Here’s a news article on the matter. Here’s Peter’s take on it. He’s taking it a whole lot better than I suspect most people would in his position. He’ll be sentenced in late April; he could be sentenced to up two years but quite obviously I hope it’s for rather less than that.

Given that this is happening to someone I know and like and as such I am likely to be wildly uncivil to the first trolling jackass who pops in the thread to crow about the verdict, I’m just gonna not turn on the comments for this post at all.

* Sweater Quest: My Year of Knitting Dangerously, by Adrienne Martini (Free Press): When Krissy was pregnant with Athena, both she and I decided to try our hand at knitting, and very quickly thereafter both of us stopped trying out hand at knitting, because neither of us could figure it out and we were likely to use the knitting needles to stab something instead. So I have a baseline level of being impressed with knitters, because they seemingly do quite easily something I very failed at. In Sweater Quest, Martini not only knits but attempts one of knitting’s supreme challenges: A Mary Tudor sweater, the mere mention of which apparently gives knitters the sweats. The book tracks that, plus explores the world of knitting — a world which, anecdotally, has a significant overlap with science fiction geeks, considering how many of them I know who knit (Martini herself writes for SF/F outlets). As noted, I’m not a knitter and likely never will be, but I did read through this book and enjoyed it as an exploration of a well-loved yet sometimes-frustrating hobby, which I think is something everyone can identify with (I know I can). It comes out next Tuesday, so now you know what to get that knitter in your life.

* Ship Breaker, by Paolo Bacigalupi (Little, Brown): Paolo tries his hand at YA, and the resulting novel is unsurprisingly good, and full of the world-run-down-y-ness that has become his trademark. I was sent a galley of the draft for possible blurbing and indeed liked it enough to blurb it, although you’ll have to wait for May 2010 to find out precisely what I said. By that time Paolo may have picked up a Hugo nod to go with his Nebula nod for The Wind Up Girl. Not a bad year for Paolo, I’d say.

* Blood of the Demon, by Diana Rowland (Bantam): The second of Rowland’s series featuring Kara Gillian, a cop with supernatural gifts, searching for a killer who doesn’t just murder people, but eats their souls. Which is just rude, if you ask me. Diana, incidentally, is also running for South/Central Regional Representative in the current SFWA election and has my endorsement, because she would be just plain awesome in that role. So if you’re in SFWA, consider voting for her. If you’re not in SFWA, well, hey, look: A book! Which is out now.

* Not My Boy! by Rodney Peete (Hyperion): Former NFL player and current football commentator Peete’s memoir of his son’s autism and his own coming to terms with the autism and his work to connect to his son and connect him to the world. Out now.

* Fire Will Fall, by Carol Plum-Ucci (Harcourt): Prinz-winning author Plum-Ucci with the sequel to 2008’s Streams of Babel, in which four teens affected by bioterrorism try to deal with the fallout (so to speak) of their affliction while others race to find the cure. Out in May.

* Bitter Seeds, by Ian Tregellis (Tor): It’s the eve of World War II! Are the Nazis up to no good? Well, if they weren’t, they really wouldn’t be Nazis, now, would they. But what they’re up to no good with this time? Scary horrible mutant technology! And it’s up to the warlocks of Britain to stop them! I mean, obviously, right? This (clearly) fantasy-history telling of WWII will be the subject of a Big Idea in April.

* Dragonfly Falling, by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Pyr): The follow up to Empire of Black and Gold. This time two unlikely heroes have to warn their city of an encroaching menance. But will they be believed in time? Out in April.

Okay, I’m lying, I’ve just been spending hours admiring all the new flooring in the house. Because it’s so pretty. But I’m over that now, so here are some links for you.

1. Mary Anne Mohanraj asked me to let you all know about this writer’s grant:

The deadline for the Speculative Literature Foundation’s Older Writers’ Grant is fast approaching! The grant of $750 is available to any writer of speculative literature of 50 years or older at the time of application who is just beginning to work professionally in the field. There are no restrictions on the use of the grant money.

