So I've been struck by an epiphany. Sort of. Last night I was scrolling through my Facebook updates and noticed that one of the editors I follow announced that one of his publishing's company's titles was a book club selection for someone's book club. I didn't think twice about it until it sunk in that the particular title was the selection for JANUARY. Crazy, right? So I went to bed, and then woke up with this slight "epiphany."

There's a disadvantage in announcing a book club selection the month it belongs to: there's a limited time to get your hands on it and therefore, a limited time to read it. And it also occurred to me that those of us who have book blogs have a much heavier reading schedule, and might have a harder time sneaking in a book club title to our month's pile of TBRs. So with that in mind, I thought:

What if we select book club titles two months in advance?

Not only would this give you PLENTY of time to get your hands on the book, but it'd also give you PLENTY OF TIME to actually read it. Not everyone's a fast reader, and frankly, as long as you read the book between the time it's announced and the time I post my review, I consider that participation. So if I announced the January book club title TODAY and you finished reading it this month, that's cool, because you probably wouldn't have read the book otherwise if not for the book club, right?

So what do you think? Shall we go ahead and get our December and January selections under our belts? And then in December, decide February? And so on and so forth? I'd love you opinions, so lay them on me! I'll make it easy too with a poll!

Poll #1482466 Book Club: When to Vote?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 2

When you want the book club selection announced?

If you do have suggestions though, I'd love to hear them. If we do this, I'll go ahead and post December's poll this week. :) Thanks!

Out of a very sad five total entries, we have a winner for Steven R. Boyett's Elegy Beach! The Research Randomizer Website tallied up the entries and selected one at random, so I'm pleased to announce the winner is:

Jennifer Lawrence from Indiana!

While this was another VERY SMALL contest, I thank everyone who entered! I hope the next contest brings many more entries, but for now, thanks for your participation! :)

Gregory Frost will be a guest lecturer at this year’s Odyssey workshop. He is a writer of fantasy, thrillers, and science fiction who has been publishing steadily for more than two decades. His latest work, the compelling fantasy duology, Shadowbridge. and Lord Tophet (Del Rey Books) was voted one of the four best fantasy novels of the year by the American Library Association. It was a finalist this year for the James Tiptree Award.

His previous novel, Fitcher’s Brides was a finalist for both the World Fantasy Award and the International Horror Guild Award for Best Novel. Other novels include, Tain, Lyrec, and Nebula-nominated sf work The Pure Cold Light. His short story collection, Attack of the Jazz Giants and Other Stories was given a starred review by Publishers Weekly, which called it "one of the best fantasy collections of the year" while hailing the author as a master of the short story form. The collection includes James Tiptree Award, Nebula Award, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and Hugo Award finalist fiction.

His shorter work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov's Magazine, Weird Tales, Realms of Fantasy, and in numerous award-winning anthologies. His latest short story can be found in Poe (Solaris Books), edited by Ellen Datlow.

He is a Fiction Writing Workshop Director at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, PA.

His web site is www.gregoryfrost.com. He's on Facebook as Gregory Frost; on Twitter as gregory_frost; and his LJ blog, "Frostbites" is at http://frostokovich.livejournal.com.

Once you started writing seriously, how long did it take you to sell your first piece? What were you doing wrong in your writing in those early days?

Well, if we mark my “serious” Rubicon as the undergraduate writing program at the University of Iowa followed directly by Clarion (which was far more intensive), then it was six years before I sold my first short story. In that time I’d written two dreadful novels, and lots of short stories that were either marketed and failed or else stuck in a drawer because I was never happy with them, as well as those that were never finished. One of those pieces was a story I’d started directly after Clarion and which I revised again and again over the next six years, and which became the second piece of fiction I sold.

What changed in particular...I’m not sure. I think a process of evolution was going on, but I was the experiment, not outside and observing it, and the best guess I can give you is that while I probably felt stuck in place, I was in fact learning by producing a lot of garbage, making a lot of mistakes. Now that I’ve been a slush pile reader for a magazine, which is sort of being the editor who reads the untested fiction, I’ve seen all the mistakes I made laid bare. But that’s how you learn: by getting things wrong, at the same time as you’re analyzing good writing, figuring out how someone else did it well, and then trying again. If I had to pick one thing, it would be learning how to write beginnings. That’s a major breakthrough by itself.

