On Wednesday Oct 29th, from 6:30-8:30pm, 20 distinguished authors and artists will be present, including David Drake, Kate Elliot, Graham Joyce, Patricia McKillip, Garth Nix, Ken Scholes, Michael Swanwick, James Anderson, Carol Berg, Chaz Brenchley, Gail Carriger, David B. Coe, David Lunde, L.E. Modesitt, Jr., John Picacio, Barbara and Christopher Roden, Mark Sebanc, S.M. Stirling, Mark Van Name, Bill Willingham, Zoran Zivkoivc, and probably more!

On Monday Nov 2nd, from 6:30-8:30pm, over a dozen distinguished authors and editors will be there, including Paolo Bacigalupi, Ellen Datlow, Nina Kriki Hoffman, Cecelia Holland and Mary Robinette Kowal, Laird Barron, Marie Brennan, Lynn Ceasar, Nancy Etchemendy, Cody Goodfellow, Elaine Isaak, Nick Mamatas, Diana Paxson, Mark Teppo, Tony Richards, Michael Shea, John Skipp and more!

We are giving away one (1) copy of the newly released e-book application that includes:

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Guide to the previous five books, which includes the forward, “So Far As We Know,” by Eoin Colfer)
• Deep Thought – Swipe or shake the device to display a random quote from the Hitchhiker’s series
• Multiple Choice Quiz – Challenge yourself to a quiz and find out how much you know about the Hitchhiker’s series
• A Brief History of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
• The Glossary
• Updated video clips, including the 2009 San Diego Comic-Con Panel, wallpapers and much more.
• A pantheon of unemployed gods, everyone’s favorite renegade Galactic President, a lovestruck green alien, an irritating computer, and at least one very large slab of cheese

To enter, just send an email to contest [at] dragonpage [dot] com and put “Hitchhikers” in the subject line.

Be sure to include your name and shipping address in the body of the email. Any entries submitted without name and mailing address information will be disqualified and discarded.

One entry per email per day, and all entries must be received by midnight Pacific time, October 26, 2009

One lucky winner will get a promo code to download the new e-book application from the Apple Apps store.

Publisher’s Weekly reports that Gaiman is writing a new crowd-sourced short story on Twitter.   Starting today (Oct. 13) at noon EST, the author will Tweet the first line of a new story, and fans can continue it with their own 140-character contributions. BBC Audiobooks America will then compile the contributions—they expect about 1,000—into a short story that will be recorded by a professional narrator. The audiobook will be available for free download at BBCAudiobooksAmerica.com/trade and at iTunes and other audiobook retailers before the end of the year. There are no plans to release the story in print.

Michele Lee Cobb, marketing director for BBC Audiobooks America, said the project is “a fantastic way to get more people excited and actively engaging with audiobooks.” Cobb said BBC was inspired to initiate the project following Britain’s Royal Opera House successful creation of a fan-twittered opera last month. “There’s a misconception still that audiobooks are only for a small, elite niche of book lovers and we want to explode that myth and tap into the possibilities of digital storytelling in a whole new way,” Cobb said.

To contribute, fans should follow @BBCAA and Tweet with the hashtag #bbcawdio. Official participation rules and a legal waiver are posted on the BBCAA blog.

You can find Gaiman’s Twitter feed at @neilhimself.

On the 30th Anniversary of the first publication of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy comes And Another Thing…, the sixth book of the series penned by Artemis Fowl novelist Eoin (pronounced Owen) Colfer. Colfer discusses his reluctance to take on the project and his hopes for the future of Hitchhiker’s.

Q: What made you decide you wanted to pick up where Douglas Adams left off?

A: The project was not something I went looking for. Douglas Adams’s agent presented it to me as a way to bring the Hitchhiker back to the forefront of scifi, so that seemed like a good, honest project to be a part of. Also I was insanely flattered to be asked.

Q: Adams has said he was disappointed with how bleak the fifth book was. How focused were you on making this more upbeat?

A: My books tend to naturally veer away from the bleak, which is probably why I feel a little bleak most of the time myself. Maybe I should get rid of a little of it through writing in the future.

