Today is America's day, and what's more American than Coney Island? I have a poem for Coney Island, so, by the transitive property, this poem is also for America. And like America, it perhaps contains some bad words.

(It’s also for Throwback Thursday, since it was recorded live, complete with rhythm section, at the HiFi Bar in Manhattan on October 11, 2015. Happy 4th.)

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tl;dr: Ten years ago Derryl Murphy and I published Cast a Cold Eye, a hardcover novella about spirit photography set in 1921. It came out to some very nice reviews. Now we’re republishing it as an ebook. We hope you’ll preorder a copy!

Cast a Cold Eye is back! It was a mere— Oh, good lord. Has it really been sixteen years since this project started?

Apparently so. According to my records, it was June 7, 2003, when Derryl Murphy dropped me that fateful email:

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Larry Eisenberg, science fiction writer and biomedical engineer, passed away on Christmas Day at the age of 99. Despite his accomplishments in those field, to readers of the New York Times online comments section he was best known as a prolific versifier, whose more than 13,000 posts since 2008 came mostly in the form of limericks.

Dr. Eisenberg's passing inspired a host of tributes in verse. I posted one of my own, both in the Times comments section and on Twitter:

With a wry little wave and a chortle,
Dr. Eisenberg slipped through the portal.
He had nothing to fear
As he passed from this sphere.
His limericks had made him immortal.

RIP. https://t.co/n8d3R0XPvx

— William Shunn (@shunn) December 27, 2018

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A reader writes to ask:

I want to submit a novel manuscript to a small press in the US and their guidelines say "indented, not tabbed."

What's the difference? Usually I just hit the tab key once. Should I be doing something else?

I have Word Starter 2010, and I can't see any distinction between "indent" and "tab."

How do I make sure I'm indenting and not tabbing? If I'm tabbing, how do I change it to indent?

This is an excellent question, and I'm sure the cause of much confusion among word-processing novices. There is in fact a distinction between tabbing and indenting—or rather, it might be more accurate to say that tabbing is only one way to indent a paragraph. I will try to explain a method for indenting paragraphs that makes your document more portable* and easier for your publisher to use.

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