Paul Tremblay's Blog, page 11
April 19, 2012
My LA Times Festival of Books schedule
The festival is free to the public and held on the USC campus. If I have time I’ll try to find where John Carpenter fell asleep in film classes. See you in LA!
Crime Fiction: Out of the Box, Saturday, 4/21/2012, 3:30:00 PM
Moderator/Interviewer/Introducer
Celeste Fremon
Panelists
Nelson George
Gary Phillips
P.G. Sturges
Paul Tremblay
Fiction: Bump in the Night, Sunday, 4/22/2012, 11:30:00 AM
Moderator/Interviewer/Introducer
Paul Tremblay
Panelists
Melissa de la Cruz
Seth Grahame-Smith
Deborah Harkness
Richard Kadrey
April 9, 2012
New short story, “Our Town’s Monster.”
“Our Town’s Monster” is live at Chizine.
There’s a randy couple, a persnickety real estate agent, an old school house, a historical swamp, and, we hope, a monster at the end of the story…Right, Grover?
New short story, "Our Town's Monster."
"Our Town's Monster" is live at Chizine.
There's a randy couple, a persnickety real estate agent, an old school house, a historical swamp, and, we hope, a monster at the end of the story…Right, Grover?
March 12, 2012
Death and Facebook
In mid-February, while doing my morning rounds on Facebook, the name of a recently deceased acquaintance popped up on my "your friend has a birthday today" list. This acquaintance was not someone I was close to, but over the years, I'd had more than a few professional dealings with him and I always found him to be friendly, pleasant, and courteous.
That last sentence in the above paragraph hardly qualifies as a heartfelt eulogy. Is that an awful thing to say about a relatively young person who died unexpectedly? No, I don't think it is an awful thing to say, if you and I were in the same room, talking. I don't think it would be awkward or awful at all to share these feelings in a personal conversation. But somehow, in digital pixel-form, it does feel much more awkward.
In mid-February, I clicked on his still-live Facebook account to see what was happening on his wall.
Love it, hate it, have your brains reshaped by it, social media has certainly changed our daily lives in ways large and small. I tend not to spend much of my day fretting over these changes. I flatter myself by thinking that I'm so savvy therefore I know what I'm getting into. I know the deal struck, and the consequences. But I have to admit, one month later, the death of this acquaintance, or more specificially, seeing his Facebook wall continues to unnerve me.
This goes well beyond my own personal annoyance unease with the near-anymous RIP messages dedicated to the celebrity/actor/musician/writer/artist du jour one finds on news feeds and twitter accounts on a daily or hourly basis. Not that I haven't participated in the social media version of the two-second eulogy. And rationally, I understand the cathartic value of joining or starting a cultural discussion/remembrance of Person X by posting to social media, and the value of publicly proclaiming this person who lived was important to me and here's a little of the why. I do think my unease is associated not with the message but with the messenger: the staid permanence of the digital sentence, which is generally without nuance and most certainly lacking the nonverbal communication cues associated with live conversations, plus the arbitrary constraint of that digital RIP message to 140 or 420 characters. Maybe it's the non-permenance of the digital gesture as well. Your blip on the screen disappears so quickly it's as though it was never there in the first place.
I'm not proud of myself for digitally rubber necking the deceased acquaintance's Facebook wall. I can't explain why I went to his wall when I don't spent time on the walls of other deceased people to whom I was quite close. Perhaps it's because I knew what I was going to find, but I still wanted to see it.
There were touching missing-you-on-your-birthday wishes and other sad messages from people who were close to him, and from others, who, like me, were only acquaintances yet moved to write something on his wall that day. There were also happy birthday messages from people who clearly did not know that he passed away months ago. Invariably these messages were written by writers of various levels of career.
