There’s an amazing 1963 documentary over at the Internet Archive titled Ray Bradbury: Story of a Writer by David L. Wolper that you should all rush over and watch. It’s wonderful seeing Bradbury, now almost 90, at age 43, more than half his lifetime ago.

Go, enjoy, but I’d like you to pay special attention to a particular section that fascinated me. Beginning at 18:20, we see Bradbury workshop his short story “Dial Double Zero.” The narrator tells us, “Every other Friday for the past 14 years, Bradbury and a group of friends have met to read and criticize each other’s work.” But—who are these friends? They’re unidentified in the documentary, and I don’t recognize them. Are they members of the California SF community at the time? Or local non-SF writers we wouldn’t know?

There were seven writers in attendance for the filmed session, two of whom are only visible in a long shot from the backs of their heads. Below are screen grabs of the five who could be seen in close-ups.

Can you name them?

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I saw Inception last weekend and enjoyed it … except for one thing. If you know me, you know I dream. I dream a lot. And those orderly, stable Inception dreams—except for an occasional freight train or twisted bit of geography—were nothing like the dreams I know. So while Christopher Nolan may have made an exciting heist movie, he completely failed when it came to creating a believable dreamscape.

Here are the dreams I tweeted last month if Nolan needs any more ideas. Yeah, some of them ape the real world in ways. But many are just plain weird.

I dreamt that while being interviewed by a TV reporter at a con, I called Andy Porter over, then saw he had my old autograph album with him. July 30, 2010 7:34:22 AM

I dreamt I was on top of a huge mountain, demolishing it by kicking the boulders that made it up one by one into the abyss. July 30, 2010 7:28:59 AM

I dreamt I saw two bears outside, so ran off to get my camera. But realized it was a dream when I saw the giraffe in the backyard with them. July 29, 2010 7:44:01 AM

I dreamt I wandered a school poking my head in classrooms. In one of them? Kim Jong Il! I changed into slippers so I’d be let in to see him. July 28, 2010 8:06:00 AM

I dreamt I wandered a bank I used to work for looking for my desk but unable to find it, and not understanding where it could have gone to. July 28, 2010 8:01:00 AM

I dreamt I tried to let my Dad in the house without letting in a mastiff, but whenever I cracked open the door, the dog poked his nose in. July 28, 2010 7:57:49 AM

I dreamt I ran over Irene while backing out of the garage. I couldn’t find her after I got out of the car, and ran around shouting her name. July 28, 2010 7:55:46 AM

I dreamt I was installing new doors throughout the house. And for sound insulation, I was filling them with ground beef and chicken breasts. July 27, 2010 7:48:55 AM

I dreamt I was seated with Chip Delany at the counter of a sushi bar, but instead of sushi, we were devouring endless quantities of dim sum. July 21, 2010 7:26:01 AM

I dreamt a doctor was exhibiting me in front of a room full of medical students who had to point at and identify every muscle in my body. July 21, 2010 7:24:13 AM (more…)

I’ve been so busy I only just realized that though I uploaded my final Readercon clips to YouTube long ago, I never mentioned it here. After my first convention outing with my new Flip camcorder, I posted a total of 13 videos from the weekend. Here are the final five clips.

First, some of the beginning and some of the ending from the panel on “The New and Improved Future of Magazines,” featuring John Joseph Adams, John Benson, Leah Bobet, Robert Killheffer, and Sean Wallace.

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Up until last week, I don’t think I’d seen more than two or three praying mantises in my life, and each time I felt privileged, sort of the way I feel when I see a rainbow. Though I’ve spotted rainbows far more frequently. (Yes, even double rainbows, of which I’ve seen a few.) But last week, I saw two praying mantises just a foot or two away from each other.

I was inside working, Irene was outside, and the phone rang. Which had me thinking … uh, oh. Irene spotted a snake. But she hadn’t. She spotted these guys.

First up—the male. (Or so I assume. You tell me.)

Next—the female. (Or so I again assume.) (more…)

I’ve been so busy preparing for, reporting on, and recovering from Comic-Con that I’ve had no time to share my thoughts about it here, so why not let a picture stand in for those thousand words?

One afternoon, as I was racing from one end of the humongous exhibit hall to the other, I spotted a dealer selling the original art for the cover to an issue of Doorway to Nightmare I’d written long, long ago. (Make that long, long, long ago.) So I stopped my power walking and asked, “How much do you want for the Kaluta?”

The dealer’s answer? “Thirty.”

You do realize I was meant to add three zeroes after that number, right? There was of course no way I could afford to own the drawing, but I figured I should at least get a picture with it.

And so:

Here’s the cover as it was originally published.

Time flies. Money flies, too.

Been real busy at Comic-Con. Too busy to post here. I worked from 5:00 a.m. until 1:00 a.m. yesterday writing and/or editing 20 stories for Blastr. But there were plenty of fun moments mixed in.

Like talking to Seth Rogen about the Lone Ranger.

And this. Danny Trejo, star of Machete and fearsome dude, handed me a beef taco last night. I ate it. I had to.

Would you have turned this guy down?

More later when I come out the other side of Comic-Con!

If you’ve been wanting to own a mess of my stories between two covers, but horror’s not your thing (so These Words Are Haunted isn’t for you) and zombies freak you out (so What Will Come After is waaaaaay out of your comfort zone), check out the cover to my next collection, What We Still Talk About, which will soon be published by Fantastic Books.

What We Still Talk About collects eleven of my favorite science-fiction (aliens, robots, time travelers and more) short stories from the past thirty years. As soon as ordering information becomes available, I’ll be back to let you know!

A week ago today, Kit Reed, Mike Allen, Adam Golaski, Barry Malzberg, Kathryn Cramer, and Peter Straub (who can all be seen in that order in the clips below) took part in the Readercon panel, “Down There in the Gutter: The Fiction of the Unpleasant,” and I was in the front row recording it with my Flip MinoHD.

Here’s how the panel was described in the program book:

In a recent online essay, Peter Straub argues that the only difference between the best horror and “literary” fiction is that the former acknowledges that life is dominated by unpleasantness, by “crappy, low-rent feeling states.” But in making this argument he mentions neither fear nor disgust (the staples of genre horror) but shame, loss, envy, panic, greed, insecurity, and loneliness. There’s no question that we are oddly hardwired to enjoy fear when we intellectually recognize that there is no actual threat. There is, however, much less of a case to be made for the vicarious enjoyment of the other emotional states that Straub lists, so it is harder to see them functioning in a story the same way fear does in genre horror. Is Straub here in fact defining a new literary subgenre entirely, one that just happens to include (but is hardly limited to) the best of horror? If so, can we trace the history of this secret genre and its influence on and interaction with more conventional literary fiction?

Here are the three best chunks from that 55-minute hour. (more…)

I was too busy tweeting and shooting video at Readercon to take my usual number of photos. What few I managed to snap can be seen over at flicker.

And now I find I’m far too busy and tired to write up an account of the weekend. So for now, let this picture of me with Junot Díaz stand in for all the fun I had.

And for those of you who wish you could have been there, you can be. Sort of. Here are four more excerpts from Readercon panels I attended. (more…)

And another thing you missed by not attending Readercon was me reading my short story “Tell Me Like You Done Before,” which can be found in my collection of zombie stories, What Will Come After.

If you’re up to finding out what happened to George and Lenny after John Steinbeck got through with them, check it out below!

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