Nick Mamatas's Blog, page 27
November 13, 2014
An LJ dream post?
That's one of Dempow Torishima's illustrations from his novella in Phantasm Japan, about which I had a dream last night. Or, should I say, in which I had a dream last night, in that I was floating upside down in the head of what Torishima's story "Sisyphean" calls "the president." I have a number of recurring dreams, and I suspect this will be one of them. All my recurring dreams involve the vertiginous. Having to climb slowly disintegrating suspension bridges, often with elderly relatives somehow in tow (ice floes, giant baskets) is a common one. Recently, I realized that it comes from this, which I saw too young:
Others involve enormous numbers of steps, often involving either my childhood apartment in Brooklyn or the five (make that five hundred) story walk-up I used to live in in Manhattan; dreaming waking up with everything backwards—that is, the entire room is reversed, just for starters; and the bed I am in turning on its side and sending me hurtling into infinite blackness. The only non-vertiginous recurring dream I have involves dust and spiders made of dust in an old apartment. Sometimes the spiders combine to form giant centipedes.
And sometimes, the dream features YOU.
November 11, 2014
No Interviews, No Comments
I haven't said much about the latest iteration of the current drama in SF, and am embracing this call here. I only mention it here as I got a note from a journalist asking for some on-the-record comments in my LJ Inbox a few moments ago.
November 10, 2014
Monday Late Notes
Horror writer JF Gonzalez, a friendly acquaintance of mine, and a much closer friend of people close to me, has died. Brian Keene has a great appreciation of him here. I always wonder about the mainstream horror guys who started publishing in the late 1990s. If only they were all fifteen years older, they would have been huge! In the same way Poe was born to early to be a best-selling writer, Jesus and others were born a little too late. Jesus did have a couple of mass market books with Leisure, including a super-extreme title that, when I flipped open a random page, involved an infant being torn apart while its mother watched, but he had a lot that was more my speed as well. Check out The Corporation. I especially valued his knowledge of Weird Tales and other old pulp magazines. His column in Lamplight will be missed, at least by me.
Phantasm Japan got a neat little review in Japan Times. It's a capsule review, so worth just presenting the whole thing here:
To outsiders, the overriding image of Japan is of some fantasy land, a place that is impossibly real. However, it’s restricting to place the 20-some works in this book under the single genre of fantasy; fantastical or not, Japan offers perplexing perspectives and gargantuan horizons.
Thus “Phantasm Japan” collects creepy stories about ghosts and demons, science-fiction thrillers and a revenge tale with a strong feminist tone. With titles such as “The Last Packet of Tea,” “Those Who Hunt Monster Hunters” and “Thirty-Eight Observations on the Nature of the Self,” it’s clear that nothing about Japan is black and white: Editors Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington let you know so.
Phantasm Japan got a neat little review in Japan Times. It's a capsule review, so worth just presenting the whole thing here:
To outsiders, the overriding image of Japan is of some fantasy land, a place that is impossibly real. However, it’s restricting to place the 20-some works in this book under the single genre of fantasy; fantastical or not, Japan offers perplexing perspectives and gargantuan horizons.
Thus “Phantasm Japan” collects creepy stories about ghosts and demons, science-fiction thrillers and a revenge tale with a strong feminist tone. With titles such as “The Last Packet of Tea,” “Those Who Hunt Monster Hunters” and “Thirty-Eight Observations on the Nature of the Self,” it’s clear that nothing about Japan is black and white: Editors Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington let you know so.
November 4, 2014
Tuesday Quick Notes
One last bit of birthday fun:
We were at Fenton's, a local ice cream parlor that trades heavily in nostalgia.
Nostalgia is big these days, as can be seen by the re-issues of "classic" toys from Fisher Price. The record player, sadly, is a digital reimagining and not an actual record player/music box. There's no needle on the stylus and it doesn't matter whether or not the record even turns—placing them on the player just signals a stored recording to begin playing. Boo!
It's Election Day today and I'm really most interested in seeing whether middle-class moralists will succeed in assigning a regressive tax on poor communities of color in the name of the anti-corporate left. Between this and the "Avert your eyes, Negro! A flower of white womanhood walks down your streets on this day!" video, this sort of moralistic do-gooderism seems to be making a comeback. I chalk it up to the failure of Occupy and the NGO-industrial complex regaining the initiative among a layer of activists. Soon we'll even see the billionaires involved.
