He’s in this box.
I’ve owned five Apple computers: an Apple IIe (it was really my parents’, but I used it more), a Powerbook Duo, a Pismo PowerBook, and two MacBook Pros. I also have an old Mac that is now an aquarium; Ben used it in college, and Ken gutted it and built a lexan tank. I haven’t brought it out of storage, and won’t until Grace is old enough not to, y’know, toddler the fish, but it’ll return to the living room one day. It’s a friendly-looking device, even if you removed the elephant ears that Ben velcroed on back at Mudd.
The Pismo was my favorite, because it felt so solid and comfortable and had, I think, the best keyboard action of any Mac. I bought it for $600 off Craigslist, back when I needed something to get into TicketMaster’s systems to work. And, yes, I felt very chipper and nerdsexy carting that beast around on the bus, taking it out of its case for meetings, and all that. I really didn’t write a lot on it, though. At least, I don’t think I did. It’s sitting in the closet, waiting for the day when I haul it to a shop to resurrect it.
I’m pretty sure it was the last laptop Apple made before Steve Jobs returned (I’m too tired and lazy to look it up, but I’m sure some Mac pedant will come along in the comments to correct me if I’m wrong), and that got me thinking a lot today about how the machines have changed since Jobs returned. I can remember opening up the IIe to look at its guts, and, even as a kid, I could appreciate how pretty it looked inside. It doesn’t surprise me the Jobs rode the IIe team to make it look as good inside as it did out.
While I couldn’t get into the Duo, I could pop out the batteries and the drive bays and all that stuff. The Pismo had levers, and I thought that was awesome. Done with this battery? Just pull the lever and pop a fresh one in, then maybe hotswap a drive, just because you can (or not. Can’t remember if that was possible. Shut up, Apple Pedants!)
Then I bought Jason’s used MacBook Pro, and when things went wrong (like the DVD drive crapping out), I could still attempt to take it apart. It was a royal pain in the ass, and it required all sorts of tiny screwdrivers and Torx heads and a roll of Scotch tape just so you didn’t lose track of the screws, but, dammit, you could still get into the damn thing. Screw the warranty, screw the Genius Bar; I have a Radio Shack electronics screwdriver set, and I’m bloody well using it myself!
The DVD drive I bought off eBay didn’t work, by the way. I mean, the machine knows it’s there, it’s just indifferent to the drive’s presence.
When that machine’s trackpad started to go, I hemmed and hawed about getting it fixed by a pro versus hauling out the Torx, and caved. I bought a new MacBook Pro, and it’s sealed. Everything’s locked in. If the battery croaks, there’s no friendly switches to pull. It’s all tucked inside the case behind ten screws that are just daring me to undo them.
And I can’t help but wonder how much of Job’s obsession with industrial design and Apple’s obsession with control freakery (and how both bled into each other; Apple is Jobs is industrial design is we’ll tell you how to get your contacts onto your iPhone and you’ll bloody well like it) were driven by Job’s pancreatic cancer. Here’s a man who could make entertainment companies bend to his will, who reshaped the face of personal technology time after time, who could probably reduce Ph.D’s to tears with a single shake of his head, and he couldn’t keep his own body from rebelling and killing him. We’ve all read or seen his excellent commencement address to Stanford, and it sounded like a man who had looked Death in the face and told it he would go when he was good and ready…
And yet, here’s this case. Here are these ten screws. Here is someone saying, “I’m going to put all this good stuff in here, and you have to trust me and not try and take it out.”
I wonder if some of that good stuff was a bit of himself. Steve is in there, in all our machines, among the memory subroutines and bits to monitor the processor temperature, making sure the Good Stuff stays in there.
In a few months, my iPhone will get its updates over the air. Steve will be out there, now. Fifty-six is too fucking young.
(I know, I know. Everyone and his mother is going to use that as the title for their review, including the marketing department of Del Rey when they come out with the ninth printing, but I’m tired because I was up all night finishing the damn book, so this is the best you’re going to get.)
I joke a lot about my massive reach on the internet, even though I know it’s mostly my friends, my mom, and disappointed South Korean who think they’re going to a billpay site but wind up here instead. It’s a small circle, but I’m a big believer in using the internet to spread ideas. Yesterday, Jamie showed me a video of a dubbed dog, and I thought it was so damn funny that I sent it to Anne and my mom, who will quite likely share it their friends, and on and on until everyone has seen this video. You’ll see it, too, because you’ll want to see the deal is. You’ll become another vector.
