I have a new story, “Mating Habits of the Late Cretaceous,” out in the September ‘12 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction.  The nasty beasty lunging out of the cover illustrates my story (he said immodestly), but the fantastic art work belongs to Marc Simonetti.

Without giving too much away, I’ll say that the story itself is about dinosaurs (as you may have guessed) and marriages, both troubled and untroubled (the marriages, that is; the dinosaurs are just hungry!).

When I was a kid, dinosaurs thundered through my nightmares.  I still remember my first time standing in the shadow of the great Diplodocus on display in Dinosaur Hall at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.  The fierce Jurassic predator Allosaurus loomed not far away, its vast skull unhinged as it lunged in for the kill.  But it was my reading of Ray Bradbury–in “Tyrannosaurus Rex,” in “The Fog Horn,” and most of all, of course, in “A Sound of Thunder”–that put flesh on those old bones.  I hope my story will stand in tribute to him in this year of his death.