Gwenda Bond

Nice Profile

The Washington Post has an excellent, fairly lengthy profile piece of M.T. "Tobin" Anderson, talking about the Octavian books but also his others:

"It's insulting to believe that teens should have a different kind of book than an adult should," says the author of "Feed" and, most recently, "The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation." Teens like challenges, he says. They know the world is complicated, and "they can tell when a book is simplifying life."

Thankful

For so many things, I am. I'm a very happy girl with where life has landed me, with noremarkably few complaints.

It's hard not to love a day when you get to appreciate such luck. Have a nice holiday, everybody.

Updated: Also for "10 Things You Should Know About Twilight." C'mon, guys, let's go see this instead of Bond!

We Earned That Puppy

Presidential pet photo gallery at the WaPo.

Which is your favorite? I have a soft spot for Checkers, because he really got Richard Nixon to open up to those two zany girls.

Tuesday Hangovers

• I've broken out the Zicam spray, to stave off burgeoning cold but probably allergy-type stuff. Headachey. Could it be all that painting? The couch beckons, but sadly we must wait for Netflix to provide the next Life season one disc before the marathon can continue. All will be wellness by Thursday night when company arrives.
• Go out and welcome Chris Barzak's second novel The Love We Share Without Knowing into the world--I hear it makes a great holiday gift. I can't wait to read it. See also: Chris does The Big Idea at Scalzi's joint.
• Gavin has the good links, about Couch events and Kelly Link being interviewed by Lizzie Skurnick in a couple of weeks.
• Christopher likes to map stuff, particularly stuff related to outlandish stories.
• John Green's ALAN speech. It's a great speech (and not just because it touches on some of the same themes as my graduating lecture, either, though it will be nice to quote): "Too many times, we say to our young people, “Hey, read this. It’s a fun read. Not too serious, you know. None of that English stuff.” As if there is some kind of dichotomy between good and fun. As if Gatsby is oatmeal and vampires are Lucky Charms. Vampires, of course, ARE Lucky Charms—they are magical and delicious and just dangerous enough to excite me. I love vampires, and I love vampire books. And please know that I would never argue against putting books kids want to read in their hands. But I am arguing that we need to make space in our classes—no matter how advanced or remedial the students—for ambitious novels. Because good is not the opposite of fun. Smart is not the opposite of fun. Boring is the opposite of fun, and when we create the smart/fun dichotomy, what we end up implying is that Gatsby is boring."
• Sara Ryan posts an excerpt from her dad's SF fanzine, autumn/winter 1957 issue.
• Justine has some questions for signing attendees.

I Helped This Time!

In addition to finally painting the living room*, Christopher had some other good news made formal this weekend. Go congratulate him, even if you don't know what it's for yet!

*Yes, I realize this sentence doesn't quite make sense. Also, no more painting** until spring.

**Pics soon. The living room is "contemplation." Who comes up with these names?

Friday Hangovers

• E-mail catch-up has resumed in time for le holiday. I heart the new Gmail themes. (Ninja, for nowsies!)
• I had none of Matt Cheney's qualms while reading The Kingdom on the Waves, but I do remember wishing I'd been able to read the book all at once, as one experience, rather than as a divided one. Whatever your own feelings about Octavian Nothing (I or II), it's well worth reading Matt's thoughtful review.
• Genevieve Valentine over at Tor.com on the Twilight movie, with more promised! Updated: Promised more.
• Subsurface glaciers on Mars! Wow!
• Vitamins worthless? What next?
• Ray gun!
• Vampire infodumps. 
• Street theater meets Google Maps Streetview. I know someone hiding secret library Easter Eggs in GM. SHHHHHH....
• Comics for the work-a-day world in Japan.
• Day Five of the WBBT.

Two Delightful Things

1. Ilona Andrews' acronyms for writers.

2. A little Twilight midnight showing live blog action, and here (first few posts). I'm waiting for the reviews and play-by-play, girls.

Thursday Hangovers

• Science news crazy crazy: woolly mammoth DNA sequenced so let's make one; the pygmy tarsier is the cutest mouse-like creature ever; and maybe we can clone Copernicus sometime for fun.
• Congratulations to Judy Blundell (whose book I can't wait to read), and all the other NBA honorees and winners. 
• Jackie Dolamore on the immediate changes after your first book deal. 
• Paul Collins on the long tradition of mail hoarding postal carriers. I personally thank any junk mail stealers.
• Science fiction is undead, plus several essaylets about what the future of SF might hold from the likes of Kim Stanley Robinson, William Gibson, and Ursula Le Guin, among others. (Hat tip to Leda!)
• Well-preserved mummies create controversy in China.
• Someday soon I will lose many hours to the newly-launched Europeana. (Via Lisa Gold.)
• Seussian editorial cartoons. (Via Leila.)
• Pinky on Andrew Carnegie, the littlest library tycoon. She also seemingly declares a dangerous bias for Team Zombie.
• Post o the week: Five Centuries of Board Games.
• Days three and four of the WBBT.

