Tim Waggoner Nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award!

I'm very happy to post the following press release from the Shirley Jackson Awards (and clipped from sfscope.com), announcing this year's finalists, including my friend and former mentor, Tim Waggoner. Way to go, Tim!
 

A press release from The Shirley Jackson Awards:
 
In recognition of the legacy of Shirley Jackson's writing, and with permission of the author's estate, The Shirley Jackson Awards, Inc. has been established for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic.

The Shirley Jackson Awards are voted upon by a jury of professional writers, editors, critics, and academics, with input from a Board of Advisors. The awards are given for the best work published in the preceding calendar year in the following categories: Novel, Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Single-Author Collection, and Edited Anthology.

The nominees for the 2011 Shirley Jackson Awards are:

Novel:
The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock (Doubleday)
The Dracula Papers by Reggie Oliver (Chômu Press)
The Great Lover by Michael Cisco (Chômu Press)
Knock Knock by S.P. Miskowski (Omnium Gatherum Media)
The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan (Canongate Books, Ltd.)
Witches on the Road Tonight by Sheri Holman (Grove Press)

Novella:
"And the Dead Shall Outnumber the Living" by Deborah Biancotti (Ishtar, Gilgamesh Press)
"A Child's Problem" by Reggie Oliver (A Book of Horrors, Jo Fletcher Books)
"Displacement" by Michael Marano (Stories from the Plague Years, Cemetery Dance Publications)
The Men Upstairs by Tim Waggoner (Delirium Books)
"Near Zennor" by Elizabeth Hand (A Book of Horrors, Jo Fletcher Books)
"Rose Street Attractors" by Lucius Shepard (Ghosts by Gaslight, Harper Voyager)

Novelette:
"The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine" by Peter Straub (Conjunctions 56)
"Ditch Witch" by Lucius Shepard (Supernatural Noir, Dark Horse)
"The Last Triangle" by Jeffrey Ford (Supernatural Noir, Dark Horse)
"Omphalos" by Livia Llewellyn (Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors, Lethe Press)
"The Summer People" by Kelly Link (Tin House 49/Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories, Candlewick Press)

Short Fiction:
"Absolute Zero" by Nadia Bulkin (Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters, Prime Books)
"The Corpse Painter's Masterpiece" by M. Rickert (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Sept/Oct 2011)
"Hair" by Joan Aiken (The Monkey's Wedding and Other Stories, Small Beer Press/The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July/Aug 2011)
"Max" by Jason Ockert (The Iowa Review 41/1)
"Sunbleached" by Nathan Ballingrud (Teeth, HarperCollins)
"Things to Know About Being Dead" by Genevieve Valentine (Teeth, HarperCollins)

Single-Author Collection:
After the Apocalypse: Stories by Maureen F. McHugh (Small Beer Press)
The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares by Joyce Carol Oates (Mysterious Press)
Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors by Livia Llewellyn (Lethe Press)
The Janus Tree by Glen Hirshberg (Subterranean Press)
Red Gloves by Christopher Fowler (PS Publishing)
What Wolves Know by Kit Reed (PS Publishing)

Edited Anthology:
Blood and Other Cravings edited by Ellen Datlow (Tor)
A Book of Horrors edited by Stephen Jones (Jo Fletcher Books)
Ghosts by Gaslight edited by Jack Dann and Nick Gevers (Harper Voyager)
Supernatural Noir edited by Ellen Datlow (Dark Horse)
Teeth edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling (HarperCollins)
The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (Harper Voyager)

Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) wrote such classic novels as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, as well as one of the most famous short stories in the English language, "The Lottery." Her work continues to be a major influence on writers of every kind of fiction, from the most traditional genre offerings to the most innovative literary work.

The 2011 Shirley Jackson Awards will be presented on Sunday, July 15th at Readercon 23, Conference on Imaginative Literature, in Burlington, Massachusetts. Shirley Jackson is the Memorial Guest of Honor. Readercon 23 Guests of Honor, Peter Straub and Caitlin R. Kiernan, will act as hosts.

Manhattan Visit: Fine Food, Fun Friends, and the Greatest Agent in the World

Last week, I took the train into NYC, and, as always, Manhattan was a blast.

One of my favorite parts was killing a few hours the day I arrived. I Wandered into a hole-in-the-wall Thai place (Olieng at 644 10^th Ave in Hell’s Kitchen, which I highly recommend), drank some Thai beer, ate pad Thai, and read Firestarter. The waiter, this friendly guy in glasses, asked if I'd seen the movie, promised it was worth my time, and smiled knowingly when I praised the food, which was the best Thai I’ve had this side of Australia. Whenever anyone paused at the menu outside, he'd open the door and ask if they had questions. It was raining lightly. It was one of those perfect little unplanned moments that Europeans (and probably the Thai) almost certainly have words or phrases to capture precisely.

Wednesday night, I attended a panel that included my friend Lissa Price, whose book Starters is making big buzz these days. The panel-game-show-thing was okay-ish, but it was nice, getting a chance to say hello and listen to the authors read excerpts from their dystopian YA novels. The coolest part: all this went down in the Ghostbusters library. Yes!

From there, I met up with my old friend Matt Schwartz. We sat at the bar and talked books and movies until around one in the morning, then went out for burgers. An absolutely stellar hang-out session – few experiences parallel talking books and movies with Matt – but by the time I got back to the hotel, it was probably 2:30.

The next morning, I woke too early after a night of honking horns and sleep made patchy by the knowledge that I had to wake early, crossed town, and met with the greatest agent in the world, Christina Hogrebe, and a few of the other excellent folks at the Jane Rotrosen Agency. It was a fun, productive meeting. There’s been some exciting stuff going on with my manuscript, and we did our best to map the road ahead, in terms of both this book and the one I’ve been exhaustively researching and planning this spring. I left feeling charged up and ready to eat the world, Nick-Cato-style.

