Yesterday’s annual Thank God Winter Is Over Thank God It’s Spring Daffodil Party—the fifth April we’ve invited friends out to the wilds of West Virginia—was a success. Good friends, good food, good conversation. The first guests began to arrive at noon, they continued to come and go in waves, and the last guests left (not counting our overnighters from New York) shortly after 9:00 p.m.

The body count this year was 35, with many repeat visitors as well as a few newcomers. One of those newcomers was … Scott Edelman.

Check him/me/us out below. (And just in case you don’t remember, I’m the Scott Edelman on the right.)

In addition to sharing the same name, we share the same age. Scott Edelman (the one on the left), a diplomat with the State Department, is 37 days older than me. This is the first time we’ve met in the flesh. We became friends via Facebook last year, and since then have been befuddling each other’s friends, since it looks to them as if we’re commenting on our own status updates. We decided it was time to finally meet, and the daffodil party seemed the perfect time, so we crossed our fingers and hoped a chrono-synclastic infundibulum would not result. Luckily, no cosmic event occurred as part of this meeting.

As for the daffodils …

We learned this year that you can never quite predict how a blooming season will turn out. Though we did have daffodils in bloom, they were mostly gone, while last year’s party, held one day later, had more than 3,000 in bloom! (I know because I counted.) It was partially due to the 90-degree weather in early April, but mostly (I think) due to the nearly four feet of snow that covered the ground here for almost a month. That snow acted as insulation and warmed the bulbs, causing them to burst slightly earlier than they might have otherwise. I could be wrong … but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Irene suggested that next year, we pay attention to the predictions made by DC Cherry Blossom Festival as they pick the height of their own season, and use that as a guide when scheduling our sixth daffodil party. So the decision as to whether the next party turns out to be April 9 or April 16, 2010 is out of our hands.

Who knows? Maybe we’ll see you there!

The Spring 2010 issue of The Paris Review contains an interview with Ray Bradbury that we all should have gotten a chance to read 30+ years ago. (That’s me and Ray below at the 2009 San Diego Comic-Con International.)

Why has this interview gone unpublished until now? Because George Plimpton, editor of the magazine in the late 1970s, declared it to be “a bit informal in places, maybe overly enthusiastic.” Now that the transcribed interview has been rediscovered in Bradbury’s files, the magazine has rectified its error by talking further with Bradbury and bringing the piece up to date. (Which feels a bit odd; since the sections are undated, we have no idea when we’re reading 1970s’ Bradbury vs. 2010 Bradbury.)

As happy as I am to finally see the interview in print (and here’s a brief excerpt of it), it still irks me a bit to see the conversation organized, whether the exchange occurred that way originally or not, so that the magazine starts off by challenging Bradbury to defend his love of SF.

Here are the first two questions and answers: (more…)

Another day, another killer review of my PS Publishing zombie collection What Will Come After.

This latest one is written by the Adam-Troy Castro, whose own zombie tale “Dead Like Me” is a must-read, and appears in the June 2010 issue of SCI FI magazine.

(Full disclosure for those who worry about such things: Adam wrote the introduction for my last horror collection, the 2001 These Words Are Haunted, while I wrote the introduction for Castro’s 2002 collection Vossoff and Nimmitz: Just a Couple of Idiots Reupholstering Space and Time. Take that as logrolling if you will, but I prefer to think of it as two guys who really, really like each other’s writing. Birds of a feather, and all that.)

Here’s what he had to say in a review that gave the book a grade of A:

Zombies are not renowned for their individuality. Once transformed, they become part of the same vast shambling horde, with little in the way of an agenda beyond chowing down on any living people in their vicinity.

But authors of zombie stories are of course a different matter entirely, and so the subgenre that sometimes seems unable to offer much more than endless variations on the trope of intrepid zombie-killers finding a way to put one in the brain, proves richer and deeper and even more emotionally effective in the hands of storytellers who take the trope’s seeming limitations as a personal challenge. Witness Scott Edelman, who here seems to say, “Okay. They shamble. They eat flesh. They’re not too pleasant to the nose. That’s a given, and that’s frankly old news. Want to see what else I’ve got?” (more…)

Step into the Wayback Machine once more to see me scribbling away. (What else would I be doing?) I have no idea at what, however. But based on when this picture was taken, it was more likely a comic-book script than a short story.

