This is part 5 of an email conversation I had with Matt Cheney about the state of Speculative Fiction. Read part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4. Some things discussed: the dark heart of aesthetics, zombie movies, literary greatness and William Shakespeare.

So last night my Twitter account started pinging my phone with updates featuing the #chase hashtag. Apparently something was going on in Los Angeles involving a slow speed chase through north Hollywood. Curious to see what was going on, I signed in and started following the updates. A man in a white Bentley had been leading police around for 3 hours before stopping in front of a Toyota dealership. Local Fox and ABC affiliates had helicopters on the scene and Fox was streaming the actual unedited camera feed through it's website. Twitter en masse was enthralled with updates coming rapidly with the unfiltered immediate responses of the people watching. Eventually, the driver killed himself. The feeds went off. People went to bed. And now comes the analytical aftermath of what in my opinion amounts to a non event.

The new version of Literate Machine is now online!

Go check out loads of downloadable comics, ebooks, magazines and more.

I don't like short stories. I have never made this a secret. There is the occasional writer like Mark Twain, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges or Gabriel Garcia Marquez who writes short stories that I like. But these writers are few and far between.

This is part 4 of an email conversation I had with Matt Cheney about the state of Speculative Fiction. Read part 1 and part 2 and part 3. Some things discussed: the object-subject relationship, zombie movies, the evaluation of art, Star Trek as godawful crap vs. fun godawful crap

I don't watch the Superbowl. Never cared about football (that's American football to all you foreign types). But the one part of the show that is entertaining are the big-budget advertisements which have often been used to roll out big new products like the famous '1984' ad for the original Macintosh.

But where can I go to just watch the ads? Or pick and choose just the ads I want to watch? Well Adland (commercial-archive.com) is already posting them. So screw the Superbowl.

(Full disclosure: Adland is run by my friend, the super-awesome Åsk Wäppling.)

Not so long ago, I despaired at the idea of finding a place to publish my own fiction. Like many aspiring writers, I flipped through Writer's Market and sent stuff out to the supposed top of the short story food chain, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, etc., with predictable results (that is, rejection). But then why should I have been surprised? I didn't generally like the stories published in those magazines (they are usually, shall we say, boring). Even if I was writing the best possible stories I could in the style I liked (and I definitely wasn't) I probably wouldn't have been published in those venues. With this in mind, I set out to find short story publications that I could actually read regularly and enjoy. This is the list I've come up with (so far) in alphabetical order, though I more than welcome recommendations:

Rest In Peace John Updike.

This is part 3 of an email conversation I had with Matt Cheney about the state of Speculative Fiction. Read part 1 and part 2. Some things discussed: Delany and transgression; anthologies; sf writers vs. literary writers; frames, objects and subjects; Roberto Bolaño.