How many stages does your work go through before you send it off to a publisher? How much of your time is spent writing the first draft, and how much time is spent in revision? What sort of revisions do you do?

All of this depends on the work. Shadowbridge went through repeated shaping. What my pal Judith Berman calls her “zero draft”--I probably wrote dozens of those, because that book was channeling out of some deep well of stories and had to be teased into the light. And then in the middle of it, Terri Windling invited me to contribute a book to her fairy tale series, and I set it all aside and wrote Fitcher’s Brides, which was done in three passes, fairly painlessly, and in ten months. The first draft of that took five months. But there I had an armature to work with--a fairy tale structure tested by time; and by accident I’d done all the research into the period and place I was writing about--the 1840s, the Fingerlakes district of New York. And then I went back to Shadowbridge. Almost immediately my father died, and I simply locked up for nearly two years…which was right and truly scary. I was in the grips of an actual writing block: the roiling core of crazy stuff--ideas, images, concepts, “what ifs”--that have been with me simply forever just evaporated. There was nothing. A vacuum. And writers, Carol Emshwiller for one, reassured me that I would come out the other side of it, as she had done, and that what I wrote on the far side of the singularity would be different from before. I’m still the experiment, so I can’t tell you if that part is true, but I did come out. One day it was just “We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.” I went back to “Shadowbridge.

As for revisions, they are so very different from first drafts. First drafts exhaust me after a few hours, and the so-called writer’s high is for me a first draft phenomenon. Revision can go all day by comparison because it’s a different section of the brain, the analytical, editorial section. I expect, as Joyce Carol Oates has said in interviews, that the beginning gets far more revision than the rest of the story, just as the beginning is probably the last thing written. I fear that workshops like Clarion tend to focus on getting you to write a lot of first drafts of stories, but not so much on how to revise those drafts properly; and revision is a skill unto itself, probably the most critical skill of all.

What's the biggest weakness in your writing these days, and how do you cope with it?

Social media: Fighting off the allure of the Internet. I’m glad I write first drafts with a fountain pen, because it means I can walk away from the bloody computer, sit me down anywhere with a notebook and dive in. Cory Doctorow wrote an amusing essay last winter about how a writer needs only to devote 20 minutes a day to his craft, thus allowing for lots of social media time. It’s specious, of course, but he’s right that you have to carve out some time. You can write a draft of a novel in a year if you write 20 minutes a day, provided you produce one page in that 20 minutes. But how many of us can sit down, cold, and just flip over to the writing side of our lizard brain and go? I’m sure there’s someone out there going “Oh, I can do that.” Well, it ain’t me.

From vampires in your short fiction to your unique world in Shadowbridge, do you generally form an idea first before you start a story or do characters appear first?

I think the two arrive in some complementary fashion. No idea comes without, for me, a character rolling in either with it or almost immediately after. And I’ve had stories that began with a character and the story emerged out of them. Some are explorations—following a character to find out both who they are and what their story is. I think Leodora was like that for me. I saw her on top of the bridge at the beginning of Shadowbridge with her mask on, the braid of her hair...and I had to find out who she was. Casting back, I feel as if I just followed her quite awhile. But before the first act of that book was completed, I had written the confrontation with Lord Tophet that occurred at the end of the second book. I had no idea how she and I were going to get there, but I trusted that we would. Took a very long time, but indeed that’s where we arrived. I didn’t know at that point that her mother was “alive” in a mirror, what had happened to Bardsham, or what the fates of Soter and Diverus would be. I didn’t even know who Diverus was until I’d placed the two of them--him and Leodora--in Epama Epam. It’s good to be surprised by one’s writing, though.

Your essay “Coloring Between the Lines” (http://www.interstitialarts.org/why/coloringBetweenTheLines1.html) focuses on breaking out of genre boxes, in particular slipstream fiction. What is your advice to beginning writers who want to cross different genres? Should they experiment or work in just one genre? What are the benefits and/or drawbacks?

