All other things (like payment, for example) being equal, at this point I’d rather have short fiction published online than in a print magazine.  It lasts longer, it’s accessible to more readers, and typos can be fixed.

I saw Tony O’Neill read from Sick City a few weeks ago when he was in town and heard him tell stories afterward.  Even more edifying, however, is this Jim Ruland interview for Fanzine where they drive east on Sunset Boulevard and O’Neill reminisces about the stuff he sees.

I just got the first library card I’ve had in years.  For most of my adult life I’ve bought rather than borrowed the vast majority of books I read.  New or used, whatever.  Now I’m recovering that thrill I used to experience as a middle-schooler browsing the library’s website, putting stacks of books on hold.  It’s pleasing, no?

Profile of Eugene Marten in the NY Observer.  Damn, nice.  I like that picture.  I want my skull to look like that when I’m 50.

Wow… an old audio interview with Vincent Gallo, which is mesmerizing in its relentless mad-dog shit-talking.  Gallo shoots venom at Spike Jonze, Sofia Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola, Jason Schwartzman… I guess he really doesn’t like that family?  Other topics include Mickey Rourke’s face, alleged incest in the Roberts family, Abel Ferrara’s crack addiction, Eric Roberts’s face, Kirsten Dunst being fired from one of his movies, and why he hates giving credits in movies.  (via Jeff Wells)

A movie called Predators came out this weekend, involving a species of vicious aliens who drop a bunch of humans onto a “game preserve” jungle planet to hunt them.  On the same day, I published a story called “Predator Bait,” involving shlubby men who try to hook up with young girls on the internet.  I now realize both pieces could be improved by combining them, so that Adrien Brody and Laurence Fishbourne et al have to survive on a hostile jungle planet while fleeing shlubby men who want to molest them.

Just listened to Samuel ”Chip” Delaney (of Hogg and Dhalgren) read a long, amiable, detail-rich story about a fellow who likes eat his own excrement and semen.  Feel sort of fatalistic, for some reason.

Peter Straub, a few minutes ago (paraphrased from memory): “Literary writers working with a surreal or supernatural concept tend to be content to just describe it in detail.  A genre writer is more likely to feel compelled to turn it into a story, which may succeed brilliantly or fail miserably, but has more potential to be a satisfactory turn.”

Around this time last year, random people told me about Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg and seemed shocked that I never heard of it, much less read it.  So I bought it and read it, and it’s amazing.  Now the book the universe is telling me about is The Man Who Was Thursday by GK Chesterton.  On the list it goes.

Today I find myself at Readercon.  Surrounded by ravenous readers of genre literature.  These are my people, or some of them at least.  I love story.  I just got off a panel called “The Unknowable Character” (I think).  John Crowley said, “I don’t mean to channel Rumsfeld, but when it comes to unknowable characters, there are known unknowns and unknown unknowns, and each is useful to a writer.”  (I’m paraphrasing from memory.)

Merwin named Poet Laureate. Is this news of interest or relevance to you?  Genuine question.

Paula Bomer’s collection Baby & other stories is now available for pre-order on Word Riot’s website.  I am super-psyched for this collection.  Paula’s a friend of HTML Giant, a friend of mine, and an awesome writer.

Victor LaValle, author of Big Machine, The Ecstatic, and Slapboxing with Jesus (and, full disclosure, a guy who blurbed one of my books), on his early-20s period of obesity, depression, and phone sex: “Have you ever known men or women who don’t get any kind of loving for years? They get weird. The women become either monstrously drab or they costume themselves in ways that make them seem unreal; they externalise their inner fantasies and come to believe that – on some level – they really are elves or princesses or, most disturbing of all, children again. And the men? They’re even worse. Men who are denied affection for too long devolve into some kind of rage-filled hominoid. Their anger becomes palpable. You can almost feel the wrath emanating from their pores. Lonely women destroy themselves; lonely men threaten the world.”

I love HTMLGIANT commenter I. Fontana’s new story in Juked. Just as I loved his amazing Jean Harlow story in Spork a while back, which I think was the first short story I read of his.