Category: GENERAL

Check Out the Zombie on That Cover. Oh, Wait…

One of the fitness magazines I read, Men’s Fitness, recently featured tennis star Andy Roddick on their cover. But though Roddick is a fine physical specimen, he wasn’t quite fine enough for Men’s Fitness; they enhanced his image through visual trickery to make him look more buff. It was so blatant, some readers thought they’d actually photoshopped Roddick’s head onto someone else’s body. (They didn’t; it was just airbrushing or the digital equivalent.)I could get all outraged about it, but actually, instead I think that maybe SF should do the same thing. I could try to be vague, but since the demise of SF Chronicle, there’s really only one magazine I could be talking about–Locus. I’ve seen a number of recent covers (and interior shots) that are less than flattering to their subjects. There has been more than one that I’ve seen and thought, “Yeesh, he looks like a zombie in that picture.” I mean, I’m not asking anyone to make them look beautiful or anything, but, you know, can we make them not look like zombies?

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2nd Annual Slushapalooza

Doug Cohen and I will be appearing on Hour of the Wolf this Saturday, 5-7 am. Like our appearance last year, we’ll be discussing all things slush, but this time we’ll be allotting more time for call-in questions, as last time the phone lines lit up like a Christmas tree, but we didn’t have much time to field the questions.

Hour of the Wolf airs on WBAI (99.5 FM) in New York City. If you’re not local, or if you just don’t want to get up at 5 am (or both), you’ll be able to listen to the show via streaming audio on the Hour of the Wolf website after the broadcast airs.

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Meeting the Easter Bunny*

One of my slush survivors, George Tucker, is in town this weekend, so he and I and Gordon met up with him last night, the first meeting for all of us. We met at an Indian restaurant in Manhattan called Utsav, which was good, but pricey. For some reason they didn’t have murgha tikka, though they had other cubed chicken dishes, and they had tandoori chicken, which uses the same sauce as murgha tikka, which left me wondering why the hell they couldn’t just make it for me.

But anyway, it was a fun evening. We chatted about everything from porn expos to mystery novels to the intricacies of book publishing. Normally, Gordon and I just talk about porn expos, so it was nice to have the excuse to talk about something else for a change.

* If you’re confused about this reference, look here.

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Vacation Report

Here, at last, is my long-delayed vacation report. Like most vacations, it was great fun and relaxing, though despite that, I seemed to require some time after I got home to recover from the actual vacation. It’s an odd phenomenon, but one that I’ve frequently experienced.

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Flash (Ah-Aaaah!) Gordon

So everyone who was interested probably saw the new Flash Gordon series on SCI FI by now, and has already realized it really sucks. However, Flash Gordon afforded me the opportunity to work on the most unusual assignment of my freelancing career thus far: I was hired by the SCI FI Channel to research and write a series of quizzes based on the historical iterations of Flash Gordon. The first of these (and I assume future quizzes) can be found here: http://www.scifi.com/flashgordon/quizzes/. As you might guess, mine is the one labeled “Historical: Flash Gordon’s Roots.” I didn’t write the other one, as I hadn’t seen the new show in advance of its premeire. I’m pretty happy with this one, but I wrote five quizzes total and I think some of the others are more entertaining.

I was initially wary of the assignment at first, as I was no great lover of Flash Gordon (in fact, I knew almost nothing about it), but it was fun doing the research and coming up with the questions. One thing I discovered during my research is that by far the most enjoyable version of Flash Gordon I came across was the original comic strips. They’re not *good* or anything, understand, but I found them much more palatable than any other iteration (including the new series, which might be the worst of them all–hey at least the serials have the excuse of being made like 70 years ago!). If you’re interested in Flash Gordon’s history, the original comic strips are available in a series of graphic novels from Checker Book Publishing. They’re nice volumes; my only real complaint with them is that they’re kind of a rip-off–each book is only 90 or so pages and they cost $20 each. At that page count, Checker could have easily put the strips together in a nice large omnibus, but instead they went the price-gouge the fans route. It’s too bad–they’re nice books otherwise.

 

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Back

I’m back from vacation and already processed some slush and am back into the swing of things at F&SF. However, I’m still playing catch-up with all of my freelancing work, so I’ve had no time to blog. But a trip report will be forthcoming at a later date!

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SFWA SkunkWorks

Check out the new public SFWA newsgroup on SFF.net, SFWA SkunkWorks. It’s mission, basically, is to alert members to “new trends in SF publishing, even ‘bleeding edge’ trends that were experimental and hadn’t proven themselves one way or another.”

Already, I found something useful: according to Tobias Buckell, AmazonConnect now allows you to run your regular blog’s feed through AmazonConnect, which means you can blog as normal and still reap the benefits of Amazon blogging without the extra hassle. I can’t actually find the information about this that Toby’s talking about, but that could be because I don’t have AmazonConnect setup for myself yet, since I don’t have any books available on Amazon (as of yet).

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Public Service Announcement: Don’t Be a Dick

Don’t be a dick. That’s good advice for life in general, but at the moment I’m saying this in reference to the new Harry Potter book. With just a few days to go before the big release, I’m seeing posts on the net talking about spoilers of the final book–people have gotten advanced copies and blogged an ENTIRE SYNOPSIS (don’t look!), and someone even photographed every page of the book and posted a torrent.

So, do us all a favor: don’t be a dick. Don’t spoil the book for people who don’t want to be spoiled. Be mindful of where (and how loudly) you reveal crucial plot points. It’s bad enough the news will probably report on the ending as if it were, you know, *news*. Like they did with The Sopranos.

And for god’s sake people, when you get the book, take it home and read it. Don’t flip to the last chapter to find out if Harry lives. Pages are numbered for a reason, and it’s not just so you can find your place if your bookmark falls out. You’ve waited this long to find out what happens; surely you can wait just a little bit longer.

And I’m not just talking about regular folks either; remember that bookstore people might want to remain unspoiled as well, and they’ll be at the highest risk of overhearing something they don’t want to. I still remember working at Books-a-Million in the days and weeks prior to the release of The Phantom Menace and that stupid fat fuck who excitedly blabbed to his friend how Liam Neeson’s character dies at the end. Sure, the movie kind of sucked, but I didn’t know that then, and seeing that movie was the thing I was most looking forward to in the whole world at that time. There’s going to be a lot of Harry Potter readers out there who feel the same way.

So don’t be a dick.

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