There was one message from AuthorX. I really can't stand AuthorX and I think AuthorX is a self-absorbed tool bag. AuthorX's wall message was: "I hope this and every day's a happy one for you." In the instant after I read this, all my petty assumptions and suspicions about AuthorX were validated. AuthorX, who is marketing and self-promotion crazed, was only on Facebook to accumulate potential sales. AuthorX's smarmy, sell-at-all costs persona summed up not in a simple happy birthday wish, but in that puke-worthy florid sentence meant to show that AuthorX's birthday wish goes beyond your average Facebook friend, and that AuthorX truly cares about you. Only, you know, AuthorX doesn't realize that you are dead. And he'll likely never realize you're dead.
I know that's not fair of me. I know that it's an honest mistake, one that two friends of mine made on the same wall. They too innocently yet ignorantly wished the dead acquaintance happy birthday. I know it's a mistake that I could easily make.
With few exceptions, partaking in social media is a necessary evil for most writers. Henry Holt as a part of their marketing plan for my second novel strongly suggested that I get on Twitter. My needing a better marketing strategy aside, the mad rush for writers to find some sort of online presence in this chaotic publishing climate is often a desperate one. Like most writers I know with a Facebook account, we have a friend's list mainly comprised of people who aren't our real friends. Certainly comprised by people we've never met in the flesh. Most of us accept friend requests with the idea that our network is growing wider, stronger, that it'll all result, somehow, magically, in more sales and better deals. The writer's online presence is something that so many of us fret over. So many of us have editors and publicists tell us we need to worry about our presence; that precious garden which now needs to be obsessively tilled and cultivated.
I'll freely admit that most days I do enjoy the glancing interactions, the amorphous sense of community I have with other writers and readers, and the speedy exchange of information on social media. Sometimes, though, I grow weary of tilling that garden.
I went back to the acquaintance's Facebook wall today. All the messages are still there. They confuse me more than ever.
February 29, 2012
Books! They were read! By me in 2012! So far!
I've been blog-slacking. Hey, I've been busy, all right. Your reward. A slew of one or two-line book reviews! In order of what was read first.
Treasure Island!!! by Sarah Levine: One of the smartest and funniest books I've read in a long time. 25 year-old slacker reads Treasure Island and is inspired to live her using the book as her moral compass. I hereby retroactively add it to my favs of 2011 list.
Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi: A dark, dream-like, and twisted love story between a writer, his muse, and his wife. Helen's work is, as always, fiercely original and compelling.
Shoebox Trainwreck by John Mantooth: This was a reread for me as I blurbed this fine debut collection. John writes these melancholy but twisted Southern Gothics about down-and-outers that would be at home in a bookcase that includes books from Daniel Woodrell, Tom Piccirilli, and Rob Roberge.
Taft 2012 by Jason Heller: High concept fun. President Taft is re-animated after a century long sleep to run for president again. I was most impressed by Heller's odd but welcomed sense of optimism amidst the wacky fun and political satire.
The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus: Children's speech becomes toxic to adults. Soon all communication is potentially lethal in this strange, challenging, dark novel with a big brain.
The Odds by Stewart O'Nan: Another quiet masterpiece from one of the best writers working today. His middle-aged couple betting their relationship and future on a doomed-to-fail getaway weekend to Niagara Falls and its casinos is spellbinding.
The San Veneficio Canon (The Divinity Student/The Golem) by Michael Cisco: What else is there to say about Cisco's madly brilliant, hallucinatory prose? Well, I tried by writing an introduction for THE GOLEM in Centipede Press's forthcoming 5 volume edition of Cisco's early works.
So Much Pretty by Cara Hoffman: Another book to retroactively put on my best of 2011 list. In rural upstate New York, where a conglom farm economically dominates the area while it decimates it environmentally, a local woman Wendy White goes missing for months, before her brutalized body turns up on the side of the road. An angry screed against our cultural misogyny. A gut punch of a book.
The Croning by Laird Barron: I got me an early peek of Laird's first novel, which is due out in May. Geologists/anthropologists, cults, and Old Leech, oh my! It's dark, creepy, paranoid, and fantastic. Fans of his short fiction will be delighted. I hope the novel brings him hordes of new fans, too.
