King of Zembla takes Jeff Ford, Rick Bowes and me to the Zemblan Literary Thunderdome.

With a name like Conservapedia, you know it's unbiased.

(Via Michael Libling.)

New York Times: An Audience-Friendly Theatrical Town, Chicago Is

Epidode #39 of "ShunnCast" is now available, in which Bill faces a bail magistrate, finds himself compelled repeatedly to pantomime his strip search, and contemplates the deep philosophical question of whether or not God protects missionaries. Special "existential dread" episode!

http://www.shunn.net/podcast?id=39

See also shunncast.

Snowflakes ride updrafts
in Brownian reels outside
my twelfth-floor window.

I hope you intrepid New Yorkers will brave the cold and the wind tonight at the South Street Seaport to attend March's entry in the New York Review of Science Fiction Reading Series. I am guest-curating, and I'm very pleased that our readers tonight will be Lauren McLaughlin and Andrea Kail, who both come to written SF from the worlds of visual media.

Lauren McLaughlin spent ten years in the film industry, writing the films Hypercube, Specimen, and Prisoner of Love and producing American Psycho, Buffalo '66 and several others. After a brief stint writing the flash animation series "Maatkara" and the award-wnning "Chi-Chian" for SciFi.com, she abandoned her screen ambitions to write fiction. Her first novel, Cycler, is due from Random House in the fall of 2008. Her short fiction has appeared in Interzone, Year's Best SF, Sybil's Garage and Salon. She is also at work on a science fiction musical about transhumanist love. Her website and blog are available at laurenmclaughlin.net.

A native New Yorker, Andrea Kail is a graduate of the Dramatic Writing Program at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and of the Odyssey Writing Workshop. She has spent 20 years working in New York's film and television industry and is currently the script coordinator at "Late Night with Conan O'Brien." Her first story is set to appear in Issue 6 of Fantasy Magazine, and she was recently named a first-place winner in the Writers of the Future contest with a story that Robert J. Sawyer has called "a knockout" and "Hugo-caliber." Andrea has been advised to say, should anyone ask, that, yes indeed, she is working on a novel.

Should be a great evening. I can't wait! Please come!

MORE INFO

Site redesign in progress!

This entry is a test to check whether or not my new Perl script is working as an automatic cron job. If it is, this entry should automatically be mirrored to my new Moveable Type blog at approximately a quarter to the hour.

I will sit here not watching the clock.

It looks like it's working! I'm pretty pleased with this mirroring script I wrote. I've even been writing my own Moveable Type plugin to help customize my site. More later on all the exciting, grotty details.

I'd like to propose a law. My idea is inspired by a technique I proposed for preventing executives from prioritizing the most egregiously idiotic of projects, but admittedly those stakes are small beer compared to the problem my law would address.

The proposal is simple. Before declaring preemptive (i.e., unprovoked) war, the president would be required to sacrifice a finger.

I'm not talking about a clean amputation, either, with anaesthesia and all those modern niceties. I mean the president's finger would be hacked off with a dull saw, preferably rusty, while he watches. In the most appealing scenario, the amputation would be performed by a surgeon with experience in Civil War reenactments. The surgeon could have whisky, but the president could not.

Also, the stump would be cauterized with a red-hot branding iron.

As you can imagine, the president would have to feel pretty strongly about the necessity of a preemptive war in order to start one. And we could be sure that he was feeling at least a portion of the misery, pain, and suffering he was about to unleash.

Oh, yes, and the amputation would be televised, so we could see how long it took the president to pass out. I'd write my senator and suggest this, but my senator is Hillary Clinton.

So Laura and I went back to see our bowling-champion accountant last night to pick up our taxes. He met us rushing back from dinner at a neighborhood Italian place down the avenue. The news was so good that we went straight over to a bar called Dillinger's for celebratory beer and wings.

Of course, good news is relative, and in this case means the news was not nearly as bad as we feared it would be. We may still be able to afford to move to Chicago and go to Worldcon in Yokohama.

And of course, even if the news had been truly bad, we still would have gone to Dillinger's for consolatory beer and wings. They just wouldn't have tasted quite as good as the celebratory ones.

My main contribution to this evening's CD Mix of the Month Club for March is Into the Lens, a celebration of the great photography in which so many CDMOM-ers seem to indulge.

I'm feeling some urgency about these terrific little get-togethers, since there are only four left to go before moving day, so I'm sneaking in all the extra mixes I can. This time around the just-because-I'm-leaving-soon bonus mix is Four by Four: Four Letter Words from Four Letter Artists, the second volume of my four-volume Four Letter Words series.

There's also great news, in that our CDMOM mom, Lisa, had her baby Sienna yesterday. I feel like we're all aunts and uncles. Congratulations to Lisa and Yves, and to Sienna who will grow up with great parents and lots of good music around.

(The story so far.)

I've just been listening to some Gordon Lightfoot. I'm not familiar with his œuvre beyond the three of four biggest hits, so I was a little puzzled when I heard him singing about the "ghosts of gay porn."

Ah. I learn from the track listing that it's the "Ghosts of Cape Horn." Well, that casts the song in a different light.

