Launch Pad Workshop Opens for Applications

I was swamped back in February, so I forgot to post about the application deadline for Clarion West, which was a couple of weeks ago, but for those who are working in a creative capacity–not just as a writer, mind you–the Launch Pad workshop is open for applications. Basically, it’s a crash course in astronomy designed for people who could use some training in the area to better handle related subjects in their creative work. In my class, we had mostly fiction authors (and not all of them exclusively writers of SF), but also a science comedy team. Screenwriters, film …

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On Academic Ecologies, Career Planning, and Worldbuilding,

At my goodbye party last week, we were talking about the future collapse of the TEFL industry when brute-force autotranslation gets good enough that most people will only study foreign languages the way that some people still do math by hand. (I mean without a calculator–that is, out of academic requirements, a sense of old-fashionedness, or rare personal impetus to do so.) I commented that I think now is a pretty good time to distance oneself from TEFL altogether, and certainly a good time to get out of depending on jobs where one is directly teaching English.  (Unless one is …

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Cloud Atlas (Updated!)

(Note: I’ve added and update, because it turned out I had more to say.) Original Post: Just saw Cloud Atlas. I think Mrs. Jiwaku’s response is a pretty fair one: “It’s a commercial-deep movie.” Which is to say, a commercial movie can only be so deep, but this one tried for that. (So did Life of Pi, which we also saw recently, but that film failed in my opinion.) The interracial makeup… I don’t know what to say about it, really, except that I’m a bit baffled. I thought at first it was supposed to convey continuity between lives of …

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Linkery, Linkery…

I have a huge list of links marked “to post” which, to be honest, I find kind of daunting. I used to post links a lot more, but lately my blog is mostly devoted to housing my ongoing project, Blogging Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, along  with occasional posts on SF or Korea-related issues. But I have had a few tabs open on my browser for over a week, which seem worth posting to me, and having been delayed for my critique group’s meeting by an annoying fridge-related disaster (though less delayed than another member), I am now sitting in a …

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The Music of Jo Hyeja: Accepted, World Premiere Upcoming!

So, I announced this news on Twitter and Facebook a little over a week ago, but didn’t get around to announcing it here. Our short film “The Music of Jo Hyeja” has been accepted for the Los Angeles HP Lovecraft Film Festival. It will be the film’s World Premiere, and as a Lovecraftian movie, it’s hard for me to imagine a better festival for it to premiere at! The website for tickets is here. I won’t be able to go, though Miss Jiwaku will be in attendance. The lineup looks interesting, as you can see from all the links from the …

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Publication News: A New Story Out, and a Reprint in Good Company

I am in the habit now of not announcing things until they’re definitely announced by the publisher, but I have some publishing news that’s definitely out of the bag, and I’m pleased about it, so here it is: First off, my Clarkesworld story “Of Melei, of Ulthar” is going to be reprinted in The Book of Cthulhu II, from Nightshade books. Checking out the Table of Contents, I am frankly bowled over to find myself in the company of the likes of Fritz Leiber and William Browning Spencer, two authors I’ve been reading since I rediscovered speculative fiction as an …

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Seoul SF&F Library — Relocated!

This entry is part 54 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

So, recently, the Seoul SF & Fantasy Library relocated to Mapo-gu. The new location is near Hong-Ik Dae University, and is a wonderful space: large, bright, and very versatile, as well as above-ground — it is on the third floor of the building in which it is located. I was meaning to take some photos of the wonderful place, but it slipped my mind before I left, so that will have to await an update for this post. I attended a reception there, where many of Seoul’s SF fans, authors, and other personalities were in attendance, and we celebrated the …

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Who Thought Dryco Wasn’t Plausible?

Well, I just cracked open the novel Heathern, by Jack Womack, which pretty much describes a world on its way from our familiar, 1980s world into the horror of the most dystopian of his Dryco novels. Here’s the first couple of paragraphs: A baby almost killed me as I walked to work one morning. By passing beneath a bus shelter’s roof at the ordained moment I lived to tell my tale. With strangers surrounding me I looked at what remained. Laoughter from heaven made us lift our eyes skyward. The baby’s mother lowered her arms and leaned out her window. …

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미래경 (Futuroscope) #3 Has Arrived

This entry is part 53 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

It’s been one of those weeks, seriously it has — and today, during my office hours, I was flooded with visitors (which is to be expected, as it’s Teacher’s Day today). In any case, one of the visitors came by to drop off a package that had been accidentally delivered to the wrong office. In it was my contributor’s copy of the Korean “mook” (magazine-book) fanzine 미래경 (Futuroscope) #3 (Spring 2012), which contains my article “Outside Looking In” (translated to Korean by Insu Hong). (For those interested, I’ll see if I can post a copy of the piece in English sometime …

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