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.

Suddenly, the media everywhere are talking about the self-publishing craze that’s sweeping the States and starting to trend in other countries, such as Canada. You can attribute it to whatever you like — the rise of the Kindle and ebooks in general, the death of bookstores, the ability of writers to leverage social media relationships into book sales. It doesn’t matter. It’s not a fad — it’s the new Gutenberg revolution. Some writers and publishers will figure out a way to make it work for them. Others won’t. And some people will treat it like they treat blogs now: a creative venture they do in their spare time that may make them a little money, but not much. But it’s not money they’re after.

One of the stars of the self-pub movement is Amanda Hocking, who writes paranormals. She’s getting tons of press and making tons of money. As is the case with traditional publishing, self-published writers benefit greatly from media attention. There’s a lively Metafilter thread about her and she’s often mentioned at Kindleboards, where she sometimes posts.

If you’re interested in learning more about the brave new world of self-publishing, check out Joe Konrath’s blog, A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing. It’s got a mystery fiction bent, but it’s not exclusive that way. And Konrath’s focus is talking about the business side of self-publishing, with plenty of guest posts. Follow the links from there.

In my own self-pubbing adventure with Please, I’ve got a nod over at Spalding’s Racket, and I’ll have some more news soon. I’ll keep you posted.

Just hit the 200 page mark in the new book, The Apocalypse Corpse. That’s around 55,000 words in Pages, the word processor I’m using. I estimate it to be around the two-thirds mark, as I think the book will come in somewhere between 250-300 pages.

So I’ve been averaging a little more than 100 pages a month, which is like warp speed for me. And I’ve only skipped one minor scene so far, which I’ll fill in later.

I am now officially exhausted.

I’ve got family visiting for the next week, so I probably won’t do much more until March. But who knows — maybe I’ll have a rough draft done by April rather than June, as I was originally predicting.

Oh yes, the body count continues to climb.

Just discovered the work of Nele Azevedo. Stunning stuff. If you like this, you may also like the art of Jason de Caires Taylor.

Today while I was working on the new book, Alden toddled into my office, grabbed a Mark Leyner book from the shelf, and then toddled off down the hall again. Later he came back and pulled some more books off the shelf to read. I guess I can’t complain. Now if I only knew where he’d put that Leyner book….

I’ve rented three sci-fi movies in the last few months: District 9, Monsters and Transformers: Revenge of the Batteries. Guess which ones I liked and which one I thought was even more idiotic than I expected it to be.

District 9 — Great use of that documentary/security camera feel. The whole film should have been done that way. The weak parts were when it used conventional static camera shots to flesh out parts of the storyline. Those parts made me wonder if they were demanded by studio execs who worried people wouldn’t be able to think the story through.

District 9 also did what sci-fi is supposed to do — use the future to talk about the present. (Because really, isn’t that what Alien and Blade Runner are? Anxieties about the time in which they were filmed, projected into the future.) We don’t really need to discuss the “messages” of this film, do we? Let’s just say it was actively engaged with the geopolitics of the current era, and not an escapist fantasy about the future, and leave it at that.

Monsters — Just watched it last night. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting more than a sci-fi thriller or horror flick, based on the marketing. It looked like another Cloverfield. Instead, it was as thoughtful and as politically engaged as District 9. The film is set mostly in Mexico, parts of which have become an “infected zone” after a spacecraft brings back some alien hitchhikers and crashes there. The aliens start off small and then grow into large tentacley beasts that try to migrate into America. The Americans build a wall to stop them and launch a war on the alien immigrants…. get it? It’s full of nods to the war on drugs, illegal immigration, the role of the media, even the subprime crisis (if you look at a destroyed neighbourhood the right way). Interestingly, the closer the characters get to America, the worse things become.

Monsters is more subtle than District 9 — it’s largely an emotional film rather than a political action film. There are some stunningly beautiful shots, and a lot of moments that just celebrate humanity and community. Communion, even. The ending, well, let’s just say the film ends on an emotional note rather than a plot point. It could have been overwrought and anti-climatic, but it works perfectly.

Transformers — a film about toys. And maybe cars. The cars could be toys though, so I’m not sure they deserve a separate category. The film is also about…. no, that’s it. Toys.

It saddens me that this film gets a blockbuster release, while District 9 and Monsters have to be “discovered” and championed by celebrities, just to get medium-sized releases. And only then when their marketing campaigns try to present them as films they aren’t — bug hunt shoot ’em ups or horror flicks. But I guess that’s what sells.

I don’t know who I’m really upset with more — the Hollywood studios or the film audiences.