The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror was one of the anthologies that I eagerly waited for every year, especially since back in the day, not a lot of anthologies made it to our shores.
Here's the table of contents for this year's upcoming release (from Small Beer Press):
“The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics” Daniel Abraham
“The Gray Boy’s Work” M.T. Anderson
“Troll” (poem) Nathalie Anderson
“The Monsters of Heaven” Nathan Ballingrud
“The Forest” Laird Barron
“Reversal of Fortune” Holly Black
“The House of Mechanical Pain” Chaz Brenchley
“The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” Ted Chiang
“Scenes of Hell” (poem) Billy Collins
“Toother” Terry Dowling
“The Drowned Life” Jeffrey Ford
“The Last Worders” Karen Joy Fowler
“Monkey” (poem) Eliza Griswold
“Up the Fire Road” Eileen Gunn
“Winter’s Wife” Elizabeth Hand
“A Perfect and Unmappable Grace” Jack Haringa
“The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change” Kij Johnson
“The Boulder” Lucy Kemnitzer
“The Hill” Tanith Lee
“The Ape Man” Alexander MacBride
“Lovers (Jafaar the Winged)” (poem) Khaled Mattawa
“Hum Drum” Gary McMahon
“A Thing Forbidden” Donald Mead
“England and Nowhere” Tim Nickels
“Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz Go to War Again” Garth Nix
“Valentine, July Heat Wave” Joyce Carol Oates
“Mr. Poo Poo” Reggie Oliver
“Fragrant Goddess” Paul Park
“Holiday” M. Rickert
“Vampires in the Lemon Grove” Karen Russell
“Rats” Veronica Schanoes
“The Fiddler of Bayou Teche” Delia Sherman
“Village Smart” (poem) Maggie Smith
“The Tenth Muse” William Browning Spencer
“Follow Me Home” Sonya Taaffe
“The Swing” Don Tumasonis
“Closet Dreams” Lisa Tuttle
“The Seven Devils of Central California” Catherynne M. Valente
“Splitfoot” Paul Walther
“The Hide” Liz Williams
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Internations Horror Guild Award nominees announced
From Ellen Datlow:
PETER STRAUB has been named as this year's International Horror Guild Living Legend. Mr. Straub is the author of numerous short stories and novellas as well as seventeen novels (including two co-authored with Stephen King), which have been translated into more than twenty foreign languages. The recipient of many awards and honors, he has achieved both critical acclaim and commercial success in a notable career in which he has continually reshaped and expanded the field of dark literature.
The International Horror Guild Awards have been presented annually since 1995. Based on public recommendations, the juried awards recognize outstanding achievements in the field of Horror and Dark Fantasy. Nominations are derived from recommendations made by the public and the judges' knowledge of the field. This year's awards will be presented Friday evening, October 31, 2008 in an online presentation via its Web site (www.horroraward.org).
INTERNATIONAL HORROR GUILD NOMINATIONS for WORKS from 2007
NOVEL
* Grin of the Dark. Ramsey Campbell (PS Publishing)
* Generation Loss. Elizabeth Hand (Small Beer Press)
* The Missing. Sarah Langan (HarperCollns)
* Season of the Witch. Natasha Mostert (Dutton)
* The Terror. Dan Simmons (Little, Brown & Company)
FICTION COLLECTION
* The Imago Sequence and Other Stories. Laird Barron (Night Shade Books)
* Plots and Misadventures. Stephen Gallagher (Subterranean Press)
* Shadows Kith and Kin. Joe R. Lansdale (Subterranean Press)
* Masques of Satan. Reggie Oliver (Ash Tree Press)
* Dagger Key and Other Stories. Lucius Shepard (PS Publishing)
LONG FICTION
* Procession of the Black Sloth. Laird Barron (The Imago Sequence: Night Shade Books)
* The Man in the Picture: A Ghost Story. Susan Hill (Profile)
* Softspoken. Lucius Shepard (Night Shade Books)
* The Scalding Rooms. Conrad Williams (PS Publishing)
MID-LENGTH FICTION
* "The Janus Tree". Glen Hirshberg (Inferno: Tor)
* "Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed". Steven Duffy (At Ease with the Dead: Ash Tree Press)
* "The Bone Man". Fredric S. Durbin (Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 2007)
* "Closet Dreams". Lisa Tuttle (Postscripts 10: PS Publishing)
SHORT FICTION
* "Digging Deep". Ramsey Campbell (Phobic: Comma Press)
* "Honey in the Wound". Nancy Etchemendy (The Restless Dead: Candlewick Press)
* "The Tank". Paul Finch (At Ease with the Dead: Ash Tree Press)
* "Splitfoot". Paul Walther (New Genre 5, Spring 2007)
* "The Great White Bed". Don Webb (Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 2007)
ANTHOLOGY
* Inferno. Ellen Datlow, editor (Tor)
* Summer Chills. Stephen Jones, editor (Carroll & Graf)
* American Supernatural Tales. S.T. Joshi, editor (Penguin)
* Strange Tales Volume II. Rosalie Parker, editor (Tartarus Press)
* At Ease with the Dead. Barbara and Christopher Roden, editors (Ash Tree Press)
NON-FICTION
* Frankenstein: A Cultural History. Susan Tyler Hitchcock (W.W. Norton & Company)
* Mario Bava: All the Colors of Dark. Tim Lucas (Video Watchdog)
* Warnings to the Curious: A Sheaf of Criticism on M.R. James. Rosemary Pardoe & S.T. Joshi, eds. (Hippocampus Press)
* Sides. Peter Straub (Borderlands Press)
* The Science of Stephen King. Bob Weinberg & Lois M. Gresh (John Wiley)
PERIODICAL
* Black Static
* Dead Reckonings
* The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
* Postscripts
* Weird Tales
ILLUSTRATED NARRATIVE
* Scalped: Indian Country. Jason Aaron (writer) R.M. Gu�ra (artist) (Vertigo/DC Comics)
* The Nightmare Factory. Thomas Ligotti (creator/writer), Joe Harris & Stuart Moore (writers), Ben Templesmith, Michael Gaydos, Colleen Doran & Ted McKeever (illustrators) (Fox Atomic/Harper Paperbacks)
* The Blot. Tom Neely (I Will Destroy You)
* The Arrival. Shaun Tan (Arthur A. Levine Books)
* Wormwood Gentleman Corpse: Birds, Bees, Blood & Beer. Ben Templesmith (IDW)
ART
* Didier Cottier for Exhibit at Utopiales, Nantes, France, November 2007
* David Ho for his body of work
* Elizabeth McGrath for "The Incurable Disorder", Billy Shire Fine Arts, December 2007
* Chris Mars for "New Salem", Jonathan Levine Gallery, October 2007
* Mike Mignola for cover & illustrations: Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire (Bantam Spectra)
The IHG Awards
The International Horror Guild Awards are now in their thirteenth year. Based on public recommendations, the juried awards recognize outstanding achievements in the field of Horror and Dark Fantasy. [List of recipients and nominees] Nominations are derived from recommendations made by the public and the judges' knowledge of the field. Edward Bryant, Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Ann Kennedy, and Hank Wagner currently adjudicate. Paula Guran is the award administrator. The awards are overseen by a non-profit corporation, The Mirabundus Project, Inc.
If you have a recommendation to make for a work published in 2007, please check the award rules, and email your recommendations to info@horroraward.org. It is also important to provide, whenever possible, copies of the work to the judges.
PETER STRAUB has been named as this year's International Horror Guild Living Legend. Mr. Straub is the author of numerous short stories and novellas as well as seventeen novels (including two co-authored with Stephen King), which have been translated into more than twenty foreign languages. The recipient of many awards and honors, he has achieved both critical acclaim and commercial success in a notable career in which he has continually reshaped and expanded the field of dark literature.
The International Horror Guild Awards have been presented annually since 1995. Based on public recommendations, the juried awards recognize outstanding achievements in the field of Horror and Dark Fantasy. Nominations are derived from recommendations made by the public and the judges' knowledge of the field. This year's awards will be presented Friday evening, October 31, 2008 in an online presentation via its Web site (www.horroraward.org).
