• Goddamn. Thomas M Disch is dead. Committed suicide on July 4. #
• There’s a new book hiding somewhere inside me. I can feel it. I must extract it. With hooks. Or nails. Ropes. A shovel? Not a Hoover. #
• @davidwynne STOP TALKING ABOUT MY PENIS LIKE THAT #
• @freakyfudge And you can keep @templesmith ’s mucus off it, too. You people disgust me. Jesus will come for you in your sleep. With eels. #

(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)

My Storytellers Unplugged column for today. "Think about what you're doing, not how you're doing it."

Shadow Unit: "Vigil"  Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. (more to follow)

---

Right. So that's done. What next?

2008
Revise "The Red in the Sky is Our Blood" (this week or next.)
Revise Bone and Jewel Creatures
Finish Chill (real damned soonish, now, I hope)
Revise One-Eyed Jack and the Suicide King
Write S2 Shadow Unit episodes (looks like 2.5 right now, unless stuff changes.)
Write Boojumverse horror collab with truepenny
Write "Smile"
Write "Snow Dragons"

2009
Rewrite The Sea thy Mistress
Write Patience & Fortitude (if it sells.)
Shadow Unit S3

2016 words on Seven for a Secret today, for a completed submission draft, and I just sent it in.

Boys and girls, it's time for a nice glass of something bad for my liver. And a couple naproxen, because my back has just announced its feelings about me being in this chair since 7 am this morning.

Whew.

Should anyone need to get in touch with me for the next week, feel free to email me at the usual address...I'll try to pick up email daily (but I'm not taking my laptop with me). If you have my cell number, you can feel free to call it.

Hope it's a great week for everyone.

The BMW Museum's kinectic sculpture (via Engadget) nearly blew out my brain...until I saw the strings. Even so, it's amazing...and beautiful:

Clearly I'm allergic to fun. After going to Gasworks park (along with half the city) to watch fireworks, all I've wanted to do is sleep.

When I get to Hell, they're going to make me the IT girl. And NOT for my blinding talent.

I'm the only one in the house who has a clue about our wireless network, but I'm not surefooted enough with it to do things right the first time. So I get everything wrong at first, then run around figuring things out and trying to decipher arcane terms I've never heard of, until I've banged my head against the problem long enough that I manage to fix it. There is also a lot of swearing involved.

This time, when I tried to add a new device, I got the settings wrong. So wrong that, in trying to figure out what I screwed up, I managed to knock out the entire network in various and interesting ways. I spent all day of the 4th rebuilding the whole thing from the factory settings and getting all the computers back online. I was very sad. Okay, no, I was a livid ball of furious hate with (most likely) ridiculously high blood pressure. This is how I get when I'm fixing the computers. The up side is that I now know a whole lot more than I did about the system, and won't make the same mistakes again. The down side is that I probably shaved a few years off my life through sheer irritation. And I'm sure there's lots of new mistakes for me to make later. There always are. Oh, another good thing: the wireless network now functions beautifully in all parts of the house, even the bits that couldn't get a signal before.

We've started watching the old HBO series Carnivale. So far, it's really good. Kind of like finding a new Bradbury story. (Mmmm... Bradbury.) Also, the set design is delicious. I'm really enjoying it.

In June, we went to an event hosted by Clarion West: an interview with William Gibson. It was really interesting to listen to him talk. I should go to more of that sort of thing. Later, at the reception, we got to meet him briefly, and he said nice things about our work, which completely floored me. Pretty awesome.

At the same party, I got to meet Connie Willis, which was embarrassing as can be. I didn't want to barge in on her, so Phil dragged me across the room to where she was standing. Then I completely lost my mind and couldn't say more than "...geeble!" at her. I had nothing intelligent to say. No, that's not it, I just couldn't get anything out. 'Cause I'm a big dork. Phil had to say: "she re-reads your books every year." (Meanwhile, I'm doing my amazing goldfish impression.) Fortunately, she seemed to be used to such things. She was very kind and carried the conversation graciously. What I remember of it involves her suggestion that in addition to rereading her work over and over again, I should read the Mapp and Lucia books. Okay, I will. They look great.

For those who haven't heard me say this before, all of Connie Willis' work is great. To Say Nothing of the Dog is one of my comfort books. I read it when I get too blue, and it never fails to improve my mood. Her short stories are also great pick-me-ups.

