Trance-Fusion, I'm pleased to see the very same date singled out as another nexus of coincidence, it being the date on the disc from the master engineer and also the date on the Master Tape check sheet, separated by twelve years. And it's still the date of my birthday. (Funny, that.) So there you go. I may not be an innocent pre-teen any more, and these two incidents might be separated by three decades or more, but I still get a bit of a tingle...

PS. Fly in the sky: fashion for the free-falling, here and here. In space, no one can get away with being a frump any more.