The Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop has announced its instructor lineup for summer 2008 — and it’s a stellar bunch! Clarion is a kind of six-week boot-camp for sf writers (I’m a graduate, sometime instructor and member of the Board of Directors for The Clarion Foundation, the nonprofit that oversees the workshop), and this year’s teachers are: Kelly Link, James Patrick Kelly, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Neil Gaiman, Nalo Hopkinson and Geoff Ryman.

Not to be outdone, the Clarion West workshop (a kind of sister workshop, but located in Seattle instead of San Diego) has announced its lineup for this summer: Paul Park, Mary Rosenblum, Cory Doctorow, Connie Willis, Sheree R. Thomas, and Chuck Palahniuk.

Yes, I taught Clarion this past year and will teach Clarion West next year. There’s a pretty good chance I’ll end up doing another (undisclosed) Clarion next year, then I’m taking a several-year hiatus. These things are incredibly rewarding, but man, they’re hard work!

Link to Clarion roster,
Link to Clarion West roster

Rock band Wintergreen’s latest video — “Can’t Sit Still,” directed by Keith Schofield — features one of the musicians reading a copy of my latest short story collection, Overclocked. Sweet!

Link

(Thanks, Terry!)

Michael Buckbee, proprietor of a “Fabjectory” (Bruce Sterling’s neologism “fabject” + “factory” = Fabjectory) has created a Second Life version of the print-and-fold minicomic of Printcrime, created by talented comics artist Martin Cendreda (the story appears in my collection Overclocked. He sez, “We use rapid prototyping machines to create real life objects from the avatars and sculptures that people make in SecondLife and I’ve been vainly trying to explain to people that this isn’t so much about creating expensive immobile dolls for people as it is breaking ground for a new way to interact with the world, something Print Crime does so well.”

Screenshot Link 1, Screenshot Link 2

Thomas Crampton cornered me in China this week with a video camera and asked me how to blog — here’s a video of my answer. In a nutshell: pretend you’re a wire-service stringer and you’ll end up writing better headlines.

Link

I’m coming to Beijing, China next week and I’ll be stopping in at the Beijing Bookworm to give a talk on China, the Information Economy and copyright — and I’ll be reading a little never-before-seen new fiction while I’m there. Hope to see you!

When: Wednesday 12th September 7.30pm
Where: The Bookworm, Building 4, Nan Sanlitun Road, Chao Yang District, Beijing, 100000, P.R. China, (010) 6586 9507, books@beijingbookworm.com

Link

My latest column in Locus Magazine has just gone live. Called “Free(konomic) E-books,” it’s an attempt to enumerate the evidence that Creative Commons and other scheme for giving away free ebooks works to sell printed books. In my next column, I’l expain how Creative Commons works, and how science fiction writers can use it.

Many of us have assumed, a priori, that electronic books substitute for print books. While I don’t have controlled, quantitative data to refute the proposition, I do have plenty of experience with this stuff, and all that experience leads me to believe that giving away my books is selling the hell out of them.

More importantly, the free e-book skeptics have no evidence to offer in support of their position — just hand-waving and dark muttering about a mythological future when book-lovers give up their printed books for electronic book-readers (as opposed to the much more plausible future where book lovers go on buying their fetish objects and carry books around on their electronic devices).

Link