Last summer my friend Derek was supposed to open for Blues Traveler, but the show didn’t come off due to monsoon rains that blasted the east coast (boo!). Well, I just heard that he’s at it again, this time scheduled to open for Sugar Ray (yay!). Please everyone exercise whatever sway you have with the rain gods to ensure a fruitful concert.

I’m back in New York now. (Spring break.) I’ll be going to Lunacon this coming weekend, but I’m pretty much free during the week, so if anyone else is free and wants to hang out, drop me a line.

On my flight from L.A. to Chicago, aside from a brief interlude in which I watched the in-flight movie Night at the Museum (which was actually better than I was expecting), I spent the whole time talking to the young woman (Polly) sitting next to me. She had one of the those little dogs you carry around in a purse. The dog never moved or made a peep. Polly said that on the flight out she’d had the purse unzipped. A flight attendant had come by and told Polly to zip up the purse, so Polly zipped it up half way, thinking this would be sufficient. It wasn’t. The flight attendant appeared again and said that Polly was now facing federal felony charges for disobeying the staff in flight. When the plane landed, Polly was taken into police custody. She spent a long time explaining — contrary to what the police had been told — that no, the dog had not run amock in the cabin, and that no, she had not refused to obey the repeated orders of every member of flight crew. She was eventually released. Ah, the joys of modern air travel.

And if you think it’s bad for U.S. citizens, just try dealing with it if you’re from another country. My British friend Adam says that every time he enters the U.S. he has to face a string of interrogators who each grill him about whether he’s ever been to Missouri. He tells them, “No, I haven’t. I’ve never even heard of it.” I recently picked him up at the airport, and he related how the interrogator had asked him, “If you’re in the U.S. to go to school, then why did you leave for one week to go to Europe?,” as if to say, “Gotcha!” Adam explained, “I went to visit my girlfriend for Valentine’s Day.” “Hmmm,” said the interrogator, as if to say, “Very suspicious,” and stamped Adam’s papers with a “Probably a terrorist/Full cavity search” sort of stamp. Adam says that getting into the U.S. these days is such a nightmare that more and more people from abroad who are invited to come speak here simply refuse.

This afternoon one of my friends emailed me and said, “Did you notice that Tim Pratt and Larry Niven are appearing at USC today?” I thought this must be some sort of joke, since it seemed too improbably awesome, especially considering that I hadn’t heard anything about it, but it turned out to be completely true. I had already missed their event, but I made it over to campus in time to hang out with them. I’d never met Larry Niven before, and it was a big thrill for me to be able to do so. He’s my dad’s favorite science fiction writer, so I read a ton of Niven growing up, and especially his short stories such as “Inconstant Moon,” “Neutron Star,” and “Death by Ecstasy” were huge inspirations to me. Tim will also be dropping by USC’s Ground Zero coffee house tomorrow at 1:00 p.m. to give a reading, so if you’re in the neighborhood you should definitely stop by. If you’re not in the neighborhood, you can still check out his new collection Hart & Boot & Other Stories, which is one of the best collections I’ve read recently (and I’ve read a lot of collections recently).

Then this evening I went to a production of Maxim Gorky’s “The Barbarians,” which was thrilling, though I found the ending pretty unsatisfying.

This is fun. I’ve been invited to take part in a panel discussion on April 21st in Santa Clarita on the state of science fiction writing today and the impact of Ray Bradbury’s work on my writing and on the genre as a whole. The event is part of the Big Read initiative.

Most unintentionally funny line uttered during my fiction workshop last night: “I didn’t used to realize how badly my grammar was until some friends pointed it out and helped me fix it.”

WARNING: Self-aggrandizement ahead.

Last night in class, my humor prof, comedian Shelley Berman, who plays characters on the TV shows Curb Your Enthusiasm and Boston Legal, said my sketch about two obnoxious guys who visit the zoo was the funniest piece of student writing he’s seen in 25 years of teaching.

That was cool.

I hate it when you’re reading a short story and you realize halfway through that the first person narrator is the opposite gender as what you’ve been imagining. It really throws you out of the story. This happened to me just now.

I always assume that a first person narrator is the same gender as the author unless there’s a very clear signal early on to the contrary. For example, if the author is female but is writing a male first person narrator, she might start out the story like this:

My friend Bob tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Hey Mark. Nice penis you’ve got there.”
“Thanks,” I said. “So what’s up?”

Okay, actually that might be overdoing it a bit. But seriously, clue us in somehow.