Don’t listen to me for advice on how to make a heap of money at this, but my opinion is that you should write what you want to write. If you chase after the dictates of the marketplace--what’s hot today--unless you’re really incredibly facile and fast, it won’t be the hot thing by the time you write it (although, God help us, we don’t seem to be able to get rid of vampires or King Arthur). In some ways, I think you’re better off choosing some territory you really want to write in and carving out that space. Bruce Sterling did that with his Shaper/Mechanist universe. He worked it to where he had an audience aware of what he was doing. Then he moved on, moved out. Charles Stross, likewise with the stories collected in Accelerando.

When you’re beginning, you’re likely looking for your voice, a stamp you can put on your fiction. This is the time to try everything. Absorb everything. If you are going to write in the genres, you’re going to have to bring something to the table that everybody else writing in your turf hasn’t done to death already. I’ve got adult students in a night class who want to write fantasy fiction, but they know fantasy and sf only through things like The Twilight Zone and Star Trek, so their work is utterly derivative and dated. They have nothing original to bring to the table. You want to write a Twilight Zone story? Then go read some Nabokov or Cortazar. Bring that into your work. That’s going to make it much more interesting and original (which is somewhat my statement on interstitiality). Aim for great art. If you just get a tolerable story out of it, you still shot for the highest mark, the best you could write.

As a guest lecturer at this summer's Odyssey Workshop, you'll be lecturing, workshopping, and meeting individually with students. What do you think is the most important advice you can give to developing writers?

Give yourself permission to completely [mess] up. Get everything wrong. Make giant mistakes. Try things you don’t know how to do. And don’t beat yourself up for it. That’s how you learn. Get it all wrong now so that later you’ll have mastered all these elements and won’t have to worry about them anymore.

What's next on the writing-related horizon? Are you starting any new projects?

Always. I’m finishing a novel right now, should be done with it before the end of the year (which is good, seeing as how I originally promised it to my agent like last New Year). I just completed a story for a Cthulhu anthology, which I hope is the funniest story in it. I have two stories in the works now, both for projects I was invited to contribute to. There’s a possible third Shadowbridge novel that has nothing to do with the first two, and another novel where all I know is that I have a woman falling through the sky. I’ve figured out who she is, but the story--to borrow from Stephen King--is a fossil I’ve only just started to uncover.

---

For more information about Odyssey, its graduates and instructors, please visit our website at http://www.odysseyworkshop.org.

I was too sick to watch movies last night but did so tonight. Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break with Keanu Reeves, Patrick Swayze, and Gary Busey. About 15 minutes too long, some gorgeous shots of surfing, interesting (but someone predictable) plot. It was not a bad way to spend almost two hours.

And saw the earlier version or Imitation of Life with Claudette Colbert. Here's my post and the thread on the later version Imitation of Life .

Some thoughts: although the guy doesn't overtly pressure Colbert to leave her job he does beg to take her away on his boat doing fish research, hence giving up her career to hang around with him while he continues his. However....she's already rich rich rich, so she could retire.

I don't like that Colbert feels forced to give the guy up (for an indefinite period of time) because of her daughter--not saying it's not realistic or even reasonable; I just don't like it.

Same heartbreaking scenes with regard to Peola coming back to the mom's funeral.

Overly sentimental death scene with the spirituals sung in the background are dreadful.

I've seen Claudette Colbert act better in other movies.

The young woman who plays Colbert's daughter is terrible. The one who plays Delilah's daughter is much better.

Today, after sleeping on and off for 1 1/2 days, I woke up feeling almost human. I don't believe it was any kind of flu just a really awful, fast-moving cold. I'm still coughing (trying to get up the stuff that's too far down for comfort)and it hurts every time I cough--ribs, etc caused BY the coughing the first two days. I felt good enough to go out and shop for zinc (couldn't find the Odwalla Vit C drink) and groceries. And for the first time in years, I had them delivered.

I ate my first food early afternoon--yesterday I just had toast--I just didn't want anything else that I had in the house.
Making chicken soup now. Taking expectorant cough syrup, gargling with salt water, drinking lots of water.