If my hair, the dashiki, and my clunky typewriter don’t clue you in as to when this picture was taken, check out the calendar on the wall behind me. I don’t know what year Frazetta calendar (at least I think it’s a Frazetta calendar) that February image would have been from, but a quick search of online calendars shows that the only possible years Februarys began and ended on those dates was 1977 and 1983. And since Irene and I only rented this apartment in Brooklyn on Dahill Road near McDonald Avenue from 1976 through 1982, that pins this down as having been taken sometime during the month of February 1977.

At the time, I’d been married for less than six months. (We’ll be celebrating our 34th anniversary later this year while at the Melbourne Worldcon.)

I still own the dictionary which supports the lamp, as well as the Marie Severin drawing you can barely make out which hangs above the calendar.

The dashiki, however, is long gone.

Today’s mail brought a copy of the April 2010 issue of Locus, and with it Tim Pratt’s review of my PS Publishing zombie collection What Will Come After, which launched last weekend at the World Horror Convention in Brighton.

I’ve already told you about the three positive reviews (and because I believe in full disclosure, one negative review, too) my collection already received, but this one was so complimentary as to astonish even me.

The review, which occupied a column and a half of real estate, began with:

What Will Come After is “the complete zombie stories” of Scott Edelman, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a more literary and literate collection of tales about the living dead.

And ended with:

In the hands of a lesser writer, a book of nothing but zombie stories could risk becoming repetitive, but Edelman’s audacity regarding style and form, along with his brilliant unpacking of the themes inherent in zombie fiction, make this instead a compendium of singular treasures.

And between that first and last sentence were such phrases as:

… a heartbreaking and beautiful literary tour-de-force …

… it’s heartwrenching and not a bit tongue in cheek …

… audacious blend of science fiction and supernatural zombie fiction …

(Can you tell that I’m blushing?)

If those words of praise intrigue you enough to make you want to check out the book for yourself, who am I to stop you?

Back in December 2008, I wrote about Patricia Highsmith’s work in comics, and how surprised I was never to have heard of it before. Now that I’ve gotten my hands on a copy of The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith, by Joan Schenkar, I don’t feel quite so ashamed of my ignorance.

Because that’s the way Highsmith would have wanted it.

It turns out she did her best to erase all evidence of her history in comics. And if she didn’t want me to remember her, why feel bad for not doing so?

Here’s what Schenkar wrote about that history:

Pat systematically erased from her life every single thing that had to do with comics; she threw away every comic script, every proposal for a comic script, and every scenario for a comic book story she ever wrote. There would have been thousands of pages of comics work to cull—and she culled every one of them,. Nor did she keep any copies.

It turns out that the only evidence Highsmith kept of her extensive comics work was by accident. On the back of a page of French vocabulary can be found these notes toward a story about the character The Golden Arrow. (more…)

My subconscious was just as active as usual last month, resulting in many tweeted dreams.

I was thinking of telling you which one of these seemed to me to be the weirdest, or the most entertaining, but as I reread them now, I find that I can’t choose from among my children. I enjoyed having them all.

Well … most of them, anyway.

I dreamed I attended a SFWA banquet at which there were no tables, and we all sat very confused in rows with plates balanced on our knees. 3:42 AM Mar 30th

I dreamt I was at a cast Q&A for Mad Men, but the poor actor who played Sal was shunned and forced to sit in the audience. I commiserated. 3:40 AM Mar 30th

I dreamt Dracula, as drawn by Gene Colan, had captured me but was unable to bite me due to garlic I’d eaten and bit off my toenails instead. 1:57 AM Mar 29th

I dreamt Joss Whedon revealed a previously undisclosed Buffy character was gay — and that as a result, a NY Yankee came out of the closet. 3:37 AM Mar 27th

I dreamt during my airplane sleep to #WHC2010 that I was trapped inside an issue of Nova written by Marv Wolfman and drawn by Sal Buscema. 12:59 PM Mar 25th

I dreamt I was having a heavily choreographed fist fight while “There’s a Kind of Hush” played as an ironic soundtrack in the background. 5:16 AM Mar 24th