Q: Did you have to change your style of writing at all to mimic Adams’s, or are you writing about these familiar characters in your own voice?

A: I use my own voice mostly, but I think that unconsciously I tried to make the prose somewhat reminiscent of Douglas, but not in a slavish way.

Q: What was the biggest challenge in picking up this franchise?

A: I found the biggest challenge was walking the fine line between new and familiar. I wanted the older readers to be reminded of the Hitchhiker universe without alienating the new readers with constant references.

Q: Your Artemis Fowl books are always written in a half-serious tone, and for that reason are often called children’s books. Do you see any similarities to the Hitchhiker series?

A: Absolutely, except the Hitchhiker books are even less serious in tone than Artemis. All bets are off when writing a book like this. You can take the story in any direction.

Q: You grew up a fan of Hitchhikers — what was your favorite thing to write?

A: I have always loved Zaphod Beeblebrox, maverick two headed president of the galaxy and of course famous lady’s man. Also, my favorite Hitchhiker book is Restaurant at the End of the Universe — and I did try to mirror its zany mood.

Q: What are some of the key things you knew you had to include in a new Hitchhiker book?

A: I knew Zaphod had to come back, and I felt I had to deal with Fenchurch’s disappearance. Also I felt I had to bring some Irishness to the series.

Q: Do you think you might write more Hitchhiker stories in the future?

A: I would like to see a different high profile writer do one every year.

Yes, it was inconvenient and an annoyance to everyone who had purchased the novels. But for Justin Gawronski it was much more that that. Gawronski was reading both books on the Kindle and using it to make notes on the book for a homework assignment.

When the recall occurred, Gawronski’s notes were thrown into chaos.

“I was between a quarter and halfway through [the book],” said Gawronski. “I had a good amount of notes.” Though the notes survived, they pointed only to strings of characters, where the novel’s text had gone missing.

Gawronski sued Amazon and won a settlement of $150,000, who says he will donate the money to charity after paying his legal bills.

First we had the instant classic “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” and last month saw the release of “Sense and Sensibility and Seamonsters.”

But apparently the classic monsters weren’t content to continue attacking the characters of Jane Austen.   They’re moving on to a whole different literary group of characters–this time the creations of Louisa May Alcott.

SciFi Wire reports that Del Rey Books has purchased the publishing rights to “Little Women and Werewolves” from writer Porter Grand.

“In this retelling of Louisa May Alcott’s classic, the beloved little women must keep not just the wolf, but the werewolves, from the door … and the kindly old gentlemen next door and his grandson may have some secrets to hide—or share with the March girls,” the publisher says.

No word yet on when this latest mash-up will hit stores.

Deborah Yu of Clive, IA

Max Carballo of Doral, FL

Rachel Lindley of Phoenix, AZ

Look for your prizes to arrive in the mail shortly!

We are giving away three (3) prize packs! Each winner will receive:
# 1 limited edition promotional T-shirt
# 1 collectible mocking jay pin
# 1 copy of Catching Fire

To enter, just send an email to contest [at] dragonpage [dot] com and put “Catching Fire” in the subject line.

Be sure to include your name and shipping address in the body of the email. Any entries submitted without name and mailing address information will be disqualified and discarded.

One entry per email per day, and all entries must be received by midnight Pacific time, September 24, 2009.

This contest is only open to those with mailing addresses in the US.

Synopsis:
Having just passed the ultimate test of survival—the Hunger Games—sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark defied the Capitol and their harsh rules. But even as both won their families a life of safety, now the Capitol wants revenge. Despite her feelings for Gale Hawthorne, Katniss must showcase her love for Peeta on a cruel Victory Tour, and the stakes are higher than ever. Rumors of unrest are spreading quickly, and to Katniss and Peeta’s shock, they’ve become the face of a dangerous rebellion. But how will they be able to take on the Capitol and protect their families? In Catching Fire, the second installment of the Hunger Games, only one thing is certain: sparks will fly!

