It was a dark and stormy night, and while the vampires where out, prowling, howling like werewolves on a hot tin roof, totally unaware of the shenanigans in Congress that would take away their retirement benefits like a thief in the night, the...um...if forgot where I was going with this...oh, yeah, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest results for 2009 are in like butter on bread.

The winner is David McKenzie from Federal Way, Washington. Here is the start to his entry:

"Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the "Ellie May,...."

To see the rest of this winning entry and the runner-up, go here. There are also many genre category winners and runners up ("dishonorable mentions"), including science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, romance and others. Here is the start of the fantasy winner:

"A quest is not to be undertaken lightly--or at all!--pondered Hlothgar, Thrag of the Western Boglands, son of Glothar, nephew of Garthol, known far and wide as Skull Dunker, as he wielded his chesty stallion Hralgoth through...."

The July '09 Flash Fiction Online issue is up and it's a good one. We have a ghost story, a sobering mainstream story, an honest-to-goodness romance with a charming character, and a science fiction Classic Flash.

Bruce Holland Rogers discusses character and gives us character story called “Jerry”.

From Oct. 1 to Dec. 31, submissions will be taken for the Third Annual Micro Award. The Micro Award is a competition for fiction not over 1000 words. The present award will be for works published in 2009. Editors may submit two stories and anyone else may submit one. This year, self-published stories are eligible and the prize for the winning story is $100. Rules and submission information are posted at the Micro Award Official Website.

Bruce Holland Rogers won the first Micro Award for his story, "Reconstruction Work," published here at Flash Fiction Online.

Sam Tomaino at SF Revu has a review of the June 2009 issue of FFO, which should have this link after the June issue is published, otherwise, it is the current issue.

Sam was complimentary of all of the June stories, especially this one:

"Branwen’s Revenge" by Sarah Adams is a retelling of the old collection of Welsh myths called The Mabinogion. Branwen had been married off to a king who did not appreciate her. He made her a scullery maid and abuses her. Every day she sings to the mockingbird "Alas for Branwen the White, who suffers every day!" Will her brother hear her call? This was a beautifully written piece.

Sam also reviews the most recent editions of Analog Science Fiction and Fact (Sept.), Asimov's Science Fiction (August), Black Static Eleven (June/July), Greatest Uncommon Denominator Magazine (Spring), Jim Baen’s Universe (June), Sybil's Garage (#6, May), and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (August/September) .

Ars Technica has a small piece on email spam, based on a Symantec report. Symantec is one of the major virus/malware protection companies. According to the report, botnets (networks of computers) account for over 80% of all spam. People continue clicking through to disreputable suppliers of suspicious products, so the spammers likewise continue.

Not mentioned in the article is comment spam. This is spam posted on public forums, such as the Flash Fiction Online Forum. This type of spam may promote a "product," but much of the spam has what seems like an irrational number of often-undecipherable links. These spammers are simply trying to get as many links back to their websites of interest to improve their ranking on search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN. As a generalization (the search engines are more-and-more sophisticated and opaque in their analyses), the more links there are to a web site, the closer to the top of a keyword search they'll land. Google and others try to punish such behavior via analysis, but the art of spam and the art of spam counter-measures continue.

From FFO's experience, much of the forum comment spam is done by botnets, too. Someone teaches the botnet to create accounts and post comments automatically. That's why, occasionally, you'll see the "Latest Member" with a suspicious if not appalling name. These are soon banned from the forum and their spam, if it manages to make it through, is soon removed.

The problem with botnets is that they don't tire. They keep plugging away, attempting to create accounts and post comment spam...sometimes for months after their IP address or email address has been banned. I've seen some forums so inundated with spam that the forum is useless (100-to-1 spam to legitimate post or worse). Fortunately, FFO staffers check often so that the forum remains a pleasant place.

This guy has some odd ideas about writers. He seems to think they waste a lot of time, so that by the end of the day, they've only done an hour or two of real work. That's just insulting. I read the first paragraph of the article and had to go for a walk before I read the next, to blow off some steam. The walk was tiring, so I *had* to stop at a coffee shop...research. By then, the morning was shot because of that guy, so I went to lunch. After lunch, I read the second paragraph, and that really ticked me off.

He ruined practically my whole workday. So now that my day job is over, I'll really be in a foul mood when I go home tonight to do some writing.

According to the University of Kansas Center for the Study of Science Fiction:

The John W. Campbell Memorial Award for the best science-fiction novel of the year is one of the three major annual awards for science fiction.

Although this award is announced officially at a banquet later in July at the university, the result is out, according to Locus magazine, a tie:

• Cory Doctorow's Little Brother (Tor), and
• Ian R. MacLeod's Song of Time (PS Publishing)

Here is the long list of finalists.

Also reported by Locus magazine is the winner of the the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, for the year's best short fiction, presented at the same banquet: "The Ray Gun: A Love Story" by James Alan Gardner (Asimov's 2/08)

Here is the long list of finalists for the Sturgeon Award.