So apparently The Living Dead 2 has been all printed up and will be appearing soon on store shelves. And check out who supplied the front cover blurb:

Yes, that’s right, Shaun of the Dead himself (and Scotty from the new Trek film) … Simon Pegg. That’s pretty cool.

In response to my retrospective on Richard Garriott’s Ultima series, Joe Garrity of the Origin Museum writes:

Excellent article, David. Your summary was spot-on, and your opinions seconded. I too would love to see a new Ultima, but it might not be in the cards. There is always hope, however. Ultima’s current IP holder is EA (Garriott only holds copyright on the names Lord British and Shamino). EA is responsible for UO of course, and they’ve just started Lord of Ultima as an RTS through Facebook, which is doing well. Exercising this use of their IP may be a way of “testing the waters” for the popularity of a new Ultima game. I think the days of single-player are over, but I’d give anything to wander the streets of Britannia again, and adventure with comrades that have been my trusted allies since we were 10 pixels high! :)

Hi Joe. Thanks for posting a comment. Yeah, that’s cool that EA is testing the waters with an Ultima RTS, though I’ve never been a big RTS fan myself. Last night I was actually just talking with some friends about Ultima, and I was commenting that one thing that made Ultima more fun than other RPGs — particularly multiplayer ones — is that you play the entire game as the most important person in the world, and everyone you meet just falls over themselves praising you and expressing amazement that they’re actually getting a chance to meet you. It may not really be practicing the Britannian virtue of humility to enjoy that so much, but it is fun.

Looks like I got quoted in this sermon: “Sunday of the Living Dead,” by Cynthia Landrum, Minister of the Universalist Unitarian Church of East Liberty in Clarklake, Michigan. She notes that, “There have been several requests that I post a copy of this week’s sermon, a sermon subject purchased at this year’s auction: Zombies.”

In reponse to my post on colloidal silver turning skin blue, John Willy writes:

I am taking colloidal silver for sinus congestion, etc., and it works great. There are no harmful side effects at all. It is completely natural. To turn blue, my doctor states that you would need to take 2 bottles of silver a day for 70+ years. I am taking a couple teaspoons a day for a few months.

Hi John. To say that something is “completely natural” doesn’t indicate anything about its safety. Many, many poisons, from arsenic to deadly nightshade, are completely natural. There are countless reports online from people who are much younger than seventy who have suffered severe adverse health effects (turning blue is just one extreme example) from taking colloidal silver. Most chronic conditions fluctuate over time, so it’s very difficult to say with any certainty whether one person’s improvement is due to a particular treatment or not. That’s why it’s necessary to do statistically significant studies involving thousands of subjects to establish whether a treatment actually works or not. I strongly encourage you to do more research on colloidal silver, as I think the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence suggests that it’s not an effective treatment.

Here’s a new banner ad for the Alpha workshop (thanks to Gillian Conahan):

We’ve paid to have this go up on Ralan.com, but of course anyone else feel free to post it other places too. We just won’t pay you. Sorry.

So on Saturday I appeared alongside Saladin Ahmed, Laura Anne Gilman, and Blake Charlton at Borders bookstore in New York. This was a very last-minute thing, and details were being worked out right down to the wire. Initially Blake had asked if I’d be interested in joining him at the end for a group signing. I said I’d be happy to, though it seemed to me pretty unlikely that anyone would actually have something they’d want me to sign. It occurred to me that maybe I should just bring a few books that I’m in and give them away, since then there’d be at least that many people with something for me to sign. Then it occurred to me that The Living Dead 2 is coming out next month, and that if I gave away copies of The Living Dead, that would not only give me something to sign, but it would also give me a chance to promote The Living Dead 2, and maybe some of the people who got a free copy of The Living Dead would be motivated to purchase the sequel. Even though The Living Dead is a massive tome, copies of it are relatively cheap on Amazon ($11), so I ordered half a dozen. My first thought was to just give one to the first six people who came up and talked to me at the signing, but then it occurred to me that probably the first people to approach me would be my friends and acquaintances, and it seemed a little pointless to be giving away free books to people who already know me pretty well. So then I hit on the idea of offering the free books only to people I don’t already know. At the close of my reading (it ended up that I did a short reading in addition to the signing), I explained that I had six books I was willing to give away to people that I didn’t already know, and did anyone matching that description want one? I counted off the first six people who raised their hands, and encouraged them to approach me afterward for their free signed book. That worked out really well. I got to meet a number of new people I wouldn’t otherwise have talked to (including a successful author and a book editor’s assistant), I got a copy of one of my stories into the hands of six new readers, and they all got a free book that includes not just me but lots of big-name authors as well. And sure it cost me money, but when you compare the cost to say, buying a round or two of drinks, it seems pretty reasonable, especially considering how infrequently I do signings.

Sure there are squirrels who want to get at my birdfeeder. Fortunately I own cats. Oh wait…

So my friend Keith just posted a thing about watching The Last Unicorn for the first time. That’s one of my favorite movies, and one I’ve rewatched countless times. My parents read me the novel on a camping trip when I was four years old, and then we saw the animated movie in the theater. I was so taken with the film that afterward I spent all night making my own picture book of it, which I still have. It’s 25 pages long and tells the whole story from beginning to end, though some of the illustrations are fairly abstract and I don’t know if anyone besides me could decipher what they’re supposed to be. Here are some of the better ones:

Warning: Last Unicorn Spoilers.