I want you to become vectors for Daryl Gregory’s Raising Stony Mayhall, because it is so goddamned good. It is keep-me-awake-to-see-what-happens-next good. It is I-want-to-eat-Daryl’s-brains-just-so-I-can-gain-his-writing-skills good (though that bit is just between you and me. I’m going to see Daryl in a few weeks, and I don’t want him to get wise to me and show up wearing a helmet). It is a zombie novel told from the zombies’ point of view, and it will break your heart and make you laugh and do all the great things that Daryl’s writing does.
I remember talking with him about this in Montreal, when he was busy trying to talk himself out of writing Stony. The Zombie Glut was approaching maximum saturation, and Daryl was convinced that his book would be lost in a wave of po-mo zombie stories that took the genre apart and sewed it back together. I am so glad Daryl kept at it, because I think he’s scored another winner.
Go buy this book. Buy two copies so you can lend one to your friends, and watch it spread. Give in to the Big Bite. Be the vector.
Hello. It’s been a while. I have been nurturing and writing, sometimes at the same time. The results haven’t been pretty, but the kid sure is.
I have nothing interesting to say right now, which is why I am down on my knees thanking the Flying Spaghetti Monster that my friend, Daryl Gregory, does have something interesting to say. Here it is:
Hi, I’m Daryl Gregory. My third novel, Raising Stony Mayhall, will be out in stores on June 28. The book is my skewed take on the zombie genre, featuring a kid who thinks he’s the last living dead boy in the world. Publisher’s Weekly just gave it a starred review and named it their Pick of the Week — which is nice. You can also read the prologue and the first chapter on my website, at http://www.darylgregory.com/stony/
If you pre-order Stony, I’ like to thank you by sending you a signed bookplate. (Which is just a fancy sticker with my actual, not-scanned, handwritten signature and a nice thank-you message that you can paste into your book.) And if you do so right away, I’ll throw in these lovely Ginsu knives. Okay, that last part’s a lie. Sorry about that.
Just pre-order from anywhere (some possible links below), then, before June 28, send me an email with your mailing address. That’s it. No proof of purchase necessary, though if you send me box tops from your favorite cereal, that’s cool.
I’ll mail you the bookplate, with of course an inscription. Make sure to let me know if you’d like me to mention something specific — like, say, that this a gift for your beloved spouse, ex-girlfriend, or dog. However, I will not participate in gifts for beloved ex-dogs.
Some places to order, in alphabetical order:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Borders
Flights of Fantasy Books (a great
indie bookstore)
Powell’s BooksFeel free to pass this around. Any friend of yours is a friend of mine!
–Daryl
Now, Daryl, being the polite Midwesterner that he is, wanted people to pass this around to people they knew via email. I, of course, having the world’s greatest internet fan base, mostly based in South Korea and my imagination, wanted to spread it to all of you. Why? Because Daryl tells a hell of a good story and you will enjoy this book and want to buy his previous books and enjoy them, too. And because the evil, sleep-deprived part of my brain that sounds like Andy Dick on a Sudefed bender wants Daryl to have to sign and mail eleventy-jillion bookplates. Of course, if Raising Stony Mayhall becomes an eleventy-jillion copy best-seller, Daryl can afford to get himself one of those robo-clone hands I hear they’re growing in China. Totally ethically raised, too.
So, spread the word, people! Pre-order Raising Stony Mayahall and make Daryl Gregory happy! Or suffer, depending on how you look at it.
Man, I am lucky.
That’s the only way I can figure out how I got to spend last week the way I did. If I hadn’t gone to last year’s World Fantasy Convention, if I hadn’t wound up sharing a room with Daryl Gregory, if I hadn’t gone room-hopping with everyone, I would have been at home, watching the kid practice her back-to-front rolls and not get enough sleep.
Instead, all those things happened, so I got to kick around Flagstaff, Arizona with ten talented, funny people, watching Charlie The Unicorn and not getting enough sleep.
I met Sarah K. Castle at WFC, and we got to talking about writing and what we were working on (me, Windswept; her, a science fiction thriller about a world-spanning EPA with teeth, which I said she should market as SCIENCE NINJAS. She demurred). I made a friend, which is always a nice thing to do at conventions, and I also wound up getting invited to Starry Heaven, a novel-writing workshop based on the Blue Heaven workshop that Charles Coleman Finlay created.
