Video, Radio, Text: A Ubiquity of Links

I feel like a month’s worth of doings have been crammed into the first three days of this week. Overexposure looms! Ubiquity attends! Enough of me to foil stick-shakers!

So here’s a brief summary:

1) On Monday I moderated an online discussion about genre thrillers with Hachette authors Malindo Lo, Jaye Wells, and Michael Marshall Smith, talking about their respective books Adaptation, Dirty Magic, and We Are Here. You can watch it on Youtube here. It was great fun, and my first time doing anything of the sort as well as my first exposure to these authors’ books; I found myself wishing that this were just a private conversation instead of a publicity thing because so much of what I wanted to discuss was spoilery.

2) On Tuesday I took part in a discussion at BBC Scotland about Scottishness, Arabness, and identity in general under the auspices of World Have Your Say and BBC Arabic. You can listen to it here. My contributions are around the 4 and 30 minute marks; there was quite a lot more I wanted to say at various points, but there were about 50 people in the room, and 3 moderators trying to keep on top of things while not being telepathic. There’s also one Tory dunderhead who decides to tell everyone they’re wrong to identify as Arab, or something, because history, or whatever. He was sitting RIGHT NEXT TO ME. I have many, many thoughts about the whole experience, but will have to give it its own post.

3) I participated in one of SF Signal’s Mind Melds! Paul Weimer asked Django Wexler, Kari Sperring, Catherine Lundoff, Derek Johnson, Deborah Stanish, Alisa Krasnostein, Lynne Thomas, Michael D. Thomas, and me to share our thoughts on our favourite convention panel experiences. Everyone shares thoughtful, intriguing, sometimes poignant stories; I talk about butts. So it goes!

4) A review I wrote of Tim Powers’ The Drawing of the Dark and its Problematic East/West Stuff is now up at Pornokitsch. This is my first contribution to Jared Shurin’s excellent (and World Fantasy Award Winning!) site and I’m delighted to have work featured there.

All this while reading an average of 1.5 novels a day, applying for Stuff, receiving my middle brother for a visit, and working on getting the Winter issue of Goblin Fruit up this week in spite of the sense-stunning sunshine and crocuses mocking and beckoning me at every turn. And today I received Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World in the post, which is astounding thus far, and which I need to review for … Well, tomorrow.

But luckily my brother’s spending today in Aberdeen, so I can head out to Kelvingrove and read this book in the sun and having typed that I’m now longing to do so with a physical sort of hunger, so off I go.

MARCH! You are amazing, and also a directive!

#SFWApro