Hey, I know her! During my first semester at USC, I was a regular at the meetings of the Secular Alliance, a club for students of any or no religious affiliation to meet up and discuss the role of religion in society. The group was a really interesting mix of smart, iconoclastic people, with a wide variety of ages, from first-year undergrads to forty-something grad students, a wide variety of fields of study, from music to neuroscience, and a wide variety of religious views, from hardcore atheists to evangelical Christians. The weekly meetings were one of the highlights of my time at USC. One of the other regulars was singer-songwriter Kina Grannis, who was a junior. I saw her perform around campus maybe three or four times, and I liked her music enough to buy some of her songs off iTunes. So I was startled and delighted to see that she was featured singing during the frickin’ Super Bowl. Wow.

I’ve really been enjoying The Tudors, of which I just finished watching the first season. (I don’t watch TV shows until they come out on DVD, so sorry if this is old news for people.) Though I’m probably a bad person to be offering an opinion, since I’m a sucker for any kind of historical drama — anything involving swords, outlandish costumes, honorifics, and casual bloodshed — and I seem to like ’em all, even the ones that everyone else despises. I think I’m the perfect audience for historical dramas because I love historical settings and don’t care whether or not they’re historically accurate, which seems to be a rare combination. The Tudors is conspicuously low-rent compared to Rome, which was the last series I watched, and as with Rome they made the first episode basically a soft-core porn flick to grab people’s attention and then toned the sex way down in most subsequent episodes, so don’t let the first episode put you off the show (or, depending on your disposition, don’t let it set your expectations too high). Anyway, until HBO gets around to making their A Song of Ice and Fire series (if they ever do), The Tudors is probably the closest I’m going to get to seeing that sort of story on TV.

Speaking of A Song of Ice and Fire, George R. R. Martin has updated the “From My Readers” section of his website, in which people send him fan art as well as photos of pets and/or children that they’ve named after his characters, such as young Nymeria Daenerys Cersei Smidgrodski. (I think it would be awesome if George would name some minor character “Smidgrodski.” Then all four of this girl’s names would be straight out of ASOIAF.) Many of these kids have learned to walk and talk and have gone off to school in the time that George has been working on A Dance with Dragons (Book 5). He remarks, “Have we really been doing this fan page for four years??? That’s scary. Next thing I know these kids are going to be going to college. I do hope I’ve finished A DANCE WITH DRAGONS by then, at least.” It’s good to see that he’s not losing his sense of humor about it. Man, time does fly, doesn’t it? Has it really been seven years that we’ve been waiting to find out who Coldhands is? Why, it seems like only yesterday that … actually, no, wait, holy crap, it’s been a really long time. You’ve also got to love the fan with the Asshai Girls Make It Hotter T-shirt.

Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, an online fiction magazine, is doing a promotion this month where they’re making one story from each of their first four issues available as a free sample. Readers of this blog may be interested to note that the first free story, “Trill and the Beanstalk,” features a character named Colonel Kirtley, and as you’d expect he’s basically a giant dick, e.g.:

“Let me put this in terms that your tiny mind can grasp,” Kirtley said. “You can either put that thing out of commission and come home a hero, or you can die trying. Frankly I don’t care which. But if you come back here and their elevator is still functioning, I’m going to drop a bomb on their station — and it’s going to be duct-taped to your ass. The Chinese government will not claim Mars. Do I make myself clear?”

The site looks like this:

Here’s a letter from the editor giving the lowdown:
—

To Readers of Science Fiction and Fantasy everywhere,

When you have something great, you want everyone to know. So you tell people about it. You share it. You pass it along to friends everywhere. Well, that’s what we’re doing with InterGalactic Medicine Show. We want to make sure everyone has had a chance to check out what we’re doing, so we’re offering up a sampling of our stories – for free.

During the month of February we are going to make one story from each of our first four issues available at no charge. Two stories will be set free on February 1st, and two more on February 15th. Just visit www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com and explore the table of contents; the free stories will be clearly marked.