Applicants are asked to submit a brief autobiographical statement, a writing sample, and a bibliography. For full details on how to apply for the grant, please see the SLF web site (http://www.speculativeliterature.org/Grants/SLFOlderWriters.php), or email olderwriters@speclit.org. Applications must be received by March 31st 2010. The successful applicant will be announced on June 1st 2010.

If this could apply to you, consider applying.

2. The alumni of the Alpha SF/F/H Workshop for Young Writers are doing a fundraiser so that other teenagers will be able to get workshop experience and mentoring from top-name science fiction and fantasy writers. To help with their goal, they’re posting an adorable little picture book about love and zombies (of course!) called Ned & Jane. Where? At NedAndJane.com, of course. Check it out and if you enjoy it, considering chipping in to help them reach their $2,500 goal by April 30.

3. This from agent Colleen Lindsay:

Our good buddy Alan DeNiro is hitting the road down South and is trying to use his book tour to raise money for Mercy Corps and their efforts to aid in Haiti’s earthquake relief.

Details here: http://bit.ly/9egPak

And thanks in advance!

4. My excellent friend Chris Barrus has a new band called the ExDetectives, and their music is full of shoegazy goodness. Have you had any shoegazy goodness today? And don’t give me that “Oh, I gave up shoegaze for Lent.” Seriously, who does that. I’m ashamed you even tried that line on me. Look, go to the ExDetectives site, listen to the music there, and if you like it, their EP is available on iTunes and on Amazon.

5. Justine Larbalestier thinks this guest post on her site by Alaya Dawn Johnson about book covers and racism should be read by lots of people. And I agree. So there you are.

There, that should be enough for your linkable enjoyment today.

My AMC column is out early this week (and in fact may be permanently moving to Wednesday; I have to check) and this week I’m looking at why Hollywood rarely gets the future right, or, why the Los Angeles of 2019 will almost certainly not have replicants in it. Yes, I know. I’m disappointed too. As always, leave your pungent nuggets of wisdom in the comment thread over there.

So: Is there a topic you’ve always wanted me to write on, which I haven’t? Something about me you’ve always wanted to know? Or do you just wish to see me dance like a monkey for your pleasure? Or some combination of any or all of the above? This is the time! This is the place! No subject is taboo, and no subject is too serious or too silly. I can’t answer every topic request, but I do try to get an interesting mix in there.

While you are brewing up your questions, allow me to make two suggestions:

1. Pick quality over quantity: A single, well thought-out topic question is always more interesting to me than one that says lists out very bland, general topics, i.e., “can you talk about writing? And politics? And about your cats?” Yes, I can do that, but I already do do that. Ask me something interesting.

2. Specifically on the subject of writing, I get asked about writing a lot, and one of the reasons I do the Reader Request Week is to write on something else besides writing. So while you’re free to ask writing questions, be aware that unless  find it a really interesting question, I’m likely to go for another topic entirely.

Once the requests start coming in, I’ll go through them and pick the ones I find the most interesting and start writing them up on Monday. To help you avoid asking the same questions I’ve recently answered, here’s an index of the last five years worth of Reader Request Weeks:

From 2005:

Reader Request #1: Creative Commons and FanFic
Reader Request #2: Peak Oil
Reader Request #3: Beatles, Batman and They
Reader Request #4: Pot!
Reader Request #5: Odds and Ends

From 2006:

Reader Request #1: SF Novels and Films
Reader Request #2: 10 Childhood Nuggets
Reader Request #3: Writers and Technology
Reader Request #4: The Nintendo Revolution
Reader Request #5: A Political Judiciary
Reader Request #6: Paranoid Parents
Reader Request #7: Writing About Writing

From 2007:

