Exiles at Home - Fri, 4:00–5:15 pm - Conference 2
Christopher Barzak, M. Rickert, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Sofia Samatar, David J. Schwartz
Five Tales of Longing, Constraint, and general Creepiness. Safe as houses? Think again.

Sipping From the Firehose: Managing Writing and Social Media - Sat, 1:00–2:15 pm - Senate A
Moderator: K. Tempest Bradford. Barth Anderson, Kimberly Gonzalez, Michael J. "Orange Mike" Lowrey, David J. Schwartz
FaceBook, Google+, LiveJournal, Tumblr, Twitter, blog, traditional website: Does a writer need them all? How do they help with self-promotion? How do they help with the isolation of writing? If you participate in social media, how do you keep it all up-to-date and still find time to write?

MUPPETS!!! - Mon, 10:00–11:15 am - Room 634
Moderator: Christopher Davis. Sarah Emrys, Jackie Gross, Joanna Lowenstein, David J. Schwartz
What's been your life experience of The Muppets? Does your age group make a difference in how you feel about them? Did you meet them through Sesame Street, Tales from Muppetland, The Muppet Show, commercials, movies? What did you think of the 2011 film? Can the Muppets be a vehicle for social change?

In addition, I'll be running the Small Beer Press table again, so if you're looking for me I'll be in the Dealer's Room more often than not.

1. Feral Cell by Richard Bowes.
2. Orlando by Virginia Woolf.
3. Fractured by Karin Slaughter.
4. Orsinian Tales by Ursula K. Le Guin.
5. Living to Tell the Tale by Gabriel García Márquez.
6. Undone by Karin Slaughter.

7. Thor by Walter Simonson Omnibus by Walter Simonson, Sal Buscema, et al. This is a pricy item--I was lucky enough to get it as a gift--but man is it worth it. This collection includes Simonson's entire run--The Mighty Thor #337-382, minus 2 non-Simonson fill-in issues but with the 4-issue limited series Balder the Brave included. It is, in my opinion, the second greatest extended run on any regularly published comic ever, the first being Koike and Kojima's Lone Wolf and Cub. Until a couple of years ago, Marvel had never managed to collect the entire run into trades, but this 1100+ page monster (I won't bore you with the complexities of attempting to read it in bed) has it all in glorious color on durable glossy paper, along with an extended glossary of sketches and character designs. But here's why it's great: Simonson blends Eddic source material with a Silver Age Marvel aesthetic, updating the mythmaking of each while walking the line between reverence and disrespect. There's a lot of the Kirby aesthetic to the art--Simonson draws the majority of the run, with Sal Buscema ably filling in for the last several issues--but the story is a little less angsty and a little more coherent than the Stan Lee tradition. The plot is complex without being confusing, with a multi-threaded foreshadowing approach similar to the best of Chris Claremont's X-Men. It starts with the introduction of this guy:



That's Beta Ray Bill, by the way, and if you don't know who he is you're going to love him.

From there the story runs the gamut from the cosmic--Surtur and the fire giants invade Asgard by way of the Big Apple--to the gleefully ridiculous--a transformed Thor leads the frogs of Central Park against the murderous rats of New York City.



And it climaxes with an issue composed entirely of glorious splash pages, as a Thor cursed with brittle bones by Hela battles the Midgard Serpent.

If you can't swing a copy of your own, bug your local librarian, because this is spectacular stuff.

Some good news to report: my story "Today's Friends" will be appearing in a future issue of Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine! This is likely my biggest short fiction sale to date, and I'm very excited about it.

My twisted little fantasy story has been PodCasted. Give it a listen!

1. Feral Cell by Richard Bowes.
2. Orlando by Virginia Woolf.
3. Fractured by Karin Slaughter.
4. Orsinian Tales by Ursula K. Le Guin.
5. Living to Tell the Tale by Gabriel García Márquez.

6. Undone by Karin Slaughter. The Grant County and Atlanta/Will Trent books come together in an extremely satisfying, character-driven way in this book. There's also, of course, some horrific criminal activity going on (and for I think the first time in Slaughter's work, I knew who the culprit was pretty early in the book), as well as the bad behavior and communication gaps that make her books so realistic and frustrating (in a good way). There are only a couple more of these out thus far, so I guess I may finish up Slaughter's oeuvre soon.

My story Bear in Contradicting Landscape is live as part of Apex Magazine's Issue 33. An excerpt:

L’s full name, Logos Agape Varvara, was her father’s way of protesting Vatican II. It meant something like “the wandering word of divine love.” She’d put up with playground taunts until she was twelve, then started using her initials, LAV, as her name. It didn’t take long, however, for the boys to start calling her “LAV-ia,” so she’d given up and started going simply as L, wearing black and reading books on witchcraft. By the time I’d met her, she was working as an embalmer, prepping cadavers with cosmetics and chemicals.

Also in this issue: an interview and a short fiction reprint from Maureen McHugh; fiction from A.C. Wise; poetry from Carrie Vaughn; nonfiction from Alex Bledsoe; and an editorial by the boss, Lynne M. Thomas.

