Archive for November, 2012

The Deal with Dumbspeech.

As some of you may recall, back on May 10, 2010 I clambered onto the ‘crawl to announce the signing of a contract for the sidequel to Blindsight. As of Nov 2 2011, I announced that I’d handed in the manuscript. In between (and occasionally afterward), I dropped what occasional fiblets I could without giving […]

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Sunless, Squidless.

So apparently I’m attending The Waterloo Festival For Animated Cinema this weekend. I’m there right now, in fact. I am surprised to learn this, since I haven’t left Toronto today. I haven’t even left the Magic Bungalow. In fact I haven’t even got out of bed, except to feed the fur and the fins, and […]

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The Windbreaker of Shame.

Back around the turn of the century — when I was old enough to know better, anyway — I answered a knock on the door to find an unfamiliar twentysomething  looking up at me with a disarming seal-pup expression on his face. He’d locked himself out of his car, apparently. He needed $20 to pay […]

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Pics for Posterity.

So, here’s a nice surprise in my In-box: prototype cover for next year’s Finnish translation of Blindsight from Gummerus. The artist is Jussi Kaakinen, and I think he’s done a terrific job. Oooh, and just after I finished posting this the first time, a courier showed up at my door with a box of these: […]

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Corroboration.

This is for Steve. And Private Quentin. And whoever else  has nothing else to do but argue on Amazon’s fora on a Thursday night, when you all should be out drinking (which is what I’m doing, although fortunately the Duke of Somerset has WiFi). I’m not Quentin.  I’m just me. Steve Ptasznik should lay off.

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The Coming Con.

I was going to save this post until closer to the weekend, but I figure that folks to the south might want something to distract them from voting machines that tally up Obama votes in the Romney column, and election officials who helpfully fill out other people’s ballots with a clean sweep of Republicans. So […]

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Geoengineering and the Evils of Conservation

Well, traditional conservation, anyway. The kind where you presume to “manage” a wildlife population by ensuring, year after year, that its population remains stable. The problem is that as any population varies, so too does its behavior. Mortality curves, reproductive rates, vulnerability to pathogens and predators — a hundred other variables — all change with […]

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