Here’s a paragraph from my new story. Can anyone give me a definitive citation for how the dashes and quotation marks around “she held up her massive hands” ought to be formatted here? As far as I can tell there is absolutely zero agreement about this among published novels I’ve read.

“So that’s Abraxas. And he could be showing up here at any minute, and I’ll have to fight him. Now”–she held up her massive hands–“these hands are formidable things, but nevertheless, given the circumstances, I really wouldn’t mind having a weapon, you know what I mean? You getting the picture?”

I thought that the way I have it here was standard, even though I hate the way it looks and I’d do it differently if I could, but then I just noticed that the copy editor changed it on one of my other stories to something that seems to me even more random, so now I’m totally confused.

Love this. Here’s one of the most charming pieces of art I’ve come across recently: The Wishing Well by Travis Hanson. He’s got a clean, comic book style reminiscent of Bill Watterson, and the premise of this piece is delightful and inspired: Coins dropped into a wishing well end up in a dragon’s hoard.

Here’s a cool sketch of me reading my short story “The Ontological Factor” at Confluence, done by a very talented member of the audience. Usually I only get to see sketches of myself when I’m the defendant (those charges are bullshit, by the way), so this was a nice change of pace.

The latest fictional offering from Lightspeed magazine is “Manumission” by Tobias S. Buckell, an origin story for his character Pepper, who also appears in the novels Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin, and Sly Mongoose.

More old stuff. Here are some art assets from a few different games I fooled around on. Oh giant pixels, how I’ve missed you.

If you missed last week’s NYRSF reading, you can still check out “Mister Hadj’s Sunset Ride,” the story that Saladin Ahmed performed. It’s a short, engaging “weird western” involving a Muslim hero and a zombie outlaw, and it features just a terrifically well-done voice. It’s currently up on Beneath Ceaseless Skies in both text and audio format.

So the Monkey Island 2: Special Edition came out yesterday … but NOT FOR THE MAC. WTF, LucasArts? It’s been widely reported online that the game would be on the Mac, but so far nothing, and LucasArts has given no indication whatsoever on when or if the Mac version is coming. I can only describe their behavior on this as ass-clownish in the extreme.

The game is currently available for the iPhone, so I got that. (I half suspect they’re delaying the Mac release to exploit all the Mac users like me who will, out of desperation, buy the iPhone version and then later the Mac version too, and if this is the case then I DO NOT APPRECIATE IT AT ALL.)

Anyway, I’ve been playing the iPhone version. One of the big draws of the Special Edition is the new high definition art — which serves no purpose whatsoever on the iPhone, as the screen is way too small to appreciate the level of detail. Since there’s no mouse, you play the game by touching the screen. This works okay for the most part, but is often INSANELY frustrating. Even though I know exactly what I’m supposed to do, it often takes me upwards of 15 tries to get it to work using the touchscreen. (I played for about half an hour without talking to Wally the cartographer because I just could not get this simple command to work at all.) I can’t imagine anyone wanting to play this game for the first time on the iPhone.

Though it is nice to be able to play Monkey Island at the beach, as I did yesterday. They have an iPad version too, and I can imagine that being pretty cool, though I don’t have an iPad, so who knows?

Yeah, so anyway, playing Monkey Island on the iPhone is basically like listening to someone belch the Star-Spangled Banner. It’s amazing that it works at all, but it’s not like it’s a good rendition or anything.

WHERE IS THE HELL IS THE MAC VERSION?

ETA: Listen to my December 2010 interview with Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert.

Hey, looks like the Alpha workshop has a brand new website. How about that. It’s always nice when stuff like that just happens without me having to do anything. Thanks to former student Sarah Brand for setting this up. And here’s the new logo, designed by former student Gillian Conahan:

Elena Gleason, 2005 & 2006
“Erased,” Fantasy Magazine, April 2008
“Whisper’s Voice,” Fantasy Magazine, April 2010

Shivaun Hoad, 2006
“The Fairy’s Challenge,” Cicada, March/April 2009

Richard Larson
“Last Call,” Eclectica Magazine Vol. 13 No. 3, July 2009
“Up in the Air,” Strange Horizons, November 2008
“Notice,” Vibrant Gray #2, February 2008
“Night and Day,” Pindeldyboz, September 2007

Rachel Sobel, 2008 & 2009
“The Loyalty of Birds,” Clarkesworld Magazine

Emily Tersoff
“The White Part of the Apple,” Fantasy Magazine, September 2009

Jeannette Westwood, 2005 & 2006
“The Banyan Tree,” Fantasy Magazine, October 2008

Here are two paragraphs I posted over at Torque Control that I figured were worth cross-posting here:

Joe Sherry writes: “I don’t care how good the story is or who wrote it, I’m shutting down the moment I see catmen. I freaking hate catmen.”

