Hey, another sighting last night of a celebrity (sort of). I went to the Writers Guild to see a panel on writing for videogames. I noticed one of the guys in the audience and thought, Hey, I know that guy. It’s the computer geek henchman from Mission Impossible 2. He left shortly before the end of the panel. Later, I was talking to another writer, and I said, “Hey, did you notice the guy sitting to our right?” And the writer said, “Yeah, it was him. I was texting my girlfriend and being like, ‘Hey, I’m sitting next to Ethan from Lost.’ Tom Hank’s brother.” I said, “I thought he was Tom Cruise’s cousin.” The writer said, “Yeah, maybe. I’m not sure.” I said, “I’m not sure either.” Neither of knew his name. Wow, it’s like a Zen koan: Is a celebrity still a celebrity if nobody knows who he is?

Last night as I was strolling the Sunset Strip I passed a red carpet that had been set up in front of a hotel. Some of the people gathered there were obviously celebrities, but I didn’t recognize any of them, so I kept walking. All sorts of vehicles were pulling up to the curb, and camera crews were jumping out and setting up, and the crews all looked really intense, as if they were doing something incredibly important, and I sort of thought to myself, Wow, these guys really get worked up over a bunch of minor celebrities that I don’t even recognize.

As I was passing House of Blues, this big black guy said, “Hey, can I give you something?” and thrust an object into my hand. I figured it was a handbill and took it. It was actually a CD. The guy said, “This is my CD. We’re giving them out as a free promotion.” He pointed to the cover. “That’s me there — the bald dude — and this here is my crew. We’re very respectful. We don’t call women b-i-t-c-h-e-ses or anything like that.” I was like, “Sounds great. Thanks, dude,” and went to leave. He added quickly, “Of course, we are accepting donations to help us cover the cost of production.” And I was like, Argh. I am. So. Gullible. I figured, Well, that’s what you get for letting someone hand you something/letting someone engage you conversation. I figured a dollar was a small price to pay for a lesson learned and a chance to get away without this encounter turning any more painfully awkward than it already was. The guy managed to talk me up to two dollars, since “It costs us two dollars to make each of these,” which is total b.s., but whatever. Anyway, I am seriously never letting anyone hand me anything ever again.

Then some Scandanavian tourists pulled up next to me and ask me how to get to Hollywood boulevard. I am asked for directions with insane frequency by poor fools who don’t realize that beneath my affable exterior lurks a tragic — almost superhuman — inability to navigate. About 80% of the time I manage to send people 180 degrees in the wrong direction. Which I did again last night. And yes, I’ve given some pretty bad directions in my day, but being in the middle of Hollywood and misdirecting people to Hollywood boulevard, which was one block away, I think represents new heights of accomplishment.

On the way back to my car, I passed the red carpet again. A whole family of Southerners was gathered on a stoop there with cameras poised. My curiosity got the better of me, and I asked, “What’s going on over there?” They said, “They’re opening a new club. We saw Ashton Kutcher and Demi. But they went inside already.” So, I blew my big chance to see Ashton and Demi. Dammit. Two years in L.A. now, and what do I have to show for it? One lousy Giovanni Ribisi sighting. (Sorry, Giovanni.)

Speaking of celebrities, according to Locus online Greg Bear will be appearing on the Daily Show on Thursday, which I can hardly believe, but if that’s true it’s awesome. On the exceedingly rare occasions that I watch late night talk shows, I am usually filled with despair at the thought that no matter what I accomplish in my life, my society will never value what I have to say as much as it values some airhead telling a lame anecdote about how she once accidentally tripped over her dog, or whatever. But this gives me hope.

Best T-shirt spotted recently: “I was bald and drunk before Britney.”

