Alex Bledsoe's Blog, page 42

Three questions with Alaya Johnson, author of Moonshine

I reviewed Alaya Johnson's new novel Moonshine here. Alaya was also kind enough to answer some questions about the book.

When you and I first discussed Moonshine back in 2009, I got the sense that it would be a much darker book than it turned out to be. Did the tone change, or did I just project my own atmosphere onto it?

I'd already finished it at that time, so I suppose that it was as dark as it was going to get. I'd conceived of Moonshine as a fun vampire book that was still very much aware...

How to help Tennessee

I'm from Tennessee, as are both sides of my family. I'm familiar with a lot of the places that are now flooded. Memphis, Nashville, Smyrna, I-24, I-40...these are places I could almost navigate in my sleep. It's a region that gave the world an awful lot of cool things.

And with the horrible damage likely to be revealed as the waters recede, I wanted to pass on information on how you (and me) can help.

Keep up to date at the Middle Tennessee Red Cross Chapter. Information on where to send do...

Review: a vampire suffragette in Alaya Johnson's Moonshine

I first heard about Moonshine when I was on a 2009 convention panel with its author, Alaya Johnson. The central conceit--in 1920s New York, a woman battles for the rights of vampires much as other suffragettes stood up for women and immigrants--fascinated me. My own vampire novels, Blood Groove and The Girls with Games of Blood, also draw parallels between the racial and gender tensions of the 70s and the identity crises faced by my vampires.

According to Johnson, Moonshine was originally ti...

Just in: the cover for The Girls with Games of Blood

Here's the cover for The Girls with Games of Blood, the sequel to Blood Groove.

Leave a comment before May 7 for a chance to win one of five signed paperbacks of Blood Groove, my first novel about vampires in Memphis in the Seventies.

The Girls with Games of Blood will be available in July!

So, at last we meet...

One massive fringe benefit of teaching at the Wisconsin Writers Institute this past weekend was that I finally got to meet my agent Marlene Stringer in person. That's right: although she's been my agent for five years and listened patiently while I whined, kvetched, bitched and wheedled, we've never actually met. Now we have, and here's the photo to prove it:

Notes from Odyssey Con (OddCon) 2010

Just back from Odyssey Con 2010 in Madison, WI.

High points:
--meeting guest of honor Harry Turtledove for the first time.
--hanging out with other guest of honor Tobias Buckell who I haven't seen in over a year.
--dinner with Toby, Steven Silver, Sarah Monette and Lynne and Michael Thomas.
--premiering the first chapter of The Girls with Games of Blood.
--participating in a great panel on the resurgence of sword and sorcery.
--and an end-of-con Thai outing with Toby, Sarah, Nayad Monroe, LaShawn Wa...

Fatherhood, Spenser style: Early Autumn

Since the death of Robert B. Parker in January 2010, I've been re-reading his Spenser novels. The earliest ones, written in the 1970s and 80s, staked out his moral as well as physical territory, revolving around ideas of traditional masculinity in conflict with the modern world. And in 1981's Early Autumn, Spenser demonstrates how his code is built and applied in the life of a clueless teenage boy. It's a book of its time in the particulars of setting, plot and society, but it touches on u...

"The most demanding form after poetry..."*

(*the short story, according to William Faulkner.)

For the first time in a long while, I'm working on a new short story.

When I had my epiphany moment in 1996 and decided it was time to get real about this whole writing thing, I started with short stories. For a while I wrote a new one every week, as if the stories had piled up in my brain over the years and then burst forth in a rush when I finally took them seriously. They averaged 3,000 words, which still seems to me about right for a shor...

The dignity of the faux dead

This is an addendum to my earlier post on P.F. Kluge's novel Eddie and the Cruisers. And I swear it's true.

In the late 1980s I worked in Florence, Alabama for the Olan Mills Portrait Studio chain. The studio manager was a woman then in her mid-forties, and one night just after closing our conversation turned to how much I liked the music from Eddie and the Cruisers.

"You know," she said fervently, "I wish they'd leave him alone."

I said, "I beg your pardon?"

"I wish they'd just let him rest in...

Found movies: Posse (the one from 1975)

The 1975 western Posse poses a fascinating set of ethical and moral dilemmas. Released just after President Nixon's resignation, it speaks in the standard western vocabulary: tough marshal (Kirk Douglas), wily outlaw (Bruce Dern), a posse on the criminal's trail, shoot outs and train chases. But its purpose is to show the stained truth behind these pure symbols, both within the story and for the audiences of its time. Thirty-five years later, those truths are, if anything, more vivid.

Marsh...