रोबोट फिश

no update today.

i'm busy.

watch the robot fish.

after trying to read billy collins

the poet laureate of america, billy collins, is adored and gushed about just about every time i turn around.

i don't get it.

once again, i picked up billy collins' collection, "nine horses:poems", and once again, i didn't think i was reading great poetry. i didn't even feel like i was reading pretty good poetry.

but, i realized there was something i was reading that was otherwise often absent from the current poetry of the country.

billy collins isn't a manic-depressive. his verse - though tepid - is consistenly upbeat, and cheerful. he is a happy fellow.

no wonder he's so popular.

currently, our literary poets write elegies and dirges about everything.they are a very sad, depressed bunch of people. when they are happy, they gush like a kid just discovering a new tv show. then, they drop back into deep despair.

no wonder billy collins is so popular. getting through his anthology doesn't require xanax and whiskey.

i wonder when good poets will rediscover happiness.

Pre-order the Mass Market Paperback!

Ladies and gents, the Amazon pre-order page is up for the Mass Market Paperback edition of Last Dragon!

(My royalties are higher, and the quality of the paper/binding/etc is higher on the trade paperback, by the way. If you can spare the seven extra bucks, please pick up the trade paperback... BUT, if you want to save some scratch - and who doesn't now that a gallon of gas might be more expensive than the mass market paperback by the time the paperback comes out - I will not think even one iota less of you for picking up the mass market. I'm just happy to have readers!)

about books on e-bay

Recently, I was at BEA signing books and giving away promotional copies of the books. Advance Reading Copies (ARCs) often come labelled with the big words "Not Intended for Resale" on them.

The books we gave away at BEA were not labeled thusly. However, the spirit of the ARC, I think, remained.

They're showing up on e-bay. That's cool. Just... Um... No, that's not cool. These were promotional copies given by authors who don't make lots of money in the hopes of increasing our readership.

Turning around and selling that on e-Bay is uncool. They really should be donated to charity auctions, given to friends and relatives, and/or hoarded in carbonite for generations. The e-Bay is just not cool. Nor is selling the books to a used book store.

However, I don't want to stop people from doing this. I did gum up their gears a little bit, as one auctioneer noted. When asked for a date, I gave him the wrong date (8/31/08). I did that all weekend long. At first I did it, because I was signing lots of books and made a mistake. Then, I kept doing it, because it would make it easier to spot the weasel copies on the secondary market.

If you want one, great, but please don't get in a bidding war over it. And remember, everyone with 8/31/08 in your signed books: I'm watching and thinking bad thoughts in the direction of those I see for sale with this date in the cover.

glimpse into the seeds of a maze

I haven't decided if this piece will be a novella, or a novel when I have the time for it(I'm kind of busy on a novel, already) and I doubt I'll keep this little snippet from the journalings in whatever final form emerges...
***
Trolls walked among my nightmares more than most of the rest of the beasts. Trolls were hideous with sap for veins and a hunger for meat.

I once hid in a very lonely old oak tree and held my breath while a six trolls ate the girl that wasn’t as fast as I was, and wasn’t as quiet. I took small sips of air, and clutched at the highest branches I dared climb. The trolls didn’t look up at me. They had someone to eat at their feet. They probably thought I had turned a corner in the maze and then another and then another until my trail was lost in the tesseracts where the trees ended. Then, the men came with fire and brickbats and drove the trolls away. Four dead, that time, and two of them from where the barricade had been broken.

The trolls were fibrous like dead trees, and moved stiff. They covered their bodies in bird guano. When they walked, they sounded like creaking branches in breezes too strong for these halls.

Minotaurs, too, hunt for meat among the stones. They tend to work alone. I have never seen one alive – thank Lucius’ God – but I have seen them dead. They taste terrible, but they don’t make you sick and when winter comes every ounce of meat jerky helps us survive the snowfall. They have big, brutish heads with long snouts, and black hairs. Their horns are wild and curve up towards the sky. When they catch their prey, they gore them on the horns, and eat them that way.

The last time we caught a minotaur, Saitan was out on patrol with an older man named Brim. Together they smashed the minotaur into a pulp with their brickbats. I could barely make out its skull.

