This week I’m in Pittsburgh teaching at the Alpha Writers Workshop. Tonight I gave a reading at Barnes & Noble alongside Timothy Zahn. Zahn wrote Heir to the Empire, the first Star Wars novel to continue the story past Return of the Jedi. That book was HUGE back in the day, so it was a lot of fun for me to be able to appear with him. I read “Blood of Virgins,” which seemed to be very well received.

I guess I should mention, for readers who may not be as familiar with the vagaries of publishing, that you won’t have to wait until October to read my story in the “October” issue of Realms of Fantasy. The August issue has been out for a while now, and since the magazine is bimonthly, the October issue will be the next one to hit newsstands, probably sometime in the next month or so. Of course I’ll mention it here when I know it’s out. If anyone sees it, please drop me a line and let me know.

I got my contract today from Realms of Fantasy for “Blood of Virgins.” The contract indicates that my story will appear in the October 2006 issue. I’m not sure how certain that is, but I thought I’d pass it along.

I hung out backstage at Conan O’Brien again on Friday. I actually got to see Conan this time. Before he goes out in front of the crowd/cameras, he goes through a ritual to psych himself up. He reviews the monologue jokes off of flash cards while hopping up and down, busting dance moves, and mugging outrageously. Then, during the drumroll, he rips out the beating heart of an intern and eats it. It was pretty intense.

After that I had dinner with a bunch of friends. At one point, the conversation had covered both China Mieville and Blade (yeah, it was those kinds of friends), so I tossed out my recent observation that China Mieville is like the Blade of geeks — “All of their strengths, none of their weaknesses.”

Then Saturday morning I was on the radio. Check out my site’s new and improved Media page.

Listen to some of the highlights from my appearance this morning on WBAI 99.5 FM in New York here.

Here are some more Readercon photos, from ‘s birthday party, including an okay one of me.

Readercon was AWESOME. Awesome, I tell you. I always have fun at cons, but I had a particularly good time at this one. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that the guests of honor were two of my favorite contemporary writers, James Morrow and China Mieville. (Just imagine if they’d had George R. R. Martin as a third guest of honor … but then my head probably would have exploded, so perhaps it’s just as well.) Overall it was just a great group of people, and small enough that it felt like a family gathering. By Sunday afternoon some of us were too exhausted/wound up to sit still anymore, so we blew off some steam with a no-holds-barred round of frisbee tossing. Check out the photos.

Something else cool happened this weekend. Back in the spring, I had a few classes taught by director Ted Post, whom you can see has had a long career in Hollywood. I had just finished writing “Blood of Virgins,” so I gave him a copy to read. He said he’d call me with his comments. I didn’t hear from him, and figured he was busy, and sort of forgot about it as I wrapped up the semester and packed to go to the Netherlands. My cell phone didn’t work in the Netherlands, but when I just got back to New York I found a message waiting for me. It was Ted Post. He’d read my story and was extraordinarily enthusastic and complimentary. He said, “Do you have an agent? Have you done anything with this? What about Disney? I think they might really be interested in this.” I called him back yesterday and chatted with him, and he suggested a few things I should try to get my stuff read by the right people. He said, “With your talent you should be being read and reviewed by all the top critics. You should be making lots of money and spending every day telling stories.” I promised I’d call him back in the fall and let him know what I was doing with myself. Overall it was just a tremendously exciting and motivating conversation.

Via The Slush God:

My buddy Chris Cevasco is off at the intensive six week Clarion writers workshop. Some of our other New York friends got together and gave him a little present to take with him:

In principle I have nothing against the idea of dating websites, but I’m starting to get really annoyed by the constant barrage of patronizing, intrusive, and prurient ads for such sites, which all suggest that if I sign up I’ll instantly be deluged by sultry, cleavage-baring vixens. (I’m annoyed because I think they’re misleading me. If by some chance they’re not, somebody please let me know and I’ll sign up.) One recent ad I saw said “Find True Love” and featured a shot of cleavage. Just cleavage. I mean come on.

