If you missed last night’s presidential debate, this pretty much sums it up:

 
And here’s a public service announcement:

Last night I swung by Borders in downtown Palo Alto, and of course I checked out how they were doing in terms of stocking books that include me. (One copy of the Fantasy: The Best of the Year 2008 trade paperback, three copies of the mass market paperback, and a princely five copies of The Living Dead.) While I was there in the horror anthologies section, a father and his son — who looked about twelve — appeared. The dad was introducing his son to the writings of H. P. Lovecraft. The son took down a volume and said, “Does this have that ‘Call of Cthulhu’ story?” and the dad said, “Yeah, so either get that one or ‘At the Mountains of Madness.'” The son said, “What’s that about?” and the dad said, “Well, it’s about these … mountains … of madness.” (I guess it’s been a while since he read it.) Anyway, it always warms my heart to see a father and son bonding over unnameable eldritch terrors.

And speaking of The Living Dead, last week’s New York Review of Science Fiction reading series with me and John Langan went swimmingly. The event was scheduled against the second presidential debate, so I was a little worried that that would affect the turnout, but in fact quite a lively crowd showed up. (One attendee suggested that, given a choice between zombie horror and presidential politics, the audience had gone with the less-scary alternative.)

Before I read my story “The Skull-Faced Boy,” I told an anecdote that went something like this: “I’d never really written any horror before, but back around the time I graduated from college my life had become so miserable that horror was the only way I could express all my angsty angst. I’m happy to get a chance to read this story tonight to a live audience because this sort of reminds me of going on camping trips as a kid and telling ghost stories around the campfire. In fact, I went on a family camping trip shortly after writing this story, and so I actually did once read this story around a campfire. One of the people along on that trip was one of my dad’s colleagues, who went on to become the first and only female tenured physics faculty member at Stanford. She’s not a big horror fan, and I think the story really freaked her out. It’s been years now, but every time I see her she still mentions how scared she was by my story about the vampires, and I have to tell her, ‘Actually, it was zombies … geez, I thought you were supposed to be smart.'”

John Langan also posted about the evening (he notes some interesting points of congruence between his story and mine), and so did Jordache, who reports of the story I read, “The story follows a young sentient zombie during a zombie invasion and what happens to him when he gets in contact with his still-human family. I really enjoyed the story and was moved by it. I wasn’t expecting to be moved by zombie stories … I expected a lot of gore. It says a lot about the quality of the stories in this collection.” I also met for the first time the writers Carrie Laben, Rhodi Hawk, and M. M. De Voe, as well as Hippocampus Press editor Derrick Hussey (who you can see in this clip from The Ali G Show). (Also present, apparently, was David Wellington, author of the Monster Island zombie series, though I never really got a chance to say hi.)

My absentee ballot for the 2008 presidential election:

I just saw someone wearing one of these bags:

I think that’s a pretty cool bag.

I just saw that my Resources for Teen Writers site got mentioned in the book The Teen-Centered Writing Club: Bringing Teens and Words Together. In other news, I have a resources for teen writers site. It’s actually something my mom put together back when I was a teen writer and she was researching markets where I could send my stuff. Then later, when I was no longer a teen writer, we decided we might as well put all the info up online so that people who still were teen writers might benefit from it. I’m glad people seem to be finding it helpful.

Here’s what the book has to say:

I like being lauded for my “lack of commercialism,” though if I could figure out some way to make tons of dough off that site, I would honestly probably sell out pretty quick. I did finally put up a banner ad encouraging people to go look at my free “Save Me Plz” YouTube video, and hardly anyone ever even clicks on that — even though my teen writing site gets thousands upon thousands of visitors — so if there are all these super-commercialized teen writing sites out there, I seriously doubt that anyone’s getting rich off them.

Actually, the cover of The Teen-Centered Writing Club, which features a soulful-looking high school kid sitting next to a pretty girl, reminds me of something that happened when I was in high school. Some filmmakers came to my creative writing class to film the workshop and to interview a few students for a video about being a writer. I was one of the students that the teacher selected to be interviewed, and the whole time I was talking the woman interviewing me was just like, “Yeah! Wow! This is great! Yeah! Wow! Keep going!” So afterward I felt sure that I’d really impressed them and that I’d be featured prominently in the resulting video. Well, a few weeks later our teacher came to class with the finished video, and we all watched it. The video focused almost exclusively on this girl in the class named Cheryl, who was really pretty and appealing and who as far as I recall had no particular interest in writing whatsoever, but she said stuff like “I write about things that really happened to me” and “I keep a journal where I write down all my feelings,” sort of your standard high school-level writing crap. I had only one or two lines in the video, one of which I remember was, “Aliens” — in response to the question: “What are some of the things you like to write about?” (I also remember there was this kid Kevin whose response of “I wrote a story in which World Peace is achieved by replacing all objects with Nerf” also made the cut.) After class, as I was leaving, the teacher handed me an envelope and said, “David, this is for you.” I was befuddled. I went to my next class and opened the envelope, which contained a letter from the teacher apologizing for the fact that the video hadn’t used any of what I’d said. The teacher said she felt really bad, and that she’d argued with the filmmakers that they should include more of me, but they’d explained that I’d seemed way too thoughtful and articulate, and they were afraid that kids watching the video would be intimidated by me and would think that only smart kids could be writers. So that made me feel better … I guess. So anyway, high school, yay.