To my eternal sorrow, I saw Ghost Rider tonight. Ghost Rider is about a superhero who’s a biker with a flaming skull. If you are evil, Ghost Rider might appear and suck your soul out through your eyes and leave behind only a smoking, fiery mess where your brain used to be, which, by a curious coincidence, is exactly what it feels like to sit through this movie. I swear to you I am not exaggerating when I say I thought I was going to vomit from how bad this movie is. It’s true I spent almost the entire movie giggling, but it was in an unpleasant, escaped-mental-patient sort of way. The dialogue is atrocious, the storyline is incoherent, and the characterization is ludicrous. (The special effects aren’t bad.) If anyone suggests to you going to see this movie, please, please, learn from my mistake. Head in the opposite direction so fast that you leave a flaming trail behind you.

I just got word from my good friend Andrea Kail that her story “The Sun God at Dawn, Rising From a Lotus Blossom” was selected as first prize winner in the Writers of the Future contest. Yay!

I met Andrea years ago at an Odyssey alums dinner, but I had never read anything of hers, since she always said that nothing she’d written was ready for public scrutiny. Then last May she sent me a copy of “Sun God,” and I was blown away. Checking the email I wrote then, I see that I remarked “this is f***ing brilliant” and “If you can write like that, I don’t understand why you aren’t publishing. Are you sending stuff out?” She was sending stuff out, but only barely. A short time later, her story “Soft, Like a Rabbit” was accepted by Fantasy magazine. “Sun God” received maybe the most enthusiastic response I ever saw from my now-defunct New York writers workshop, the legendarily unenthused 8th of February Group. I also put “Sun God” on my list of best stories I read recently. I’m thrilled that the WotF judges concurred. Congratulations, Andrea!

I am blessed with an embarrassment of talented friends. I should also note that Carol Pinchefsky recently sold her first piece to the New York Times. Watch for her Modern Love essay “I Didn’t Marry Him for His Money, I Swear” in this Sunday’s Style section.

Last night I went to the latest event in USC’s Visions and Voices lecture series. The theme was “Point of View.” One talk was about whether there’s really such a thing as objectivity in reporting, and another was about the cinematography in Hitchcock’s Notorious, but any impressions I might have formed on those topics have been completely obliterated by the third talk, which was a very graphic discussion of bonobo sex. What did this have to do with “point of view”? Who cares! It’s bonobo sex! I’ll spare you graphic details, but I’ll just note in passing that the average duration for bonobo sex is apparently 9-15 seconds, so guys, don’t feel bad. Actually, the talk did have a lot to do with point of view, since the person presenting it was USC’s only “Feminist Darwinian Scholar.” She said that feminists have traditionally been hostile to biology, since biology has so often been used to push a view of the “natural order” in which males are dominant. But according to her, if you bring a feminist perspective to biology you start noticing things that’ve been overlooked or misinterpreted by male researchers. For example, bonobo females have a lot of sex with each other. Researchers have traditionally tried to come up with all sorts of tortured rationalizations to explain this behavior as something other than sex for pleasure, though that’s obviously exactly what it is. In fact, bonobo females have actually evolved to have pleasurable sex with each other — the female bonobo has developed a large, distended clitoris for the sole purpose of being able to rub it against the clitoris of other females. (Okay, I guess I was sort of lying about that whole “sparing you the graphic details” thing.) This scholar also talked about how as bonobo females age, they tend to form “Mean Girls“-esque clicks that dominate their tribe. Male researchers have tended to underplay this, insinuating that the males could easily be in charge, but they just choose not to be, rather than the more obvious and straightforward explanation that the females are, in fact, dominant.

Tonight I went to an event on campus entitled Love Shack, an interdisciplinary faculty discussion on love and lust. The part I found most interesting was a statistical analysis of mate selection. Apparently, there’s a problem in statistics that involves picking the best product off an assembly line, assuming you have to dispose of each product as you reject it, and the solution applies equally well to mate selection. The solution is not to pick any of the first 1/3 of the choices that come along, and instead simply take note of what the best choice is from that sample. (And, critically, in the case of mate selection, one factor in determining the “best choice” is that they’d have you.) Then after that first 1/3, select the next one that comes along that’s as good as or better than your previously identified “best choice.” You heard it here first. I expect to be invited to the wedding when this works for you.

