So in another twenty minutes, Rami might make it to fashion week on Project Runway. For those of you who follow the show, Rami likes to drape. He drapes his dresses. Every damn dress is some kind of drapery. Kinda like the foams of that guy on Top Chef.

Well, at least I know why he has this obsession. In the outtakes on the Bravo website, he explains that his first major sexual encounter was with a high school teacher who had come to his house to tutor him, and they did it behind the livingroom drapes. Ever since, draping and drapery has been imprinted on his fashion soul.

Knowing this does not in any way make it right. STOP THE DRAPERY!

I realize this entire post may be incomprehensible to large numbers of my readers.

Jeff

In addition to running his livejournal, Jason Erik Lundberg is a writer and editor who, with his wife Janet Chui, runs Two Cranes Press. TCP put out Scattered, Covered, Smothered (fiction about food/cooking) and has a new antho coming out soon. In 2008, his writing will see publication in Subterranean Mag, Farrago’s Wainscot, Sybil’s Garage, Tiny Stories, and Strange Horizons. In addition to all of that, he podcasts, including a reading of my story “Appoggiatura” from John Klima’s Loghorrea anthology. In the middle of all of this activity, he up and moved to Singapore. I thought it would be interesting to interview him about his various projects, and what it’s like to live in Asia.

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My SciFi Weekly review of Inferno, edited by Ellen Datlow:

This is the brief at the smoldering heart of Inferno: to provide the reader with a heart-pounding moment of shock or dread. But horror is about more than that jolt, and the majority of stories in Inferno work well because the writers are willing to push their concepts and their characters to the brink. The best examples of this willingness to go beyond come from two of the Young Turks in the anthology, Barron and Ballingrud, both of whom are known exclusively for their short fiction.

On Amazon’s book blog:

Tiny Books, Big Imaginations
Why do I like small books? Well, when I’m on vacation, it’s a great rationalization for buying books in the first place: Oh, I’ll just get this microscopic book here, that I have to pick up with tweezers. That way, it’ll fit in my luggage. Of course, I wind up buying so many tiny books using that rationale that I wind up with less space than if I’d just bought big books to begin with.

Are You Feeling Better?
In Better, now out in trade paperback, Gawande focuses on issues like hand-washing (if everyone in hospitals did it, many more lives would be saved), medical malpractice suits (the issue is more complicated than you might think), and advances in saving lives on the battlefield (due mostly to improved processes rather than new technology).

Various linkage

Ann and I finally have an emerging schedule for the year, and as you can see it’s somewhat crowded–and likely to get more crowded on the events side, since several other things are pending; we are highly chuffed about the Czech thing, which just happened yesterday.

Re the projects, you’ll note we have six anthos coming out this year–each radically different from the last. Sometimes it just happens that way. So just bear with me as I babble on about one thing or the other. We’re excited about each of these projects and each of them will have our full attention. (The pirate antho date was just fixed for October and we’re in the process of letting the contributors know.) Things are off to a good start with several amazing developments for The New Weird antho that I’ll share in the coming weeks.

APPEARANCES
Feb – South Carolina Book Fair guests
March – Keynote speaker, Arizona Convocation of librarians
April – I-CON guests
August – Czech Republic convention in Pilsen (with China Mieville, Les Edwards, and Steph Swainston)

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