Not a Blog

Merry Minions

December 31, 2021 at 9:26 am
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Here’s hoping that all my friends and readers out there had a wonderful holiday.   I hope that Santa Claus was kind to you, and that neither Krampus nor Nackles turned up at your door with a big black bag.

We had a good Christmas here in Santa Fe.

One of the highlights was our annual Fevre River Packet Company holiday dinner.

The merry minions are, L to R, Lenore, Elias, Sid, Raya, and Andrea.   (Amy and Sarah were unable to make it).

I’m Gru, of course.

Current Mood: happy happy

Gobble Gobble

November 25, 2021 at 7:53 am
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Wishing a Happy Thanksgiving for all my friends, fans, and readers.

It has been another wretched year, but most of us still have  a lot to be thankful for.   I certainly do.

Enjoy your meat and mead.

 

Current Mood: loved loved

Words For Our Times

May 5, 2021 at 6:49 pm
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Current Mood: contemplative contemplative

Not A Blogging

April 13, 2021 at 4:39 pm
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Way back when on LiveJournal, when I started this column or journal or whatever it is, I called it my “Not A Blog,” because I could see that regular blogging was a lot of work, and I didn’t think I had the time to devote to it.   I was late on a book even then, though I do not recall which one.  I figured I would just make posts from time to time, when I had an important announcement, when the mood struck me, whatever.

Somehow, though, over the decades, the Not A Blog became a blog, and what I had intended as a occasional pleasure and a way to stay in touch with my readers has become a Blog (ironically, at the same time as everyone else was abandoning their blogs for Facebook and Twitter), complete with a sense of obligation.   And when a lot of stuff happens very fast, I fall further and further behind.

I am hugely behind right now, and the prospect of trying to catch up is feeling increasingly oppressive.

My life has become one of extremes these past few months.   Some days I do not know whether to laugh or cry, to shoot off fireworks and dance in the streets or crawl back into bed and pull the covers over my head.   The good stuff that has been happening to me has been very very very good, the kind of thing that will make a year, or a career.  But the bad stuff that is happening has been very very very bad, and it is hard to cherish the good and feel the joy when the shadows are all around.

If any of you read the stories about me on the internet, you will know my good news.   I have a new five-year deal with HBO, to create new GOT successor shows (and some non-related series, like ROADMARKS) for both HBO and HBO Max.  It’s an incredible deal, an amazing deal, very exciting, and I want to tell you all about it… although it seems the press has already done it.   There are stories in all the trades.   You can read about it there.    (These days I almost never get to break any news about myself, the Hollywood press is always ahead of me.   Some of their stories are even accurate).   I will blog about it, I expect, but not today.

On the other side of the coin… well, I am now fully vaccinated, hurrah hurray, that’s good.   However, I have now lost six friends since November.  (Only a couple to Covid.   Alas, I am old, and so are many of my friends.   Valar morghulis, I guess).   And a seventh friend, a very old and dear friend who has been a huge part of my life for a long time, is in the hospital, very sick, recovering from surgery… at least we hope he is recovering.

Honestly, it is hard to dance in the streets even for the deal of a lifetime when another loved one dies every two/ three weeks, and that has been going on for me since November, when my longtime editor Kay McCauley passed away.

There’s lots more going on as well.   Meow Wolf stuff.   Railroad stuff.   Beastly Books has reopened, but the JCC is still shuttered.   The Jets traded Sam Darnold away.   I am going to be leaving my cabin in a couple of months.    I am close to delivering  PAIRING UP, a brand new Wild Cards book.

I will tell you about some of this, I guess.   But not today.

Current Mood: tired tired

Golden Glory

October 18, 2020 at 8:50 am
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New Mexico truly is the Land of Enchantment.   And fall is my favorite time of year here.

(No, not because Winter Is Coming).

Our autumns are gloriously golden.   We don’t get the reds and oranges they have up in New England, but the aspens and cottonwoods all turn gold.  It does not last long, but then again, all beauty is fleeting.   Seeing entire forests and mountainsides glowing in gold always lifts my heart.

(And these days, with the world the way it is, my heart is often in need of lifting).

Current Mood: contemplative contemplative

Another Nameday

September 24, 2020 at 8:43 am
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I had a pretty nice birthday.   And thanks to all my fans and friends who sent me greetings by email, text, or (in one case) card.