I dreamt I was in a crowded SFWA suite at Worldcon discussing the novels of Kevin J. Anderson with — Jack Cassidy? Yes, Jack Cassidy. 8:04 AM Mar 23rd

I dreamt my toilet overflowed, and I was trapped in the bathroom as the water rose around me. See, I sometimes have _normal_ dreams, too! 7:57 AM Mar 23rd

I dreamt I was a woman stalked by a man, and as he walked toward me, our roles and genders reversed, and I became a man stalked by a woman. 8:38 AM Mar 22nd

I dreamt that a NY panhandler held out a hand, and rather than asking for money, _gave_ a dollar to each person who walked by on the street. 8:33 AM Mar 22nd (more…)

I’d intended to make daily reports during my week-long trip to the UK as I usually do while traveling, filling you in on my doings at the World Horror Con and the Stokers in Brighton, plus my few days in London after, but this time I failed. Oh, you could have found short bursts of news if you were following me on Twitter or at Facebook, but there were none of my usual meaty write-ups.

Was it that I was having more fun than I normally do? Or that the time difference exhausted me more than usual, leaving nothing left over for blogging? We’ll never know, since now that I’m back in the real world once more there’s no way I’ll be able to catch up here. But I should at least take a moment to say …

Nope, I didn’t win a Stoker this year, my fifth such loss. (I did take the stage to accept Gene O’Neill’s Stoker for Best Collection, though.) But how could I feel sad when the weekend also handed me a prize more important than any award—the publication of What Will Come After, my zombie collection from PS Publishing?

Here I am in the WHC art show, coming face to rotting face with Les Edwards’ original drawing for the cover.

You can find other photos from the weekend over at flickr. I hope that each of those pictures is worth the proverbial thousand words, because now that I’m in the thick of things, that’s all I have the time to share.

What Will Come After, my zombie collection from PS Publishing, was just reviewed by Publishers Weekly, and the anonymous reviewer absolutely hated, hated, hated the book, as can see below.

I don’t present it here to argue with the opinion—those of you who attended my presentation “How to Respond to a Critique of Your Writing” at the Montreal Worldcon know I believe a writer should never do that, because after all, there’s no such thing as bad publicity—but rather in the interests of full disclosure.

After all, if I share my glowing reviews, shouldn’t I also let you know when I get slammed?

In any case, here’s PW‘s verdict:

SF news industry veteran Edelman collects nine zombie-themed short stories, but the content falls short of its promise. Les Edwards’s cover illustration, which depicts the author as one of the undead, hints at Edelman’s fondness for self-insertion; alas, the title story, in which he narrates his own rise from the grave and rampage through suburbia, goes on rather longer than the thousand words that might match the picture. Even the Stoker-nominated “A Plague on Both Your Houses” and “Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man” fall a little flat. Edelman’s prose is strong, but each story, regardless of perspective, seems to have been written in the same voice, creating a monotony that undermines any excitement.

Luckily, even if I didn’t find negative reviews as interesting as positive ones, the piece appears when my spirit is at its most impervious, because I head for the airport later today for the World Horror Convention in Brighton, where I’ll a) get to hold the final book in my hands for the first time, and b) possibly win a Stoker Award.

How can anyone possibly be down when facing that?

I’ve always loved reading obituaries, and not just those of the famous, but of the rest of us, too. So in addition to reading the lengthy write-ups newspaper editors assemble, I always scan the pages of smaller paid ads families insert to remember the deceased. Which is why I found myself reading the obituaries from yesterday’s Washington Post while eating lunch today.

I like to see the photos that have been chosen (sometimes of the memorialized both young and old), the nicknames (this issue included Gigi, Duke, and Cootie), and the odd facts (Edward Ramond Seibert “participated in field tests on the rifle that Lee Harvey Oswald used to assassinate President Kennedy”).

As I scanned the obits today, I noticed a photo that was quite … unusual. How odd, I thought, that someone had chosen, in the midst of page after page of dignified photos, to be remembered dressed up like a pro wrestler. But when I looked more closely, I saw that—Hey! That’s not just someone dressed like a pro wrestler—that is a pro wrestler!

Don’t know who Big John Studd was? Then you’d better check out both parts of this classic match! (more…)