Enroute home I picked up a four foot tall book shelf/column that I think I'll -put in my bedroom to keep the "books to be read for Best of the year"--rather than where they have been--on my floor. We'll see how that works.

And here are the photos from WFC: http://tinyurl.com/yb7j6eq

What does it mean if I put off taking a survey on procrastination?

In praise of Poe by Edward Pettit
Pettit is the Philadelphian Poe expert

The empire strikes back

In recent weeks, we've taken huge steps towards blocking spam accounts on LiveJournal. In fact, we've suspended as many as 30,000 accounts in a single day! We've implemented several pre-emptive measures to prevent the creation of spam accounts, and we've honed our detection of suspicious content. Spam bots are a crafty lot, so we'll continue to refine our tactics and keep up the good fight to keep you safe from spam attacks on LiveJournal.

RSS feeds again

If you're addicted to xkcd_rss, icanhaschzbrgr, or other syndicated feeds, we're pleased to report that we've resolved the update error that was mucking up your RSS feeds. While content was being pulled correctly, it wasn't being posted to the feeds themselves. Late last week, we finally nailed down what we hope was the root problem, so content should post properly. We thank you for your patience.

Wii have killer CSI Deadly Intent contests!

c_s_i

If you're a gamer who loves CSI, have Wii got news for you! c_s_i is sponsoring killer contests. Simply post a question to a member of the CSI crew. The winner will get a free copy of CSI: Deadly Intent for Nintendo Wii (with a retail value of $39.99) and get their question answered by a member of the CSI writing team! There's also a fantastic monthly contest. To enter, join c_s_i, play the online version of CSI: Deadly Intent, and respond to a two-part query for a chance to win a Wii! Entries will be judged on composition and originality. Sorry, but you must be a U.S. resident and over 18 years old to participate. Check out the rules here.

Enveloped in postcards

Last week, we asked you to send in postcards to help us decorate our drab concrete walls. Here's a photo of the results so far! Thank you so much and please keep them coming! You can mail them to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. Be sure to include your username, since we'll be giving ten random users paid account credits.

Photos of the week

If you haven't visited our new LiveJournal photo community, you're in for an amazing visual trip. LiveJournal users from around the world will take you on a scenic journey to everywhere. Post your own pictures or kick back and enjoy at lj_photophile. You can view some of this week's awesome photos after the jump. Please start tagging with geographic location, since we'd like to track all the places around the world represented in this community. Keep on commenting too!
( Read more... )

within hours of returning home I was hit smack bang with a hacking(cough), sneezing, nose running cold. At least that's what I'm assuming as I've got no temperature or aches and pains or nausea, etc. I hope I didn't give it to the Locus crowd, with whom I visited Tuesday (no symptoms then)...

I will be hibernated as much as possible for the next couple of days-drinking hot water, lemon, ginger, and honey; tea. Taking cough meds, cold meds, and stuffing vicks up my nose and on my chest. And keeping a BIG box of tissues next to me.

People keep asking me about it, and I'm amazed that it only took a few months to figure out, but in the shower this morning I finally realized what the "M" stands for in the abbreviation for the University of Vermont. You'll never believe it, but the "M" really stands for [REDACTED]

We apologize, but the readers of this blog are not cleared for this information. Thank you for your cooperation.

Yeah, so that's it. Amazing, huh? Who would have guessed?

Horror world reviews TWISTS OF THE TALE
(you'll have to scroll down for it).

Some choice quotes:
"If there’s one thing Ellen Datlow knows how to do well, it’s put an amazing anthology together. From The Year’s Best Horror to Poe to The Dark, she has never failed to capture the essence of the concept she set out to accomplish. The best stories are always chosen, not the most well-known authors, which results in nearly flawless products for both seasoned horror fans and those who just might be browsing....

Highly recommended – even for those who prefer dogs."


And a great review in Green Man review of The Best Horror of the Year volume One
Again, some choice quotes:
"The quality and variety of stories, along with the depth and breadth of Datlow's summary of the year in review, makes The Best Horror of the Year informative as well as entertaining, and any horror fan who wishes to keep current with the state of the genre will want to have a copy."

