The current July/August 2005 issue of the amazing magazine Adbusters includes a reprint of my story “To Market, To Market, the Re-Branding of Billy Bailey,” which was originally published in the British sf magazine Interzone. It got a lot of favorable critical attention when it was first published — it’s a comedic story about junior-high students who create and market personal brands, accepting street-crew sponsorshipd from various companies. You can pick up the current Adbusters at most decent newsstands and bookstores.

Billy and Principal Andrew Alty went all the way back to kindergarten, when Billy had convinced Mitchell McCoy that the green fingerpaint was Shamrock Shake, and watched with glee as the little babyface had scarfed it all down. Billy knew that Andrew Alty knew his style: refined, controlled, and above all, _personal_. Billy never would’ve dropped a dozen M-80s down the girls’ toilet. His stuff was always one-on-one, and possessed of a degree of charm and subtlety.

But nevertheless, here was Billy, along with the sixth-grade bumper-crop of nasty-come-latelies, called on the carpet in front of Andrew Alty’s massive desk. Andrew Alty was an athletic forty, a babyface true-and-through, and a charismatic thought-leader in his demographic.

Hormones. They were the problem.

Billy Bailey was the finest heel the sixth grade had ever seen — a true artisan who kept his brand pure and unsullied, picking and managing his strategic alliances with the utmost care and acumen. He’d dumped BanginBumpin Fireworks (a division of The Shanghai Novelty Company, Ltd.) in the _fourth_ grade, fer chrissakes. Their ladyfingers were too small to bother with; their M-80s were so big that you’d have to be a lunatic to go near them.

But sixth grade was the Year of the Hormone at Pepsi Elementary. Boys who’d been babyfaces since kindergarten suddenly sprouted acne, pubic hair, and an uncontrollable urge to impress girls. Their weak brands were no match for the onslaught of -osterones and -ogens that flooded their brains, and in short order they found themselves switching over to heel.

As a result, the sixth grade was experiencing a heel glut. Last year’s Little Lord Fauntleroys were now busy snapping bras, dropping textbooks, cracking grading computers, and blowing up the girls’ toilets.

Hormones. They made Billy want to puke.

On Sunday, I did an in-game book-signing in Second Life, a massively multiplayer online world. Now, part one of the transcript from the interview is online. The signing was stupendously weird and fun — people turned up in avatars designed to look like characters from the book (or in other, weirder avatars, including an AT-ST from the Star Wars universe!). All this week, you can check back with New World Notes, Second Life’s in-game newspaper, for subsequent installments on the transcript:

For those few here (and I hope it’s just a few) who haven’t read Someone Comes to Town yet, why not give us your brief cocktail party pitch for the story?

Cory Doctorow: Hmm– it’s not an easy book to summarize. Alan is a serial entrepreneur who moved to Toronto to get away from his family. His father is a mountain and his mother is a washing machine. He has several brothers, including one who is an island, three who nest like Russian dolls, a precognitive, and a demonic savage. When he was a teenager, he murdered the latter brother, with his other brothers cooperating. And now that brother is back form the dead, stalking them all. Alan has fallen in with a gang of anarcho-info-hippies who are using dumpster-dived hardware to build meshing WiFi repeaters in a mad bid to unwire all of Toronto, or at least the bohemian Kensington Market streets. Meanwhile, his neighbors– a student household– contain a girl with wings and a mean-spirited guitar player/bartender, who, it appears, may be in league with the demonic brother.

So that’s it in a nutshell. A very large and n-dimensional nutshell.

HL: If someone asked me to classify Someone Comes to Town, I’d call it “high-tech magic realism”. (That may be a new genre!) But how’s that hit you?

CD: I think that’s a good classification. I’ve been calling it a techie contemporary fantasy — contemporary fantasy being the label commonly applied to magic realist fiction when written by North American popular authors instead of Marquez and his cohort.

Yesterday’s in-game book-signing in the massively multiplayer online world Second Life went swimmingly. A variety of accounts of it are appearing now, including this liveblog on the Terra Nova blog and this Flickr set of photos from in the game, that includes some of the attendees’ avatars who turned up “dressed” like Mimi, a character from the book. Man, that was cool.

Tomorrow — Sunday — at 2PM Pacific (11AM Eastern, 10PM UK) I’m doing my in-game book-signing in Second Life, a massively multiplayer online world with an extensive toolkit for creating in-game artifacts that have sophisticated behaviors and appearances (I once met a guy who makes a real living making and selling in-game penises).

The Second Lifers made a special effort to make me welcome, holding a design competition to create an in-game edition of my new book, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (which included a replica cover made by creating an in-game avatar that looked like the girl on the cover’s brilliant Dave McKean painting, posing it, and taking screenshots).

They also roped a Second Lifer, lilith Pendragon, into creating a custom avatar for me that looks pretty eerily lifelike (I logged in for a bit last night and made it do funky disco moves that required a lot more coordination that the real-life me could ever muster).

Second Life’s in-game reporter, Hamlet Linden, has run a fascinating interview with lilith, who apparently has a whole in-gmae business creating custom avatars for players:

So lilith’s Cory Doctorow joins an esteemed list of her celebrity tributes which also include Frieda Kahlo and Shirley Manson of Garbage (lilith most often wears her Ms. Manson, on herself). Her Cory is so exacting, I initially assumed she’d created a custom skin of him in Photoshop. But as she tells it, she brought Doctorow into this world “just using the [default avatar creation] sliders and looking at his pic. Then I made all the clothes in Photoshop.”

She did have a challenge recreating Cory’s skull-hugging haircut, however.

“I tried to do his hair with prims to get the flat top, but it just looked horrid, and I’m not patient,” she says. “Made a hair texture for his head, similar to how I did the corn rows for Snoop, and tweaked the hair sliders to make a little stick up in front.”

(Thanks, James!)

The BBC ran a profile of me today — a very flattering one indeed.

Author, blogger and campaigner Cory Doctorow passionately believes the internet has helped unleash a new form of creativity based around collaboration.

He co-wrote an award-winning short story, called Jury service, with a writer in Scotland called Charles Stross.

But the pair never met and instead collaborated via the internet, from start to finish.

“That story is repeated in macrocosm a million times a day on the internet,” said the Canada-born and London-based writer.

“There are people who have never met, who do not know each other, may only just pass in the night.”

But he says big media companies are trying to stifle the ability to share content in the name of protecting copyright.

This is the best birthday present I’ve ever received — the cover of a notional comic book of which I am the hero, created by the extraordinarily talented Alice Taylor. (click the image for a larger version).