Sybil’s Garage will be closing to submissions for our seventh issue on April 12th.  Please make sure to send us your submissions on or before that date.

Here are the Sybil’s Garage submission stats so far:

We have received 361 stories, 55 poems
We have rejected 234 stories, 25 poems
Average response time: 12 days for stories, 15 days for poems

Please be on the lookout for a submissions closing date sometime in April.  I will make an official announcement soon.

Last night, the folks in the house wanted to watch the Oscars, but we are all in a house at the top of a small mountain, and there is no television to be found.  But there were many laptops, and broadband wireless.  So with Googled blogs and followed Twitter feeds we discovered several web streams from which to watch the Oscars.  We all huddled around the laptop on the hard floor and watched a satellite feed from England rebroadcast to net viewers by some generous person, and when that failed, to one from France.  We watched perhaps five different feeds, from decent to poor in quality.  None were what you might call excellent.

I’m not very much a fan of the Oscars.  I find the whole thing kind of boring, but I was more excited by the prospect of what last evening signifies for cable.  Cablevision and ABC, in a tussle yesterday, parted ways, and many people were without (oh no!) their annual Oscars.  But the Internet came to the rescue.  ABC, in pulling their content from Cablevision, made the mistake of a generation by not offering an alternate live stream on their website for viewers to watch.  Instead, millions scrambled to bars with satellite feeds or watched lossy rebroadcasts that traveled around the world three times to land skipping and pixelated on people’s screens.  To add insult to injury, ABC supposedly then went around shutting down the rebroadcasts (presumably by threat of suit) and we were forced to router hop around the web.

I call this Oscar Fail.  It is a Fail because it could have been the moment that the world realized that cable is dead.  As Sigue Sigue Sputnik says before one of their songs, “Cable is dead.  Low power TV, here and now.”  Maybe not low power TV, but low power internet broadcasts.  ABC could have provided a stream to its cut-off viewers of high quality.  They could have funded it with commercials.  They could have convinced millions of people that a 3-year, exorbitant contract for Cable television is absurd, especially when one can now travel to any station on the internet to get the content that they want.

Instead, Old Man Network TV cut off people from watching their show from a channel they had paid for, and then went around the internet and tried to stop people from receiving the content they had the diligence to find.  ABC could have been a hero, but instead they look like the old, cantankerous man on the block who shouts at kids to stay off his well-manicured lawn.

I’m very happy to announce this morning that my short story “The History Within Us” is up at Clarkesworld Magazine alongside a fine story from Gord Sellar and an interview with Kij Johnson.  You can read my story here.  And you can find the full issue here.

The story’s genesis is an interesting one.  My father had several old reels of film from when he was a boy, back in the early 40s, which he had recently converted to DVD.  On one long weekend we added his narrative voice-overs, so he could explain who the folks in the pictures were.  I saw a window into my ancestral past that I had never seen, and it was amazing, to see how my great-grandparents dressed, strolling through New York City, or idling their summers in the country.  I saw Passover Seders and New Year’s celebrations and walks through the Central Park Zoo.  And I saw my dad as a boy, a very rare sight.  And I realized that because the videos had now been digitized, they would never be lost.  I could pass them on to my offspring without degradation.  And my children could do the same to theirs, ad infinitum.  A thousand years from now, my ancestors could watch this film, if we kept it with us.  Now mix in an article I read in Discover Magazine about the possibility of black holes spawning other universes, and the possibility of sending information into that new universe as a way to escape the heat death of ours.  About a year and several revisions later appeared the story you see up at Clarkesworld today.

Please drop me a line and let me know what you think!

Drop what you’re doing right now and go read “Small Burdens” by Paul M. Berger, now up at Strange Horizons.  Granted, Paul is a friend of mine, and he’s in my writers group.  But had that not been the case I’d still be recommending this uber creepy and subtly told tale of faerie and cradle robbing.