Speaking of the Bay and Occupy politics, a special Elsa Hermens guest-edited Oakland-themed and issue of The Big Click is now live. We opened a third slot for my own short story "Bad Day at Black Bloc" and please check out the other stories too. Buy the issue, subscribe, etc.!
In other news, The Horror Fiction Review gave The Nickronomicon a nice preview-review, writing in part:
By the time you get to the finale, in “On the Occasion of My Retirement,” your brain will have been worked and stretched like silly putty until it's all nice and supple, ready to bend in every weird way. And that's good, because you'll need it that way. (Scroll all the way down to the last item.)
Finally, I liked this post on class and writing from Australia. Check it out.
We were at Fenton's, a local ice cream parlor that trades heavily in nostalgia.
Nostalgia is big these days, as can be seen by the re-issues of "classic" toys from Fisher Price. The record player, sadly, is a digital reimagining and not an actual record player/music box. There's no needle on the stylus and it doesn't matter whether or not the record even turns—placing them on the player just signals a stored recording to begin playing. Boo!
It's Election Day today and I'm really most interested in seeing whether middle-class moralists will succeed in assigning a regressive tax on poor communities of color in the name of the anti-corporate left. Between this and the "Avert your eyes, Negro! A flower of white womanhood walks down your streets on this day!" video, this sort of moralistic do-gooderism seems to be making a comeback. I chalk it up to the failure of Occupy and the NGO-industrial complex regaining the initiative among a layer of activists. Soon we'll even see the billionaires involved.
Speaking of the Bay and Occupy politics, a special Elsa Hermens guest-edited Oakland-themed and issue of The Big Click is now live. We opened a third slot for my own short story "Bad Day at Black Bloc" and please check out the other stories too. Buy the issue, subscribe, etc.!
In other news, The Horror Fiction Review gave The Nickronomicon a nice preview-review, writing in part:
By the time you get to the finale, in “On the Occasion of My Retirement,” your brain will have been worked and stretched like silly putty until it's all nice and supple, ready to bend in every weird way. And that's good, because you'll need it that way. (Scroll all the way down to the last item.)
Finally, I liked this post on class and writing from Australia. Check it out.
November 2, 2014
What a difference a year makes
2013:
2014:
To celebrate, kind of, we went to Vegas! I was a special guest at the Vegas Valley Comic Book Festival, which is a smallish but well put-together and generous one-day convention. The Clark County Library is very nice, and even has a theater for performances—the sort of thing a community college might have. I gave a brief workshop on adapting novels and other material into comics (as I did earlier this year), which mostly went well. We had a bit less than an hour, so after a brief talk about the power and flexibility of the comic panel, I told the class about George, who ran away to join the circus as a kid. He spent the next few decades following the elephants around with a shovel to scoop up their shit, to hose out their assholes when they were blocked up, and occasionally to jam suppositories up their butts. Finally, George is ninety years old and still at it, and the ringmaster comes to him and says, "George! You're ninety years old and have been shoveling elephant shit your whole life! Why don't you retire?"
And George says, "What, and quit show business?"
(This, not so incidentally, is my favorite joke of all time.)
And their assignment was to adapt that. One woman was "not inspired at all" and left, but most of the other people had fun—a father/daughter team turned their version into a sad little tragedy; another workshopper gave George a few friends and a spouse from the sideshow and made his shit-shoveling triumphant. Some used a few too many panels to get the story across, others had pretty good ideas about how to express time passing between panels. So it worked out, I think.
I was also a part of a "breaking into comics" panel and that was fun. My main contribution was to point out that if you want to break in with a comic of your own, make sure the idea is a comic idea and not a toy line idea or a motion picture idea. That and my first rule of freelancing: the first time someone who is legit solicits you to do something instead of the other way around, "Say yes!"
I stuck around for the Hello, The Future! set, which was fun, and bought a couple of things. O and O went to the Springs Preserve with a high school friend of hers with whom she reconnected via Facebook. They had us over for dinner and everything after the con, which was very nice.