I see that one of my livejournal friends (fairfeather) is studying at University College Cork in Ireland. I also studied there, during my junior year of college, and seeing some of her photos brings back memories.

Not, it must be said, all super-wonderful memories. I did have some good times in Ireland, but mostly it was a pretty lonely period. I didn’t really click with anyone there, either among the small group of kids from my school (which, I discovered after I’d signed up, consisted substantially of an ex of mine of her friends) nor among my flat of Irish roommates, whose interests (pubs, raunchy jokes, cricket, television) didn’t exactly mesh with mine. I’d signed up for the study abroad program at the last minute so that I keep could working with my favorite creative writing professor, but he seemed pretty harried and distracted that whole semester, and I ended up seeing very little of him. (Later I found out that he was a little distracted because he was in the process of transitioning to a she.) The classes I took in the English department at UCC were awfully undemanding (I had one professor who always arrived late, always visibly hung over, and who always gave his lectures off of notes that he’d plainly scrawled on a bar napkin the night before), and since I didn’t really know anyone, that left me with a lot of time on my hands. Every day or two I’d walk across town to the bookstore, buy a book, and then walk back. Then I’d lie in the grass beside the river, below the great cliffside stair that led up to the campus, and read. And read. And read. Philip K. Dick is huge in Irish bookstores, so I read a lot of him. I discovered Iain M. Banks, who is also huge in Ireland (and who is — inexplicably — mostly unknown in the states, though this seems to be changing recently; his sf novels Player of Games and Use of Weapons are must-reads). I read Irish authors — Beckett and Yeats and Joyce (who’s on the currency there — can you imagine a writer on U.S. currency?) I also read a lot of philosophy and literary theory. (Like, I read through the entire 1,000 page Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory — I mean, why not? What else was I going to do?) Thinking back on this now, those sunny days of literary discovery beside the meandering river in Cork, Ireland actually seem kind of appealing, and I can actually feel nostalgic for them, but at the time I felt mostly a pervasive sense of emptiness and a longing to get back home. I did become much better at writing fiction that semester, though. Really, there’s nothing like five months of around-the-clock reading and writing new things, without the distractions of parties, friends, and social interaction, to really hone your writing abilities.

Oh, I’m probably exaggerating. I did spend an awful lot of time in pubs, watching Manchester United or Irish folk music. And there were weekend trips to Dublin (which I loved), Galway, Limerick, the cliffs of Moher, etc. And I eventually joined a roller hockey team. But when I think back on Cork, it’s the wandering-around-by-myself that really looms large. One other random memory:

I took a class called Romance & Realism. (This is Romance as in Romanticism, not as in the modern publishing category of Romance, i.e. two people falling in love.) The class was taught by two different professors, and they divided the workload, so that one day a week would be Romance and the other would be Realism. The books we read for the Romance section were entrancing — Frankenstein (the terrific 1818 text, before Percy and public opinion screwed it up), Caleb Williams, The Hound of the Baskervilles, She, The Moonstone — and the discussions about them were fascinating (Mary Shelley’s family life, the development of the detective novel). The Realism section was a thundering bore, the novels vapid and forgettable (so forgettable, in fact, that I honestly can’t even remember any of them — so forgettable that I think I’d already forgotten each of them by the time I turned the last page). The lectures on them were always really, really reaching — embarrassingly strained attempts to find something profound or interesting to say, usually through the application of silly jargony neologisms or vague and arbitrary categories that could be interpreted to mean anything, about books that always struck me as, ultimately, out-of-date sit-coms without the “com.” I always thought that the first professor, the one who covered Romance, was great, and that the second, who covered Realism, was a complete dumbass. But then something interesting happened. Halfway through the semester the two of them switched sections, so that now the second professor was covering Romance and the first was covering Realism, and overnight my opinion of their lectures reversed totally. Which was when I realized that it wasn’t actually the second professor who sucked, it was Realism. (Sorry Realism, maybe I’m being unfair. You produced some accomplished works of literature. But geez, give me Romance any day.)

