shrapnel

The excerpt from my new book is now live at Taddle Creek.

I’ve got a new short story, “Beat the Geeks,” coming out in the Tesseracts Eleven anthology sometime later this year. The editors are Cory Doctorow and Holly Phillips. I don’t know who the other contributors are yet, but I’m looking forward to checking out the other works in the collection. I’ve always liked the Tesseracts books, and the publisher Edge has been doing great work lately, like Jason Christie’s I, Robot. I’ll post an update when I have more details.

(”Beat the Geeks” is in the same vein as “Has the World Ended Yet?” and a few other stories I’m working on for a collection.)

I’ve also got an excerpt from my new novel coming out in the next issue of Taddle Creek. I’ll post more information about that when I have it. In the meantime, pop over to Taddle Creek and check out some of the fine writing they have online right now.

I’ve added a couple of shorts to the library. “Has the World Ended Yet?” was originally published as an Amazon Short and is still available for purchase at Amazon.com for 49 cents. Unfortunately, Amazon changed its administrative procedure after publishing the story, and you can only buy it from them now if you’re a U.S. resident (or you can trick the apps into thinking you’re a U.S. resident).

The other add is a little oddity that came to me the other day: 10 Things Horatio Didn’t Tell the Police. Don’t know what to say about it other than that.

It’s been five years since my first book, Please, was published, and it’s starting to get a little hard to find in bookstores. So I’ve decided to jump on the Creative Commons bandwagon and release Please for free online. You can download it in PDF or text form, or you can read it in episodes here. Enjoy.

First Cormac McCarthy’s The Road gets the nod from Oprah, then from the Pulitzer judges (although Oprah probably counts more). In honour of the occasion, here’s a link to the interview I did with the band Blood Meridian about The Road over at my other blog.

READ THIS: So what do you think caused the apocalypse in the book?

MATT: It doesn’t matter. That’s what so timeless about it.

SHARIA: You can project your own fears on it.

MATT: When you’re reading it, it’s not so much as “I wonder what happened to make this world” as “Ah, so this is what it’s going to look like.”

JEFF: In Blood Meridian, I had a better idea of where and when it took place, and in that way it just a brutal image of a time and a place, whereas The Road was more like —

SHARIA: It’s tomorrow.

Or maybe a fetish party.

The Superman outfit worn by the late actor Christopher Reeve and the latex creature suit from Alien sold at auction for almost $250,000 US ($287,600 Cdn) combined…

The Superman outfit fetched $115,000 US, while the creature costume from the 1979 Alien film starring Sigourney Weaver sold for $126,500 US.

Families go to the cinema to see a wholesome movie for the kids — and are shown The Hills Have Eyes 2 by mistake.

The moviegoers were expecting to see The Last Mimzy, the PG-rated tale of a brother and sister who discover a mysterious box of toys and become endowed with superhuman powers to help preserve humanity’s future.

Instead, the crowd saw the opening scene of The Hills Have Eyes 2, the R-rated sequel to a recent remake of a 1977 horror classic by the genre’s renowned director, Wes Craven. The film centers on National Guard troops who stumble on a clan of mutant cannibals and starts with a chained woman giving birth to a mutant.

Hey, they have to learn about adult life sometime.

I posted about the new book Blackwater, which looks at the U.S. government’s use of “private contractors” — mercenaries — over at my other blog.

In 2004, a group of Americans drove into the Iraqi village of Fallujah and a deadly ambush by insurgents. The men were killed and two of their burned corpses hung from a bridge. Video of the scene made its way around the world, and many commentators compared it to the footage of dead American soldiers dragged through the streets of Mogadishu in the Black Hawk Down battle.

But there was one key difference: the men killed in Fallujah were not soldiers. They were mercenaries, private contractors employed by the private-security firm Blackwater

Sex offenders living under a bridge.

MIAMI – Five convicted sex offenders are living under a noisy highway bridge with the state’s grudging approval because an ordinance intended to keep predators away from children made it nearly impossible for them to find housing…

The five committed such crimes as sexual battery, molestation, abuse and grand theft. Many of the offenses were against children. The state moved the men under the bridge from their previous home — a lot next to a center for sexually abused children and close to a day care center — after they were unable to find affordable housing that did not violate the sex-offender ordinance.

First there was Craigslist Missed Connections, now there’s Craigslist housewreckers.

TACOMA, Wash. — Many people have had success buying, selling and swapping goods on the Web site craigslist, but one Tacoma woman says she was robbed.

Laurie Raye said she had everything stripped from her home after someone placed a fake ad on the San Francisco-based Internet site, a collection of online classifieds.

“The instigator who published this ad invited the public to come in and vandalize me,” Raye told Seattle television station KING.

A Swedish couple wants to name their daughter Metallica, but the government is opposing the move.

“It suits her,” Karolina Tomaro said Tuesday. “She’s decisive and she knows what she wants.”

The Tomaros have been locked in a battle with Swedish officials over their six-month-old daughter’s name.

In Sweden, parents must have their baby’s name approved by the country’s tax authority, which keeps track of the population registry and issues personal identification numbers.

Ikea moves into the housing business.

BoKlok (pronounced “book look”, Swedish for “smart living”) is Ikea’s biggest idea yet. Having seized the market for affordable home furnishings in the past decade, the Swedish retail giant is now planning to provide the homes themselves. They’ve already built some 3,500 BoKlok dwellings across Scandinavia – and now they’re coming to the UK.

BoKlok homes don’t exactly come in flatpacks, but they’re not far off. The timber-framed buildings are almost entirely prefabricated. They are usually brought to the site on the back of trucks as pre-assembled units, like Portakabins, with the interiors already fitted out. Each apartment is made up of two of these units, which are simply moved into position by crane. Put on the roof and exterior wall cladding, plumb and wire it in, and it’s ready to live in. The typical BoKlok arrangement is an L-shaped, two-storey block with three apartments on each floor. One such block can be put up in a day.

Cleaning sewers full of blood.

A Minneapolis city worker is worried about blood in the sewer system because he said, while he was cleaning the system, blood sprayed out of a hole and got all over him.

“We could tell it was blood, I mean large amount of blood,” said Minneapolis Sewer Maintenance Worker Ron Huebner.

It happened about two weeks ago in Northeast Minneapolis near a lab that does medical testing and dumps blood into the sewer. It is allowed but the city is now making changes to help protect workers in the future.

(Via Boing Boing)