Nick Mamatas's Blog, page 36

Weekend and More

Dare I try to write a daily life post?

Let's see—my friend was in town so I had an excuse to try Pathos, which is the sort of semi-fancy place beloved of Berkeley: small menu, a teensy bit showy, next to a Dollar Store. Very good. I've eaten a lot (a LOT) of spanakoptia in my life, and the stuff at Pathos was among the best I've ever had. Medium rare lamb chops actually were served medium rare, which is some sort of miracle these days. The saganaki wasn't served flaming, because that's stupid. I'd go again, definitely.

Here's a book I enjoyed recently: David Goodis: A Life in Black and White, which is a translation from the French. Author Philippe Garnier is a filmmaker and journalist, and his book about the famed crime writer is less a biography and more of an oral history of the author's trip to America and his attempt to find people who knew Goodis and will talk to him. There's an emphasis on Goodis's career as a screenwriter, interesting asides about the pulp fiction industry, and a coda about his affair with the sculptor Selma Burke. Goodis was a strange character: he turned his back on Hollywood to crank out paperback originals, he made a great income but preferred to sleep on a couch in a friend's apartment, and he consistently sought out the lowlife before slumming became the chic thing to do. Garnier is fascinated by Goodis's taste in large black women, which is considered part and parcel of his pathologies for the usual reasons of racist abjection (i.e., oh dear, did he first fall in love with the his parents' maid tee-hee) but this is a minor part of the book. Incidentally, Goodis is all but privately published—no amazon. One, whether retail or wholesale, must buy directly from the publisher.

I put the baby in the wagon and took him to the store for Free Comic Book Day, but we did not last long as there was a loooong line for free comics and, I was glad to see, a loooong line for people actually purchasing comics as well. I was interested primarily to see if my local was carrying the sample of All You Need Is Kill, which comes out tomorrow. We didn't get there till 1:30pm, so who knows whether the store never had any copies or had already distributed them all. Anyway, out tomorrow, with a script by me!


Not to be confused with the manga, which is currently being serialized online. But even a single panel would resolve the confusion.

Interesting article about adaptations, looking at AYNIK in fair if speculative depth, here.

Just in time for May Day

The Marxist Internet Archive, a website devoted to radical writers and thinkers, recently received an email: It must take down hundreds of works by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels or face legal consequences.

The warning didn’t come from a multinational media conglomerate but from a small, leftist publisher, Lawrence & Wishart, which asserted copyright ownership over the 50-volume, English-language edition of Marx’s and Engels’s writings.

To some, it was “uncomradely” that fellow radicals would deploy the capitalist tool of intellectual property law to keep Marx’s and Engels’s writings off the Internet. And it wasn’t lost on the archive’s supporters that the deadline for complying with the order came on the eve of May 1, International Workers’ Day.

L&W would have had a much easier time of it had they just asked comrades for money. Though I wonder if the massive attention has led to extra sales of their other books, which is some of the most boring stuff Marxism has to offer!

World Horror schedule

Am I not retired? I am, but The Last Weekend just came out, plus Portland! Anyway, I'll be at World Horror next week, the 8th through the 11th. Here is my schedule:

THURSDAY
8:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Ross/Morrison
Panel: What Editors Want
(Paula Guran, Don D'Auria, Jeff Burk, Nick Mamatas, Ross Lockhart )
Professional editors offer their insights on their side of the publishing market: what sells, what grabs an audience, and what often crashes with the best of intentions.

9:30 PM - 10:00 PM
Hawthorne
Reading: Nick Mamatas
NB: it is extremely unlikely I'll be doing any reading at this event. Maybe a Q/A.

FRIDAY
10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Ross/Morrison Panel: The Short Form
(Ellen Datlow, Nick Mamatas, Norman Partridge, John Shirley, E. Michael Lewis, James Lea, Minerva Zimmerman)
The short horror story delivers a great deal of payoff to author and reader alike, and is one of the best ways to deliver horror. Authors in the field discuss the most efficient means of administration, animation and continued locomotion.

11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Sellwood
Panel: That Is Not Dead - H. P. Lovecraft's Contributions To Modern Horror
(S.T. Joshi, W.H. Pugmire, Cody Goodfellow, Nick Mamatas, Ross Lockhart, Ellen Datlow)
Six of the Lovecraft Circle's brightest lights explain the renaissance going on in the Cosmic Horror subgenre today, from 'True Detective' back to the Providence Spook's own literary and anthropological influences.

