One thing got left out of yesterday’s patchwork post. Recently I did HORNS-themed interviews with SFX magazine and The Novel Blog; both have been posted. The SFX interview is fuller and more expansive, but be warned, it contains some low-level spoilers. The Novel Blog gabfest is more general and won’t ruin anything for anyone. The Novel Blog also has an early, very positive review of the book (scroll down).

Like every other ass with a blog and a little free time, I feel obliged to punish you all with a few “Best of ’09″ lists. Let’s get one thing clear, though. When I use the word ‘Best’ I really mean “(What I Liked) Best” which is different from “(What is Objectively, Inarguably, And-You’re-Douchewater-If-You-Don’t-Agree-With-Me) Best.” You see the difference – what does it for me may not do it for you, and that doesn’t make either of us righter or smarter than the other.

So here’s the best of everything I read, saw, and listened to last year. I’ve highlighted my very favorites; the lists that follow, however, are in no particular order. Be warned! It’s possible in the next week or two there will be a dreadful 2nd list, summing up my favorites of the decade. Apologies in advance.

And please, use the comments thread to let me know about your own favorites.

Best of What I Read – 2009:

Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree, Jr.

and

James Tiptree , Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips

Also:

Black Dogs by Ian McEwan

The Daydreamer by Ian McEwan

City of Thieves by David Benioff

Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane

This Book Will Save Your Life by A.M. Holmes

(more…)

I know I’ve been sort of a non-presence here on the blog the last month or two, but I think as September rolls along, I might have a bit more to post.

Two items of note:

• Spike TV hosts a show, the annual Scream Awards (the Screamies?), to honor the best in horror, science fiction, fantasy, and geek-culture-at-large, and it turns out I’m nominated in the Best Comic Book Writer category. Oh hell yes I hope you’ll go over and vote for me. But look, I ain’t kidding myself I’m going to win. I’m not just up against five pretty talented guys… I’m up against five of the very best comic writers of the current century, guys who are working at the very peak of the craft, and who have been at that peak for several years: Brian Vaughan, Grant Morrison, Brian Bendis, Mark Millar, Geoff Johns. I’m tempted to try and come up with a couple catty lines to cut down my competition, but the truth is I love reading all these guys, and I’m blissed out to find myself listed among them. It’s an overused line, but in this case it’s very true and nothing else will do: it is a tremendous honor to be nominated. Getting on that list is my prize.

• The highlight of my trip to Comic Con was the chance to meet Ray Bradbury and shake his hand and pass a word. He’s a wonderful gentleman and one of the great imaginations of our time – a lot of the culture that productions like the Scream Awards celebrate can be traced back to the fevered, bounding imagination of a big-hearted, small town kid named Ray from Waukegan, Illinois.

PS Publishing and Subterreanean Press recently teamed up to do a limited of The Martian Chronicles, featuring the definitive edition of the novel, not one but two screenplay adaptations of the book, and a slew of outtakes… Mars stories that for one reason or another never made it into the final novel. I was asked if I would write an introduction for these “other Mars stories” and I did – with great pleasure (many of these “unseen” Mars stories are as startling and memorable as the ones in the original book). Sub Press just posted my intro on their Chronicles page. It’s a quick read, so if you like Ray, and you’re looking to kill five minutes, here’s the link. (It’s at the bottom of the page – scroll down to find it.)

Hope everyone is well. More soon.

Haven’t posted for a while because I’ve been up to my neck in work. I’m glad to say I made all of my goals for the month, both professional and otherwise – January was good to me. If every month was like January, I’d probably be a much more prolific author.

(I haven’t been blogging, but I didn’t entirely abandon the internet, either; I usually manage to spill a few lines of inane chatter over on Twitter every day. To be honest, posting there is stupidly addictive. Tweets are the internet version of haiku. If you sign-up and want to follow me, you’ll find me as joe_hill… not joehill).

A whole bunch of things I’ve been meaning to mention have stacked up in the last couple weeks, so expect a flurry of posts in the next few days, and then another return to something like radio silence, while I cross items off the February To Do list. Piss on February for only having 28 days. I’ve never liked February. At the end of every February, you’re one month closer to being dead, even though you got screwed out of three days. Think about that. Pretty sketchy, ain’t it?

And here’s one of those things I’ve been meaning to mention. I’ve been keeping a reading diary for 19 years now, and at the end of every year, I do the obligatory top ten list. All of my year-end lists are archived over on LibraryThing… including this year’s. Check it out if you’re curious about some (not all) of my favorites from 2008. It might or might not be useful to know that the 2008 list is actually two top 5 lists, welded together: my 5 favorite works of prose, and my 5 favorite graphic novels.

At the end of this year, I’ll actually have two lists to post. The first will be my favorite books of 2009, and I’ll probably put it up in the middle of December. The second will be my favorite books of the ’00′s and will cover everything from 2000 to 2009, a full decade of reading. What’s going to be on it? Hint: comic books, British writers, and comic books written by British writers.

Mine is “Gimpel the Fool” by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Just something I was thinking about this morning. Yours?