Link: Official Hunger Games Website

The show, hosted by actor LeVar Burton, was unable to secure a sponsor to underwrite the cost of producing and airing the show on PBS, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Pointing to changes in educational programming funding, John Grant, chief content officer at the program’s home station, said that the Department of Education and PBS are spending more money on teaching kids how to read, not on teaching them to savor the act itself. But the delights of “Reading Rainbow” stemmed directly from this premise – that kids could lose themselves in magical worlds just by turning a page.

Host Levar Burton hasn’t yet tweeted about it, but dismayed fans have already coined the twitter hash #savereadingrainbow.

Dune author Frank Herbert’s son discusses picking up his father’s threads in Winds of Dune, out this month, and his hopes for Peter Berg’s film adaptation of the saga.

Q: The Winds of Dune is part of your Heroes of Dune series of prequels. What was the inspiration to go back?

A: When [co-author] Kevin [J. Anderson] and I started writing books together, he wanted to do Dune 7, which was the book my dad had not written before he passed away. I wanted to do The Butlerian Jihad and go back 10,000 years. So we settled on a third option — we’re doing the core characters of Dune when they’re all older. Winds of Dune focuses on Jessica, and it’s about her reaction to this jihad that’s going on — billions of people have been killed in her son’s name. My dad was a reporter and he liked to look at the myths under which we lived, and he would flip the myth of a charismatic leader: Isn’t it great we have this wonderful leader, but what if it’s the other way? Hitler and bin Laden were charismatic too.

Q: Was it difficult to write a Dune prequel that doesn’t conflict with canon?

A: It was a big challenge. Kevin has said he felt daunted. I felt like I was ready for this test. In fact before we wrote a word together I spent a year doing a concordance of all six Frank Herbert Dune novels. So I know on what pages all the Bene Gesserit are described and the eye color of the characters — I can go right to the pages.

Q: Did Frank Herbert leave you any notes to guide you in writing these prequels?

A: When dad died he was using a yellow highlighter on Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse Dune. That’s all I knew. Then I got a call from an estate attorney who asked me what I wanted to do with two safety deposit boxes of my dad’s. I didn’t know they existed. So we went down there, and in them were the notes to Dune 7 — it was a 30-page outline. So I went up in my attic and found another 1,000 pages of working notes. As far as filling in these stories, Dad would say for example, “Between Dune and Dune Messiah it’s been 11 years and billions of people were killed in the jihad.” That’s very enticing. So we’re staying right on the Frank Herbert thread of his story line.

Q: Will you continue to write more Dune novels after you’ve finished with Heroes?

A: You could write them forever, but would they be substantial enough to be a major Dune novel? Maybe there could be Young Adult; there could be graphic novels that take little aspects of it. But we think there are perhaps three more Dune novels after Heroes. We may go on to the founding of the great schools: Dad says there are five, but we’re going to do it in three. You’ve got the Bene Gesserit — that would be The Sisterhood of Dune; then there’s The Mentats of Dune and The Swordmasters of Dune.

Q: Why do you think it’s been so hard to adapt Dune into a feature film?

A: The original movie by David Lynch was really popular overseas. But it was completed right when Universal Pictures changed their presidency, and the new president did not like the movie and he canceled a bunch of reviewers that he thought would be unfriendly. So it bombed over here, and I remember people talking to me who had not seen the movie, and they’d say, “Isn’t it a horrible movie?” And I said, “Well you have to see it, there are a lot of things that are very good.” It just doesn’t follow the plot in all places. It feels like Dune, has a great cast, and I like it. But it’s not the place to enter Dune. Then the two TV series followed the plot wonderfully.

Q: Are you optimistic about Peter Berg’s upcoming adaptation?

A: Kevin and I are technical advisors on it. We sat in with them for a meeting about the script, and we gave them a lot of information and our feelings about the need for authenticity. They want to do a classic interpretation of the novel, and it would follow the plot more carefully. But it’s such a huge canvas. And so we’re in the script-writing phase right now, and we’re hopeful it gets the green-light beyond that. And if the movie does well, then there will be additional Dune movies and perhaps some TV specials and that kind of thing.

Q: Do you think it’s an appropriate time for a remake since the plot so closely parallels what’s going on in the Middle East right now?

