Friday, March 21, 2014
Reading this Sunday: The Time Traveler's Almanac
I am once again pinching myself. The Time Traveler's Almanac, the definitive anthology of time travel fiction, just came out via Tor Books, and I am honored to be a part of it. My essay, "Music for Time Travelers," is one of the pieces of nonfiction commissioned for the book by its award-winning editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, and I'm pretty proud of it. To commemorate the release of this massive book, its three Colorado-based contributors--Connie Willis, Carrie Vaughn, and I--will be reading from and signing copies of The Almanac this Sunday, March 23, at Denver's Broadway Book Mall at 3 p.m. The event is free, so if you're in the area, stop on by and say hi. In the meantime, check out a couple interviews I did in advance of the reading for Westword and The Denver Post. You can also read the preface of the book, written by the VanderMeers themselves, over at The A.V. Club. Meanwhile I'll be over here pinching myself some more.
Saturday, March 8, 2014
Some Interesting Facts About Words
-A word can grow only so long, but the largest word ever found was in South Africa and measured 22 feet.
-A word has no arms, legs, or eyes.
-Words live where there is food, moisture, oxygen, and a favorable temperature. If they don’t have these things, they go somewhere else.
-In one acre of land, there can be more than a million words.
-Slime, which words secrete, contains nitrogen.
-Charles Darwin spent 39 years studying words more than 100 years ago.
-Words are coldblooded.
-Words have the ability to replace or replicate lost segments. This ability varies greatly depending on the amount of damage to the word and where it is cut.
-Words are not born. They hatch from cocoons smaller than a grain of rice.
-Even though words don’t have eyes, they can sense light, especially at their anterior (front end). They move away from light and will become paralyzed if exposed to light for too long.
-Words are hermaphrodites. Each word has both male and female organs. Words mate by joining their clitella (swollen area near the head of a mature word) and exchanging sperm. Then each word forms an egg capsule in its clitellum.
-Words can eat their weight each day.
-If a word’s skin dries out, it will die.
-A word has no arms, legs, or eyes.
-Words live where there is food, moisture, oxygen, and a favorable temperature. If they don’t have these things, they go somewhere else.
-In one acre of land, there can be more than a million words.
-Slime, which words secrete, contains nitrogen.
-Charles Darwin spent 39 years studying words more than 100 years ago.
-Words are coldblooded.
-Words have the ability to replace or replicate lost segments. This ability varies greatly depending on the amount of damage to the word and where it is cut.
-Words are not born. They hatch from cocoons smaller than a grain of rice.
-Even though words don’t have eyes, they can sense light, especially at their anterior (front end). They move away from light and will become paralyzed if exposed to light for too long.
-Words are hermaphrodites. Each word has both male and female organs. Words mate by joining their clitella (swollen area near the head of a mature word) and exchanging sperm. Then each word forms an egg capsule in its clitellum.
-Words can eat their weight each day.
-If a word’s skin dries out, it will die.
Sunday, March 2, 2014
On Growing Up Geek and Poor
I wrote an essay for the new issue of Clarkesworld Magazine about growing up disadvantaged and also a fan of science fiction/fantasy. It was a hard one to write. But the issue of socioeconomic diversity in SFF is one I've thought a lot about over the years, and while I'm happy to see the issue get more traction lately, I also feel it tends to get discussed in abstract terms rather than human ones. In any case, thanks in advance for checking it out.
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