S. Andrew Swann's Blog, page 30

No I haven't given up ranting about politics.

But I decided to stop doing it here.  Frankly, most of the people coming to this site are a lot more interested in my thoughts about writing and fiction than my political ravings.  And while I may have a few fans for my rants, it seems that it might make more sense to direct them to another blog now dedicated to such blather.  It really is a win-win.  The fans of my fiction can delude themselves into thinking I inhabit the same political universe they do, and I get to play in a sandbox where ...

A glimpse at the future of narrative

It is the nature of prose that it is linear.  There's a beginning, a middle and a end.  That has been a fact of life for storytellers since the beginning of time, and the rules of drama have been around since the ancient Greeks, and are still taught in scriptwriting courses.   As many innovations writers have played with, mixing up time and space, it's always been page two following page one, everything in a particular order.  Even a crazy-backwards story like Memento was crafted with a...

Audioness. . .

Just to let fans of audio books know that I have recently signed contracts to have the Apotheosis Trilogy be released on Audible.com. I spent Thursday evening talking to the voice-over artist going over pronunciations.  I'm just glad most of my proper nouns have some basis in actual language somewhere.

While on the topic of readings, here's the video they shot of me reading Prophets at Norwescon (you might need to up the volume a bit):

Norwescon pics

Well, you probably know by now I didn't win the PKD award, but I still had a fun time at Norwescon, and I thought I'd post a few pictures:

Me and my book:

Daryl Gregory,  Ian McDonald,  Daryl Gregory #2 (inside joke),  David G. Hartwell:

Me and Cory Doctorow:

Tomorrow is the Moment of Truth

Friday (obscenely early) I fly off to the west cost to Norwescon to find out if Prophets won the Phillip K. Dick Award.  The announcement will happen during the awards ceremony at 7pm Pacific.  You can see the stiff competition I'm up against here.  Wish me luck.

Regardless of how things go with the award, I will be bopping around the con on panels and such till Saturday afternoon.  Hope to see you there.

Spring is here

Spent this weekend building raised beds in the back for a vegetable garden.  Spent most of Saturday building these, three boxes 8×4x2 and three 4×4x2.

And Truffles is much more mobile now, and she can hang out outside now.

I has CDs!

I just got author copies of the audio version of Wolfbreed. While I can't live without mp3s now, and the first thing I did with this was rip it into iTunes, I must say there is something way cool about having a physical object to point to and say, "That's my book."

You can get it here, and on the page is a little flash widget where you can listen to a sample of the mayhem.

In lieu of a blog post

I give you abused movie trailers:

Toy Story 2 vs. Dark Knight:

Watchmen vs. Wall-E:

Reservoir Dogs vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

What I will be doing this weekend. . .

This Saturday March 20th between 1 and 3 PM I will be joined by fellow authors Mary Ellis, Linda Robertson and Casey Daniels at the Borders Bookstore at 335 Howe Avenue in Cuyahoga Falls, across from Chapel Hill Mall. We'll be talking about writing, signing books and all that wonderful author-type stuff

Random things

Computers in cars are not always a good thing.

Porn Stars and Dungeons & Dragons.

History is strange.

Do you trust buildings made with slave labor?

P. G. Wodehouse does Batman.

Howard Stern is fed up.