A: Absolutely. Look at all the predictive qualities that my dad had. The interesting thing about Frank Herbert is that he was living so far in the future, and he could just see how things came out.

You can download a PDF of the first chapter this week, and a new chapter will be posted online every week until the second season premiere on Monday, September 21. The full book will be available on September 29.

The biggest mystery is who is the real author behind the books written by “Richard Castle” (portrayed by Nathan Fillion), will we ever find out, and will we end up with more novels in this series if the crossover appeal works?

Link: Castle: Nikki Heat Novel (download the PDFs)
Link: Castle: ABC.com
Buy the book at Amazon.com

“I grew up in the UK during the latter stages of the Cold War,” Stross told SciFi Wire. “Britain is relatively compact, and much closer to the borders of the USSR than anywhere in North America. Orwell satirized the UK as ‘Airstrip One’ in 1984 for a reason—much of its role during the upheavals of the 20th century has been to provide a giant, unsinkable aircraft carrier for the US military, moored off the coast of Europe. The Soviets knew this well, and had planned accordingly: from about 1960 onwards, in event of a world war the UK’s destiny was to be pulverized by short-range nuclear weapons. (The government virtually gave up on civil defense in the mid-1970s, when their casualty estimates exceeded 90%.)

“As it is, I have never lived more than five miles from ground zero of a major strategic target. With that kind of background, it’s very easy to see yourself as a small, frightened human being living in the shadow of great beings who are engaged in a titanic, existential struggle for control of the universe… and who can destroy you and yours in an instant for reasons you may never understand. And if that isn’t a dead ringer for the Lovecraftian experience (never mind the Cold War thriller), what is?”

The new collection of stories has just hit bookstores. And Stross’ latest novel (and current Hugo nominee) “Saturn’s Children” has just been released in mass market paperback.

If you’re looking for some great summer reading, these two books are definitely worth picking up.

The TV series “Castle” features a New York Times best-selling mystery author, in the style of James Patterson and Michael Connolly, and as a series tie-in, a book published by the character “Richard Castle” will play a part in the promotion leading up to the new season debut in late September.

The book, titled Heat Wave, is the first in the author’s new series, whose main character is based on the detective that Castle spent the first season following around New York City and observing her work homicide cases.

Heat Wave will debut on ABC.com, on August 10, where the first half of the book will be serialized on the website. The full published novel will be available in stores on September 29, and the novel will apparently be a stand-alone mystery with some cross-over elements to the on-screen story.

Season 1 of “Castle” is currently reairing on Saturday nights on ABC, and will be available on DVD on September 22.

Link: ‘Castle’ book to promote series

Ursula K. Le Guin’s work still resonates with readers
The seminal science fiction writer just won another Nebula award, and her themes about the environment, politics and feminism are still fresh.
by Scott Timberg | The Writers Life | Los Angeles Times | May 10, 2009

PORTLAND, OR — Forest Park is one of the largest patches of urban wilderness in the United States, and the Victorian homes and gardens nearby create an air of Tolkienesque enchantment. Right around here in fact, one of Tolkien’s heirs labors in a century-old house.

“I agree with Tolstoy that the best way to tell a story is invisibly,” Ursula K. Le Guin says. “But I also hear what I write, and I think if you can’t read it out loud, there’s something wrong with it.”

It’s hard to find a literary career as varied as Le Guin’s. At 79, she’s worked for half a century on the ever-shifting frontier between literary and genre writing, a line she has helped redraw with her elegant prose.

Le Guin has long been celebrated as a pioneer of young adult literature. Just two weeks ago she won a sixth Nebula Award for her YA novel “Powers.” With last year’s death of Arthur C. Clarke, she is also arguably the most acclaimed science fiction writer on the planet. But she’s more.

Her 1968 novel, “A Wizard of Earthsea,” concerned a school for wizards; the National Endowment for the Arts made the book a selection of its program the Big Read.

“I think Le Guin is vastly underrated by the critical establishment, which continues to stereotype her as a genre writer,” says former NEA Chairman Dana Gioia. “She’s become a deeply serious writer without losing the vitality and the excitement of popular literature.”

