Readers may already remember Margo Lanagan from the beer-and-book posts I did several months back. She gave one of the best answers with regard to her novel Tender Morsels, now out in hardcover:
“[It] goes perfectly with a schooner of Toohey’s Old Black Ale, ‘a great Australian dark ale’ to go with a great Australian dark tale. Not knock-you-over in the alcohol stakes (4.4% alc/vol), this is probably a good thing, because there’s a lot to keep track of in this book: bears, babes, treasure, dwarves, giant eagles and a spot of time slippage. The story is lightly hopped, giving the reader/drinker a few underhand laughs during the smooth transition from malty, dead-sexy beginning to bitter, none-too-clean finish. The black malt enhances the forested gloom of much of the book, as well as its nicknames, ‘Black Juice revisited’ and the Doylesque Tender Morsels Bwa-Ha-Ha. Many readers/drinkers are timid when it comes to dark (t)ales. If you are curious about the dark side of beer/bears, Toohey’s Old/Tender Morsels is a great place to begin your exploration. Broad-hipped childbearing flavour gives way to the berry nice esters, which blend well with hoppiness and a hint of raw ptarmigan to finish with a bitter blend crescendo that will leave you wondering WTF? Why haven’t you been a dark ale drinker all your life? Do you dare to turn off your bedside lamp tonight? Try Tender Morsels and Tooheys Old Black Ale with a juicy, still-slightly-bloody roast, with game pies and slow cooked meats. Old is also a great flavour to go with strong cheeses such as gorgonzola, blue vein and Wensleydale. But pretty much anything fart-producing will do. Just don’t expect a comfy night’s sleep after you’ve stomached this lot.”
Now that I've got Tender Morsels in hand, I am happy to report that the book does not disappoint--and, indeed, supports her description above. And it's brilliantly written, full of fascinating characters, dangerous, moving--deeply strange in the best possible way.
Recently, I asked Lanagan if she would add anything to her description above. Her reply? "I would add a salad of spinach, mushrooms and honey-marinated underbark to go with the roast, and probably a flourish of Armagnac and a lot of wood-smoke, rosy cheeks and golden candlelight at the end of the meal."
My first thought on reading that answer was, anyone who can describe food and drink this wonderfully has my attention as a fiction writer. Which seemed to lead naturally into a question about fiction: What gets to you most about the fiction you love?
"As a reader, I want to feel that if I skip even a single sentence, I will miss out on some neat or vivid wordsmithery and on some crucial piece of information. What gets to me more than anything is the impression some books give me that the author is completely unaware of me, that she or he is so deeply engaged in the journey through the story that it’s a privilege to be allowed to just quietly sit in a corner of her/his brain."
Tender Morsels is a great example of the good things that happen when a writer takes this approach to fiction. It's a novel I expect to be on many, many year's best lists.
(You can also read my interview with Lanagan at Clarkesworld.)
The Vertigo Encyclopedia by Alex Irvine is one of the sharpest-looking books to appear on my doorstep recently. A copiously illustrated full-color coffee table extravaganza, the encyclopedia covers the famous Vertigo comics line from 100 Bullets to Young Liars. Modestly priced for the value, the book includes an introduction by Neil Gaiman, multi-page spreads on the most popular series (including Constantine, The Sandman, and Fables), and features an original cover by one of my favorite artists, Dave McKean.
Readers may be familiar with Alex Irvine as the author of several excellent novels, including A Scattering of Jade, The Narrows, and One King, One Soldier (all of which you should pick up if you haven't already). I interviewed him recently about The Vertigo Encyclopedia to get his behind-the-scenes take on both the book and Vertigo's importance to the comics field.
Amazon.com: How did you get involved in this project?
Alex Irvine: It was a surprise, but the story is pretty simple. I'd done some other work for DC (Batman: Inferno and a couple of Supernatural-related books), so when they decided to do the Vertigopedia, they asked me to write it, and I jumped at the chance.
Amazon.com: What's your attachment or involvement in the world of comics prior to this book?
