Nick Mamatas's Blog, page 17

Wednesday Quick Notes

Lovecraft Unbound is finally an ebook, with a launch price of 99 cents: amazon, NOOKM, iTunes. This edition does not include the Michael Chabon story from the paperback original, but does, of course, include my Raymond Carver/H.P. Lovecraft mash-up "That of Which We Speak When We Speak of the Unspeakable." I have great affection for this story, as I met Olivia at the reading where I debuted it, and it led to a professional relationship with the publisher, Dark Horse, that led to the release of two of my novels:The Damned Highway and Love Is the Law.. It was also reprinted in Lovecraft's Monsters. The two anthos have both paid out royalties, so it's sweet all around. Don't be suckered by the "paper and pencil" figuring when it comes to short fiction—there are long-term payouts on several levels. But anyway, Lovecraft Unbound! Ninety-nine cents!


Also, launching a new, streamlined version of my class in San Francisco for October:

Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Mysteries, Young Adult, Magical Realism, Chick Lit & More.

6 Sessions

Thursdays 6:30-9:30pm

October 15-Nov 19, 2015

WeWork Bldg. * 25 Taylor St.* San Francisco

Cost: $395

Tell your friends!

Oh noes!

Baby Stalinists on Twitter are mad at me for wondering why people who proclaim a dozen marginalized identities would sign up with Stalin, who'd just kill them all were he around. I might be stricken from the records of "allies", to name something I never was.

Oh sniffy-doo!

Oliver's Name Day!

Oliver isn't a very popular name in Greece, and so there are few choices for Name Day. There's February 3rd, but that is very close to my sister's birthday. So the better choice is today, September 17, which has a few things going on, including the 156 martyrs of Palestine. Among them was Elias, and ελιά is "olive", so there you go! Really, more Olivias celebrate their name day today than Olivers (Olivanos), but it will do. I'd also like Opie to grow up with some affection for Palestine in general.

And to make it do, Opie got a present. Drums!



And we sent him off to nursery school with the Berkeley version of cupcakes (not my idea!)—whole wheat mini-bagels slathered with strawberry cream cheese. I'm sure suddenly one of his classmates will be revealed as a gluten-free vegan two-year-old, but there are limits. I am sure Opie will be greeted by his teachers with a rousing "Happy birthday!" as well, just to round out the confusion, but in the afternoon there will be more drumming, so it should be a good, loud, day.

Short Fiction is Dead

This week I took possession of editor copies of the Russian edition of Haunted Legends (which leaves my name off the cover!), reviewed the galleys for my story, "Exit Through the Gift Shop", which is due to be reprinted in The Year's Best Weird Fiction, reviewed the edits for my piece, "The Person Who Was Followed Around By Men In Pig Masks: A Play In One Act", which will appear as the fiction feature in the next number of the political journal Salvage Zone, and got review copies of my dayjob anthology Hanzai Japan (only eight bucks on Kindle for pre-order, cheap!) out the door.

It's almost like short stories are still a real thing in the tiny corner of the world in which I happen to live. Sweet.

What Is Industrivism?

If you can read this blog, you can use the calendar function to see what happened on 9/11. (Long story short, I was in line of site of the WTC, and spent much of the afternoon sweeping flaming debris off my stoop while waiting to see if my roommate at the time, who took PATH in to the WTC every morning, and my father who worked on the nearby docks, were still alive. I do not care about the 9/11 story of anyone who begins it with "I was watching TV when...")

In happier, if much less important, news, The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk is finally getting some reviews. This extensive one highlights my now free-to-read novelette We Never Sleep:

"We Never Sleep" by Nick Mamatas also conjured up the days of the pulps, and his main character is a pulp writer. The pulp writer has gotten an assignment to write about Industrivism. She needs to write brochures and articles about it, but nobody knows what it is, not even her friend Jake, who works as a guard at a factory, and is the go-between for the enigmatic Old Man and the pulp writer. Jake is haunted by evil dreams, dreams he thinks come from a guilty conscience (he helped in union-busting at a factory as a Pinkerton), but they are truer than he realizes. Mamatas has an ear for ad copy and for dialogue; he understands propaganda; and he puts those skills to excellent use here. It’s an intriguing, fascinating story.

Let's hang out!