...."Diversity, complexity, and uniqueness are shared characteristics of all of these stories, making the entire volume a balm for any horror fan who has at times felt a sense of ennui at the sight of books featuring the same old names on the covers along with the same old illustrations of tough stoic men and naked screaming women."

Just made Scotch eggs and chocolate chip cookies with sociofemme.

Nom nom nom.

More evidence that the Universe is pleasantly disposed towards me:

Free Lunch. Just walked past the burrito place on campus and was given a free wrap.

Of course, if the Universe really liked me, I'd win the lottery once in a while.

Podcast #31 is now available for download here.

In her lecture at Odyssey 2009, Patricia Bray explored the role of a sidekick in fiction. In this podcast, the first of two parts, Patricia defines a sidekick and explains the inherently unequal nature of the hero/sidekick relationship. Giving examples that illuminate the long literary tradition of sidekicks, Patricia identifies the genres that tend to have sidekicks and the differences between a protagonist's sidekick and an antagonist's sidekick. She explains why sidekicks are necessary in some stories and novels and the specific ways in which they can be used.

Patricia Bray is the author of a dozen novels, including Devlin's Luck, which won the 2003 Compton Crook Award for the best first novel in the field of science fiction or fantasy. A multi-genre author whose career spans both Regency romance and epic fantasy, Patricia has had her books translated into Russian, German, Hebrew and Portuguese. She is a two-time co-chair of the Southern Tier Writer's conference, and her articles on the writer's craft have appeared in numerous publications, including Broadsheet, Nink, STARbytes, and RWA's Keys to Success: A Professional Writer's Career Handbook.

Patricia lives in upstate New York, where she combines her writing with a full-time career as an I/T professional, ensuring that she is never more than a few feet away from a keyboard. Her latest novel is The Final Sacrifice, the concluding volume in The Chronicles of Josan, which was released by Bantam Spectra in July 2008.

Where are my pants?

I just finished reading Agents & Adepts by Kathryn Sullivan.

( Read more... )Overall, I liked all the short stories in this book and will most likely seek out other things Sullivan has written.

I'll be honest with you: I've never seen the original V. Not a single incarnation of it. For starters, I was too young when it premiered, and even if I hadn't been, I doubt my grandparents would've wanted me watching it. ;) Be that as it may, even now that I'm old enough to know what the show is and what it means for the SF genre, I've never had a single inkling to watch it. I've got a . . . let's say phobia . . . of watching old tv shows and old movies, but that's an entirely different post. So what am I here to talk about?

OMG! I'M SO EXCITED ABOUT ABC'S REMAKE OF V!!!!!



You might ask, "But why?"

Well, for starters, I harbor a secret glee when the stuff from the good old days gets remade (most of the time. This, too, is a separate post). I love watching the horrified reactions of people when their favorite stuff gets updated for current audiences. Why? Because right now, I'm that current audience. I want to see how today's society, today's fears, can transform a television show (or movie). It gives me a chance to enjoy the original without suffering through the dated look of the original. So yeah, when remakes happen, I tend to be thrilled, especially if it's bright and shiny-looking like the trailers for V are promising the show will be.

Also? Elizabeth Mitchell (aka Juliet on Lost) is starring in this beast. Can I just say HOW MUCH I love Elizabeth Mitchell? More so since I saw an interview of her today on EW.com and she was completely adorkable (click here and scroll down). I want this show to succeed. I want it to be awesome. For her, so I can keep seeing her on my television screen, and because it's an overt SF show, and I'm always game for them to blow the ratings out of the water. Also, I'm excited to see Morena Baccarin (aka Inara on Firefly) in the show as well (I think she's perfectly cast for the character of Anna).

Don't get me wrong: this might COMPLETELY suck. I'm well aware of that. But I'm glad I won't be comparing it to the original. I'll be judging it on its own merit, and trust me when I say, I hope it's awesome.

Speaking of awesome, the promos ABC has been airing for the show featuring Muse's "Uprising?" BEST SONG CHOICE EVER. They did an extended promo (they're calling it a music video, but really, it's an extended promo), which you can view here.

Anyway, I'm to excited to sit still. Anyone else?