Issue one’s free story will be “Trill and The Beanstalk” by Edmund R. Schubert, issue two’s will be “Yazoo Queen” by Orson Scott Card (from his Alvin Maker series), issue three’s “Xoco’s Fire” by Oliver Dale, and issue four’s “Tabloid Reporter To The Stars” by Eric James Stone. Each story is fully illustrated by artists who were commissioned to create artwork to accompany that tale — as is every story published in IGMS.

“Tabloid Reporter To The Stars” will also be featured in the upcoming InterGalactic Medicine Show anthology from Tor, which will be out this August (we wanted you to get a sneak peek of the anthology, too). However, the other three stories aren’t available anywhere except the online version of IGMS.

It’s really quite simple. Great stories. Custom illustrations. Free. We’re pleased with and proud of the magazine we’re publishing; now we’re passing it along to our friends and telling them about it. We hope you’ll enjoy it and do the same.

Edmund R. Schubert
Editor, Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show
www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com
—

So I managed to successfully copy all the blog posts from my livejournal over to my new wordpress blog. In this mixed-up, crazy world, it gives me some small measure of assurance to think that in the event of a monumental catastrophe (thermonuclear war, asteroid impact, virulent strain contracted from dirty telephone booth, etc.) this indispensable archive of observation and commentary is now twice as likely to survive to instruct and edify future generations, be they human beings or giant mutated squirrels.

Regular readers of this blog will know that people always ask me for directions and that crazy/eccentric people like to talk to me. I don’t know why, because I emphatically do nothing to encourage them or to appear sociable. The other day, as I was walking down the street minding my own business and listening to my moody music, an older gentleman barks at me, “Smile! You’ll look younger.” What the hell? Did I ask you? And then as I was walking back from the store recently this little blond kid sticks his head out the window of his SUV and taunts, “Nice backpack!” Again, what the hell? I mean, I could understand if I was wearing a “Hello Kitty” backpack or something, but it’s just a normal black backpack that I use to carry groceries in. Screw you, kid.

There’s also this diminutive Asian woman over at the 3rd Street Promenade who always accosts me. She comes up and says, “Can I ask you a question?” I could tell from the first moment I saw her, just from something about her body language I guess, that she wanted to recruit me for some stupid religious cult or something (Hare Krishnas, as it turns out), so I always just sort of smiled and said, “No thanks,” and walked on by. Well, I’m over at the Promenade a lot, and I know she recognizes me by now, and she’s becoming ever more aggressive about hounding me, even though I start waving her off and hurrying away as soon as she homes in on me. I finally lost it when she approached me twice within five minutes, and when she asked, “Can I ask you a question?” I said, “No. Leave me alone.” This has not deterred her. I think I’m actually going to have to start avoiding that stretch of the Promenade, which is a pain, since that’s where one of the movie theaters is, but I just can’t take any more of her.

If you have a second, please consider popping over to YouTube and giving a five-star rating to my “Save Me Plz” video. I don’t know what effect this will have exactly, but it can’t hurt.

And while you’re there, check out the cool trailer for Tobias S. Buckell‘s upcoming novel Sly Mongoose, the third of his books about Caribbean-descended characters living in the far future:

Anyone know of any other authors who are doing interesting things on YouTube?

So I was in the bookstore the other day, and in the New Books section my interest was piqued by the gorgeous cover art for Thunderer by Felix Gilman. I picked up the book and scanned its back cover, and what should I see but a blurb from Tobias S. Buckell! How about that? I think it’s really cool that one of my good buddies, who’s been in this with me since the beginning, has now achieved such stature that not only do they put his name on books, they even put his name on other people’s books.