1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Ross/Morrison Panel: Four Color Calamaties: Horror In Comic Books
(Greg Staples, Cullen Bunn, Brian Keene, Daniel Knauf, Kari Yadro, Nick Mamatas)
Creators from indie to mainstream in the graphic novel industry methods of getting your work out there and the challenges within the medium.

A few minutes, or maybe more, sometime between 3 and 4 o'clock
Signing copies of Lovecraft's Monsters, next to Ellen Datlow. The dealer room? I dunno! Something!

SATURDAY
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Ross/Morrison Panel: How To Put Together A Great Anthology
(Paula Guran, Ellen Datlow, Nick Mamatas, Ross Lockhart, Jennifer Brozek )
Professional anthologists discuss the ways that the multi-headed anthology beast survives its infancy and becomes remembered.

Monday Monday

Here is a Storify Story of some tweets from my sister on the occasion of our grandfather's passing.

Yesterday, I was Google-Hangout interviewed by the Lovecraft EZine. It's here on YouTube now. There's some lag and such at the beginning, but it clears up.

I don't normally blurb books, mainly because I'm rarely asked and secondarily because the people who do ask are usually terrible*, but I liked the book Haxan by Kenneth Mark Hoover. I wrote: "You know those terrible Z-grade horror movies? Imagine if Sam Peckinpah directed one, and brought his aesthetic of poetic violence to the proceedings. That's Haxan." So check it out if that sounds good to you.



*Writers can tell how terrible they are based on my response. If I just quietly never respond after receiving the ms, it is because you are terrible. If I respond with an edited first chapter and a plea for you to stop publication if you can do so at all, you're even worse but I figure you can learn something. Maybe one day you'll be able to be terrible enough to ignore like so many other successful writers of commercial fiction.

Three Events This Weekend

"Flytrap" Magazine Re-Debut Event with editors Tim Pratt & Heather Shaw and contributors Megan
Arkenberg, Aislinn Quicksilver Harvey, Jessica May Lin, Nick Mamatas, Dominica Phetteplace, and Sarah Smith, Saturday, April 26th at 3:00 pm, at Borderlands Books.

Here's an online event, which is done via Google+ hangout:

THE “LOVECRAFT EZINE” LIVE WEB SERIES

Do you wish you had other Lovecraft fans to talk with, face to face? Now you do! The Lovecraft eZine hosts a LIVE video show several times a week. You can join us, or you can simply watch LIVE.

SUNDAY April 27th, 6:00pm Eastern time (5pm Central, 3pm Pacific): Special guest: Nick Mamatas, author.


Then a complex event, in the flesh, that evening:
We’re celebrating the launch of Mike E. G.’s new novel + album, The Mysticist, with a night of book readings and live music on April 27, 2014 at Brick & Mortar Music Hall in San Francisco, CA.

We’ll have delicious food by Fiddlehead Supper Club and book readings with live score by Dominica Phetteplace, Nick Mamatas, Vylar Kaftan, Tim Pratt, Mike E. G., Mark Pantoja, and more! RSVP on Facebook.

The reading part is free, but they're asking a donation of $5. Also, the eating part is $25. I'm actually not sure when people are supposed to show up for what bit, but the Facebook link should have the details.

Some junk

Thanks for all the condolences. I won't be going down for the funeral, which has to happen right away for both logistical and liturgical reasons, but will be attending the mnemósynon in about forty days.

I've been enjoying the new LJs I'm reading now. Ever since I started my day job, nearly six years ago now, I've had little time/ability to write about daily life. My friend Caren used to blog, years ago, "Put on clothes, went to work" every week day, and now I see why. I suppose I could write about Oliver's green poop! It's green!

nick_kaufmann is trying to get people to visit his website by launching a guest-blog thing called "The Scariest Part." Today I write about the scariest part of my UK-hardcover-only title The Last Weekend. Check it out. (People who want the book, but who don't want to pay for transatlantic mail, should probably order from Borderlands Books, which has copies in stock.)

I liked this interview with Cheryl Strayed over at Scratch Magazine. It's about money, which is everyone's favorite subject:

I needed it to pay my rent. I had accrued $50,000 in credit card debt to write that book. The same thing happened later with Wild, only I was in deeper debt. So I got that check for Torch, and it was gone the next day. I actually paid my credit card bill. Poof!

