KILN PEOPLE/ VACUUM FLOWERS

I've been rather lax in maintaining this blog over the last couple weeks.  I've been trying to pull out of a spell of winter/holiday gloom and convince myself that THIS January ought to be greeted with optimism.  January seems to be the month of the year where some kind...

The Enormous Big Thing

In the introduction to the "From Ringworld" section of Larry Niven's fine 1990 retrospective volume N-Space, he talks about the technique he used to gradually brace the reader for the incredible scale of the Ringworld, showing first the Pierson's puppeteers Fleet of Worlds, presenting scale comparisons, keeping the number of characters small, and letting the Ringworld's size and nature "come as a recurring surprise to the characters."  He writes,...

A HOLIDAY MESSAGE

Christmas has not been a particularly joyous time for Jeff and me in recent years. We used to be quite well-to-do with our good jobs and abundance of disposable income. We would host lavish Christmas Eve parties in our home and dazzle our friends and family with our fine food and...

Got some McDonald books today

Today I visited the used book shop near my home, which has a large and deep (if disorganized and perhaps over-priced) sf section. There I found two books by Ian McDonald, fulfilling my wish to have (and eventually read) more stuff by him (see previous entry). The novels are Terminal...

IAN McDONALD in YEAR'S BEST SF

That little column of books with the heading "Recent Reading List," located somewhere down there on the left side of the page, is probably misnamed in a couple of different ways. It's not entirely "recent" since some of those items were read a couple years ago.  It's also...

MAG UPDATE: Print and circulation

I am hashing through some tedious technical details involving the PDF format, embedded fonts, print-on-demand, blah, blah, blah...but I think I'm close on all that, and should have some news on the actual cost and method of distribution of the print edition shortly. I am also thinking pretty hard about ways to increase the overall circulation of the zine in a possibly more rapid manner than I had originally imagined.  Yeah, right now, the real...

DANGEROUS VISIONS? Bah! Nothing of the sort!

Occasionally when I need a quick reference or refresher on some writer or book or movement or era in science fiction, I will reach for my copy of Brian Aldiss's thick work of genre history and criticism Trillion Year Spree (only good up until the mid-1980s). Last night I was scanning...

M-BRANE PRINT EDITION DEVELOPMENTS

Possibly within a week (but certainly by the end of the month), I think I will have a final decision made on how the print version of the zine is to be sold, printed and distributed. The plan is to produce it by way of a print-on-demand publisher, and I am in process of deciding which one to go with.  It will then be sold online via that publisher and this site.  One good possibility is that I might use CreateSpace for it, and then it could...

ISSUES #1 and #2 COMING TOGETHER

I haven't posted for a few days, but that doesn't mean I haven't been working. Indeed, the magazine is coming together at a gratifying pace.  I think I did well by not promising its debut until February and thereby giving myself enough time to work on it at a reasonable--rather than crazy--speed. The last few days, the volume of new submissions of stories has slowed a bit.  That's a good thing right now, because I should probably slow my...

ENDER IN EXILE, M-BRANE PRINT EDITION THOUGHTS

1. Down near the bottom of this page, there is a spot where podcasts from Tor Books (the great sf publisher) show up. Available now is one consisting of Orson Scott Card talking about his new book Ender in Exile. His comments on this book and the others are interesting as are his...

JETER, FAREWELL HORIZONTAL

KW Jeter, the sf writer known, according to Wikipedia, for his "literary writing style, dark themes and paranoid, unsympathetic characters" was new to me up until just a few years when my friend Pat lent me a copy of one of Jeter's Bladerunner sequels. It was totally weird and...

M-BRANE IN PRINT? HMMM....

Things are coming together well as far as the content for the mag.  I have acquired a few really nice new stories lately, and I think that my debut issue will be totally respectable. I am in a conundrum, however, as to how to handle the print edition.  There has been virtually zero interest in it, with everyone instead opting for the PDF version. I can't say I blame anyone for that.  That's certainly what I would do...and you can go...

RADIO/FLASH/PERDIDO STREET/MBRANE ON GOOGLE/CURRENT PROJECT

1. One of the things that I love best about the fact that I recently upgraded from a decade-old computer to a brand new MacBook is that I can easily capture all of my favorite radio shows as podcasts and listen to them at my leisure. People who know me personally probably regard...

M-BRANE MAG UPDATE

I have very little time to report tonight (that stupid, stupid day job getting in the way in a horrific fashion these past few days), but a couple of major milestones with M-Brane SF have been attained lately: 1) I feel I have enough decent material in hand to make issue #1 a respectable first outing; and 2) I have begun to receive actual paid subscriptions to it! &nb...

