Jeff VanderMeer's Blog, page 153

More *&@&*#!! Delays

Sorry, folks. 60 in 60 will be delayed another few days. I’m also behind on shipping out Secret Lives, etc. Please bear with me. I don’t post much personal stuff here ’cause I don’t like whining when I read it elsewhere so why whine here, but will just say a temporary condition is a little more serious than I thought and playing havoc with my ability to concentrate on anything. So serious writing stuff of any kind is just not going to fly for right now. Might or might not post this week. Mostly

Evil ‘n’ Mord on The Mutant Chronicles

Note: Read no further if easily offended…

Evil Monkey:

What in the name of fuckety-fuck-fuck is that?!

Jeff:

That’s just Mord.

Evil Monkey:

He’s like 30 stories tall and his breath smells like maggots have been throwing up in his mouth for centuries. Why the hell did you let him in here?

Jeff:

You don’t “let” Mord in. He goes wherever he wants.

Evil Monkey:

I bet he does. So long as there’s no roof.

Mord:

MONKEY FLESH TASTE LIKE LEMUR. LEMUR TASTE LIKE CAT. MONKEY CAT?

Evil Monkey:
Brain scientist is he

PKD Award

Congrats to David Walton, whose Terminal Mind from Meadowhawk Press in Memphis just won the Philip K. Dick Award.

Update: Er, now in the comments section of Cheryl Morgan picking up my link, some confusion is expressed as to the results. Adam Troy-Castro and Walton are sharing the award? There’s no special citation? As I recall, the original announcement about the finalists was off a bit, too. So…will await official press release. I got my intel directly from the publisher of Terminal Mind. (In t

So, What’re You Doing This Weekend?

I spent part of my holiday arm-wrestling a child. Always up for a challenge! Afterwards, I body-slammed a chipmunk. Then I punted a bunny rabbit.

Blog Favorites

Someone emailed me today and asked what’s on my blog favorites list on my browser. It’s pretty sparse, frankly. I’ve pared it down quite a bit because I was just sick of being overwhelmed with information, and also I have a low b.s. threshold at the moment. What’s on there now is a combo of blogs that I think of as “no bullshit zones,” blogs I’m just curious about recently and may or may not have staying power, a couple of news/review sites (Barnes & Noble has been publishing some really high-qu

A Drifting Life

My latest Graphic Novel Friday feature on Omnivoracious:

“In simple but unsparing panels, Tatsumi describes not only the setbacks to his career but his fundamental loneliness–a loneliness that seems ameliorated by his immersion in the comics world. Encounters with women are few and far between, and often end in embarrassment or sadness. Woven into the narrative are portraits of his envious brother, his father’s financial problems, and a Japan recovering from defeat to forge a new identity still r

Mord’s Facebook Reign: 9:53am April 8 to 4:33am April 10

Mord’s reign on Facebook has come to an end, but here are the highlights from yesterday, following up on my last post. (Mord is a [nonspeaking:] character in a short novel I’m working on, fragment from which can be found here.)

8:20am

MORD EMOTIONALLY EXHAUSTED FROM UNEXPECTED STRESS OF ALL THE KILLING AND EATING. BUT A HAPPY SORT OF EXHAUSTION.
>>Paul Witcover at 8:33am April 9: the vocabulary of this post seems a bit advanced for Mord. Has he hired–or eaten–a ghost writer?
>>Matt Staggs at 9:04am

Mord Says Penguin Blog Is Wrong Re 60 in 60: I Am Not Mad

Colin Brush on the Penguin Blog has the cojones to suggest I’ve gone insane from doing the 60 in 60:

It is a sad thing to watch a writer go off the rails. But in these Twittered, My-Faced, Spacebooked, blog-rolled times, any meltdown is bound to be tragically public…[long garble about my insanity:]…Then on Tuesday, this post appeared on his blog (see the not-at-all-disturbing screen-grab above). Who knows what possessed him when he wrote it? Guilt perhaps. Shame maybe. Alcohol certainly. But also

The Allure of Machinic Life, But Not Until the Red Fog Rises

“In the early era of cybernetics and information theory following the Second World War, two distinctly new types of machine appeared. The first, the computer, was initially associated with war and death–breaking secret codes and calculating artillery trajectories and the forces required to trigger atomic bombs. But the second type, a new kind of liminal machine, was associated with life, inasmuch as it exhibited many of the behaviors that characterize living entities–homeostasis, self-directed a

B&N Review of Castle, More Linkage

(Jango and me, checking out the links.)

A few links for a Wednesday–some really interesting stuff, I think. I’m pretty happy with how the Lennon review turned out, too.

My review of Castle by J. Robert Lennon
“Intense psychological profiles dominate the literature of unease, sometimes known as “neo-gothic” and typified by such modern masters as Brian Evenson. In these tales, the suggestion of something not quite right about the narrator or the protagonist is followed by the dread that we will lear