Well, another day, another staggering catastrophe brought about by a Conservative ideology that openly disdains expertise, the scientific method, and empirical reality. I guess now is as good a time as any to cash in this:

I finally had a chance to read through my contributor’s copy of Rich Horton’s Fantasy: The Best of the Year 2008 (which includes my story “Save Me Plz”). If you come across this book in a store, I recommend you do a quick read-through of “Buttons” by William Alexander, which in only two pages will forever change the way you look at crosswalk buttons. Another story that packs a big punch in just a few pages is “Something in the Mermaid Way” by Carrie Laben, which appears to be her first published story, and which concerns a family who manufactures tiny fake mermaid-corpse souvenirs by combining fish and monkey parts. My favorite stories from the book were: “Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz Go to War Again” by Garth Nix (about a musketeer-style adventurer and his creepy animated puppet sidekick, Mr. Fitz — the characterization of Mr. Fitz really made this story for me), “The Cambist and Lord Iron” by Daniel Abraham (an extremely sharp and engaging “fairytale of economics” full of delightful twists), and “Singing of Mount Abora” by Theodora Goss (an elegantly crafted piece in which a fairy tale and the travails of a contemporary grad student turn out to be interconnected in mind-bending ways). Two others that have really stuck with me were Erik Amundsen’s “Bufo Rex,” a vivid, grotesque, and thoroughly bizarre tale about the adventures of a frog, and “Brother of the Moon” by Holly Phillips, a story about a modern-day prince on an enigmatic mission. (I really liked the ending of this one.)

I’m experimenting with a new look for my site’s splash page:

The “pop-punk geek lit” thing is sort of a joke. I may change that. Though it is more succinct than what I used to have.

I like this graphic that appeared on Countdown last night:

I just finished a new story, “P-NZ4.” This is the story that came out of my musings about acid-rave sci-fi punk-funk lit. My story has no rave, and virtually no funk, but it’s certainly sci-fi, and sorta punk-ish, and there’s definitely acid, so I call that a pretty good first attempt. I’m actually supposed to be working on a screenplay right now, and I had instituted an ironclad rule against writing any fiction until my screenplay was done, but I just couldn’t stop thinking about “P-NZ4,” and I had finally figured out exactly how the first scene should go, and I’d come up with enough good lines that I was afraid I was going to start forgetting them if I didn’t just go ahead and write it, so I sat down to type up just the first scene, and before I knew it I had 7,000 words of comic gold. It’s Star Wars meets Don Quixote meets Huckleberry Finn. On acid. Lots of acid. Watch for it probably not anytime soon in a magazine or anthology near you.

So I watched the Democratic National Convention, which was often extremely moving, but what really struck me was some of the early speeches by the second-string politicians, which ranged from pretty good to kind of awkward. But over and over again you heard about some of the changes we can hope for from a Democratic administration. A lot of the speeches kind of sounded like this:

“We’re gonna stop torturing people, especially if they’re innocent. And we’re going to stop spying on everyone all the time. And when we invade another country, we’re going to make sure it’s the right country, and we’re also going to try diplomacy first. And when a natural disaster destroys one of our cities, when going to respond that very same day.”

I mean, those are all definitely changes I can believe in, but egad the bar has been set low. As long as we’re setting the bar this low, while we’re at it why don’t we send the bar on a suicide mission to restart the earth’s core?

I’m now planning to pop back to the East Coast for a bit in early October so I can appear at this:
 

Related Links:

* The Living Dead edited by John Joseph Adams at Amazon.com

* “The Skull-Faced Boy” by David Barr Kirtley at the Pseudopod horror podcast

* New York Review of Science Fiction Reading Series

I’ve always found it immensely irksome that when you type my name into the Amazon.com search box, no results come up, even though Amazon sells numerous anthologies that I’m in and even though those anthologies are all tagged with my name. Well, there’s a new feature on Amazon that addresses this. Now you can go to the page for a book and suggest search terms for which that book should appear. I would highly recommend that all authors do this for every anthology in which you’ve been published (and for which you’re not already listed as one of the authors). You can access this feature by scrolling down to the section “Tags Customers Associate with This Product.” The whole process takes forever to actually work its way through the Amazon system, but once it finally does, you’ll see this on the page for your anthology:

And then when you do a search on your name you’ll see this:

Nifty.

Clip from Bill Maher’s New Film Religulous: “You Don’t Have to Pass an IQ Test to be in the Senate”