Dispatches since 2005
The journal
Announcements, new editions, travel, diving, cooking and the working life of a novelist — 230 entries, all of them here in full.
November 5, 2008 · 67 words
A Remarkable Encounter With One of the Most Significant Writers of This or Any Time
I am interviewed by Charles Tan.“I need people to buy my stuff and to tell perfect strangers how wonderful I am. I need to be interviewed constantly on the nationwide networks. I need people to buy my books as presents for their loved ones. All my books.“What I really need is for the whole universe […]
Read entry →November 5, 2008 · 96 words
Kenya Declares a Holiday
I watched the election results on the BBC, partly in order to avoid having to view the same smug talking heads saying the same smug things, but mainly because they had some really interesting guests, like John Bolton, Christopher Hitchens, Jay McInerny, and Gore Vidal. Vidal was a disappointment, since all he did was i
Read entry →November 5, 2008 · 442 words
Back from Canada
We’re back from Canada and the World Fantasy Convention. I had very little to actually do at the convention— I was on one panel, and my agent took me to a concert, and other than that I had nothing to do but enj0y myself. So I did.One morning I didn’t get to sleep till nearly […]
Read entry →October 30, 2008 · 189 words
Athabaska!
So here we are on the Athabaska Glacier, disembarked from our custom-made Terrabus. Of the 23 Terrabuses in the world, 22 of them take folks out on the ice The 23rd is at McMurdo in Antarctica, and its name is “Ivan the Terrabus.” That’s your Antarctic humor for the day. As you can see from […]
Read entry →October 29, 2008 · 137 words
Turquoise
We have spent the day surrounded by towering mountains, glacier-fed lakes, and douglas fir. This is a picture of Bow Lake, which is distinct from the other Bow Lake, and also from Lac d’Arc, which means “Bow Lake” in French. (Though Kathy’s theory was that Joan of Arc’s family moved here, and the lake was […]
Read entry →October 27, 2008 · 107 words
Sound Familiar?
“While the crash only took place six months ago, I am convinced we have now passed through the worst — and with continued unity of effort we shall rapidly recover. There has been no significant bank or industrial failure. That danger, too, is safely behind us.” – Herbert Hoover, President of the United Stat
Read entry →October 27, 2008 · 518 words
Reviews Too Late: The Sandbaggers
Netflix told me I was going to like The Sandbaggers. Netflix was right.The Sandbaggers is a Cold War espionage drama dating from the 1970s— the length of the characters’ sideburns is a clue that I decoded before I got to the copyright date of MDCCCCLXXVIII. It stars the Young Roy Marsden, who looks surprisingly l
Read entry →October 24, 2008 · 146 words
Jo Walton Sez . . .
Hey, Jo Walton is saying nice things about me over on Tor.com! Williams is a remarkably underrated writer. He’s amazingly versatile and he’s never written the same book twice . . . I’ve been reading him enthusiastically and buying every book he’s written since I fell in love with Knight Moves on that long ago […
Read entry →October 22, 2008 · 237 words
The Starbucks Economy
This from Daniel Gross:“I propose the Starbucks theory of international economics. The higher the concentration of expensive, nautically themed, faux-Italian-branded Frappuccino joints in a country’s financial capital, the more likely the country is to have suffered catastrophic financial losses . . . ” . . . At first
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