Matt Ruff's Blog, page 33
March 9, 2013
Portland
I’m home from my overnight visit to Portland.
I had a small but enthusiastic group of fans at the Powell’s on Hawthorne event, and while I was there I scored a hardcover copy of Joe Coomer’s Kentucky Love. (If you’re not familiar with Coomer, a good novel to start with is Apologizing to Dogs, or, if you can find it, A Flatland Fable.)
I signed stock at Powell’s on Hawthorne and at the main Powell’s location downtown. The downtown store had a German-language hardcover of Bad Monkeys.
The one sad note of the trip came when I stopped in to sign copies of The Mirage at Murder by the Book, which hosted one of my events during my last visit to Portland. It turns out the store is closing in April after thirty years in business. I’ve only known them a short time but the staff are really nice folks, so I’m sorry to see them go.
The Powell’s appearance was my last scheduled paperback publication event. It’s time to get back to work on novel #6. More details about that shortly.
March 5, 2013
In Portland on Thursday
This Thursday night at 7:30 PM I’ll be reading and signing books at Powell’s Books on Hawthorne in Portland, Oregon.
Also:
* If you’re in the Queen Anne area, you should check out the new Queen Anne Book Company. They’ve got signed copies of my novels as well as signed books from all the other local authors who attended their grand opening weekend. They’ve also got the world’s sweetest bookstore dog, Tali.
* Signed copies of The Mirage trade paperback are also in stock at the University Book Store, the Elliott Bay Book Company, the Secret Garden Bookshop, and the Seattle Mystery Bookshop.
* Today’s New York Times has a piece on the difficulties of training cats to perform in live theater, but the best anecdote in the story involves a dog and some KFC: “Bill Berloni, an animal trainer who cast the dog Sandy in the current Broadway production of ‘Annie,’ remembers when a family in the front rows of ‘Legally Blonde: The Musical’ brought a bucket of chicken, and the Chihuahua he had cast abandoned its role to hover at the edge of the stage.”
March 1, 2013
The Queen Anne Book Company grand opening is today!
The A-Team
Signs and wonders: A new independent bookstore . Doors open at 9 AM!
I’ll be hanging out at the store this afternoon between 4 PM and 6 PM. Lots of other local authors will be coming by over the weekend to help celebrate—the full list of confirmed visitors is posted here.
February 25, 2013
This week…
* I’ll be reading from The Mirage and signing books at Elliott Bay Book Company on Thursday, February 28, at 7 PM.
* I’ll be attending the grand opening of the Queen Anne Book Company on Friday, March 1, from 4 PM to 6 PM. Lots of other Seattle authors will be at the bookstore over the weekend; check the event page for exact times.
Also:
* Secret Garden Books in Ballard, the University Book Store at the U.W., and the Seattle Mystery Bookshop downtown all now have signed copies of The Mirage trade paperback.
February 21, 2013
One week left to apply for your National Endowment for the Arts grant
The deadline to apply for a 2014 NEA Literature Fellowship is next Thursday, February 28. Fellowship applications must be filed electronically, which means if you wait till the last minute and the NEA’s computers happen to go down you’ll be out of luck. Procrastination is part of the artist’s job description but do yourself a favor and get it done this weekend. More details about the Fellowship here.
Other news:
* I had a good reading last night at the University Book Store. If you missed it, you can catch me on February 28 at 7 PM at the Elliott Bay Book Company.
* The Queen Anne Book Company is celebrating its grand opening on the weekend of March 1-3. I plan to attend as part of their “cavalcade of local authors,” though I don’t know yet exactly when I’ll be there.
* I’ll also be doing a reading and signing in Portland, OR, at Powell’s Books on Hawthorne on March 7 at 7:30 PM.
* Via Gawker: Six minutes of cute animals. With bonus rain frog video.
February 18, 2013
Appearing this Wednesday night at the University Book Store
I’ll be reading and signing at the U.W. University Book Store this Wednesday, February 20, at 7 PM.
Then at 7 PM on Thursday, February 28, I’ll be at the Elliott Bay Book Company.