Her admirers include Salman Rushdie as well as the generation working genre’s borderlands: Michael Chabon, Neil Gaiman, David Mitchell, Jonathan Lethem and Kelly Link.

For all this, she is in a curious position: She’s achieved these things almost entirely on the basis of work now three and four decades old. “She was the big thing for almost 20 years,” said Donna White, author of “Dancing With Dragons: Ursula Le Guin and the Critics.” “The 1970s and 1980s were her big decades; she was revered by scholars. But now people have moved on.”

Her status is further confused because of the variety of fields — YA, fantasy, science fiction, essays — in which she writes.

But don’t count Le Guin out. Her recent “Lavinia,” a novel set in the world of Virgil’s “Aeneid,” was compared by Publishers Weekly to Robert Graves’ “I, Claudius.”

Le Guin’s early years help explain her abiding concern: Is there such a thing as a stable human nature? She grew up in Berkeley, the daughter of Alfred Kroeber, a founder of modern anthropology, and Theodora Kroeber, author of “Ishi in Two Worlds,” about an American Indian who had outlived his tribe. Her childhood, which included summers at a family ranch in Napa, was full of reading, storytelling and visits from European intellectuals and Native Americans.

“I was privileged,” she says, “to know the kind of people that most American kids, most bourgeois white kids, don’t.” She was raised “as irreligious as a jack rabbit.”

Eric Rabkin, who teaches at the University of Michigan, sees her work as profoundly shaped by her exposure to alien cultures as well as her father’s ambition to find as specifically as he could the time and place from which Western civilization had sprung.

“There’s a kind of romance to that view,” Rabkin says. “That once upon a time, the worst antagonisms were merely inter-familial — that basically we’re all alike and trustworthy. And I believe she grew up in a family in which that was considered not a fantasy but a scientific fact.”

As a kid, Le Guin thought science fiction was corny.

“When I was about 11,” she recalls, “my brother and I used to buy Astounding [and other pulps]. We sneered at a lot of it. We were pretty arrogant kids.”

Then, around age 30, a friend drew her attention to Cordwainer Smith and Theodore Sturgeon. “I thought, ‘Oh, look at that. That could be fun.’ ”

Some of the SF faithful hold it against Le Guin that she prefers Borges and Virginia Woolf to what she calls the “white man conquers the universe” tradition of Robert A. Heinlein. Yet science fiction clearly fit this daughter of anthropologists. Here, she wrote, “All alternatives are thinkable. It’s not a comfortable, reassuring place. It’s a very large house, a drafty house. But it’s the house we live in.”

From the late 1960s to the early 1970s, Le Guin went on a streak inspired by her interest in thought experiments and a Taoist concern for equilibrium.

The ferment of the Vietnam War and Watergate, of feminism and civil rights, stimulated her imagination: She took these concerns and transmuted them, setting them on other planets and in other centuries. This was an artist working at the peak of her powers.

All her books of this period have powerful images that suggest her importance to the environmental movement: a forest world, a harsh desert moon, flooded cities, island planets.

Her breakthrough novel was “A Wizard of Earthsea,” the coming-of-age tale of a young sorcerer who possesses great power but has also, through reckless pride, done damage to the world. After it came two undisputed SF masterpieces: “The Left Hand of Darkness” and “The Dispossessed.”

Le Guin started writing the former as a book about a planet caught in an ice age. It evolved into the tale of a race with no fixed gender: Every month, people go through a process in which they take on masculine or feminine characteristics.

This world is fully imagined, its texture coming from myths and folk tales wrapped around the narrative.

“I’m following Tolkien’s prescription for fantasy creation,” Le Guin says, sitting in her living room. “You are making a world out of words, and the only thing that’s going to hold it together is its inner consistency.”

“The Dispossessed” was equally celebrated; it’s a lively novel of ideas about a planet resembling the Cold War Earth and its anarchist moon and the troubled, soulful man who tries to restore their connection. When it won the Hugo Award (given by the fans) and the Nebula (given by the writers), Le Guin became the first author to win the doubleheader for two novels.

