http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/011890.html

From my arsenal of quotes for dealing with SAD:

Those joys were so small that they passed unnoticed, like gold in sand, and at bad moments she could see nothing but the pain, nothing but sand; but there were good moments too when she saw nothing but the joy, nothing but gold.
Anna Karenina, book 3, chapter 7

http://www.suvudu.com/2009/11/video-naomi-novik-reads-vici.html

Anthologies abound!

There are several great ones coming out in the coming months. The first is The Dragon Book, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. It was released on November 3rd and features short stories from some of the very best writers in the business.

One of them is Naomi Novik, author of the recently published In His Majesty's Service omnibus containing her first three Temeraire novels!

First, here is The Dragon Book summary:

Never before published stories by New York Times bestselling authors Jonathan Stroud, Gregory Maguire, Garth Nix, Diana Gabaldon, and others.

Whether portrayed as fire-breathing reptilian beasts at war with humanity or as noble creatures capable of speech and mystically bonded to the warriors who ride them, dragons have been found in nearly every culture's mythology. In modern times, they can be found far from their medieval settings in locales as mundane as suburbia or as barren as post-apocalyptic landscapes-and in The Dragon Book, today's greatest fantasists reignite the fire with legendary tales that will consume readers' imaginations.

With original stories by New York Times bestselling authors Jonathan Stroud, Gregory Maguire, Garth Nix, Diana Gabaldon, Tamora Pierce, Harry Turtledove, Sean Williams, and Tad Williams as well as tales by Naomi Novik, Peter Beagle, Jane Yolen, Adam Stemple, Cecelia Holland, Kage Baker, Samuel Sykes, Diana Wynne Jones, Mary Rosenblum, Tanith Lee, Andy Duncan, and Bruce Coville.

Second, as a treat to her fans, here is author Naomi Novik reading the first quarter of her anthology submission, the short story titled Vici.

To find out what happens with the first taming of a great dragon in the West, you will have to read The Dragon Book!

Along with the other great short stories in the anthology!

Enjoy!

http://www.suvudu.com/2009/11/a-week-in-links-111409.html

The internet(s) gives and gives and gives.

There are some great sci-fi/fantasy bloggers out there, fans who are devoting a lot of time and energy into supporting authors and their readers. Variety is the spice of life, as they say, and with the menagerie of unique and very different individuals out there contributing to , it produces a whole that is better than its parts.

Here are some of the highlights from the last week of blog work outside of Suvudu:

• Interview: A Dribble of Ink interviews Blake Charlton, author of Spellwright
• Review: Debuts & Reviews reads The Court of the Air by Stephen Hunt
• Interview: Fantasy Book Critic interviews James Barclay
• Review: Graeme's Fantasy Book Review reads Finch by Jeff VanderMeer
• Comment: Grasping for the Wind writes On the Opinion that Authors Should Not Respond to Reviews
• Interview: SciFi Chick interviews Julie Kenner, author of Tainted
• Review: Fantasy & SciFi Lovin' News read The Magicians by Lev Grossman
• Review: The Wertzone reads The Cardinal's Blades by Pierre Pevel

Rob and I spent yesterday bumming around San Fransisco, interspersed with me doing drawings for a potential gig and prepping for the Nebula Nomination period to open at SFWA. The sweet boy has been endlessly patient with me.

In the evening we joined the SF in SF group at Henry’s Hunan for dinner. It was like KGB in reverse in that Chinese food preceded the meal. Seeing Cheryl Morgan, Jeff Vandermeer, Jacob Weisman and the rest of the gang was a lot of fun.

Then I was off to Writers with Drinks in the Mission. Oh, my goodness. What. Fun. Charlie Jane Anders absolutely rocks as a hostess and M.C. I very much enjoyed hearing the other readers. In fact, they were so good that I got nervous about my fiction and offered the audience a choice. 1 story, 2 very short stories, or 1 very short story and a puppetry demo.

They chose option 3, so after I finished reading “Death Comes but Twice,” I pulled off my boot and used it as a puppet to demo the 4 principles of puppetry. So, you may imagine my delight when Chris Hsiang, gave me this dollar bill as I walked off the stage.

Rob and I had a relaxed day in SF and are now in San Jose where I will be teaching for the next couple of days.

Comments? -- Link.

• Today I went to the zoo with Ellen, Avi, and Avi’s husband Gordon. I took some pictures. My favorite is probably this one.

