I am back in town, and between a cold and a flight and two late nights, I've hardly had time for anything. So, some catch-up:
AWP was...fun. It could have been more fun, but weather and the distance to the venue from my Cambridge hotel (Royal Sonesta—great btw and cheap thanks to HotWire.com) stymied me sometimes. I also got to catch up with my old taiji class. We shoveled snow in park in order to train. See?
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Just a note, as this has come up: apparently, I am on some outdated book review lists and the people who live in my old home in Massachusetts receive occasional packages. I have not lived on the East Coast since 2008. If you are a writer, please ask your publicist to update their reviewer lists. If you are a publicist, please write to me rather than just arbitrarily sending some vampire princess book to some address once associated with me.
I also had a reading last night in San Fran, with Tim Pratt and Cliff Winnig and Mark Pantoja, which I forgot to mention here. It was a pop-up supper club (v. tasty) and an ebook launch for a new company called Freemade SF. The company's gimmick is that their ebooks come with enhanced audio—music and such. There was music at the event. I read from Love is the Law accompanied by chillwave loops. I wanted chillstep loops, dammit! It went well anyway. People like literary readings when there's food involved. Not the typical science fiction crowd, either. I was the ugliest person in the room. When I mentioned that to Olivia, she said, "No, you were probably just the least stylish person in the room."
Over at the day job, I am promoting the imminent release of the mindblowing and kooky novel/collection hybrid Self-Reference ENGINE with a giveaway contest (Essay: What is the strangest book you've ever read?) and by interviewing LJ's own![]()
dr_phil_physics right here. NOW we shall see if people who claim to like "hard SF" actually do want to read books in which issues of physics and science are dramatized, or if "hard SF" is just a codeword for stories in which rationalist fascists perform cold equations and decide that it would be best to kill girls, commit genocide, let the world end rather than be inconvenienced themselves, etc. This is the litmus test: is the whole subgenre nothing but a neckbeard lie?! Let's find out, this week!
AWP was...fun. It could have been more fun, but weather and the distance to the venue from my Cambridge hotel (Royal Sonesta—great btw and cheap thanks to HotWire.com) stymied me sometimes. I also got to catch up with my old taiji class. We shoveled snow in park in order to train. See?
Just a note, as this has come up: apparently, I am on some outdated book review lists and the people who live in my old home in Massachusetts receive occasional packages. I have not lived on the East Coast since 2008. If you are a writer, please ask your publicist to update their reviewer lists. If you are a publicist, please write to me rather than just arbitrarily sending some vampire princess book to some address once associated with me.
I also had a reading last night in San Fran, with Tim Pratt and Cliff Winnig and Mark Pantoja, which I forgot to mention here. It was a pop-up supper club (v. tasty) and an ebook launch for a new company called Freemade SF. The company's gimmick is that their ebooks come with enhanced audio—music and such. There was music at the event. I read from Love is the Law accompanied by chillwave loops. I wanted chillstep loops, dammit! It went well anyway. People like literary readings when there's food involved. Not the typical science fiction crowd, either. I was the ugliest person in the room. When I mentioned that to Olivia, she said, "No, you were probably just the least stylish person in the room."
Over at the day job, I am promoting the imminent release of the mindblowing and kooky novel/collection hybrid Self-Reference ENGINE with a giveaway contest (Essay: What is the strangest book you've ever read?) and by interviewing LJ's own
dr_phil_physics right here. NOW we shall see if people who claim to like "hard SF" actually do want to read books in which issues of physics and science are dramatized, or if "hard SF" is just a codeword for stories in which rationalist fascists perform cold equations and decide that it would be best to kill girls, commit genocide, let the world end rather than be inconvenienced themselves, etc. This is the litmus test: is the whole subgenre nothing but a neckbeard lie?! Let's find out, this week!