I’ve just updated my events schedule with some new appearances. Please drop by or tune in as appropriate!
Hour of the Wolf
Radio Show, WBAI 99.5 FM
Oct. 4, 2008
New York Review of Science Fiction Reading Series
New York, NY
Oct. 7, 2008
Zombie Fest
Monroeville, PA
Oct. 25-26, 2008
World Fantasy Convention
Calgary, Canada
Oct. 30 – Nov. 2, 2008
Both Seeds of Change and The Living Dead are featured on the "new and notable" page of Amazon.com at the moment.
Also, Big Dumb Object reviews Seeds, in which the reviewer singles out Ted Kosmatka’s "N-Words," Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu’s "Spider the Artist," and Ken MacLeod’s "A Dance Called Armageddon."
Look what I got for my birthday:
And here’s the Night of the Living Dead-esque shot:
I look forward to freaking out delivery people and other strangers who come by.
I have to say, it’s one thing to see a photo of it, it’s quite another to see it in your own backyard. It really amuses me to no end.
Thanks, Mom!
Take another look at the cover. See that zombie on the right, indicated by the arrow (drawn in by me)? That’s Tor art director Irene Gallo! (Click to enlarge.)
When I first saw it, I said to myself, “Hey, that kind of looks like Irene.” Then I see Irene’s blog in which she explains. Compare for yourself with some images from Flickr.
Irene went on (in a comment) to ID some of the other zombies: Alan Williams, Greg Manchess, and Kristina Carroll. (I could only find a website for one of them; I assume all three are artists.)
I wonder what’s cooler: Being tuckerized into a story as a zombie, or being artistically tuckerized on the cover of a book?
Now this is the final cover for The Living Dead. All I can say is OMG and what a difference!
After the jump you’ll find the two versions side-by-side: on the left, the demo version accidentally released into the wild; on the right, the final version that will appear on the actual book.
Turns out the cover for The Living Dead that Amazon has posted is not the final version, and was accidentally sent out by the distributor. So an even shinier version should be forthcoming shortly.
Just wanted to thank everyone who congratulated me on The Living Dead’s table of contents and those who provided blurb suggestions. It’s much appreciated!
Who do you think would be the best people to approach for blurbs for my anthology The Living Dead? Let’s assume George Romero’s on the top of the list and proceed from there.
At last, I’m done assembling my zombie anthology, The Living Dead. It’s scheduled for publication in September 2008, and is available for pre-order from Night Shade Books and Amazon.com. Read on for the preliminary cover copy and the complete table of contents. (For those of you counting, that’s 34 stories, and more than 230,000 words.)
From White Zombie to Dawn of the Dead; from Resident Evil to World War Z, zombies have invaded popular culture, becoming the monsters that best express the fears and anxieties of the modern west. The ultimate consumers, zombies rise from the dead and feed upon the living, their teeming masses ever hungry, ever seeking to devour or convert, like mindless, faceless eating machines. Zombies have been depicted as mind-controlled minions, the shambling infected, the disintegrating dead, the ultimate lumpenproletariat, but in all cases, they reflect us, mere mortals afraid of death in a society on the verge of collapse.
Gathering together the best zombie literature of the last three decades from many of today’s most renowned authors of fantasy, speculative fiction, and horror, including Stephen King, Harlan Ellison®, Robert Silverberg, George R. R. Martin, Clive Barker, Poppy Z. Brite, Neil Gaiman, Joe Hill, Laurell K. Hamilton, and Joe R. Lansdale, The Living Dead, covers the broad spectrum of zombie fiction. The zombies of The Living Dead range from Romero-style zombies to reanimated corpses to voodoo zombies and beyond.
This Year’s Class Picture by Dan Simmons, from Still Dead (1992)
Some Zombie Contingency Plans by Kelly Link, from Magic For Beginners (2005)
Death and Suffrage by Dale Bailey, from F&SF (2002)
Ghost Dance by Sherman Alexie, from McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales (2003)
Blossom by David J. Schow, from Book of the Dead (1989)
The Third Dead Body by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, from The Ultimate Zombie (1993)
The Dead by Michael Swanwick, from Starlight 1 (1996)
The Dead Kid by Darrell Schweitzer, from The Book of More Flesh (2002)
Malthusian’s Zombie by Jeffrey Ford, from SCI FICTION (2000)
Beautiful Stuff by Susan Palwick, from SCI FICTION (2004)
Sex, Death and Starshine by Clive Barker, from Books of Blood, Vol. 1 (1984)
Stockholm Syndrome by David Tallerman, from Pseudopod (2007)
Bobby Conroy Comes Back From The Dead by Joe Hill, from Postscripts (2005)
Those Who Seek Forgiveness by Laurell K. Hamilton, from Strange Candy (2006)
In Beauty, Like the Night by Norman Partridge, from Mr. Fox and Other Feral Tales (1992)
Prairie by Brian Evenson, from The Silver Web (1997)
Everything is Better with Zombies by Hannah Wolf Bowen, from Phantom (2006)
Home Delivery by Stephen King, from Book of the Dead (1989)
Less than Zombie by Douglas E. Winter, from Book of the Dead (1989)
Sparks Fly Upward by Lisa Morton, from Mondo Zombie (2006)
Meathouse Man by George R. R. Martin, from Orbit 18 (1976)
Deadman’s Road by Joe Lansdale, from Weird Tales (2007)
The Skull-Faced Boy by David Barr Kirtley, from Gothic.net (2002)
The Age of Sorrow by Nancy Kilpatrick, from Postscripts (2007)
Bitter Grounds by Neil Gaiman, from Mojo: Conjure Stories (2003)
She’s Taking Her Tits to the Grave by Catherine Cheek, from Ideomancer (2008)
Dead Like Me by Adam-Troy Castro, from A Desperate, Decaying Darkness (2000)
Zora and the Zombie by Andy Duncan, from SCI FICTION (2004)
Calcutta, Lord of Nerves by Poppy Z. Brite, from Still Dead (1992)
Followed by Will McIntosh, from Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet (2006)
The Song the Zombie Sang by Harlan Ellison® & Robert Silverberg, from Cosmopolitan (1970)
Passion Play by Nancy Holder, from Still Dead (1992)
Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man by Scott Edelman, from Postscripts (2007)
How the Day Runs Down by John Langan, original to this volume (2008)
I’m still banging my head against the desk as a result of something very stupid I did earlier today. I was working on assembling my preliminary table of contents for the zombie anthology and inadvertently lost a bunch of data.
I’ve got a spreadsheet setup in Excel, which listed title, author, original publication, and word count. I wanted to add another column for year of publication, so I could see the range of the age of the stories on my shortlist. In doing so, I attempted to move a column as I added the new one…and somehow deleted the word count column…and didn’t notice until like an hour later, at which point it was way too late to undo that mistake.
ARGH! (Note that’s the cry of anguish, not the piratesque Arrr!) Of all the columns of data to lose, that’s absolutely the worst one. Any of the others would have been super easy to fix (except maybe for title), but word count…gah. That’s one of the most time-consuming sort of administrative activities associated with putting together a reprint anthology. I am not looking forward to starting over from scratch. And all indications are that there’s no way to recover that data from some autosaved file hidden on my hard drive somewhere.
