On the Small Beer Press not-a-blog, Gavin Grant shows off the latest proposed logo design, this one by Theo Black:
There’s some other cool designs to check out too, but I think this one would be impossible to beat in my eyes. Not sure how well it would work on the spine of a book, however.
Ann Miller, whose story "Retrospect" appears in the February 2008 issue of F&SF, said in an interview that the story actually started as a poem. "I was fooling around with the idea of how different books, if they were sent back in time, would change history and working with the play of ideas when I realized I’d need a larger vehicle to explore the concept properly," she said. "The first line of the story was initially the first line of my poem."
The story concerns a fledging auction agent who unwittingly gets involved with a circle of book lovers who are considering sending a book back in time, Miller said. "As the story develops, the protagonist discovers that the glittering world he has chosen, of high-stakes auction and finance, cannot sustain him and he gravitates toward his new circle of friends whom he feels are more genuine," she said. "They also ultimately betray him, and the unfolding of the narrative involves the choice the protagonist makes, given these experiences, when history has been changed and he has the chance to change it back."
Okay, one more Wastelands publicity post for the day, and then I’ll quit. I see that as of 11:30 today, Wastelands’s Amazon sales rank is up to #919, the highest I’ve ever seen it. And perhaps more startling, not only is it the #1 seller in books by George R. R. Martin, but it’s also #1 in books by Stephen King!
All this translates to it being #44 on Amazon’s science fiction best-seller list.
I appeared on Jim Freund’s radio show Hour of the Wolf on Saturday morning to promote Wastelands. If you’d like to listen to the show, the radio station, WBAI, has it up on their archives page. For a direct link (which will start the audio streaming), click here.
Daniel W. Powell, on his blog, The Byproduct, posted a nice review of Wastelands. Here’s a snippet:
I can’t recommend this anthology enough. It stands as a definitive collection in the sub-genre, and I have to say that Night Shade Books did an impressive job with the project. Editor John Joseph Adams has a nice eye for strong writing and clearly has read widely in the field. [whole review]
And the Books Anonymous blog had this to say:
I love a good tale of the apocalypse so this book was like a trip to Camden Park (before it became old, dangerous, and creepy). […] I can only give this collection 2 thumbs up because I only have 2 thumbs. [whole review]
A friend of mine asked me to sign her copy of Wastelands, to which of course I said sure. However, I qualified my answer thusly:
I’ll even try to think of something witty. No promises there though. More likely I’ll stare at the page for several minutes and then write something lame.
That’s been my experience so far with signing copies. For all you authors out there, how do you go about it? What do you write inside as an inscription?
The Fix has a great, very detailed review up of Wastelands. Here’s a snippet:
There’s a wry, fatalistic charm to Dale Bailey’s “The End of the World as We Know It,” an unusual and highly self-conscious tale of the apocalypse. It begins with a brief description of the Bubonic plague, and interspersed throughout the subsequent narrative are a number of digressions reflecting on the conventions of the “end-of’the-world” story to which, as Bailey observes, his protagonist fails to conform. Alongside these dissections of the mechanics of the sub-genre, Bailey also cites a number of real life apocalypses—Pompeii, Krakatoa, 9/11, the extinction event that did in the dinosaurs, the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda. One event he mentions—the death of Elvis Presley—hints at the real point of the story, which is that for both victims and survivors, the apocalypse is largely a personal event. [whole review]
It’s really a well-crafted review, and considering it’s written by several different reviewers, the overall result is remarkably cohesive.
My pal Jeremiah Tolbert has a story up at Fantasy Magazine called "The Yeti Behind You," which originally appeared in the magazine’s sampler anthology, Fantasy. I’m a big fan of JT’s writing, and this one is one of his best, I think.