INTERNATIONAL HORROR GUILD NOMINATIONS for WORKS from 2007
NOVEL
* Grin of the Dark. Ramsey Campbell (PS Publishing)
* Generation Loss. Elizabeth Hand (Small Beer Press)
* The Missing. Sarah Langan (HarperCollns)
* Season of the Witch. Natasha Mostert (Dutton)
* The Terror. Dan Simmons (Little, Brown & Company)
FICTION COLLECTION
* The Imago Sequence and Other Stories. Laird Barron (Night Shade Books)
* Plots and Misadventures. Stephen Gallagher (Subterranean Press)
* Shadows Kith and Kin. Joe R. Lansdale (Subterranean Press)
* Masques of Satan. Reggie Oliver (Ash Tree Press)
* Dagger Key and Other Stories. Lucius Shepard (PS Publishing)
LONG FICTION
* Procession of the Black Sloth. Laird Barron (The Imago Sequence: Night Shade Books)
* The Man in the Picture: A Ghost Story. Susan Hill (Profile)
* Softspoken. Lucius Shepard (Night Shade Books)
* The Scalding Rooms. Conrad Williams (PS Publishing)
MID-LENGTH FICTION
* "The Janus Tree". Glen Hirshberg (Inferno: Tor)
* "Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed". Steven Duffy (At Ease with the Dead: Ash Tree Press)
* "The Bone Man". Fredric S. Durbin (Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 2007)
* "Closet Dreams". Lisa Tuttle (Postscripts 10: PS Publishing)
SHORT FICTION
* "Digging Deep". Ramsey Campbell (Phobic: Comma Press)
* "Honey in the Wound". Nancy Etchemendy (The Restless Dead: Candlewick Press)
* "The Tank". Paul Finch (At Ease with the Dead: Ash Tree Press)
* "Splitfoot". Paul Walther (New Genre 5, Spring 2007)
* "The Great White Bed". Don Webb (Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 2007)
ANTHOLOGY
* Inferno. Ellen Datlow, editor (Tor)
* Summer Chills. Stephen Jones, editor (Carroll & Graf)
* American Supernatural Tales. S.T. Joshi, editor (Penguin)
* Strange Tales Volume II. Rosalie Parker, editor (Tartarus Press)
* At Ease with the Dead. Barbara and Christopher Roden, editors (Ash Tree Press)
NON-FICTION
* Frankenstein: A Cultural History. Susan Tyler Hitchcock (W.W. Norton & Company)
* Mario Bava: All the Colors of Dark. Tim Lucas (Video Watchdog)
* Warnings to the Curious: A Sheaf of Criticism on M.R. James. Rosemary Pardoe & S.T. Joshi, eds. (Hippocampus Press)
* Sides. Peter Straub (Borderlands Press)
* The Science of Stephen King. Bob Weinberg & Lois M. Gresh (John Wiley)
PERIODICAL
* Black Static
* Dead Reckonings
* The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
* Postscripts
* Weird Tales
ILLUSTRATED NARRATIVE
* Scalped: Indian Country. Jason Aaron (writer) R.M. Gu�ra (artist) (Vertigo/DC Comics)
* The Nightmare Factory. Thomas Ligotti (creator/writer), Joe Harris & Stuart Moore (writers), Ben Templesmith, Michael Gaydos, Colleen Doran & Ted McKeever (illustrators) (Fox Atomic/Harper Paperbacks)
* The Blot. Tom Neely (I Will Destroy You)
* The Arrival. Shaun Tan (Arthur A. Levine Books)
* Wormwood Gentleman Corpse: Birds, Bees, Blood & Beer. Ben Templesmith (IDW)
ART
* Didier Cottier for Exhibit at Utopiales, Nantes, France, November 2007
* David Ho for his body of work
* Elizabeth McGrath for "The Incurable Disorder", Billy Shire Fine Arts, December 2007
* Chris Mars for "New Salem", Jonathan Levine Gallery, October 2007
* Mike Mignola for cover & illustrations: Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire (Bantam Spectra)
The IHG Awards
The International Horror Guild Awards are now in their thirteenth year. Based on public recommendations, the juried awards recognize outstanding achievements in the field of Horror and Dark Fantasy. [List of recipients and nominees] Nominations are derived from recommendations made by the public and the judges' knowledge of the field. Edward Bryant, Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Ann Kennedy, and Hank Wagner currently adjudicate. Paula Guran is the award administrator. The awards are overseen by a non-profit corporation, The Mirabundus Project, Inc.
If you have a recommendation to make for a work published in 2007, please check the award rules, and email your recommendations to info@horroraward.org. It is also important to provide, whenever possible, copies of the work to the judges.
Friday, July 11, 2008
If You Happen To Be Lacking A Story For Anthology Builder...
I'm not a prolific writer, or an extremely talented one at that (at least at this point in time), but I do hope to one day become a great writer and the only way that's going to happen is if I keep on writing and get published.
In line with that, if you are interested in availing of the services of Anthology Builder, you might want to check out my story. It's not particularly long and I hope readers enjoy it.
And in the rare instance that you're ordering the anthology just for my sake, might I recommend other Filipino speculative fiction authors such as Dean Francis Alfar and Alexander Osias? (Now if only there were more Filipino writers in Anthology Builder--names that don't begin with "Dean" and end with "Alfar"--one could create a Filipino fantasy/science fiction anthology and have it shipped anywhere in the world.)
And in the off-chance that you're still reading this, you also might want to check out the following authors:
In line with that, if you are interested in availing of the services of Anthology Builder, you might want to check out my story. It's not particularly long and I hope readers enjoy it.
And in the rare instance that you're ordering the anthology just for my sake, might I recommend other Filipino speculative fiction authors such as Dean Francis Alfar and Alexander Osias? (Now if only there were more Filipino writers in Anthology Builder--names that don't begin with "Dean" and end with "Alfar"--one could create a Filipino fantasy/science fiction anthology and have it shipped anywhere in the world.)
And in the off-chance that you're still reading this, you also might want to check out the following authors:
Podcast Focus: Astronomy Cast
Every Friday, I'll talk about a podcast or two that catches my fancy.
URL: http://www.astronomycast.com/
RSS Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/astronomycast
Description: It's not the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop but it's probably the next best thing as this podcast talks about Astronomy in lay man's terms. Questions like what is the shape of the universe, what happens when you enter a black hole, or its recent shows, humans on Mars. I'm personally not into Astronomy but this podcast is compelling and expands my knowledge of science (who knows, it all might come in handy some day when you write that SF novel...).
URL: http://www.astronomycast.com/RSS Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/astronomycast
Description: It's not the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop but it's probably the next best thing as this podcast talks about Astronomy in lay man's terms. Questions like what is the shape of the universe, what happens when you enter a black hole, or its recent shows, humans on Mars. I'm personally not into Astronomy but this podcast is compelling and expands my knowledge of science (who knows, it all might come in handy some day when you write that SF novel...).
Podcast Focus: Radio Free Hommlet
Every Friday, I'll talk about a podcast or two that catches my fancy.
URL: http://shiftways.com
RSS Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/RadioFreeHommlet
Description: The new kid on the block, Radio Free Hommlet is a comprehensive D&D 4E podcast that can probably best be described as an "audio magazine" podcast. They have various segments, everything from focusing on the pros and cons of a specific character class, to answering your rules questions. If you're curious or have an interest in D&D 4E, you might want to try this podcast.
URL: http://shiftways.comRSS Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/RadioFreeHommlet
Description: The new kid on the block, Radio Free Hommlet is a comprehensive D&D 4E podcast that can probably best be described as an "audio magazine" podcast. They have various segments, everything from focusing on the pros and cons of a specific character class, to answering your rules questions. If you're curious or have an interest in D&D 4E, you might want to try this podcast.
Top 10 Best-Sellers as of 2008/7/6
From USA Today's best-seller list (you can find out their basis here):
- Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
- New Moon by Stephenie Meyer
- Someday Soon by Debbie Macomber
- The Shack by William P. Young
- Fast Track by Fern Michaels
- Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer
- Fearless Fourteen by Janet Evanovich
- The MacGregor Grooms by Nora Roberts
- Double Talk: An FBI Thriller by Catherine Coulter
- The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch, Jeffrey Zaslow
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Authors and RPGs
I don't know why but in the past two months, two online fiction magazines have non-fiction articles on tabletop RPGs.
The first (which I missed when I first looked at Strange Horizons earlier this week) is Lingua Rpga and the Writer by Steve Berman. Here, he gets testimonials from authors like Holly Black, Will Ludwigsen, Cecil Castellucci, and Jim Hines on their experiences with D&D. [Link courtesy of Matt Staggs.]
The second is from Clarkesworld two months ago. Justine Howe and Jason S. Ridler interview a variety of authors and get the pros and cons of the influence of RPGs.
While I'm at it, I'll throw you a bonus deal as well. Local author Dean Alfar shares his gaming experiences and how it has helped not just his writing but his business as well.
The first (which I missed when I first looked at Strange Horizons earlier this week) is Lingua Rpga and the Writer by Steve Berman. Here, he gets testimonials from authors like Holly Black, Will Ludwigsen, Cecil Castellucci, and Jim Hines on their experiences with D&D. [Link courtesy of Matt Staggs.]