Tuesday Hangovers

• Betsy Bird reviews the film adaption of The Boy in Striped Pajamas, and I've no doubt the review is better than both the book and movie in question: While many children's books have sought to teach young readers about Hitler's greatest atrocity, few have been quite as divisive as John Boyne's 2006 novel The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. This novel has caused some readers to sing its praises to the heavens while others desire nothing more than to rake out their own eyeballs after a chapter or two.
• Holly and Justine are editing a zombie vs. unicorns anthology.
• "Magic and the Brain: How Magicians 'Trick' the Mind" at Scientific American. Yay. (Thanks, sweetie.)
• It makes me happy when insanely rich people do stuff like this, and by this I mean Madeleine Pickens saving more than 30,000 wild horses and burros from euthanasia. The pictures of these horses are AMAZING. (Someday I will so live our my childhood dream to go to Chincoteague Island.)
• Maria Tatar reviews Laura Miller's new book about C.S. Lewis and the Narnia books (which I greatly enjoyed) in Bookforum.
• My hero Lewis Hyde profiled in the NYT, with some tantalizing talk about the book he's working on (finished with? almost?) about the cultural commonspace. Can't. Wait.
• The Winter Blog Blast Tour continues. I just read Leila's fabulous interview with Kathleen Duey, who has turned in the sequel to Skin Hunger. (Woo!) On to Finding Wonderland's chat with D.M. Cornish.  Then maybe to Colleen's interview with Ellen Datlow?

Worker Bee

But I'd be remiss not to point you to Colleen's Table of Contents for the WBBT's first day. I can't wait to catch up once I'm through the deadline squall.

Monday Hangovers

• Sold: I will definitely be reading Rachel Neumeier's The City in the Lake, the pretty cover of which I've admired several times already.
• David Orr on the interaction of poetry and gossip (aka biographical details?), in light of a new edition of Ted Hughes' letters.
• Shannon Hale writes on why good books vs. bad books is frequently not a useful distinction, especially based on things like trim sizes and cover illustrations and genre.
• What will happen to the big boxes when they go empty and fossilized?
• "Paperback Dreams"-- a documentary about the trials and tribulations of indie bookstores.
• What books for 13-year-old boys should be, by a 13-year-old boy in PW: The vampire was always depicted as a menacing badass. That is the kind of book teenage boys want to read. Also good: books with videogame-style plots involving zombie attacks, alien attacks, robot attacks or any excuse to shoot something. Of course, he also says not to skimp on the politics.
• Booklist's Top 10 first novels for young readers of 2008; good list.
• Meghan's going to be guesting over at Jeff VanderMeer's this week. Check her.

Dirda V. Naipaul Bio Fisticuffs

In the OUCH! department, Michael Dirda turns in an extremely entertaining review of Patrick French's new biography of V.S. Naipaul, The World Is What It Is. One of the money quotes:

As Patrick French's nuanced and generous but often dispiriting biography shows, there's not much to like or praise about V.S. Naipaul as a human being. He starts life as a twerp, then fairly quickly becomes a jerk and ends up an old sourpuss. The best overall epithet for him is infantile -- though one shouldn't neglect the claims of such adjectives as whiney, narcissistic, insulting, needy, callous, impolite, cruel, vengeful, indecisive, miserly, exploitative, snobbish, sadistic, self-pitying and ungrateful. Of course, his is, to some extent, the modern artistic sensibility writ very, very large. But even our favorite monsters and divas -- Picasso, Waugh, Callas, Brando -- are never as smarmy and nasty as Naipaul. He can make a spoiled 3-year-old look mature.

Seeing as Naipaul's still with us, and Dirda goes on to (let's face it, aptly) characterize him as "increasingly blimpish, less a cultural scourge than a mean-spirited, intolerant crank," I'm not answering anything without a recognized caller ID for a few days if I'm the critic in question.

Oopsie

I hate it when deadlines attack all at once. I've got a lecture to think out and write, a Dear Aunt Gwenda column to finish, a workshop submission to generate (20 pages of new fiction... I'm thinking now is the time to tackle the big fun SF middle grade thing and we shall see), aaaaaaand something else I'm forgetting. Oh, a Crafty Monday topic to host on our program's private, student-run message board. Plus, you know, reshelving all these books and junk once the front room is Officially Together. (Getting there.) Miscellaneous, etcetera, et al.