Then there was Vegas. We got two free nights at Bally's, an old-school Vegas hotel that was very basic: a steakhouse, table games and slots (I doubled my money!...to ten dollars) and a mentalist sufficiently behind the times that one of his tricks is to stop an audience member's watch. Who the heck even wears a watch anymore? was my thought, though there was a semi-expensive watch store right in the lobby. What can be said about Vegas anyway, except that it's a city that obviously took JG Ballard's dark satires and warnings as blueprints for the future. The strip is just gross and seems premised on providing for sixty-year-olds what they thought was cool when they were sixteen. And there is a whole raft of "What, and quit show business?" types around, playing pianos, singing in doo-wop bands, shaking their asses, and telling jokes about Monica Lewinsky. Thank God she wandered back into the news last month, amirite?
Bally's is connected to Paris—see croissant, above—which was a bit more inventive, with a Disneyland flair and lingerie models dealing at the baby's first single-deck blackjack tables. I did get a very nice kobe beef burger at a bar there, which inspired the drunk next to me to point at my meal and say "I'll have what he got, but well-done!" which I think sums it all up. I actually went to bed at 9:30PM last night, that's how awesome Vegas was. Olivia, a vegetarian, had her best meal at the airport this afternoon as we went home. If you're in the international/Virgin America concourse at LAS, try the PGA Tour Grill, which features some "heart healthy" vegetarian items, which are marked on the menu with a leaf. If you're a normal person, just wait around with your mouth open—someone will put a steak in it and if you pay enough, will manipulate your jaw for you so you can chew and swallow. I, for one, am expert at saying "A gig's a gig!" with my mouth full.
Speaking of gigs, The Nickronomicon pre-sale is over. We pre-sold ninety hard copies via the publisher's website and got fifty-two pre-orders from Kindle, plus some unknown but likely fairly small number of NOOK and Kobo sales. Probably twenty or so between the two, but we won't get those numbers till mid-November. So I'll call it 160 pre-sales, a little short of the 200 I was wishing for, but a pretty good start for an Innsmouth Free Press title.
The online e-tailers are still taking pre-orders, of course, and on Nov 18 they'll all have hard copies as well. Check it out!
2014:
To celebrate, kind of, we went to Vegas! I was a special guest at the Vegas Valley Comic Book Festival, which is a smallish but well put-together and generous one-day convention. The Clark County Library is very nice, and even has a theater for performances—the sort of thing a community college might have. I gave a brief workshop on adapting novels and other material into comics (as I did earlier this year), which mostly went well. We had a bit less than an hour, so after a brief talk about the power and flexibility of the comic panel, I told the class about George, who ran away to join the circus as a kid. He spent the next few decades following the elephants around with a shovel to scoop up their shit, to hose out their assholes when they were blocked up, and occasionally to jam suppositories up their butts. Finally, George is ninety years old and still at it, and the ringmaster comes to him and says, "George! You're ninety years old and have been shoveling elephant shit your whole life! Why don't you retire?"
And George says, "What, and quit show business?"
(This, not so incidentally, is my favorite joke of all time.)
And their assignment was to adapt that. One woman was "not inspired at all" and left, but most of the other people had fun—a father/daughter team turned their version into a sad little tragedy; another workshopper gave George a few friends and a spouse from the sideshow and made his shit-shoveling triumphant. Some used a few too many panels to get the story across, others had pretty good ideas about how to express time passing between panels. So it worked out, I think.
I was also a part of a "breaking into comics" panel and that was fun. My main contribution was to point out that if you want to break in with a comic of your own, make sure the idea is a comic idea and not a toy line idea or a motion picture idea. That and my first rule of freelancing: the first time someone who is legit solicits you to do something instead of the other way around, "Say yes!"
I stuck around for the Hello, The Future! set, which was fun, and bought a couple of things. O and O went to the Springs Preserve with a high school friend of hers with whom she reconnected via Facebook. They had us over for dinner and everything after the con, which was very nice.