• People have been emailing to ask where to find copies of Boneshaker here in Seattle. Apparently it’s been selling out around town (which is a good thing), and people can’t find it (which is a bad thing). Let it now be known: both the Barnes & Noble locations at Pacific Place and Northgate are well stocked with copies, all of which are signed; and likewise, the University Book Store in the U-district has a stash of signed copies (at the moment, as of this posting). Please, have at.

• If you’d like something signed to you, personally (or to a loved one … hey, the holidays are just over the horizon there, aren’t they?), you can order such a book through the University Book Store.

• Regarding electronic editions of Boneshaker — you can find the book here on the Kindle or via this listing at Diesel E-Books. This is literally all the information on the subject I have at my disposal.

• If you are a local (or even local-ish) bookseller and you’d like to get your stock signed, drop me an email at cherie.priest@gmail.com - and I’ll be glad to talk about coming to your store. It might take me a day or two depending on my work load and your location, but I’m always happy to accommodate you if at all possible.
  

http://www.locusmag.com/

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/fantasymag/~3/fWGhPN9hFOU/

http://www.fantasy-magazine.com/?p=6922

Originally published at Vylar Kaftan. You can comment here or there.

A friend pointed me to this set of photos from the war in Afghanistan.

Truly amazing.  Many of these are brilliant, but I think the most striking one shows all the soldiers sleeping in their fighting-holes… but it looks like they’re lying in graves.  The children playing in terrible conditions–prison, refugee camps, wherever they were–also stayed with me for a long time.

For people like me who’ve never seen combat, these pics drove home to me how ugly battle really is and how dangerous the conditions are.  I can’t even imagine myself in battle; I just don’t think I could handle it.  I’m curious what those of you with military experience think of these pictures.

http://justinelarbalestier.com/blog/2009/11/15/signed-books-in-the-usa/

http://justinelarbalestier.com/?p=6818

Because I just had a long discussion with some friends about what constitutes being crassly commercial I’ve decided now is the time to let you know where you can buy signed books of mine. What? Some people write and ask me that, you know. Also it’s Sunday no one will notice me being crassly commercial.

I have scribbled on copies of my books in the following places in the US of A:

Austin</p>

Book People
603 N. Lamar Blvd.
Austin, TX 78703

Chicago Area

B&N Skokie
55 Old Orchard Center

Skokie, IL

Anderson’s Bookshop
5112 Main St

Downers Grove, IL

Lake Forest Book Store
680 N. Western Ave.
Lake Forest, IL

Memphis

Davis-Kidd Booksellers
387 Perkins Ext

Memphis, TN

New York

Voracious Reader
1997 Palmer Ave

Larchmont, NY

Books of Wonder
18 W. 18th St.

New York, NY

Philadelphia

Blue Marble
551 Carpenter Ln

Philadelphia, PA

Children’s Book World
17 Haverford Station Road
Haverford, PA

Portland

A Children’s Place
4807 NE Fremont St

Portland, OR

Barnes & Noble
12000 SE 82nd Avenue

Portland, OR

Seattle area

UWash Bookstore
4326 University Way NE

Seattle, WA

Third Place Books
17171 Bothell Way NE
Lake Forest Park, WA

Barnes & Noble
19401 Alderwood Mall Parkway

Lynnwood, WA

For those of you in Australia, I will be back home and shall try to sign books at various book stores in Sydney in December. I pretty much always manage to make it to Kinokuniya and Galaxy. I’ll keep you posted.

Thus ends this crassly comercial service announcement. Normal service will resume tomorrow.

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2009/11/15/statements-which-are-accurate-as-long-as-you-ignore-the-rest-of-the-planet/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=9112

The Blu-Ray version of Up which I purchased earlier this week trumpets that the film is the “#1 Animated Film of the Year!” with the exclamation point being their emphasis, not mine. While I certainly enjoyed Up very much, and fully expect it to win the Best Animated Film Oscar this year, and possibly even be nominated for Best Picture (thanks to the Best Picture nomination slate being expanded to ten films), this claim is only somewhat true. It’s true Up is the number one animated film of the year for the Domestic Box Office (which means the US and Canada), but in the global market (US, Canada and everywhere else), the actual #1 animated film of the year is Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.

Indeed, it’s not even close: Up’s pulled in just over $500 million globally, which is really not bad, you know, but Ice Age: DotD has racked up a genuinely incredible $878 million, which is enough not only to give it the #1 animated film of 2009 crown, but also to place it at #15 on the list of all time global movie hits (unadjusted for inflation), and make it the #1 film of 2009 outside the domestic box office sphere, beating out the latest Harry Potter for that spot. Seriously, look it up. Or to put it another way, Ice Age’s non-domestic box office is $682 million, which means that it made about $175 million more outside the US and Canada than Up has made around the entire planet. As I said, add up all the money, it’s no contest.

