Category: craft

Not going to say I cut my teeth on this story, quite. What I cut my teeth on, short-fiction-wise, would be Ellen Datlow’s selections for OMNI, way back when. Those stories didn’t just sustain me, they molded me. Recently, when OMNI started all over again, I was maybe going to be in issue #2, even, which would have so wonderfully full-circle. But then, like all good things (he said cynically), it fell apart. Anyway, no, I didn’t cut my teeth on John Updike̵…

That “Letter to a Just Starting-Out Indian Writer” piece I read first at . . . NALS, I think? in 2015 or so? Anyway, read it again at IAIA a year or so later, they Vimeo’d it, but then, these past few months, it had gotten behind a password wall. No longer: it’s free and clickable again (but not embeddable, looks like):

Stephen Graham Jones from IAIA – Low Rez MFA on Vimeo.

• https://vimeo.com/136764357

Because I likely won’t remember to give attribution for each link, I’ll just say it here: probably three-quarters of these paleo type links are from a friend, Joe Lansdale (and all the Apple ones are from my wife). Just, don’t want to pretend I have my thumb on all the good pulses. Rather, I know people with those thumbs. Anyway, on with the reads, starting with the longer stuff:

• “Genetic data on half a million Brits reveal ongoing evolution and Neande

Oh, man, this thing I’m writing, it’s one word away from clicking over into official novel land. And it’s almost two-thirds done, maybe, hopefully:

Would jam through to the end in a few days, but I got a script-thing and a story on February deadline, and, I mean, February is coming up pretty fast . . .

And, for kicks and grins, here’s the playlist I’m cueing up many times a day, since . . . I don’t know: January second, it maybe was? Somewhere a…

Which, before I get into it, let me say: I’m the last dude who should ever do a how-to on anything, except maybe writing a novel or a story. But maybe not even that. However, got one of those 3/4 scale 1-Up Galaga machines for Christmas, and of course love love love it. However? I’m six-plus feet tall, so this of course doesn’t quite work:

Anyway, a quick search of YouTube showed there’s plenty of heigh…

Finally, a text-driven meme. So cool:

I remember not long after House of Leaves came out, with Lethem’s way cool blurb on back, that there was an article or interview somewhere, where he (Lethem) was saying his agent was making him not do blurbs for six months or a year. Just because he, being him, wanted to do them all, of course, and that was clogging up the works. And he’s all of us—me anyway: I want to give each writer, each book whatever small boost I can. 

You can’t, though, I’ve found. See…

Was very cool doing this interview/podcast with them. Nice working with a team, in a studio, and Ken McConnellogue is a superb host. You can listen to it here, or, looks like, just wherever you get your podcastery:

His stuff’s always good to read. Guess this is one reason why: the attention, the do-overs, the insistence on getting it right. We should all be so conscientious, and so articulate about the process. And, I think you have to click on this (the bird-icon works, the arrow-out works) to go to Twitter to read the actual thread? I don’t know . . . once I did SOMEthing where the whole thread embedded, but I haven’t lucked onto that for many a post. So, a launch point in…

Mike Flanagan’s Netflix series, I mean, not Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel*—though? I do kind of wonder if a whole generation will find a re-issue of The Haunting of Hill House, maybe even with a cover from this television series, and consider it this weird old-timey novelization that doesn’t have Theo being a sister, that puts Hugh Crain way in the past instead of at the head of the current family, all that. I mean, the rain of stones will remain, the novel…