This is too good to pass up. It's a rant by Charlie Jane Anders about the literary and sci-fi ghettos, and what might happen if they crossed. And there's a numbered list.

 Number 6 from that list of what to expect if SF went more literary: A fetishization of a certain kind of person. People joke about the literary story revolving around suburban malaise, but it's sort of true nonetheless. During my year of reading piles of literary books, I read tons of near-identical stories of growing up with a nanny, or being a soccer mom, or being a business dad. For some reason, a lot of literary novels start with a funeral, forcing a successful thirtysomething or fortysomething person to return to his/her family and uncover the buried secrets of his/her childhood. (Think Sweet Home Alabama, but not quite as cute.) In science fiction terms, this would mean more stories about middle managers, shuttling around below decks on the starcruiser and wondering if this is all there is to life.

Read it here.

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Jeff VanderMeer's Predator book is in bookstores, and causing some (author included) to do spontaneous dances of glee. Ever wonder what happens when one of America's foremost fantasists puts his hand to the alien enterprise? Read and find out.

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And more from the man who manages to do more than most men...

 Check out Jeff VanderMeer's review of Don Delillo's "Falling Man" and Slattery's "Liberation." The Slattery book looks like a must-read, especially now. 

 Read it here. 

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Dude. The wovel helps brain power!

 How? The BBC explains...

 "For middle aged and older people at least, using the internet helps boost brain power, research suggests.

A University of California Los Angeles team found searching the web stimulates centres in the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning."

 Read the whole story here...

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Tom Piccirilli has gone mainstream on blogspot. Congrats Pic!

Read it here, and get the scoop on his upcoming titles, including The Coldest Mile and Shadow Season, plus get the news on the books he's writing. 

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I’ve been to two conferences in three weeks. While Superman could keep this schedule, I’m afraid that it drove me into the ground a bit. After World Fantasy in Calgary, I returned to Portland with a cold the size of the Rockies. A week in bed still had me coughing and sniffling. I sent my last packet in for grad school on Friday, and then went to the PubWest conference here in Portland. All very fun, but all very tiring.

However. I have a renewed commitment to letting you know what’s going on with Underland. What’s really going on . . .

The best part of World Fantasy was the bar at the end of the day, when we stopped being editors and publishers and writers, and we started being human. The best part of the PubWest conference was the publisher’s round circle, which put twenty of us in a room and let us talk, in confidence, about what we saw going on in the industry.

Sure, we laughed, us publishers. But not because what we were hearing as funny.

The economy is effecting us book sellers and publishers as much as it’s effecting everybody else. And we don’t know what’s going to happen when the dust settles. There’s a sense of taking hold of the handle bar and waiting for the worst of the curves to be through. We’ll survive, but we don’t know how we’ll look a year, or two years, from now.

From my perspective, that’s not bad news. Change is constant, it seems. We can ride with it, or we can fight it. I’m trying to ride with it, and to keep as open a mind as possible. I count myself lucky to be entering this fray at this time. Change has always breed possibility, for those willing and able to keep their eyes open.

We’ll see how that goes . . .

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The Portland wovel team--Jesse Pollack the web guru, Rachel Miller the proofreading goddess, Jemiah Jefferson the genius wovelist, and me--took a field trip to the OPB studios here in town, to do a long-dstance ISDN interview with Rick Kleffel. We put on the earphones, sat in comfy chairs, and tried to be both personable and intellegent. I think we did all right.

Rick was an amazing interviewer. He talked us in, step by step, and I was reminded yet again how much of an art interviewing is.  Afterward, I wished I was still a smoker... My hands were shaking, I was that nervous.

Here's a picture... (slightly stretched... I'm working on that!)

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Some blogs are about my professional life, some blogs are about my personal life. This one is about my sister's personal life...

My sister had her first child on my birthday, after more than 24 hours of labor. She had her second child on Sunday, after a little less than 12 hours of labor. The first was a girl, and I'm totally in love. The second is a boy, and I can't wait to fall in love. Congrats, Sis! 

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It's Halloween back home, but here in Calgary it's World Fantasy.

I arrived yesterday with enough time to nap, take a sneak peak at the schedule, scan down the panels and discover, to my pleasure and amusment, my name on one of the panels. I showered, dressed, grabbed some food, and off I went for my first panel at my first WFC...

 The panel was on the topic of indie presses. It's was an honor to be included among the publishers of presses I admire. Thanks, Randy, for putting me on (even though I haven't managed to meet you yet...) 

Still, I'm very aware of being the new kid on the block. It seems as if most convention goers have been coming for years. The publishers I talked to last night have all made the mistakes I'm probably making now, they've gone through their growth stages, they've changed as publishing has changed. And they've all seen publishers come and go.

Every convention teaches me something new. This convention is teaching me that I need and want to stick around for many years to come. 

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