My short story “Two Strikes Against” was selected as the Winner in the inaugural Next Generation Short Story Awards! (Official list to be available next week.) UPDATED: Link here https://shortstoryawards.com/winners.php?year=2024
Basically it’s a story about a Japanese baseball player on Mars, with a twist. It got rejected a couple of years ago by several scifi magazines, so I figured why not try the sports category.
Especially since there was no scifi category.
Just grateful and thankful for the award. I hope you all get a chance to read the story!
(FWIW “Marsball” is mentioned by characters in an early chapter of Bringer of Light. In fact, I was going to call the story that. Very glad that I didn’t in the end!)
When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed. And when you’re older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.
I’m excited to announce my books Approaching Twi-Night and Adam’s Stepsonswill be promoted as part of a special sale on @Smashwords to celebrate 2024 Read an Ebook Week from March 3 – March 9. Be sure to follow me for more updates and links to the promotion for my books and many more! #ebookweek24 #Smashwords
I got two bone spurs, separated by two years, thanks to playing baseball in junior high school. Both were fingers on my left hand.
The first time was my left thumb first joint. The second time was my left hand ring finger second joint.
Both times, our local health clinic doctor put a metal splint on the finger, wrapped it in flexible bandage and sealed it off with a tiny metal clip.
And of course I stupidly went on playing baseball, because at age 15 guys think they are completely indestructible.
My ring finger stuck out when I batted. I’m lucky I didn’t get hit by a pitch in the hand (I did get hit on the knee, but that’s a whole ‘nother story).
Also, it inspired my baseball novel. So there was a silver lining!
I’ve been testing ChatGPT over the last couple of days. (If you don’t know what this chatbot is, here’s a good NYT article about ChatGPT and others currently in development.)
The avowed purpose of ChatGPT is to create an AI that can create believable dialogues. It does this by scouring the web for data it uses to respond to simple prompts.
By “simple,” I mean sometimes “horribly complicated,” of course. And sometimes a little ridiculous.
Somehow, I doubt that people in the US said “livin’ the dream” in the ’50s…
As has been pointed out, chatbots only generate texts based on what they have been fed, i.e., “garbage in / garbage out.” So if you push the programs hard enough, they will generate racist, sexist, homophobic etc awful stuff — because unfortunately that kind of sick and twisted garbage is still out there, somewhere online in a troll’s paradise.
So far, I have asked the program to:
Write a haiku about winter without using the word “winter”
Write a limerick about an Irish baseball player
Write a dialogue between God and Nietzsche (I just had to…)
Imagine what Jean-Paul Sartre and Immanuel Kant would say to each other (see above) but using US ’50 slang
Have Thomas Aquinas and John Locke argue about the existence of God (that one was fun)
Write a 300 word cause-effect essay about climate change
Write a 300 word compare and contrast essay about the US and Japan
Write a 1000 word short science fiction story based on Mars
Write a 1500 word short science fiction about robots in the style of Philip K Dick
“Find my ebooks and a wide collection of great indie titles as part of the Smashwords 2022 End of Year Sale! Check out https://smashwords.com/shelves/promos before the end of the month and follow @smashwords for more promos like this! #SmashwordsEOYSale #ebook #sale #books2read #indiebooks”
(I swiped this from the Smashwords promo site as a “generic blurb.” But what else, really, do I need to write?
All my ebooks on Smashwords are “50%” off! That means the books that are listed as $0.99 are actually free, since they don’t do $0.49.
And don’t forget that all proceeds from Destiny in the Future are donated to fight cancer.
The Smashwords “Authors Give Back” free ebooks for COVI-19 lockdown campaign has been extended to May 31st!
Since baseball (and all other sports and events) have been postponed until further notice, I decided to revisit my literary baseball novel, Approaching Twi-Night (published 2015). It’s now available in the following ebook formats for FREE: .ePub (Apple Books etc), .mobi (Kindle), .pdb (Nook etc.), PDF, text, and online reader.
NOTE: This is a story written for those who know who Mark Harris, Bernard Malamud, Ring Lardner, W. P. Kinsella, and Philip Roth were. It’s not a Disney movie. It’s not aimed at kids (don’t read it aloud with children under age 14 or 15, and don’t say I didn’t warn you!).
With only one week to go before the regular MLB season begins, I thought I’d go back and take a look at my old baseball pictures.
Only it turned out that I only had one: a tiny black and white picture of me standing at third base that appeared in my high school yearbook. Proud baseball Poppa to the rescue!
My father dug up about eight photos of me as a gangly 16 year old, doing what I did best that year: protecting the left bench from foul balls.
I also got really good at keeping score. When I wasn’t standing in right field while it snowed. Spring in the Adirondacks: we never played any of our scheduled games the first week of April, and even during the second and third week games typically featured flurries, sub-freezing temperatures, and rock-hard dirt surfaces to bounce on…ah, slide on when stealing second. Even now in my hometown, there are three feet of snow on the field, and I’m sure the players are tired of practicing inside the gym (the parking lot is also a favorite for ground-ball drills). Continue Reading
This past Sunday, I was invited to give a presentation/workshop in Kyoto called “Basic Statistics for Language Teachers.” That’s what I do: educational statistics. Writing about statistics is usually not as interesting as writing fiction. I think that probably goes without saying.
But actually, the history of sports, and of baseball in particular, is exactly that: writing about statistics. Continue Reading
Big news from my university’s affiliated high school this year: the high school baseball team was chosen to enter the national Spring Invitational Tournament. This is the first time in five years, and the fifth time since the university bought the failing school two decades ago and turned it into a regional powerhouse for international studies.
The Smashwords “Authors Give Back” free ebooks for COVI-19 lockdown campaign has been extended to May 31st!
M Thomas Apple Author Page 