I will be attending the World Fantasy Convention in San Diego from October 27-30. For those interested, I have a solo reading scheduled on Saturday, October 29 at 11:30 AM. I will also be participating in a group reading for The Way of the Wizard at 2:00 PM on the same day. If you’re at the convention, I’d love it if you would come by. Either way, it would be nice to meet new people and reconnect with old friends.
Last night I had the pleasure of seeing one of my favorite living authors, Jeffrey Ford, read at the WORD Bookstore in Greenpoint. Jeff’s stories are surreal, funny, poignant and personal to use just a few adjectives, and always entertaining. Last night was no exception. He read a story called “The Double of My Double is Not My Double”. The story is new and, I believe, unpublished. That’s one of the great things about Jeff’s readings – you usually end up with something you’ve never heard (or read) before. I think Jeff’s one of the finest short story writers I’ve ever encountered and if you’re interested in short stories as either a reader or a writer, you must check out some of his fine fiction. You can read some of them for free here, here, and here. Also here. Or you can hear me reading two of his stories at Podcastle – The Dreaming Wind and The Annals of Eelin-Ok.
Also reading last night was Felix Gilman who read part of a short story set in the same world as his most recent novel (which I’m dying to read), The Half-Made World. What I heard of “Lightbringers and Rainmakers” sounded great and the whole thing is available to read (for free) on Tor.com.
Which brings me just to one point. WORD has this thing, particularly for this Wold Newton series of readings, where they have musical accompaniment with the readers. It’s an interesting concept, but one I find ultimately problematic. While the band is great, and the music a pleasure to listen to, I find that it often competes with the author’s reading and, the way my brain works, I have to fight to focus on the words rather than the music. Last night, Jeff managed to be heard throughout his reading, but Felix, who is more softspoken, sometimes seemed drowned out. I wouldn’t have them ditch the music completely, but I think it would be used more effectively to intro and outro the readers and perhaps as people are coming in and in-between readers. Otherwise I, at least, find it to be somewhat distracting.
Afterward, we moved over to the nearby Lulu’s for a beer. I have to admit to being pleasantly surprised by the place. It’s a comfy, dark yet somehow elegant bar with a decent beer selection and with each drink you order after 6, you get a free pizza. I paid five bucks for a Captain Lawrence Smoked Porter, which I enjoyed, expecting a wilted, cardboardy slice of pizza to accompany it. Instead I got a fairly decent mini-pie that filled me up completely. I have to admit to now being a fan of the place and I will certainly return.
All in all, quite a wonderful night.
I’ve been having website difficulties lately, so I haven’t had a chance to mention this here yet, but while I was at the World Fantasy Convention in Columbus last weekend, I had the opportunity to see The Way of the Wizard anthology, which has my story, “Card Sharp”, in it. It’s definitely a worthwhile anthology, with stories from writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Jeffrey Ford, George R. R. Martin, Susanna Clarke, Neil Gaiman, Kelly Link and more. It’s still a pre-order on Amazon, but I expect it will be available there, and in stores, soon.
However, if you don’t want to wait, several of the stories are available online in their entirety, including my story. The site also has more information and interviews with some of the authors.
I also read Card Sharp at World Fantasy in my first ever solo reading and I think it went pretty well. I think the high point for me was someone who came to the reading, who I didn’t know, who told me at a party afterward how much he liked the story.
If you check it out, hope you do, too.
I am apparently one of those people who not only embraces eBooks, but who is now starting to prefer them. Don’t get me wrong, I love books. I have shelves of them. And I know the power of old books, with yellow pages crisp with history. But I also live in NY. Aside from the limited amount of space that I have in the apartment, I am very often out and about from the moment I leave my apartment in the morning around 6:45 until I come home at night which is often after 9 PM. Typical days for me involve lots of walking, subway rides and a bus or two. And while I have a nice big backpack to carry all my stuff in, sometimes I like to streamline and I usually like to keep the weight of my gear down.
A paperback book is not a big deal. Only I tend to buy hardcovers and trade paperbacks over the mass market size. Then there’s the book(s) I’m reading now – Roger Zelazny’s Amber series. This is one of my favorite series. I re-read it every few years. Yet it only is available (right now at least) in one massive volume collecting all 10 books in the series. No single volumes. No eBook(s). I checked. See, this is the kind of book/series that I would keep in hardcopy and in electronic form. Since I revisit it often, it would be the perfect thing to keep on my phone (or in the future, an iPad). But it’s not available. And I find that this irks me. Five years ago I had never read an ebook and such a thing would seem exotic. Today I’m bothered when I can’t find something that way.
This is not to say that print is dead, or that I expect it to die soon. But I’m amazed at how quickly I got used to the idea of having options. In this case, the option to own something in multiple formats. I expect we’ll see the Amber books in electronic format eventually. Hopefully. Because people are getting used to the idea of being able to get something instantly.
What an interesting world…
Below is the cover image for the Skulls and Crossbones anthology soon to be released from Mindancer Press.
The anthology will reprint my story, “The Furies”, which originally appeared in Shimmer’s Pirate Issue. “The Furies” was my first published story and I’m really excited to see it appearing again in this anthology.
I’m still waiting to hear when the book will be available, but it should be coming soon.
Paul Di Filippo looks at the new series of Roger Zelazny collections from NESFA Press at the Barnes and Noble Review site. I’m a huge Zelazny fan and I’ve acquired the first four volumes in the NESFA series. The last two are due out at the end of the year. I have yet to delve into them, but I’m looking forward to it. While I’ve read some of Zelazny’s short fiction, I’m looking forward to some of the more obscure stories and tracking his evolution as a writer. Maybe I should make 2010 the year of Zelazny.