Overview

Station: ABC
Time: Tuesdays @ 8:00 pm est (they're airing a four-episode mini-series in November, and then the show will come back after the Olympics next spring)
Status: Season One
Where to Start? No time like the present! V premieres tonight!
Website: http://abc.go.com/shows/v

Project: Entanglement (SFR)
Chapters Edited: 35 out of 73

Things Accomplished in Fiction: Yet again, it's been a while since my last update, but I've now got a new computer and FAR fewer reasons to procrastinate. Well, far fewer GOOD ones, anyway. So fifteen chapters edited. I'm still liking it, but I'm starting to really see where this manuscript needs to be tightened up in terms of narrative, or maybe even broken into two books. We'll see.

Reason for Stopping: Fifteen chapters is more than enough for one night. I'm tired, and I'd like to get ready for bed and read for a little while. :)

Nightmare Vermont is done for the year.

No more long rehearsals, no more listening to the elevator music version of "the Girl from Ipanema," no more crowds of clueless or belligerent audience members to wrangle, no more running to catch up to the next group, no more bruises, and no more blood on my clothes.

However, this also means no more creepy abandoned gymnasium to play around in, no more spending time with an awesome group of people, no more laughs, no more scares, no more screams, and no more pitch-black maze in a creepy abandoned gymnasium. Did I mention the creepy abandoned gymnasium?

Many, many years ago, I was into theater. There was a small point in time between being embarrassed by everything (elementary school) and when I start larping (high school) where I liked theater. But I hated rehearsal. I still hate rehearsal. It was worth it, as the end result was amazing, but I find it extremely hard to get into character when the environment is wrong. I only really got into it when we had an audience and the stage was set. But that's why larping is so easy for me - it's easy to fall into character when everyone around you is.

Memorizing lines is also irritating. Improv is much better, I think. Give me a character and a costume and some motivation, and I'll do fine.

Oh, and speaking of the creepy abandoned gymnasium, this weekend I was finally able to accomplish one of my goals: I got to run a boffer game in the Olympiad. Not a full larp, but two sets of my variant of Humans vs. Zombies, played in a darkened gym fill of nooks and crannies to hide things and zombies in. About fifteen people showed up to play, and everyone had an awesome time, and is demanding more. I suppose I will be looking into running some kind of boffer game in Vermont...

I'm staying with friends for today and tomorrow and we've finally fixed the wireless problem (couldn't get online on my machine last night or this morning)-I've been hooked directly into their cable network downstairs. Yay!

So as you must all know, I lost the WFA to Paper Cities, edited by Ekaterina Sedia and published by my friend and colleage (KGB) Matt Kressel. I'm delighted for them. Of course, I'd have loved to have won the award for one of my two anthos but I'm honored for the last YBFH and The Del Rey Book of SF&F to have been in the running. (particularly because the latter was NOT only fantasy but sf). And there's always next year for my 2009 anthologies.

Which brings me to the exciting news that Lovecraft Unbound has been listed as one of the five best sf/f/h books of the year by Publishers Weekly. Congratulations to my contributors. The whole list is:

The Windup Girl
Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade)-Bacigalupi's powerful debut warns of dire ecological collapse and the evils of colonialism in an eerily plausible near future Thailand.

Lovecraft Unbound Edited by Ellen Datlow (Dark Horse)--Editor extraordinaire Datlow assembles a phenomenal anthology of homages to pulp horror great H.P. Lovecraft, penned by an impressive slate of big-name horror authors.

The Devil's Alphabet Daryl Gregory (Del Rey)--This subtle, eerie present-day horror novel mercilessly dissects and reassembles the classic narrative of a man returning to his smalltown birthplace, where the familiar folks have become strange creatures.

The City & the City China Miéville (Del Rey)--Putting a quasi-fantastical twist on a classic police procedural story, Miéville delves deep into the psyches of city dwellers and the ways people blind themselves to reality.

Boneshaker
Cherie Priest (Tor)--The dramatic first novel in Priest's Clockwork Century universe sends a determined 35-year-old single mom into a ruined city full of zombies and poison gas, where she must save her son from a mad inventor.

Tonight's the mass signing at Borderlands in SF 7pm for anyone in the neighborhood.