Until I saw this article, I thought I was just crazy–people kept replying to emails I couldn’t remember sending. But it turns out if you sleepwalk, you can send emails in your sleep. Here are a few of the emails I sent out. Anybody had a similar experience?

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This blog post is part of my ongoing “60 Books in 60 Days” encounter with the Penguin Great Ideas series–the Guardian’s book site of the week and mentioned on the Penguin blog. (Their latest post comments on the first 20.) From mid-December to mid-February, I will read one book in the series each night and post a blog entry about it the next morning. For more on this beautifully designed series, visit Penguin’s page about the books.

An Attack on an Enemy of Freedom
by Cicero (106-43 BC)

Memorable Line
“Senators, after the deeds that I have done, death actually seems to me desirable. Two things only I pray for. One, that in dying I may leave the Roman people free—the immortal gods could grant me no greater gift. My other prayer is this: that no man’s fortunes may fail to correspond with his services to our country!”

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Received via website feedback form:
Dear Mr. VanderMeer, I have to admit right off the bat that I’m not terribly familiar with your work; though I’ve seen your name on the shelves at stores and on various contents pages while thumbing through anthologies, the only real contact I’ve had with your fiction comes from book reviews. But I recently noticed something unintentional about my own (unpublished) writing, and I figured the best way to find the answer to the question it raised was to ask you directly (it will make sense in a second). I’m an aspiring writer and I’ve been working on a novella recently. After watching a documentary about the ocean I decided on a whim to give the society about which I was writing the quirk that they venerated octopuses as sacred animals, and to make their faith and culture full of octopus-imagery. I thought I was being terribly original, but recently I remembered reading about your own Ambergris stories, and the importance squid have in Ambergris.

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For an upcoming story about the nature of dreams, I’m writing about an adjunct professor at a strange college in the South. The recipe is as follows, always remembering that without love, inspiration, and discipline nothing in this world is more than merely edible:

1 character from my imagination and memories from university, conjured up from the thought of someone leaving the Natural History Museum in disgrace

1 torn-out Harper’s article on subsistence food made from glue and boots (Stalingrad defenders)

1 torn-out Harper’s article on the calcified ashes of prisoners (recently discovered)

1 book on the Natural History Museum, cataloguing all of its eccentricities

3 photocopied pages of various techniques or maneuvers carried out by John Le Carre (in particular, one page demonstrating how to create subtle differences between two characters, one page showing how to manage progressions in a scene, and one page with an interesting way of showing deafness).

Add a dash or two of:

Let boil for three or four weeks, and it’ll come out of the oven hot, compact, and delicious (although you might have to have an acquired taste for ink and papyrus). Serves anywhere from one to a couple hundred thousand, depending on your good or bad fortune.

This blog post is part of my ongoing “60 Books in 60 Days” encounter with the Penguin Great Ideas series–the Guardian’s book site of the week and mentioned on the Penguin blog. (Their latest post comments on the first 20.) From mid-December to mid-February, I will read one book in the series each night and post a blog entry about it the next morning. For more on this beautifully designed series, visit Penguin’s page about the books.

Sensation and Sex
by Lucretius (99-55 BC)

Memorable Line
“For the barrenness of the males is due in some cases to the over-coarse grain of the seed, in others to excessive fineness and fluidity. The fine seed, because it cannot stick fast in its place, slips quickly away and returns abortive. The coarser type, because it is emitted in too cohesive a form, either does not travel with enough momentum, or fails to penetrate where it is required…”

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I am enjoying the heck out of this book. Not only does it combine disciplines and subjects of interest to writer and reader, it talks in unique ways about form in fiction. This is especially useful after you acquire a certain level of mastery, by which I mean you might pick up a regular writing book every once in awhile as a kind of refresher, but there are few books on craft specifically for writers in mid- or late career. Maps of the Imagination isn’t meant to be that book, either, but that turns out to be a tangential benefit of reading it. Some images below the cut.

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This blog post is part of my ongoing “60 Books in 60 Days” encounter with the Penguin Great Ideas series–the Guardian’s book site of the week and mentioned on the Penguin blog. (Their latest post comments on the first 20.) From mid-December to mid-February, I will read one book in the series each night and post a blog entry about it the next morning. For more on this beautifully designed series, visit Penguin’s page about the books.

The Symposium
by Plato (429-347 BC)

Memorable Line
“Socrates sat down and said, ‘How splendid it would be, Agathon, if wisdom was the sort of thing that could flow from the fuller to the emptier of us when we touch each other, like water, which flows through a piece of wool from a fuller cup to an emptier one.”

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It’s been a great year for Weird Tales, and Stephen Segal emailed to say that on their website they have a great round-up, making a case for being nominated for a Hugo in the semi-prozine category. Below the cut I’m stealing from Sir Tessa’s recent post, because I’m lazy (hope she’ll forgive me).

Especially note the fiction you can read online, from various issues this year. I’d like to second Sir Tessa’s enthusiastic endorsement of “Renovations”. I’m frankly shocked that this amazing story hasn’t been taken for a year’s best.

Anyway, check it out, and check out the rest–there’s so much great stuff there. Ann has a sure eye and a unique skill for picking great stories by new writers. (More on Ann in 2008 here.) So take advantage of it–read some online fiction. And think about nominating for the Hugo if you think it’s worthy.

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A blunt sharp shock to the system…

Cover: By the amazing John Coulthart. For a larger version, click here. An interesting fact–John tells me the cobblestones in the picture are from a photo he took while we were walking through Paris together; er, sans blood. (This design is semi-final, in that a blurb will probably occupy the space under my name.)

Publisher: Underland Press, October 31, 2009, trade paper

Description: A noir thriller/visionary fantasy set in the failed state of Ambergris, 100 years after Shriek: An Afterword. The gray caps, mysterious underground inhabitants, have re-conquered Ambergris and put the city under martial law, disbanding House Hoegbotton, and controlling the human inhabitants with strange addictive drugs, internment in camps, and random acts of terror. The rebel resistance is scattered, and the gray caps are using human labor to build two strange towers. Against this backdrop, John Finch, who lives alone with a cat and a lizard, must solve an impossible double murder for his gray cap masters while trying to make contact with the rebels.

Nothing is as it seems as Finch and his disintegrating partner Wyte negotiate their way through a landscape of spies, rebels, and deception. Trapped by his job and the city, Finch is about to come face to face with a series of mysteries that will change him and Ambergris forever.

The cat and the lizard watch intently. Something is about to happen. And they both want to know: who is Finch, really?

(A favorite new cover: just another day at the office with my needle-fanged maggot-parasite.)

A slow week as publicists everywhere uncurl from their cryogenic cyborg slumber in sensory deprivation tanks and slowly take up again once more their ancestral positions influencing the minds of gatekeepers across the multiverse. Processing new permutations of press release boilerplate at the rate of a billion bytes a second. Sixth sense straining to discern through the ether the presence of new reviewers, pink and naked under that merciless, predatory gaze, and to make out, too, the dark husks of reviewers gone belly up, forwarding address unknown, once more escaping the Life into life… (Gawd, I’ve got to start another piece of fiction soon.)

Anyway, here’s some Morgan, some great new stuff from Alterna Comics, an outfit I hadn’t heard of before (I’ll be reviewing some of this for Amazon), and a new fixture: a classic book cover to punctuate the post with an exclamation mark rather than a period.

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