The second is from Clarkesworld two months ago. Justine Howe and Jason S. Ridler interview a variety of authors and get the pros and cons of the influence of RPGs.
While I'm at it, I'll throw you a bonus deal as well. Local author Dean Alfar shares his gaming experiences and how it has helped not just his writing but his business as well.
2008/7/10 Tabletop RPG Podcasts
Every Thursday, I post links to various podcasts that deals with tabletop RPGs.
Tabletop RPG (Mostly)
General Discussions/Reviews/Everything Else
- Pulp Gamer episodes: Customer Service (GTS Seminar).
- Geek Radio Daily episodes: July 3, 7, 8, 9.
- Fist Full of Comics and Games episodes: Batman: Gotham Knight Preview (Inner Circle), JJ and Sean Talk 4th Edition (Investigating Mind Games), Monarchs Comics Briefing for July 2, 2008.
- Fell Calls!, a podcast on the Iron Kingdoms, episodes: Circle Girls Like It Off-Road.
- Secret Identity episodes: Issue #121.
- The Order 66 Podcast, a podcast on d20 Star Wars Saga Edition, episodes: Dark Kramer Does Not Listen to Rush.
- 3.5 Private Sanctuary, a D&D 3.5 podcast, episodes: Episode 40.
- Animalcast episodes: Episode 52.
- RPGCast episodes: Explorers of Thyme.
- Gateway to the Megaverse episodes: Machinations of Perez.
- Bear Swarm! episodes: Knock Knock.
- The Tome Show episodes: Game Night.
- Fear the Boot episodes: Resurrection, Roleplaying Games, and You, Drawing Out Shy Players.
- Ninja vs. Pirates episodes: The Haunted Game & Playtesting.
- Geekerati episodes: The 100 Best Westerns of All Time? A Response the the WWA List.
- Wandering Geek Podcast episodes: Cell Phone Tricks With Walt.
- Wapcaplets episodes: Obligatory D&D 4E Episode.
- All Games Considered episodes: Presenting the Dead Gentlemen.
- Amorphous Blob Games episodes: Best of the Best, Different Genres and You.
- Have Games Will Travel episodes: After Action Report for Origins 2008.
- Nuketown Radio Active episodes: One Geeky Summer.
- Yog-Sothoth episodes: Yog Meet Audio Recording from UK Games Expo 2008.
- The Secret Lair episodes: Origins 20008.
- The Game's The Thing episodes: Origins Game Fair 2008 Wrap-Up.
- Secret Life of Girl Gamers episodes: D&D 4th Edition Overview.
- The Podge Cast episodes: A Podgecast is Born.
- Role Playing Public Radio episodes: Bargain Bin Bonanza.
- Secret Identity episodes: Issue #121 where they re-air an old interview with the late Michael Turner.
- Fist Full of Comics and Games episodes: Charlie Christman, State Fair Comic; Michael Duron, Locoduck Productions; Todd Gnacinski, Satellite State comic; Antidote Comics; Scott Story, Johnny Saturn Comic; Steve Forde, Go Hero (direct link unavailable as of press time); Mike Bear, Artist for Devil’s Due Comics; Mark Sparacio Artist from Moonstone Comics; Sean Ward; Sean Fernald, Producer of the Motion Picture Red Velvet; Cliff Simon.
- HeadGames Podcast episodes: Origins 2008 Interview with Reiner Knizia!
- Master Plan episodes: Designing from Other Games 4, Clint Krause on Roanoke.
- Theory from the Closet episodes: Peter Adkison.
- The Tome Show episodes: Mearls at Origins 08.
- Atomic Array episodes: Colonial Gothic.
- Pulp Gamer episodes: Eddy Webb and John Chambers of White Wolf.
- Heroic Cthulhu episodes: How to Make a Character Revisited, I Want Candy! (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), Dark Rivals (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10), Roller Derby (1, 2, 3, 4), Weather Girl (1, 2, 3).
- RPGMP3 episodes: Keep on the Shadowfell (3).
- Dragon Magazine podcasts: Penny Arcade/PVP Podcast (6).
- Gamer's Haven episodes: Dungeons & Dragons: Kingdom of Thoth (7).
- Colorado Story Games episodes: Primetime Adventures Session 1 (2).
- Canon Puncture episodes: CP-AP Star Wars L PTA (4).
- Virtual Play episodes: Overhead at Origins, Classic Traveller (1, 2), Star Hero.
- Rolemonkeys episodes: Feng Shui (2).
Wednesday, July 09, 2008
Plug: Guest Blogging at Ecstatic Days
Writer Jeff VanderMeer's Ecstatic Days blog will feature a different guest blogger each week through October 10. The excitement kicks off with a celebration of the fiction of noir master Jack O'Connell, followed by, among others, NYT bestseller Michelle Richmond, Tiptree Award-winning fantasist Catherynne M. Valente, Soft Skull editor Richard Nash, Canadian writer/activist Minister Faust, Indian writer Vandana Singh, Brazilian critic Fabio Fernandes, crime writer Meg Gardiner, Romanian editor and publisher Horia Ursu, Russian-born novelist Ekaterina Sedia, publicist Matt Staggs, short story writer John Langan, and writer-editor Cat Rambo. Come visit and experience what promises to be a lively and diverse discussion. In recent months, Ecstatic Days posts on kosher imaginary animals post and writing a novel in two months both resulted in book deals. The blog is known for being a sometimes humorous, sometimes serious exploration of books, pop culture, and more.
http://www.jeffvandermeer.com
Plug: Jennifer Pelland at the Nebula Awards Site
In case you haven't heard of it yet, check out the Nebula Awards site where you'll find information, interviews, and blog entries. In case you haven't checked it out, Jen West has an interview with Nancy Kress.
Anyway, a few weeks ago, I got to interview the talented Jennifer Pelland. It's now up and you can check out what she has to say.
Anyway, a few weeks ago, I got to interview the talented Jennifer Pelland. It's now up and you can check out what she has to say.
Special Feature: Countdown to Fully Booked and Neil Gaiman's 3rd Philippine Graphic Fiction Awards
Every Wednesday until August, I'll have a special feature on the 3rd Philippine Graphic Fiction Awards.
Just reminding Filipino writers, comic artists, and filmmakers that the deadline for the 3rd Philippine Graphic Fiction Awards (see guidelines here) is on Sept. 30, 2008. (On a side note, Filipino speculative fiction authors should also remember that the deadline for Philippine Speculative Fiction Vol. 4 is on September 15, 2008.)
Now the cash prize for first place in the competition (based on the previous two years) is P100,000.00 (roughly $2,222.00) and that's certainly more than half my annual salary so both aspiring and existing authors, artists, and film directors have a lucrative chance to not only gain prestige but earn some lucrative cash as well.
Anyway, to help promote the event and encourage participants (this is all voluntary on my part and neither Fully Booked nor Neil Gaiman is supporting this blog), I'll be posting some interviews I had with the previous winners starting next Wednesday (at the very least, you can look forward to interviews with Joey Nacino and Ian Casocot and Andrew Drilon).
In the meantime, you can treat yourself to some excerpts from Neil Gaiman's speech during last year's awarding ceremonies. You can also download and listen to the RAW mp3 of the event here (Gaiman starts talking at around 5 minutes into the recording).
Would you tell us Neil why you're so involved in these awards?
So I came up around two and a half years ago and one of the first things I had to do, more or less getting off the plane was judge an art competition and I was astonished by how good the art was and then I kept going around and talking to people and meeting people. And I got a sense of how smart everybody was, how good they were, how really cleaned up on science fiction and fantasy and horror and how much science fiction and fantasy and horror was part of the walk of life of society here. How well they understood it and nobody seemed to be writing it. There wasn't really a tradition of Filipino fantasy and Filipino horror despite the fact that you got the coolest and richest folklore in the world. And you do! And you have such amazing, intelligent people. When I grew up, when I was around fourteen, the best artists in American comics were Filipinos. They were Alex Nino, they were Alfredo Alcala, they were Tony de Zuniga, Nestor Rodondo. There were lots of them and they were amazing. And then these days you don't seem to be playing very much, just started at it again. There are a few people who are playing on a global stage. And I thought I wanted to encourage them so I phoned up Jaime Daez from Fully Booked and I said okay, I will deal with you. We talked about it a bit and I would put up the prize money personally if you run the competition. So that's the way it turned up. I put up the prize money. Putting up the prize money is the easy bit. Jaime Daez, they really have the hard bit because they have to organize it and then to run it. About a year ago, the first round of winners were announced. And then a year later, I've written the introduction and we have two collections of the winners so you can actually read them. It has the winners and has a lot of good stuff in there, but if you're can't be good enough to be runner up or worse, what we'll be doing later today is announce the winners of this year's competition and we'll always talk, I think I'll mention it now. We're going into year three, we're going to do the competition for year three and the quality of the prose entries I actually thought was excellent in year one. You have better writers, better writing than we did in year one. The comics entries weren't actually as good. I should warn you ahead of time that when we talked this evening, we have no first prize. We have two second prizes and a third prizes but no first which we thought was good enough. And we got the --- that we're not giving you long enough so so you have about a year. This year. We are announcing right now, there will be a third year.
