It’s October, which means this year’s World Fantasy Con is just around the corner. I don’t know about you, but I’ve already figured out where I’ll be eating while in San Diego. That’s because wherever Adam Richman of Man v. Food goes, I go. Which means this year you’ll spot me at the Broken Yolk Cafe for breakfast, and at Phil’s BBQ and the Lucha Libre Gourmet Taco Shop for lunches and dinners.

And if you plan to be at WFC, too, I’ll be trying to drag you along.

Check out the San Diego episode of Man v. Food and you’ll see why.

Will you be there?

Just in case you didn’t read my short story “What Will Come After” in my collection of the same name, you’ve got another chance, because it’s now the lead story in Best New Horror 22 from the perceptive editor Stephen Jones. And if the thought of reading me isn’t enough of an impetus to get you to pick up a copy, you’d also get to read my betters, writers like Ramsey Campbell, Joe Lansdale, and Robert Shearman.

This is my third appearance in one of Jones’ annual roundups, as I was also reprinted in Best New Horror 4 and Best New Horror 8.

The UK edition from Robinson (with cover art by Vincent Chong) is on the left, while the U.S. edition from Running Press (with cover art by Joe Roberts) is on the right.

I love both images equally, but I’ve got to admit that the freaky pumpkin is weirding me out …

According to this Associated Press article from the mid-’30s, it turns out that “fat persons are fat because they eat too much” and “gains in flesh always followed the taking of more energy than was expended in muscular work by the individual.”

Wow … who knew?

Ain’t science amazing?

Irene was going through some boxes in her closet and came across a couple of issues I wrote way back when of Welcome Back, Kotter, and since there’s no reason for her to hang on to comics she had nothing to do with, she passed them on to me. When I flipped through the extremely yellowed pages, what I found far more interesting than my own attempts at aping the voices of those Sweathogs was the following fractional ad.

Not sure how many comics readers in 1978 were interested in investing a quarter in finding out more about what was likely just some spurious land deal. I certainly wasn’t. The only ads I paid attention to were the in-house ads and the ones for back issues. Well … those and the Twinkie ads, too, of course.

How about you? Any idea what this was about? Googling any section of the text of the ad gets me nothing, so I’m counting on the group mind out there to tell me what was going on here. If you sent a sticky quarter to Collector Enterprises, please let me know what you got in return.

I only hope you’re not an oil baron now. I wouldn’t want to have to kick myself!

Dan Harmon, the creator of the TV series Community, has a theory about the shape of stories, one which was shared in a profile recently published in Wired. It’s different from any other story shape I’ve seen, in that it’s circular, rather than the usual X-Y graph reflecting highs and lows, whether of fortune, or tension, or some other plot element.

He says that when watching movies and TV, “I can’t not see that circle. It’s tattooed on my brain.”

Here’s how he lays it out.

It makes for an interesting theory, but it’s not one I’m comfortable with accepting as the skeleton of story, due partially to the circle and partially the fact that I don’t see many of these numerical concepts as being universal.

For example— (more…)

Back when I told you what I bought at this year’s Small Press Expo in Bethesda, I mentioned that I’d attended three presentations. What I didn’t say was that I recorded the one that interested me the most, “The Secret History of Women in Comics.” Not just so I could share it with you, but so that my wife, Impish Irene Vartanoff, who wasn’t able to be in the audience that day but who could be considered a part of that history, would be able to witness it, too.

Sorry it’s taken me two weeks to get this up on YouTube, but, hey … I’ve been busy.

In any case, the panel, held Saturday, September 10, 2011 at SPX, was described as follows on the program: “The increased involvement of women in the comics field over the past several years has been a significant positive change in a historically male-dominated industry. However, just as it’s worth celebrating this progressive revolution, it is also worth noting that today’s women cartoonists are part of a lineage of pioneering women who have made many contributions to the field. Heidi MacDonald will discuss this history with Jessica Abel, Robyn Chapman, Alexa Dickman and Diane Noomin.”

And here it is!

Thank goodness those guys got rid of that silly upside-down spaceship headquarters in exchange for something more environmentally aware.

I used the Everyday iPhone app to snap a picture of myself each day from March 23-September 23 … the result of which tells me little more than how boring I am!

I’ll be attending Capclave next month, a local science fiction convention held in Gaitherburg, Maryland. If you’ll be there, too, here’s where you’ll be able to find me. (Well, when I’m not hanging out in the bar or con suite, that is.)

Ideas into Story
Saturday, October 15, 1:00 PM
”Where do you get your ideas ?” is a question that writers always get asked. The real work is taking an idea and turning into a story. How does that happen?

Reading
Saturday, October 15, 6:30 PM
Got a few weeks to decide exactly what I’ll be reading … all I know is that it’ll be something I’ve never read at a Capclave before!

Self-Editing: From Rough Draft to Finished Work (m)
Sunday, October 16, 1:00 PM
How do writers look critically at their own work? What steps do they take to hone their drafts into polished stories?

Endings: Varieties of Wrapping Up (m)
Sunday, October 16, 3:00 PM
In the final pages, the resolution of the present story becomes clear (and so might the nature of the sequel). It’s not always done well—let’s talk about how and when it is done well, as well as the many other challenges of creating good endings.

See you there!

When I was a kid, I loved reading all the reissued novels in the late ’60s that featured the adventures of Doc Savage and other pulp heroes. One of the things I liked the most was that sense of time travel; that is, experiencing a story from another era. Which is why when I came across a Spider reprint that had been updated—I think the vintage of a bottle of wine was of a date which had come after the original story had been published—I felt cheated.

Didn’t the publisher realize it was eliminating one of the things that had attracted me to the book in the first place?

Based on how Wikipedia recounts what happened, I wasn’t the only one who felt that way:

It seems likely that these four books were edited and modernized reprints, one of several reasons why they may have never caught on with their intended audience. In one, Death and the Spider, with an original publishing date of 1940, Nita Van Sloan is shown driving an Jaguar E-type X-KE, a sportscar not created and on the streets until 1961, some nineteen years later.

I was even more offended when I learned that James Schmitz had been edited in rerelease to eliminate numerous references to smoking, which later came up at a World Fantasy Con panel I was on during which I, without realizing it, ended up sitting next to the guy who was responsible for that expurgation. (You can check out the discussion—and see the flabbergasted Nancy Kress—starting at 11:56 here.)

So you can imagine how I felt when I read the following in a review of Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants in the September 19 issue of Publishers Weekly:

Pohl has attempted to make this classic novel relevant to modern readers with new references to Wal-mart, Enron, and Reagan, but the revisions only throw the 1950s attitudes and gender stereotypes into sharp relief, resulting in a dated, muddled mess.

It’s been years since I last read that 1950s classic, so I can’t speak to the palatability of its attitudes. I only know that this type of updating is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea.

Please, kids … don’t do this at home.

Let’s leave this sort of thing to George Lucas … agreed?