My Literary Immortality

Michael Swanwick wrote a story about me. Srsly, dude. Or at least, he wrote a story with a character named Dennis Ginoza. I suspect it has something to do with my reading his novel The Iron Dragon’s Daughter while fiddling with some magnetic coils I found behind the UW’s Particle Physics lab. Could also be because I sent  some cash to Clarion West‘s Writeathon, but I’m pretty sure it was those coils.

Smoker of Cheap Cigars
by Michael Swanwick
This is Dennis Ginoza: wheelchair user, collector of typewriters, smoker of cheap cigars. If he were a city, he’d be Chicago and Carl Sandberg would write a poem about him, throwing in hog butcher for the world, stacker of wheat, and player with railroads just for good measure. Perhaps in some larger cosmic sense, that’s how and why it ahappened. Some people warp the reality about them; they’re strangeness magnets.

Ginoza could go them one better, however. He had a flatulent bulldog named Leo. That pushed him into new realms of oddity. As the sign on his desk said: THE STRANGENESS STOPS HERE.