Brim had been gored by it. He held his own intestines in with one hand, and leaned on his brickbat with the other, using it like a cane. Saitan dragged the dead minotaur behind him. Two trails of blood led off into the maze until the rain washed the blood away. Brim went straight to his hut, his wife. She bathed him three times a day. She fed him by hand for a week. Everything he ate fell out of his stomach, half-digested.

Brim never cried out. He just stayed there, in his hut with his wife, for thirteen days lingering. When he died, his wife, Justine, sliced off all her hair. She poured it over his body where we had left the body for the crows and vultures and bugs.
Justine cried a long time. I worked with her sewing nets, and she couldn’t stop crying. Geraldine yelled at her for crying on the birds we had caught. Geraldine said it was bad luck to weep while we pulled our supper from the nets. Justine called Geraldine all sorts of names, and in the end, Justine ran off with her sister and never came back to the nets again.

When the meat was done smoking, we wanted to give Justine more of it, but she wouldn’t touch any of it, even if it meant starving. When winter came, all we had for a week was dried minotaur. She still wouldn’t eat it. She got sick. Enyo put her out in a hut by herself so she wouldn’t get the rest of us sick. When the solstice flies finally came, Enyo brought all he could to her in her hut, and nursed her back himself.

Justine doesn’t talk very much, anymore.

Stonecows aren’t vicious, and don’t eat men, but they’re just as dangerous. They’re huge beasts and covered in a thick hide of stone. They walk the halls, nibbling on pebbles and rocks and fallen stones. When they found plants, they ate among the roots, until the roots dwindled like naked, muddy ropes struggling to hold their plants in place, failing, falling down, and then there are no more tree. Stonecows move in huge herds. They must be pressed back with strong sticks and barricades of wood, lest they come into our grove and eat our trees to death, dumb herding beasts. We have not found a way to kill them, but they are not immune to the pester of our sticks. We shout and whack at them, they fall back into their herd. Their herd falls back into the halls. They wander away from us. I’ve heard they can trample someone to death if they get really scared and all start running, but I’ve never seen it.

working on non-fiction for a change...

Here's a sneak peek at a bit of non-fiction I'm working on that will be posted in full somewhere awesome, soon enough... I should probably edit out that f-bomb, but in this case it is very appropriate to add emphasis to the word "dangerous". Because, the crossing is genuinely and truly fucking dangerous.

***

"...our demand doesn’t disappear just because the supply of – let’s face the facts – near-slave labor dries up. Who will pick our grapes? Who will build our roads? Who will bus our tables and slaughter our beef? Who will clean our houses, and landscape our yards? Where is this supposed glut of American citizens that want these jobs?

We haven’t wanted these jobs since 1942 on any kind of scale large enough to meet the demand for the cheep labor force. This won’t change just because the folks making the crossing are even more likely to be desperate criminals, due to the increased danger of the crossing and the higher profit that can be made as a result.

The crossing is really fucking dangerous already. People die of heat stroke. They get hit by cars in the night on poorly-lit roads. They drown in flooded rivers and streams. They get killed by unscrupulous coyotes. The mass rape and murder of women along our borders is fucking horrible, and we should all be ashamed at the number of unsolved, unreported, and undiscovered crimes upon women remain in border towns. Increasing the danger by clamping down on our borders is going to be about as safe and effective as the war on drugs has been at making the streets safe in our inner cities. "

***

Still cleaning up the flow, and looking for good footnotes, but you get the idea of what I'll be talking about, right?

is neil gaiman actually the doctor?

i pose to you this quandary. neil gaiman, fabulist of the highest order and spinner of tales that crack open the cosmos, and everyone's favorite british alien, the "doctor", are, in fact, one and the same person.

for instance, the ninth doctor, played by christopher eccleston, dresses in a manner quite similar - nay, nearly *exactly* - like neil gaiman. like the doctor, neil gaiman has knowledge of alternate realities nigh unmatched on this earth. often, he is followed by a companion (mr. gaiman may refer to her as a personal assistant, or somesuch term, but don't believe him). also, mr. gaiman seems to think nothing of jaunting all over the world as if it were his own, personal playground. his sunny, experimental and seemingly tireless demeanor is quite on target with the doctor's energetic ways.

in fact, i wouldn't be surprised to discover that the doctor decided to settle down a while, and scribes true stories of people and things encountered.

for further proof, study the films and fictions...

i'm telling you, i think neil gaiman is actually the eleventh incarnation of doctor who.

