I’m always a bit ish-ish about recommending books to people. Giving books to people is fine – there are few things I enjoy more than randomly giving friends books they might enjoy – but asking people to trust my taste and spend their hard-earned money on something is…ish-ish. This doesn’t mean I don’t do it. […]
I’ve just seen the first review of Electric Velocipde 21/22, courtesy of Lois Tilton at Locus online, and it says very nice things about Memories of Chalice and recommends it to readers. I’m going to steal a bit from the end, since the beginning mostly sets up what the story’s about: While the narrator speaks […]
On Friday night, after a panel at the QWC’s One Book, Many Brisbanes program, I got the opportunity to go hang out with Cat Sparks, Trent Jamieson, and the elusive Ben Payne. There was beer and chatter and hot chips with tomato sauce. The true value of this experience probably doesn’t sink in unless you […]
When I was about twenty I lived in a motel, and it was the weirdest place I’ve ever rented in my life. If you’ve read Bleed, you’re already kinda familiar with it, ’cause it served as the basis for Palm Tree Row and abandoned motel where Aster finds the corpse. If you read the second installment of […]
1) The rejuvenating power of The Birthday Party’s Release the Bats when you’re tired, pissed off, and generally unwilling to engage with things. 2) How unfeasibly cool it is that Angela Slatter had her books mentioned on Ellen Datlow’s list of book recommendations for XMas. 3) The somewhat tricky process of making the first installment […]
My primary activity at the moment is not doing things, which is not conducive to exciting bloggery. For example, I’m not succumbing to the temptation to renew my Locus subscription; I’m not rushing out to buy the passel of books I really want to buy; I’m not going on online shopping sprees to celebrating the […]
So the latest issue of Apex Magazine is now online and features my story L’esprit de L’escalier about a guy, and endless staircase, and the things you think about during the descent. There’s already some discussion about the story taking place over at I09 which has left me thinking, among other things, “wow, I really do need […]
1) There’s is nothing quite so pleasant as heading out to one of your favorite bookstores on a rainy night and having someone read to you, but it’s doubly awesome when the topic du-jour is the Art of the Reading. The irony is that this totally wasn’t my idea – my sister e-mailed a few […]
Since it came up in comments on in the livejournal feed, I’m going to make quick mention of this. I can understand the desire to make fun of country music, because much of it isn’t my thing and there are far too many examples of bad country music out there (especially in Australian, where the […]
My friend Jason Fischer has expressed his consternation regarding author bios that mention cats in the past, so I feel obligated to mention this in the interests of scientific research: People love them some cats. I mean, seriously, the spike in visitors once I started blogging about the cat-sitting scares me a little (and that was […]
I talked to the inimitable Ben Francisco over the weekend and was immediately reminded of the fact that this doesn’t happen often enough. There is something dreadfully wretched about having people I enjoy talking too spread across the globe, accessible only via chat programs that require one of us to be awake at an ungodly […]
Bugger who I write like*, when presented with a tool of complex literary analysis such as this I can think of only one sensible thing to do with it. And now I give the you the results of my most important and detailed analysis: When you plug in the lyrics to Sir Mix-a-Lot’s Baby Got […]