Dark Matter by Michelle Paver: I'm a sucker for stories set in the arctic. This is a ghost story set in the arctic, one ultimately about our cosmic aloneness. And it's a very good one with some genuinely creepy scenes.
Available Dark by Elizabeth Hand: Punk photographer Cass Neary of the brilliant Generation Loss is back. Neary dives headlong into the violent underground world of Norwegian black metal when she's hired to authenticate macabre photos that a famous fashion photographer is selling to a mysterious bidder. Hand's prose is impeccable, as always. The story is tight and fast. And for you horror types, with all the talk of gruesome murders, old gods, and the near-apocalyptic landscape of Iceland, you can all but forget the cover calls it a "crime" novel.
Mother, Stranger by Cris Beam: Another quality non-fic piece published by The Atavist. It's a sad, honest, and difficult look at the cycle of abuse and the damage and pain lasting generations. Generations that include the descendants of William Faulkner.
February 28, 2012
Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye: Cover and limited edition pre-order
My satire/dystoptian/kitchen sink novel SWALLOWING A DONKEY’S EYE, due to be published as a trade paperback by CZP in August, has a final cover. And this is that cover!
Dig it. Cue jacket copy:
Join Farm today! It’s only six years of your life. . . .
Farm is the mega-conglomerate food supplier for City, populated with rabidly bureaucratic superiors, antagonistic and sexually deviant tour guides dressed in chicken and duck suits, and farm animals illegally engineered for silence. City is sprawling, technocratic, and rests hundreds of feet above the coastline on the creaking shoulders of a giant wooden pier.
When the narrator’s single mother, whom he left behind in City, falls out of contact, he fears the worst: his mother is homeless and subsequently to be deported under City to the Pier. On his desperate search to find his mother, he encounters ecoterrorists wearing plush animal suits, an election hangs in the balance as the City’s all-powerful Mayor is infatuated with magic refrigerators and outlaw campaigns, and he’s reunited with a wise-cracking, over-sexed priest who may or may not have ESP, but who is most certainly his deadbeat dad.
Whether rebelling against the regimented and ridiculous nature of Farm life, exploring the all-too-familiar and consumer-obsessed world of City, experiencing the all-too-real suffering of the homeless in Pier, or confronting the secrets of his own childhood, Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye’s narrator is a hilarious, neurotic, and rage-filled Quixote searching for his mother, his own dignity, and the meaning of humanity.
Cemetery Dance is now taking preorders for the limited hardcover version. Extras include a stunning full cover frontspiece bythe wonderful Susanne Apgar. I will also be including my novella City Pier in the limited ed. That’s a lot of Farm, City, and Pier in one book folks!
Swallowing a Donkey's Eye: Cover and limited edition pre-order
My satire/dystoptian/kitchen sink novel SWALLOWING A DONKEY'S EYE, due to be published as a trade paperback by CZP in August, has a final cover. And this is that cover!
Dig it. Cue jacket copy:
Join Farm today! It's only six years of your life. . . .
Farm is the mega-conglomerate food supplier for City, populated with rabidly bureaucratic superiors, antagonistic and sexually deviant tour guides dressed in chicken and duck suits, and farm animals illegally engineered for silence. City is sprawling, technocratic, and rests hundreds of feet above the coastline on the creaking shoulders of a giant wooden pier.
When the narrator's single mother, whom he left behind in City, falls out of contact, he fears the worst: his mother is homeless and subsequently to be deported under City to the Pier. On his desperate search to find his mother, he encounters ecoterrorists wearing plush animal suits, an election hangs in the balance as the City's all-powerful Mayor is infatuated with magic refrigerators and outlaw campaigns, and he's reunited with a wise-cracking, over-sexed priest who may or may not have ESP, but who is most certainly his deadbeat dad.