BEA photos

My readers are very good-looking.



I'm signing books and books and books.



The historic first meeting between J M McDermott and the editor that discovered him, Phil Athans:



Thanks to Wizards of the Coast for sending me these photos, and for a great time at BEA!

Also, thanks to all of my readers, without whom, I would have sat there holding a pen and looking like a sexy, sexy moron.

strange horizons annual fundraiser

It's that time of year, folks.

http://strangehorizons.com/fund_drives/200806/main.shtml

Follow the progress at their blog.

Quit reading my blog and go help Strange Horizons.

Why?

I'm glad you asked. Here's what Fantasy Magazine says about it.

http://www.darkfantasy.org/fantasy/?p=598

a sign, as large as the box upon which it was प्लासद...

Unauthorized
Signs
Prohibited

corner of winscott and the big municipal complex by the library.

bureaucracy is inherently funny.

I should throw another contest...

In the interest of shameless self-promotion, I would like to throw a new contest.

The Winner will recieve a secret box of mystical power including things that have been scribbled upon related to the book, LAST DRAGON, totally collectable and geeky. The main prize is actually extremely rare, and only two like it exist in the universe.

Runner up prizesd shall be awarded, as well, but will likely just be a cool, little button.

What do I want?

1) You must tell people about this contest.

2) You must select a character from LAST DRAGON, and scribe at least one paragraph of original fan fiction wherein you or someone you like to write about meets this character, and what happens when such a meeting occurs. Length must be at least 25 words, but no more than 4,000. Quality has nothing to do with your odds of victory, so feel free to suck. (This can be any character, whether a mustachioed, anonymous waiter or Adel, herself.)

3) Winners of prior contests are eligible to re-enter. This prize is very different, very rare, and very collectible. I'd feel remiss if I didn't allow anyone to try again after this prize.

4) Your deadline is me leaving for Apollocon, which begins on June 27. I will select a winner before I leave for Apollocon. I will read the winning entry during my reading period at Apollocon.

Winners will be selected randomly via a mystical process involving a frog puppet, frozen cauliflower, and magic markers. In otherwords, victory will be randomized. The point isn't to sweat the gruelling process of the prosaic, but to have fun. Thus, frog puppet, frozen cauliflowers, and magic markers. This isn't a writing contest. It's a literary lottery.

How to enter:

1) First send me an e-mail where you can show me where you've told people about this contest.

2) Second, send me an e-mail where you can show me your entry into the contest.

3) These must be two different places. If you post both to your blog, that's fine, just make sure they are part of separate entries on your blog.

What am I giving away?

Hint: There's only two in the entire world. One is already in the hands of a hoarding friend/fan. The only other one in creation is collecting dust on my bookshelf. I ought to give it away before I accidentally destroy it with coffee and/or spring cleaning.

I'll take a picture of what I'm giving away in a couple weeks. Scholars and librarians would be most interested in this item, someday.

Don't forget to have fun!

why is elmo a monster

i was thinking about the monstrosity of elmo when i saw "elmo grows up" rehearsals in front of the staples center whilst walking in to BEA.

elmo, you see, never actually grows up. this is what is truly monstrous about him. it isn't the red fur, or the odd body-shape. plenty of animals have red fur and odd bodies and do not qualify as monsters.

elmo is a mosnter because he is stuck in this one mindset, this one moment in time. he never ages. he never grows. he lives in a moment that he'll never escape.

though he is not a dangerous, nor particularly scary monster, he qualifies as monstrous because of that simple fact. imagine what it must be like, to be six for thirty years. to always look forward to someday when you'll grow up, but to never actually reach that day.

all elmo's friends age around you. every year new friends arrive, but they too shall outgrow elmo's moment in time.

children's television, like baboons, can be quite scary if you think about it a while.

while i'm recovering from bea and dealing with some s*** that met me unhappily at the airport...

while i'm dealing with some s***, contemplate this fact:

baboons are fucking scary.

back from BEA

just flew in, and i'm tired and covered in books.

i just want to say three things:

1) Neil Gaiman's "The Graveyard Book" is very, very good.

2) Kelly Link's new short story anthology, "Pretty Monsters" is very, very good.

3) Cory Doctorow's new comic book, "Craphound", is very, very good.

Now, off to bed.

Gesundheit, everyone. Er... Good night. God Bless You. Etc.