mallory_blog

I've been getting a lot of messages and emails asking questions about the Gunn Workshop and so I thought it might be helpful if I described how it works.

It starts on a Sunday evening with a get together in the lounge of the dorm on the same floor where we are housed. The lounge looks like this


You can see where the wall of windows (facing the campus), lots of comfy couches and chairs and there are books lined up on the window ledge. Behind Chris there are two small tables with coffee maker, goodies, microwave. Where I'm standing taking the picture is a round table with a printer on it (that sometimes works) To the left in this picture is another round table and chairs where lots of us sit to crit. Further behind me is the novel workshop room which looks like this:

It has a table and chairs and is rather cramped (MO) I have another better photo somewhere but not in my upload apparently. Hmmm.

The workshop is split into 3 areas:

Retreat: These are people who basically sit around and type. They can listen in to either workshop and they definitely hang out with everyone and go to dinner etc.

Short Story Workshop: We use the big lounge space and crit in the afternoons. Jim Gunn runs this workshop.

Novel Workshop: They use the small room and crit in the mornings. Kij Johnson runs this workshop.

The Short Story Workshop requires 3 submission stories that we received about a month before the start of the actual workshop. This translated in 35 or so stories we had to critique prior to getting here (we have some naughty folks doing them while here) After we arrived and did our intro stuff on Sunday, the next morning we started. In the afternoon we split the group in half (based on alphabet and names) and we critiqued the first submission story. Tuesday the rest of the group had their first story critted. Wednesday back for story two of the first group. Thursday back for story two of the second group. Friday we did exercises and were assigned our revision story. Monday we had to submit our revision story to give everyone time to crit them for later in the week. Monday we critted group 2's third story and Tuesday we critted group 1's third story. Today is Wednesday and we are picking up the critique of the revised stories we completed last weekend. We sill finish tomorrow with the remaining revised stories. Then we attend the Campbell Conference and Awards and the Theodore Sturdeon Awards and then they kick us out.

The Novel Workshop also does critiques but the best way to learn about the actual structure of that workshop is to send email to the workshop instructor or Chris. It is pretty intense and they seem to be working almost as hard as we are. :)

Hopefully this clarifies what I've been up to and am up to today :)

florismk

Okay, okay, not now, but at least soon. The online podcast market PseudoPod accepted Deep Red for publication today, meaning that at some point in the near future (by fall, I'd guess) there will be a podcast MP3 available from their site. This makes the third reincarnation of the story, after first appearing in Futures in 2003 and finding an online life with AnotheRealm in 2004. It also quadruples the money I've made off the story (which say more about the original checks than about the current payment, I'm sad to say).

If you can't wait a few months to hear the story, read it first at AnotheRealm...

jedediah

http://www.kith.org/journals/jed/2008/07/09/11294.html

I imagine most of you who would want to know already know by now that Thomas M. Disch committed suicide a few days ago.

Disch was one of my favorite authors in high school. I still have a high regard for a lot of his work--I think I read most of his fiction (and a little of his nonfiction) that was published before 1980 or so. Somehow I never got around to reading his later work; not sure why. But anyone looking for an introduction to his short fiction could do worse than to dig up a used copy of Fundamental Disch. I always had a particular fondness for "Dangerous Flags," though it's certainly not a Deep or Significant story; just short and fun.

Sadly, Disch later criticized some of that early work as "juvenilia." But fwiw, I still consider it worth reading.

He was, I think, the second author who we did an author focus issue on; we reprinted a story, two poems, and some nonfiction by him, and we added a review of the then-new Vintage reissues of a couple of his books, plus an interview with him (conducted by then-Articles-editor David Horwich, who I think was a big Disch fan). That last was quoted in the abovelinked New York Times obituary; thanks to all who dropped me notes about it. (I assume that the Times writer just Googled Disch's name; that interview was relatively high in search results.)

The Locus obituary notes that Disch had two books out in the past year, with a collection coming from Tachyon this October; maybe I'll check them out.

It sounds like things had been pretty rough for him lately, but I'm sad to see him go.

kenscholes

 Wow.  I love my job.  I continue to be amazed by and grateful for everyone's kind words about Lamentation.  And some heavy hitters -- writers I deeply respect and quite nearly worship -- have blown me away with their blurbs.

