Jeff VanderMeer's Blog, page 89

Finding Our Stories

I've found my way here, after a short delay. Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, guest-blogging from the Netherlands. For the curious, you can find out more about me here. I am a Filipino writer. I can't predict what I'll be posting about most of the time, but this first post is something that I've been thinking about and which I hope will resonate with some of you.

I recently had an online exchange with a couple of young writers from the Philippines where we talked about writing and the challenges that we ...

Maturity and the Artist

Deborah Kalin just posted a brilliant little piece – Impatience for the New excludes…the New – in which she looks at the manner in which the hunger for art that is fresh is the very reason why that hunger will not be fed.  She nails it, not just the frustration felt, but the root of that frustration.

…we idolise them, not for what they've actually achieved, but for their potential. What we think they can achieve. We rush them into celebrity so fast we push them ahead of their learning...

Pondering Author Platform

While one of Angela's personalities is arguing with Evil Monkey about who pays for the coffee, another other part is over here, hopefully posting something useful … other personalities are variously conducting a shoe-shine business in New Orleans, drinking coffee in Melbourne and complaining about the weather, and planning a jewellery heist in Paris (wherein I will ultimately be caught due to the permanent nose print I left on the glass surrounding the French Crown jewels) …

I work in a...

Are Dreams Really As Weird As All That?

Hello Vanderworld readers. Sorry I'm so late to my own guest blogging gig. But now I'm here, and better late than never. I've done the guest blogging thing before — here's my intro in case you don't remember — and for those of you who are seeing me for the first time, I'll elt you in on a secret: I'm totally black.

I know, it was a shock for me, too.

But today I am not going to talk about "black stuff," I want to talk to you all about dreams.

This weekend many of my friends went to go see the...

Shared Worlds, Day Two

(Me showing Shared Worlds students Miranda Severance and Jackie Gitlin some pages from the comics adaptation of my story "The Situation")

Guest blogging has begun to kick in, and you'll continue to see it during the week.

Meanwhile, I've been teaching at Shared Worlds as well as doing things behind the scenes as assistant director, here at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. We've got 39 students, and I have to say, they're all extremely dedicated, creative, and smart. It's only t...

Jay Lake

Writer Jay Lake has posted about his cancer situation, and the need for further chemo. Go by his livejournal and let him know he's in your thoughts. I hope he will make sure to take care of hiimself, and I think it's not an unreasonable thing to say that it's really important at this point to be supportive. Any external stressors are going to be just one more thing he has to deal with, and I will have zero sympathy for anyone who adds to that stress during this period.

The MasterChief Always Was a Bit of a Jerk

Guest Blogging – or How Did I Get Here?? (i)

Angela Slatter is an Australian writer trapped in Brisbane, Queensland (not California, dude) by a malfunctioning vortex manipulator. Here she recounts how she got into the guest blogging business and talks about herself in third person. She also blogs over here about shiny objects that catch her attention.

Scene One:

Jeff: Pssst. You. Wanna blog-sit for a while? There are a few people here already, but I kinda need someone to take care of the memory cathedral; someone not too fond of...

King Squid, Reviewed (Plus Guest Bloggers)

I have been waiting for ages hoping someone would actually dive into King Squid, in terms of a longer review. This is my favorite piece in the appendix of City of Saints, and I still remember with a great deal of satisfaction the anger and irritation with which editors in the field returned it to me when I submited it to them. (In some cases, because I was feeling perverse, I followed it up with the encrypted version of the numbers story from City of Saints. Most times I received no response ...

Launch Pad, Day Six, Mike Brotherton Leaves Us with a Lecture

To read the rest of my launch pad posts, click here.

We spent the morning playing with images in an astronomy program that you can download for free if you, also, would like to spend your morning playing with images — SAOImage DS9.

Books:

Is Anyone Out There? by Frank Drake and Dava Sobel

The Space Environment: Implications for Spaceship Design by Alan C. Tribble

Distance measurements to other galaxies:

a) Cepheid method: using period/luminosity relationship for classical Cepheids. This is what's ...