How would you describe or define Filipino Unrealism?
Filipino Unrealism is really, it began as a comment by me out of reading about why are the things coming out of the Philippines is if you come to the Philippines, people will give you things. And they give you really cool things you've never encountered before if you're me like Calamansi juice and strange little wooden carvings with enormous penises. Even Chocnut. One of the things I was given in quantity were books of the literature of the Philippines including short story collections and great Filipino short stories and I've been reading this stuff and loving it and wondering why do you have an amazing tradition here of Filipino realistic literature. There's great realism but there doesn't seem to be any unrealism. There's no tradition of great fantastic literature, of great horror, of great science fiction. That's really what I'm looking to pick up the --- tube to use an English expression and see if we can push on Filipino unrealism.
How can writers of fiction, especially speculative fiction, engage themselves in social causes? How can writers be agents of change?
Which is a really good question because I think that sometimes people think that you cannot talk about something real when you're talking about something unreal. Whereas I think it's the other way around. I think it's very very hard sometimes to talk about things that people are very very familiar with. Why did I write ---? I could have written a novel about homelessness in London and nobody would have ever read it except those people who are interested in homelessness in London. And instead I wrote a novel called Neverwhere. And somewhere you get --- taken away from him about the people who fall through the cracks and I get to write about the dispossessed, I get to write about the people whose lives fall through the cracks, I get to write about the homeless and the land in a way which makes people read the book and look at the homeless encounter possibly for the first time because it's talking about the way that all the people who've become invisible to the people who have jobs working income. But you can do that better sometimes when you sort of go around the prom.... in the same way that you talk about these feelings that you had when you were a kid whether you're gay, whether you're sloppy, whether you're weird, whether you were a nerd, whether you were lonely. And suddenly you're a --- and you could have helped that in a way...
Just reminding Filipino writers, comic artists, and filmmakers that the deadline for the 3rd Philippine Graphic Fiction Awards (see guidelines here) is on Sept. 30, 2008. (On a side note, Filipino speculative fiction authors should also remember that the deadline for Philippine Speculative Fiction Vol. 4 is on September 15, 2008.)
Now the cash prize for first place in the competition (based on the previous two years) is P100,000.00 (roughly $2,222.00) and that's certainly more than half my annual salary so both aspiring and existing authors, artists, and film directors have a lucrative chance to not only gain prestige but earn some lucrative cash as well.
Anyway, to help promote the event and encourage participants (this is all voluntary on my part and neither Fully Booked nor Neil Gaiman is supporting this blog), I'll be posting some interviews I had with the previous winners starting next Wednesday (at the very least, you can look forward to interviews with Joey Nacino and Ian Casocot and Andrew Drilon).
In the meantime, you can treat yourself to some excerpts from Neil Gaiman's speech during last year's awarding ceremonies. You can also download and listen to the RAW mp3 of the event here (Gaiman starts talking at around 5 minutes into the recording).
Would you tell us Neil why you're so involved in these awards?
So I came up around two and a half years ago and one of the first things I had to do, more or less getting off the plane was judge an art competition and I was astonished by how good the art was and then I kept going around and talking to people and meeting people. And I got a sense of how smart everybody was, how good they were, how really cleaned up on science fiction and fantasy and horror and how much science fiction and fantasy and horror was part of the walk of life of society here. How well they understood it and nobody seemed to be writing it. There wasn't really a tradition of Filipino fantasy and Filipino horror despite the fact that you got the coolest and richest folklore in the world. And you do! And you have such amazing, intelligent people. When I grew up, when I was around fourteen, the best artists in American comics were Filipinos. They were Alex Nino, they were Alfredo Alcala, they were Tony de Zuniga, Nestor Rodondo. There were lots of them and they were amazing. And then these days you don't seem to be playing very much, just started at it again. There are a few people who are playing on a global stage. And I thought I wanted to encourage them so I phoned up Jaime Daez from Fully Booked and I said okay, I will deal with you. We talked about it a bit and I would put up the prize money personally if you run the competition. So that's the way it turned up. I put up the prize money. Putting up the prize money is the easy bit. Jaime Daez, they really have the hard bit because they have to organize it and then to run it. About a year ago, the first round of winners were announced. And then a year later, I've written the introduction and we have two collections of the winners so you can actually read them. It has the winners and has a lot of good stuff in there, but if you're can't be good enough to be runner up or worse, what we'll be doing later today is announce the winners of this year's competition and we'll always talk, I think I'll mention it now. We're going into year three, we're going to do the competition for year three and the quality of the prose entries I actually thought was excellent in year one. You have better writers, better writing than we did in year one. The comics entries weren't actually as good. I should warn you ahead of time that when we talked this evening, we have no first prize. We have two second prizes and a third prizes but no first which we thought was good enough. And we got the --- that we're not giving you long enough so so you have about a year. This year. We are announcing right now, there will be a third year.
How would you describe or define Filipino Unrealism?
Filipino Unrealism is really, it began as a comment by me out of reading about why are the things coming out of the Philippines is if you come to the Philippines, people will give you things. And they give you really cool things you've never encountered before if you're me like Calamansi juice and strange little wooden carvings with enormous penises. Even Chocnut. One of the things I was given in quantity were books of the literature of the Philippines including short story collections and great Filipino short stories and I've been reading this stuff and loving it and wondering why do you have an amazing tradition here of Filipino realistic literature. There's great realism but there doesn't seem to be any unrealism. There's no tradition of great fantastic literature, of great horror, of great science fiction. That's really what I'm looking to pick up the --- tube to use an English expression and see if we can push on Filipino unrealism.
How can writers of fiction, especially speculative fiction, engage themselves in social causes? How can writers be agents of change?
Which is a really good question because I think that sometimes people think that you cannot talk about something real when you're talking about something unreal. Whereas I think it's the other way around. I think it's very very hard sometimes to talk about things that people are very very familiar with. Why did I write ---? I could have written a novel about homelessness in London and nobody would have ever read it except those people who are interested in homelessness in London. And instead I wrote a novel called Neverwhere. And somewhere you get --- taken away from him about the people who fall through the cracks and I get to write about the dispossessed, I get to write about the people whose lives fall through the cracks, I get to write about the homeless and the land in a way which makes people read the book and look at the homeless encounter possibly for the first time because it's talking about the way that all the people who've become invisible to the people who have jobs working income. But you can do that better sometimes when you sort of go around the prom.... in the same way that you talk about these feelings that you had when you were a kid whether you're gay, whether you're sloppy, whether you're weird, whether you were a nerd, whether you were lonely. And suddenly you're a --- and you could have helped that in a way...
Essay: Exploring the Frontiers of Fiction
Every Wednesday, I have an essay on any topic that catches my fancy!
I don’t claim to be someone who’s well-read but these past few months, I’ve been reading more and more material (thanks in part to this blog—not just the book reviews but reading up on the works of various authors/editors/publishers I plan to interview) and it only edifies my belief of how ignorant I am. In many ways, I see this as a good thing. There are lots of people out there who are bored at what they do and expect no surprises such as the guy stuck in a monotonous job. For me, that’s not the case when I’m reading books—at least if I allow myself to explore the possibilities. I mean nothing’s preventing me from reading the same material I’ve always been reading and obviously, if that’s the type of reading habit that I nurture, the books I read will be formulaic. But if I’m open to exposing myself to new authors, new genres, new styles of writing, it’s a vast frontier out there.