I don’t have a problem with Disney bragging on the performance of Up, but I think strictly as a matter of truth in advertising that “#1 Animated Film of the Year!” notation needs an asterisk, which the packaging does not provide. Independently, I think the rest of the world gets a big, fat “WTF?” regarding Ice Age: DotD, which while amusing enough if you’re eight is not a film I would think the rest of the world should explode with squee over. But then, the #1 movie of 2009 in the Domestic Box Office arena is that damned Transformers sequel, so I don’t think the US and Canada can criticize overmuch, now, can we.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ecstaticdays/~3/pncyINvQeN0/

http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/?p=6287

It’s always hard to keep up with everything that’s out there, especially in today’s digital world. I’d like to think that I do a fairly decent job of managing to keep myself informed of what’s going on in the print and digital marketplaces but, of course, thinking that I do a decent job of keeping up and actually keeping up are two very, very different things. To misquote a cliché, the more I read, the more I realize that – in actuality – I don’t know jack.

So I’m turning to you, Dear Internet, for guidance. I’ll tell you what I’ve been reading (and watching) and hopefully you’ll share with me what you’ve been following and/or what you think I should add to my list. Television commercials have started telling me that the Season of Giving (or, as I like to think of it, the Season of Going-into-Debt-for-No-Good-Reason) is upon us – and I am not one to argue with the Failing Commercial Gods. So as you read this, picture me as that guy standing outside the mall in a big red suit, incessantly ringing that accursed bell, and making you feel guilty for not carrying cash anymore. So guilty, in fact, that you’ll probably go buy a crappy food court snack just so you can ask for cashback on your order. And then when you go back outside to vindicate yourself and say, “Hey, Guy-in-Red-Suit, I CARE. I just wasn’t carrying cash earlier. That’s why I averted my eyes. But everything’s different now because I have $2.36 in change,” you realize that there was a Guy-in-Red-Suit shift change while you were at the food court, and now a Different-Guy-in-Red-Suit is manning the Holiday Guilt Bell. And you try to tell Different Guy that you NEED him to tell the Original Guy-in-Red-Suit that you CARE ABOUT HUMANITY. But Different-Guy-in-Red-Suit just looks at you funny and asks you to step away because you’re scaring the children.

Yeah. Think of me as that guy.

So here’s what I’ve been following/reading/watching lately *DINGDINGDINGDING*:

• Emile Habiby’s The Secret Life of Saeed, the Ill-Fated Pessoptimist.

I’ve been teaching a class on Modern Arabic Literature this semester and, as a result, I’ve gotten to re-read a lot of really great work. Really great work. The Secret Life is, IMHO, one of the most endearing, confusing, challenging, funny, fantastical narratives to tackle the situation in Israel/Palestine. Habiby was a Palestinian-Israeli who served as a sitting member of the Israeli Parliament (Knesset) as a founding member of Maki (the Israeli Communist Party). He stirred up some controversy in 1990 when he was awarded (and accepted) both the al-Quds Prize, awarded by the PLO, and the Israel Prize, generally regarded as the Israeli state’s highest honor. The novel is a comic masterpiece; it begins with Saeed claiming to have been visited by space aliens to whom he narrates an absurd story of conflict, torture, exile, and loss. Following in the footsteps of comic anti-heroes like Voltaire’s Candide, Saeed is a frustrating failure who is as absurd as the narrative he tells. If you’ve ever been interested in the absurd, the meeting of tragedy and comedy, or the interweaving of the personal and the political, do yourselves a favor and get a copy of this novel.

• The 99 and Samandal

After reading Lavie Tidhar’s post here, I started digging around for science fiction/ fantasy/ graphic novels from the Arab World. I was pleasantly surprised by what I found. The 99 is a comic book created by Dr. Naif al-Mutawa, a Kuwaiti “clinical psychologist [who worked] with former prisoners of war in Kuwait and with survivors of political torture in New York City.” The 99 is his answer to militant Islam, an attempt to “take back” Arab Muslim culture from the fanaticism that has hijacked it in recent years. The story he tells begins with the 1258 Mongol invasion of Baghdad that ended with the destruction of the books from its library – they were thrown into the Tigris River. Some of the librarians in Dr. al-Mutawa’s story escape the attack, however, and drop 99 enchanted stones in the river to absorb and preserve the knowledge from the destroyed books. Several centuries later, young heroes hailing from 99 world countries (including, for example, the United States, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and Portugal) recover the stones and become empowered in different ways. While the 99 superheroes are based on the 99 attributes of Allah in the Koran, they have different physical characteristics from one another and none of them pray or read the Koran, as Dr. al-Mutawa’s stated goal is to produce a comic with universal appeal. The first issue is available for free download at The 99’s official website. Check it out.

