Jeff VanderMeer's Blog, page 93
July 6, 2010
Rambling Thoughts Upon Reaching Old Fart Status
Tomorrow I turn 42, and right now I feel every year of it, although that might just be the Gulf oil crisis aging me. Every day, I can feel that torrent in my head, and if I have one birthday wish it's just that I want them to stop it as soon as possible.
Truly, though, I'm a battle-scarred squid at the moment, worn down by too many deadlines but with the promise of a respite soon to come. I'm also officially transitioned from young turk to old fart. Ages of writers are relative to the amount ...
July 5, 2010
Subterranean Offer on Shriek, and Linkage
(A reprint of a classic–from Savoy, and the genius of book designer John Coulthart.)
Subterranean is offering the limited edition of my novel Shriek, the second in the Ambergris cycle before City and after Finch, below the publisher price. This edition features a soundtrack by The Church and a cover by Ben Templesmith, design by John Coulthart. Signed and numbered.
In other news, there've been quite a few interesting posts out in the blogosphere the last week or so. If you haven't caught some ...
July 4, 2010
The Future of Publishing: Small Presses?
Many people are predicting massive changes to publishing as we know it, and making the case for e-readers, e-books, and a future in which the physical book is only a part of how we view reading sustained, long texts. Here are a few things you should know about the future of publishing, including the fact that small presses may be on the forefront of the wave…
—Within 50 to 70 years most power grids will be overloaded and have gone dark, in coordination with the collapse of a unified world...
The Horror: They Always Come Back
(Neo and his favorite blankie: photo as stress relief.)
The thing they don't tell beginning writers? The ghosts of books future come back to haunt you in horrible fashion—they just keep returning prior to publication. You write it or edit it, and that seems like a monumental task…but then the stages of pre-production leer out of the mist at you with precise if jagged teeth.
If you have a lot of books out in a particular period, and you're working on creating more, this becomes particularly...
July 2, 2010
Anthologies: A Writer's Point of View
Last month, I talked about fiction anthologies from my perspective as a reader, as well as soliciting information from others about how they view anthologies.
Now I'd like to further bore you into submission by talking about anthologies from a writer's point of view. Or, more accurately, from this writer's point of view. I'm not going to claim to speak for anyone else, or to be proposing anything with regard to anyone else. Also, I am speaking about approaches and kinds of choices that may...
July 1, 2010
The Third Bear: Story Beginnings
(Two more good review of the collection, at the Sacramento Book Review and at Empty Your Heart of Its Mortal Dream.)
It looks like this cold isn't going to allow me any rest anyway, and I've been dipping into my just-published story collection The Third Bear the last few hours, so I might as well talk a little bit about story beginnings, using the book as an example.
Please note that I'm not claiming anything special about my beginnings–readers decide what's successful or not–but am just...
LA Times Review of a Steamy Subject
The LA Times has published my review of a history of steampower by William Rosen. They asked me to integrate some aspects of Steampunk perspective on it, so I did. Not sure if it's a chemical or physical reaction, but go check it out.
A young Steampunk's dream, William Rosen's "The Most Powerful Idea in the World" manages to make sense of the many threads that together tell the story of the origins and applications of steam power. The book has a crackling energy to it, often as riveting as it...
June 30, 2010
The Third Bear Arrives! (and a couple cool books)
"One of our very best contemporary practitioners of the fantastic. Superb prose, overwhelmingly odd situations, and fascinating, eccentric characters." —Publishers Weekly, starred review
On the heels of a great review by PW, The Third Bear has arrived on our doorstep, festooned with blurbs by, among others, Cat Valente, Junot Diaz, and Mike Mignola. Although the official publication date is late July/early August, it appears to be available on Amazon (where right now you can buy it along...
June 29, 2010
Borne from Subterranean and The Situation Comic by Eric Orchard
A couple bits of news. First off, Subterranean Press will publish my long novella "Borne" as a stand-alone book in 2011, in both trade and limited editions. The limited will come with a chapbook, probably of the comics script for "The Situation." "Borne" is a loose sequel to "The Situation," and features the narrator of that story as a secondary character, as well as the employee-turned bear character of Mord.
Which brings me to the second bit of news. As some of you may remember, Eric...
