So today as I was trying to navigate through a busy intersection in Koreatown a crazy lady wildly attacked my passenger window with her keys. I guess she thought I was in her way? I don’t even know. Amazingly, the window doesn’t even seem to be scratched.

Wow, going grocery shopping on Sunday afternoon in Hollywood is like attending a cosmetic surgery expo.

Oh, and since a few people have asked, I found a place to stay, at least temporarily. I’m renting a room in a pretty nice 2B2B near La Brea & Sunset with an aspiring filmmaker, Matt, who I found through craigslist. The place is just for September while his actress girlfriend is away filming a movie and he’s got a spare room. I LOVE the location, right in the heart of everything. The Walk of Fame is one block away, and I’m also within walking distance of the Sunset Strip and the Grove. This afternoon, strolling the Walk of Fame, I passed a homeless guy with a cardboard sign that said “Kick me in the nuts $20.” They’re also filming a movie up there right now, and the whole street is cordoned off in front of Mann’s Chinese Theater, and there are all sorts of smashed up cars and cranes and giant lights, and what appears to be a cement mixer that was dropped upside down from a great height.

So yesterday afternoon I popped over to T. C. Boyle’s office before class to chat, and the first thing he said was, “So … you’re a sci-fi guy.” Crap, my cover’s blown. (T. C. Boyle doesn’t read and doesn’t have any affection for quote-unquote science fiction, as may be gleaned from interviews like this.) I tried to explain that it was all my parents’ fault for reading me all those Madeleine L’Engel, Robert Heinlein, and William Sleator books when I was a kid. I said, “Did you look at my website?” and he said, “No, James told me.” (James is another student who knows me.) So, with some trepidation, I showed T. C. Boyle a copy of the issue of Realms of Fantasy with my story “Save Me Plz.” He looked at my story and remarked, “Great first paragraph.” I said, “Thanks.” He flipped a few pages and read some more. After a minute he said, “I just read the beginning and the end. You seem to have a good story sense.” I said, “Thanks,” again. So then I talked about some of my experiences reading fantasy & science fiction and reading literary fiction, and my impressions of them, mentioning Kelly Link and Jonathan Lethem and Aimee Bender. That discussion carried over into class, in which we discussed Fiskadoro, a postapocalyptic novel by Denis Johnson. Toward the end of class, T. C. Boyle brought up the issue of whether the book was “science fiction.” The other students are mostly English PhD candidates. One guy said he’d call it more of a “literary thought experiment,” and that the book wasn’t science fiction because it didn’t deal with stuff like “clones and brain swapping.” Someone else opined that the novel couldn’t be science fiction because it dealt with “serious themes.” I finally put in, “Well, you know, I’ve read hundreds of science fiction novels, and I guess I don’t see anything that makes this book somehow categorically different from any of dozens of other science fiction books that I could name. I think any story set in a semi-plausible imaginary future, whatever other categories the story might fall into, has to be read as a work of science fiction.” No one challenged me on that. I had the strong impression that none of the detractors had ever actually read any science fiction, and were therefore at something of a disadvantage when it came to arguing the point. Then T. C. Boyle brought up the issue of whether writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges should be considered “science fiction.” I pointed out that Borges had acknowledged that his biggest influence was H. G. Wells, so obviously Borges’ work at least had something to do with science fiction. After class, T. C. Boyle told me that my comments were brilliant. All in all, not a bad afternoon.

I’ll be appearing at Skylight Books (Los Angeles) on October 5th at 7:30 p.m. alongside other students from USC’s Master of Professional Writing program.

So I got back to L.A. last night. I decided to stick around L.A. for one more semester so I could take T. C. Boyle’s class, except now I have no place to live. If anyone knows of any good temporary housing opportunities in the L.A. area, please let me know. My class only meets once a week, so the place could theoretically be pretty far outside L.A.

Yesterday I picked up a copy of the 2008 Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market, which includes the article “Speculative Fiction: The Next Generation,” featuring commentary (about being a young writer) from me, Tobias Buckell, Tim Pratt, and Cherie Priest. The article was drawn from interviews conducted with all of us by John Joseph Adams. If you’re curious, you can check out the entire interview with me.

Check out the jaw-dropping cover art for my buddy Toby’s new novel.

Over at the Realms of Fantasy message boards, there’s now a thread for people to post comments about the October issue (which includes my story “Save Me Plz”).

Becoming Jane = Terrific

* * My opinion on The Bourne Ultimatum * *

Yeah, so you could pretty much skip this one. Or else just watch The Bourne Supremacy again, since this is almost exactly the same script, just not as good.

I updated my “Save Me Plz” page with the illustration by HyeJeong Park from Realms of Fantasy.

My short story “Save Me Plz” is available now in the October 2007 issue of Realms of Fantasy magazine. And look, I even got my name on the cover.

I just found out that the anthology The Dragon Done It, which will include my story “The Black Bird,” will feature a cover by Bob Eggleton! Check out Bob Eggleton’s cover art for The Dragon Done It.

In the supermarket just now, the enormous guy behind me in line said, “Man, you eat way too healthy.” I looked at what he was getting — two big bottles of Dr. Pepper — and said, “You think I should switch to the Dr. Pepper diet?” He said, “No, no, this isn’t my diet. This is just to give me my morning shot of energy so I can drive over to the steakhouse.”

Hey, the StarShipSofa guys came across my June 5th blog post about them, and read it out on a show 49, “Fandom.” It’s pretty surreal to be listening along to a podcast and then suddenly have the hosts start talking about you. Surreal, and nifty.

My good friend Doug Cohen (a.k.a. The Slushmaster) will soon be seeing his first fiction publication when his story “Feelings of the Flesh” appears in Interzone. Click here and scroll to see the awesome (and also intriguingly bizarre) illustration. Congrats!