The format works like this: every participant submits the first fifty pages of the novel they want to workshop. Everyone reads every first fifty, then chooses two full novels to read. Then everyone goes to Flagstaff (Sarah’s stomping grounds), where you eat, drink, and critique. The first three days are group sessions where we deliver critiques of the first fifties, four a day. The rest of the workshop, we split into groups of three to deliver the full critiques. It was a lot of work, but when you’ve got good material and good people, it doesn’t feel like it.
Sarah’s invite came at a real low point in my writing career (though that doesn’t feel like the right word. Writing apprenticeship? Writing gestation? Writing sitting-on-my-can-trying-to-fill-the-page-with-text time?), and the workshop was just the kick in the ass I needed. I got to read YA, horror (both urban and smaller urban), fantasy, SF, all of it great. There will be some excellent books coming out of this workshop, and I hope that mine will be one of them (or, at least, it’ll be better than it has been before). Fortunately, I got a lot of excellent input from everyone, especially my two full readers,
So, time to get back to work. But first, I have to go change a diaper. Ah, the glorious writer’s life…
Ozark Pudding
1 egg
2 T flour
1/8 t salt
1 apple, diced and peeled
1/2 c sugar
1 1/2 t baking powder
1/2 c nuts, broken
1 t vanilla
Beat eggs and sugar until smooth. Add flour, powder, salt. Add nuts, apple, vanilla. Bake in 8″ buttered pie tin 35 min at 350. Serve with whipped cream or ice cream. Serves 3-4.
Note: we triple this recipe for a 9×13 pan, but do not triple the sugar.
When I was in high school, I was at Wendy Grace’s house watching “The Commitments” with a group of friends. At some point, for some reason that I couldn’t identify then and sure as hell couldn’t now, my friend, Rob, and I started laughing and could not stop.
(Note for clarification: we were not on drugs of any kind. I feel it’s important to state that for the record. We were so squeaky-clean that you could’ve served a banquet for the Queen on our souls. Not that you’d want to, ’cause, dude, that would make for a really crowded table.)
One of us would slow down to catch his breath, look at the other, then start all over again. We reinforced each other in a positive feedback loop that had us laughing so hard that it hurt. Tears streamed down our faces, our stomachs hurt from doubling over, but we could not stop, not even if we wanted.
Last night, at w00tstock, it was just like being in Wendy Grace’s living room, except instead of Rob, there were three hundred geeks, and, instead of “The Commitments,” there was the greatest line-up of nerd music, movies and comedy this world has ever seen. And I just made my Saving Throw vs. Hyperbole, so that’s totally for reals. My sides still ache from laughing.
If you were a member of the World Science Fiction Convention in Denver last year, or if you’re a member of the Montreal version this year, you can nominate stuff for the Hugos. Did you know this? I sure as hell didn’t the first time I went to a Worldcon, probably because I was more concerned with avoiding the outrageous parking fees at the Anaheim Convention Center than voting and nominating and such.
Ever since, I’ve tried to get the people I know on the ballot, for both the quality of their work and the novelty of saying, “Hey, I know that name!” It hasn’t worked out as well as I’ve hoped, but no one said World Domination was easy. That’s why I hope this little nugget will spread from my site to Facebook and Twitter and beyond. You gotta start somewhere.
So, if you can nominate stuff for the Hugos, please take a look at these works. If you like them, please tell people about them. And if you really like them, please nominate them.
Best Novel: “Pandemonium,” by Daryl Gregory. Del Rey, August 2008.
Best Novella: “Far Horizon,” by Jason Stoddard. Interzone #214.
Best Novelette: “The Right People,” by Adam Rakunas (hey, I know that name!). Futurismic, October 2008.
Best Novelette: “The Elephant Ironclads,” by Jason Stoddard. The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Del Rey, April 2008.
Best Short Story: “Willpower,” by Jason Stoddard. Futurismic, December 2008.
Best Short Story: “Living with Creely,” Andrew Tisbert. Rosebud #41.
Best Short Story: “Tetris Dooms Itself,” by Meghan McCarron. Clarkesworld #23, August 2008.
Best Short Story: “Random Acts of Cosmic Whimsey,” by Jetse de Vries. Flurb #6.
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