But that brings me to a serious issue. A gathering storm. Certainly the greatest threat in the history of the world. Forget terrorism, global warming, nuclear proliferation, or an avian flu pandemic. We can’t waste any time on crap like that with this other threat looming over us. I think you know what I’m talking about.

Nipples. Yeah, that’s right — nipples. Just the word sends terror down the spine and makes the blood run cold. Nipples are everywhere. Everywhere. You probably know people with nipples. I’ve heard rumors that some people even have two of them. Maybe you’ve even seen nipples and lived to tell of it. The most insidious thing about nipples is that it’s so hard to see what’s so bad about them. That’s just what makes them so dangerous. But some people are fighting back. Take for instance this judge in Lincoln who may send a woman to jail for 8 months for having an insufficiently opaque coating on her nipples. I fear it’s too little too late. Nipples will probably soon overwhelm all of North America, and we will all be forced to flee to Europe, where no one has ever even heard of nipples.

Whew. I’m glad France won. I really wasn’t looking forward to seeing a final match showdown between Italy and Portugal, two teams composed entirely of players who fake death throes every time someone so much as breathes on them. Sorry if you were really looking forward to seeing that game, but here, you can get much the same effect by simply staring at this photograph.

“Hemingway” is spelled with one m. Seriously. I’m not kidding. You can look it up. I only mention this because out of the last twenty times I’ve seen him mentioned on the internet, his name has not been spelled correctly once. This includes many articles by professional writers. Though most of these people misspelling his name are people listing him as one of their favorite authors(!). I don’t know whether these people are all just extremely oblivious or whether they’re only pretending to be literate (“Okay, gotta put something for ‘Books’ on MySpace. Hmm, let’s see … geez, man, the only thing thing I’ve read in the last ten years was the name of the contestant at the bottom of the screen on American Idol. Um … hmmm … how about that ‘Hemmingway’ guy. I’m pretty sure he was a writer. I think we were supposed to read something by him back in middle school. Okay, he’ll do.”), but in any event it needs stop. Please. Just stop.

I’ve become weirdly enamored with the Assault Rifle Basics podcast that I found randomly in iTunes. Basically it’s these two gamers who play a lot of first person shooters, and they got curious about the real-life weapons featured in the games. They talk to gun owners and retailers, who show off different gun models and configurations. If, like me, you’re sadly bereft of an actual Bushmaster M-16 (Now that’ll keep the neighborhood kids off your lawn), you can watch the videos and get a decent idea of how it works. Handy for writers who might want to feature an assault rifle in a work of fiction. (And really, what work of fiction wouldn’t benefit from the inclusion of a few assault rifles? Take The Grapes of Wrath. Pretty decent story, right? But throw in some assault rifles and … bam! Now we’re talking. See what I mean?) What these podcasts lack in professional polish they make up for by being free. (Go to the iTunes music store and search for assault rifle basics.)

Have I mentioned how fit everyone in the Netherlands looks? It’s eerie. Pretty much everyone age 40 and up has the body of a 25-year-old American. You really have to get pretty close to someone to have any idea how old they are. I guess that’s one of the advantages of using bicycles as your primary mode of transportation. Also, their diet is a lot healthier, and their portions are tiny.

One of the funniest (and saddest) things I’ve seen here are the ads for Big Americans pizza. The ads show hearty, brawny men tearing into their pizzas, while the announcer intones, “Tired of ham and cheese all the time? Want something oily and greasy? Are you ready to eat like an American? Then Big Americans pizza is just what you’ve been craving. Mmmmmm, so good.”

Well okay, I just made that last part up. I don’t speak Dutch, so I really have no idea what the announcer is intoning, but I’m pretty sure it’s something along those lines. The really sad thing is that a Big Americans pizza, which is four times the size of any other pizza I’ve seen here in the Netherlands, is what would be called in America a “small” pizza. I’m not kidding.

