CLARION AUCTION AND TWO NEW COLUMNS

Er, 'cause you know I haven't done enough interviews this year...

UPDATE: The first deadline for the Clarion auction has passed and the Ambergris item has gone for $250. James Crossley is the winner, on behalf of his son, Jasper Marlowe Anthony Crossley-Blasio. For the current story, that will translate into the Marlowe-Crossley Effect and for the two future Ambergris novels, into much more, including at least one mention of the full name. I'm happy to have such a rich name to work with. :)

There's about an hour and a half remaining on the Clarion auction VanderMeer item: namely, embedding you into the Ambergris milieu.

In other news, I am definitely doing two new monthly columns.

The first will be a comics/graphic novel column for Bookslut called Smacky For You. In the first installment, I review Alan Moore's Lost Girls, A.L.I.E.E.E.N. by Lewis Trondheim, and Rumo by Walter Moers, in addition to talking about the Indian comics of my youth.

The second column will be about SF/F/H for SF Site and it is tentatively entitled Adventures in the Ink Trade. It will have a video component most of the time, in addition to traditional print interviews with people like Jonathan Strahan, mini book reviews, and commentary on "issues of the day" as they say. It will debut November 1.

I'm not getting paid for either column and I'll be doing each one for a year, at which point both sides will re-evaluate the value and quality before going forward.

So, I'm not getting paid and yet I'm going to be spending about 8 to 10 hours a month writing these columns. Am I nuts? No, I'm not nuts. I'm doing the comics column because I love comics and I'm passionate about them. I'm doing the SF Site column because I know and love genre fiction, and I think doing a monthly column will help me focus more of my enthusiasms into a single and more coherent focus than at present. Which isn't to say I won't be doing blog entries, but you'll be more likely to find book recommendations and other things of that nature in the SF Site column.

I also feel that with the loss of Emerald City and the sometimes heated discussion about reviewing in general on the internet that it's a good time to harness some of my blawg energy in a more public forum.

Jeff

At night, only half the street lamps in Ambergris worked, but all across the skyline phosphorescence dripped and bled and hazed in and hazed out again. Sometimes, a cloud of vermillion spores would form in mid-air and settle down over a building, stretching across its bricks or wood or stone like a second skin, before moving on or dissipating. In one extreme case, Finch had seen the spores take on the form of a huge, bloated green monster with spiraling red eyes. It had bellowed and dived down into a neighborhood to the north, smashing itself into motes against the ground.