Jeff VanderMeer's Blog, page 117

A Fine Creepy Texture: The Illustrations of Aleks Sennwald

S.J. Chambers is an articles editor for Strange Horizons.  Not only has her work appeared in that fine forum, but also in Tor.com, Yankee Pot Roast, Mungbeing, Fantasy, Bookslut, and The Baltimore Sun's Read Street Blog.  She is also currently working with Jeff as Master Archivist for The Steampunk Bible.

Hi, everyone.  As you probably gathered from above, I'm S.J. Chambers and I  am a writer and editor.  I really love talking to people and finding out why they do what they do and love what ...

Weird (and awesome) link! Green porno.

So, to start with, I am almost totally alienated from pop culture. Ironically, I'm much more tapped in now (at 27) than I ever was as a teenager. Pop music, movies, what? I can name like three Madonna songs and that's primarily because I went to Sarah Lawrence College (where the stereos flip wildly from "Vogue" to Wagner's The Ring Cycle to Sondheim in Concert).

The one form of popular media that I do intake regularly (and much more than is good for me, no doubt) is television. For a while, I ...

How I learned to stop worrying and tolerate the day job.

Eden Robins writes what she has just decided to call quirky fantasy or "quirkpunk."  She is also co-founder of Brain Harvest: An Almanac of Bad-Ass Speculative Fiction and lives in Chicago where she dreams of advances in non-dairy cheese technology. Her day job is pretty cool, but she'd still like to quit it someday.

In honor of Jeff's thoughtful and helpful new guide to the writing life, Booklife, I thought I would offer my own less helpful advice on living through the life before you get to ...

What editors want

Caren Gussoff writes urban science fantasy, whatever that is. She's also co-founder of Brain Harvest: An Almanac of Speculative Fiction. She lives in Seattle with her husband, the SFF artist Chris Sumption, and their two cats, Molly Bloom and Paul Atriedes.

So, not only did I get to see Jeff read from Finch last week, but this past Monday, I attended a salon/lecture he hosted on some ideas taken from Booklife. I'm not gloating–OK, maybe a little–but the salon/lecture got me thinking about my o...

From the Road: Blurry but Unbowed….

(Oh dear. This isn't going to end well.)

You peeps? You still out there? Can you tell me what day it is? I think it might be Wednesday, but I'm not sure.

The book tour goes well–I've just written a little bit about it thus far for the Omnivoracious blog, including a mention of the remarkable Tio's Tacos.

I've also started guest blogging over at Borders' Babel Clash, along with David Anthony Durham and Paul Tremblay, who I'll be reading with at the Boston Borders on November 20th. Check out...

Genre fiction and Tie-in Fiction – a conversation between Mark Charan Newton and Dan Abnett.

Mark Charan Newton was born in 1981, and has worked as an editor for imprints covering film and media tie-in fiction, and later SF and Fantasy. His first novel, Nights of Villjamur, is published by Pan Macmillan (Tor UK), and will be released in June 2010 from Random House (Bantam Spectra).

In a previous life, I worked as an editor of tie-in fiction for properties of 2000AD and New Line Cinema – further adventures, not merely novelisations of screenplays. It was an immense amount of fun. The b...

Niches, Typecasting, and Stereotypes

The other day, I was chatting with some of my co-workers at my day job, and the subject of Dragon*Con came up—of which I'm a director—and particularly last Dragon*Con, where we had Leonard Nimoy as a guest.  The discussion got around to how he has embraced his Star Trek lineage now where in the past he tried to distance himself from it, not wanting to be typecast forever as Spock.

It started me musing upon the nature of fame and creative pigeonholes.  From where I'm sitting, as a writer whose ...

Excited about International SF

The Apex Book of World SF has just been released, and I'm excited. It's been a long time in the making – from conception, to convincing the venerable Secret Masters of Apex Books to take it on, to the reading and the soliciting and the selection, and putting it all together – but it's finally out, and I'm excited.

It's an exciting time for international SF in English. Zoran Živković was the Guest of Honour at this year's World Fantasy Convention – an incredibly rare honour for a non-English...

Self-promoting like a self-promoter.

Hello. My name is Rachel Swirsky, and for better or worse, I'm a short fiction writer. This is relevant to today's post — and indeed, to my entire last week — because for me, fantasy and science fiction has turned out not to be just a fun occupation, but also a disease vector.

Last week, my husband and I headed over to San Jose for the World Fantasy Convention, where — among many other entertaining things — I was able to meet our fair hosts, the VanderMeers. Unfortunately, my husband and I...

Bibliophile Stalker Best Of 2009 Short List

Guest Blogger Charles Tan blogs at Bibliophile Stalker, The World SF News Blog, and SF Signal.

It's not yet the end of the year and publications/companies/people are already publishing their "Best Of 2009″ lists. Don't you find that annoying? (I, on the other hand, am trying to cram as much books that I haven't yet read in this last two months.) Anyway, I'm following Andrew Wheeler's advice on publishing my short list. At the end of the year, I'll be publishing my top three titles in various c...