Then there was Vegas. We got two free nights at Bally's, an old-school Vegas hotel that was very basic: a steakhouse, table games and slots (I doubled my money!...to ten dollars) and a mentalist sufficiently behind the times that one of his tricks is to stop an audience member's watch. Who the heck even wears a watch anymore? was my thought, though there was a semi-expensive watch store right in the lobby. What can be said about Vegas anyway, except that it's a city that obviously took JG Ballard's dark satires and warnings as blueprints for the future. The strip is just gross and seems premised on providing for sixty-year-olds what they thought was cool when they were sixteen. And there is a whole raft of "What, and quit show business?" types around, playing pianos, singing in doo-wop bands, shaking their asses, and telling jokes about Monica Lewinsky. Thank God she wandered back into the news last month, amirite?
Bally's is connected to Paris—see croissant, above—which was a bit more inventive, with a Disneyland flair and lingerie models dealing at the baby's first single-deck blackjack tables. I did get a very nice kobe beef burger at a bar there, which inspired the drunk next to me to point at my meal and say "I'll have what he got, but well-done!" which I think sums it all up. I actually went to bed at 9:30PM last night, that's how awesome Vegas was. Olivia, a vegetarian, had her best meal at the airport this afternoon as we went home. If you're in the international/Virgin America concourse at LAS, try the PGA Tour Grill, which features some "heart healthy" vegetarian items, which are marked on the menu with a leaf. If you're a normal person, just wait around with your mouth open—someone will put a steak in it and if you pay enough, will manipulate your jaw for you so you can chew and swallow. I, for one, am expert at saying "A gig's a gig!" with my mouth full.
Speaking of gigs, The Nickronomicon pre-sale is over. We pre-sold ninety hard copies via the publisher's website and got fifty-two pre-orders from Kindle, plus some unknown but likely fairly small number of NOOK and Kobo sales. Probably twenty or so between the two, but we won't get those numbers till mid-November. So I'll call it 160 pre-sales, a little short of the 200 I was wishing for, but a pretty good start for an Innsmouth Free Press title.
The online e-tailers are still taking pre-orders, of course, and on Nov 18 they'll all have hard copies as well. Check it out!
October 31, 2014
Halloowwwweeeeen
The Mummy awakens!
I posted this photo in a seedier, or at least less bright, corner of the Internet and was asked if the mummy outfit wasn't cultural appropriation of Egyptian culture. Of course, Hellenized Egyptians were also mummified, plus, OH MY GOD!
But it was still a better response than this past weekend, when Opie wore the outfit to a baby party and someone looked at it and said, "Hey, a zombie costume."
Speaking of horrifying mixes of Egyptian and Greek culture, plus appropriation, this is the last day of The Nickronomicon's pre-sale twenty percent discount offer from the publisher. So buy it! The paper copies will roll out onto various e-tailers in November, for a 11/18 release. Until then, there are links to Amazon Kindle, NOOK, and Kobo. A few days ago, I was even a hit on Kobo, see:
#10 in Fic/Lit Horror and #12 in SF/F Horror. Not bad—I guess I really have my finger on the pulse of the seven people who own Kobos.
Tonight, we head out to Vegas, and tomorrow I'll be at the Vegas Valley Comic Book Festival, giving a workshop and attending a panel:
11 a.m.
Workshop for Writers – Adapting Books and Other Materials into Comics
Literature, film and comics are distinct entities—something that’s awesometacular in a book or a movie can become a giant puddle of “meh” on the comics page. Don’t create a giant puddle of meh. Attend this workshop with editor and writer Nick Mamatas if you are thinking about adapting something to comics. (Note: Workshop is limited to 15 attendees.)
Noon Breaking Into Comics
Turns out there’s no secret handshake or secret password to help you get your foot in the door, but our panel of working professionals (Fillbach Brothers, Russell Lissau, Nick Mamatas and Chris Staros) knows how to promote works, prepare a portfolio, make a good impression, and apply elbow grease to the skids.
So, come on out if you're in Vegas too and want an even surer way to lose all your money than gambling.
October 29, 2014
Well, if you ever write Harry Potter fanfiction with different names, we won't buy THAT, we mean!
So, the dramas of the last several weeks demonstrated fairly conclusively to me that the people who fume "We'll never buy your work again!" don't mean it. (See icon.) What they mean, at best, is "I've never bought your work before and now I really won't do it!" One of the wonders of Bookscan is that you can monitor week-by-week sales of paper books. (One of the wonders of Kindle is that you can monitor sales on a daily basis.) So, all those "Haha, you're off our shopping list forever!" types? No effect at all.