Now most readers have a favorite book or two. There’ll be various reasons as to why certain books call out to us, everything from nostalgia (“this was the first book that I read…”) to quality (“Shakespeare writes in a way that I can’t explain…”). It’s like having a favorite sport or hobby: it’s not that we’re incapable of appreciating various other hobbies but we tend to stick to one or two because there’s something about that particular activity that resonates with us. Thankfully, reading a particular book doesn’t take so much time, at least compared to a hobby where you need to train your body or spend much time finding and collecting exotic material. There’s really no limit as to how many favorite books we can have. But for some people, they do limit their number of favorite books. Well, on one hand, it’s difficult to hold a conversation when all you’re doing is spouting off an infinite number of titles and authors. On the other hand, I think it has to do with making an impression on us. Many people remember the first time they tackle J. R. R. Tolkien, or H. P. Lovecraft, or Shirley Jackson, or Ernest Hemingway, or Edgar Allan Poe, or Agatha Christie, or –insert established author here-. I think it has to do with paradigm shifts—the works of such authors makes us think: I never knew this type of fiction was possible! Taking my Tolkien example, that’s why some fans will constantly cite Tolkien (because of the new cosmology he establishes) but not other high fantasy authors. As much as they might enjoy Ramond E. Feist or Terry Brooks or –insert high fantasy author here-, the reader didn’t have a new outlook once they read such material. (This experience is all subjective of course; E. E. Doc Smith for example should be one of the must-reads of space opera but if you become acquainted with space opera through other mediums or a different author, E. E. Doc Smith will read trite and cliché even if that wasn’t the case during his era.)
For many people, the problem I think is capturing that “eureka” moment, especially in an era where the mass market publishers tend to take little risk (that’s not to say they don’t make the occasional experimental foray) and churn out formulaic material. So the real dilemma is finding those “eureka” books and perhaps a misconception is that they’re simply too few. Well, I’d like to qualify that statement. Those “eureka” books are too few when compared to the number of books and publications being printed every year but as far as a human lifetime goes, it’s my opinion that we have more than enough. Take the list of literary canon, both past and present, for example. That’s a long list of books to read (and I’ll be the first one to admit, I haven’t read a quarter of those books, much less all of it). Then slightly drifting away from literary canon are the literature of various countries and cultures, whether it’s Japan, China, Russia, Germany, Australia, Argentinia, or the Philippines. And then close to my heart are the various genres which have histories of their own. If all one did was read all the good books in the world (and that’s a big if!), I still don’t think one would get to read everything.
Now in searching for this treasure trove of reading material, there are two ways of approaching this endeavor. The most common way is to look back at literature’s history. If you’re tackling horror for example, it might mean going as far back as Edgar Allan Poe and going through Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, H. P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, M. R. James, etc. Sounds pretty conventional and the progress of literature should be evident. (However, a caveat here is that it’s been my experience is that writing has changed over the years so one might not necessarily be a fan of an old writing style.) That's also why I value publishers who reprint previously out-of-print authors. I remember a time when I couldn't find any hard copies of Lovecraft's works and was wondering who the hell was this H. P. Lovecraft guy and why was he often mentioned by authors.
The other method--and what personally excites me--is reading contemporary authors. I mean it’s important to look back at history but we can’t neglect our present writers either. Who are the good writers and who are the not-so-good ones? Everyone will have opinions and I think this is the best time to find your own reading preference, especially when there’s no “canon” to rely on. A lot of writers out there are both acknowledged and unacknowledged. In previous years, I was impressed by the fiction of Banana Yoshimoto, Chuck Palahniuk, George R. R. Martin, Haruki Murakami, Jeffrey Ford, Jeff VanderMeer, Orson Scott Card, Patricia McKillip, etc. Now for readers of this blog, some of those names might be no-brainers (and I’m sure you’ll have your own list of people that impressed you but I didn’t mention). Just goes to show how much reading up I need to do. Of course in this year alone, I’ve also discovered some fantastic authors that sent chills down my spine: Tim Pratt, Ted Chiang, Joe Hill, Elizabeth Hand, Martin Millar, Paul Tremblay, Theodora Goss, Zoran Zivkovic, Elizabeth Ziemska, etc. Again, some of those writers have been writing for more than a decade while others have made their debut only recently. For me, it's fantastic discovering these authors and I know that this won't be the last time I'll be surprised by someone's writing.
And then there are the not-so-apparent situations which I'll attempt to describe. This week, we mourn the passing of a talented writer, Thomas M. Disch. I'll be honest: I didn't know who Disch was until various people started posting tributes to him. I've never read any of his books or poems or essays or video games. Or so I thought. And then one of the blog entries I saw had the poster of The Brave Little Toaster up. Now I have fond albeit vague memories of this animated feature and something stirred within me when I saw the poster. I wouldn't call The Brave Little Toaster one of my favorite movies but it's certainly a significant part of my childhood. Apparently, Disch wrote the book/novella and all I can say is wow. That's my eureka moment. I didn't know who Disch was yet he's had this impact on my life all these years. Now I know who to thank and this is a clear instance of awareness triumphing over ignorance.For me, fiction is literally a place where every book has the possibility to surprise me. We've mapped out the continents of the world (well, perhaps not the seabed) but I don't think there's any one person who's familiarized himself or herself with all there is to read. There'll always be a book out there that'll expand your horizons and one of the biggest challenge is if we're ready to seek those books out.
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
Plug: THE SHIRLEY JACKSON AWARDS Fund raiser at KGB bar July 23rd
THE SHIRLEY JACKSON AWARDS
Leading authors read from Shirley Jackson canon to commemorate 60th anniversary of “The Lottery” July 23rd at KGB Bar
In honor of Shirley Jackson, Ellen Datlow will be hosting a reading of Shirley Jackson’s work by award-winning and leading authors of the dark fantastic and horror on July 23rd at the KGB Bar,85 East 4th Street (just off 2nd Ave, upstairs in New York City). Proceeds from the event will benefit the Shirley Jackson Awards.
Shirley Jackson(1916-1965)wrote the classic novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, as well as one of the most famous short stories in the English language, “The Lottery,” first published June 28, 1948 in The New Yorker.
Authors reading from Ms. Jackson’s work are:
F. Brett Cox -- recent stories published in Black Static and Postscripts.
Jeffrey Ford -- author The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Shadow Year.
Jack Ketchum -- author of Joyride, Red, and Hide and Seek.
Carrie Laben’s --nominee in the short story category for the 2007 Shirley Jackson Awards.
John Langan-- Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters, is forthcoming from Prime Books.
Sarah Langan--author of The Keeper and The Missing
Peter Straub-- author of seventeen novels, including Ghost Story, Koko, Mr. X, In the Night Room, and two collaborations with Stephen King.
David Wellington-- author of Monster Island, 13 Bullets, and 99 Coffins.
Jack Womack-- is the author of Ambient, Terraplane, Heathern, Elvissey, Random Acts of Senseless Violence, Let’s Put the Future Behind Us, and Going, Going, Gone.
An evening of live readings from Ms. Jackson’s work will take place at KGB Bar, beginning at 7pm and ending by 9pm. The cover charge is $5 per person.
The Shirley Jackson Awards have been established for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic. The 2007 Shirley Jackson Awards will be presented on Sunday, July 20th 2008, at Readercon 19 in Burlington, Massachusetts.
http://www.ShirleyJacksonAwards.org
Leading authors read from Shirley Jackson canon to commemorate 60th anniversary of “The Lottery” July 23rd at KGB Bar
In honor of Shirley Jackson, Ellen Datlow will be hosting a reading of Shirley Jackson’s work by award-winning and leading authors of the dark fantastic and horror on July 23rd at the KGB Bar,85 East 4th Street (just off 2nd Ave, upstairs in New York City). Proceeds from the event will benefit the Shirley Jackson Awards.
Shirley Jackson(1916-1965)wrote the classic novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, as well as one of the most famous short stories in the English language, “The Lottery,” first published June 28, 1948 in The New Yorker.
Authors reading from Ms. Jackson’s work are:
F. Brett Cox -- recent stories published in Black Static and Postscripts.
Jeffrey Ford -- author The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Shadow Year.
Jack Ketchum -- author of Joyride, Red, and Hide and Seek.
Carrie Laben’s --nominee in the short story category for the 2007 Shirley Jackson Awards.
John Langan-- Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters, is forthcoming from Prime Books.
Sarah Langan--author of The Keeper and The Missing
Peter Straub-- author of seventeen novels, including Ghost Story, Koko, Mr. X, In the Night Room, and two collaborations with Stephen King.
David Wellington-- author of Monster Island, 13 Bullets, and 99 Coffins.
Jack Womack-- is the author of Ambient, Terraplane, Heathern, Elvissey, Random Acts of Senseless Violence, Let’s Put the Future Behind Us, and Going, Going, Gone.
An evening of live readings from Ms. Jackson’s work will take place at KGB Bar, beginning at 7pm and ending by 9pm. The cover charge is $5 per person.