...but, you have to pay me. My next eight-week in person class at the SF Writing Institute Writing the Literary Page Turner: A Workshop in Genre Fiction

8 Sessions

Thursdays 6:30-9:30pm

Sept 17-Nov 5 2015

WeWork Bldg. * 25 Taylor St.* San Francisco

Cost: $495

We workshop seven out of eight weeks, so this is a good opportunity to have a chunk of a novel reviewed by your classmates and by heavily prescriptive me.

Also pleased that my latest day job anthology Hanzai Japan is up for pre-order at ibooks and Kindle. Hard copies are currently flooding the distribution networks as well, for the October 20th release date. This is science fiction and fantasy crime (hanzai!) stories from Japan and the West, featuring Hiroshi Sakurazaka (All You Need Is KILL), Carrie Vaughn, and crim writers SJ Rozan, Naomi Hirahara, and Ray Banks, as well as a variety of talents new (Violet LeVoit) and established (Chet Williamson). Pick up a copy!

O Death

Not a good week to know me. An acquaintance from my grad school days has died after a sudden illness. She wanted to be a writer and never quite managed to get published and produced the way she wanted to. Her kids, who I met has tweens, are starting college. Rough stuff.

Also, the new issue of The Big Click is live, with stories by Jim Nisbet and Vito Gulla. It also includes, as part of the editorial, the tribute to Tom Piccirilli I wrote originally for Locus last month.

In a little bit of good news, I am now an award-winning art director.



Communications Arts named Catherynne Valente's The Melancholy of Mechagirl one of the best book covers, and listed artist Yuko Shimizu, designer Fawn Lau, and me as art director. (As editor I am responsible for cover concepts and executions.)

See?




So that was a nice pick-me-up during a dark week. Might have some avant-garde fiction/theater news soon as well.

Sara/Kate

I didn't get online at the dawn of time, but I was there in the late 1980s, on the second set of TinyMUDs after the original. (Chaos, Islandia, etc.). And there, I met sarakate . I was 17, and she was just 19. We were not super-close, not ever, but I always just thought she was great, and admired her from afar, and sometimes from a-near. She was always whip smart, and never flipped out as far as I could see, and these were the days when everyone was having a meltdown approximately once every thirty-six hours or so.

And then we grew up. Of the crowd I ran with (there's a book about us) she was one of the most interesting to talk to. Sally got a degree in civil engineering and then in law, got married, and had two kids, and just so observant—it was the combination of the interest in the material (say, civil engineering) and the social (constructs like law) that made her a pleasure. She rarely updated her LJ, but when she did I always read it closely. When she commented here, or later on my FB, everything she had to say was well-informed and sensible. When we finally met some years ago, after what was then eighteen years of virtual acquaintance, it was because we both finally managed to drop everything to do so, and I was thrilled.

Because Sally wasn't very social on social media—career and kids, you know—our old crowd did not find out that her body was discovered in her car on August 10th until yesterday. Sally had driven out to a park-and-ride and fired a gun into her own chest. Some of us were sending her birthday greetings on Facebook, pushing down the comments from relatives and local friends that took the form of condolences and wishes for a peaceful afterlife.

I was shocked. My first thought was that Sally was murdered. Police are wrong about foul play all the time, aren't they? I was working up the nerve to contact a friend to suggest we raise money to hire a private detective when the word came through that Sally had experienced depression for a long time. Obviously, she and I weren't very close, but even people closer to her than I were thrown for a loop. It's just a terrible terrible thing. Like I told my friend who knew her, if I were to have made a list of all of us from most likely to suicide to least likely to, Sally would have honestly been dead last. In reality, she was first.

I suppose this is where one is supposed to say "If you're depressed, you can always turn to me!" or "If you're depressed, seek out help!" but sometimes friends and help are not enough. All we can really do is just watch out for one another as best we can, and remember that even the bit players in your life might miss you more than you'll ever know.

"We Never Sleep"

In a fit of something or other, if not exactly pique, I decided to put my novelette "We Never Sleep", which appeared earlier this year in The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk, online.

We Never Sleep: A Novelette. Check it out. Buy the book if you like. Share the link on social media if you like. Start an aggressive campaign to get me all the awards that will end in utter defeat if you like, just so you can pretend to have won.

Diesel.

Golden Tones

I recently invited myself onto the podcast Cabbages and Kings to talk about short stories. I had the host read three so we could chat about them.

One I liked: "The Red Tower" by Thomas Ligotti

One I disliked: "If You Were a Dinosaur My Love by Rachel Swirsky

One I wrote: "We Never Sleep", a novelette which appears in the anthology The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk.

So, check it out, short story fans!