Of course, I'd guessed all this ten years ago, but until now I never had the perfect moment of easy access to fine-grained sales information and a widespread Internet furor to confirm. I'm sure some of the group even actually buy books occasionally—I'm just as sure that there's enough Harry Potter fan fiction in the world that one can read it and nothing else until the sun goes nova and the Earth is a cinder—but to be perfectly blunt, anyone who is totally into Cindy Pon's stuff is not going to be enthusiastic about, say, Love is the Law in the first place. It's an accident of marketing and my own pedigree as a writer (no fancy school, no secured wealth that would allow me to send dozens of stories out to prestigious but non-paying literary journals until such time as the literary establishment deigns to notice me) that puts me on the same shelf as, say, the Anita Blake novels.
Honestly, it's sort of like GamerGate complaining that Depression Quest exists—that it does in no way hinders one's ability to enjoy Final Fantasy in all its many ridiculous iterations.
Anyway, speaking of buying books or not buying them, we have a couple of neat fan reviews of The Nickronomicon:
Jason Wayne Allen writes, in part, the author’s voice and ideas truly proves to be one of the most vital, and relevant in the Lovecraftian genre.
Scott Jones discerns a theme in the stories and then goes on to write If you enjoy Lovecraft even a little, enough to have grown tired of the rehashed Mythos slurry that passes for “weird fiction” these days, you owe it to yourself to get a copy of The Nickronomicon in your hands, and into the hands of your friends. Highly recommended.
The pre-sale ends on Friday. That is, it goes through Friday, as Halloween is a payday this year. Spend your pay check here. If you like ebooks, we have Amazon, Kobo, and NOOK.
Of course, I'd guessed all this ten years ago, but until now I never had the perfect moment of easy access to fine-grained sales information and a widespread Internet furor to confirm. I'm sure some of the group even actually buy books occasionally—I'm just as sure that there's enough Harry Potter fan fiction in the world that one can read it and nothing else until the sun goes nova and the Earth is a cinder—but to be perfectly blunt, anyone who is totally into Cindy Pon's stuff is not going to be enthusiastic about, say, Love is the Law in the first place. It's an accident of marketing and my own pedigree as a writer (no fancy school, no secured wealth that would allow me to send dozens of stories out to prestigious but non-paying literary journals until such time as the literary establishment deigns to notice me) that puts me on the same shelf as, say, the Anita Blake novels.
Honestly, it's sort of like GamerGate complaining that Depression Quest exists—that it does in no way hinders one's ability to enjoy Final Fantasy in all its many ridiculous iterations.
Anyway, speaking of buying books or not buying them, we have a couple of neat fan reviews of The Nickronomicon:
Jason Wayne Allen writes, in part, the author’s voice and ideas truly proves to be one of the most vital, and relevant in the Lovecraftian genre.
Scott Jones discerns a theme in the stories and then goes on to write If you enjoy Lovecraft even a little, enough to have grown tired of the rehashed Mythos slurry that passes for “weird fiction” these days, you owe it to yourself to get a copy of The Nickronomicon in your hands, and into the hands of your friends. Highly recommended.
The pre-sale ends on Friday. That is, it goes through Friday, as Halloween is a payday this year. Spend your pay check here. If you like ebooks, we have Amazon, Kobo, and NOOK.
October 24, 2014
Nickronomicon countdown, Phantasm Japan Q/A
Some little Facebook blurb pre-reviews for The Nickronomicon:
Scott R. Jones read the new novelette in the book, "On the Occasion of My Retirement" and...
it made him giddy.
Jason Wayne "My Middle Name Doesn't Make Me a Serial Killer" Allen posted last night:
"...a masterpiece by a legend." I'll take it.
The pre-sale sends on Halloween. We blew past our goal a while ago and are still moving toward 200, which would be great to hit. Amazon normally doesn't discount micropress titles so heavily, so if you want the book for under eleven bucks, this is the last week you'll be able to get it.
Ebook pre-orders are also neat: Kindle, NOOK, and Kobo. Five bucks. Amazon continues to improve its market position by selling the book at a mere $4.99 though.
