How to use this Page

Today is Jeff VanderMeer's 24th birthday.  Coincidentally, his new collection of stories, The Third Bear, is being released this month, so it's the best of all possible worlds: you can make him happy by buying yourself a present!  Everybody wins!

I'll have more to say about The Third Bear next week (Yoda says, "Read it, you should!"). Mostly I just wanted to post this picture of Jeff in the wild:

I was recently asked the question " What are your favorite cross-genre stories?" by John DeNardo of SF signal. My answer, along with ones by much smarter people can be found here. Thanks for the opportunity John, Ive always loved this column.

This is about the coolest thing in the world to be involved in. Thanks Jeff! You rock, good sir.

Dear Nebula Voters,

I know what your real purpose is with the nominees for this year's award.  Don't think you can hide your secret, conspiratorial goals from me!  I know what you really want to do is cause me immense angst by putting some of my favorite people up against each other in your various (nefarious!) categories.  You know when it comes to awards I root for the people I know and like before I even consider anything else, because of course the people I know and like are all the greatest writer in the world, but what am I supposed to do when you, for instance, put VanderMeer up against Barzak in the novel category?!

I'm safe, at least, with the short story category.  Jim Kelly is the only writer I know well there, so obviously he should win.  Novelette is worse -- Paolo Bacigalupi is the one person whose short stories have caused me to write a long essay, and he's a really nice guy (well, as long as you don't burn lots of hydrocarbons in front of him.  I tried digging an oil well at the World Fantasy Convention in 2005, and he threatened to punch me).  Rachel Swirsky I've communicated with regarding Best American Fantasy (we reprinted her story "How the World Became Quiet: A Post-Human Creation Myth" in BAF 2, and all of the BAF contributors feel like family to me, even if I never talk to them, which is mostly what makes them feel like family...)  And then there's Mr. Bowes, who once attacked me with a stiletto-heeled shoe when I suggested that Cats is not the greatest musical of all time.  I've forgiven him, even though Starlight Express is obviously the greatest musical of all time, and in learning forgiveness, I have learned to appreciate the man himself, and so of course I want him to win as much as I want Paolo and Rachel to win.  Maybe they all can.  (Voters!  Coordinate your efforts to please me!)

Novella is actually easy, too, because the only person there I've met is John Scalzi, and he's alright, even if I remain dead to him.

But the novel category ... it's killing me.  I'm going to have to freebase my entire collection of pill-bottle cotton tonight just to calm my aching soul.  Not only are Messrs. Barzak and VanderMeer, two of my favorite people, present there, but Paolo Bacigalupi is hanging out in that category as well, and so is China Mieville with The City & The City, a book I adored.  And though I don't know Cherie Priest, I know her editor, who is also one of my favorite people, and thus is, by definition, the greatest editor in the world.

Okay, Nebula voters -- I give up!  Uncle!  Please please please start nominating more works by mean, nasty people I don't like!  Or at least people I don't know!  I'm working hard to be a recluse, so it shouldn't be all that difficult to locate more people I don't know.  It will save me agonized nights of writhing on the floor, my loyalties pulling me in all directions, my heart torn asunder.

What's that you say?  It's not all about me?  Yes, I've heard that before, many times.  Conspirators always deny their conspiracy.  I know the truth, though, and in the immortal words of Bob Dylan: "I don't believe you!"

Meanwhile, congratulations to all!

Sincerely,
Patient #45403892, New Hampshire State Home for the Criminally Bewildered

PS
Whoever has my tinfoil hat, you'd bett

>

Less then halfway through this book it easily became one of my favorite books and definitely my favorite Jeff VanderMeer book. Ambergris comes alive here in a totally new way, revealing hidden depths and strange new Burroughs. It has the sense of richness of the previous Ambergris books but with an added sense of immediacy and truancy as it's a detective novel. A very hard boiled detective novel that reads more authentic and original then many contemporary "straight" noirish detective books. For me, something really clicked having Ambergris as a Victorian, steampunk, fungal, occupied city (Finch takes place one hundred years after Shriek.)