Parris came up to the mountains to visit me in my fortress of solitude, the first time she has checked out the cabin, and I was thrilled and delighted to be able to spend some time with her.   She brought me a wondrous present, a  wolf from the same Santa Fe artist who made my ravens.   I will need to take a picture and post it here.  He’s marvelous.   My thanks to Dahlia, her right hand and assistant, for helping her make the trip.

My assistant Sid, who is an incredible baker (she owned her own coffee and pastry shop when she was only eighteen, before coming to work for me) baked us a birthday cake from scratch, a gorgeous… and delicious… red velvet cake with cream cheese icing.

I got several other nice gifts as well, among them some amazing old vinyl albums, including old Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers radio dramas, and an album of JFK’s speeches.   Which is uplifting and depressing at the same time, when one contemplates how far we have fallen.   My thanks to my friend Ti Mikkel for the thoughtful present.

Come evening, we watched the Emmy Awards.   A very strange Emmy night.   Jimmy Kimmel did a nice job hosting, playing to an empty auditorium, and I got a hoot out of the big robo-boxes that John Oliver and a few others received, with a big hand that burst out clutching an Emmy when the winner was announced.   Congratulations to all of this year’s winners…. and to the losers.    I have lost quite a few myself, I will always have a soft spot in my heart for the bridesmaids… whether Emmy losers or Hugo losers.   It IS an honor just to be nominated.

In addition to the pandemic-inspired weirdness, it also felt odd for me personally.   For ten of the past eleven years, I have attended the Emmy Awards in LA… including last year, when GAME OF THRONES won its fourth for Best Drama.   But I have to say, it was much more relaxing to be watching from home.   The big Hollywood awards ceremonies are exciting, beyond a doubt, but they are also very stressful… and exhausting, especially for an old codger like me.

And there is no doubt, I am an old codger.   As of the 20th, I turned 72.   Damn.   When did THAT happen?   The years have gone by so quickly, it seems.  Inside I certainly do not feel 72.  Hell, scratch me and that kid who wrote those letters to Stan & Jack and stories for dittoed comics fanzines is right below the surface.   Truth be told, birthdays tend to depress me these days.   And this year… ancient as I may be, there is no doubt that 2020 is the worst year I have ever lived through (I never thought any year could be as bad as 1968, till now)… I think the occasion might really have gotten to me, if not for that fact I was surrounded by friends and loved ones.   Thanks to them, I did have a happy birthday.

Current Mood: happy happy

Words For Our Times

July 23, 2020 at 5:35 pm
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Current Mood: quixotic quixotic

Writing, Reading, Writing

June 23, 2020 at 9:38 am
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I have to confess, after half a year of pandemic, quarantine, and social distancing, I am showing signs of cabin fever… half of which is quite literal in my case.  Yes, I am in an actual cabin in the mountains.   No, I have no fever.   Yay!   For the present at least, I am healthy… for an out-of-shape guy of 71, at least … and doing all I can to stay that way.

If nothing else, the enforced isolation has helped me write.   I am spending long hours every day on THE WINDS OF WINTER, and making steady progress.   I finished a new chapter yesterday, another one three days ago, another one the previous week.   But no, this does not mean that the book will be finished tomorrow or published next week.   It’s going to be a huge book, and I still have a long way to go.   Please do not give any credence to any of the click-bait websites that like to parse every word of my posts as if they were papal encyclicals to divine hidden meanings.

I was heartbroken when CoNZealand was forced to go virtual due to the pandemic and I had to cancel my plans (exciting plans) for a long trip down to Wellington with Parris and my minions… but there is definitely a silver lining in that cloud.   The last thing I need right now is a long interruption that might cost me all the momentum I have built up.   I can always visit Wellington next year, when I hope that both Covid-19 and THE WINDS OF WINTER will be done.

I still plan to host the Hugo Awards and fulfill all the rest of my toastmasterly duties for worldcon, and have started pre-recording some bits for the ceremony (a wise precaution, since I am hopeless with Zoom and Skype and like things), but that is a lot less time-consuming and distracting than flying to the other end of the world.   In between tapings, I return to Westeros.   Of late I have been visiting with Cersei, Asha, Tyrion, Ser Barristan, and Areo Hotah.   I will be dropping back into Braavos next week.    I have bad days, which get me down, and good days, which lift me up, but all in all I am pleased with the way things are doing.

I do wish they would go faster, of course.   Way way back in 1999, when I was deep in the writing of A STORM OF SWORDS, I was averaging about 150 pages of manuscript a month.   I fear I shall never recapture that pace again.   Looking back, I am not sure how I did it then.    A fever indeed.