Reader Request #1: Justifying My Life
Reader Request #2: Coffee, or Lack Thereof
Reader Request #3: BaconCat Fame
Reader Request #4: The Inevitable Blackness That Will Engulf Us All
Reader Request #5: Out of Poverty
Reader Request #6: Short Bits
Reader Request #7: Short Bits II: Electric Boogaloo

From 2008:

Reader Request #1: Homeschooling
Reader Request #2: Technological Gifts
Reader Request #3: Sex and Video Games
Reader Request #4: Where I Am Now
Reader Request #5: Professional Jealousy
Reader Request #6: Author Relations
Reader Request #7: Fame or Lack Thereof
Reader Request #8: Politics and the Olympics
Reader Request #9: Polygamy
Reader Request #10: Meeting Authors (and Me)
Reader Request #11 Athena and Whatever
Reader Request #12: Soldiers and Support
Reader Request #13: Diminishing Returns
Reader Request #14: Quick Hits, Volume I
Reader Request #15: Quick Hits, Volume II

From 2009:

Reader Request #1: SF YA These Days
Reader Request #2: OMW and Zoe’s Tale (and Angst and Pain)
Reader Request #3: Space!
Reader Request #4: Procreation
Reader Request #5: Having Been Poor
Reader Request #6: 80s Pop Music
Reader Request #7: Writing and Babies
Reader Request #8: Twitter
Reader Request #9: Can I Be Bought?
Reader Request #10: Writing Short Bits
Reader Request #11: Wrapping Up

There you have it.

So: Questions! Topics! Subjects! You have them! I want them! Put them in the comment thread, and starting Monday, I’ll start writing about them.

Behold the front room of our house, which at the moment holds a toilet and a bathroom sink in it, both relocated from the downstairs bathroom, which today along with the front hall and at least part of the kitchen is being refloored. On the chairs you can see some of the contents of the hall closet, which is also being refloored. I’d show you the kitchen, but then I suspect Krissy would murder me. The fact is, the house is a real mess. But necessarily so; things simply have to be moved around when you’re putting down new floors, and there’s not much point arguing the necessity.

Our house will in fact be in a more or less constant state of mess for the next couple of weeks as things get moved out of rooms into other rooms, and then moved back into rooms with then other stuff as those rooms in turn get new floors/carpets. This was in fact one of the reasons why my office was the first room to be done; while people are crawling around the house, constantly moving stuff, I can hide in my room. Works for me. At least, until the cabinet maker comes to do the bookshelves. Then who knows what I’ll do with myself. I suppose I’ll worry about it then.

When we know something, it’s not just what we know but how we came to know it that determines how useful it is to us: How did we learn it? Is it from a trusted source? How will we save and store that knowledge? How will we pass it on? In a world where we can store entire encyclopedias on flash drives the size of a fingernail, this doesn’t seem like much of an issue. But it’s not that difficult to imagine a world where it might be.

Such a world exists in The Dead-Tossed Waves, author Carrie Ryan’s follow-up to her bestselling debut, The Forest of Hands and Teeth. In these books, the world of the living is small, poor, and clearly demarcated. In that world, what we know and how we know it has implications not only for how people live day to day, but also how they see the world… and how they imagine how the world can be.

CARRIE RYAN:

In my first book, The Forest of Hands and Teeth (released last year) Mary, my protagonist, lives in an amazingly circumscribed world — a small village in the middle of a forest full of zombies where everyone’s told there’s nothing left of humanity past the fences. Mary lives about 150 years after the zombie apocalypse and her village has nothing left from the before time — no books (other than one religious text), electricity, maps and the like. Every bit of information and knowledge they have is passed down through several generations.

I think of it a bit like playing a game of telephone — you know where one person whispers a phrase to the person sitting next to them and it gets passed around the room such that “I had eggs for breakfast” somehow becomes “bacon taped on cats is yummy”?

The idea of memory and the corruption of information over time fascinates me. We’re so reliant on outside sources of information today that if the apocalypse hit… what stories would we remember to pass down?