I reply: “Hi Joe. I often meet people who detest a particular fantasy notion, whether it’s elves or zombies or unicorns or time travel or talking cats or whatever. And of course all too often I meet people who hate any fantasy notion whatsoever. So it goes. Personally I love all fantasy notions with heedless abandon, even the cheesiest of them … perhaps even especially the cheesiest of them. ‘Catmen’ stories, whether it’s Larry Niven or Brian Jacques or yes, Thundercats, have meant a great deal to me, and I would hate to see them, or any other idea, banished forever from our stories.”

Jonathan McCalmont writes: “I must admit to not understanding why one would write stuff that didn’t consciously push the envelope.”

I reply: “Hi Jonathan. As to why would anyone ever want to write something that doesn’t consciously push the envelope … I dunno, maybe because often there’s some really great stuff that fits just fine in the envelope. When I think of my favorite books and stories, a fairly high percentage of them don’t ‘push the envelope’ in any way that I can identify — they’re just great stories about characters that I care about. And many of my favorite books and stories do ‘push the envelope.’ And I’m glad to have both. Requiring that everything push the envelope all the time would seem to me to lead to a pointlessly escalating cycle of grotesquery and obscurantism, in a way that would deprive us of the wonderful variety of potential stories.”

Here’s an interesting BBC documentary called The Power of Nightmares, which traces the parallel rise of the neoconservatives in America and Al Qaeda in the Middle East. A few of the more notable claims in the film are:

* As everyone knows, in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war, the neoconservatives set up their own team of analysts because they wouldn’t accept what the CIA was telling them, and their team produced the wildly inaccurate intelligence that was used to justify the war. It turns out they did the same thing back in the early ’80s. Back then, the CIA was saying that the Soviet military was falling apart, but the neocons refused to accept this, and believed instead a paranoid fantasy that the Soviets were secretly controlling all terrorist groups everywhere. Their evidence, drawn from a bestselling book, was dismissed by the CIA. What made the CIA so sure? Well, all the “information” in this book had originally been fabricated by the CIA themselves as part of an anti-Soviet propaganda campaign, and they had the case files to prove it. Even this wasn’t enough to dissuade the neocons, whose wacky ideas became the basis for Reagan’s foreign policy.

* Osama bin Laden was never able to rally any significant number of people to his cause of global jihad. Most of the fighters he associates with are nationalists interested in bringing about revolution in their home countries, but who are indifferent to any wider struggle. In a video that shows bin Laden ringed by a throng of masked fighters, he was forced to literally hire those guys as extras for the day of filming. The reason that actual Al Qaeda terrorists seem so scarce both in Afghanistan and among the populations of secret US prisons is that there just weren’t that many Al Qaeda fighters to begin with. In fact, the reason bin Laden decided to attack the US in the first place was as a desperate, last-ditch attempt to get attention, as his efforts to mobilize mass movements in Middle Eastern countries had been consistently ignored.

* Reports about terrorist “sleeper cells” operating in the US are wildly exaggerated. One group of kids was fingered by a con artist/convict in exchange for a reduced sentence. The only evidence against them was that they had filmed their trip to Disneyworld. The government argued that this tape was a cleverly disguised ploy in which the kids were casing potential targets, and that the hours of footage of them horsing around was an ingenious smokescreen. The charges were dropped. Apparently the best case the government has of a “sleeper cell” is a group of kids who did visit a terrorist training camp, but they seem to have quickly decided that this wasn’t for them and they came home again. The FBI kept them under surveillance for a year afterward, and found no evidence that they were planning to do anything. Finally one of the kids traveled abroad and emailed his friends that he was getting “married” and “wouldn’t be seeing them” for a while. The government interpreted this as a coded message that he was planning a suicide attack, but all indications are that actually he was just getting married and wouldn’t be seeing them for a while. The government eventually charged them for visiting the training camp but not for any plot.

* After interrogating a captured Al Qaeda leader, the government issued warnings that terrorists were plotting to destroy landmarks all around Manhattan. It turns out that Al Qaeda had no such capability, and the guy was just trying to scare us. In fact, he had recently watched Godzilla (2000), and was just listing anything he could think of that had been destroyed in that movie.

* “Dirty bombs” are much less scary than they’re made out to be, as the radioactive material would be widely dispersed and would be cleaned up pretty quickly. Even in the (inconceivable) event that there was no cleanup whatsoever and those in the affected area stayed put for a full year afterward, it’s unlikely that anyone would die as a result. Wikipedia describes the health risks from a dirty bomb as comparable to regularly eating ice cream.