Okay, I have a confession. I did no research whatsoever for my previous entry in which I asserted that in the Netherlands they call a Quarter Pounder a “Royale with Cheese.” I just assumed that Pulp Fiction was giving it to me straight. But I just went into a McDonald’s, and you know what they called a Quarter Pounder? A “Quarter Pounder.” How disillusioning. Who would’ve ever guessed you could get a skewed view of reality from watching Pulp Fiction?

Update: Whoops, my bad. I double-checked the Pulp Fiction dialogue, and it turns out that they supposedly call a Quarter Pounder a “Royale with Cheese” in France. It’s the rest of the conversation that’s about the Netherlands. I misremembered. So I guess it’s still an open question whether or not they call a Quarter Pounder a “Royale with Cheese” in France. But you can absolutely take it to the bank that they don’t call it a “Royale with Cheese” in the Netherlands. Not a chance. Anyway, I apologize to Pulp Fiction for casting aspersions on its status as a reliable portrayal of reality.

If Quentin Tarantino remade Star Wars.

Like many people with an interest in stories of magic and adventure, I watched The Princess Bride so many times growing up that if I ever close my eyes I can still hear the dialogue echoing around in my brain. Everyone loves this movie. When I was on the fencing team back in college, I would always ask new recruits how they got interested in fencing, and they’d always shrug and say, “I don’t know,” and I’d say, “Come on, it was Princess Bride, right?” and they’d nod and say, “Yeah.” So it’s exciting to hear that there’s a new Special Edition DVD out that features brilliant commentary by my friend . Really looking forward to checking that out.

I just passed a little Dutch kid wearing a T-shirt that said, “The Next Brad Pitt.” I thought that was pretty funny. (Though just between us, I think he’s kidding himself.)

Yeah, in case you were unaware of this, American pop culture has a global reach. For example, a Dutch act called the Beatfreakz has been receiving a lot of airtime here. (Are they showing this in the U.S.? I have no idea.) See if you can spot the subtle creeping influence of American pop culture in their latest video.

Anyway, that T-shirt made me reflect that since coming to the Netherlands I have no idea what’s going on with Brad & Jen & Angelina. Or Nick & Jessica. Or Tom & Katie. Or Paris & whoever her best friend is this week. I can’t even begin to describe how ecstatically happy this makes me. Of course I have no interest whatsoever in the vapid tawdry lives of these people, but in the U.S. I can’t buy a frickin’ gallon of milk without getting an unsolicited update on them. It makes me feel violated. But at the local grocery store here in the Netherlands, the tabloids are mercifully quarantined in the corner. It’s bliss. Sometimes I wonder if they have any different celebrities that they dish on over here. Fortunately, I will never have to find out.

So to any American developers out there: You build a grocery store where it’s possible to shop while avoiding the tabloids and you’ve got yourself a customer. Are you listening?

So the other day I was walking in the woods and something popped into my head, and I thought, “Oh, it’s like a … like a … oh, what’s the word?” And I couldn’t think of the word. It was driving me nuts. I spent about 45 minutes trying to come up with the word, to no avail. Though I did manage to come up with five or six other words that I felt pretty sure were somehow related to the word I was trying to think of. (One of them was “chiaroscuro.”) I finally got home and googled the definition and got the word: palimpsest. Oh course! Palimpsest, how could I ever forget you?

I first started noticing this word a few years ago in some books I read. I didn’t know it, and was too lazy to go look it up, so I just started guessing based on context that it had something to do with light shining through or around something or maybe making shadows. I think this is because somehow “palimpsest” reminds me of the phrase “penumbras and emanations” from Supreme Court jurisprudence. This misimpression became so fixed in my mind that I still have to remind myself sometimes that this isn’t what the word means. (And hence the association with “chiaroscuro.”)

