To those who’ve e-mailed me over the past 24 hours to offer congratulations for “The Island”‘s Sturgeon Award nomination: thank you. Now I gotta go read up on what this Sturgeon Award thing is.
All About Me.
Category: interviews, public interface, writing newsHere are a few bits and pieces that have been piling up in the background while I raged impotently against imaginary friends who let me down. Dr. Mark McCutcheon, of Athabasca University, is presenting a paper called “The copyfight, science fiction, and social media” at Congress 2010, a Canadian humanities and social science conference. I […]
Lost? Damned Right It Was.
Category: ink on art, rantYou know what the creators of epic, multiyear-arc television shows need? They need a novelist or two on staff. Or a playwright. Somebody who understands that an epic tale needs to be planned in advance, that plot is not something you work out after you’ve already written 90% of the story, that you can’t just […]
The Revenge of the Lizard Queen
Category: ink on art, rantThere are so many little things I could talk about: another doomed award nom, a couple of nifty academic analyses of Blindsight, even an intriguing new finding of a relationship between hand-washing and buyer’s remorse (no, really — it factors into everything from musical preferences to crucifixions). And I’ll post on at least some of […]
It’s Official.
Category: Dumbspeech, writing newsIt took way longer than I was expecting. It was about as pleasant as a date with Andrew Beaudry. I wondered on more than one occasion if it was ever going to happen. But I have just signed a contract with Tor for State of Grace, and the terms are, well, better than they’ve been […]
Detox. Recharge.
Category: SquidgateI have spent the better part of a week lying back and letting the stress hormones leach slowly out of my system. I have been taking my friends off hold one by one, and avoiding deadlines, and growing plump. I’ve been looking at the sky, and marvelling that I’ll be able to look at it […]
Smoke Monsters
Category: SquidgateSo by now you’ve heard, from any of a myriad sources: suspended sentence. Jail time but no jail time, just as long as I paid a relatively small fine ($500), and a somewhat larger bolus of assorted court costs ($1128). And I did pay, promptly if not exactly gladly. If I’d gone to jail I’d […]
Lockdown
Category: SquidgateFlanders asked, in the comments under the Octopus post, when I was going to share my “good news”. Logically Enough surmised that the octopi had got me. The truth is somewhat worse: my good news is on hold for the time being, having been swamped by an unrelated development that is, well, not so good. […]
Coincidence? I Think Not.
Category: biology, marine, misc, writing newsSo, I see that some of you have noticed the endearing footage of the kleptopus making off with some hapless diver’s video camera. (For those who don’t follow the endlessly proliferating comment threads from previous posts, the smoking-gun is here.1) Oh yes, how cute. But how many of you have noticed how closely this act […]