But I think this is the last big slew of vicious swarming deadlines for a bit. All to the good, that.

Sadly, and it does make me oh so sad, all the all meant that I didn't have time to do interviews for the Winter Blog Blast Tour this time around. But I'll be linking as it goes all next week anyway, because there's some fabulous interviews lined up by my more industrious, better organized compadres. You would be remiss not to check them.

Now I smell another cup of Kava Stress Relief tea in my future.

Updated: This made me and C howl like monkeys... or puppies!

(Hat tip to Karen, who has definitely earned the new puppy!)

Wednesday Hangovers

• Write or Die. Or you could just get an Alphasmart Neo.
• Shocker: Booksellers and publishers nervous as the holiday season approaches, hoping that books will be the cheap gift of choice. Might I suggest The Serial Garden? (There's an Octavian Nothing 2 banner ad attached to the NYT story, btw.)
• Top Chef!
• Maureen writes about roasting chicken for a dinner party and breaks your heart (in the way that actually makes you feel better) in the meantime.
• Lethem on Robert Bolano.
• Nnedi Okorafor's debut YA novel Zahrah the Windseeker has taken the Wole Soyinka Prize. Very exciting, and although I haven't read this one, I can highly recommend The Shadow Speaker. (Via Leila.) Here's the author's reaction.

Holiday Home Improvement

Happy Veteran's Day, everybody.

We've spent it eating delish cornmeal strawberry pancakes (the dogs got their Mickey Mouse pancake, per tradition) and singing along with too-loud music (Magnetic Fields, Johnny Cash, and Kristin Hersh, thus far) and painting the front room and some assorted pieces of furniture and reorganizing. Earlier, I finally gave up on the return of VHS* (I was a hold out on cassette tapes too), and tossed all our tapes. A trash bag and a half full of Buster Keaton and weird Houdini movies and many, many fine screwballs and proto-screwballs (all of which, I'm now assured, are on DVD). A technological era has ended. And our DVDs now fit in the glass case that previously held the VHS tapes.

The sad thing about painting the front room (which, to be honest, Christopher is mainly doing -- I'm much better at purging and organizing and prepping than the actual physical labor... especially in a room with elaborate trim!)? Is that it makes me want to paint the living room and the kitchen even more.

See: Home ownership, the joys of. (It is joyous when the painting is done though. But the dogs and cat are nervous and exploration-inclined in the meantime and there are stacks of displaced books everywhichwhere.)

Pictures someday soonish. The great e-mail answering project returns tomorrow, but I've already got ye olde inbox down from 2,000+ to 78 or so.

*I will be insufferable at being forced to give these up if, in the great zombie apocalypse ahead, all we can find for entertainment are VHS players.

Monday Hangovers

• The NYT children's book special section is full of excellent things. Please continue ignoring Gawker at your leisure.
• The fabulous Carolyn reviews Jeff Ford's new collection, The Drowned Life, for the LA Times. She also likes the salty language.
• Jeff VanderMeer spotlights the Amazon top 10 SFF titles of the year list (good list), which is interesting to contrast with the also-included top 10 customer picks list of same.
• Bike Kwan Do, over at Paul Collins' place.
• Let the Dollhouse deathwatch continue... Please please please don't be Fox, Fox. At least Life's getting a full season pick up.
• Laini Taylor highlights The Gypsy Crown, and it's been added to the TBR list.
• Felicity Dahl offers rare insight about her life with Roald.
• Brian Francis Slattery posts some typically intriguing and well-formed thoughts about magical realism and fantasy, and the usefulness of definitions. (Am very looking forward to sinking my eyeballs into his new one, as soon as the grad program is ovah...)
• ... nonparenthetically speaking of which, my creative thesis has been approved. Le novel is done! Well, at least, it will be in a few weeks. I'm setting it aside for a couple of weeks, will make a few tweaks, and then it'll be all grown up and ready to see the world. But it is approved by the fabulous genius known as Martine Leavitt. I essentially started this book around the beginning of August, and so while there are bits and pieces of the novel I've been working on for well over a year in there, most of it is entirely new. Since August. This to explain the sporadic and sucky nature of posting, and the even more sporadic and sucky nature of e-mail responses and other commitments this fall. But I am happy. And approved. My heart is light.
• Because of the above bullet, it's entirely possible that posting will resume a normal pace in the very near future. Of course, now I have to start something new as the workshop submission deadline for the final residency approaches apace, and there's that whole drafting my lecture for next week's packet deadline too. At some point, though, larger thoughts on the MFA process will be posted -- at least specific to my program, which I can't recommend highly enough. Did I mention my heart is light?