Leaving the agency, I walked across town – hour after hour, mile after mile, meandering – and wandered the city, soaking it in, loving it, until finally wrapping around to my actual destination, Penn Station, where, after a fascinating encounter with a one-footed pigeon living in the lounge, I boarded a train and rode home, humming with happiness.

STARTERS Review

What if you could rent your body -- basically go to sleep for a day or a week, while another person's consciousness "lived" inside of your body, skiing, skydiving, or skipping through fields -- for big, big bucks? No way, right? What a creepy thought...

Well, what if your parents were dead and your little brother was sick... really, really sick, and the only way to save him was go on into Prime Destinations and rent yourself out to a stranger?

That's the basic premise behind Lissa Price's fantastic YA thriller, STARTERS. In this excellently-drawn dystopia, there are only "starters" -- young people -- and "enders," very old people, some of whom have celebrated over two hundred birthdays. Why? When a recent war went biological, there was only enough serum to vaccinate the old and the young...

The book jumps straight into the thick of things, the first scene taking us straight to the uber-creepy Prime Destinations, where the likeable main character, Callie, is understandably skeeeeeeeved, talking to the old "enders", who, in there power and hunger and basic chilliness, come off as something like vampires. The writing is great without drawing attention to itself, and the story rolls along smoothly -- despite its excellent plotting, amazing twists, and an ending you'll never see coming.

STARTERS is a fantastic thrill ride sure to please both teens and adults, from readers who love action to readers who love mystery to readers who love mind-blowing creativity. This is a can't-miss read!

Nick Cato Eats the World!

2012 is shaping up to be a great year, book-wise, as evidenced by recent news that my good friend Nick Cato has three books coming out this year.

On his Antibacterial Pope blog, Nick writes, "In 2012, I'll have 3 books published all around the same time. One is titled THE APOCALYPSE OF PETER, a bizarro/dark fantasy novella coming in June from DAMNATION BOOKS. Another is a collection of my book reviews (more info when contracts are signed), and the third is a short story collection (also out in June) titled ANTIBACTERIAL POPE AND OTHER INCONGRUOUS STORIES, released through SQUID SALAD PRESS, which is the bizarro imprint of NOVELLO PUBLISHERS. Here's the AMAZING cover art by Chuck Hodi:"

The Problem with Pre-orders

Here you have it: my first whiny post.

It's about pre-orders. As I type this, I realize this is probably less a whiny post and more a confession of idiocy. See, I've been burned before...

Here's how it goes down: I get really excited about a book, so I pre-order it, often mooooonths ahead of time. Have you ever done this before? The thing is, you feel like you're on the cutting edge; you feel like you're ahead of the game; you feel, in making this early investment, that somehow -- and to my credit, I did say "feel" as opposed to "think" -- you're going to be reading this book before anyone else. You're part of the pre-order in-crowd!

But you're not. Because there's no such thing.

Like I said, it's happened to me before. It happened with the Potter books (more than once). It's happened with King titles. But never before has it happened twice... at the same time!

(*Begin whiny post*)

So here's what happened: I pre-ordered Mike Cooper's much anticipated Viking hardcover release, Clawback, which launched last week, and I pre-ordered Lissa Price's bound-to-be-awesome and much-posted-about-here Starters, which came out yesterday. But because I'm not only a pre-ordering fool with a flimsy memory of past woes but also a thrifty thumbknuckle, I ordered them at the same time... from Amazon... and clicked on free shipping...

Yup. So now Mr. Pre-order waits. Both books are in stores, taunting me, but I have neither. Bundled together, they'll arrive at the release date of the later released -- Starters -- plus a few days' shipping time.

And since I'm suffering, I figured I'd drag you into it. So, has this sort of thing ever happened to you? Have you suffered pre-order pain?

Lee Battersby's THE CORPSE-RAT KING: What a cover!

Pretty snazzy, huh?

Lee's book isn't available yet, but Adam Browne says it's a winner, and Adam's just about the closest thing to a high priest that we have around here, so I'll definitely be picking up a copy. Beyond Adam's recommendation, I've read Lee's short fiction, which rocks, and I have to admit, that cover -- it hooks me and gets me halfway out of the water all on it's own...

Marco of the book's publisher, Angry Robot, says of the cover (and check out the description of the book itself!):

"Somedays, well, somedays this cover design lark takes a little time to untangle. Take this novel as a case in point. How, how, how, we had to ask, does one create a cover for a novel about a battlefield looter who accidentally kills the king dead, gets killed dead himself, becomes mistaken for the king of the dead by the hordes of the dead, and then sent on his semi-dead way to find the real king, or be actually properly dead?

Answer, loads and loads and loads of dead things. Obviously.

So thank you, Nick Castle off of Castle Design, for taking my concept and going way beyond where I hoped it would end up. And thanks, of course, to the mighty Lee Battersby, whose wonderfully dark and devilishly funny fantasy novel The Corpse-Rat King will appear from Angry Robot in early September this year."

Opening Day for STARTERS by Lissa Price

Lissa Price's much-anticipated Starters hit stores. It's also already available at Audible.com. Perfect timing, considering The Hunger Games movie's impending debut.

Speaking of The Hunger Games, The L.A. Times recently named Starters the "next, best" book in that decidedly hot vein.

Though Lissa is based on the West Coast, her promotional tour will be taking her all over the country. Check out her travel schedule at Lissaprice.com

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Note: How cool is the imbedded image? That's the cover from the German edition.