Some might remember me posting a link regarding a call for papers on the zombie for an interdisciplinary collection? Well, today (Hallowe’en!) is the deadline, and even though I’m a good half-day ahead of the recipient, I got it tidied up and decided to send it off now. The gist of my proposal is that zombies work in a couple of ways: on one level, zombies are the ultimate tabula rasa — they don’t speak or seem to think, their motivations or internal experience (whatever it may be) is inscrutable, and thus they can be seen as figures for everything …
Month: October 2008
Busy, So Raftman
I’m busy as all get-out, and while I’ve fallen out of the habit of sharing the interesting stuff I run across online — there’s just so much of it! — I do want to share this, which I found at Tor.com… The Raftman, by Keith Bearden:
[redacted] and the Blowfish
Yet more good writing-related news: the Machine of Death anthology is going to be illustrated, and (I think this is firm) I’m chuffed at who they’ve chosen to illustrate my little yakuza story! (Which some might remember is titled “Improperly Prepared Blowfish.”) (NOTE: I noticed that the guys over at Machine of Death is not publicizing names for a bit, so I’ll let them announce it first when things are finalized. But it’s cool!) The comics world is a foreign land to me, as is probably evident from the fact I used the word “comics” just now, but I had …
What Todd and Peanut Have in Common
I changed schools a lot in elementary school, mostly just because my family moved around a lot. When we arrived in Prince Albert, a town in Northern Saskatchewan, I ended up at this small elementary school where one of my classmates was a kid named Todd. Now, this was in the fourth grade, when secondary sexual characteristics aren’t really, er, apparent yet. Todd had a somewhat girlish face, but was built big, and had short-ish (but not quite short) curly hair. And I guess it was for this reason that Todd was often ridiculed by classmates as a “girl.” I …
Dhuluma No More Podcast
More writing squeeage — Starship Sofa, an excellent British SF podcast I’ve been listening to for a while now, will be podcasting “Dhuluma No More,” my most recent publication which appeared in Asimov’s SF. Now, I just need to get the manuscript tidied (ie. enter the copy-edits into my final text) and email it to Tony Smith at Starship Sofa. Apparently he’s got a hell of a lineup in addition to the stories he’s already podcast, including people like Bruce Sterling, Nancy Kress, Ted Chiang, Elizabeth Bear, Norman Spinrad, and all kinds of other luminaries. So, yes, I am feeling …
Poems Forthcoming
I haven’t sold many poems before, but I have a bunch on my hard drive and, happily, unlike SF, poetry doesn’t necessarily age quickly. I’m very happy to announce that Camille Alexa has bought three of my poems for Diet Soap: “Dadeumie Sori,” “Ode to the Competent,” and “Tian Zhu Jiao.” The first two poems will appear in their (Wage) Slavery theme issue, and the latter will appear in their Sabotage theme issue. These are the first poems I’ve gotten published since before coming to Korea, so I’m very excited! Perhaps now is a good time to spill a couple …
If You’ve Emailed Me…
… or left a comment, or tried to call and not gotten a response: Sorry, but we’ve been moving house! This means that right now is my brief and perhaps my last internet connection for the next day or two. The campus network’s security system is allergic to Linux, or maybe to having two computers hook up on a shared wireless account, I’m not sure which (or maybe it’s both), so while I’m going to set up the wireless router upstairs, it may not work for me until Monday when the befuddled internet guys get called in to fix it …
“Soybean Paste Girls” as a Barometer of, or Catalyst of, Consumerization of Korean Society?
I have a cold, so I’m keeping this relatively brief; hopefully it will also be relatively coherent. I was thinking in EMart the other day. (E-Mart, for those who aren’t in Korea, is the big grocery chain here.) Lime and I had just been in a restaurant, and the food had some to the table, well, er, unacceptably cold. I complained, and the server’s first reaction was to tell me, “No, it’s supposed to be a little cold.” To which I responded, “Uh, no, it’s not.” With an implied, Yes, it’s Western food, and yes, I do know what the …
Oriental Medical Pseudoscience Medicine, Sympathetic Magic, and the Consumption of… What?
I mentioned recently that Lime and I are thinking about picking up a second cat to give Peanut/Buffy/Undecided a playmate. She’s been looking at the adopt-a-cat webpages online, and was explaining to me the procedure in Korea for adopting cats. Not an official procedure, mind, just a common one. It goes like this: you adopt the cat. You pay a flat fee of, say, the equivalent of $20, or $30, or even $50. (Sometimes more.) Then the person who gave you the cat will come a few months later and check out how the cat is doing, as well as …
The Lone Ranger, and Tonto
So yesterday I was discussing Thomas King’s “How Corporal Colin Sterling Saved Blossom, Alberta, and Most of the Rest of the World” (from King’s collection One Good Story, That One), which is, well, sort of SF. “Sort of” because it’s not taking itself seriously as SF, but plays with SF tropes about aliens and spaceships. (Which, you know, is better than the kind of thing you see a lot of “mainstream” authors do — writing SF, and claiming it isn’t, because it’s not silly or dumb, or whatever. Yes, Margaret Atwood, I’m looking at you. Come over here and say …