Also at the same party, there was amazingly good cake. Seriously GOOD cake. All around, a really enjoyable evening. Even if I did turn into an incoherent puddle of fan goo in front of an author whose work I love. So that's what it feels like...I had no idea...

And lastly, what my kids are currently fighting over: Bananna Sunday. A really cute, funny comic about a girl and her friends and her talking apes. Good stuff.

http://scalzi.com/whatever/?p=976

As noted, a longer write-up on InConJunction is coming up later, but for now, dig on this:

A sketch of yours truly from Howard Tayler, of Schlock Mercenary fame, who was also a Guest of Honor at the convention this weekend. I especially love that he drew me with hair.

Everyone who looked upon it said “dude, that would make an excellent LiveJournal icon.” I agree, although for clarity, one needs to fiddle with the word bubble:

Expect this to start showing up on my LiveJournal comments soon.

In any event, very cool of Howard to do the sketch. Give him link love and go visit his site, please, if in fact you do not visit it already.

They say that relocating to a new state, starting a new type of job, and ending a relationship are three of the most stressful things one can go through (at least under First World political circumstances, for people with their health and only the genteel sort of literary poverty to which I have become accustomed), and doing all three at once over the course of a month is no picnic either.

But we can mark one stressor off -- I just got a call offering me a 2 bedroom apt in Berkeley for the same price I was paying for my 3 bedroom in Jersey City nine years ago. Not too bad, and if stuff gets rough I can always stick someone in that spare room.

Now I have a place to mail my stuff too as well!

Interested parties are directed to the text-based computer game Amnesia (1986) by Disch, which was ahead of its time they say.

I have no idea whether that download is legal or not, but if you are down for some crime, why not try it?

Here's a spoiler page in which you can talk about (or ask me questions about) Ink & Steel.

The years 2001-2007, approximately, on the web were the crazy years. The patchwork years. The years the web was massively and chaotically pumped full of Stuff. 1995-2001 were pretty crazy, of course, but they were checked by connection speed and the limitations of personal publishing. By 2002, broadband was happening over a broader swathe of the world, and blogging had bitten in. Followed by the takeup of bit torrent, YouTube, podcasting, and every other damn thing.

One of the few sane responses to this explosion of production was to assume the role of curator. (Other sane responses include moving to the woods and considering a completion of the work Ted Kaczynski started.) The two most famous examples of same are Jorn Barger’s Robot Wisdom (est. 1997) — Barger is said to have coined the term "weblog" — and Mark Frauenfelder’s Boing Boing (est. 2000 as a weblog, previously a print magazine est. 1988), co-produced for much of its life by Cory Doctorow, David Pescovitz, and Xeni Jardin. The latter, in particular, has spawned countless imitators, all deeply involved in doing the web-work of 2001-2007 — sorting out all the weird crap that’s out there and re-presenting it in some kind of ordered and aesthetically or politically filtered manner for our consideration.

My own filter, on the site diepunyhumans.com from 2002-2004 before I moved that side of things to warrenellis.com, was simply gathering research material. It had occurred to me that if I gathered my internet-based research on to a searchable database — something as simple as a blog — I’d have access to it anywhere I could get an internet connection. Which, for someone who usually travels with mobile devices, was kind of a big deal. And so I’ve found myself calling up reference through a Web TV five thousand miles from home while writing on a Treo handheld device and foldout keyboard in order to meet a deadline, before now.

In the shift from there to warrenellis.com, I’ve taken great pleasure in reporting the doings of my network of mad and beautiful acquaintances, further personalising the curation process. But it is, regardless, a curation process.

Anyway. That’s been the job of half the web, for the last several years — collating links from the other half of the web. Last year, I started getting a little itchy about this.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could stand up now and say, okay, these are the post-curation years? The world does not need another linkblog. What is required, frankly, is what we’re supposed to call “content” these days. When I were a lad, back in the age of steam, we called this “original material.” Put another way: we like it when Cory and Xeni are the copy/paste editors for the internet, but we like it better when Cory writes a book and Xeni makes an episode of BoingBoingTV.

(In fact, if you read any of the abhorrent comments threads on BoingBoing, you could be forgiven for coming away with the notion that its readership would be happy if it shut down tomorrow.)

(It’s also notable, I think, that my favourite “new” groupblogs — Ectomo, Coilhouse, Inferior4+1 — don’t just link and go. But anyway.)