Here's the latest.  And can I just say Yowza before I faint again?

Ken Scholes is a hot new voice to watch for on the interesting frontier between science fiction and fantasy. He has a keen eye for action and a keen ear for the sounds of the human heart. Grab on now, because he's going places.

-- Harry Turtledove, author of Guns of the South

Thank you, sir, for your high praise.  It means a lot coming from you.

scalzifeed

http://scalzi.com/whatever/?p=990

Howard Tayler wrote the post-con write-up I would have written (minus, you know, the parts that refer specifically to Howard Tayler’s professional life), so I’ll just point you at it and let you read it with my voice in your head.

Nevertheless, I will amplify what Howard said about it being an excellent example of a well-run local convention, and in particular I would recommend all cons try to emulate InConJunction’s Con Suite, which rather than being a hotel suite was one of the meeting rooms, with lots of tables for folks to sit at, and (importantly) enough ventilation so that by the end of the con, the consuite did not reek of fan funk and crockpot chili. It makes a huge difference in my desire to actually want to spend time there. Conrunners, if you’re not doing your con suites like this already, you should.

In any event: I had a really wonderful time, and it all went off without a hitch, at least on my end. Thanks, InConJunction, for having me.

scalzifeed

http://scalzi.com/whatever/?p=989

Folks have been asking me in e-mail if I had any thought about Jonah Goldberg’s recent assertion in the LA Times that Barack Obama’s proposed requirement of public service for teens and college students is not unlike slavery. The answer: No, not really; once the man declared that Mussolini was really a Socialist all his life, despite ample historical evidence to the contrary (Mussolini leaving Italy’s Socialist party, founding the Fascist party as an explicit right-wing refutation of Socialism, ordering the murders of prominent Socialists and then bascially daring anyone to do something about it on the floor of the Italian parliament) I recognized that Jonah Goldberg is kind of like the conservative movement’s special younger brother, the one that drank a pint of lead-based paint at age six, utters sentences where the verbs and nouns don’t quite match up, and gets moody and throws things when you gently try to explain that actually, no, goats did not land on the moon in 1983. In this context, of course Jonah Goldberg would suggest youth public service contributes to a “slave mentality.” It would be surprising if he hadn’t, frankly. It doesn’t mean such an attention-seeking comment merits serious consideration on my part.

(No doubt Mr. Goldberg’s rejoinder to this would be to point out that the book in which he gets lots about fascism wrong has racked up some lovely sales numbers; the obvious rejoinder to this is: well, you know. At this point on its downslope into minority, the conservative movement has a lot of special younger brothers.)

That said, while I don’t want to have to unpack Goldberg’s nonsensery, I would commend to you Stephen Bainbridge’s take on Goldberg’s column, as an example of someone who is a conservative with libertarian leanings, has serious reservations about Obama’s plan, and, heck, even hauls out the “S” word, yet does not descend into paint-quaffing madness. Aside from the quality of Professor Bainbridge’s comments, it’s worth noting the small irony that Goldberg’s platform for his gouting silliness is a newspaper, while Bainbridge’s rather more sensible discussion is hosted on a blog, and yet it’s the electronic medium that gets hammered for hosting bloviating ninnies. Funny about that.

brian_keene

http://www.briankeene.com/?p=93

Here is wisdom, excerpted from this morning’s Bad Signal (which is the only thing I look forward to in my email box each day. Well, that and emails from people who want to give me money):

“Facebook fucked around with their friend-request management tools so much that it just became impossible to use properly. At least, impossible if I wanted to just have a few actual friends on there. If I reopen it, I’ll just have to turn it into another ”add everyone who asks” place, making it functionally useless for me.

The future of actual workable “social networking” would seem to me right now to be in small private hubs, most of which are run on Fight Club rules.

As fun as the big systems can be, I think it’ll be those small hubs that generate actual “scenes” — like-minded people growing strange things in the dark.”

And you know what? He’s right. He’s always right. That’s why Come In Alone by Warren Ellis is the book I recommend to people who want suggestions on books about writing (along with Dick Laymon’s A Writer’s Tale, Tom Piccirilli’s Welcome To Hell, and David Morrell’s Lessons From A Lifetime Of Writing).