Because here’s the thing… once, about a decade ago, I sat with my ill grandmother while she told me stories from her life. In one of them, she described going to a dance at Amherst with her mother as a chaperone and wearing lavender stockings (during a time when such a color stocking was rare). One of the matrons at the dance asked my Nana to leave because of her shameless attire (re: lavender stockings). Her mother, my great-grandmother, straightened her back and gave one of the best retorts I’d ever herd — so perfect and cutting and yet also so poised. I remember listening to that story and thinking “this is where the strength of the women in my family comes from — this is how I am who I am.”

And yet I can’t remember what my great-grandmother’s oh-so-perfect retort was and no one else in my large family ever heard the story. It’s lost to time. This is the corrosion of memory.

Now imagine that on a larger scale: how to build things and cure things and repair things. How many miles in a light year or which clouds are cumulus and which are cirrus. All the things we turn to Wikipedia and books for — just slowly eroding away.

This is Mary’s world in the forest: the only information the villagers have is what’s passed down year after year with no influence from the outside world. So when I decided to write a sequel/companion book set beyond the forest, I suddenly had to figure out what would we retain and remember given slightly more resources?

My answer: not much more. In my second book, The Dead-Tossed Waves, Mary’s daughter, Gabry, grows up in a dead-end town at the edge of the ocean. There’s little communication between enclaves of survivors (no electricity because resources for things like wires is rare and travel is dangerous because roads are still rife with zombies). But even more disturbing is that there’s a pervasive feeling among the survivors of “what’s the use?”

What’s the point of caring or learning about art or physics or calculus in the face of everyday issues like keeping the town safe, farming fields, feeding mouths? Knowledge and learning becomes a luxury pretty quickly. At one point in the book a teacher comes to town and talks about the universe and gravity and most of the families pull their kids from school because to them, such information is useless.

Sometimes I think of these characters in my books — these random survivors — as living their lives with their heads down, sometimes glancing over their shoulders to ensure no zombies have breached their carefully structured safety. And then I imagine my protagonists standing, head raised, looking to the horizon and wondering what’s out there.

In the first book, this is Mary, staring at the forest and wondering if there’s a life on the other side. In the second book this is Gabry, growing up in a lighthouse by the ocean wondering if there’s an easier and safer life out there. And then the real question becomes: what causes someone to raise their head from the ground, to not just stare at the horizon but to go out after it?

Zombies can embody all sorts of themes: the slow crawl of death, fear of science/religion/technology/ourselves, inescapable nihilism. But to me, they often represent a life not fully lived. They are nothing more than pure existence shuffling through time with no dreams, hopes, desires or memories. This drives me to wonder what separates the character living life staring at the ground and the zombie straining at the fence?

What makes us raise our heads and go after something more? What makes us care about lives apart from our own? What’s the difference between the person who stands at the edge of the ocean day after day wondering what’s past the waves and the person who gets in a boat and paddles off to find the answer?

Often, it’s my own fear of not taking advantage of this life — of forgetting my grandmother’s stories, of not bothering to read poetry or look at art or remember what kind of flower grows on my front porch or caring about a dispute between two warring tribes on the other side of the world — that causes me to write about people who do take advantage of what they’re given and constantly grasp for more. I hope their drive and determination will bolster my own.

—-

The Dead-Tossed Waves: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|IndieBound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. See the book trailer. Visit Carrie Ryan’s blog. Follow her on Twitter.

As noted earlier, for my office I am currently waiting on a desk and bookshelves, and while I wait, rather than reintroduce the previous massive and now esthetically incompatible desk (which sits, in pieces, in the basement), I went the other direction and got a laptop stand. As it happens, the laptop stand is the perfect height for typing while standing, and for when I want to sit, I got myself a nice little stool. And the laptop stand is finished in cherry wood, so it matches the flooring. Truly, the best of all possible worlds. So I’ve gone from maximum clutter to minimum necessary materials. We’ll see how long that lasts. But for now it’s nice.