In 1973, Le Guin wrote that science fiction had too little real criticism, that “the writer is almost his only critic.” Soon criticism came thick and fast, not only from fandom and newspapers but also from an academia discovering SF. Le Guin joined the dialogue, firing back in some cases. Critics approached her work from so many directions — Jungian, Taoist, environmental, feminist — that they often talked past each other.

During the last 20 years, however, all that has changed. Even many of those who admire Le Guin describe a falling off.

For guardians of SF tradition, her most devastating move may have been co-editing “The Norton Book of Science Fiction,” a 1993 anthology that George Slusser — who once wrote an admiring study of her and has taught for 30 years at UC Riverside — called “an act of condescension.” With 26 of 67 stories by women, he says, the book lacks respect for SF’s roots and established figures and “does not reflect the field.”

In his study “The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of,” Thomas M. Disch, a novelist of SF’s New Wave who died last year, dismissed the book as “a one-volume affirmative action campaign” for gender balance, resenting its “equation of male sexuality with aggression and physical violence.”

And yet, Le Guin’s later efforts do have their champions. Writer and critic Carter Scholz describes “Always Coming Home,” a 1985 novel about a post-apocalyptic California dominated by hunter-gatherer tribes, as “her most ambitious, experimental work.”

“Lavinia,” meanwhile — which Kirkus Reviews called “arguably her best novel” — makes clear that Le Guin can still write in her classic style. “It isn’t like anything else I’ve done,” she says. “But the dignified style is the way I used to write, in the first Earthsea books. Some of the cadences are storytelling rather than story writing.”

Le Guin relearned Latin to read “The Aeneid” and research its era. But because so little is known about daily life in the days when Rome was a dusty village, she was able largely to create that world.

Le Guin knows her work isn’t reaching audiences as it once did. But if there’s less breaking ground in her recent writing, she’s not striving for that anymore. Her familiar concerns — environmental devastation and energy shortages — don’t seem like remnants of the 1970s but have become pertinent all over again.

“Writing science fiction and fantasy allow you to back off a little bit,” she says, sipping an Oregon beer on her deck, “to try to find the problems that always come back, that we never solve. Like gender relations, war — once there’s more than 50 of us living in one place we seem to have war.

“How do we and why do we enslave one another? Slavery is maybe another way of saying class. And of course race, which is involved in the others. I’m just circling around these subjects, which have become somewhat clearer to me as I’ve gotten older, as being the big problems.”

Link to full article: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-ca-ursula-leguin10-2009may10,0,5322342,full.story

Bone Shop: A Reader-Supported Novella

As I mentioned yesterday, my wife was laid off this week, and while we both hope she finds a new job soon (and that I sell some more novels, as far as that goes), we’re in sudden need of money now. I could have just straight-out asked for financial help — and for those who’ve offered that, thanks, it’s appreciated — but I’m a writer, and if there’s one thing I have in ample quantity, it’s stories to tell.

Specifically a story I’ve been wanting to write for a while, but couldn’t find the right market for: a longish piece about the early adventures of my series character Marla Mason.

Bone Shop is a serialized, donation-funded urban fantasy novella, available for anyone to read for free. New chapters will go up every Monday. The Bone Shop website is here, though there’s not a lot there at the moment. I’ll post the first chapter on June 29.

Marla Mason is the chief sorcerer of Felport, a woman who’s tangled with gods and monsters and come out on top (if a bit damaged in the process). But she wasn’t always a formidable engine of brute force and pragmatism; she started out alone, in a strange city, without allies or any more power than the average teenage runaway on the street. Marla was always willing to do anything necessary to survive, and it didn’t take long for her to stumble into a world of magic, danger… and even the occasional moment of grace.

Bone Shop tells the story of Marla’s evolution from runaway to sorcerer’s apprentice to mercenary magician and beyond. Fans of the urban fantasy series that began with Blood Engines will find surprising secrets revealed about Marla’s past, and new readers can meet the character from the very beginning.

Your donations will help keep a roof over our heads, and pay our son’s medical bills (he has congenital glaucoma, and requires regular visits with specialists to keep his eyesight from deteriorating). We appreciate whatever you can give. And I hope you enjoy the story!

Visit Bone Shop and donate to the novella and help out Tim’s family.