Funny enunciation you've got there, Gord.

I'm not sure which would be worse to receive—a head in a box, or, um, something else in a box.

Via quixote317, who provides good contextualization for this meme.

By the way, that should say "Bet you aren't as smart as I."

I don't see the fear of speaking on telephones on this list, but I'm pretty sure I suffer from it. For something like that, I wonder who you call.

John Klima has an important announcement. Listen up!

Epidode #40 of "ShunnCast" is now available, in which Bill faces sentencing at the hands of a philosophical judge, while Joseph Smith faces martyrdom at the hands of an angry mob. Special cameo appearance by the guy who blows up planes!

http://www.shunn.net/podcast?id=40

See also shunncast.

One element of my new site redesign I want to point is my bibliography page. Cross-indexed, cross-referenced, and fully interactive!

I continue to wonder why I didn't switch from hand-crafted HTML pages to Moveable Type years ago.

By the way, suggestions for bibliography interface improvement are very welcome.

In today's mail, I received an invitation to have my biography included in the next Marquis Who's Who in America. I knew already that it was a scam, but if I hadn't I would have guessed as much from the fact that the invitation came to my work address. There's no reason whatsoever for my day job to get me into Who's Who.

A minute or two of searching online led me to an amusing article from Forbes by Tucker Carlson, "The Hall of Lame." To Carlson's catalog of Who's Who shames, I would add this question: Why does Ronnie Spector think it's important for me to know she's a member of the Literary Guild?

The elephants are coming! The elephants are coming!

I went with eleanor and a couple of other friends, wow, maybe three years ago to see the elephants emerge from the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, and it was a sight worth waiting around in the midnight cold for. It's a sight that must be seen one last time.

Via gregvaneekhout:

Everyone knows that a proper landscape drawing contains:

1. a mountain
   
2. a path, like a dirt hiking trail or even a paved highway
   
3. some trees.

The results of your analysis say:

• You tend to pursue many different activities simultaneously. When misfortune does happen, it doesn't actually dishearten you all that much.
• You are a thoughtful and cautious person. You like to think about your method, seeking to pursue your goal in the most effective way.
• You like following the rules and being objective. You are precise and meticulous, and like to evaluate decisions before making them.
• You feel morose and are prone to lethargy.

What does your drawing say about YOU?

My essay "The Missionary Imposition," from Sybil's Garage #2, has just gotten a spiffy new treatment at the hands of Matthew Kressel. Thanks, Matt!

Casting my rubber-stamp of an uncontested SFWA officers ballot early, I missed the opportunity to support the write-in campaigns of John Scalzi and Derryl Murphy. But if I had a time machine I surely would. I surely would.

Ahem, is there a candidate with a time machine?

What a hectic day yesterday was! After most of a frantic morning at the office, I sneaked out to spend an extended lunch hour watching the new independent supernatural thriller First Snow, after which I rushed back to the office to crank out a quick same-day review for SciFi.com, then stayed late at the office working frantically to try to make up for some of the chaos my absence had caused.

At home that night, even with a nice glass of Lagavulin in hand, watching Borat on DVD did little to relax me. Call me not a fan.

This morning Laura and I hauled two rolling suitcases full of books from Queens to the Strand in Manhattan. Nice little payday, and not one of our books was rejected. Laura has really figured out what books they'll take and which ones they won't—which is nice, because the Strand used-book counter I remember from my early days in the city is one characterized by sneering and snobbishness. I like this morning's Strand much better.

Here are a couple of fun little squibs from page 8 of this week's The Week:

Bad week for... Mitt Romney, after the presidential candidate alienated an audience of Cuban Americans in Miami by quoting, in stumbling Spanish, the Communist slogan "Fatherland or death. We shall overcome!" Romney apparently didn't realize that the slogan has been used for decades by Fidel Castro to salute Cuba's revolution.

Only in America Utah state officials have ordered motorist Glenn Eurick to remove the vanity license plate "merlot" from his car, after discovering that Merlot is a type of wine. State law prohibits the names of "intoxicants" on license plates, but Eurick, who has had the plate for 10 years, said most people in the largely Mormon state were puzzled, not offended, by it. "People usually ask us what the words means," he said.

I've acquired a whole lot of mix CDs over the years, from friends, acquaintances, and correspondents, and I've added commercial CDs to my collection after finding them in the stereos of cars I've rented. (This, for instance, is why I own a copy of the Love and Basketball soundtrack.)

But last Wednesday was the first time I've added a mix CD to my collection after finding it in a rental car stereo. And I have to say, it was pretty disappointing. I liked only about a sixth of what's on it. In the future when I have the choice, I'll think I'll stick to mix CDs from sources I trust.

At last! A web site that proves I'm not alone in remembering that obscure but wonderful classic of lost '70s television—Cliffhangers! What? A television series that ends every episode on a cliffhanger? Unthinkable!

God, I hope some enlightened soul puts this on DVD someday. I didn't miss an episode of this as a kid of eleven, at least until my sisters won an argument about what program we were going to watch one night, and I'm still bitter about never having seen the endings of "Stop Susan Williams," "The Secret Empire," and "The Curse of Dracula." (Cliffhangers! was cancelled before "Stop" and "Empire" were concluded.)

