419 Memoirs & Other Strange Stories.

My first full length ebook story collection is now available:

An outcast child and a mountain shaman hold the keys to humanity's survival. A gunfighter steps out of myth and into the twisted realities of the modern personal development movement. One weary universe collapses-and a new one rises. Voices from an all-too real future reach out to one another, desperate to connect. Hamlet celebrates his 40th birthday with an old friend and a to-do list. A television producer descends into madness. The god of sound taunts the god of sight.

Set in impossible pasts, bizarre futures, and skewed-but-recognizable versions of the present, these sixteen stories, and more, from the inimitable Michael Canfield will take you on iconoclastic voyages of the imagination you won't soon forget.

Includes The Food Processor, Library Rules, They Get Away from You, Once Upon a Time ... At the Learning Annex, A Flavor of Quark, The Last Confessions of NinjaBaby, The Whited Child, A Flavor of Quark and nine others. Plus a complete short novel: The Plastic Fruit Museum, excerpts from two forthcoming novels: Red Jacket, and Growing Up Zombie, and many other extras.

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Smashwords

Fifth story up on Smashwords now.

"Wednesday" from the Stoker-Award nominated anthology Corpse Blossoms.

It's .99¢ unless you want to get it free on Smashwords using this coupon:


Promotional price: $0.00
Coupon Code: BN94Q
Expires: February 18, 2011 Expired!!

The most important rejection I ever received.

This wasn't my first rejection letter; it wasn't even my first personal rejection letter, but it's the most significant one. It would be another six years before I sold my first story to Karen Joy Fowler for the Mota: Courage anthology, but one letter with a little praise and some very important criticism from Algis Budrys (whose few novels, which seem unjustly forgotten, I have always adored and admired) kept me going a long long time. This first paragraph was Budrys's standard rejection template, I have a few other that say the same thing, so it rocked me to see the three paragraphs that followed. Budrys wrote rejections that were turning points in the careers of many writers. Stephen King, in On Writing, wrote about one he received when Budrys edited F&SF.

My rejection slips.

I'm moving, and at the same time, I'm getting rid of a lot of stuff. I no longer feel the need to keep physical copies of old rejection slips. I have about 540 altogether (a ream plus a novelette of paper!) Here's a pile of them. I'm keeping exactly one, which I'll share about later in the week. You can see, in this picture, that I submit to mainstream as well as genre markets, though not necessarily the same stories. I have NO idea what I sent to Redbook though,  or when I sent it. Don't recall that one at all.

A cover for my short ebook.

Some of my previously published stories will soon be appearing in various ebook formats. Here's the cover of one, "Peas and Carrots" which originally appeared in Realms of Fantasy awhile back, and is now available through Smashwords. (The background photo is by weatherbox.)

Charles Schulz / "Mad Men" / Radio Lab

"But in the mid-1950s a large part of [Schulz's] public consisted of good, plain people who felt guilty at being discontented in an epoch of unprecedented prosperity. Peanuts struck a chord with those who had thought they had everything they wanted only to discover that they didn't, and needed an acceptably gentle reminder of this insight."

-- David Michaelis, Schulz and Peanuts pg 342.

Mad Men begins at the dawn of the sixties but the same dynamic is in play. Today the existential anxiety is coming from the unprecedented level of possibilities the connected world promises to offer (or should that be threatens to offer), as discussed in the first part of WNYC's Radio Lab latest program "Choice" with it description of new college grads frozen into inaction from fear of making decisions -- each decision taken represents an elimination of some tantalizing (and now lost) hypothetical opportunity.

Kanye West "Good Morning" video.

Cool Murakami furry-scifi animation:

Kanye West - Good Morning
Uploaded by kanyewestofficial

Sunrise by Shannon Hurley remixed

We spent all afternoon remixing a song on ccMixter using Garage Band which was fun. Garage Band's not that intuitive though. We couldn't do a lot of things -- which is probably for the best, because it kept our band's version simple. Not that we created any original samples, we grabbed everything from Creative Commons. Here's the license. Another thing we would never ever been able to experience in the pre-digital age.

Here's the original:

And here's our version: A Simple Sunrise.mp3

Letterman is funny.

Joke from the other night's show:

"Fidel Castro is stepping down, and announced he will be succeeded by his idiot son Fidel W. Castro."

Err ... this is supposed to be Kara Thrace ...

Not EVEN close, I know, but I like the colors anyway - they sort of match this blog's colors. I have this box of pastels and a 99¢ sketchpad left over from an exercise (but that's another story).

Christmas Eve, I came across the supplies which were resting under a stack of books and mags I plan to sell some time. I noticed them when I added this month's Wired to the stack, so thought I'd see what would come of playing around with these materials in the Silent Night, I made drew sketch from a small Katee Sackhoff-as-Starbuck publicity shot alongside a minor rant by a Wired staffer that BSG will not be back until April. Happy Holidays anyway, skiffy lovers!
Tags:science fiction, bsg, starbuck

Design changes

Sadly, all the available fonts look crappy on Windows boxes. My advice: get a Mac, or run Ubuntu.

New Phil Dick tees

phildickian Tee

Philip K. Dick Tee

Coverage for the torso, only from

ANTHROSCHEMA.

According to this quiz-thingy Kucinich is my ideal candidate

Link
But then again the same site's "which college should I go to" and "which TV show should I watch" quizzes netted me the answers, "Texas Christian University," and "CSI:NY" respectively. So I think I will stick with Obama for now, thank you very much for playing indeed!

Better than average editing

Youtube has no shortage of old movie clips mashed with Queen's "We Will Rock You", but this one really works, the ape make-up makes it easy to match up the lyrics. I especially like the single shot of Dr. Zaius -- a grumpy old orangutan perturbed by all the rockin'.

And this ...

Seal generator, again. Has added stuff since I played around with it last.

Another generator engine

Via boingboing. Link: Warning Labels!

Latest "Heroes" review

My review of Heroes episode 19, ".07%" is now up on TVSquad.

Page 1

New "Heroes" post up

Of episode 13 "The Fix" at TvS. Takei!

Here's a snip, a mini-editorial on how I feel about George Takei being cast in the show:

Some viewers aren't looking to give Takei much of a chance, based on web chatter I've seen. I like Takei. He barely makes an appearance tonight, but the single shot of his stony visage as he stares down Hiro in fatherly disappointment is enough to make me willingly decide to forget Sulu for the purposes of enjoying Heroes. Takei is having a resurgence right now, and that is only part of a long and distinguished career. Meet him halfway. If the audience gives him the chance they would give any other well-known face in a new role I expect they will see he can do the character and the show justice.