Overheard in a bookstore last night:

“So I’d been having this pain in my left arm, and I went to see my doctor, my @#$!#%! Kaiser doctor, and he tells me it’s tendonitis. I didn’t think it was, so I talked to my old roommate, who’s this really good internist, and he tells me, ‘Man, you’re sitting on a heart attack there.’ And sure enough, a few weeks later I had a heart attack. The thing was, I was seeing my doctor when it happened. So there I was in his office having a heart attack, and he just keeps telling me it’s tendonitis and doing this chiropractic massage on my arm. So after I left his office, my wife drove me over to the emergency room, and I told them I thought this doctor had broken my arm with his massage, and they told me, ‘No, you just had a heart attack.’ So anyway, after that I run into my friend, and he’s got a big piece missing out of his head, and I say, ‘What happened? It looks like someone took a bite out of your head,’ and he says he had to have surgery for a brain aneurysm. So I start telling him about my experience with Doctor So-and-so, and he says, ‘Doctor So-and-so? Doctor So-and-so should be shot!’ So he had the same doctor, who told him his problem was a migraine! So later when I saw this doctor … what? Yeah, I kept seeing him after that. With Kaiser you don’t really have any choice. Anyway, this doctor got fired, but not because he can’t tell when a patient is having a heart attack right in front of him. No, this woman went to see him because she was having headaches, and he told her to take off her blouse and bra, and she reported him. So that’s America for you. Matters of life or death, nobody does anything, but if it’s got anything to do with sex, then bam, that’s it.”

Last night I went to a reading by Lori Andrews, a leading geneticist and bioethicist who incorporates her knowledge of those disciplines into her new series of mystery novels. She told this story: Years ago she was teaching a law class at a university, and she decided that on the side she’d enroll in one of the school’s creative writing classes. The class was taught by a rising young writer who wrote very literary novels. Andrews, who was used to the high-pressure environment of the legal world, quickly became bored with the slow pace and low expectations of the creative writing class. She told the instructor that she was thinking about quitting. He encouraged her to stay, saying that if she did he would work with her more one-on-one and teach her to write in a more literary way. He added jokingly, “Which I promise will knock at least $100,000 off your advances.” She was charmed by this, and decided to stick with the class.

Oh yeah. Also spotted at Venice Beach recently: a woman wearing a T-shirt that read “Free Katie.”

Overheard by me recently at Venice Beach:

A tall middle-aged guy wearing khaki shorts and a collared T-shirt holds hands with his attractive wife as they stroll along. They pass a cluster of homeless guys sprawled on the grass. One of the homeless guys, who is obviously intoxicated and has a biker look going on, shouts, “Wow, man! You are one lucky dude! Man, you are luckiest guy in … this whole place! Damn!” Oddly enough, the guy and his wife do not seem particularly grateful for the compliment.

Two homeless guys are engaged in a verbal altercation. One of the homeless guys is missing one leg and is a wheelchair. He shouts several obscenities, then concludes, “I’ll a kick your ass!” The other guy says, “Oh yeah? Well … ” (A painfully long pause ensues.) ” … How … are you going to do that, huh? You … only got one leg! You’ll … fall over you try to kick my ass, ha!”

A sinewy white homeless woman dressed like Cindy Lauper is chatting with a huge shirtless black guy on rollerblades. The woman says, “They just let me out.” The guy says, “What were you in for?” The woman says, “Fightin’. I’m always fightin’. I been in fourteen fights just the past couple months.” The guy: “Where you do that?” The woman: “Here, Inglewood … ” The guy: “You fight those black girls down in Inglewood?” The woman: “I’ll fight anyone — black girls, white girls, chicanos. It don’t matter.”

A guy who has a long, puffy white beard and is wearing white robes approaches a pair of construction workers and says, “Good news, brothers! Jesus walks the earth again!” One of the construction guys says skeptically, “He does, huh?” The robed guy: “Yup!” The construction guy: “Are you him?” The robed guy shakes his head and says, “Oh, no.” The construction guy mutters, “Good,” obviously relieved that at least the robed guy isn’t that crazy. The robed guy adds, “No, I’m his brother, James.”

I think tonight I’m going to go check out an appearance by Larry Doyle, a former Simpsons writer who’ll be reading from his debut novel, I Love You, Beth Cooper. I have to say I’m a bit intrigued by this book because the story it tells, that of a geeky guy pining after a beautiful, unattainable female, is so contrary to my own experience. But that’s really one of the great strengths of fiction, isn’t it? Being able to slip inside another person’s skin and see the world from a completely new and alien perspective. Actually, I’ve been reading up recently on these so called “geeks,” and it’s really quite fascinating. It turns out that they tend to be into science fiction, computers, role-playing games … actually, a lot of the same sorts of things that I’m into. Who knew?