I really thought I was the only one who had ever seen this show (which would explain why it vanished without a trace), and sometimes I wondered if I had only imagined it.

Actually, I'm tuning in to catch the latest CIA bulletins.

Sadly, I will miss the Rush Snakes & Arrows tour in New York, as it will arrive in town just after we move. That's okay, though, because I hate going to Jones Beach, and Rush will play Chicago in September!

I am downloading the new single, "Far Cry," from iTunes as we speak.

I'm not writing a lot of short fiction these days, owing mostly to work on novels and memoirs and such, but I'm delighted that John Klima has just bought a story called "Timesink" from me for a future, as yet undetermined issue of Electric Velocipede. This is my fourth story for EV—er, if you count that Perry Slaughter number as one of mine.

John will be responsible for making a couple other of my stories available this very year, when he brings out my chapbook An Alternate History of the 21st Century this summer. Four reprints plus two new stories, and from what I hear there may be some very, very cool artwork too. You'll have to stay tuned for more details on that.

For those of you who've been shocked, shocked, at the revelation that I am not naturally blond, here is a photograph from back when I still proudly wore my natural hair color:

That was 1998. Of course, now if I stopped getting highlights my hair would be a lot less dark than that. Gray, even.

A.R. Yngve writes to tell me that a rather infamous 1987 essay about Ender's Game, "Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman" by Elaine Radford, is now available online.

Ms. Radford makes interesting points, but I have to say I'm not entirely convinced by her argument that Ender is modeled on Hitler. I won't rehash the reasons why here, but I've commented in the past on my own conviction that Ender springs from some of Mormonism's basic myths. I think the correspondences to Hitler's life are probably coincidental.

Still, if you're at all interested in the controversy that continues to rage periodically around Ender's Game, you ought to read Radford's essay.

I woke up this morning to find an inbox flooded with congratulations on being nominated for the Hugo Award! Okay, so the majority of them were copies of one email from gregvaneekhout that inexplicably keeps getting redelivered, but still. Greg can congratulate me on being nominated as many times as he wants!

Just let me say, I am stunned. Which is odd, because the nominees are all informed early, and I've known about this for almost two weeks. But this morning I find I am stunned all over again, even moreso than when I was first informed of the nomination. This is without a doubt the greatest morning of my professional career so far. I am thrilled. The idea that readers out there not only read something I wrote but liked it well enough to nominate it for a Hugo is amazing to me. I am not exaggerating to say this is a childhood dream.

To everyone who read and nominated "Inclination" for best novella, I wish I could hug you all. Thank you!

I will have more to say about this later today, much more, but even Hugo nominees have to go out and walk the dog on Thursday mornings!

Wait, one more thing. We're going to Japan!

A wonderful poem about monsters by Patrick O'Leary.

I promised earlier to write more about the Hugo nominations today, but what I really wanted to do was take some time to do what I was too pressed to do this morning and congratulate everyone else who made the ballot. Particular congratulations to folks I know like Robert Reed, Sheila Williams, Gordon Van Gelder, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, David Hartwell, Kevin Maroney, Gardner Dozois, Gavin Grant & Kelly Link, and John Scalzi!

In the short story category I'm delighted to see tim_pratt, whose "Impossible Dreams" is the kind of story that makes you wish desperately that it was true. It was a pleasure to get to know him at the Blue Heaven workshop last year. I don't know Paolo Bacigalupi well, but I'm very stoked that we'll get to hang out together at this year's Blue Heaven and try to figure out how to write novels. I don't really know anyone in the novel category, either, but I feel related-by-collaboration to Peter Watts, since both he and I have recently written stories with Derryl Murphy.

And then there's paulmelko, a great guy whom I had known for a few years but was lucky enough to really get to know well last year at Blue Heaven. I'm excited for him for the way he's burst onto the scene over the past few years, and for his evident work ethic and commitment to the SF cause via SFWA involvement. But I'm also happy because our two novellas, which appear in the same issue of Asimov's, have managed to garner both Hugo and Nebula nominations. (Hugula, dude!) The only thing that could possibly top this ride is for the two of us to tie for the Hugo.

Of course, as I said in Paul's journal earlier, with Robert Reed, Michael Swanwick, and Robert Charles Wilson, all of whom I admire very much, as fellow nominees, I figure I can just rest easy and enjoy the awards ceremony knowing this is not my year to set off airport security with a rocket in my luggage. (Bob Reed's novella in particular I thought was brilliant.)

That's it for the folks I know. Congratulations now to everybody! Great work, and good luck!

Hey, my good friend and screenwriting partner Christopher Rivera is featured at 365Portraits.com today! Shades of a New York that used to be, or maybe never was.

Here are a couple of Ikea commercials you probably won't see on American television:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03Gctf025qo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFHRAuvjOtQ

Epidode #41 of "ShunnCast" is now available, in which Bill, after only a brief taste of freedom, is told to sit down, shut up, take the money, get on the plane, and pretend the past week never happened.

http://www.shunn.net/podcast?id=41

See also shunncast.