While you still have a sense of dislocation of an urban, New Weird story this story draws you in in an emotional level; unlike any other New Weird story I've read. The characterization is more compelling and more real. The city is broken in a way that that seems real and elicits sympathy.

An amazing ending.

Several posts back, I mentioned reading Jeff Vandermeer's BOOKLIFE: STRATEGIES AND SURVIVAL TIPS FOR THE 21ST-CENTURY WRITER. This book is excellent for a number of reasons. The thing I most appreciated, though, was his intentional division of a writer's public and private booklife. In the Private Booklife section, he's devoted a whole chapter to envy.

It is easy to be envious in all professions, but I think there's a special envy reserved just for the arts. When what you create is the thing ultimately received or rejected by others, it is often difficult to keep ourselves separate from our work, and it's easy to grow bitter when others' work is received differently than our own.

Here's what Vandermeer has to say:

"...Envy expresses a perverse feeling of helplessness: an acknowledgement of our inability to control what we could never control anyway. The only true balm is to tend to our own work, our own business, and to be as sound and honest in it as we can be -- and as for others, to treat them with love and affection, recognizing that what we may see of them in our eye, they too may see of us in theirs. Recognizing that the fortunes of our fellow travelers rise and fall as do our own -- knowing that we are bound in a brotherhood and sisterhood of envy -- may remove the sting of the sliver when it enters, and when it exits."

How do you deal with envy?

Last fall, I read Jeff Vandermeer's BOOKLIFE: STRATEGIES AND SURVIVAL TIPS FOR THE 21ST -CENTURY WRITER. One of the things I most enjoyed about the book was the fact it was divided into two main sections: your Public Booklife and your Private Booklife.

Permission to Fail is a chapter within the Private Booklife section. Vandermeer touches upon a few things I've mentioned here before: the risk involved in the creative life. I'd love to hear what all of you think about what he has to say:

"...Perfection can be a signal of lack of imagination...To be great, we must attempt so much that we not only are in danger of forever failing, but that we do fail, and in the failure create something greater than if we had set our sights lower."

And his advice to high school students:
"Whatever you do from now on, don't feel that it has to always be successful. To be successful, to be as good as you can possibly be in whatever field you choose, you need to feel like you can bungee jump out to the edge of success and into that space where the ropes might break. If you don't you won't take risks, you won't get out there, to that place with a night sky full of unfamiliar stars where 'success' might become either something extraordinary or utter failure.. because utter failure and extraordinary accomplishment are conjoined twins most of the time."

Ms. P. Martha Moog thought about reading Finch, but decided against it when she discovered that the eponymous protagonist is not, in fact, a delectable bird. She very much liked the gun on the cover, though, and so dragged the book and one of our home decorations over the couch to spend some time with them. (She fancies herself a gun moll, I'm afraid. I keep having to confiscate her collection of Derringers.)

Jeff VanderMeer has posted a picture of copies of the actual Booklife, which excites me very much, because it's a neat book (yes, I still say "neat"; deal with it) and includes a little essay-thing I wrote at the end (alongside various essay-things by more interesting and less conflicted writers than I). Full contents here. I'm planning to keep a stock of extra copies of Booklife always on hand to give to the various aspiring and aspired writers I encounter, because it really does get at some stuff that I haven't seen elsewhere, and, well, I kind of had an addiction to writers' guides for a decade or so, which makes me oddly and a bit ashamedly qualified to make a statement like that. (The thing is, most writing guides are really terrible. Really. But not all.) Booklife is one of the few books I've seen to really address the life part of it all, rather than just the craft, and it does so in a way that is generous and suggestive rather than prescriptive. (I think I'll make a bumper sticker: "Kill your guru. Get a Booklife.")

Also, Jeff's upcoming novel Finch has an instrumental soundtrack from the band Murder by Death. The website lets you stream it, or you can download the album or specific tracks and pay what you want for them. Some lovely, haunting stuff that I haven't had nearly enough time to listen to to really absorb, but the couple times I've had it on the background, I've been pleased. I also seem to have grown strange mold on my skin and developed a real craving for dark, damp places...