The Shirley Jackson Awards have been established for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic. The 2007 Shirley Jackson Awards will be presented on Sunday, July 20th 2008, at Readercon 19 in Burlington, Massachusetts.
http://www.ShirleyJacksonAwards.org
Plug: KGB FANTASTIC FICTION ONLINE RAFFLE
The Hosts of KGB Fantastic Fiction will raffle off donations from well-known authors, editors, artists, and agents to help support the reading series. Event takes place from July 14th, 2008 through July 28th, 2008. Raffle tickets will be $1 each and can be purchased from www.kgbfantasticfiction.org
New York, NY (July 2008) – The hosts of the KGB Fantastic Fiction reading series in New York City are holding a raffle to help support the series. Well-known artists and professionals have donated prizes (see Partial List of Prizes below) which will be raffled off in July. All proceeds from the raffle will go to support the reading series, which has been a bright star in the speculative fiction scene for more than a decade.
Raffle tickets will cost one dollar US ($1) and can be purchased at www.kgbfantasticfiction.org. You may purchase as many tickets as you want. Tickets will be available from July 14th, 2008 through July 28th, 2008. At midnight on July 28th, raffle winners will be selected randomly for each item and announced on the web. Prizes will be mailed to the lucky winners. (See a more detailed explanation in Raffle Rules).
Partial List of Prizes (a full list is available at the website)
• Story in a bottle by Michael Swanwick
• Tuckerization (your name in a story) by Lucius Shepard
• Tuckerization by Elizabeth Hand
• Tuckerization by Jeffrey Ford
• Pen & Ink drawing of an animal-your choice- by Gahan Wilson
• Original art for a George R. R. Martin novel by Tom Canty
• John Picacio signed print of art for Michael Moorcock novel
• Naomi Novik signed TEMERAIRE first edition
• Your very own wormhole from physicist Michio Kaku
• Peter Straub line-edited manuscript of novel in progress
• Holly Black signed advance copy of GOOD NEIGHBORS
• Original art by Terri Windling
• Carol Emshwiller signed manuscript of THE ABOMINABLE CHILD’S TALE
• Complete set of back issues and lifetime subscription to PARADOX MAGAZINE
• Critique of a short story by Ellen Datlow
• Critique of a short story by Gardner Dozois
• Critique of a short story by Nancy Kress
• Two year subscription to SYBIL’S GARAGE MAGAZINE
• Ray Bradbury limited edition worth $900
• And dozens more prizes on the website…
About KGB Fantastic Fiction
KGB Fantastic Fiction is a monthly reading series held on the third Wednesday of every month at the famous KGB Bar in Manhattan, hosted by Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel. The reading series features luminaries and up-and-comers in speculative fiction. Admission is always free.
Some of our past readers
Joyce Carol Oates, Lucius Shepard, Jeffrey Ford, Scott Westerfeld, Kelly Link, China Miéville, Nancy Kress, Jack Ketchum, Jack McDevitt, Stewart O’Nan, James Patrick Kelly, Barry N. Malzberg, Samuel (Chip) Delaney, Holly Black, Michael Swanwick, Kit Reed, Peter Straub, Andy Duncan, Richard Bowes, Catherynne Valente, Ellen Kushner, Jeff VanderMeer, Naomi Novik, Elizabeth Bear, and others.
A Brief History of the Series
Terry Bisson and Alice K. Turner started the KGB Fantastic Fiction reading series in the late 1990s, attempting to bring together mainstream writers with writers of speculative fiction in order to show, in Alice Turner’s words, “that at a certain level they were plowing exactly the same field.” In the spring of 2000 Ellen Datlow took over for Alice K. Turner and in August 2002 Gavin J. Grant, publisher of Small Beer Press, stepped in for Bisson when he moved to California. Matthew Kressel stepped in for Gavin in April of 2008.
Raffle Rules
Tickets will go on sale from July 14th through July 28th, midnight, Eastern Daylight Time. The raffle will be held on July 28th at midnight. Each item will be raffled off individually. You may purchase as many tickets per item as you would like. For example, you may purchase ten tickets for the “Michael Swanwick message in a bottle” and fifty tickets for the “Peter Straub manuscript.”
Each ticket purchase increases your chances of winning. For example, if you purchase five tickets of the “Jeffrey Ford Tuckerization” and a total of ten tickets have been sold, your odds of winning are 5 out of 10.
For each item, one winner will be chosen at random using a computerized random number generator. The winning names and prizes will be announced on the KGB Fantastic Fiction website. The donating party is responsible for mailing the prize to the lucky winner.
All proceeds from the raffle go to support the reading series.
KGB Fantastic Fiction website:
http://www.kgbfantasticfiction.org
Raffle Information website:
http://www.kgbfantasticfiction.org/?page_id=3
List of All Raffle Items online:
http://www.kgbfantasticfiction.org/store/
Contacts:
Ellen Datlow, KGB co-host, Datlow AT datlow DOT com,
Matthew Kressel, KGB co-host, matt AT sensesfive DOT com,
Mary Robinette Kowal, raffle consultant, mary AT maryrobinettekowal DOT com
Feature: Interview with Rick Kleffel
Every Tuesday, I'll have a feature article posted.
Rick Kleffel is the editor behind the online book review and commentary site The Agony Column. He also does radio interviews and book reviews for KUSP and has been described by Cory Doctorow as "the top science fiction person on NPR nationwide."
Hi! Thanks for doing the interview and I'm a big fan of the site. First off, for those unfamiliar with the website, can you tell them what kind of content is available there?
The Agony Column now includes over 800 book reviews, more than five years of daily book news and commentary, and more than 400 podcast interviews ... sort of. Some of the interviews were posted before there was such a thing as podcasting, so they're in RealAudio only. Currently, I post written book news and audio podcasts five days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, even on holidays, along with a sprinkling of reviews.
Can you tell us how The Agony Column got started? How has it changed over the years?
It's very old. I started reviewing horror and science fiction for Chuq Von Rospach's OtherRealms back in 1987, I think. I wanted to write separate reviews and essays that tied the reviews together as well. Thus I found myself writing round-ups. That went on for a while, and I parlayed it into gigs reviewing for print magazines.
Then the web came along. I was writing book reviews for what was then Andy Fairclough's Horror World, and thought the web with the power of the hyperlink would be the ideal method to pursue my earlier goal. To this end, I wrote an essay called American Cheese, about cheesy American horror novels, which I do love, where I was able to link a mention of a book to a review. That was really the first web incarnation of TAC. The fans of Horrorworld took great offense to my piece. Ah success! But the IT world I was in began to eat my brain and rolled over any spare time.
I left the world of IT in July of 2001. Though I initially made a decision to do nothing, I ended up creating the first rev of The Agony Column website as a place to post my book reviews. Once I started, it became a sort of addiction to see what I could get posted each day.
My original thought was to post book reviews and then write little essays which I called columns. I brought Terry D'Auray on board to help with the reviews and columns and proof my copy when I sent it to her, which wasn't always the case. I met some reviewers in the UK via S1ngularity, a Strange Horizons / TAC-like web "zine" created by Gabe Chouinard. Serena Trowbridge, Stephanie Cage, Katie Dean and Nazalee Raja all wrote reviews for me for a while.
At first the format was just reviews with the occasional column. Then I decided to write book news daily, starting in late 2002. I've been writing book news daily, five days a week since then, even if I'm on vacation or there is a holiday.
Once I started doing radio interviews, I realized I could post them and people could download them. There was no podcasting at the time. Eventually, increasing bandwidth made podcasting possible, so already entrenched in five days a week news, I added once a week podcasting. Last year, in August, I bought a Telos unit to do phone interviews and decided to start podcasting five days a week, and I've done so even when I was on a cruise ship traveling to Mexico. Kind of compulsive, I know. Due to the podcasting workload, I've folded what used to be discrete reviews into the news. So now, it's podcasting and book news five days a week.
Why call it The Agony Column? On your site you define it on your site and reference Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Are you a big fan of Sherlock Holmes?
It is a tip of the hat to Sherlock Holmes; he used to get his jobs out of the Agony [aunt] columns, or look for clues there in what I think we'd call the personals, er Craigslist. Also, when I started reviewing, I was reviewing mostly horror and I wanted to emphasize that with the word "agony". It just stuck with me afterwards.
I was a huge Conan Doyle fan and growing up I remember making special bus trips as a twelve-year old from Covina where I lived into Los Angeles to a "big bookstore" (can't remember the name) that had all the Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger books in these neato-unified editions. I collected them all. Along with Lovecraft, they were among the first books I collected. So yes, Doyle and Homes and stuffy old Challenger are all very dear to me in a sentimental manner.
And while I'm at it, why Trashotron?