FREAKY-DEAKY KIDS and THE O-BOMB

Reading Paul of Dune reminded me once more of how often one runs into freakily intelligent and scarily capable young children in the sf genre. In Dune, of course, one starts with Paul Atreides who cheated death repeatedly and overthrew a galactic empire while still in his teens....

PROGRESS REPORT

One of the things this blog is good for is making me keep track of and stay on task with my many projects. Since I claim publicly that I am doing stuff with with my time, I feel some positive pressure to keep making claims to that effect on this blog...The last few days have actually been reasonably productive for me on all fronts: I got some more work done on the magazine, including acquiring a little pile of new fiction submissions to read over...

Neil Gaiman

The other day I mentioned China Mieville--new to my reading list as of this week--and remarked that I had not gotten around to his well-regarded books yet because they are generally considered to be fantasy and that's not my genre of choice, even when the stories are supposedly...

M-BRANE MAG UPDATE

Work on the mag is proceeding slowly, but that’s okay. I don’t want to rush it along too fast and have it be a mess. I have increased somewhat my ambition for the quantity of material in issue #1, and am now actively seeking some new submissions for the very first outing. I am about to post calls for submissions on some sites, but have been trying to decide on what exactly I want my listings to say. I guess it’s simplest to just direct everyone...

READING LIST

I have really piled up a reading list for the coming couple of weeks. My friend Pat lent me his copy of KW Jeter’s Farewell Horizontal after I mentioned that I was between books and looking for something to read. That was yesterday, but just this morning I visited the library and...

CLONEPOD!

Everyone needs to immediately check out clonepod (there’s a link way down below in my list of some fave sites; the artwork to the left is from their site and depicts, presumably, the "clone pod" itself). It’s sort of an sf webzine except they present the stories in audio form as...

CURRENT PROJECT UPDATE

The novel, still known as Current Project, is now in a state where I think I can reasonably claim that all of the major scenes and events are at least represented somehow in the manuscript. What is still missing, however, is a lot of detail in some segments and some back-fill concerning some of the characters and how they got to be the way they are. I have a couple extra days off from work in the coming week, and am setting a goal of having the...

FOMALHAUT b

Though the confirmed existence of planets outside our own star system has long been one of the coolest things that astronomy has had to offer to the lay person, it has always been somewhat unsatisfying that their detection was always by very indirect and complicated methods beyond...

The All Thing

A subject on NPR’s Talk of the Nation show this afternoon was the internet and its role in politics during the recent general election campaign and what its importance might be going forward. President Obama, for example, will have, as result of his amazing grass roots and internet-assisted...

SLAN HUNTER

I read this a few weeks before I started this blog, so it's not current reading exactly.  Nonetheless, we all need to take a step back and take a look:  SLAN HUNTER!  On the front cover of this amazing book is an endorsement from Harlan Ellison which says something...

This Week's Reading

I set down Delany for a few days (in the midst of Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand). I generally don't take a break from a book midway but I had two other pressing priorities.  The first was that I needed to catch up on the old horror movies that I had DVRed on TMC on...

Current Project update

Yeah, the novel is still known only as Current Project.  I'm not sure why a title still eludes me this late into the work.  It now stands at about fifty thousand words and is fully plotted and it seems like its title should have exposed itself by now. No big deal: it will probably crop up amid the next fifty thousand words.  Like with the magazine, progress has been slow during the last two weeks though not negligible.  I have...

MAGAZINE UPDATE

The problem right now--as if evident from my lack of postings since before Halloween--is the fact that outside life has been intruding too much and I have gotten nothing done on the zine yet.  Well, I have done one thing: I moved its launch date from January to February.  I am determined that this will the last delay.  My projects right now are to get more word of it out to other sites and resources and get a few more submissions of...

WRITING UPDATE 10/27: CURRENT PROJECT

The novel is proceeding albeit at a slower pace than I’d like. I had set a deadline for a complete first draft for Halloween. Since that’s this Friday and I’m nowhere near close to anything that could be called a complete first draft, I will have to accept an extension of that deadline.Some background: People who know me may be aware of an ongoing, very much unfinished novel that I have been working on collaboratively with my friend Pat. This project...

MAGAZINE PROGRESS

The magazine could be going better. I am still determined to make the January launch date, but I am getting somewhat concerned about the lack of content. While much of it is ready to go, I still want probably four or five more pieces of fiction and at least one solid piece of criticism now that I have decided that the zine should include some solid scholarly writing rather than simple, shallow book reviews. I know that once it appears and has gone...

DELANY EXCITEMENT CONTINUES

The only thing going on with my current reading and probably my future reading for a few months to come is the amazing Samuel Delany. That it took me thirty-seven years to find out about how great this writer is and start reading his books just makes me tremble. What else am I missing?...