Finally, if you're in the Plymouth, New Hampshire area between October 15 and November 23, stop by the Lamson Library & Learning Commons at Plymouth State University, where the exhibit "Illustrating VanderMeer: A Glimpse Into the Collaborative Works of Author, Jeff VanderMeer and Illustrator, Eric Schaller" will be on display (contrary to what the site says, though the majority of the books included are from my collection, some of them are Eric's). The big event will be the evening of Monday, November 23, when Eric and Jeff will both be in attendance, and there will be a reading, as well as discussion. I expect we might even be able to rope David Beronä into the discussion, though he might not be willing to join us for the obligatory mud wrestling afterward.

I was there at the beginning.

Yes, soon after Dr. Schaller (my favorite mad scientist) captured the bird, I blindly selected one of my favorite tommy guns and slaughtered the creature with panache.  I gutted it with my teeth.  I deconstructed it with a gulletful of Derrida.  I chugged a shot of ennui and belched sentences of purple bile into the airspace of downed jetliners.  I wouldn't call it a beautiful sight, but it was what I had.

Jeff VanderMeer called me a "smart ass", but I was used to that.  He'd called me worse ("cretinous wombat", "illiterate dirigible", "barbaric yawp", "Dick Cheney").

It all led to a chain reaction of words, words, words.

And now those words have been packaged and frozen with flash, waiting for you to take them out of the freezer and stick them in the microwave of your soul.

All for charity.

Go now, my minions.  Pre your order.  Feed the Wyrm and its whimsical Ministry.  Bring back souvenirs and relics and tchotchkes of the damned.  You're doing something good for the world.  Tell your friends.  They'll never believe you, but you're used to that, ever since the UFO and the sasquatch and the death panels.

The Bird Head took his last drink and I no longer have any tommy guns.  But why should that stop you?  There are mad scientists and realpolitiking consiglieri who claim sovereignty over the rest of us, but you -- you're free.  Suck in your gut.  Join the abjection.  Flay your dreams.

Remember: it's all for charity.  All the children who don't learn to read, I'm sending them to you.  It's time to ask yourself: Do you really want that weight to rend the fabric of the last vestiges of your conscience, punk?

Do it for the Bird Head.  One day, you, too, will take your last drink.  But that day is not today.  Go now, so you can say you did one good deed in your life.

Here are some exploratory sketches I did for a Jeff Vandermeer project. I love pencil and consider it one of my primary mediums. These sketches lead to some interesting digital experiments as well; trying to balance a hand drawn image processed and manipulated digitally. I can't seem to fully keep away from digital media, it's always exciting.

It is a sad thing to watch a writer go off the rails. But in these Twittered, My-Faced, Spacebooked, blog-rolled times, any meltdown is bound to be tragically public.

You may remember that at the tail end of last year author Jeff VanderMeer rashly took on the challenge of reading and reviewing Penguin's three series of Great Ideas one after the other. That's sixty books in sixty days. At the time, I questioned the wisdom of this idea. But Jeff was adamant that he, and he alone, could do it. His endeavour - his hubris? - got picked up in a few places. Suddenly the world was watching. The pressure was on.

If Jeff wasn't true to his word, he was going to find more than egg on his face.

It was going so well. The first twenty books were dispatched on schedule. In those early reviews, more like mini-essays really, Jeff filleted the classics and artfully arranged their innards so that we looked at them anew. He was producing a minimum of a thousand words every day on each review, in addition to his other projects and posts.

'Every time I see “[...]” in these texts I consider it a special communication, and that there is the possibility the Penguin editors been monitoring my reading patterns and have personalized my copy to cut the text in just the right places for my attention span.'

A few posts later, he wrote, in a review of Hume's On Suicide (and other essays):

'Creators are a bunch of half-mad louts drunk with words, who gain power and strength through constructive expression of their irrationalities.'

At this point I was not yet aware that the wheels were coming off the wagon.

Then in late January I began to get the emails. Jeff needed to take a break. Not because he'd recognised the signs of mental exhaustion himself. But because he had 'other commitments'. A 'teaching gig in Australia' was mentioned. He stopped at book 36 of 60, then went off line for a while. Some posts 'from Australia' duly appeared. He was due to resume but then 'deadlines' got in the way. Two books needed 'last-minute edits'. There would be further delays. February came and went. And March. He was posting again on his blog but avoiding the subject of 60 in 60.

