Ambrose & Elsewhere

Intrepid editor Lou Anders has just put up a new Morlock story, “Fire and Sleet”, which explains what happened to the phoenix after “A Book of Silences”. It also contains helpful hints on keeping people from reading your mind while you play poker, avoiding fiery death in the claws of immortal predators, etc. News you can use!

Part 2 of my non-awaited discussion of the novels nominated Nebula is now up at the Blog Gate. It contains my first conflict of interest! Not to be missed!

Word on the street is that Amazon and Barnes and Noble online have Blood of Ambrose in stock (with brick-and-mortar stores to follow shortly). Used copies are running $17.00 more expensive than new copies at Amazon–I have no idea what that’s about. Used bookstores trying to snare a few bucks from injudicious collectors, possibly.

My author copies came yesterday, and it was much just like that scene in Back to the Future where George McFly (2.0) receives the copies of his first novel. Except we have fewer but cooler kids than the McFly household, and my spouse wasn’t there, and Biff was not being so much a character as he usually is, and I’m somewhat less suave but also less greasy than Crispin Glover… Well, maybe it wasn’t just like that scene.

It was unspeakably cool, though: the book itself is a beautiful thing, between Dominic Harman’s great cover and the design and the typography. (Fritz Leiber should have had it this good.) I’ve heard good things about the story, but the source is a little biased, so take that with a grain of salt.

Somewhere over the Pacific it is still Wednesday, so I feel that my Blog Gate post of the week is not actually late. (Well, late-ish, maybe.)

Intrepid (and Hugo-nominated) editor Lou Anders (who is busy enough with more important things lately; see a recent interview here) has put up the full text of the Morlock story “A Book of Silences” (originally published in Black Gate 10). This is part of our lead up to the release of Blood of Ambrose next month. Soon will come a novelette-length sequel to “Book of Silences” (in which we find out what happened to the phoenix, and other important matters), and some sample chapters from the novel.

I know I owe the world and the Blog Gate a final Nebulation post. I’ll have to chop it in two, since I haven’t quite laid hands on all the books yet. But I should be able to fire something off on three of the six nominated books later this afternoon. Or, um, perhaps early this evening. Before midnight Pacific time, almost semicertainly.

Franz Kafka International Airport: not as inviting as it sounds.

Maybe the weirdest thing about this joke is the cool professionalism with which the story is delivered by Bobbie Battista, a Peabody-Award-winning journalist I remember seeing frequently on the Headline News Network (back when they actually did news). (MTV also played music videos.) (You’ll have to take my word on this stuff, kids: the world was different back then.)

I was sorry to see that Nicholas Hughes, son of Ted Hughes (the late poet laureate, adapter of Seneca and Euripides, author of Crow etc.) and Sylvia Plath (author of Ariel, The Bell Jar etc.) had taken his own life. Odd but appropriate to think of the son of Hughes and Plath in Alaska, fishing in the wild waters and sitting through those long dark winter nights, those pitiless light-filled summer nights.

My Blog Gate post of the week is finally up, a penultimate Nebulation (about the Nebunovellas, this time). I’m working on the novels, but I may not have them all read by next week’s post: kind of depends on how the week goes. (The plumbing issues have been resolved, though, fortunately.)

Plumbing is the mind-killer.

Plumbing is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

I will face my plumbing.

I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.

Where the plumbing has gone there will be nothing.

Only I will remain.

With a sump pump that works, hopefully. Otherwise we’re going to have to move.

1. Vergil’s Facebook page (seen at Rogue Classicism).

2. The Hobbiton & Barchester panel for Flycon, starting at 2 PM Eastern Daylight Time (11 AM Pacific).