Anyway… when I am not writing, or thinking about writing, I am watching television and reading.    Publishers send me huge piles of books, so my “to be read” pile is always growing, no many how many books I consume.   Of course, I also buy books as well.   Cannot help it, I am a book junkie.   The new Stephen King collection IF IT BLEEDS was one recent favorite.  I love these novella collections that King comes out with from time to time between his novels.   This one features a new Holly Gibney story, and it is always great to see that character again… but there’s also a story called “Rat” about a writer trying to finish a novel in an isolated cabin which… ah… resonated with me rather strongly for some reason.   One bit, where the writer gets derailed trying to figure out how many rocking chairs a sheriff could fit on his porch, was a dead-on depiction of the kind of stuff I go through all the time.   Steve’s protagonist gets some help when a dead rat turns up to be his muse.  So far, no rats at my cabin.    Sid did catch a couple of mice last year, but she made pets of them.  And Timmy and TomTom were no help whatsoever with WINDS.   (Please don’t send me long emails about the dangers of mice, we know all that stuff).

Another recent book that really knocked me out was THE GLASS HOTEL, the latest by Emily St. John Mandel.    A few years back, she wrote a (ahem) post-pandemic SF novel called STATION ELEVEN which I loved at the time and now devoutly hope is not going to prove prophetic.  It was my favorite novel of that year, and I thought it deserved to win the Hugo and the Nebula.   Which it didn’t, alas.   But I had Emily at my theatre for an author event, which was great, and snapped up her three earlier novels.  I really liked those too.   Now comes her latest, THE GLASS HOTEL.  No, this one is not science fiction or fantasy.  In fact, I would be hard pressed to say what it is except a damn fine novel.   It is about a hotel in a remote location, the people who work there, the people who stay there, it is about a Ponzi scheme, and art, and music, and a dysfunctional family, and… oh, well, I don’t know what it is about, but I do know that once I started reading, I could not stop.   When people describe a book as a “page turner,” usually they are talking about novels that have a lot of plot, which Mandel definitely does not, yet somehow she keeps me turning pages regardless.   And she writes just beautifully.   Her prose is not overblown or excessively ornate, as is the case with too many writers who are known as “stylists,” but… it is just lovely, haunting and evocative and immersive…   I guess you can say I am a big Emily St. John Mandel fanboy.   I look forward to whatever she writes next.

There are other things going on in my life as well.   I bought a railroad… well, I bought a third of a railroad.   See the post below.   Hollywood has slowed to a crawl thanks to the pandemic, but THE HOUSE OF THE DRAGON is still flying along wonderfully, thanks to Ryan Condal and his writers, and the tireless Ti Mikkel.   With my producer hat on, I am still involved in trying to bring Nnedi Okorafor’s brilliant WHO FEARS DEATH to the small screen, and relaunch the WILD CARDS tv project.   We have feature films in development adapted from my stories “Sandkings” and “The Ice Dragon” and “The Lost Lands,” television shows in development based on works by Roger Zelazny and Tony Hillerman, there are the secret shorts we’re doing that… well, no, if I spilled that, it wouldn’t be secret.

But up here on the mountain, all of that that seems very distant, and much of it has stuttered to a halt in any case, until Covid goes away.

Mostly, it’s just me in Westeros, with occasional side trips to other places in the pages of a great book.

Now you will have to excuse me.   Arya is calling.   I think she means to kill someone.

Current Mood: contemplative contemplative

No Fooling

April 2, 2020 at 12:53 pm
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April is here, though up where I am there is still a lot more snow than flowers.

The weirdness continues, all around the world.  Sometimes it is hard to recall how much has changed in just one month.

Regular readers of my Not A Blog and the Wild Cards website know that I usually do an April Fools post.   We have had some great ones over the years, even fooled a few people.   Not this year, though.  None of the ideas we were playing with seemed quite appropriate, with everything that is going on.  Or maybe I just wasn’t feeling very funny.

Science Fiction writers are supposed to be good at predicting the future (that’s a myth, actually, but never mind), but I have to confess, I have no notion where or when any of this is going to end.   I can see half a dozen branching alternatives, some of which are very grim indeed, and some much less so.  One does not want to be too alarmist, of course.   But at the same time, it would be folly to be too dismissive of the dangers.  All we can do is shelter in place, keep an eye on the news, and take this day by day.