Whether rebelling against the regimented and ridiculous nature of Farm life, exploring the all-too-familiar and consumer-obsessed world of City, experiencing the all-too-real suffering of the homeless in Pier, or confronting the secrets of his own childhood, Swallowing a Donkey's Eye's narrator is a hilarious, neurotic, and rage-filled Quixote searching for his mother, his own dignity, and the meaning of humanity.
Cemetery Dance is now taking preorders for the limited hardcover version. Extras include a stunning full cover frontspiece bythe wonderful Susanne Apgar. I will also be including my novella City Pier in the limited ed. That's a lot of Farm, City, and Pier in one book folks!
February 23, 2012
Boskone: the chocolate fountain the con report
The short version: a wonderful, speculative time was had by all.
The way longer version (apologies for people, places, and things I forgot):
Pre-pre-Boskone, writer, friend, man about town, John Langan came to my school to speak to some classes about writing and dairy farming. The students interested in dairy farming were sorely disappointed, but everyone else enjoyed John's visit. He's a great teacher and his passion for writing is infectious, just like his nasty case of scabies.
Pre-Boskone we stopped by my house where John demanded my family serve him bottles of scotch whiskey and bags of no-name black liquorice. The kids only laughed and threw nerf balls at his nether region instead.
We arrived at the Westin hotel carrying bricks of corn bread and plastic tubs of delicious beef stew from the famous L Street Diner (South Boston). This part of the story is true. John Joseph Adams was made to watch us consume while John, finally, dispensed with the do's-and-don'ts of dairy farming. Eventually we were discovered by Jack Harigna and Genevieve Valentine. Hilarity and good conversation ensued. I'd credit her with the naming of a new genre called sh*tpunk, but then I'd be lying.
I had two panels on that Friday night. The first was Ten Best Books of the Past Ten Years and was very well attended. After banging my shoe on the table like nikita khrushchev the other panelists kindly agreed that my two Sleep novels and my short story collection just had to be every and all top ten book lists. We also talked about other books and publishing trends/successes from the last ten years.
Because my books made those top ten lists, I was then roped into serving on a panel on short fiction: why wasn't it more popular? James Patrick Kelly moderated, John Joseph Adams and Brett Cox (who is my friend, but I also know he's a spy from the south) talked about why you people want to read long boring novels instead of our awesome short stories.
After encountering the chocolate petri dish of death in the dealer's room, the rest of the evening was spent in joyously in the company of my betters, including all of the aforementioned plus Dana Cameron and Boskone hero, JoAnn Cox.
Saturday, was more of the same. JoAnn, Brett, Jack, John, and myself had a secret Shirley Jackson Awards board meeting at the where we dined on the squamous. Post-lunch, John Harvey, Dave Wellington, Barry Lee Dejasu, and Jordan and Matt London joined in on the con fun. Or at least shared in my con fun. Pre-dinner, I read my story "House of Windows" to throngs of people. Not thongs of people. Fine. I joined the thongs of people for a big dinner at Papagayo. Hands down the best food of the weekend, says me. Food was enjoyed until Brett Cox insisted on taking a picture of John, Genevieve, and myself. It took three tries to get our collective good side. Can't have been that good either, because the photo has yet to materialize.
After dinner was the big Politics in Horror panel. Genevieve, Jordan, and John made it a very easy panel to moderate. I threw out a quote from Stephen King about how horror was as conservative as an Illinois Republican in a three-piece suit and we were off and running. We also addressed Lovecraft, torture-porn flicks, and works of horror that were transgressive and not reactionary.
Post-paneling, more fun hangout time with the peeps. Not the Peeps. Peeps are yellow and made of marshmallow.
These are not the Peeps I hang out with.
Sunday was the wrap-up day. John and I had a Kaffeeklatsche and enjoyed talking dairy farming with Jack, Brett, Theodore, Frank, and Patricia.
It was another great weekend. I already miss all my marshmallowy friends and can't wait to do it again soon.
February 16, 2012
My Boskone schedule
Boskone is this weekend and very much looking forward to hanging out with friends. Even that Haringa character.