Snow is, next to fog, the most literary of weather conditions. Sleet has no attention span, wind constantly revises, and rain throws everything it writes away. Snow's success in the world of letters can be attributed to its strength as a collaborator. Over the centuries it has worked with many of the world's greatest literary geniuses--all of them, in fact, who have spent enough time at the appropriate latitudes or elevations. But since literary genius is often found huddled near a fireplace, snow works more extensively with professions not always thought of as literary--soldiers, schoolchildren, and cross-country skiers.

Sadly, much of snow's output has been lost, for reasons that should be obvious. What has been preserved is primarily in the polar regions, but many scraps have been preserved by migrating birds, certain satellites, and zephyrs. The collection is kept in the White Library, which has branches in Arkhangelsk, Ellsworth Station in Antarctica (purportedly closed, but accessible to snow-shovelers of 6th level and above), and the shady side of Mt. Everest.

Most works written in snow fall into one or more of three categories, classified as singular collected "books":

1.The Book of Travel. Eloquent in their simplicity, these texts record the movement of beasts and humans throughout history. It was from these works that Mrs. Edith Wallin of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, during a sabbatical from her position as an elementary school secretary, first derived the principle now known as the "First Walker Theory." Wallin had observed the tendency for a succession of persons to scale large ridges of snow by walking in the footfalls of a single intrepid climber. By examining the pages of the Books of Travel for her hometown in the years 1946 to 1992, Wallin discovered that these snow-stiles (as they are known to specialists) always appear in precisely the same spot from year to year, leading her to postulate the existence of a primordial snow-traveler (or travelers) in whose footsteps we are all still walking now.

2.The Book of Names. Recorded using various writing materials--sticks, shovels, mittened hands, and others better left unmentioned (it is perhaps enough to note that a majority of the names written crudely in yellow are male)--this census of the cooler climes is primarily of interest not for the fame of its signatories (few last names are recorded, either because of modesty or a loss of interest) but for the demographic trends it illustrates. For example, the unexpected popularity of the name "Nefertiti" among the Sami people of sixth century Norway, or the fact that in the winter of 1742 the name "Channing" is the only one recorded globally, occurring over 74,000 times. Fans of comic-books may be interested to know that in 1844 the given names of Marvel's Fantastic Four were recorded in mile-wide letters on the surface of Patagonia's glaciers. A few tips, should you choose to add your name to the record: choose an open area, do not attempt a cursive script, and make it large, so that it is clearly visible to birds and satellites.

3.The Book of War. These pages are often in poor condition, worn through to the grass and dirt, stained with red. They are similar to the pages of the Book of Travel in that they show the overlapping movements of men and beasts and vehicles, but the movements in the Book of War are panicked and confused, and few scholars can bear to study them for extended periods. It was in the aftermath of the siege at Arkhangelsk that the White Library was first established, by the ornithomancer Osip Kirichienko. Kirichienko had only managed to save a few of his avian assistants from the city's starving inhabitants; he sent them out to record the battlefield, hoping to create a record that would discourage all future wars. Though Kirichienko's hope was not to be fulfilled, his library still stands, and all branches are open to the general public. Just ask the birds for directions.

1. Feral Cell by Richard Bowes.
2. Orlando by Virginia Woolf.
3. Fractured by Karin Slaughter.
4. Orsinian Tales by Ursula K. Le Guin.

5. Living to Tell the Tale by Gabriel García Márquez. So far this year, I am reading v e r y s l o w l y. This book took me some time to finish, because Gabo's chapters are very long, and his memoir style is sprawling and not terrifically linear--not dissimilar to his fiction style, but with more names and characters who are important for a paragraph or two and then disappear. I'm sure I would have gotten more out of this if I knew more about the literary scene in Colombia in general. I did enjoy Gabo's self-deprecating tone and learning about the inspirations for Macondo and reading about his early years as a directionless, poverty-stricken journeyman writer.

1. Feral Cell by Richard Bowes.
2. Orlando by Virginia Woolf.
3. Fractured by Karin Slaughter.

4. Orsinian Tales by Ursula K. Le Guin. I wish I had a name more like Ursula, because if I was to create a fictional country and name it after myself I think the results would be less elegant and more obvious. Davidia? Doesn't work. I really like what Le Guin has done here; she takes this imaginary nation (which is located somewhere in Europe, probably Eastern Europe) and gives it a reality with stories that take place at different points throughout 800 years of its history. These are not fantasy stories (though one of them has overtones of such), and stylistically they feel a little bit different, as if the literature of Orsinia were distinguished by a sort of stoic melancholy. They aren't fantasy, but they have that flavor of regret. Malafrena, the only novel set in Orsinia, is up next.

1. Feral Cell by Richard Bowes.
2. Orlando by Virginia Woolf.

3. Fractured by Karin Slaughter. After the insane events of Beyond Reach it's perhaps inevitable that this transitional novel would be a little bit of a letdown. It's not that it isn't good, just that there isn't as much history with these characters, and that I miss the folks from Grant County. The next novel will integrate the two, and I'm looking forward to it very much.