Blog Archives
Podcasting the Puppies
I talked to Kristi Charish yesterday for my Book Rogues podcast at The Province. What did we talk about? The Sad Puppies controversy, of course. What else is there to talk about these days?
Coffee Break: The edition you won’t notice
Why write when you can read?
- Everyone is sharing the Telegraph piece about why great novels don’t get noticed now.
- How genre fiction became more important than literary fiction. Can we just end the genre wars now? Seriously. Please.
The Real Vancouver Writers Series celebrates five years in an unreal city
Over at that weird newspaper thing I do, I talked to Sean Cranbury and Dina Del Bucchia about the Real Vancouver Writers Series. We cover it all — the origin story, the villains, the new hope for the future. You can even hear Sean and I drink coffee!
It was kind of a weird interview. I took a Cthulhu selfie before the interview started, and my recorder stopped working after that. Luckily Sean was recording. Then it started raining. In Vancouver! Coincidence? I think not.
“We created the Real Vancouver Writers Series based on the fact that when the eyes of the world were on Vancouver, when the biggest spectacle in the history of the city was going to occur, we were going to represent for the city, for the publishers and independent presses, for the people we knew,” Cranbury says.
“I think that there was a sense in the city that [while] the Olympics were happening, a lot of people felt like this city wasn’t itself … That’s why we call it Real Vancouver. It was a Vancouver that was true to itself and true to the streets and the neighbourhoods that make up the city that house the writers that make the art.”
Let me tell you about the Underdark
Is geeksplaining a thing? Because I made a thread about it over at reddit.
Everyone is dead!
I went to grab a link for The Dead Hamlets the other day and this made me smile. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is one of my favourite plays. Glad to be in that company, even if we were introduced by an algorithm.
Get all of ChiZine’s 2015 books for just $99
I got a message today that people who take advantage of ChiZine’s subscription service are receiving their copies of The Dead Hamlets early. It’s worth checking out if you love ChiZine books — and who doesn’t love ChiZine books? For just $99 you can get ebooks of all 36 titles they’re releasing this year. That’s less than $3 per book! You can’t get a coffee that cheap, unless it’s gas station coffee, which we all know isn’t really coffee anyway. But hurry — the price goes up to $139 in March. Nearly $4 for a book? Outrageous!
Check out the books included in the subscription:
- Imaginarium 3: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing edited by Sandra Kasturi and Helen Marshall [anthology]
- The Yellow Wood by Melanie Tem (novel)
- Angels & Exiles by Yves Meynard (novel)
- The Dead Hamlets by Peter Roman (novel)
- A Telling of Stars by Caitlin Sweet (eBook only; novel)
- The Silences of Home by Caitlin Sweet (eBook only; novel)
- Probably Monsters by Ray Cluley (collection)
- Point Hollow by Rio Youers (novel)
- Quaternity by Kenneth Mark Hoover (novel)
- Against a Darkening Sky by Lauren B. Davis (novel)
- The Acolyte by Nick Cutter (novel)
- The House of War and Witness by Mike Carey, Linda Carey, and Louise Carey (novel)
- The H.M.S. Bad Idea by Peter Chiykowski (ChiGraphic; graphic humour collection)
- Infinitum by GMB Chomichuk (ChiGraphic; graphic novel)
- Dead Girls Don’t by Mags Storey (ChiTeen; novel)
- The Good Brother by E.L. Chen (ChiTeen; novel)
- What We Salvage by David Baillie (novel)
- Lament for the Afterlife by Lisa L. Hannett (novel)
- Imaginarium 4: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing edited by Sandra Kasturi and Jerome Stueart (anthology)
- Almost Dark by Letitia Trent (novel)
- The Worm in Every Heart by Gemma Files (eBook only; collection)
- Kissing Carrion by Gemma Files (eBook only; collection)
- The Book of David by Robert Boyczuk (novel)
- The Flame in the Maze by Caitlin Sweet (novel)
- Wrapped in Skin by Mark Morris (collection)
- The Humanity of Monsters edited by Michael Matheson (anthology)
- The Lady Paranorma by Vincent Marcone (ChiGraphic; graphic short story)
- Northern Frights: Volumes 1–5 edited by Don Hutchison (eBook only; anthologies)
- Experimental Film by Gemma Files (novel)
- One Nation Under Gods by Jerome Stueart (novel)
- Licence Expired: The Unauthorized James Bond edited by Madeline Ashby and David Nickle (ChiDunnit; anthology)
- Derby Cavendish Stories by Don Bassingthwaite (eBook only; collection)
Books brawl breaks out online
The other day I noticed a bit of controversy growing online after Vancouver writer Raziel Reid’s book Everything Feels Like the Movies was announced as a contestant for the 2015 Canada Reads. National Post columnist Barbara Kay attacked the book for being void of values, and a petition was launched asking the Canada Council to rescind the book’s 2014 Governor General’s award for children’s literature. Vancouver writer and international bestseller Steven Galloway stepped into the fray, and things started to get heated, so I decided to write about it.
Then things got crazy.
Day job linkage
The day job kept me busy today. First, I wrote a little piece about the Exploding Kittens Kickstarter blowing up the Internet. Seriously. For a while I just sat there, staring at my screen and watching the dollar figures multiply in real time. Clearly, I am working in the wrong business. I need to be getting drunk with friends and coming up with crazy card games.
Second, I wrote an article about the Canada Council, the arts funding agency in my little nation, deciding to completely overhaul its funding model. It’s a decision that will affect artists of all stripes in major ways, but no one yet knows what those major ways are. Yes, that plan of getting drunk and making games is looking more attractive by the minute.
Licence Expired
Here’s a piece of interesting news: my publisher ChiZine is publishing an unauthorized James Bond anthology. Ian Fleming’s work has hit the public domain in Canada (there’s a whole other post about copyright in regard to that), and ChiZine is looking for works of a certain flavour. Full press release follows. Read the rest of this entry
peter darbyshire 