I went to the campus bookstore yesterday, to pick up a new spiral notebook, and swung by the fantasy & science fiction aisle. There I spotted a copy of George R. R. Martin’s The Armageddon Rag, one of the few works by GRRM I haven’t read. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Armageddon Rag has been out of print for a while, and was supposed to be reissued in 2004 along with GRRM’s Dying of the Light and Fevre Dream, but its release kept being pushed back, apparently due to complications involving the rights to the various song lyrics quoted in the book. I used to check online fairly regularly to see if it was out yet, but I finally gave up, and by 2007 I don’t think I honestly believed that it would ever come out. But there it was, so I bought it. Armageddon Rag sold very poorly upon its initial release, and essentially derailed GRRM’s fiction career at that time. I’ve heard him explain that the book is a mix of fantasy, science fiction, and rock & roll. He thought this would be great, that it would appeal to fans of all three. What he didn’t take into account, he says, is that there was too much fantasy for the science fiction fans, too much science fiction for the fantasy fans, and rock & roll fans don’t read. It seems that readers these days a bit more open to genre blending, and at any rate GRRM is so popular now that I’m sure the book will fare better this time around. I read the first couple chapters yesterday, and they’re terrific.

I just passed a homeless guy standing by the side of the road and holding a sign that had a big yellow smiley face and also read: “IT ONLY TAKES A CRUMB … TO MAKE ME A HAPPY BUM!!” Definitely one of the better beggar signs I’ve seen recently.

And speaking of beggars, yesterday a cop was telling one of my friends that LAPD will be flushing all the homeless people out of Skid Row (the area with the nation’s largest homeless population — which I had the interesting experience of bicycling through at midnight), so we should expect a big influx of them around USC for a week or so until they all move back. (And believe me, it’s not like there’s a huge shortage of homeless people around here already.) The point of this exercise is not clear to me.

The cop also warned us not to give any spare cash to the homeless people, since they’d just spend it on booze, but considering that we’d probably just spend it on booze too, I don’t see what the big problem is.

Since finishing Ulysses, I was getting restless without a book to copy out, so I decided to do Proust’s Swann’s Way (the new Lydia Davis translation). I’m about halfway through. I chose it because there’s a reference to it in Zelazny’s Amber books (in The Courts of Chaos: “My heart leaped with a kind of Proustian joy”) and because I came across a quote from Lovecraft in which he acknowledged that Proust was the greatest contemporary writer because of his ability to manipulate time. I also wanted to take a closer look at some really long sentences, because a few people in my fiction workshop last semester felt that I write with too many short, clipped sentences. Is this true? Do I? I don’t know. I kinda like ’em. Short sentences, that is. Clipped ones. But anyway, I decided it was worth pondering. I wasn’t expecting to particularly like the book itself, but so far I’m really enjoying it. My first reaction was: “Holy crap, this sounds exactly like the voice in ‘The Fifth Head of Cerberus’ [by Gene Wolfe].” A quick google search reveals that I’m not the first person to have noticed this. Wolfe’s ability to mimic Proust’s voice is eerie and uncanny. And due to this similarity, and since I read ‘Fifth Head of Cerberus’ first, the whole time I’m reading Swann’s Way I can’t escape the impression that there must be some shapeshifting aliens lurking about, which I think makes the proceedings a bit more lively, though no shapeshifting aliens have actually put in an appearance (yet — as I said, I’m only halfway through).

Browsing the internet just now, I stumbled across an eBay listing for issue #1 of Realms of Fantasy. I went ahead and ordered it (my first ever purchase through eBay). My own copy of issue #1 is sadly lost forever, but I still vividly remember receiving it as a teenager (as part of a special promotion) and beholding the magic words: “ROGER ZELAZNY: NEW AMBER ADVENTURE.” Holy crap, I get chills just thinking about it. Anyway, I’m really looking forward to perusing its pages once again.

My buddy Adam and I are looking for a 2-bedroom apartment in the vicinity of USC. We got a lead on place that was very reasonably priced, so I figured the area must not be that great, but it’s only five blocks from campus, so I figured how bad could it be?

Turns out five blocks seems like a long way when everyone you pass is a gang member glowering at you. During this ten minute walk, there were about five instances where I thought we were going to get mugged. And this was at noon. There’s no way I’m going over there at night. Oh yeah, there was also a homeless woman who had apparently smeared blood all over her face into a sort of mask.

Anyway, we’re going to keep looking.

My mind is still boggling from the fact that someone in my fiction workshop last night was able to utter the following comment without detecting any double entendre: “I liked the sex scene. It was subtle. You didn’t try to shove anything down our throats.”

Speaking of, I don’t normally read the Daily Trojan (the campus paper), but I picked up one recently on a whim and read the following headline: “Pantsless Man Caught Masturbating in Leavey Library.” The story is full of odd details, such as: “He told us that he had left his pants in Doheny Library earlier in the night. To this date, the pants haven’t been found.” Also: “Witnesses then positively identified him as who they had seen in the library,” which makes me imagine a lineup and a witness saying, “Boy, I’m really not sure, officer. It was dark. If I had to guess, I’d say maybe it was that one there, number 4, the one with no pants.”

