1. I was scrolling through a newsfeed and found this article. “Pus!” I muttered. “I was going to write something like that for Tor.com!” Then I realized: Hey, I did.
2. Matt Sturges (of Midwinter and Jack of Fables fame) and I (of Morlockian infame) are going to be guestblogging this week at the Borders “Babel Clash” blog.
“There is nothing so unbelievable that it may not become probable by putting it into words.”–Cicero, Paradoxes. (Sed nihil est tam incredibile, quod non dicendo fiat probabile.)
Fantasists and spin-doctors live by this saying, even if they’ve never heard it.
After well over a month of slacking, I’ve finally posted a new Blog Gate entry, this one a dignified whine about whiners, specifically the type of person who says (and people have been saying this for as long as I remember), “SF doesn’t get any respect!” Appropriate answers run a narrow gamut from “Yes,” to “No” to “So?” but I managed to expand those three words into roughly 500 because I am a professional. So my SFWA card keeps on telling me.
My return to the lists of bloggerdom was partly inspired by a fortunate accident: Lou Anders kindly quoted a wisecrack of mine about “those who thirst for the foamy gray poison of respectability” in a post which sparked an interesting discussion, and the quote was picked up by Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist and io9, not exactly in the Oh-my-God-what-a-genius acclaimy way one would always prefer to be quoted. But it suddenly occurred to me that those that are begging for genre-respect always achieve the opposite. They’re like Rodney Dangerfield, only they can’t smell their own flop sweat. So I thought I would kindly point it out, that being the kind of guy I am.
After not posting through most of September, I seem to be posting a lot lately, but I should mention that I was recently interviewed by Randolph Carter of “Grinding to Valhalla” (here). And the guys from “Sci Fi Guys Book Review” talked to me last week for a podcast that should be appearing soon.
While I’ve been mostly incommunicado, Dave Freer has been running a project to finance taking his family’s pets along when the family emigrates to Australia. It’s a “Storyteller’s Bowl” concept: he publishes a new installment of his upcoming book, Save the Dragons, online every time donations reach a certain threshold. It’s a great cause–and a great story, as a matter of fact.
Two squirrels, both alike in dignity,
in the Great Black Swamp, where we lay our scene,
from innate squirr’liness run up two trees
in one synchronic rush ‘cross lawny green.
What antic maze, more mad than mating fit,
posses’t the sciurids wild to wildly roam
through street and yard in simultaneous snit
and so adorn the trees of neighbr’ing homes?
Was it the speeding cyclist drove them mad?
The SUVs that hulked along the curb?
Or bright October air that made them glad
until their squirr’ly brains became disturbed?
Damn if I know. I just pedall’d past
as brace of squirrels stood arbor-bound, aghast.
_____
Actually, I think it was walnut intoxication. All the squirrels in town have been acting crazy lately, and the many black-walnut trees in town have been dropping ripe walnuts for weeks so, on the post-hoc-propter-hoc principle that never fails, I conclude the two things have something to do with each other. But none of that fit the meter. I expect Shakespeare had the same sort of problem.
It turns out there is a cure for the summertime blues. Fall!
This Crooked Way is now in stock at Amazon.com. It should be hitting actual shelves in brick-and-mortar stores fairly soon.
It’s already been reviewed, not wholly favorably, by Publishers Weekly. (They didn’t like the ending though they say nice things about some of the episodes.)
1. The obligatory Disney-buys-Marvel joke: “High School Musical: Xavier Institute Edition”. Let’s face it: it couldn’t suck worse than X-Men 3.
2. My son is back and better than ever. His cat Lewis, however, has developed some weird attachment issues from the separation. For instance, Lewis kept running around to block me as I was trying to leave the house this morning–and I’m not even his tertiary Comfort Person. But it seems that nowadays no one is allowed to leave the house without his written permission, and he doesn’t know how to write.
3. My friend Howard Jones got a big splash in the Wall Street Journal for his collections of Harold Lamb’s adventure fiction. A belated “Yay!” for that–they really are great books and Howard has done incredible work bringing the stories back to light.
4. I was reading Ogden’s Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds last night and I saw that Iambilichus claimed the mys- in mystery comes from Greek μῦς (“mouse”). So every mys-tery is really a mouse-tery. This strikes me both as a pretty unlikely etymology and as totally awesome. This fourth item might seem to violate the “Three-Thing Day” rule–unless it is really the first item over again, eternally recurring, like a mouse swallowing his own tail.
1. Inglourious Basterds: The Dirty Dozen meets Mission Impossible in the 7th Circle of Hell. This is not a negative review, unless it sounds like one to you.
2. My son is in out of town this week for a professional conference. It makes me feel impossibly old to type that–and, more importantly, I’m missing him a lot. Still, it’s pretty cool and I hope it goes well for him.
3. It was back to classes for me today. Things have gone pretty well so far: minimal-to-acceptable casualties.