Friday 8pm-9pm
Ten Best Books of the Past Ten Years
Let's take the longer view and pick the works of science fiction, fantasy, or horror that stood the test of the last decade or so. We'll bring our own lists and opinions; please share yours too. Do any trends stand out? What makes a book lasting rather than just latest and greatest?
Claire Eddy (M)
Ellen Asher
Don D'Ammassa
Michael J. Walsh
Paul G. Tremblay
Saturday 10:00am – 11:00am
Movies that Messed Us Up
Horror movies can make a lasting impression on us, in good and bad ways. Let's discuss those films.
Jordan Hamessley (M)
Marc Scheff
Genevieve Valentine
Jacob Sommer
Paul G. Tremblay
Saturday 4:30pm-5:00pm
Reading: Paul G. Tremblay
(I'll be reading my short story "House of Windows," which is currently appearing in Phantasmagorium, Issue 2)
Saturday 8:00-9:00
The Politics of Horror
Horror tales, like stories in many genres, work best when they work on more than one level. Let's discuss the history of the political in horror, and the political underpinnings (or failures) of recent horror books and movies.
Paul G. Tremblay (M)
Genevieve Valentine
Jordan Hamessley
John Langan
Sunday 12:00 – 1:00
Kaffeeklatsche: Paul Tremblay and John Langan
February 8, 2012
TOP AUTHORS (and me!) CONTRIBUTE TO THE SHARED WORLDS CRITTER MAP
Shared Worlds SF/Fantasy Teen Writing Camp Launches 2012 Registration and Donation Drive
https://www.wofford.edu/ sharedworlds/critters/
Neil Gaiman, Lev Grossman, Scott Westerfeld, and thirty-seven more (including me!) of the most imaginative writers from around the world have contributed to Shared Worlds' "Critter Map," a webpage of fantastical beasts. Their whimsical descriptions of imaginary creatures created by pop artist Jeremy Zerfoss are in support of the Shared Worlds registration and fund drive for 2012. Every summer up to 50 teen writers come to Shared Worlds SF/F Teen Writing Camp at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, from as far away Japan to participate in this unique camp. This year, registrants include teens from all parts of the United States as well as Germany and Indonesia. Wofford College provides a structured, supervised environment in which the students can excel and demonstrate their creativity.
At Shared Worlds, the students form teams in classrooms to build entire fantasy or science fictional worlds in the first week and then write stories in those worlds the second week. Top professional writers are on hand to provide feedback and to conduct workshops. The guest writers for the 2012 include New York Times bestsellers Julianna Baggott, Naomi Novik, and Tobias Buckell as well as Prix Award Winner Karin Lowachee and Hugo Award winner Ann VanderMeer. The teens also get to attend author readings, take fieldtrips to bookstores, and create videos about their imaginary worlds. Shared Worlds also publishes an annual book of the students' writing.
"For many of our students, Shared Worlds is a transformational experience," said the camp's assistant director, fantasy writer Jeff VanderMeer. "They not only learn more about writing, they also get to have fun solving problems in in the world-building groups, and they form what will probably turn out to be life-long friendships with like-minded teens."
The "Critter Map" is the cornerstone of a donation drive intended to ensure that attending the Shared Worlds Teen Writing Camp can be a possibility for all registered students, no matter what their financial need. Monies will join contributions from donors like Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman and major support from Amazon.com.
The contributors to the "Critter Map" range from such icons as Michael Moorcock and Gene Wolfe to exciting new authors like Viivi Hyvönen and Kirsten Imani Kasai. Filmmaker and writer Gregory Norman Bossert has created the Critter Map website, and Therese Goulding served as editor for the contributions.
Additional Links:
Critter Map stories alphabetically by author: https://www.wofford.edu/ sharedworlds/critters/ byauthor.html
Shared Worlds Website: http://www.wofford.edu/ sharedworlds/
Donation Page: http://www.wofford.edu/ sharedworlds/donate/
Registration Page: https://www.wofford.edu/ sharedworlds/inner-register. aspx