Alex Irvine: I think my story isn't uncommon. I was a hugely devoted fan of comics when I was a kid--especially the out-of-the-way titles like Devil Dinosaur or ROM--and then girls intruded into my worldview and I didn't get back to comics until I was almost out of college. It wasn't until I started working on the Vertigopedia that I fell completely back into the kind of love for comics I had when I was a kid, and even if the rest of the experience had been awful (which it wasn't) I would have been happy about doing it just because it put me back in touch with that feeling.
Also, before I started work on this book, I'd written a couple of short series for Marvel (Hellstorm, Son of Satan: Equinox and Daredevil Noir). That's whetted my appetite to dive all the way into comics again, and rereading all of those classic Vertigo titles...I'm dying to do more with comics. My hard drive is littered with bits of scripts and outlines, both for new stuff and stories involving some of my favorite characters from when I was a kid. I would still give just about anything to write (for example) a Batman comic. Also Dr. Strange. And Devil Dinosaur!
Amazon.com: In researching and writing the book, did you discover anything that surprised you?
Alex Irvine: All kinds of things. There are so many one-shots and short series--Moonshadow comes to mind, Enigma, WE3, Orbiter, newer stuff like Cairo--that don't always get the same kind of notice as Vertigo's tentpole series, but they're great. And they're optimistic, maybe, or even if they're not optimistic they depart from the tragic dark-fantasy mode of Sandman or Fables or Hellblazer, which people tend to think of as Vertigo's default mode. That's a facet of Vertigo's history that is often overlooked, I think, because of the enormous success of its supernatural/horror/dark fantasy titles. It was also funny to note how many of the comics include visual cameos of Alan Moore...or maybe I just started seeing them everywhere because I was looking for them.
Amazon.com: With a project of this nature, what're the best and worst parts of doing it?
Alex Irvine: The best part, other than getting reacquainted with so many great comics and getting introduced to others, was the feeling that this book is going to be the first draft of a history of one of the most influential imprints in the history of comics. Writing that first draft was an honor, really. I was proud to have a shot at it. The worst parts were aspects of the best parts, really. I didn't feel comfortable writing about anything unless I had just read (or reread) it, so I ended up with a really overwhelming amount of reading. Something like 20 to 25 linear feet of comics. Every entry was written with the comics open on my desk next to the computer. (Which didn't prevent some errors from creeping in; John Morgan at DC and I are already compiling an errata list.) And one of the things about writing a book of this nature is that there's a huge body of devoted fans who are going to have their own opinions about what should have been in it, how I should have treated certain series, and so forth. That was on my mind while I worked.
Amazon.com: What kind of influence do you think Vertigo has had on the comics field? Any concrete manifestations you can think of?
Alex Irvine: Well, influence is tough to trace with any degree of certainty, but I think it's probably safe to say that the success of Vertigo had a lot to do with DC and Marvel being willing to take their regular universe books in more mature directions. Also, the Sandman phenomenon brought so much attention to comics in general that it created a huge new appetite for comics with a certain kind of attitude. This in turn meant that people who had worked primarily in indie and underground comics--David Lapham comes to mind, or Paul Pope--had a chance to put their work in front of new audiences. Then that becomes a feedback loop, and because Paul Pope has done 100% and Heavy Liquid (in addition to his previous success in manga), the possibility for him to do a regular DC book comes along, and you get Batman: Year 100. I don't know that it all happened that way, but if it did, you can see how the prominence of Vertigo becomes an opportunity and then creates opportunities for creators in all parts of the industry. Vertigo has also been ahead of the curve in providing opportunities for women creators, and that's had an obvious positive effect throughout the industry.
Amazon.com: What do you want readers to come away from the book with, besides an encyclopedic knowledge of the Vertigo line?
