When I heard that Majel Barrett-Roddenberry had died, I immediately remembered the first time I’d met her, which sent me scurrying back to the autographs I’d gathered as a teen at my early conventions. What I found, which you can see at right (click to view at a larger size), showed that what I’d always thought occurred never did, that I hadn’t met her when I thought I had.

The image I’d always held in my mind was very specific. It was back at the Statler-Hilton Hotel in 1972, either at the first Star Trek convention or a Creation Con, and if I close my eyes I can even see the interior of the small room where I filled this page, which was off a corridor near the elevators. Yet when I found this sheet which was supposed to contain her signature, her name was nowhere to be seen.

Ah, fickle memory! (more…)

I’m way behind on reading my newspapers, so I’m only just now getting to the December 7th issue of the Washington Post Book World.

In an essay published as part of the regular feature “The Writing Life,” in which guest writers offer insight into their methods, Roy Blount Jr. provides this advice:

The only writing tip I can honestly offer, aside from “Do not shift your metaphors without making clear that you realize you are doing it,” is to quote something Wynonie Harris sung back in the ’50s: “Keep on churning till the butter comes.”

I like that metaphor. I really do. It speaks to the fact that perspiration will beget inspiration.

And yet … somehow I get the sense that Harris was singing about something other than writing …

I dreamt this morning that I was working with the entire SCIFI.COM staff out of a storefront office in a strip mall. I knew this because I could make out the crowded parking lot through the front windows. My real-life boss was there, as were my other real-life coworkers. Only we weren’t engaged in our real-life job of putting together a Web site, but instead were running a literary agency.

At no point were we ever actually reading manuscripts as part of this agency, however. Instead, we were opening packages arriving from writers—and, strangely, from other literary agencies—and inserting them into a large machine which resembled an old-fashioned clunky photocopier. The machine would then pass judgment and spit out an answer.

After doing this for awhile, I found myself wandering the halls of what seemed like a fancy hotel—plush carpeting, highly polished doors outside each room, lots of flower arrangements. On each door, instead of a room number, there was a plaque with the name of a literary agency or publishing company, as if when you checked in it became public knowledge in which room you stayed.

As I wandered the hall looking for my room, I was wearing nothing but a towel (as opposed to the first half of the dream, in which I was fully clothed), but unlike those anxiety dreams in which you’re in school taking a test in your underwear, I didn’t care. I was calm and serene. There seemed to be nothing unusual about it. I’d pass people I knew in the hall—Ginjer Buchanan, for example—and say hello to them and chat briefly as if I did this all the time. So there was no “Where the Hell are my pants?” about this dream.

Then, as if on cue, every door on the floor opened and everybody poured out into the hallway. Fire drill? Convention programming about to begin? TIme for lunch? I have no idea why the mass room exodus. And once more, there was no anxiety about being in the midst of this crowd in my just-stepped-from-the-shower state. (I guess I have no shame.) I merely continued looking for my room, nodding to those I knew, until I woke.

I’ve been browsing through—and enjoying—The Book of Lists: Horror, edited by Amy Wallace, Del Howison, and Scott Bradley.

The book is filled with the sort of lists you’d expect, such as “Twenty Great Openings in Horror Fiction,” “Eight Horror Notables Who Have Directed Music Videos,” and “Six Stars Who Turned Down Famous Horror Movie Roles.” There are also some unusual lists which made me laugh, including “Anthony Timpone’s Ten Movies I Wish I Never Put on the Cover of Fangoria” and “Davey Johnson’s Account of the Involuntary Reactions of Ten Dates to Ten Horror Movie Moments.”

But one of the lists actually managed to achieve poetry, as far as I’m concerned. And that’s “Warren Martense’s Ten Things H.P. Lovecraft Never Asked for in a Bar,” which includes:

3. The barmaid’s phone number.
5. The name of the sax player on the jukebox.
9. Whatever Hemingway drank.

I liked this particular list so much that I’d post the entire thing here if I could, but that’s more than fair use would allow. So you’ll have to track it down yourself. (more…)

While I haven’t read the entirety of David Marusek’s short-story collection Getting to Know You, I have read most of what’s between the covers, since eight of the ten stories reprinted there first appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, which I read religiously. So I can recommend the book wholeheartedly.

In fact, since there’s still time to do some holiday shopping, go order copies for your friends right now. (And actually, now that I think of it, that overlap is probably a good reason for you to buy them subscriptions to Asimov’s as well.)

Last night, as I was dipping into some of my favorite pieces, I happened to notice something about the cover which intrigued me. Nothing leapt out at me from the back cover, which contained quotes from Cory Doctorow, Locus, and Publishers Weekly. But something about this blurb on the front cover nagged at me:

Marusek [has] the potential to make an indifferent audience care about [science fiction] again.