Seriously. If you want to write for a living, you should be reading these.

makinglight

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/010378.html

The Democratic recount ran out of money, so we don't have a 100% count. But the Republican recount (financed by the Ron Paul campaign) chugged on to the end.

The complete results don't just show the major Republican candidates: they show everyone. Including the Democrats who got write-ins on the Republican ballots. I'm going to presume, here, that Independents who wanted to vote for a Democrat would have picked up a Democratic ballot, so these votes for Democrats are coming from registered Republicans.

In the following list Democrats are in boldface. "Others" is the group list of folks who hadn't registered as running for president (e.g. Mickey Mouse).

All of the Democrats on this list were write ins on Republican ballots.

• McCain 88,713
• Romney 75,675
• Huckabee 26,916
• Giuliani 20,344
• Paul 18,346
• Thompson 2,956
• Obama 1,996
• Clinton 1,828
• Duncan Hunter 1,192
• Edwards 747
• Richardson 210

• Keyes 205
• Marchuk 127
• Others 94
• Tancredo 63
• O'Connor 46
• Howard 43
• Supreme 43
• Cox 39
• Wuensche 36
• Cort 35
• Gilbert 35
• Shepard 28
• Mitchell, Jr. 26
• Klein 16
• Kucinich 15
• Fendig, Jr. 13
• Gravel 5
• Biden 1
• Caligiuri 0
• Capalbo 0
• Crow 0
• Dodd 0
• Hewes 0
• Hughes 0
• D.R. Hunter 0
• Keefe 0
• Killeen 0
• Koos 0
• LaMagna 0
• Laughlin 0
• Savior 0
• Skok 0

So what does that mean? Not a lot. But in this snapshot it does show that in January 2008, in New Hampshire, Obama had a slight edge on Clinton among registered Republicans. McCain thinks New Hampshire is in play? Nope. Not a chance. And Senator Sununu is toast too.

(I report, with some joy, that in Belknap County Vermin Supreme beat Tom Tancredo.)

jeffvandermeer

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ecstaticdays/~3/330803707/

http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/?p=1291

I discovered Jack O’Connell’s boundless imagination and tireless work ethic only two months ago through his brilliant new novel, The Resurrectionist and his appearance at Milwaukee’s best independent bookstore, Harry W. Schwartz.

The Resurrectionist is a truly moving, original marriage of dark noir and vibrant fantasy; of black-and-white alleys and magical circus acts. It’s filled with measured prose, spot-on characterizations and dialogue, unpredictable storytelling, and an undercurrent of melancholy. Can you tell it’s one of my favorite reads of recent years?

Its twin-pronged plot, though running only 300 pages, is a page-turner brimming with invention, unpredictable turns, and necessary stuff–surely, the result of nine years of deliberation (O’Connell’s last novel, Word Made Flesh, was published in 1999).

One story thread features O’Connell’s signature city Quinsigamond (think Gotham City on steroids), where a grieving father, Sweeney, admits his comatose son, Danny, into the hospital of the mad Dr. Peck. Sweeney’s fate, in typical noir fashion, intersects with the city’s underbelly, including a biker gang dubbed “The Abominations,” icy femme fatales, and a bizarre drug trade. The other story thread brings to life Danny’s favorite comic book, Limbo, where a band of circus freaks travels across a fantastical landscape in search of their lost father.

O’Connell elegantly melds these disparate strands, smartly infusing them with profound themes: He ponders the author’s moral responsibility while interrogating the relationship between identity, storytelling, and reality.

But O’Connell is more than just a virtuoso storyteller; in person, he’s affable and down-to-earth. At his Milwaukee reading, he exuded infectious enthusiasm for noir craftsmen like David Goodis and Jim Thompson as well as the short stories of Richard Matheson and Harlan Ellison (all evident, to varying degrees, in The Resurrectionist), and also endorsed a tireless work ethic that makes me glad I don’t write: For twenty-five years, while balancing a full-time job and family, he’s written every morning from 4:30 to 7!

Now, I only hope The Resurrectionist finds the audience it deserves. - Kelly Shaw, 7/5/08

Kelly Shaw is an enthusiast of literary genre fiction, especially of the dark and weird variety. Occasionally, he shares his enthusiasm and, er, criticism for books and movies on his blog.