Well, I was in a electronics & guitars band, and we had this piece of gear called he Marlboro Quadra Sound Blender. It was an early piece of outboard gear (chorus, reverb and "echo") you could get at Sears with Sears fake-o guitars and amps. I was in charge of it to echo my monophonic Pro One synthesizer. It was very persnickety and would occasionally send a terrifying blast of static through the system that would trash our recordings. I called it the Trashotron.
When I started the website, I liked that as a domain name, as I saw myself as a sort of cultural trash compactor. Bazillions have whinged about the name, publishers and whatnot who would prefer something friendlier, including my wife. I also snagged bookotron and in the fullness of time may switch it all over.
How exactly is your site related to KUSP?
In the early days of TAC, I called up my local NPR affiliate, KUSP, and suggested that I do a radio show based on the columns, essentially reading them aloud. I was sensibly told that this would be a Really Bad Idea, but they did ask if I wanted to interview authors. I said yes. At first then, the interviews were for KUSP and went to TAC later or simultaneously. Then I wheedled my way into NPR and started doing more interviews than KUSP could handle. Now, I generate a lot of audio and slice and dice it to fit into a weekly show I currently host on KUSP. There's currently some doubt as to whether or not that will continue. Currently KUSP has podcasts of the KUSP versions of my interviews which are edited for time and content to fit the one-hour (actually 47 minute) format.
If I'm not mistaken, you're financially supporting the site. What made you decide to do so?
I wanted to keep the site advertising free so there could be no inference that I'm getting support from those I review. I'm a totally independent site and I write about what interests me. I'm an omnivorous reader, and there's a lot of stuff I really like and want to write about. It's almost impossible to keep up, but I do what I can. My reviews and commentary reflect precisely what I think, and nothing else. Supporting the site is possible because it really cheap to do so financially; time is the costly factor. Of course, I'm very much small fry in this world, which helps keep it cheap, I suppose.
Also I hate flashing blipping pop-outing jump-toing advertising. It looks and feels totally shabby, and drives me away from content I often actually know I like. Supporting the site financially is all about integrity. I do spot work for commercial sites and prostitute my writing without a qualm. Pay me, I'll say it. On my site, try to pay me and I'll run away.
I'm a big fan of your podcasts and I was wondering if you had any training doing interviews before or was it something you simply developed with practice.
I've been learning as I go for what, six years now? Before I sat down with the most wonderfully agreeable Alastair Reynolds, I'd never thought to do an interview.
Still, there's a lot *to* learn. I'm just starting to do live interviews in front of audiences, which as it happens, seems pretty easy, so long as I can find a copacetic spot to park my notes. I'd like to pursue that more as opportunities present themselves, or opportunities to make opportunities present themselves.
My biggest question is how do you find the time to read the various books that you cover, write about 'em, and then conduct the interviews?
Hereditary lack of sleep and Evelyn Wood speed reading. I only sleep four or so hours a night, read quickly and have developed a procedure for creating an interview. I'm a creature of habit and routine, so I follow the same routine seven days a week, which involves getting up 3:30 AM and eventually dropping off around eleven PM. In between, I strive to stay organized. I get total support from my wife, while my children are in college. So I have a LOT of time, well, it seems so at first, but I find myself rushing through every second of every day, typing to the point where I wore out the "e", "r", "a", "s" and "c" and Command keys on my last laptop. I organize everything on my laptop -- an Apple -- and use the OS integration of calendars and email, and now the iPhone, so I can get email while I'm out at KQED doing an interview.
What made you decide to expand the site? I remember back in the day when you were doing just one interview per month in the audio archive for example. Now there's one every week day.
I decided to expand the site on a dare to myself and haven't looked back. I can tell you I got a lot better at prepping and performing interviews once I started, and I'm still learning gobs every day.
Eventually, I'd like to do a syndicated radio or TV show. It seemed that it would behoove me to demonstrate that I can come up with content 52 weeks a year; I'm about 7 weeks from having done just that. Of course, the whole syndication deal is probably a pipe dream, but chance favors the prepared mind.
Can you tell us something about the people and contributors who helps out with the site? Can other people contribute or help out?
It's sort of catch as catch can. Terry D'Auray has been with me for a long time. She lives in Santa Cruz, and I know her via my wife, with whom she used to work. She's an incredibly good writer and I hope to get her interviewing for the site somewhere down the line. She balks at the prospect thus far, but I know she'd be good. Mario Guslandi wrote me and asked to write for the site and I like his work a lot. He has a very different perspective and style from me.
I'm now starting to work with Sean Cleveland and Lyle Troxell from KUSP. They host a computer show called GeekSpeak, and they're both huge SF fans, so I'm going to be joining them once in a while to do interviews and shows.
Time is always the issue when it comes to adding people to the site. I do all the HTML, well, Dreamweaver, work myself. All my writing, all the reading, all the audio editing -- which is incredibly time-consuming -- that gives me very little time to do up the HTML for contributors, and these days limits who can contribute. Also, I have a very peculiar vision for what I want to do, and how I want to do it. So that means I'm not for everybody, and conversely, everybody's not for me.
How'd you go about the exclusive fiction and non-fiction on your site? Are you a paying market?
Some of it given to me by the authors. I have thought about paying and have some probably over-reaching ideas, but at the moment no time to enact them.
Can you tell us more about yourself?
I''ll have been married for 25 years this September to my wife Claire. I have two boys, Dietrich and Nathan, both in various stages of college. I used to spend time playing electronic music, (petsgonewild.com is the moldy website) and have a studio that I wish I had more time to use. Did I use the word "compulsive" enough? I enjoy running down on the beach near where I live every morning between five and six AM. There goes an hour of my day! I'd like to get back to writing fiction more diligently, but the creative force seems to be in the website, and I'm trying, at least, to listen to myself.
Did you grow up reading books? What were your favorites back then? What are your favorites now?
Well, of course I grew up reading books. I still have my very fist Winnie the Pooh that Grandma Kleffel gave me. I really started to get into reading with the advent of the space program in the sixties, I'd read Life and Look magazine, then Willy Ley, then Arthur C. Clarke, then Edgar Rice Burroughs. I studied English literature in college and acquired a love of Dickens, Hawthorne, Bronte, the standard greats taught because they are indeed timeless.
Anything else you'd like to promote or plug?
I do work for NPR, and occasionally hope that someday they'll let me have a little show of my own, sort of an amalgam of my website and podcast. When I do pieces for NPR, they have this "Email this Story" button that I shamefully but relentlessly promote in the write-ups. In fact, my last piece on Paolo Bacigalupi is about to fall off the chart as I answer these questions. When those reports come up, the emailing really helps. I think that NPR's audience has similarly omnivorous tastes to mine, and in the best of all possible worlds, I'd love to have a show syndicated for NPR. I need but just look around to determine that as of this moment, we're not living in the best of all possible worlds, alas. So I just run as fast as I can, Wiley Coyote-like, off the edge of the cliff and pretend not to notice there's nothing underneath.
Rick Kleffel is the editor behind the online book review and commentary site The Agony Column. He also does radio interviews and book reviews for KUSP and has been described by Cory Doctorow as "the top science fiction person on NPR nationwide."
Hi! Thanks for doing the interview and I'm a big fan of the site. First off, for those unfamiliar with the website, can you tell them what kind of content is available there?
The Agony Column now includes over 800 book reviews, more than five years of daily book news and commentary, and more than 400 podcast interviews ... sort of. Some of the interviews were posted before there was such a thing as podcasting, so they're in RealAudio only. Currently, I post written book news and audio podcasts five days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, even on holidays, along with a sprinkling of reviews.
Can you tell us how The Agony Column got started? How has it changed over the years?
It's very old. I started reviewing horror and science fiction for Chuq Von Rospach's OtherRealms back in 1987, I think. I wanted to write separate reviews and essays that tied the reviews together as well. Thus I found myself writing round-ups. That went on for a while, and I parlayed it into gigs reviewing for print magazines.
Then the web came along. I was writing book reviews for what was then Andy Fairclough's Horror World, and thought the web with the power of the hyperlink would be the ideal method to pursue my earlier goal. To this end, I wrote an essay called American Cheese, about cheesy American horror novels, which I do love, where I was able to link a mention of a book to a review. That was really the first web incarnation of TAC. The fans of Horrorworld took great offense to my piece. Ah success! But the IT world I was in began to eat my brain and rolled over any spare time.
I left the world of IT in July of 2001. Though I initially made a decision to do nothing, I ended up creating the first rev of The Agony Column website as a place to post my book reviews. Once I started, it became a sort of addiction to see what I could get posted each day.
My original thought was to post book reviews and then write little essays which I called columns. I brought Terry D'Auray on board to help with the reviews and columns and proof my copy when I sent it to her, which wasn't always the case. I met some reviewers in the UK via S1ngularity, a Strange Horizons / TAC-like web "zine" created by Gabe Chouinard. Serena Trowbridge, Stephanie Cage, Katie Dean and Nazalee Raja all wrote reviews for me for a while.