A bit more on Walt Disney. In the early days, Walt had a small staff and almost no money, but he always believed that he could rise to the top of the animation field through his obsessive focus on quality. One time, he screened one of his cartoons for an executive, and the exec passed on it. Walt, stung, was kind of like, “But the cartoon is great!” In response, the exec picked up a roll of Life Savers and said gruffly, “See these? These are Life Savers. People pay money for Life Savers. You know why? Because they know Life Savers. They don’t know you or your mouse.” That made a big impression on Walt. He was already resolved that people were damn well going to know his mouse, but now he resolved further that they were going to know him too, and he started putting his name prominently on everything that he did.

That seemed sensible, and looking over my website I realized that I didn’t even have my name on it, except in my bio and in tiny letters way up in the title bar, so I did a quick redesign in hopes that now people who stumble across the site and don’t have any idea who I am might have a chance of noticing my name and remembering it.

So, the old:

And the new:

If you’re a professional writer, it’s vital that people notice your name and remember it, but that’s hard, particularly for short story writers. I was recently at a social event for people who write for or listen to the Escape Pod podcast. One of the young women there told (Escape Pod host) Steve Eley that my story “Save Me Plz” was her favorite recent story from the show, so he called me over to introduce me to her. During the conversation, I mentioned that I’d recently had a story on Pseudopod as well, and she said, “Really? Which one?” I said, “‘The Disciple’ … it’s at a college, and there’s this evil professor … ” and she exclaimed, “Oh, I really liked that one too!” But despite the fact that she’d obviously enjoyed both stories, she’d had no idea that the same person had written them, let alone what that person’s name was. (Parenthetically, my impression from talking to some of the Escape Pod listeners was that they conceptualize the show differently than I do. For them, it seems, the stories aren’t so much “A Tim Pratt story,” or “A Greg Van Eekhout story,” or “A David Barr Kirtley story,” but “An Escape Pod story,” in much the same way that you might watch The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits each week and not particularly pay attention to who wrote the individual episodes.) Of course, I wish people would pay close attention to the names of short story writers, but I understand that people are busy and have other things to think about, and I can remember before I started writing professionally that I didn’t pay that much attention to authors’ names either, and how eye-opening it was when I started putting together a more comprehensive mental picture of who had written what and realized how many of my favorite stories that I remembered vividly were written by the same people.

I’ve been reading Neal Gabler’s mammoth new biography Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination. I didn’t really know anything about Disney’s life, particularly his early life, and it’s been striking, given the magnitude of his eventual success, to read about just how long and hard he had to work for it, and the unbelievable amount of stress and disappointment he had to weather. For example, here’s an episode I just read about. At this point, Walt has created Mickey Mouse and produced “Steamboat Willie,” the first-ever sound cartoon, and now Walt, desperately broke and having triple-mortgaged everything he owns, is trying to get people to care: “Increasingly desperate, Walt began hiking to studios again with his animations, hoping to interest one of them in securing the rights … The writer Francis Marion claimed that two editors at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had seen Disney’s cartoons and recommended them to Marion and Metro directors George Hill and Victor Fleming. Standing in the projection room, Walt was, as Marion remembered, ‘A tall, shy youth who wore a shabby suit and whose apprehensive glance at us told very clearly of many past disappointments.’ He even apologized for the crudeness of the animations. But the group was enthralled by Mickey. Fleming, his long arms flailing the air, exclaimed, ‘Man, you’ve got it! Damnedest best cartoon I’ve ever seen!” Marion said that Walt had also brought along a second cartoon, a Silly Symphony … and that the group was just as enthusiastic about it. So much so that Marion immediately headed to the office of Metro head Louis B. Mayer to drag him down to the projection room. Mayer, however, was not impressed. Watching the symphony, he pressed a button to stop the projector, pronounced the cartoon ridiculous, and growsed that while men and women dance together, and boys and girls dance together, flowers do not dance together. When Mayer rose to leave, Fleming eased him back into his chair and advised him to see the Mickey Mouse. No sooner did the film start, however, than Mayer let out a bellow and demanded that the cartoon be stopped. Driving his fist into the pit of his stomach, he declared that pregnant women go to see MGM films and that women are terrified of mice, especially a mouse ten feet tall on the motion picture screen. Mayer stormed from the room, slamming the door behind him, while Walt stood there in embarrassment.”