Alex Irvine: First, of course, I want to give a sense of how much fun the books are. And they are fun--also sad, and angry, and everything else that stories should be. The sheer extravagance of invention and ingenuity, on both the visual and narrative levels, is a blast. I also tried to give a sense in each entry of the literary nature of the stories. One of the things about Vertigo books is that they're smart, and saturated with a particular kind of cultural awareness. I'm thinking of things like the visual quote of the Zapruder film in DMZ, or more generally the profusion of allusions in series like Transmetropolitan or The Invisibles or Preacher...the list could go on. Comics have always been full of winks and nods to other comics, but I came away from writing this book with a clearer understanding of how many Vertigo titles are actively engaged in a kind of conversation with the broader literary and philosophical tradition. Maybe that sentence gives me away as an academic nerd, but it jumped out at me over and over again, and I hope the reader of the Vertigopedia starts thinking about comics not in isloation, or just in conversation with each other, but as part of the 'literary' conversation that happens in any culture.
Amazon.com: What are you currently working on?
Alex Irvine: Daredevil Noir starts coming out in January, and in March, Del Rey comes out with my next novel, Buyout. After that, I have all kinds of plans: an alternate-history comic with William Blake as leader of an underground cell of literary terrorists, a novel about a famous 18th-century hoax perpetrated by a guy calling himself George Psalmanazar, another novel about a group of refugees from a nuclear war between India and Pakistan who travel back in time to assassinate HG Wells and thus change the history of the 20th century...on and on.
You may be familiar with Dark Roasted Blend already, but if not...you should be. Where else can you learn about "Unique Pigeon Towers of Iran," "The Most Alien-looking Place on Earth," "Some of the World's Strangest Fences," or "Monowheels: The Weirdest Transport Known to Man"? To mention just a few recent entries.
Dark Roasted Blend was founded by Avi Abrams with his wife Rachel in 2006. Since then, it's become one of the most popular blogs of its type on the internet. I interviewed Avi Abrams via email recently, to find out more about this intriguing site...
Amazon.com: Why and how did you start Dark Roasted Blend?
Avi Abrams: It all stemmed from my love for science fiction, and the need to share the reading discoveries. I launched "Science Fiction & Fantasy Reading Experience" and started to write reviews for the books and stories that I've read in the past 25 years (which is more than 5,000 books, by the way). The tag line under that was "A Thrilling Wonder Publication", as a homage to the awesome pulp magazine of the 1940s "Thrilling Wonder Stories". Pulp science fiction back then was short, sweet, very colorful and full of amazing discoveries, so I tried to convey that "sense of wonder" in my book reviews, and later in my weekly reviews of discoveries around the internet.
Originally the site had a "thrillingwonder.blogspot.com" address, but then my wife and I combined the idea of short/sweet web reviews with our love of coffee--and "Dark Roasted Blend" was born on October 25, 2006. (read the first issue here). Since that time we've been growing by leaps and bounds, mostly due to our unique combination of highly-visual, often tongue-in-cheek content. We give a short portion of awesome every day, which is easy to consume during the morning cup of coffee.
Amazon.com: How is the blog/site different now than when you started?
Avi Abrams: Interestingly, "Dark Roasted Blend" name was originally intended for our internet mp3 radio project (we love rare Merseybeat, epic Euro soundtracks and baroque psychedelic groups). This never got off the ground, but I still have a dream to combine visual and music awesomeness together in some way - maybe one day. So at first DRB was mostly our original composed music (listen to some here) plus a lot of sci-fi reviews. Then our "Most Dangerous Roads of the World" took off, we were featured on USA Today and the rest is history.
Amazon.com: Did you ever expect it to be this popular?
Avi Abrams: No we did not... but soon it grew into a full-time job and needed to be popular enough to support the family. I never hugely promoted the site though, and let the content (which my inner hamster religiously wrote every day) speak for itself. One secret to our popularity lies in international exposure to social sites in Japan, Spain and Russia, where web-denizens seem to have more "sense of wonder" than rather cynical Western audience.
Amazon.com: What's your guiding principle for what you decide to highlight on the site?
Avi Abrams: It has to be either maddeningly fascinating, or insanely funny. In general we're trying to create the most high-quality content internet has ever seen. Every article has to be perfect and every link should be wholesome and entertaining. We stay away from low-brow humor, celebrities, dark horror, creating 100 percent safe-for-work fantastic environment, where you can not predict what we'll feature next. Like one reader said, "Dark Roasted Blend... has an annoying habit of catching fads before they're actually fads." We do not necessarily want to create fads, but we do want to point out amazing things to people that they did not notice before.