If you can’t make either event or just can’t wait to get your hands on a signed copy of The Mirage trade paperback, the Secret Garden Bookshop in Ballard has some in stock.
Also:
* The deadline for applying for an NEA Literature Fellowship is only ten days away. (Details here.)
* Nothing says President’s Day like a bucket of sloths. (via @queenannebookco)
February 14, 2013
Speaking to America’s youth
One of them, anyway:
Today I have a guest blog post over at Dear Teen Me, which has authors write letters to their younger selves. This is a fun game if you play it straight. I tried to stick to advice that my younger self would actually listen to, or at least pretend to listen to.
Hunting for a photo to accompany the piece, I discovered that I’ve got a lot of pictures of me as a toddler and a lot of me in college, but not so many of me as a teenager. Fortunately someone—probably Dad—snapped this shot of me at my IBM Selectric II. If you look on the right at the blue box, you can see the alternate font balls that allowed you to type in italics and boldface.
Also online this week, an interview I did with Norelle Done for her Seattle Wrote blog, which profiles local authors. You can read that here.
February 12, 2013
The Mirage paperback on sale today
I’ve updated the order links on my Mirage web page, so you don’t even have to leave the house to get a copy!
You can download a sample of the book here, and check out reviews here. The Big Idea essay I wrote for John Scalzi’s Whatever is here. Other essays and interviews, including my interview with Nancy Pearl, are here.
If you’re in the Seattle area, I’ll be reading and signing at the U.W. University Book Store on February 20 and at Elliott Bay Book Company on February 28 (both events start at 7 PM). On March 7 I go to Portland for an appearance at Powell’s Books on Hawthorne (reading starts at 7:30 PM).
And finally, just to make my publication day a little more special, I see Cory Doctorow has reposted his review of The Mirage on BoingBoing. Thanks, Cory!
February 8, 2013
Location scouting for the next apocalypse
Odds are I’m going to die in bed or in a really stupid-sounding accident, so I don’t actually need a remote mountain hideaway to serve as my last redoubt, but this’d be an awfully cool one, don’t you think? It’s the Hotel del Salto, located at Tequendama Falls outside Bogotá, Columbia. According to the Internet, it was built in the 1920s and abandoned in the 1990s due to river contamination, and because of the high number of suicides inspired by the falls, it’s also haunted. Now it’s being turned into an ecological museum, which means we can add genetically engineered killer vines and velociraptors into the mix.
The above photo is from a blog post by Francesco Mugnai called “30+ of the most beautiful places and abandoned ruins i’ve ever seen.” Some great story and/or offbeat travel fodder there. (I also really like the Christ of the Abyss statue and the abandoned Japanese amusement park.)
Incidentally, the secret back entrance to my last redoubt is located in the Ukraine:
February 7, 2013
The Mirage makes Locus magazine’s 2012 recommended reading list
Locus magazine’s February 2013 issue, on newsstands now, includes their 2012 recommended reading list, and The Mirage is on it. Quoth senior editor Tim Pratt: “[The Mirage] is more than a clever inversion of the War on Terror… in my review I called it a modern answer to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, and I stand by that.”
In other news:
* The Mirage trade paperback will be on sale next Tuesday, February 12. (Links for online preorder here.)
* I’ve been getting a lot of emails from fans in Germany asking when a German translation of The Mirage will be available. I don’t have an exact date yet, but my current understanding is that Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag will be publishing it sometime late this year or very early in 2014.
* The latest in procrastination technology: Bradley W. Schenck’s Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual website presents the Pulp-o-Mizer, which lets you create custom pulp sci-fi magazine covers and download them as .jpgs or, for a fee, have them printed on posters, cards, and coffee mugs. It’s a cool thing, and I hope the ‘Mizer is expanded to include other pulp genres. (Assuming my current book proposal goes well, I’ll be in the market for a horror/weird tales version.)
* Stewie, the world’s longest house cat (4 feet from nose to tail) has died at age 8.
* …but Shiro lives!