The Jean Cocteau Cinema and Beastly Books remain closed.   When I first shut them down a few weeks ago, it was only for a month… the idea being that we would re-evaluate on April 15 and see where things stood then.   As I write this, on April 2, that April 15 date is looking wildly optimistic.   If things change at all in the next two weeks, they are likely to be changing for the worse, not the better.   Most likely, then, both cinema and bookstore will need to remain closed… for how long, I have no idea.

Our mail-order service at Beastly Books remains open, however.   Unlike Amazon, we don’t sell toilet paper or medical equipment, so nothing will take priority over your book orders.   Take a look at the selection at https://jeancocteaucinema.com/product-category/signed-books/

All  our books are autographed, and reading is one of the best ways to pass the time while quarantined.  (I know I am doing a lot of it).  Also, truth be told, your book purchases will help us keep paying our staff at the cinema and bookstore, since there is no other source of income at present.   And we have some great, great titles in stock.

In other virus-related news, conventions and festivals and sporting events continue to cancel or postpone all over the world.   Including SF cons.   Some of them, I fear, may never come back, since — in some cases, not all — venues and hotels are refusing to let the events out of their contracts, which means the sponsoring organizations could have huge debts with no income to help offset the costs.   This year’s Nebula Weekend is going virtual.   Some of the writer’s workshops at which I sponsor scholarships — Clarion, Clarion West, Odyssey, and the Taos Toolbox — may need to do the same.   None of them have made that determination yet, since the workshops are still months away, but I know all of them are exploring their options.

The biggest news in that regard is that this year’s worldcon, CoNZealand, has also decided to go virtual.   I know what a difficult decision that was for the Kiwis, who have worked so hard bidding and winning the con, and dreamed so long of bringing fandom to their magical island.   New Zealand is one of my favorite places in the world, and Parris feels the same way.  We have been there several times before, and I know we will visit again… just not this year, alas.  I gather that pushing the con back to late 2020 or early 2021 was not feasible, for various logistical reasons, which meant that going online was the only real alternative to cancellation.   How that will work, I have no idea.   No one does, really.  It has never been done before.   The technical aspects are going to be daunting, no doubt… but I know that everyone concerned is going to do their best.   Fingers crossed.

If there is a silver lining in these clouds, this will give me more time to finish WINDS OF WINTER.   I continue to write every day, up here in my mountain fastness.

Want something to read while you’re waiting?  This would be a good time to check out my Wild Cards series, if you haven’t done so already.  There are twenty-nine of them (some still in the pipeline), which should keep you reading for a good long time.   If it is more Westeros you want, and you just know A SONG OF ICE & FIRE, take a look at A KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS (the Dunk & Egg novellas) and FIRE & BLOOD (wherein you will find the source material for the new HBO series, HOUSE OF THE DRAGON).   And there are some other wonderful writers out there as well.   The QUILLIFER series by Walter Jon Williams is the best work WJW has ever done, and I am really enjoying the new AFTERSHOCKS series from Marko Kloos.

Need something to binge watch?  The third season of OZARK is riveting, HBO’s recent Stephen King mini-series THE OUTSIDER is a faithful, engrossing adaptation of his novel, and the DOCTOR SLEEP film is very good as well.   I am also really enjoying THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA, an adaptation of the Philip Roth novel that seems more timely than ever before.   And WESTWORLD and BETTER CALL SAUL are must watch too.

However you spend your days, my friends, stay safe.

Current Mood: anxious anxious

Trick or Treat

November 2, 2019 at 9:39 pm
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A friend sent me this cartoon, which I think is very cute.

Unfortunately, it isn’t true.   For whatever reason, our neighborhood gets almost no trick or treaters.  Damned if I know why.   It’s a safe enough neighorhood, and Parris and my minions and I always stock lots of candy.

This year was the absolute nadir.   We got no one at all, not even people we know with a kid in tow.

A pity.   Halloween used to be my favorite holiday when I was a kid.   I usually went as a monster of one sort or another, and I was fearless trick or treater, prowling late into the night and knocking on doors blocks and blocks from home, on streets I seldom visited during daylight hours.   That brief glimpse into the homes of strangers when the door was opened was part of the thrill.   In those days you got the usual candy, sure, but also cooler treats, cookies and home baked pies and brownies and little cakes, the caramel apple (no razor blades, that urban myth was years in the future).   Nor would it ever have dawned on me to bring my mother along.   I would have been mortified.    All Hallows Eve was for ghoulies and ghosties and kids.

Halloween isn’t what it was, alas.

Current Mood: melancholy melancholy