Amazon.com: What do you like the most about doing Dark Roasted Blend?
Avi Abrams: Curiosity killed the cat... but it keeps DRB going. Basically I am mesmerized by everything "weird & wonderful" in our world and beyond, and will happily write about it, as long as it does not take away from my wonderful family and my first love of reading great science fiction. If DRB has become your daily source of inspiration, then our goal is fulfilled.
In this week's edition of YA Wednesday, adults ask dumb questions about teens, teens read, and bloggers vote.
"How do I develop an authentic teen voice?" Huh?
Author Ally Carter (Gallagher Girls series: I'd Tell You I love You, But Then I'd Have to
Kill You and Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy) recently expressed her disgust at this and other
"wrong" questions asked by an audience at an unnamed writer's conference.
"There is no such thing as a 'teen' voice. And no amount of hanging out in shopping malls and eavesdropping on the kids at the next table is going to teach you to write in a manner that will appeal to those kids.
Furthermore, trying to mimic those readers is an almost surefire way to make those kids hate your book."
Another hateful question: "How much should I lower my writing for teens?" Someone actually asked this? Ech. (Found via Reviewer X, my new favorite book blog.)
Books with Bite, Teen Read Week 2008 (October 12-18)
 Speaking of Ally Carter, she's one of many YA authors who will be live chatting on Readergirlz Nite Bites, featuring three authors per genre every night during YALSA's Teen Read Week.
This year's TRW theme is Books with Bite, and the brochure lists 100 suggested titles under four "bite" categories: Big Bites, prehistoric creatures and dinosaurs (um, this is for teens, right?); Biting Questions, philosophy and religion; Sound Bites, audiobooks; and Books with Byte, technology.
For more info and suggested books, go to the TRW website or wiki.
When Candace Bushnell, I mean Carrie Bradshaw, was a teen...
The New York Observer reported yesterday that Candace Bushnell, who used her mid-'90s sex column as a jumping off point for Sex and the City, is now going to mine her early years to write a YA novel (and a sequel). This time, readers will meet Candace/Carrie as a teenager.
Publisher Donna Bray outlined the early details: “I think she’ll come [to New York] the way Candace did, with her friends, to hang out in the city on the weekend, and have a lot of social interaction there, and then eventually she’ll come to college here, as Candace did.”
The Carrie Diaries is due out in fall 2010. (Found on The Book Bench.)
Quick links...
Galley Cat reports on the YA scene at last weekend's Brooklyn Book Fest, with photos by Melissa Walker (Violet on the Runway, Violet by Design, and Violet in Private).
Publisher's Weekly reports on Easthampton's Small Beer Press and founder Kelly Link's upcoming book of short stories for teens, Pretty Monsters. (Found via YPulse.)
On Brainstorm, Chronicle of Higher Education blogger Mark Bauerlein discusses teens and technology (or tech smarts v. book smarts) with author Siva Vaidhyanathan (Rewiring the Nation: The Place of Technology in American Studies).
Today is the last day of Book Blogger Appreciation Week, initiated by book blogger My Friend Amy. Many of the participating bloggers are teens, and it's fun to see how many blogs got into it. They've accumulated a ton of interesting content (author and blogger interviews, favorite blog nominees, blogging tips, etc.) and they have awards--28 awards! Winners so far: Neil Gaiman (Best Author Blog), GalleyCat (Best Industry Blog), Bookgasm (Most Concise and Best Design). More awards will be announced tomorrow. --Heidi
There's been a veritable Vice Presidential squall the past month, complete with potential scandal, raucous argument, pundit puffery, good imitations of Mongolian throat-music from Right and Left, classic Saturday Night satire, and in general a soap opera of pit bulls, lipstick, and scenic views of Russia from afar (I welcome that awesome day when I approach a country's coastline and all knowledge about it auto-downloads into my brain).