I was recently browsing YouTube for videos related to writing, and I came across some very long and interesting videos of Cory Doctorow discussing issues with new media. One questioner asked him why Boing Boing has become so popular, and I thought that part of his answer was worth sharing here for aspiring bloggers. He said that writers who come to blogging via journalism tend to write catchy, witty headlines. I forget his exact example, but here’s mine: You remember that story about the lady astronaut who drove halfway across the country to assault her romantic rival and was in such a rush that she even wore a special astronaut diaper so she wouldn’t have to make any bathroom stops? Many writers would be tempted to title a blog post about that with some witty headline such as Astro-NUT “LUST In Space”! The problem is, nobody searching for coverage of that story is going to be searching for “astro-nut lust in space.” They’re going to be searching for something like “astronaut assault rival drive + diaper,” so a more pragmatic, descriptive headline, such as “Astronaut drives halfway across country to assault romantic rival,” might be better. If you want to be witty, be witty in the second paragraph, where you won’t be shooting yourself in the foot Google-rankings-wise. Anyway, I thought that was really good advice, though nevertheless you may have noticed that I was not able to restrain myself from giving this very blog entry a catchy, witty headline.

I set up a new blog over at www.davidbarrkirtley.com. I’d heard about this software called WordPress, and I wondered if I could use it to add a blog that matched the design of the rest of my site. I decided to give it a shot, and after a few (okay, fourteen) hours of tinkering, I think I’ve finally gotten it working. I’m actually amazed that I’ve made it this far. I had to edit the code for the default WordPress theme, and I did not understand 95% of this code. I spent several hours trying to figure it out, but then my big break came when I realized that I didn’t have to understand it. I could just delete chunks of it at random, and if something important disappeared I would restore that piece of code. In this way I hacked the code down to its bare minimum, then rebuilt the layout in a way I can understand around what was left. I’m terrified that I accidentally deleted something important, but it seems to be working, and I can always try tossing code back in if I have to. There’s not a whole lot of content there right now, but no one can say what is there doesn’t match the look of the rest of my site.

I have a brand new blog and nobody knows about it except me. I can write anything I want about anyone, and they will never know. Bwahahahahaha!

This is the first post on my new blog.

Hey, my friend Andrea stopped a mugging. Badass.

Intergalactic Medicine Show interviews James Morrow

Among contemporary writers, James Morrow is one of the most intelligent, most imaginative, and also one of the funniest. In this new interview he discusses his most recent novel, The Last Witchfinder, which is about one woman’s crusade to bring down the 1604 Witchcraft Statute of James I and help usher in the Age of Reason.

Here’s one interesting bit: “Yes, there is also some demonology in the Old Testament, but we find it largely in the famous translation authorized by James I, who fancied himself an expert demonologist, even wrote a book on the subject. The King James Bible was translated by witch believers, and this state of mind influenced many of their word choices. Think about that notorious line from Exodus, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’ Today a Hebrew scholar would translate it in much more innocuous terms. It would come out something like, ‘Thou shalt not provide a fortune-teller with his means of livelihood.'”

The article “Speculative Fiction: The Next Generation” by John Joseph Adams, which originally appeared in Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market and which draws from interviews with me, Tobias S. Buckell, Tim Pratt, and Cherie Priest, is now available online. See also the complete interview with me.

Congrats to my buddy John Joseph Adams on the release of his big new anthology project Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, which features contributions by writers such as Octavia E. Butler, Orson Scott Card, Jonathan Lethem, George R. R. Martin, Stephen King, and Gene Wolfe, and which just got a great review on the Beam Me Up podcast, who stated that Wastelands is “damn close” to being in the same league as Dangerous Visions. Whoa.