Samandal, as described by its creators, is a “non-profit organization that aims to lift the stature of comics to that of a mature art form capable of tackling more than superheroes and their baffling hairdos.” It’s a really interesting publication out of Lebanon that actively attempts to combat regional misconceptions about the cultural worth of comic books and graphic art. The work Samandal publishes is multicultural and multilingual in its scope – to date, every issue has included work in Arabic, French, and English by authors from around the globe. Thematically, the work ranges from the political to the abstract to the poetic to the comic. The first issue is available for download in English translation. Issues 2 & 3 are also available for download, but not in translation. Samandal recently closed to submissions for their sixth issue.

• Professor Lawrence Lessig’s lecture, “It’s About Time: Getting Our Values Around Copyright Right,” delivered on November 5^th at the 2009 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference in Denver, CO.

EDUCAUSE is a “nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology.” At its annual meeting in Denver this month, Lawrence Lessig, a professor of law at Harvard Law School, a founding board member of Creative Commons, and a board member of the Software Freedom Law Center, delivered an enlightening – and slightly horrifying – lecture on Copyright laws and how they affect/will affect scholarship, art, and science. Anyone who is even slightly invested in the future of collaboration and of the accessibility of art and science should watch this. 90 minutes very well-spent.

• “Judge a Book by its Cover”

I’ll end this with something entertaining, clever, and sometimes freakish. “Judge a Book by its Cover” is a blog run by my lovely friend “Maughta,” a snarky librarian-type with razor-sharp wit. Hear that, Maughta? I plugged your blog. I expect beer in recompense. And, yes, I just said “recompense.” “Judge a Book” is the result of Maughta’s years working in the public library, where “[she] saw literally thousands of books every week; the good, the bad, and the truly hideous. These are the covers from the latter category.” With weekly features like “Sultry Sunday,” “Mammary Monday,” and “Phallic Phriday,” this is definitely a blog for booklovers. Snarky, mean booklovers.

Ok, Internets. That’s all I got. What about you? *DINGDINGDINGDING*

That’s right. I’ma keep ringing that damned bell ’till you give me some suggestions.

Rima Abunasser is Assistant Professor of Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture at Furman University. She also teaches Contemporary American Popular Culture, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Literature of the Arab World, and the Feminist Literary Tradition. That’s all a very complicated way of saying that she really likes to read. And to think and talk about what she reads. And, you know, to have an audience. She really likes having an audience. It makes her feel special – and somewhat drunk with power.

http://www.locusmag.com/

http://www.locusmag.com/

http://www.locusmag.com/

http://www.locusmag.com/

http://www.locusmag.com/

http://www.locusmag.com/

As mythological creatures go, I’ve always had a soft spot for cockatrices (or is it cockatrixes in the plural? I have no idea.) This is because I think roosters are incredibly pretty, and adding a snakey tail to just about anything makes it even prettier, except kittens. Or wait, maybe a kitten with a snakey tail would look prettier. I’ll have to toddle off to my lab to run some experiments on that. Anyway, this brings me to my problem. I couldn’t find any satisfactory Victorian engravings of a cockatrice for my bookplate project (of which I’ll write more at a future date) so I had to sit down and draw my own.

The key to a satisfactory cockatrice is to keep most of the beautiful features of a rooster—the gorgeous cockscomb, the extravagant tail, the powerful clawed feet—and just add a bit of snake. Not too much snake. And for heaven’s sake, no fangs! Fangs are utterly unnecessary. And finally, a satisfactory cockatrice should NOT look like a velociraptor. Just sayin’.

This little image was sketched and inked quickly (and furthermore I couldn’t find my preferred inking pens, so I had to make do with a blasted fountain pen and a dull black sharpie) so it’s rather less tight and tidy than my other black-and-white efforts. It’s supposed to look engraving-y, but the shadow lines are too random. Oh well. “Ink in haste, Photoshop at leisure.”

Originally published at M.K. Hobson | Necrophilatelist. Please leave any comments there.