Five Little Known Things About Me

Last list for a while, I swear:

1. I, like Majikthise, once tried out for the teen version of Jeopardy!. I actually got pretty far. I passed the test and won all the simulated games, but two things probably killed me. I was kind of a cold fish in the interview (the story of my life right there), and I had, at the time, a case of acne that America really wasn't prepared to see.

2. I have a large collection of teddy bears, and I have invented personalities for each of them. (Hey, you spend most of your free time alone with pages and pages of your own prose and see if you don't invent a few friends.)

3. Someone once successfully dropped my name to Middle Passage author Charles Johnson.

4. In the early months of 1997, I had an affair with a polyamorous married woman. It didn't last for the following reasons: her husband kept pestering me to read his 300-page screenplay, the couple's raging homophobia turned me off, and I balked at having a MMF threesome.

5. Harlan Ellison once called me up and yelled at me because I wrote him to complain about the delay in the publication of "The Knife Man" in Pulphouse. Why did I write him about this? In retrospect, I haven't the foggiest. Ellison wasn't the publisher, and the publisher, Dean Wesley Smith, had a very good reason for delaying publication--his magazine was going broke at the time. I chalk this incident up to adolescent frustrations gone way too far. When Ellison told me I was being an asshole "five different ways", he was underestimating me. Dean was cool about it, though, and the story came out a few months later.

So, I figure this takes care of any future blackmail attempts, unless someone finds out about...no fuck you, I only have to name five things in this list. This blog post is over.