Over at the dayjob blog, I've been running brief Q/As with some of the contributors to Phantasm Japan, which you should also totally buy if you want a thrilling and wide-ranging anthology of high weirdness and low morals. We spoke with
James A. Moore, who retold a folktale about snow spirits
Gary A. Braunbeck who tackled FDR's shameful program of internment for Japanese migrants and Japanese-Americans during the Second World War
Lauren Naturale, who wrote a historical fantasy about theater and queerness in turn of the 20th century Tokyo
and Joseph Tomaras, who wrote an avant-garde story about an American man whose personality fissions into honne and tatemae.
Check out the Q/As—some of them get feisty!—and then the book. (And my other book. That's two books, people.)
Scott R. Jones read the new novelette in the book, "On the Occasion of My Retirement" and...
it made him giddy.
Jason Wayne "My Middle Name Doesn't Make Me a Serial Killer" Allen posted last night:
"...a masterpiece by a legend." I'll take it.
The pre-sale sends on Halloween. We blew past our goal a while ago and are still moving toward 200, which would be great to hit. Amazon normally doesn't discount micropress titles so heavily, so if you want the book for under eleven bucks, this is the last week you'll be able to get it.
Ebook pre-orders are also neat: Kindle, NOOK, and Kobo. Five bucks. Amazon continues to improve its market position by selling the book at a mere $4.99 though.
Over at the dayjob blog, I've been running brief Q/As with some of the contributors to Phantasm Japan, which you should also totally buy if you want a thrilling and wide-ranging anthology of high weirdness and low morals. We spoke with
James A. Moore, who retold a folktale about snow spirits
Gary A. Braunbeck who tackled FDR's shameful program of internment for Japanese migrants and Japanese-Americans during the Second World War
Lauren Naturale, who wrote a historical fantasy about theater and queerness in turn of the 20th century Tokyo
and Joseph Tomaras, who wrote an avant-garde story about an American man whose personality fissions into honne and tatemae.
Check out the Q/As—some of them get feisty!—and then the book. (And my other book. That's two books, people.)
October 23, 2014
Nearly One
Oliver will be a year old in a couple of weeks. It's been quite a year, and all I can really say about it is one, he's such an even-tempered boy that he's done a lot more to make things run smoothly than I have, and two I turned out to be the only one who doesn't use his nickname "Opie"* despite being the one who coined it.
We live in a thoroughly middle-class milieu out here, and kiddie birthday parties are almost perfect expressions of petit bourgeois anxieties. The trick is to be almost stupidly extravagant toward a child who would just as happily spend an hour in a puddle of mud while also creating a situation where one can engage in performative anguish over the possibility that little Ayden Alkonqin Stabbler-Dershovitz might end up accidentally sipping a drachm of undiluted orange-kiwi juice, which can lead to such problems as hyperactivity, kidney failure, morbid obesity, a state university education, and marrying an unassimiliated Latina who wants a church wedding.
To resolve this important issue, I'm taking the kid to Vegas. I'm a guest at a small but enthusiastic one-day convention called The Vegas Valley Comic Book Festival, and we got a per diem and a two-night stay at Bally's. So I'll stake the baby and plop him down at a punto banco table and see what happens. As I am a good father, I'll only let him smoke one cigar for every $500 he brings me.
Anyway, if you're in Vegas on Saturday the first, come and see me.
*For Oliver Panagiotis
We live in a thoroughly middle-class milieu out here, and kiddie birthday parties are almost perfect expressions of petit bourgeois anxieties. The trick is to be almost stupidly extravagant toward a child who would just as happily spend an hour in a puddle of mud while also creating a situation where one can engage in performative anguish over the possibility that little Ayden Alkonqin Stabbler-Dershovitz might end up accidentally sipping a drachm of undiluted orange-kiwi juice, which can lead to such problems as hyperactivity, kidney failure, morbid obesity, a state university education, and marrying an unassimiliated Latina who wants a church wedding.
To resolve this important issue, I'm taking the kid to Vegas. I'm a guest at a small but enthusiastic one-day convention called The Vegas Valley Comic Book Festival, and we got a per diem and a two-night stay at Bally's. So I'll stake the baby and plop him down at a punto banco table and see what happens. As I am a good father, I'll only let him smoke one cigar for every $500 he brings me.
Anyway, if you're in Vegas on Saturday the first, come and see me.
*For Oliver Panagiotis
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