Jeff VanderMeer's Blog, page 118

The Interzone Sampler

Guest blogger Jason Sanford often rants on his website at www.jasonsanford.com. His fiction has been published in Interzone, Year's Best SF 14, Analog, Intergalactic Medicine Show, Pindeldyboz, and other places, and has won the 2008 Interzone Readers' Poll and a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship.

There's a lot of chatter these days about Analog, Asimov's and F&SF slowly dying. I suspect that like Mark Twain, not only have the rumors of their impending deaths been greatly exaggerated...

A Day in the Life of a Literature Professor, or Why I Do What I Do

Several years ago, right after I earned my Ph.D., a friend rather bluntly told me that the only reason people became literature professors was because they had failed at being creative writers. I remember shooting back with something along the lines of, "Not all academics want to be creative writers." Of course, my friend summarily discounted that statement with, "Yes, they do. If they haven't tried writing, it's because they know they'll probably fail, and they're cowards."

I've had this...

Reportin' From the Road, Don't Mind Me…

(Ann, and our friend Tessa in San Fran right after World Fantasy Con. Will I pay for posting this photo? I might…)

Catch me at Powell's, Cedar Hills, tomorrow at 4pm… (and awesome, awesome guest blogging thus far…)

It's Jeff, just checking in to say the tour is going great thus far. We had close to 70 people at the University Bookstore for my joint reading with Cherie Priest and Cat Rambo, and the turn out for the Willamette University gig was quite as impressive.

(Ann with one of Borderland...

My Spur-of-the-Moment Chapbook

Will Hindmarch is a freelance writer, graphic designer, and game designer with more than 60 published credits in books and magazines. He's currently designing a new RPG for Pelgrane Press. He also blogs at the game/story outfit, Gameplaywright, at his home venue, The Gist, and at a tumblelog, the Word Studio Notebook.

Last night I got frustrated with some writing I'm doing for a client, so I turned to myself and I said, "Put something out into the world. Something that's yours." So I took an h...

Surviving the Book Contract that Wasn't

Guest blogger Kameron Hurley does most of her ranting at her blog, Brutal Women. You can find  some of her recent fiction in Year's Best SF 12, Strange Horizons, and EscapePod. She currently makes a living as a marketing and sales copywriter in Ohio, and has sold or nearly sold or sort of sold or is still in the process of selling a book called God's War, which may or may not actually be published at some unspecified period from an as yet unspecified publisher. Stay tuned.

Surviving the...

Matt Cook's Blood Magic series

Guest blogger Jason Sanford often rants on his website at www.jasonsanford.com. His fiction has been published in Interzone, Year's Best SF 14, Analog, Intergalactic Medicine Show, Pindeldyboz, and other places, and has won the 2008 Interzone Readers' Poll and a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship.

Here's a horror story to strike fear into every writer and reader: An emerging author's first two novels are published by a small press, where the books sell very well. The author begins writing...

To Asimov's or not to Asimov's?

A couple of weeks ago, Jeff took Asimov's Magazine to task over on the Sofanauts podcast. So in thinking of writing a blog post as a guest here this month, I thought I'd write something in defence of Asimov's, just to take a devil's advocate role. I was going to write about how Asimov's, being a Dell Magazines legacy, has its hands tied in terms of design or paper quality or pretty much everything else. How it has to keep providing the sort of stuff loyal readers expect – the loyal readers...

The next big punking

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.

I've been thinking about steampunk lately.

I haven't been able to escape it, really—it was steampunk month at Tor. Two weekends ago, my hometown hosted its first SteamCon. And now, tonight, I am going to hear VanderMeer* (who, as you know...

Thoughts on the Dying Earth genre

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 is called Nights of Villjamur, published by Pan Macmillan (Tor UK) and in June 2010 from Random House (Bantam Spectra).

You can't move in the Hollywood for people clutching screenplays about the apocalypse. If you're in a café out there there's probably someone writing one next to you right now. These days there's some kind of...

Eldritch Visions of Cthalloween

Guest-blogger Will Hindmarch is a freelance writer, graphic designer, and game designer. He also blogs at the game/story outfit, Gameplaywright, at his home venue, The Gist and at the tumblelog, the Word Studio Notebook.

Halloween has come and gone, and with it went the Twitter-fiction event, Cthalloween, which I first wrote about at Gameplaywright. (See the whole event via the Twitter hashtag: #cthalloween)

I went into the event with hardly a plan in mind, writing as things struck me, aiming m...