At first the format was just reviews with the occasional column. Then I decided to write book news daily, starting in late 2002. I've been writing book news daily, five days a week since then, even if I'm on vacation or there is a holiday.
Once I started doing radio interviews, I realized I could post them and people could download them. There was no podcasting at the time. Eventually, increasing bandwidth made podcasting possible, so already entrenched in five days a week news, I added once a week podcasting. Last year, in August, I bought a Telos unit to do phone interviews and decided to start podcasting five days a week, and I've done so even when I was on a cruise ship traveling to Mexico. Kind of compulsive, I know. Due to the podcasting workload, I've folded what used to be discrete reviews into the news. So now, it's podcasting and book news five days a week.
Why call it The Agony Column? On your site you define it on your site and reference Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Are you a big fan of Sherlock Holmes?
It is a tip of the hat to Sherlock Holmes; he used to get his jobs out of the Agony [aunt] columns, or look for clues there in what I think we'd call the personals, er Craigslist. Also, when I started reviewing, I was reviewing mostly horror and I wanted to emphasize that with the word "agony". It just stuck with me afterwards.
I was a huge Conan Doyle fan and growing up I remember making special bus trips as a twelve-year old from Covina where I lived into Los Angeles to a "big bookstore" (can't remember the name) that had all the Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger books in these neato-unified editions. I collected them all. Along with Lovecraft, they were among the first books I collected. So yes, Doyle and Homes and stuffy old Challenger are all very dear to me in a sentimental manner.
And while I'm at it, why Trashotron?
Well, I was in a electronics & guitars band, and we had this piece of gear called he Marlboro Quadra Sound Blender. It was an early piece of outboard gear (chorus, reverb and "echo") you could get at Sears with Sears fake-o guitars and amps. I was in charge of it to echo my monophonic Pro One synthesizer. It was very persnickety and would occasionally send a terrifying blast of static through the system that would trash our recordings. I called it the Trashotron.
When I started the website, I liked that as a domain name, as I saw myself as a sort of cultural trash compactor. Bazillions have whinged about the name, publishers and whatnot who would prefer something friendlier, including my wife. I also snagged bookotron and in the fullness of time may switch it all over.
How exactly is your site related to KUSP?
In the early days of TAC, I called up my local NPR affiliate, KUSP, and suggested that I do a radio show based on the columns, essentially reading them aloud. I was sensibly told that this would be a Really Bad Idea, but they did ask if I wanted to interview authors. I said yes. At first then, the interviews were for KUSP and went to TAC later or simultaneously. Then I wheedled my way into NPR and started doing more interviews than KUSP could handle. Now, I generate a lot of audio and slice and dice it to fit into a weekly show I currently host on KUSP. There's currently some doubt as to whether or not that will continue. Currently KUSP has podcasts of the KUSP versions of my interviews which are edited for time and content to fit the one-hour (actually 47 minute) format.
If I'm not mistaken, you're financially supporting the site. What made you decide to do so?
I wanted to keep the site advertising free so there could be no inference that I'm getting support from those I review. I'm a totally independent site and I write about what interests me. I'm an omnivorous reader, and there's a lot of stuff I really like and want to write about. It's almost impossible to keep up, but I do what I can. My reviews and commentary reflect precisely what I think, and nothing else. Supporting the site is possible because it really cheap to do so financially; time is the costly factor. Of course, I'm very much small fry in this world, which helps keep it cheap, I suppose.
Also I hate flashing blipping pop-outing jump-toing advertising. It looks and feels totally shabby, and drives me away from content I often actually know I like. Supporting the site financially is all about integrity. I do spot work for commercial sites and prostitute my writing without a qualm. Pay me, I'll say it. On my site, try to pay me and I'll run away.
I'm a big fan of your podcasts and I was wondering if you had any training doing interviews before or was it something you simply developed with practice.
I've been learning as I go for what, six years now? Before I sat down with the most wonderfully agreeable Alastair Reynolds, I'd never thought to do an interview.
Still, there's a lot *to* learn. I'm just starting to do live interviews in front of audiences, which as it happens, seems pretty easy, so long as I can find a copacetic spot to park my notes. I'd like to pursue that more as opportunities present themselves, or opportunities to make opportunities present themselves.
My biggest question is how do you find the time to read the various books that you cover, write about 'em, and then conduct the interviews?
Hereditary lack of sleep and Evelyn Wood speed reading. I only sleep four or so hours a night, read quickly and have developed a procedure for creating an interview. I'm a creature of habit and routine, so I follow the same routine seven days a week, which involves getting up 3:30 AM and eventually dropping off around eleven PM. In between, I strive to stay organized. I get total support from my wife, while my children are in college. So I have a LOT of time, well, it seems so at first, but I find myself rushing through every second of every day, typing to the point where I wore out the "e", "r", "a", "s" and "c" and Command keys on my last laptop. I organize everything on my laptop -- an Apple -- and use the OS integration of calendars and email, and now the iPhone, so I can get email while I'm out at KQED doing an interview.
What made you decide to expand the site? I remember back in the day when you were doing just one interview per month in the audio archive for example. Now there's one every week day.
I decided to expand the site on a dare to myself and haven't looked back. I can tell you I got a lot better at prepping and performing interviews once I started, and I'm still learning gobs every day.
Eventually, I'd like to do a syndicated radio or TV show. It seemed that it would behoove me to demonstrate that I can come up with content 52 weeks a year; I'm about 7 weeks from having done just that. Of course, the whole syndication deal is probably a pipe dream, but chance favors the prepared mind.
Can you tell us something about the people and contributors who helps out with the site? Can other people contribute or help out?
It's sort of catch as catch can. Terry D'Auray has been with me for a long time. She lives in Santa Cruz, and I know her via my wife, with whom she used to work. She's an incredibly good writer and I hope to get her interviewing for the site somewhere down the line. She balks at the prospect thus far, but I know she'd be good. Mario Guslandi wrote me and asked to write for the site and I like his work a lot. He has a very different perspective and style from me.
I'm now starting to work with Sean Cleveland and Lyle Troxell from KUSP. They host a computer show called GeekSpeak, and they're both huge SF fans, so I'm going to be joining them once in a while to do interviews and shows.
Time is always the issue when it comes to adding people to the site. I do all the HTML, well, Dreamweaver, work myself. All my writing, all the reading, all the audio editing -- which is incredibly time-consuming -- that gives me very little time to do up the HTML for contributors, and these days limits who can contribute. Also, I have a very peculiar vision for what I want to do, and how I want to do it. So that means I'm not for everybody, and conversely, everybody's not for me.
How'd you go about the exclusive fiction and non-fiction on your site? Are you a paying market?
Some of it given to me by the authors. I have thought about paying and have some probably over-reaching ideas, but at the moment no time to enact them.
Can you tell us more about yourself?
I''ll have been married for 25 years this September to my wife Claire. I have two boys, Dietrich and Nathan, both in various stages of college. I used to spend time playing electronic music, (petsgonewild.com is the moldy website) and have a studio that I wish I had more time to use. Did I use the word "compulsive" enough? I enjoy running down on the beach near where I live every morning between five and six AM. There goes an hour of my day! I'd like to get back to writing fiction more diligently, but the creative force seems to be in the website, and I'm trying, at least, to listen to myself.
Did you grow up reading books? What were your favorites back then? What are your favorites now?
Well, of course I grew up reading books. I still have my very fist Winnie the Pooh that Grandma Kleffel gave me. I really started to get into reading with the advent of the space program in the sixties, I'd read Life and Look magazine, then Willy Ley, then Arthur C. Clarke, then Edgar Rice Burroughs. I studied English literature in college and acquired a love of Dickens, Hawthorne, Bronte, the standard greats taught because they are indeed timeless.
Anything else you'd like to promote or plug?
I do work for NPR, and occasionally hope that someday they'll let me have a little show of my own, sort of an amalgam of my website and podcast. When I do pieces for NPR, they have this "Email this Story" button that I shamefully but relentlessly promote in the write-ups. In fact, my last piece on Paolo Bacigalupi is about to fall off the chart as I answer these questions. When those reports come up, the emailing really helps. I think that NPR's audience has similarly omnivorous tastes to mine, and in the best of all possible worlds, I'd love to have a show syndicated for NPR. I need but just look around to determine that as of this moment, we're not living in the best of all possible worlds, alas. So I just run as fast as I can, Wiley Coyote-like, off the edge of the cliff and pretend not to notice there's nothing underneath.
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