LAPD radio calls mixed with ambient music. My new work soundtrack.

Once again, my inboxes are full of messages asking me how to publish on Kindle, thanks to my latest article on self-publishing ebooks. So I’ll just point new readers to this blog to a previous post on the subject. I don’t really have time for a step-by-step manual right now — and I’m still figuring out things myself — so if you need more guidance I’d either check out Guido Henkel’s blog entries about ebook formatting or download the free Smashwords Style Guide.

Please note the e-reader services are different — Amazon takes mobi files while the iBookstore uses epubs, etc. So make sure you’re submitting the right kind of file to each store.

Hopefully this helps. If not, I may have to write that more detailed post….

Good luck, everyone!

I wrote an article about self-publishing for The Province. I mention my own experiences a little, but it’s mainly about other writers. I talk about the stars in the U.S., of course — Amanda Hocking and Joe Konrath — but I also interviewed a few Canadians. There are some interesting comments from Cliff Burns, Joey Comeau and Nichole McGill. Check out what they have to say — and then buy their books!

I just finished Timothy Taylor‘s The Blue Light Project, and I think it’s his best novel yet. Check out my review here.

I just did an interview with rob mclennan for his great 12 or 20 Questions series. Here’s a sample:

6 – Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

It depends on the book. With Please, I was trying to write about the experiences of my generation — I should have subtitled it “Generation Temp.” But I also wound up writing a bit of a historical book in a sense, in that the characters are often longing for something from the past — a lost love, that suburban neighbourhood, the decision they failed to make — and they inhabit the ruins of the past. They live in their own memories, and in social memories, with suburbs and churches and OJ Simpson car chases and such.

The Warhol Gang is a little more sci-fi in nature, in that like all good science fiction its project is extrapolation. I took a bunch of trends I was starting to see emerging — neuromarketing, holograms, the viral video— and tried to normalize them. That is, I tried to imagine a society where they were the cultural norm. In some ways, I think I failed, because society has already become stranger than I imagined — anime news videos depicting Charlie Sheen rants? Twitter-fuelled revolutions in the Middle East? But we live in an age where the future is happening faster than we can keep up.

In my new book, I’m exploring the idea of the post-future. The characters inhabit a world where they’ve given up trying to keep pace with the future and turn to the past for meaning instead, searching for artifacts and memories that will save them. But that doesn’t stop the future from happening to them. I’m not sure how to discuss it conceptually, because we’re all still struggling to grasp the violent change we’re going through right now, and I think we’re largely unsuccessful at it.

One of my favourite blogs, BLDGBLOG, interviews China Mieville. Put your thinking caps on.

Canadian SF writer Peter Watts recently survived a bout of flesh-eating disease. Now he’s documenting the aftermath in photos on his blog. Not for the squeamish. We are nothing but meatbots.

There are a fair number of holograms in The Warhol Gang, but they’re all fairly contained. I wanted the book to feel slightly futuristic, but I didn’t want it to feel like full-blown sci-fi, so I restricted the fantastic things to holograms in the neuromarketing pod and hologram theme park disasters, so people could relive the World Trade Center attacks and things like that. I worried if there were too many holograms and other technological delights in the story, people wouldn’t believe it. Of course, shortly after The Warhol Gang came out, real life has turned it into a historical fantasy….

I was doing an interview tonight and I described my first book, Please, as historical fiction and my second book, The Warhol Gang, as sci-fi. When I was writing them, I thought of them both as contemporary. Hmm.

I’ve been getting into The Office lately, thanks to the baby finally sleeping through the night. Most nights. I like that the Michael Scott character isn’t just the asshole, clueless boss, but in fact has a bit of the tragic in him. He reminds me a little of Hank Kingsley from the Larry Sanders Show. I’m not sure what the show will do without him — I’d recommend something dramatic, like outsourcing to a prison or something. Either reinvent the show or watch it die in a season or two.

Anyway, Mindy Kaling, who plays Kelly Kapoor on the show and writes some of the episodes, is tweeting about some of the Michael Scott stories that didn’t make it to filming.