David Nickle's Blog, page 15

Ad Astra

Back from one convention, off to another: Ad Astra, in Toronto this time. It is at the Toronto Don Valley Hotel and Suites - a venue remarkably similar to the Toronto Crown Plaza Hotel, where it was held last year. Both hotels are located in the same physical space, at 1250 Eglinton Avenue East. The only difference, really, is the name.

The convention takes place next weekend - starting April 9, that is. Unlike the World Horror Convention, just past, on this one I've got lots of programming.

He...

Brighton, 2010

Well I'm back, from England and Brighton and the World Horror Convention.

The business end of it was pretty straightforward, and went very well. We had to get there on Thursday in time to launch ChiZine's line of books that night. This, we did - with a certain amount of gusto, I think. Gemma Files, Philip Nutman, Douglas Smith, Tim Lebbon, Claude Lalumiѐre and I all presented and read and signed while publishing/editing/domestic duo Brett Savory and Sandra Kasturi made it happen. 


After t...

Now about WHC...

I'm going to be at the World Horror Convention, cheerful but bleary-eyed after a red-eye flight from Toronto to London, and a bus ride to Brighton, on Thursday morning. If you're there, Yard-ape, say hello. I'm not signed up for any programming, alas - I got my membership after all that had been finalized. But I'll be there at ChiZine's Euro-Launch, introducing Monstrous Affections and a bunch of ChiZine's new titles to the British horror crowd. And I'll be around.

I will also be thanking Elle...

How I'm feeling...

I know I promised not to write about feelings (see the Yard's mission statement to the right of this post). But as the case of my friend Peter Watts and the guards at the Blue Water Bridge sinks in, feeling seems to be all I'm doing. So while this might be a good time to start telling you about the ChiZine launch at the World Horror Convention in Brighton next Thursday, I've got no stomach for it.

I wasn't at the trial in Michigan, where a jury delivered their conviction Friday morning; I was ...

Peter Watts was convicted today

The news of this hit me hard this morning. Peter, you may recall, was beaten and pepper-sprayed while crossing the Canada-U.S. border at Port Huron, Michigan. For his troubles, they charged him with resisting arrest and assaulting a federal officer - a young man named Andrew Beaudry, who accused Peter of attempting to choke him during the beating Beaudry was administering.

Good people around the world - the first of which were Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi - mobilized to help us gather Peter t...

Never Open A Book With The Weather.

This is Elmore Leonard's first rule of 10 rules of writing. And it is a good one.

He doesn't say anything about opening a blog posting with a picture of the weather, though: particularly this knobby bit of ice at the end of the Leslie Spit in Toronto, photographed by me, on a freezing cold bike ride there, earlier today.

Lots of Affections for America

This is a note for U.S. yard apes that might have been thinking about getting ahold of Monstrous Affections but were feeling stymied by its spotty availability. For a few weeks now, Amazon.com's been promising more stock real soon. And who knows where the books are available on the ground?

Two bits of encouraging news, then. First, Amazon.com's re-stocked, and will be filling those orders that came in during the stocking haitus. Check it out here.

And second: Brett at ChiZine informs me that Bo...

Stop by for a Bite...

This evening, I'm planning on spending some time at the Bitten By Books site, along with fellow Tesseracts Thirteen authors - for a part of a day-long marathon online interview-fest, in the continued launch of the chilling edition of the Canadian sf anthology. My story, "The Radejastians," is an innocent enough story about the benefits of regular church attendance; others are more ghoulish.

So stop by and talk about it. Bitten By Books has an RSVP site which you can visit to find out more, and...

Shark Attack!

It's not as bad as it sounds. Today, the Great White EBook Shark took a bite out of Monstrous Affections. But ever since that Benchley incident back in the '70s, sharks have really gotten a bad namer when it comes to playing rough.

The Great White EBook Shark website is a very constructive kind of shark attack. The Shark as he/she calls him/herself takes bits of prose that strikes the Shark's fancy. As the name suggests, the site is in the business of highlighting and promoting ebooks, by pre...

I really owe Rose Fox a nice dinner out...

Rose Fox is the genre fiction editor at Publisher's Weekly and the author of the Genreville blog. Last year, PW gave Monstrous Affections a starred review. Then Rose put it in the bottom end of her top ten sf/f/h books for 2009.

And now, she's done it again. In her Feb. 23 blog entry, as she was wondering why there weren't more out-of-country nominations for the Bram Stoker Award this year, had this to say:

Meanwhile, my first thought when I looked at the Stoker ballot was "Where are the...