Nick Mamatas's Blog, page 9

The "terror gap"

Well, that's one way to get liberals to support the idea of a secret uncheckable list of bad people.

Orlando shooting

That's one way for Islamic radicals to guarantee continued liberal participation in the war on terror.

The End

This is it

The worst thing about going to euthanize Kazzie is that moment, in the kitchen, getting ready, when I catch myself thinking "I need to fill her water bow—oh, no I don't."

THE LAST WEEKEND cosplay

sabotabby represents!



Join her, won't you?

Tada!

Actually wasn't to difficult at all to get Opie to sleep without a zillion stories or glasses of water or the ability to nurse him. He was tired after a longish day; he wanted to go to bed, and he did.

Three quicks

Had a fun reading at Borderlands Books this weekend. Actually, it was the usual miserable reading, but many copies of The Last Weekend were sold, both in the lead up to the event and on the day itself. Local bookstore plus local story plus local author means local success.

I also whipped up a pre-order form for I Am Providence for people who want it from Borderlands. See?



Several were filled out. I am back to primarily linking to Amazon as my experience with Powells and publisher websites is that for the most part even interested readers will not buy from non-amazon links, even with extensive discussion of Amazon's labor practices and the importance of supporting small publishers by buying direct. Not just me either—this was an underdiscussed element of Jessa Crispin's kiss-off interview about the shuttering of her famed blogzine Bookslut:

Well, the only reason why Bookslut was interesting was because it didn’t make money, and when I realized the sacrifices I was going to have to make in order for it to make money, it wasn’t worth it. It used to be you could get an advertiser for a month; now it’s all directly linked to how many pageviews you get. So you can’t write about obscure literature that only ten people care about and make eight cents. You have to write about the books that all the people already know about. And then it just orients you toward clickbait, and you have to come up with stunts and your design has to be beautiful. The only program that actually gives you money is Amazon. We used them back when we were profitable — we paid some writers back when we were profitable — and then, at some point, I realized they were fucking trashing the industry. Then we switched to Powell's, which gave us absolutely no money.

It's not that Powell's keeps money; it's that people won't buy from Powell's.

So here's to trashing the industry...except that if you live in the Bay Area, please check out Borderlands. They'll make a big order, happily take the form, and I'll show up early to make sure all orders are personalized. They'll also sell books when they arrive, instead of holding them in embargo till August the 2nd.


In other weird news, I was interviewed along with several other newer "horror" authors—Laird Barron, Molly Tanzer, Sarah Langan—for The Federalist.

I am just as confused as you are by that.


Finally, today is the last day for California residents to change their party identification to either Democrat or Decline to State in order to vote for Bernie in the primary to Peace and Freedom and thus actually have something to do with real socialist politics. Your county information is here.

The Return of the Mumbles

I'll be reading from both I Am Providence and The Last Weekend at Borderlands Books this Saturday. Full deets:

Nick Mamatas, THE LAST WEEKEND (Night Shade Books, Trade Paperback, $15.99) & Steve Toutonghi, JOIN (Soho Press, Hardcover, $27.00) on Saturday, May 21st at 1:00pm

Borderlands Books
866 Valencia St.
San Francisco CA 94110
USA

Katherine Dunn

I'm reminded of a workshop I did when in school once--it was a useless mushy one. We all had to go around and describe our goals as writers.

My goal, I said, was to write a perennial blacklist seller, a "cult novel" like GEEK LOVE.

This being an extremely mushy workshop, the facilitator asked, "Geek Love? Is that anything like EAT, PRAY, LOVE?"

And what can one say to that except what I did: "Yes. Yes it is. If you liked EAT, PRAY LOVE, you'll loooove GEEK LOVE."

Hint Fiction

The gun George Zimmerman is selling will inexplicably reappear in his home and continue whispering "Put me in your mouth..." every night