Then I did revisions, and I had a baby, and the next check didn’t come until 2005. I got my third check in February 2006, when it was published, and my final check when the paperback came out in 2007.

So I sold my book for $100,000, and what I received was a check for about $21,000 a year over the course of four years, and I paid a third of that to the IRS. Don't get me wrong, the book deal helped a lot—it was like getting a grant every year for four years. But it wasn't enough to live off. So, I guess it was a humbling lesson!



Finally, re: the Hugo Awards, I presume my comments from before the ballot came out make more sense now, right?

Sunday catch-up

I think I friended everyone now.

Here's a good pic and story of my grandfather, from my cousin's partner's Facebook:



Sorry I missed most of you at Norwescon. Between obligations, I mostly just retreated to my room.

In good Norwescon news, Toh EnJoe won the Philip K. Dick Special Citation for Self-Reference ENGINE. See?


If you have any interest at all in SF that is simultaneously hard and Phildickean, get this book.

My grandfather has died.

The last picture with my grandfather, in the days after my wedding. He is on the far right of this photo.

My poor papou has died. He was maternal step-grandfather, but was a blood relation paternally; he was my father's uncle. Nick Vroutos was a great man. When he married my grandmother, he became father to her four young children, including my mother, which was an unusual thing to do back then, especially in the Greek immigrant community.

When I young, he was the maître d’hôtel at the legendary Elk Hotel Restaurant in Port Jefferson, working shifts day and night in a light blue suit jacket. The other waiters all wore yellow jackets. As a little nerd I always thought this should be reversed; the captain should wear yellow, as in Star Trek, and his underlings blue. After the decline of the Elks--half of it is now a Starbucks and half something else--he went on to operate a number of smaller places on Long Island and in Florida.

Papou was the ultimate cool customer, which was also unusual among my relatives. At least to me he always seemed easygoing, skillful with people of all sorts, always ready with a smile or a smirk. Handsome too. A photo of him as a young man hung on the wall of my grandmother's house. He looked just like Desi Arnaz. I even asked my yiayia once why she had a picture of "Ricky Ricardo" with the family pictures. When I was a kid, he quit smoking by using an ingenious method: he just wouldn't light his cigarettes. Lots of smokers complain of not knowing what to do with their hands when they try to quit, and they miss other little social practices associated with the filthy habit, but he found a way around it.

In recent years I saw him less. He was in FL, and selflessly stayed which my grandmother as she continues her decline into dementia. (Long-time readers may remember this story
--my grandmother was hiding at a neighbor's house a few doors down.) Today was their fifty-second wedding anniversary. He was healthy enough to occasionally scale the roof of his home and do repairs well into his 70s, though he did suffer from diabetes.

Last month, he had damaged his foot thanks to failing nerve endings, but was taken care of in the hospital. A few days later though, he was back, with pneumonia in one lung. He spent time in the ICU. We we're all worried, of course, but if we all rushed down there he might have thought he was dying. He needed dialysis to go with his pneumonia treatment as his kidneys were weak, but he was soon transferred to an ordinary hospital room. I decided that I would have to go to Florida this summer, so he could see my baby, photos of whom he enjoyed so much. Then he was released to start rehab, just yesterday. But last night he experienced a stomachache, his blood sugar changed, he passed out and then woke back up, and he was brought to the ER, where he did not recover. So he did not meet Oliver and I will not see my papou again in this world.

In Seattle

...will friend more people when back home.

We're back, baby!

I think I friended everyone who commented on my previous post. It's all very 2002, isn't it? Still the best way to get lots of comments on LJ is to bring up the subject of LJ friends. If I've forgotten you, feel free to remind me again.

Meanwhile, over at the Australian podcast The Writer and the Critic, there is an extensive discussion of Love is the Law, about which I would have much to say if I were the sort of person who responded to reviews of my own work. Interesting stuff, check it out.

Finally, as mentioned previously, I am flying to Norwescon today. I've not checked the time, but I may be back at the airport when the Hugo nominations are announced on Sunday. (Yes, a press announcement on Easter Sunday. Go Team Fandom!) So I'll say something about it now: remember, that whatever you choose to do, you give tacit permission for anyone else, and indeed, everyone else in the world to do.