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I swear to Giger I actually took this photo outside an abattoir.

Just because I’m not busy enough with all my social networking services, I joined Fictionaut the other day. It’s actually a pretty fun and interesting site that’s devoted to community building around literature. Think Facebook meets Goodreads, only with the lit right there on the site instead of linking to books on Amazon. It’s got the wall, the ability to message people and comment on posts, etc.

I posted some of the shorts I’ve published here and had a great response from people. It’s really lovely to be instantaneously involved in a conversation with people you don’t know about something you’ve written.

There’s also some really interesting work being published on it as well. I haven’t had too much time to do a lot of reading on the site because, you know, the baby and all, but I think it’s a place you could be happily lost in for some time.

Check it out and if you want to join, add me to your contacts.

My desktop after a long day writing — Ikeaspace desktop, not cyberspace:

I just finished George Murray‘s Glimpse: Selected Aphorisms, and it’s so good I’m going to back and read it again. Each aphorism is a fortune cookie of apocalypse. Here’s the full review I posted over at Goodreads:

“George Murray’s Glimpse is an irresistible force meeting an unmovable object in your mind. Forget five stars — this book deserves its own constellation.”

Here’s the aphorism I could have easily dropped into The Warhol Gang:

“When we die we are finally impersonating no one.”

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Good news! We’re hiring again!

I’ve already got an iTunes account, so I joined Ping. Just search for me by name.

I’ll be making an appearance at Vancouver’s Word on the Street, Sunday, Sept. 26, at 3:40. I’ll be at the Authors Tent, in between readings by Susan Juby and Lee Henderson, who are both great writers and awesome people. It’s going to be an interesting hour!

The WOTS readings are longer than most literary readings — 20 minutes — so I’m planning on talking a bit about the writing of The Warhol Gang, and some of the things that influenced it. But I’m also game for questions from the audience.

As always, I’ll bring some special prizes for people who come to the event and buy a book. At previous readings I’ve given away a couple hundred postcard comics and even some lottery tickets. We’ll see what I show up with this time.

And hey, if you want to post/tweet/update about this, the offer of a free unpublished story still stands.

Hope to see you there!

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I took this photo in Hawaii. I thought I was capturing the sunset, but it turns out it was just a U.S. military experiment.

The New York Times has an interesting article about ads that stalk you online. I had to change my cookies and login to get away!

The shoes that Julie Matlin recently saw on Zappos.com were kind of cute, or so she thought. But Ms. Matlin wasn’t ready to buy and left the site.

Then the shoes started to follow her everywhere she went online. An ad for those very shoes showed up on the blog TechCrunch. It popped up again on several other blogs and on Twitpic. It was as if Zappos had unleashed a persistent salesman who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

We’ve tracked the ad — it’s coming from inside your computer! Get away from your computer!

For those readers who like The Warhol Gang, you may also enjoy this selection of quotes by Jean Baudrillard. One of my favourite bits:

“Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.”