YAY

Still weepy, still in the good way.

Yes, we can still surprise ourselves. You will find none of the inevitable tempering of expectations here. I'm willing to be surprised a million more times.

That is all.

...except for a couple of quick links:

The List
"Sorry We Can't"

Oh, and Christopher captures the mood in our corner of Lexington.

Vote Rocked = Check (Updated)

The Line When We Arrived
Originally uploaded by gwenda

It took about two hours, but was a great experience. Seriously, if I talk about it too much, I'll get weepy. I've been weepy all day, a combination of nerves and just being inspired by how special this election is.

Anyway, that's the old firehouse we vote in, and the line when we arrived. There's a few more shots at Flickr. Reading material spotted in line: Kitty Goes to Washington by Carrie Vaughn (me!), Eragon by Christopher Paolini (a lady behind us), D'Aulaire's Book of Trolls (the kid with his dad three places in front of us), and there was a creepy yuppy guy in front of us reading Ayn Rand (!) (or at least toting it around with him pretending to read it).

The rest of our evening will be spent dealing with some version of this. Here's hoping.

Updated: CNN has holograms. WTF?

Get Out Ye Olde Vote

Well, obviously, I think you should.

I don't do a lot of politics around these parts, but Colleen has organized a big nonpartisan celebration of voting. Go throw some love her way and check out the tons of posts she's rounded up on the subject.

I'm not one of those people who believes you've got no right to complain if you don't vote. As far as I'm concerned, that's one of the most awesome things about this country -- you've got the right to complain about anything at any time. (With mainly logical exceptions.) And I sympathize, too, with those people who feel the two-party system doesn't serve them well. All those people who wish there were more options to choose from, options closer to their own personal views. And I'm also sympathetic to those people who have to stand in line for five hours or more, if they happen to live in unlucky, probably swing-state precincts--the great shame of our voting system.

But I don't know that I buy anything as a particularly good reason not to vote. Participation in life, and the world, and, yes, politics is a good thing.

And that's about all I can say without getting partisan. So go vote.

Some People Are Winners

World Fantasy Award winners, that is:

Novel: Ysabel, Guy Gavriel Kay (Viking Canada/Penguin Roc)
Novella: Illyria, Elizabeth Hand (PS Publishing)
Short Story: “Singing of Mount Abora”, Theodora Goss (Logorrhea, Bantam Spectra)
Anthology: Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, Ellen Datlow, Editor (Tor)
Collection: Tiny Deaths, Robert Shearman (Comma Press)
Artist: Edward Miller
Special Award, Professional: Peter Crowther for PS Publishing
Special Award, Non-Professional: Midori Snyder and Terri Windling for Endicott Studios Website

Via Niall at Torque Control.

Yay for all the winners, and most especially for Ellen, Dora, Liz, Midori and Terri! Woo!

Shocker

Your result for Howard Gardner's Eight Types of Intelligence Test...

Linguistic

   

"Verbal-linguistic intelligence has to do with words, spoken or written. People with verbal-linguistic intelligence display a facility with words and languages. They are typically good at reading, writing, telling stories and memorizing words and dates. They tend to learn best by reading, taking notes, listening to lectures, and via discussion and debate. They are also frequently skilled at explaining, teaching and oration or persuasive speaking. Those with verbal-linguistic intelligence learn foreign languages very easily as they have high verbal memory and recall, and an ability to understand and manipulate syntax and structure.

Careers which suit those with this intelligence include writers, lawyers, philosophers, journalists, politicians and teachers." (Wikipedia)

Take Howard Gardner's Eight Types of Intelligence Test at HelloQuizzy

(Via Rachel.)

Ghostly Time Warp

Snowy Campus
Originally uploaded by gwenda

I've been remiss in not posting a link to Vermont Public Radio's excellently creepy story about Anna, the ghost who reportedly resides in the College Hall tower at my grad school's campus. (This was the first I'd heard of this story; I really feel it should be in the promotional materials.)

Anyway, have a listen to Bob the former security guard who admits he's in love with Anna's ghost, and believes he once nearly walked through a time warp she had opened for him. He established this with the help of local hypnotists. Oh, Montpelier, what a wonderful town.

And how much do I love that Bob and Anna's living relatives basically held a seance in the tower at some point? Note to future seance participants: Probably not the best idea to read ghosts their own obits.