I love being interviewed. Especially on weeks when Jack Nicholson isn’t talking to the press. I tell my wife, “I was interviewed more often than Jack Nicholson this week.”
Alice is rarely impressed. “I don’t like Jack Nicholson,” she tells me. But I keep it up, in the hopes that it will win me some lovin’.
I was interviewed by SF Signal for their regular Mind Meld column, along with people less famous than me, like Jeff VanderMeer, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Mike Resnick, Martha Wells, David B. Coe, Jaym Gates, Brenda Cooper, Mike Brotherton, A. Lee Martinez, and other international celebrities and rock stars like that. The topic was Great Gift Ideas For Geeks and Science Fiction and Fantasy Fans, and here’s what that VanderMeer guy said about some book about honey by Amal El-Mohtar:
The Honey Month – This beautifully illustrated volume of short fictions and poems takes as its inspiration the author’s tasting of 28 different kinds of honey, one per day. Each tasting leads to a different literary creation, but she begins each entry by describing the honey in terms that will be familiar to wine connoisseurs. To top it all off, Oliver Hunter’s finely rendered color illustrations make encountering such rich, heady prose even more delightful…. The book’s a slim 73 pages for a reason: like the honey described, any more and it would be too rich for most readers. As it stands, however, The Honey Month is the perfect length, and the perfect gift.
I tried to buy a copy of The Honey Month from Amal at Wiscon, but she wouldn’t sell it to me (I think because I was more famous than her). Now that she’s had a book blurbed by VanderMeer and done, like, the most popular interview in the history of Black Gate, I expect all that to change. And maybe a brother can buy a simple book, know what I’m sayin’?
You can read the complete SF Signal article here.
On the heels of Mark Twain’s best seller, we now also have this memoir from Anne Rubenstein Dick, third wife of five of the only science fiction writer so far to gain literary legitimacy for inclusion in the Library of America series. Originally self-published, The Search for Philip K. Dick has been re-edited by Tachyon Press; it covers the five years of Rubenstein’s “courtship” and marriage to one very weird guy during what might be called his “mellow years” in the early 1960s, also the time when he wrote his Hugo award winning (and only award winning) novel, Man in the High Castle. According to Anne, “I’m not saying he wasn’t a very nice person too; he was. He just had a very dark shadow.”
Conan the Renegade