I got a nice note from my friend Amy, who writes, “While cleaning out my closet, I found an old issue of Merlyn’s Pen from when I was in high school. And it turned out to have a story by you in it! (“Pomegranate Heart.”) The funny thing was, I actually remembered the story from when I read it when I was 15. So I guess it was pretty good :).”

I had kind of an interesting conversation with my mom after I posted a link to the clip of Richard Dawkins & Douglas Adams. My mom said, “Who was that other guy in the clip? Dworkins?” I said, “Dawkins. He’s the world’s most famous atheist.” My mom said, “Wait, who’s the one who’s the really aggressive, wild-eyed, extremist atheist?” I said, “Um, yeah, that’s him.” My mom said, “That’s him? Really? He seems pretty mild-mannered in that clip.” I said, “Yeah, actually he is pretty mild-mannered.” My mom said, “So why does he have such a reputation for being so extreme?” I said, “I don’t know. That’s the American media, I guess.” So I was thinking about that, and seriously, in order for a religious figure to get labeled “extremist” or “militant” by the American media, that person has to blow up a lot of people, or at least threaten to do so with some credibility. But apparently all it takes for an atheist public figure to get labeled “extremist” or “militant” is for that person to robustly defend his beliefs and maybe occasionally employ a sarcastic or condescending tone of voice.

It was the same thing with Michael Newdow, the guy who went to the Supreme Court over the words “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. I thought he had a pretty decent case, since Supreme Court precedent stated that Congress could not pass laws for the express purpose of “promoting religion,” and when Congress passed that law they stated in the record that “We’re passing this law in order to promote religion.” But whatever. What really struck me was that within minutes of the story breaking in the media, Michael Newdow’s phone was ringing off the hook with death threats, and yet all the media coverage was about what a fanatical wacko he was.

EDIT: It just occurred to me that Phillip Pullman always gets described as a “militant” atheist too. You’d think he was muling suitcase bombs on behalf of AUSCS. Seriously, he’s just a professor who writes books, and they’re fiction books for children. Get a grip, people.

* * SPOILERS FOR I AM LEGEND * *

I Am Legend is one of my favorite books. It’s a compact, harrowing vision of utter loneliness in a hostile world (something author Matheson also captured brilliantly in his novel The Shrinking Man), and its conclusion is memorable and thought-provoking. I had basically given up all hope of the movie being anything other than mindless entertainment when I heard that Akiva Goldsman (who is mediocrity made flesh, and who previously travestized another old favorite of mine, Asimov’s I, Robot) was involved. I was still hoping the movie would at least be entertaining, and it is for about two-thirds of its running time, carried by terrific performances by Will Smith and his dog. (The dog is genuinely talented; I wish the dog had written the screenplay.) Unfortunately, the final act is filmmaking that’s as bad as any I’ve ever been subjected to. Not only is absolutely everything about the final half hour of the movie absurd, incompetent, and feebleminded, but, as was exactly the case with the I, Robot adaptation, the movie replaces the thought-provoking theme of the book with a cliche theme that makes exactly the opposite point as the book, and that is exactly the sort of reflexive witlessness that the book was written to critique in the first place. I also may have a new candidate for stupidest movie line of all time (replacing Starship Troopers‘ “I don’t mind that I was eviscerated by a giant beetle because at least I got to have sex with you first” — that’s a paraphrase), which is when the miraculous and ludicrous female survivor tells Will Smith, “I know there’s a colony of survivors living in the mountains of Vermont. How? God told me.” She quickly adds, “I know how that sounds,” to which I was unable to restrain myself from remarking aloud, “Yeah, like bad writing.” The last act of the movie is so nauseatingly terrible that it casts a cloud over the whole thing, unfortunately. The first two thirds are rather enjoyable, so if you see this movie I urge you in the strongest possible terms to leave the theater/kill your DVD player as soon as Will Smith drives to the pier at night. It’s at that point that the movie suffers the most precipitous decline in quality of any movie I can think of.