Then on Tuesday, this post appeared on his blog (see the not-at-all-disturbing screen-grab above).

Who knows what possessed him when he wrote it? Guilt perhaps. Shame maybe. Alcohol certainly. But also there is a kind of insane defiance at work here. The 60 days have long passed. The war is over, the battle lost. Yet he's soldiering on nevertheless.

But rather than reading the remaining 24 titles, Jeff has instead read the BLURB and FIRST PAGE of each book. Instead of writing a thousand words on each book's contemporary relevance, he has written a three line poem.

Two examples serve to illustrate his feverish state of mind:

#37 - Henry David Thoreau’s Where I Lived and What I Lived For

Hippy words
Talks to trees
Dirty yellow toenails

#56 - Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Replicate me please
Replicate me please
Why all these eyes?

Jeff claims the full service will resume next week. I have my doubts, and I'm not sure where it will all end. If at all. I'm especially worried as later this year a fourth series of Great Ideas is scheduled to be published.

But let's not tell Jeff that.

Colin Brush
Senior Creative Copywriter

.............................................................................

..............................................................................

I'm being nudged into a cartoon world, and I'm pretty happy about it to tell the truth. On the left is my original concept for a character in the comic I'm working on; Jeff VanderMeer's The Situation. The editor wanted it less tight, more expressive. I told her that's how I'd draw all the time if I had any guts! So I came up with the guy on the right. I'm really, really happy with the redesign and it makes the whole project one hundred times more exciting. And I draw faster this way. That's just a nice side effect.
Also, I'm very happy with the way watercolour and gouache looks over a brush and ink drawing. I somehow have misplaced all my watercolour tubes so I had to use my traveling half pan set and liked using it a lot. I wasted less paint this way.
What does everyone think of the two designs? I think the second one is much better suited to a comic book. I have very smart editors.

This is the reason I got into illustration in the first place. I found out that I'll definitely part of this amazing project, a science fiction comic book written by one of my favorite authors Jeff VanderMeer. Jeff writes the kind of stories that give me the same sense of wonder and surprise I got when I first started reading science fiction and fantasy. If you've never read his work please do, it's simply amazing. You can read more about this project here.
Also, I woke up this morning to find it was featured on the Forbidden Planet blog, a total thrill for me.

Inevitably, I forgot some books I enjoyed greatly this year when I wrote my post about books I'd encountered in 2008. Despite my feeling that I hardly read anything in 2008, and that much of what I did read didn't appeal to me, I'm discovering that neither feeling is particularly true, and this is a pleasant discovery. So here are a couple more books I enjoyed mightily this year:

The Situation by Jeff VanderMeer: I forgot this one because I had read a version of it some time ago and so never associated it with 2008. It's marvelously strange and an excellent study of office life, and PS did a great job with the production of the book itself.

Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry by Reginald Shepard: I reviewed this for Rain Taxi, and it was easily one of my favorite books of the year -- I think I forgot it because it's a book that resides in my mind among books that have been around a while, books that made a deep impression, books you repeatedly recommend to particularly discerning readers. I want to say something more, particularly given that Shepard died this year, but all the vast praise I feel impelled to heap upon the book can be summed up as: Read this book, think about it, argue with it, consider how much we have lost with Shepard's early death, and be grateful for how much he accomplished during his life, how much he gave to us, his readers.

First, just a reminder that Lydia Millet will be reading tonight at McNally Robinson in Manhattan in support of her new novel How the Dead Dream, which is very much worth reading. I'm planning on being there, though will probably arrive a few minutes late.

Second, there are suddenly a bunch of free books available for download via their publishers and authors:

• As many people have noted, Tor Books is giving away a free ebook each week to people who register with them. The current book is Spin by Robert Charles Wilson, which I happen to know is a book Lydia Millet is a fan of...
  
• Nightshade Books has a few downloads available, including Richard Kadrey's Butcher Bird, which looks like it could be marvelous.
  
• Wired.com's Geekdad blog has an interview with Jeff & Ann VanderMeer from which you can download Jeff's novella The Situation (coming soon from PS Publishing).