I was talking with a writing friend who pointed to Delany’s writing book, where in part Delany talks about “everything he’s had to sacrifice to become the writer that he is: wealth, health, friends, lovers, etc.” I’m thinking about inserting a little bit about this subject into Booklife while I do the final round of substantial edits this week.

What is sacrifice in this context? What is it you’ve given up? Do you regret giving it up? What won’t you give up for your writing? What have others given up for your writing?

Feel free to post a comment anonymously as necessary.

(growing a beard is easy, except for those not trying hard enough, erm, trying hard enough, actually)

(more…)

Note: Read no further if easily offended…

(more…)

My latest Graphic Novel Friday feature on Omnivoracious:

“In simple but unsparing panels, Tatsumi describes not only the setbacks to his career but his fundamental loneliness–a loneliness that seems ameliorated by his immersion in the comics world. Encounters with women are few and far between, and often end in embarrassment or sadness. Woven into the narrative are portraits of his envious brother, his father’s financial problems, and a Japan recovering from defeat to forge a new identity still rooted in the past.”

Mord’s reign on Facebook has come to an end, but here are the highlights from yesterday, following up on my last post. (Mord is a [nonspeaking] character in a short novel I’m working on, fragment from which can be found here.)

(more…)

Mord’s reign on Facebook has come to an end, but here are the highlights from yesterday, following up on my last post. (Mord is a [nonspeaking] character in a short novel I’m working on, fragment from which can be found here.)

(more…)

UPDATE 4/10: Great. Now the National Post thinks I’m mad.

Colin Brush on the Penguin Blog has the cojones to suggest I’ve gone insane from doing the 60 in 60:

It is a sad thing to watch a writer go off the rails. But in these Twittered, My-Faced, Spacebooked, blog-rolled times, any meltdown is bound to be tragically public…[long garble about my insanity]…Then on Tuesday, this post appeared on his blog (see the not-at-all-disturbing screen-grab above). Who knows what possessed him when he wrote it? Guilt perhaps. Shame maybe. Alcohol certainly. But also there is a kind of insane defiance at work here. The 60 days have long passed. The war is over, the battle lost. Yet he’s soldiering on nevertheless.

It’s true the news that a fourth army of 20 titles is forthcoming put a momentary icicle through the part of my brain not yet numbed by my reading thus far, but I am not in any way insane.

To prove, it, I am posting selections from my Facebook status messages for the last day or so (along with related comments), since these should provide a valid snapshot of my state of mind. Proving, of course, that I’m just fine.

(more…)

“In the early era of cybernetics and information theory following the Second World War, two distinctly new types of machine appeared. The first, the computer, was initially associated with war and death–breaking secret codes and calculating artillery trajectories and the forces required to trigger atomic bombs. But the second type, a new kind of liminal machine, was associated with life, inasmuch as it exhibited many of the behaviors that characterize living entities–homeostasis, self-directed action, adaptability, and reproduction. Neither fully alive nor at all inanimate, these liminal machines exhibited what I call machinic life, mirroring in purposeful action the behavior associated with organic life while also suggesting an altogether different form of ‘life,’ an ‘artificial’ alternative, or parallel, not fully answerable to the ontological priority and sovereign preprogatives of the organic.”

“The streaks running down the stucco front of the Palmyra were black, but that wasn’t surprising because it was bang in the middle of the rough end of Earls Court, and everything was black round there. Once, like the others in the street, it must have been a family house, but as far back as people could remember it had always been known as a hotel called the Palmy, the last two letters of its name having tired and dropped out of the game. Weeds sprouted out of the cracks in its roof and raddled Victorian portico, and it looked what it was, a fifth-rate rooming-house with a heavy turnover in transients much frequented by the bailifffs, plain-clothes filth, and debt collectors. It was the kind of place where the week’s rent always fell due the day the rain came down, when depression drifted into the room like smoke under a door and the money ran out.”

(Jango and me, checking out the links.)

A few links for a Wednesday–some really interesting stuff, I think. I’m pretty happy with how the Lennon review turned out, too.

(more…)

As the above photo shows, I’ve been preoccupied with shooting down deadlines. The 60 in 60 on the Penguin Great Ideas series should resume next week–who knew I meant 60 books in 60 years–but in the meantime, I’ve been prepping by reading the back covers and first page of each one (cheating? who knows). To give you a preview based on my gleanings, here are my three-line non-trad haikus on each. Prepare to be horrified.

(more…)