Okay, I’m back. I haven’t updated for a while because I’ve been busy working around the clock on my new story, trying to get it polished up in time for the first student reading series of the semester last friday. A huge crowd showed up, and I was a bit apprehensive about reading my new story, which I had literally just finished and hadn’t gotten any reaction to from a single person, but the crowd’s response was extraordinarily enthusiastic. I’m quite fond of the story myself. Hopefully some kindly editor out there will feel the same way.

After the reading we all went out to a night spot. One member of my posse, who is quickly becoming a legend in his own time, is a young lad I shall refer to by the impenetrable pseudonym of “Mr. Buckles.” Mr. Buckles has a bit of a drinking problem … and I only say this because last year while drunk he totaled his car by crashing it into a motor boat that was parked at the side of the road, and he is now without a driver’s license and is undergoing court-mandated alcohol counseling. Near closing time, Mr. Buckles was cruising the bar looking for half-finished glasses of beer that less thorough drinkers had simply abandoned. He raised one such vessel to his lips and detected some solid object floating amidst the liquid. He reacted by spewing warm beer all over the back, skirt, and stool of the classiest and best-dressed member of our party. As she squirmed in revulsion, Mr. Buckles scrutinized his beverage and remarked, “Whew. It was just a lime. That’s a relief.” Oh, Mr. Buckles, what will he do next?

Another member of my party described a screenplay he had written based on a series of interviews he did with a real-life junkie and small-time crook. This junkie had once been fleeing from the police and had crashed his pickup truck off a bridge and gone into the river. He swam to shore and took off down the bank. When a police helicopter started circling overhead, he smeared mud all over his body and stood with his arms outstretched, pretending to be a tree. This was apparently sufficient to fool his pursuers, who were looking for movement on the ground, and he got away. I’ll have to remember that one.

A while back I mentioned that I had shoved all the furniture in my bedroom into the middle of the floor, creating a “track” along the wall for me to pace. This has turned out to be one of my best ideas ever. Now when I’m writing a story, I’ll put on my iPod, dial up whatever current song gets my emotions flowing the most, then pace around and around the room, thinking over the events of the story and trying to get my emotional state ratcheted up as high as possible. Then, when I know exactly how the next few paragraphs or the next scene is supposed to go, I’ll sit down and type it out, then go back to pacing. This has meant composing my last few stories in a constant state of adrenaline-charged euphoria, which is fun for its own sake even if the story turns out to be crap. I’ve also gotten into pretty great cardiovascular condition doing this. Seriously, give it a try.

My short story “Blood of Virgins,” which appeared in the October 2006 issue of Realms of Fantasy magazine, is now available in audio format as a free download from Escape Pod.

Last night I went to an advance screening of the new documentary God Grew Tired Of Us, about the “lost boys” of Sudan. (In 1983, the muslim Sudanese government initiated a campaign to exterminate all christian males, regardless of age. Tens of thousands fled, and those that survived the harrowing death march eventually ended up in a refugee camp on the border of Kenya.) The film follows what happens to three of the “lost boys” when the U.S. government offers to resettle them in American cities. They’ve never seen electricity or plumbing before, and at first America seems like a land of enchantment. There’s a great deal of innocent abroad humor as they adjust to life in their new country. One laments, “In the U.S. you can only have one wife. That will take getting used to.” They hold soda bottles up to the camera and say, “This is ‘Pepsi.’ But in our country it’s called ‘Coca-Cola.'” Soon, however, darker undertones emerge. The men must work long hours at low-wage jobs to support themselves, leaving them almost no time to visit each other. They complain of loneliness. They miss the spirit of community that prevailed in the refugee camps, and note that Americans seldom acknowledge each other on the street and that in America you can’t go up to a stranger’s house and get to know them. The town asks the men not to travel in groups, because shopkeepers find them intimidating. The men wire money back home, but there are always more friends and relatives in desperate need who can’t be helped. As the years pass, you can’t help noticing that the men are smiling less and slumping more, and starting to look more and more like … Americans. By the end of the film, the men have started organizing reunions, as well as committees to try to get action on resolving the crisis in Sudan. The film gets most of its energy from the men themselves, who are each charismatic, funny, and thoughtful. What will probably strike American audiences most is the chance to see America itself from the perspective of a total outsider. In one scene, one of the men stands in a mall, staring perplexed at the gigantic Christmas tree and Santa’s house. He asks, “Why do you do this? Is it in the Bible? It is pretty, I guess. But what does it have to do with the birth of Jesus?”