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Deep in the grubby sump of one of those so-called ‘Social Media’ sites, there is a clump of aging comics fanboys called The Really Very Serious Alan Moore Scholars’ Group, known to its sad and lonely adherents as TRVSAMSG. When they’re not annotating everything in sight, or calling down ancient evils on the heads of […]

Hard Case Crime will publish a new edition of Web of the City by Harlan Ellison. For the first time in thirty years, fans will be able to find the science fiction author’s first novel in bookstores.

The publisher will release the book in both paperback and eBook format in April 2013. The new edition will feature a pulp style cover created by illustrator Glen Orbik. It will also contain three thematically-linked short stories which Ellison (pictured, via) published through pulp fiction magazines during the 1950′s.

Here’s more from the release: “Written in 1957 while Ellison was enduring Army Ranger basic training in Georgia, Web of the City tells the story of a teenager who sets out to leave the New York City street gang he runs with, putting his family in grave danger.  Ellison wrote the book after going undercover for ten weeks as a member of an actual Brooklyn street gang, the Barons, an experience that also inspired him to write the famous ‘Memo From Purgatory’ episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour starring James Caan (The Godfather) and Walter Koenig (Star Trek).”

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

DreamHaven books in Minneapolis will close its retail store at the beginning of 2012. Online and mail order sales will continue.

Owner Greg Ketter explained in an email to customers: “It’s been a tough decision but in-store business has all but disappeared. Mail order shouldn’t change too much because of this but there definitely will be changes — different phone number, different hours, more used instead of new books listed — but all in all, things should be pretty much as is. Perhaps even better since I’ll have more time to catalog books that have been piling up here for the past 35 years. There will also be some big sales as I begin to clear some items out of my regular inventory. I’ll still be attending conventions, likely more than I do now.”

DreamHaven has also published a number of books. See those titles here. The great science fiction author Harlan Ellison once wrote about the beloved store: “DreamHaven is a book-seeker’s cave of miracles.” (Via Neil Gaiman)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

NPR's Morning Edition ran a piece this morning titled "Is Writing Online Without Pay Worth It?"

Listen to it. (Or at least read the summary) Then read David Carr's original article at the NY Times, "At Media Companies, a Nation of Serfs".

Yes, they're talking, in general, about non-fiction (sort of...I guess). Hell, just commenting on an article online is offering content for free. Some irony there, considering some of the comments on Carr's article. According to Carr, your Twitter feed and Facebook profile are forms of writing for free. Yikes... Facebook has learned how to cash in. Twitter isn't there. Yet.

Look--this isn't new. I occasionally listen to sports talk radio. I know, it might seem a little "out of character" for me, but it is entertaining. And you know what? The callers provide much of the content (and they are weirdos). No, it isn't a new phenomenon at all.

But is it scary? Yes, especially to anyone who wishes to write for money. Is there a corollary to fiction? Hell yes. I read a good deal of fiction online for free. Yes, many of the markets are well-paying (Apex*, Clarkesworld, Fantasy, etc.), but I'm not buying copies of Fantasy and Science Fiction or Asimov's when I'm spending my limited reading time with Redstone SF or Lightspeed online for free. I currently have subscriptions to Shimmer, Space & Time, and Necrotic Tissue. I try to spend a little money on small press every month (books, etc.), but the writing, I think, is on the virtual wall.

Will I stop blogging? No. Will I stop commenting on others' blogs, tweeting, or any of the other content-creating exercises? No. Am I going to throw an old-school Harlan Ellison rant about paying me? No.

I'm fairly nervous about teaching at Clarion this year. I said no when asked for years, because I wasn't sure what I had to teach anyone about writing. Mostly I figure I'm still figuring it out myself. I finally said yes, and I still don't think I know enough to dare to actually teach anyone.

In the shower today I tried to think about the best advice I'd ever been given by another writer. There was something that someone said at my first Milford, about using style as a covering, but sooner or later you would have to walk naked down the street, that was useful...

And then I remembered. It was Harlan Ellison about a decade ago.

He said, "Hey. Gaiman. What's with the stubble? Every time I see you, you're stubbly. What is it? Some kind of English fashion statement?"

"Not really."

"Well? Don't they have razors in England for Chrissakes?"

"If you must know, I don't like shaving because I have a really tough beard and sensitive skin. So by the time I've finished shaving I've usually scraped my face a bit. So I do it as little as possible."

"Oh." He paused. "I've got that too. What you do is, you rub your stubble with hair conditioner. Leave it a couple of minutes, then wash it off. Then shave normally. Makes it really easy to shave. No scraping."

I tried it. It works like a charm. Best advice from a writer I've ever received.

So, I gave my talk at Access and it went pretty well. I was a little out of my element since I’m usually the techie person talking to less techie people. Here I was representing the non-techies with a message of “hey don’t forget usability!” among other things. I had a lot of downtime in various lobbies and airports on the way back and so I poked around looking to see what, if anything, people had said about it. There was a short blurb on the K-State Conference blog about it.

Anyone who has been following my travels knows I have a particular soft spot for Kansas both because I’ve had a great time meeting and talking to people there, but also because they are doing some neat stuff with technology that helps make up for their geographical disatance from other KS librarians as well as other libraries generally. Just look at this list of blogs and feeds to see just some of the stuff Kansas State University is doing. Anyhow, I saw the post on my WordPress dashboard and left a comment. One of the things that I think separates people who I consider “bloggers” from people with blogs is this sort of inter-blog commenting. If someone says something nice (or not nice actually) about me, I try to leave a note. It just seems like decent etiquette and a way to say “hey welcome to the blogoworld” for newer bloggers, particularly library students.

I think an easy mistake for first-time bloggers to make is to assume that their blog is going to become some conversational destination wthout realizing that they need to go out and converse as well as bring people in to do it. The conversation that we all talk about cluing in to doesn’t happen in any one place, it happens in a lot of places all at once. Dale Askey, who was at Access 2007 and wrote the little blurb about my talk follows up with a little more explanation about some of these blog effects. He tells us about how after Amanda did her nuts and bolts talk about the Endeca rollout they did at McMaster, someone from Endeca’s Canada office emailed her a few hours later interested in talking with her about some of her ideas. Neat. This is the sort of back and forth we’d like to be having, it’s nice to see it really happening in ways that help libraries.

There’s a point to this story: people read and process our blogs in ways we cannot control and do not intend. Far from being a cautionary tale, I want to do a little dance because of this. We’re seeing what we said was the point behind blogging. Put information out there, and let people do with it what they will. Thanks to this little bizarre set of events I’ve related, I met new people [and] caught the interest of Endeca with my comments…

And, on the heels of that, NELA has a conference blog, complete with a Flickr photo pool and a team of local bloggers so anyone who can’t go can follow along at home. It’s worth noting that the entire cost to set this all up — except human time which is important but separate — was probably close to zero. Free WordPress.com account [note to NELA blog admin: consider disabling Snap previews, they’re an obnoxious side effect of WP.com blogs], free Flickr account [note to Flickr admin(s): choose a Flickr web address by clicking here when you’re logged in so the URL for your pictures is even more customized] and all the rest of it the feeds, the comments, the basic designs, just come along with it. I’m sure one or more of my talks will show up there and I’m excited to get to read about the large number of presentations that I can’t go to which I now know I can still read about.