I assumed that this quote was plucked from David Itzkoff’s 2006 New York Times review of Marusek’s debut novel Counting Heads, a piece which proved quite controversial at the time and set off much debate throughout the blogosphere. What intrigued me were the two brackets contained in such a short quote, but what I was most interested in was the the bracketing of “science fiction.”

If Itzkoff hadn’t written that Marusek would make the world care about science fiction, what had the critic thought the writer was going to make us care about? The Great American Novel? Reading itself? Peace, love, and understanding? (more…)

I had a dream this morning in which I was hanging out at a hotel with the Jonas Brothers and the guys from Entourage, two sets of people I’d never want anything to do with in real life. (While I do watch the Entourage TV show, they’re far too self-absorbed to be trusted, and as for the Jonas Brothers, they seem nice enough, but they also seem rock lite, and little more than today’s edition of the Monkees.) Anyway, after awhile in the hotel bar, someone gets the idea to hop in a limo and drive around the city.

Once we do, the city which passes by outside our windows could be any big, generic megalopolis, so I can’t tell you exactly where we were. But eventually we pass one of those upscale gentlemens clubs the Entourage guys love to frequent on their show. Out front, half-naked woman covered with leopard spots and wearing cat-like face make-up are doing gymnastics to attract attention. The car is stopped, and Vince and the guys vanish inside.

I’m left with the Jonas Brothers, and they look at each other as if to say, “Uh-oh, we can’t get caught here,” out of fear that it would ruin their squeaky clean tweener image. They look back and forth from each other to the woman again, over and over, and then they, too, leap out of the car and disappear inside the club, leaving me alone in the back of a stretch limo. After a moment, I decide to head inside to track down my companions. (more…)

In today’s dead-tree New York Times (but apparently, based on the online date stamp, yesterday’s pixel edition), writer/editor Dana Jennings invokes the spirit of Philip K. Dick to illuminate his feelings about living with prostate cancer:

This is the way prostate cancer often feels, as if my world had turned into a Philip K. Dick dystopia in which the cold intent of many people—especially my insurer and the other bureaucrats who populate the health-care-industrial-complex—was to translate me into an abstraction, to deny my damaged and tiresome flesh-and-bloodness.

I have no idea whether or not Jennings—the author of this year’s bestselling Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death and Country Music— is a science-fiction reader or fan, or just happened to pick up the Dick meme from the movies, but regardless, I think Dick would have been amused to have been conflated with a disease.

Particularly that one.

This entry is meant for active members of the Horror Writers Association only, so as for the rest of you, I am now gesturing hypnotically while incanting, “This is not the post you’re looking for.”

Now that we’re alone and I’m speaking just to those active HWA members …

Recommendations for the Stoker Awards close exactly one month from today, on January 15, 2009. According to the most recent Bram Stoker Award Recommendations update, my short story, “Petrified,” which appeared in Desolate Souls, the World Horror Convention souvenir program book earlier this year, seems to be garnering some attention.

If you happen to be an active member (and how could you be anything else but, since everybody else disappeared as soon as I cast my spell above) and would like a copy of the story for Stoker consideration, this is a reminder that you can either go to the rec list and click the provided link for a download, or else drop me an e-mail and I’ll send it to you as an attachment via return e-mail or snail mail it to you on dead trees, whichever you’d prefer.

I am now gesturing hypnotically once more, so the rest of my readers can return.

As you were.

The Independent today released its list of the 50 most ludicrous Britons of 2008, and is asking readers to help choose the recipient of the Independent on Sunday Most Ludicrous Briton Award.

Among the many “eccentrics, oddballs, incompetents, fools and misfits” are those we’ve heard of on my side of the pond, such as Prince Andrew, Graham Norton, and Amy Winehouse, plus many whose fame hasn’t traveled well, such as “the smiling, laddish and authentically regional voices and faces of television show voting quackery” Ant & Dec, “the most important, the most beautiful, the most magical, saggy old cloth cat in the whole wide world” Bagpuss, and “professional Oirishman and horticultural paranoid” Diarmuid Gavin.

While the funniest title for a category was the tirade against “rap-rapping, pose-striking, knife-wielding, gun-toting, homophobic urban yoof,” there were two other nominees worth quoting here in full. (more…)

Here are three further first day covers from my mother-in-law’s collection, grouped together not merely because each one intrigues me, but rather because, warped soul that I am, each reminds me of a tragedy of some kind.

The first celebrates the marriage of Grace Kelly to Prince Ranier on April 19, 1956. But when I first came across it in the lock box, I thought not of that wedding, but of Kelly’s fatal 1982 automobile accident.

Hey, I never said I wasn’t morbid.

Next up is a May 31, 1936 envelope which is marked as having been flown “via FIRST FLIGHT of ZEPPELIN HINDENBURG.” (more…)