Two very exciting new writers, Paolo Bacigalupi and Saladin Ahmed, will be appearing tomorrow night at the New York Review of Science Fiction Reading Series at the SoHo Gallery for Digital Art (138 Sullivan St.). $5 suggested donation. Drop by if you’re in the neighborhood.

I just read Robert Silverberg’s memoir Other Spaces, Other Times: A Life Spent in the Future. There was one part in particular I thought was interesting. As a recent college grad, Silverberg was supporting himself by writing formulaic junk fiction for a number of second-tier sf pulp magazines that would accept anything he wrote — often without bothering to read the stories — and paid the equivalent of several thousand dollars per story. (Man, those were the days.) Silverberg was taking full advantage of this, churning out stories at a ferocious rate, sometimes two a day, and planning to retire by thirty. His friends thought he was squandering his talent, and encouraged him to slow down a bit and write more ambitious work and actually, you know, revise, and submit his work to the top markets, but Silverberg’s response was that the top markets almost always bounced his stuff, and he didn’t think they’d be interested in the sort of thing he really wanted to write anyway, so from a financial standpoint it just didn’t make sense to take the time and risk of aiming higher. Finally one of his friends (Fred Pohl) assumed the editorship of one of the top-tier magazines (Galaxy) and made Silverberg a deal. He said basically, “I want you to write the best work you’re capable of, and here’s a chance for you to do it risk-free. If you send me a story and say, ‘Fred, this is the best work I’m capable of,’ I promise I’ll buy it, no questions asked. Anything you send me like that, I’ll buy. But if I read the story and don’t feel it’s the best you’re capable of, I’ll still publish it, as promised, but after that the deal’s off … Oh, and don’t under any circumstances tell any other writers about this.” Seems like a pretty ingenious tactic for getting the best work out of a writer, and it seems to have worked, as it motivated Silverberg to write some of his best material.

So I just bought a replacement scratch pad for my cats, and it came with some catnip. On a whim I decided to look up “catnip” on Wikipedia — because just what the hell is that stuff anyway? — which is where I discovered to my surprise/delight that “The plant terpenoid nepetalactone is the main chemical constituent of the essential oil of Nepeta cataria and acts as a feline attractant. This chemical enters the feline’s nose, and produces semi-hallucinogenic effects on the cat.”

Whoa, wait just a minute there. Semi-hallucinogenic? Holy crap.

Anyway, several hours later, when I had finally stopped chuckling at the thought of making my cats hallucinate, I started wondering: Hold on. How would they even know something like that anyway? What, did they run some clinical trials and give the cats a follow-up questionnaire or something? I went looking for answers.

I.e., I googled “catnip hallucinogen.”

And came up with a thread about the potential psychotropic effects of catnip not on cats, but on people. For example, this one caught my eye:

“Hello good sirs, madams. I have just smoked a big bowl of catnip out of my marijuana smoking water pipe. Being a doctor of brain surgery i have decided that catnip gets you high. I have an ounce of catnip and we are going to smoke all of it ill respond soon enough. if it doesnt work for you then f*ck your sh*t”

Well geez, I thought, if a doctor of brain surgery says it works, this must be for real.

But then I read:

“you have got to be fist fucking me. All you big floppy donkey dicks that claimed I would get high from this here cat mother fuckin nip can warmly accept my t bag in appreciation for your lies. fuck you( however, the expirience is well worth the unclimatic result because it’s funny as shit telling people that you just smoked catnip. p.s. to the kid who said he regularly smokes catnip, you are the biggest fuck ass of all time.”

Makes it sound a bit more dubious. Though really who are you going to trust, a doctor of brain surgery or just some random guy on the internet?

This individual makes a valid point, I thought:

“why the hell wold you even smoke it to see if the effect is the same as for a cat? When’s the last time you saw a cat smoking it? If you were trying to see if it worked for humans, wouldn’t you just eat it or rub it around your face?”

And apparently this is not some isolated phenomenon either, as this news story demonstrates:

“In at least one Twin Cities pet shop, it takes a note from his parents nowadays for a teenager to lay in any big supply of catnip. Owners of other stores have taken to questioning their youthful customers closely about large-scale purchases. They know the reason for the sudden popularity of catnip in the Twin Cities and nationwide — and it isn’t the one a young man gave the owner of a Hennepin Av. pet shop: ‘I have,’ he explained, ‘a GREAT, BIG cat.’ The fact is, the kids are smoking the stuff, apparently in dubious pursuit of a low-budget thrill.”

Seriously people, what the hell?

Anyway, I still haven’t found an answer to my question about how do we know that catnip makes cats hallucinate.