What it actually means is: “A manuscript, typically of papyrus or parchment, that has been written on more than once, with the earlier writing incompletely erased and often legible.” I remember the first time I looked it up my first thought was, “What a ridiculously pretentious word. Who would ever use that in a conversation? Give me a break.” (Okay, I guess actually my very first thought was, “Huh? There must be some mistake. I was sure it had something to do with light, etc.”) But I’ve subsequently been surprised at how often that word captures exactly what I’m trying to say. So then I can say, “Hey, it’s like a palimpsest!” and whoever I’m talking to can say, “What the #@%! is a palimpsest?” Which limits the word’s communicative value somewhat.

But it occurred to me that if I blogged about it, that would probably double the number of people I’m ever likely to run into who know what a palimpsest is. So next time I use it you’ll know what I’m talking about. Just don’t go spreading it around. It’ll be our little secret.

Or maybe you all knew it already and I’m just way behind the curve.

This cracked me up. This guy has set out to read the entire MLA list of the 100 best novels and write a capsule review of each one. He’s not a fan of The Ambassadors by Henry James. This was my favorite part of his review: “[I]n 1903 two chapters were reversed. It was a blatant error. The chapter that took place in the evening was followed by the one that took place in the morning. In the former chapter, a character referred to a conversation that hadn’t happened yet. A horrible error you think, right? Henry James fans would be complaining and yelling, right? Well, it remained unnoticed for FIFTY YEARS. You heard me; for half a century people were talking about and analyzing this book, forcing students to read it, and never noticed that two of the chapters were in the wrong order. The error was finally noticed by a Stanford Undergraduate, Robert Young, in 1950. Literary James scholars were anxious to get a quotation from this brilliant young man who had made such a significant discovery. What words of praise for James would their new hero give them for posterity? Let’s quote Robert Young: ‘There must be something radically wrong with a writing style that has managed to obscure an error of this magnitude for so many years from the probing eyes of innumerable readers, publishers, editors, critics, and even the author himself.'”

Recently, while consulting Wikipedia, the source of all human knowledge and wisdom, I randomly came across some interesting trivia.

Did you know that Shel Silverstein, the beloved children’s poet, lived at the Playboy Mansion? Neither did I.

Nor did I know this stuff about Vincent Van Gogh: “Legend has grown up about Van Gogh. One of the myths is that no one recognised his work. In fact it was praised in Le Mercure de France and he was called a genius. He was invited to participate in Les Vingt, an exhibition of avant-garde painters in Belgium and Monet said that his work was the best in the show. Toulouse-Lautrec challenged someone to a duel because they had insulted Van Gogh’s work. Another myth is that he cut off his ear, and although he did cut his ear, it was not the whole ear but part of it, at least the lobe and probably a little more with a diagonal cut. Van Gogh is sometimes thought of as the mad painter, but he could not paint during his disturbed episodes, only the time in between. Sometimes it is said that he did not sell any work, or only one painting in his lifetime (The Red Vineyard at Arles, 1888; Pushkin Museum, Moscow), but this is stretching the point, as he did receive some commissions, which are sales, and he also bartered work for meals etc, which is another form of sale.”

Also, anyone ever play Ultima 7? (Perhaps the greatest computer RPG of all time.) Back in my formative years, the maker of the Ultima series, Origin Systems, was locked in a death struggle with rival Electronic Arts. Origin was known for uncompromising quality and for creating games that were true works of art. Electronic Arts was known for creating games that were unplayable dreck, but the company had deep pockets and spent massive amounts of cash on marketing. The storyline for Ultima 7 concerns a sinister extradimensional entity called the Guardian who is able to influence events through the use of three giant artifacts — a cube, a sphere, and a tetrahedron — which the player must destroy in order to save the world. Until I read the Wikipedia article, I never made the connection between these artifacts and the Electronic Arts logo [dead link]. Ha! Good one! (Sadly, in the end Eletronic Arts bought out Origin, and the long-running Ultima series declined drastically in quality and quickly died.)