Nearly everyone who writes modern fantasy and horror wishes they could write stories like Kelly Link writes stories. She’ll be at the Public Library in Portsmouth, NH, in the Levinson Room on Wednesday the 7th. RiverRun Books will be co-hosting the event. If you’re in the area, and you haven’t read her, here’s your chance to discover one of the most exciting voices in American fiction (genre or mainstream). If you have read her, then you already know it’ll be worth making the trip to see her.

At 6 PM she’ll be answering questions for the RiverRun “book club” – no formal membership required, however, you can just come right in. And at 7 she’ll read from Pretty Monsters, which collects some old stories with some new ones.

It’ll be fun, you should go.

Happy New Year everyone.

UPDATE: EVENT CANCELLED. Bad weather.

After the jump you’ll find about 1000 words of think on the subject of American Wife and American Widow. My comments include some big spoilers; if you haven’t read the books and you don’t want things ruined for you, go no further.

I tried not to prattle on too long, because I think epic blog entries can be a drag to read. This isn’t, like, a full book review… just some opening thoughts, which hopefully will lead to more conversation.

(more…)

“A book ends when the reader could write the next chapter.”

     – Donald Westlake.

I think that’s great. I’d just add that I think a story ends when a reader can figure out the next paragraph, or the next sentence on their own; when what happens next is so clear it doesn’t need stating.

Warren Ellis was asked if he ever gets writer’s block (and you don’t even need to see his answer to know what a hysterical question that is, considering that at any one time Warren Ellis appears to be juggling 6-ongoing comic titles, a novel, and a TV script or two). HIs reply:

Writer’s block? I’ve heard of this. This is when a writer cannot write? Then that person isn’t a writer anymore. The job is getting up in the morning and fucking writing. If you get up in the morning and you cannot write, you’re something else, aren’t you?

I had writer’s block for about six months, right after I graduated from college. I would have these desperate, stunted sessions in front of my SE/30, staring miserably at an open document with nothing written in it, and no idea what I was doing with myself. Eventually, though, I figured out that writer’s block is generally a result of having something you want to write, and not giving yourself permission to write it, and so your frustrated imagination takes its ball and goes home. As soon as you get out of your own way, you’re fine.

In the years since, I’ve occasionally struggled with something like the opposite of writer’s block. I’ll churn out dozens, sometimes hundreds of pages of stuff that isn’t any good to anyone at all, except me. I go through down periods when I need to do a lot of bad writing, just to get a few pages of decent material. Other times I’ll write a lot of backstory that I just wind up cutting out later on. It was still useful to write it – the backstory helps me understand the characters – there just isn’t any sensible reason for boring the reader with it.

Warren Ellis’s highly addictive blog is here. It’s occasionally NSFW, so go with caution (he has a long standing interest in body modification and just loves to stick up upsetting pictures of people with rings through sensitive parts). I have especially fond feelings for the guy because he once posted the complete script for one of his comics, The Ministry of Space, on his blog, as a Microsoft Word file, which I downloaded and studied. I use the exact same format for the Locke & Key scripts.

(In the interest of proper attribution, the above quote about writer’s block was pinched from a thread on a Warren Ellis message board)

John Scalzi’s blog, The Whatever - a wellspring of hilarious pop cult commentary – is headed toward its tenth anniversary this year, and so I thought I’d celebrate by posting this essential picture of me riding a dinosaur in The Creation Museum. The Creation Museum was, of course, the source of one of John’s typically smart, cheerful essays. He’s also written, with great insight and terrific humor, on a variety of other vital topics, and if you don’t watch out you could spend all day reading him.

Now John is running a contest, inviting you to write him a choice piece of hate mail. Those who despise him most eloquently will not just win copies of his forthcoming book, Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded (which collects the best of his Whatever entries)… your screed will actually be included as a part of the book itself. How cool is that?

Note: the contest has been underway a few days, and ends at midnight on the 25th. So don’t wait. Go forth and get your hate on.

Personally, I’d be glad if the month went on twice as long.

I’ve had a great time, these last few weeks, working on the new novel – something I don’t take for granted, you never know when things are going to go cold on you. Just as good, though, I’ve been reading two of my all-time favorite writers in the world, going back and forth between Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, and Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentleman: Black Dossier, and I’m so giddy about the both of them I can hardly stand it. Graveyard Book is everything everyone loves about Neil Gaiman, only multiplied many times over, a novel that showcases his effortless feel for narrative, his flawless instincts for suspense, and above all, his dark, almost silky sense of humor. And Black Dossier is a dizzying ride through the extremes of Alan Moore’s imagination, a journey that lifts the reader, again and again, into erudite heights, only to plummet them back down into a trough of perversion and nastiness. What a blast.

And finally, as if all that weren’t enough to make a nearly perfect month, I learned yesterday that Heart-Shaped Box won the First Novel prize at the Stoker awards. I guess that’s a pretty good way to wrap up my March. My thanks to the HWA; I’m honored.

Honored, and particularly psyched for the other Stoker winners. Below are just a few of those winners… check ‘em out, why don’t you, and see what all the fuss is about:

From left to right: The Missing by Sarah Langan (BEST NOVEL); 5 Stories by Peter Straub (tied for BEST COLLECTION with Proverbs for Monsters); and Five Strokes to Midnight (BEST ANTHOLOGY – also includes Gary Braunbeck’s “Afterward, There Will Be A Hallway,” which won for BEST LONG FICTION). The complete list of this year’s Stoker winners is right here.