Obligatory: I will be at WisCon as of tomorrow! I will see what looks like 65% of you there.

Also obligatory: I will be part of the Lightspeed Launch Event!

Lightspeed Magazine Launch Event, Saturday, 10pm, Conference Room 2

Join us to celebrate the launch of Lightspeed Magazine (www.lightspeedmagazine.com), a new online science fiction magazine published by Prime Books (publisher of Fantasy Magazine). Lightspeed editors John Joseph Adams and Andrea Kail, along with publisher Sean Wallace, will be on hand to discuss this exciting new venture, and will present readings by the authors.

Alice Sola Kim, Genevieve Valentine, Vylar Kaftan, Cat T. Rambo, John Joseph Adams

I will be reading my story “The Zeppelin Conductors’ Society Annual Gentlemen’s Ball,” which is scheduled to be in the magazine this summer.

And when I get home, I have an awesome Bollywood epic to talk about! (I probably should have been talking about it since last year, but then it wasn’t available on DVD and I didn’t have Netflix yet, and so I forgot about it for a year before I thought to look it up again. When I am off the clock, my brain is pretty much a blank canvas with movies playing on top, and sometimes one slips through the cracks. Sorry, movie!)

I would be talking about it today, except that all my screencapping time last night went to laundry, and then a lot of staring at my clothes as I realized with dawning horror that I am completely unprepared for anything higher than 65 degrees. I foresee a lot of staying indoors, and/or little scuttling bursts from shade to shade as I hold up the collar on my all-black casual businesswear and hiss at the monstrous sun like an angel extra in The Prophecy.*

* Which is a straight-up awesome movie. I’ll go to the mat on this.

This weekend was the Steampunk World’s Fair, where I read for the first time from my upcoming novel (exciting), saw a lot of great costumes (very exciting!), and had the usual problems with some elements of the subculture (Me? Have problems with something? Surely not!).

Overall, though, it was great, and I’m still beyond thrilled to have been invited. There were some wonderful costumes, both subtle and flamboyant. There was also a baby with a mustache glued to its face; every time I saw it, it was wearing exactly the expression you would imagine from a baby that has been brought into a huge room full of people and had a mustache glued to its face.

Pictures are still coming in (I didn’t take any of my own, because they would have been a series of nicely-accessorized blurs), but this shot is my favorite so far:

The subtle colorway, the texture, the pose, the face – it reminds me of a Sargent painting or something. Call me a nerd, I just really like it.

Bonus: while I was at the World’s Fair, I received some good news: my story “So Deep That the Bottom Could Not Be Seen” will be appearing in the Way of the Wizards anthology! That was a nice cap to the weekend, for sure.

Now back to the grindstone, with a new goal in life: to get some Dr. Scholl’s in my zombie-fighting boots pronto, because those things get PAINFUL. Wow. Flat boots are supposed to be more comfortable! Why do you have to make a liar out of me, boots?

It’s official – I’ll be attending Launch Pad this year!

I’m incredibly excited about this, and seriously cannot wait for July. Stars! (I live in New York; if you ever see a decent night sky in New York City, something is horribly wrong and you should try to leave that parallel universe immediately.)

[This is the first of three movie reviews that were won in the auction, which assists fans of color who want to attend SFF conventions, principally WisCon.]

So, when won one of my movie reviews, I can only assume she picked Hong Kong action flick Vampire Effect (aka Twins Effect, for reasons unknown to me) because she thought it was the worst movie ever and she wished, more than anything else in her whole entire life, to make me suffer.

She must not have been aware that I have been working on getting “shitmazing” into wide usage, as the word to use when something is so spectacularly bad that it passes all descriptions of “awful” and eventually becomes its own sort of surrealist masterpiece that makes you question an objective universe.

With this word in hand, I was more than ready to tackle Vampire Effect: The Twins Effect (even the title’s shitmazing). It’s a breathtaking kaleidoscope of wonder about a mysterious world in which defeating vampires requires liberal application of banana extract.

For serious.

This is vampire prince Kazaf and his vampire butler Prada (for serious). Here, Prince Kazaf wants this movie to promise something it just cannot promise.

There is, in fact, endless sucking in this movie.
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Over the weekend I went to Capclave, and I finally hit my ceiling on the close-talker.

The close-talker is nothing new. It’s almost impossible to find someone who hasn’t been a victim. I really don’t understand why this is, except that maybe no close-talker has ever been informed how close, exactly, is too close. This letter, I hope, will be helpful in such cases.

(Please note that I am speaking only for North American and similar cultures, and am not trying to impose those cultural values on others of a different culture for whom this is not the standard. I am also not addressing those who are hard of hearing and need to stand closer in order to hear. I am ALSO also not addressing people who happen to be in close quarters because they’re standing in a crowd [though why you wouldn't leave the crowd to talk for any length of time is another question, because I'm an eighty-year-old grump]. This is just an open letter, not a Papal Decree.)

An Open Letter to Congoers:

I know that cons are crowded. Rooms are loud; hallways are narrow. You enjoy a good conversation. You want to seem personable. You want to catch what people are saying.

However.

Tell you what: Find a partner. Stand far enough apart that when you shake hands, your arm extends fully in front of you. This is pretty much the right distance between you and people you do not know well. Not one foot away, not six inches away, not so close that someone can count the capillaries in your eyes as you introduce yourself.

If someone steps back from you, it is a sign that that person considers you too close. Under no circumstances is that an invitation to take a step forward and close the distance. (Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen – nineteen capillaries, mwah ah ah! /The Count.)

I understand that in movies and ads and TV, people stand very close together, and that after a while that might look like a normal distance between people. It is not. All those people are being paid to stand close so that one camera shot can pick them up. Also, they probably hate each other. (This is speculation. I just enjoy thinking that people who play lovebirds on TV are waiting for cut so they can spitefully pelt each other with prop food.)

I also understand that sometimes other people stand close together and talk. Those people are probably friends with each other. This does not mean you can stand that close to them.

I ALSO also understand that sometimes someone is famous, or good-looking, or smells nice, or is carrying armfuls of twenty-dollar bills. You still do not get to stand close to them. Sorry.

When people want you to stand closer, they will lean in; they will shift their weight towards you; they will uncross their arms from their death grip; they will stop taking large side steps; they will wave you closer with semaphore flags. They will do SOMETHING to indicate it’s all good.

Until they do that, just step back, please.