A while back, after I’d downloaded Stanza for my iPhone, I came across a free sampler of ebooks from Random House. While these mostly consisted of science fiction and fantasy books, it also contained three of Charlie Huston’s novels – Caught Stealing, Six Bad Things, and A Dangerous Man. I knew Huston had written Moon Knight for a while, and I knew his name, so I downloaded them to check out later.
So, one day, while I was waiting for the subway, and in need of a new book, I loaded up Caught Stealing and started to read. I have to say that at first I had my doubts. For much of the beginning, the story, as told by the 1st person narrator, seemed mired in mundane life tasks. It seemed to boil down to sentences like – “I bundled my laundry up. Dumped it into the basket. I took the basket down to the laundry room. I loaded the colors into the machine. Added detergent.” Etc. I don’t mind slow beginnings, setting the stage, but nothing was really happening, and I wanted it to. * But as the novel continued, and as I worked my way into successive novels, I realized that what Huston has done here is capture the motion of a snowball rolling down an arctic mountain. At first it moves slowly, but soon it gathers speed and mass until at the end it’s hurtling along toward a massive collision.
And that’s what these books do. Hank Thompson starts as a normal guy with a bit of a shadowed past. But when he finds a key, all hell starts breaking loose. As the books continue, the hole he finds himself in gets deeper and deeper. Huston’s writing is extremely engaging and it pulls you in. Hank is a strange animal, too – likable and yet not completely. Someone you root for and despise at the same time. Together with the heaps of abuse that Huston piles on him, I could barely tear myself away. I went through all three books in record time.
As to making me sick, he very nearly did. One afternoon I was in the Jay St. subway station waiting for a train and reading A Dangerous Man. A particular scene in the book involves scarring from plastic surgery ** mixed with a description of multiple drug doses. Somehow this all combined to make me literally nauseous, to the point where I thought I was going to throw up. I see that as the mark of a good writer if he can provoke such a strong physical response.
I highly recommend Huston’s work and I intend to read more of his work in the future.
* This may be partly because of where I read it. Waiting for a subway can make one impatient.
** Plastic surgery is one of the few things that makes me queasy. Blood doesn’t bother me, I can watch eye operations up close, but plastic surgery or even talking about plastic surgery – boob jobs, facelifts, whatever – make me nauseous.
I feel like everyone I know has been to see Star Trek already. As usual, I am late to the party. I will rectify that tonight, however. In a way, though, I’m glad that some of the hype has been tempered by people having more critical opinions. I still haven’t seen too many people saying it wasn’t good, but I would rather go in expecting decent and not the best movie I’ve seen in recent times.
Tomorrow night is the Lost finale and it’s something I’m looking forward to more eagerly than I am Star Trek. I know Lost lost a lot of people a while back, but I have to say that it’s my favorite show on television. That title used to belong to Battlestar Galactica, but even in this past season, I found myself appreciating Lost more.
The Lost finale will also mark the end of cable television for me, for now at least. I’ve never been one to find that television was bad, or somehow lesser than other forms of media, but I do find that I spend too much time watching it lately. And I continue to stare at the books that line my bookshelves wondering when I’ll have the time to read them. So – no more television. Which isn’t to say that I won’t watch television shows – I will via downloads and DVD. I expect to watch more movies and actually take advantage of my Netflix subscription and the watch on demand service they offer. But I really want to read more and I figure this will help. I will also save some money in the deal.
Speaking of books, I finally finished Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun about a week ago and I’ve already started in on Urth of the New Sun, the sequel. I was originally going to wait, but I found that I couldn’t. I wanted a continuation of the story right away.
I’ll plan on writing a lengthier post on the books soon as I feel they deserve one. After this one, though, I intend to take a break and catch up on other reading.
More to come later…
I should also mention re: the last post that my friends and fellow members of Altered Fluid, E.C. Myers and N.K. Jemisin also were Honorable Mentions in the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Because they are wonderful and talented people. And my Clarion West classmate, Carlton Mellick III, was mentioned several times in its pages. He is brilliant as well, so it comes as no surprise.
One of the nice things about moving is that it gives me an opportunity to reorganize my books and put them up on my shelves alphabetized and properly placed. I’m amazed at the number of people who look at me funny when I say that I alphabetize my books – it’s just the way that makes sense to me. This way I can find what I’m looking for. And this way there is a kind of order to all the chaos.
Having finished my second bookcase (moving slowly because all of the titles are currently out of order), I realized that I have a lot of Michael Moorcock books. I have not one shelf, not two shelves, but two and a half shelves devoted to his works. Of all my books, his occupy the most space, surpassing even Shakespeare.
This partly makes sense because Moorcock has written a lot of books in his time. But in addition to his recent releases and the nice White Wolf omnibuses that were released in the 90s, I have numerous paperbacks from the man, many of them stories that are duplicated elsewhere, that I’ve picked up in second-hand shops in England. There was a time when no matter what store I would go into, there would be a book of his there, and I would always buy them, hoping to snag up some long out of print gem to add to the canon. And that’s really what it was. Since most of his books are connected, it was like a jigsaw puzzle, filling in the pieces as it were.
This is mostly the fault of my friend Brian (ljuser=”asphalteden”). Thought I’d heard of Moorcock and Elric, it was Brian, himself a huge fan, who turned me on to the man and his works. We even went to see him at a rare appearance at a New York bookstore now long gone. I hadn’t read anything by him when I went to see him, but hearing him talk about the Eternal Champion and of the interconnectedness of his books, I felt a kind of kinship to what I wanted to accomplish one day. Thus began a systematic plan to acquire as much of his work as I could.
Looking at the titles now, I realize there are still many I haven’t read. There never seems to be enough time to read everything. But having them waiting there is like having a shelf (or rather two and a half) full of future possibilities.
Now, to shelve N-Z.