Sometimes you come up on something, and it’s so freaking cool you just want to be  a part of it.

I felt that way about Nancy when I met her in the college newsroom some 20 years ago. The rest, as our kids would say, is history.

Same goes with cool fiction. Super cool fiction. I’m not saying I want to marry and impregnate cool fiction; I’m just saying that when I see it — when I read it, experience it — I want to be a part of it. It happened when my buddy Riske and I were in Keppler’s one lunch hour and he literally tossed the debut  edition of Murdaland to me, and I knew I wanted to be a part of it (I never was, unfortunately, but I tried). It happened when I went to a Sun Microsystems party with Nancy in ’95 (she was working there) and I saw all the people saying wild stuff, doing amazing things, and I thought, I want to write for these people. And it happens over and over again every freaking time I check out a new edition of Plots with Guns.

PwG INSPIRES me.

Plots with Guns is freaking cool. Way cool. Phenomenal stories. Crazy-fun art and design. This whole high-brow/low-brow thing going on. Anything goes, as long as it socks you in the gut, takes you somewhere you hadn’t yet been. It’s Gary Busey waxing poetic. Or Hume going off the deep end, on mescaline. It’s a bunch folks hanging out in the dark corner of the Town Lounge, completely unresponsive to the posturing and BS swirling around them.

All of which is to say that Plots with Guns has a new issue out — and it makes me wanna be a part of it, again. Amazing pieces — all of the them — from Shea, Bill, Tafoya, Ashley, Knight, Kiewlak, Hess, Thomas, Kerr and Elliot. No wonder everyone wants to get in PwG.