Three Hipster Haiku
SWM
Tall, fit, curls, soul patch, Vespa
You … me … my scooter
SWF
5’6″, blonde, blue
Seeking … anyone
Razr phone, iPod,
MySpace, Converse tennis shoes.
Why’s she still lonely?
— Stace Johnson, 2006
Category Archives: Writing
Sonnette
The “Sonnette” is a poetry form that I invented, and a few of the poems on this site are written in that format. Basically, it’s a shortened Italian sonnet (7 lines) with a rhyme scheme of abab ccc and a subtle turn (or volta) at the stanza break. Like the traditional Italian sonnet, it uses Iambic Pentameter.
The name “Sonnette” derives from a combination of “sonnet” and “Lannette,” my wife’s name. The first sonnette was written for her.
For examples of sonnettes on this website, see the following poems:
“Missing in Atlanta” (2006)
“Thy Cup Runneth Over” (2006)
Thy Cup Runneth Over
Thy Cup Runneth Over
(A Sonnette)
I worship at the mound, my senses filled
With musky Goddess warmth and slipp’ry taste
You shiver, shout, and in orgasmic haste
Your holy water from within is spilled.
We cuddle, spent, while candle flickers show
How chin to brow, I with your essence glow
My body blessed by your baptismal flow.
— Stace Johnson, 2006
Apex Digest Needs (and Finds) Help
UPDATE: (2/13/07) Thanks to an amazing grassroots campaign, Apex Digest is alive and well. Read the Louisville Courier-Journal article about Jason Sizemore and the magazine’s success at this link.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog post.
Jason’s story is much like mine, in some ways. We were both unemployed for four months last year, we’ve both had bad dealings with commercial printers (though in different ways), and we both have had a long standing dream of starting our own speculative fiction magazines. Of course, Jason did it, and I didn’t. The closest I came was editing the Fort Lewis College literary magazine, Images, in 1987.
The loss of Jason’s job last year put Apex Digest in jeopardy. The magazine was receiving good reviews and starting to break even, but when Jason lost his job, he could not afford pay the debt he had accrued in starting the magazine. The commercial printer for Apex Digest, which had been understanding about late payments, suddenly lowered the boom, and now the magazine needs 200 new subscribers to stay afloat.
Apex Digest is a quarterly; it puts out four issues per year. Some big names have appeared in its pages in only six issues: Tom Piccirilli, Ben Bova, Poppy Z. Brite, M.M. Buckner, and James P. Hogan, to name a few. Apex Digest is something of a rare breed; a professional, printed, perfect bound market for science fiction and horror stories. Sure, there are other digest-sized SF/F/H markets, but there’s room for more, and we need to encourage the quality of fiction that appears in Apex Digest, not allow it to fade away.
A one year subscription costs $20 (for U.S. buyers, $24 for Canadian buyers, and $34 for all other international subscriptions.) I wanted to subscribe last year, but my own unemployment precluded that. I’m employed now, and I don’t think $20 is too much to pay for a year of good writing delivered to my mailbox.
How about you?
Wireless Security Revisited
Last year, I wrote an article for ComputorEdge about the dangers of leaving a wireless network unsecured. A reader, calling himself “Anonymous San Diego Criminal” responded to the article in a letter to the editor, complaining about how I was advocating wireless security and limiting the dispensation of free Internet access. He also said the article implied that anyone who used unsecured wireless networks without permission was committing a crime, hence the name he chose to identify himself with.
Today, I saw a news article (no longer online, from what I can tell) from a Portland, Oregon television station website, describing how a man had been arrested for persistent unauthorized use of a coffee shop’s wireless Internet connection. According to the story, the man was also a level 1 sex offender. Though the story doesn’t say what destinations his Internet packets visited, the fact that he is a sex offender and used someone else’s bandwidth for his Internet access seems suspect.
No, Mr. Anonymous San Diego Criminal, I don’t think most people intend to misuse unsecured wireless networks. But doesn’t it make sense to lock down the networks to keep out those who do misuse them?