“Stay where you are, poor beast, for this is no world for you. Stay in your forest, and keep your trees green, and your friends protected. And good luck to you, for you are the last.”

Man, drawing horses is hard.

I got a little confused here. I knew the unicorn had temporarily ended up with multiple horns, but I couldn’t remember whether it was two horns or three. After some agonizing, I went with three. Dammit.

“My lady, you deserve the services of a great magician, but I’m afraid you’ll have to be glad of the aid of a second-rate pickpocket.”

Unicorns? I don’t see no unicorns. Just this lovely young lady. Well, back to my cave.

Oh yeah, now I’m a unicorn again, sucka. Get back in that ocean before I give you the last magic-horn beat-down.

The unicorn resurrects Prince Lir (not to scale).

Here’s the latest anthology from Night Shade Books, Sympathy for the Devil, edited by Tim Pratt and featuring another fantastic cover by David Palumbo.

This book includes the story “MetaPhysics” by my good friend Elizabeth Glover, which first appeared in Realms of Fantasy and which was her first fiction sale. I suggested it for inclusion in this book (via the online recommendations page) only to learn later that about four of my friends had already done the same.

Also, the acknowledgments page for this book cracks me up:

So I’ve never been big on home movies, but I do have some footage of my cats the day we brought them home from the pet store. Here’s a short clip which includes Kzin executing the most epic kitten faceplant of all time:

KzinFaceplant.mov

I’m afraid that in all the intervening years, Kzin has yet to do anything that tops this.

So a lot of people have been asking to see some video of the reading I gave at the Library of Congress when I was in high school.

Okay, not really, but here it is anyway:

ScholasticAwardReading.mov

Yeah, that’s right, unlike some seventeen-year-olds I might name, who’ve accomplished absolutely nothing in their lives, by the time I was seventeen I’d already racked up an impressive series of writing awards and publications, all of which had me totally convinced that I was going to be rich and famous by the time I turned 30.

HAHAHAHAHAHA! Ahahahahahaha. Hahaha.

Sorry, where was I? Oh yeah, so anyway I won this Gold Award in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and they invited me down to DC to give a reading at the Library of Congress. Seemed like the opportunity of a lifetime, so I made the trip. So I get to the place, and they inform everyone that due to the large numbers of readers there’s going to be a strictly enforced time limit of five minutes per person. My story was pretty short, but even so there was no way I could read the whole thing in five minutes, so I pulled out a pen and started hastily crossing out large sections of the story — basically I had to trim it down to just the climactic confrontation.

The story, BTW, was called “Recreational Suicide.”

So I read my story (quickly), and then later I got a letter asking if I wanted to buy a videotape of my appearance. It wasn’t cheap — something like $60 — but I figured this was something my grandkids would probably be dying to see someday, so I ordered a copy.

So the tape arrives, and I pop it in the VCR, and I watch this girl start reading her story, and I’m like, “Hey, that’s not me.” I had sort of expected that the tape was just going to be of my reading, but actually it was the whole hours-long session, so I’m fast forwarding and fast forwarding and not seeing myself, and this went on for a long time, and every once in a while I’d get curious and actually play the tape and listen to one of the readings, but they were all boring high school kid crap about their stupid feelings blah blah blah with nary a cyborg or evisceration in sight, and finally I get to my appearance and start playing it and …

Well, you can watch it if you want. Basically the tape cuts out right as I’m starting and picks up again moments before I finish. I don’t know what happened. Maybe they ran out of tape right in the middle of my reading, and then spent several minutes looking around for a replacement? Whatever, out of all those dozens and dozens of kids, I’m the only one who got mostly cut out. There’s less than a minute of my reading, which at sixty bucks works out to about a dollar per second of footage. So I hope you enjoy it.

So the Blake Charlton appearance on Saturday is a go! Also, he’s kindly invited a few local authors to share the stage with him, including me. I’ll be giving away a few copies of The Living Dead and probably reading something very short. Definitely swing by if you’re in the neighborhood — 4 pm (note time change) at Borders Bookstore at Columbus Circle.

As you’ve probably heard, Prop 8 has been overturned in California. If you haven’t seen it, The Mormon Proposition is a pretty good documentary about how Prop 8 came to be enacted:

Over on his Facebook Wall, Blake Charlton asks, “New Yorkers: who could make an evening event for Spellwright (possibly w/ another epic fantasist) Sat, Aug 7th, in Manhattan?”

(If you’re not familiar with Blake, check out Episode 8 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which he talks about how his love of fantasy literature helped him overcome dyslexia.)

Here’s an interesting new TED talk on YouTube: Laurie Santos: How Monkeys Mirror Human Irrationality.

It seems that the human brain is structured in such a way that we are irrationally opposed to accepting losses, whether on our stocks or on our houses, and this way of thinking has contributed to the financial collapse. In fact, people will give wildly varying answers to the same exact scenario depending on whether the question is phrased as a potential gain or a potential loss. The question is, do our monkey relatives share this same cognitive deficit?

Here’s the newly-released cover of the August issue of Lightspeed magazine:

Everyone should definitely check out their latest fictional offering, the beautifully sad tale “…for a single yesterday” by George R. R. Martin.

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.