I’d just like to give a shout out to one of my favorite podcasts, StarShipSofa. The hosts are two British guys, Tony Smith and Ciaran O’Carroll, and every week they get together to sit on a sofa and discuss a different science fiction author. The show can be a bit rough around the edges — the digressions are sometimes extreme, and the hosts tend to mispronounce authors’ names (Zelazny = “zelaney,” Kuttner = “nutter,” etc.) — but that’s all part of the charm. What I really like about the show is that the hosts are obviously having such a good time doing it. One of the downsides to being a professional writer is that you get exposed to a lot more jadedness and politicking, and I’ve come to really appreciate the weekly dose of pure passion and enthusiasm about books and authors that I get from this podcast.

Wow, now that I’m actually getting some data from my web tracker gizmo thing, this is really fun. In a manner somewhat similar to the title character in the Philip K. Dick story “The Golden Man,” I can now envision infinite multiverses of glorious time-wasting unfolding before me. I wish I had set this up a long time ago, so that I had, for example, two years worth of data to pore over rather than two days.

Let’s see, one person found my “Blood of Virgins” page by Googling “blood fantasy websites.” I hope that my quiet tale of dragons, romantic insecurity, and oil politics is just what this person was looking for.

Though I sorta doubt it.

Some highlights from author events I’ve been to recently:

Lee Child was asked which actor would be playing his series character Jack Reacher in the upcoming film. Child said, “The way things are going right now, the actor who will play Reacher has not yet been born.” That’s such a good line that I bet he must’ve stolen it from someone else, but that’s okay, since I fully intend to steal it from him if ever get the chance to use it.

Charles Baxter told a story about flying to France to receive a literary award. The award itself consisted of a fancy silver fountain pen. Baxter stuck the pen in his coat pocket and promptly forgot about it — until he was heading home and going through airport security, where he set off the metal detector. The guards wouldn’t let him take the pen through security, and he was forced to leave it behind.

D.J. MacHale and a fan hatched a plan to go to Disneyland the day the new Harry Potter book comes out, on the theory that all the kids will be home reading Harry Potter and it’ll be possible to go on all the rides and everything without any lines or noisy kids underfoot.

I set up a new gizmo to keep more detailed stats for my website, but so far I’m not getting much. Either no one besides me has visited my site recently (which is deplorable, though not impossible), or else this gizmo’s not working right. I’d really appreciate if a few people could visit my site so I can test out whether this thing is working.

Edit: Okay, that’s more like it. Thanks, guys. It seems to be working.

In response to my post about the new Transformers trailer, asks “but does the car have sex?” In case you were wondering what that was all about, I’ll explain that this is a (slightly exaggerated) reference to my story “Transformations,” my wry, affectionate, and slightly warped take on the pop culture phenomenon of robots that transform into cars, and the boys that love them. And yes, the story does feature a sex scene involving a transforming robot, but no, not like that.

Anyway, normally I wouldn’t even mention it, but now my wild enthusiasm for the Tranformers movie is tempered by mortal terror that the movie is going to “steal” some of my ideas, and that then my story, which I wrote back in January, won’t seem as fresh when the story finally comes out in Realms of Fantasy magazine late this year or early next. So I’m just going to state right now that if the movie features either a sex scene that takes place inside a transforming robot in its car form, or if the movie includes the idea that you could smash a person into pulp by having the car transform into a robot while the passenger was still inside, I did it first.

Of course, hopefully the movie won’t use these (or any of my other) ideas, and will just feature lots of robots blowing each other up, in which case I’ll be very happy. And one of my (many, many — ridiculously many, actually) fantasies is that the makers of the movie will read my story and then say to themselves, “Duh! Why didn’t we think of that? Man, from now on let’s give this guy a billion dollars to think up stuff like that for us.” And then transforming robots from outer space would hear about me and seek me out and say, “We’ve been hiding in plain view this whole time, just waiting to reveal ourselves to one special human being who really understands us.” And then the robots would whisk me off on an interstellar adventure, and I’d save the universe, and … well, you get the idea. Okay, seriously, I know, that’s a little outlandish. I’d just settle for the billion dollars.

