{"id":126,"date":"2008-04-10T07:53:00","date_gmt":"2008-04-10T15:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=126"},"modified":"2011-07-14T05:49:02","modified_gmt":"2011-07-14T13:49:02","slug":"dying-with-dignity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=126","title":{"rendered":"Dying with Dignity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anna Davour, a Post-doc out of Queen’s, has been hitting up various sf authors for informal bloggable interviews. This week was my moment<\/a> in the sun. I say some nice things about the Sarah Connor Chronicles, and repeat my usual grumbling about Firefly.<\/p>\n

And if you’re not satisfied with mere wordage\u2014 if any of you feel the need to encounter me face-to-face, if only to see for yourselves whether my headphones are surgically attached\u2014 it looks like I’ll be emerging from my hole to participate in something called the “Canada Council Heritage Series of Speculative Fiction”, being hosted by the Toronto Public Library over the next few weeks. I’m not entirely sure what the whole program consists of (the TPL’s website is mum on the subject so far, and my contract is evidently in the mail), but I’m going to be showing up on two occasions: the official kick-off on April 21, and a somewhat darker event on the 24th.<\/p>\n

Here is what I know: the kick-off is a group affair involving fellow skifscribes Karl Schroeder<\/a> and Michael Skeet, and probably someone else TBA James Alan Gardner. It’s happening at The Lillian H. Smith branch ( 239 College St. Toronto, Ontario, M5T 1R5) between 7:00 and 9:30pm. I was asked to suggest a possible theme, with the caveat that there had to be some kind of Canadian angle; I suggested “Embracing Apocalypse: How Canadian SF Can Help Us Die with Dignity”, and was gently told that no such title would ever be allowed on a TPL poster. As of this writing the title has been changed to “Embracing the Future: How Canadian SF Can Help Us Embrace the Future”.<\/p>\n

Yeah, I know. It sucks like Cygnus. I disown it utterly. But at the very least it’ll give me something to complain about right off the bat. Could be an effective icebreaker, assuming I don’t care if these guys ever invite me back again.<\/p>\n

The second event is All Me, and is being held from 7:00-8:15pm at The Beaches branch (that’s 2161 Queen St. E. Toronto, Ont. M4L 1J1). I’m not entirely sure what I’ll be doing there. It was originally suggested that I give a live performance of the Vampire Domestication talk, but I don’t know how well something like that would go over with a non-sf audience. I’ve only delivered it twice live, both at cons, and while it killed both times the con-goer sensibility isn’t entirely conventional. I’m not particularly concerned about whether a more mainstream audience would be offended<\/em>, mind you; I just don’t know if they’d get<\/em> it. So maybe I should just do a more conventional reading\u2014 a short story, maybe an excerpt from a novel-in-progress. Assuming my stories aren’t to even more peculiar tastes than the talk would be.<\/p>\n

Any suggestions? Reading or talk? If reading, any suggestions as to content? Help me out here.<\/p>\n

Update 11\/4\/08:<\/span> The event is now listed<\/a> at the TPL website. They are hosting a lot<\/span> of events for this thing. And I notice that they’ve explicitly stated that I’ll not only be reading, but reading from Blindsight<\/span>. Which is not something I’ve actually decided yet, so for the time being let’s just act as though someone jumped the gun, and continue on with the whole what-should-Peter-do thread. (OTOH, they are the ones writing the cheque, so if it turns out that they do<\/span> strongly desire a Blindsight <\/span>reading, that’s what they get.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anna Davour, a Post-doc out of Queen’s, has been hitting up various sf authors for informal bloggable interviews. This week was my moment in the sun. I say some nice things about the Sarah Connor Chronicles, and repeat my usual grumbling about Firefly. And if you’re not satisfied with mere wordage\u2014 if any of you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interviews","category-writing-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=126"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2171,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126\/revisions\/2171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}