Into this mazy-mess of an election process comes Top Shelf, which enters the arena with the soon-to-be published Veeps: Profiles in Insignificance by Bill Kelter (illustrations by Wayne Shellabarger). As the press release puts it, "Over more than 200 years, the American voters have sent a platoon of rogues, cowards, drunks, featherweights, doddering geriatrics, pillars of hapless ambition, bigots, and atrocious spellers to Washington D.C. to sit one bullet, cerebral hemorrhage, or case of pneumonia away from the highest office in the land."
Our latest VP even shot a man in the face--and got an apology from the victim! You'd think that would be hard to top, but Veeps succeeds in making face-shooting seem banal compared to some VP antics. Arm-severing anyone? For example. "I don't want to work. But I wouldn't mind being VP again," said Thomas R. Marshall, the 28th vice president of the United States, but after reading these accounts I'm not sure I'd take the same position.
Accompanied by Shellabarger's fine caricatures, the book makes good on the cliche that some reality is stranger than fiction. Definitely satirical simply because of the outrageous nature of some of the material, but also serious. Not quite a graphic novel but not quite a "normal" nonfiction book. The writing is excellent, too. Check out some sample pages here. I think after reading part of it, you'll agree that this is one issue on which we can all come together as a nation, whether Democan or Republicrat: we've had some mighty suspect VPs.
There's even a fairly spectacular Veeps website, which I highly recommend.
 
There. Isn't that better, dear reader? Now Auntie Gertrude won't take away your copy...
Stryke couldn't see the ground for the corpses. He was deafened by screams and clashing steel. Despite the cold, sweat stung his eyes. His muscles burned and his body ached. Blood, mud, and splashed brains flecked his jerkin. And now two more of the loathsome, soft pink creatures were moving on him with murder in their eyes.
That's the opening of the intimidating new edition of Stan Nicholl's Orcs, released this month from Orbit Books. It collects three novels previously published in England. The books provide an alternate rationale for those perennial bad guys, the orcs, and have sold over a million copies overseas. Orbit's cover for the book matches the tough-guy prose inside. So much so that I got sick of looking at the ugly mug on the outside, effective as it might be, and decided to "prettify" my copy of Orcs. Just look at what a few randomly applied stars, flowers, smiley-faces, and the like can do to make a cover more humane! In fact, maybe Orbit should even run a "Beautify Your Orcs" contest. I bet readers would get a kick out of that.
All silliness aside, this is a significant release, with a striking cover, from one of the hottest publishers in genre fiction at the moment. Check it out if you want some gritty realism with your fantasy.
This weekend, Seattle is Mecca for gamers. The metaphor might not extend to people actually praying in the direction of Seattle (although I wouldn't rule that out) but it is true that gamers of every kind--from casual console players to hard-core boardgame geeks--are traveling from around the world to attend the Penny Arcade Expo, a.k.a. PAX.
PAX is the largest gamer festival in the U.S., the spiritual successor to the now-more-corporatized E3, and it's just a mad-crazy three-day lineup of "freeplay" games, huge LAN combats, exhibitor demos, a variety of tournaments and competitions, panels, movies, and even concerts--from H.P. Lovecraft tribute band Darkest of the Hillside Thickets to nerdcore godfather MC Frontalot.
So what does all this have to do with books and writing? Well, there's actually some reading going on amidst all the gamer craziness. The latest edition of D&D and many of the creative minds behind it will be well-represented, but here are a few even better (and more traditionally narrative) examples:
- A reading and a panel with actor--and now accomplished writer--Wil Wheaton, who has been called "an almost Mark Twain for the geek crowd." (What, you don't read his blog?)
- Panels on "Game Criticism and Old School Journalism," "How to Make the World Notice Your Video Game Blog," and "Writing for Games." (Love the description for that last one: "Bowser takes Peach, Mario chases after Bowser, Bowser falls into some lava, The End. It wasn’t long ago when writing and storytelling were at the bottom of the priority list, but as these industry pros will tell you, the tide has changed and compelling story arcs and tight dialogue are all being used to create and sell games.")
- Many chances to meet and hear from Gabe and Tycho, the genii behind the very sharp and literate Penny Arcade comic (anthologized for your convenience if you need to catch up).
(Cross-posted to Guys Lit Wire.) --Paul
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