A few weeks ago I met TV writer Jeffrey Stepakoff, and I just finished reading his new book Billion-Dollar Kiss: The Kiss That Saved Dawson’s Creek and Other Adventures in TV Writing. The book is a quick, fun read, and I learned a ton about the TV writing business. I would definitely recommend the book to anyone who’s thinking about working in TV. I really had no idea how much the rise of “reality TV” was tied to disputes between writers and executives in Hollywood. For example, most “reality” shows are so fake that they require almost as much writing as scripted shows — inventing characters (who are then “cast”), staging dramatic events, and constructing character arcs in post-production. But people who work on reality shows aren’t called “writers,” aren’t members of the Guild, and are paid very poorly — and executives like it that way. Anyway, really interesting stuff.

Um, if you haven’t seen the new trailer for Transformers, well … you really should.

I just noticed that over at the Realms of Fantasy message board there was a poll for best story of 2006, and my “Blood of Virgins” is in the lead. Wow. I’m humbled, and I’d just like to thank everyone who voted for me. Both of you.

I decided my welcome page needed some more random text as a visual element, so I had to come up with some catchy phrase to give visitors some idea of what to expect from my fiction. What I came up with was “Offbeat, whimsical fiction blending fantasy, science fiction, politics, and pop culture,” which I think isn’t bad. I may keep it, I may change it, I don’t know. Anyway, I wondered who else out on the internet might be described as “offbeat” and “whimsical,” so I asked my pal Google, and this led me to discover Miranda July. Her short story collection looks kind of cool, I’ll probably get it. And I can’t speak for the fiction, but her website is certainly “offbeat” and “whimsical.”

I am beginning to strongly suspect that my car is inhabited by an invisible, mischievous gremlin who delights in knocking my rear view window askew every single time I’m away from the car.

I spiffed up my website with this welcome page.

Yesterday I drove up to Malibu to see an appearance by Rutger Hauer, who played the malevolent and romantic Roy Batty in Blade Runner. Apparently a new cut of Blade Runner is set to be released in theaters, which is cool. I first watched Blade Runner as a kid, and the scene where Rachel discovers that she’s a replicant and that all her memories were taken from other people and implanted into her to make her seem more human had a profound impact on me, and that scene still probably rates as my all-time #1 movie moment.

On the drive home, I noticed a black cloud hanging over the city. At first I thought it was just typical L.A. smog, but as I moved east I saw that Griffith Park was on fire. I mean really, really on fire, with huge gouts of flame shooting up all over the hillside. It was quite a spectacle. All throughout the city people gathered on corners or bridges to watch or even videotape the fire.

The Chuck Palahnhiuk reading was pretty intense. I went two hours early, and the large courtyard at Vroman’s was already pretty much full. Hundreds and hundreds of people eventually showed up. It was a young crowd — I’d guess 80% of the attendees were 16-24 — and tattoos and piercings were much in evidence. There were also a lot of people, including a lot of guys, wearing wedding dresses. Palahnhiuk cycled between reading short fiction, telling stomach-turning anecdotes, answering questions, reading notable fan letters, and asking trivia questions about his books. (Answering one of these questions correctly would win you a giant inflatable moose head.) Each time Palahnhiuk offered to answer a question, the teenage girl sitting in front of me would whimper, squirm ecstatically, throw up her arms, and cry out, “Mr. Chuck! Mr. Chuck!” But he never called on her. I really enjoyed his short story “Cold Calling,” about a teenage guy who works in telemarketing and is constantly being harangued by the ignorant folks he calls because they all assume he’s from India. At the end of the event, Palahniuk tossed dozens of inflatable hamburgers and severed limbs into the crowd.

Some of the Authors@Google videos are worth checking out. Of particular interest are John Scalzi, Jonathan Lethem, Kelly Link & Karen Joy Fowler, and Neil Gaiman. I particularly enjoyed Neil Gaiman’s take on Hollywood, which goes basically: In fairy tales, you do work for the fairies, and the fairies pay you huge piles of gold, but in the morning all the gold turns into leaves and blows away. In Hollywood it’s the opposite. In Hollywood, you get paid huge piles of gold, and you get to keep the gold, but in the morning all your work turns into leaves and blows away.