And, frankly, no-one’s going to do a better job of being the internet’s copy/paste editors than the BB crew anyway. They have the time, they have the money, they have the setup, they have the audience and they have the momentum of nearly a decade in the job. Nobody needs another linkblog like that. There are already thousands of them. The job of curation is being taken care of. Look ahead.

The weblog has evolved to the point where, today, it’s possibly the most effective way of transmitting material that any of us could have imagined. Look at Tumblr. It’s the easiest thing in the world for writers to use — and also artists, photographers, videographers, spoken-word artists, musicians and a dozen other things. Imagine a jewellery maker, a laptop musician, a performance artist, a cartoonist and a short-story writer getting together on a single Tumblr to make themselves an internet channel. The tools are all there, baked right into the site for free. Not groupblogging so much as groupcasting.

And with a million people all madly curating the web — in many cases, trying to put your link in their curational record before someone else does — getting linked up isn’t exactly hard any more. These aren’t the days of begging for space on someone’s jumpstation anymore.

The above is, as Simon Reynolds puts it, “not fully baked.” I want to come back to this once I’ve cleared this flu out of my system — which is why I have this bottle of whisky — and cleared out some of the work backlog.

(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)

Yesterday I took the kids to the Tall Ships festival in Tacoma. I enjoyed it a lot. The kids, less so; after we'd boarded the ships and looked at them, they got whiny and bored, even after I bribed them with funnel cake and smoothies, the ingrates. They perked up when we found a tent displaying old weapons and devices from the Age of Sail: flintlock pistols, a blunderbuss, a rifle with bayonet attachment, swords and daggers and cannonballs, and a spyglass.

I have a bit of advice for anyone intending to go to this festival: ARRIVE EARLY. We got there early in the day and had to wait in line about 45 minutes to see the ships. By the time we'd finished boarding, the line had more than doubled in length, and a placard said it was a 2 1/2 hour wait. I could never have survived a 2 1/2 hour line with the kids.

It was drizzling when we left the house, but I am a Seattle veteran. I put sunblock on all of us, stuffed our raincoats into a backpack, and set out. By the end of the day, we'd seen both rain and sunshine, and were glad of the precautions.

Look, Captain Jack Sparrow was at the festival!



( Read more; photos and commentary )

Hello there

I was in the neighbourhood, checking things out and I cannot help but recognize that I have just passed the 2500 mark on this here livejournal friend list. Do you know that this more people than there were enrolled in my whole university? That's a fact.

It's pretty hard to actually know that many people, but I am lucky to get so many nice comments for the pictures I post here that I'd like to know some things! So I came up with an idea! Everyone knows I make comics with my younger self, we tend to disagree on some things but it works out in the end. They can be pretty telling as to what this lady is all about, plus, they are really a treat to make. What about you?

I'd like to invite anyone who is inclined to post their own conversation with a little self right here, and maybe we'll get to know each other a bit, and have some fun with it. I know some of you draw because I've totally seen you do it.

(Anyway if you ask me, these are the sorts of things that make livejournal so enjoyable, really)



edit- I just came back here and whoa

edit edit - damn you guys like your dinosaurs

All right, novella. Tonight, either you go down, or I do.

*rolls up sleeves and makes a pot of tea*

I am listening to Gogol Bordello's album "Super Taranta", and it struck me that this is *exactly* the kind of music that Da Boyz would love. Lionel Hutz's accent is exactly what i imagine the Jaeger accent to sound like... plus he wears an impressive hat ;)

I'm not sure how to embed YouTube videos in LJ posts yet, but search for Gogol Bordello on Youtube and you'll find plenty...

Any other suggestions for Jaeger music?

   

Ellen Datlow writes:

I've just found out that Tom Disch committed suicide in his apartment on July 2nd. He was found by a friend who lives a few blocks away.

I'm shocked, saddened, but not very surprised. Tom had been depressed for several years and was especially hit by the death of his longtime partner Charles Naylor. He also was very worried about being evicted from the rent controlled apartment he lived in for decades.

His lj is tomsdisch.

I enjoyed On SF, a collection of essays that came out a couple of years ago. Nearly picked up his current novel just two days ago but decided against as I'd just have to pack it.

Ellen Datlow, Mort Castle, and I were interviewed by the online magazine Dark Scribe. It may be of interest to some people. Check it out, though it isn't quite a "roundtable" but really three distinct interviews using the same questions:

Genre Roundtable: Revealing the Secret Minds of Editors.