Bloggasm

Gwenda Bond is working on a novel for teenagers that she isn’t quite ready to talk about yet. She posts often about books and writing at her blog, Shaken & Stirred, writes an advice column for Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet as everyone’s Dear Aunt Gwenda, and co-edits Say… magazine with writer Christopher Rowe. She is a member of the recently formed LitBlog Co-op. She lives in Lexington with Mr. Rowe, who happens to be her spouse-type person, and their pets, Hemingway the Cat, Polydactyl, LLC, and Miss Emma the Dog-Girl, CPA.

Simon Owens: Since you focus a lot on both genre and non-genre work, do you think your blog is effective at getting readers to try genres they don’t normally read?

Gwenda Bond: That is, of course, the hope. I really started the blog to make recommendations (and to stop inundating a certain group of my friends with email links to stuff) and, as a reader, I don’t tend to draw very distinct lines in terms of genre. It troubles me that people may miss something they would love because it’s just in a section of the bookstore they’re unfamiliar with. In a glass half-full way, I tend to believe that a lot of people aren’t afraid to read different genres, they just feel uncomfortable or overwhelmed seeking those books out — this I base on every successful genre novel that’s made easier for mainstream readers to find.

I think I have a reputation as being generous with books, but that’s because I mostly don’t talk about ones I wouldn’t feel comfortable pressing on another person. I try to be as specific about my tastes as possible, so people can tell whether they might like a book I recommend or not. In my little sandbox world, I’m happy if one person reads something I recommend and really loves it — this is the joy of setting low bars: I get at least one email saying that for everything I rec. I am often troubled at how often people need to give caveats about genre books though (really, it’s GOOD!!! PROMISE!!!). A possible corollary to that old hippie phrase: If it’s good, read it.

Simon Owens: Have the other lit bloggers been pretty receptive to a genre blogger?

Gwenda Bond: Absolutely. Zebras, not horses.

Simon Owens: Has the blog helped you in promoting your Say… titles?

Gwenda Bond: Um, I’d say yes to the limited extent that I (or my partner-in-crime Christopher Rowe, the Real Editor) have tried doing so. We definitely got a lot of subscriptions during the drive we held last year. On the other hand, we’re teensy in terms of print runs. What we mostly do is try and get the magazines to those who will really enjoy it — and to the review outlets and best ofs. I don’t think I do much more on the blog than remind people that Say… exists when we drop an issue.

Simon Owens: How do you find most your literary news?

Gwenda Bond: I go to this laundromat and there’s this guy… I used to look more for “news,” but now I point to news stories I just come across and mostly link to other blog content that I want to make sure anyone who reads my site sees. Again, it’s largely to prevent me from inundating those I know with links. Any “real news” I get told about is top secret unless someone specifically tells me I can blog it. I think of myself as person/reader/writer and then blogger is somewhere way down the line. I don’t automatically feel the need to publish everything I’m told about. That just doesn’t interest me. I don’t want to be a news outlet so much.

Simon Owens: Do you get a lot of review copies from publishers? Which publishers contact you the most often?

Gwenda Bond: I get a flabbergasting amount of review copies — flabbergasting to me, anyway. I also get most of the ones I ask for, which is nice. I can’t say I actually break them down by publisher, but I will say that — for me, anyway — mainstream publishers are still way more likely to send books than genre publishers, something that I always find vaguely surprising. (This applies only to books sent to make me happy, not to books I request — I’ve actually never had any publisher turn down a request for a book yet.) Among the smaller publishers that I’ve found to be very good at judging taste and sending things proactively are Coffee House and Unbridled Books, both of which have excellent publicists. We’re also blessed with an excellent library just four blocks away, so I rely heavily on it too.

Simon Owens: Do you tend to nominate a lot of genre books to the Lit Blog Co-op?

Gwenda Bond: Well, I’ve only been a nominator once so far, and I did nominate a genre title, Jeff Ford’s The Girl in the Glass. As a nominator, I’m just looking for a book that readers of the LBC may have overlooked that I think is wonderful. Many, many genres titles are going to fit that criteria, because they are so often off the radar of all but genre readers.

Simon Owens: What upcoming book publications are you looking forward to the most?

Gwenda Bond: Oh dear. I never know what’s coming out when. A few books I was really looking forward to have just come out and I’m in the process of reading them — Jeff VanderMeer’s Shriek, Andrea Seigel’s To Feel Stuff, Geoff Ryman’s The King’s Last Song, Julie Phillips’ Tiptree biography. I’m very much looking forward to Cecil Castellucci’s next novel Beige , Holly Black’s Ironside and Justine Larbalestier’s Magic’s Child (oddly, all YA); there aren’t even ARCs I can covet of those yet. Of things getting ready to come out, I would recommend any of the above, plus M.T. Anderson’s Octavian Nothing: Volume 1 and John Green’s An Abundance of Katherines (more YAs). Oh, and David Levithan’s new one. I also can’t WAIT for all the original anthologies Ellen Datlow has in the works. Or for Karen Joy Fowler’s next novel (!), or John Kessel’s or Kelley Eskridge’s, for that matter–but, sadly, these don’t exactly exist yet, though I understand all are in the works. On the upside, Nicola Griffith’s next Aud novel has, according to Wiscon news, been turned in, so that one should be forthcoming (if not soon enough). I’m going to kick myself for leaving something out, I just know it.

Simon Owens: What are the five blogs you’d recommend to supplement the reading of your own?

Gwenda Bond: I think everybody reads the obvious ones (Maud Newton, Ed Rants, the Mumpsimus, Tingle Alley, etc.). I love Jeff Bryant’s Syntax of Things and Carolyn Pinkhaus’s Pinky’s Paperhaus (and both of them just joined the LBC recently). Colleen Mondor at Chasing Ray and Jenny Davidson at Light Reading are two of my absolute faves. I also love Rarely Likable and wish she’d post more–and Jay Tomio’s Bodhisattva is great. But I read way too many. Please, check out the blogroll and read the cutesy tags. In case Gavin blogs consistently now that he has a real one, I’ll say him too. And the more personal blogs of Chance Morrison, Meghan McCarron, Dave Schwartz and David Moles. That’s way too many, I know. Damn. I’m such a rec-whore.

Ben Granger has been writing as reviewer and interviewer for Spike Magazine since early 2004, and writing as blog commentator for its blog Splinters since mid 2005.”

Simon Owens: As a book blogger, how successful do you think lit blogs are at promoting titles compared to other review venues?

Ben Granger: When reading blogs you have the thrill of the “samizdat” (not to be confused with the nut-ball right-wing website of the same name), feeling that this person writing before you is either praising or damning because they want to, there’s no time-serving or monied agenda behind it. They’re less likely to be engaging in internecine feuds or back-licking with their author mates either. In that sense, a review on a blog can seem more honest and valid. Of course it may not be, but it feels like it. But then reviews in established papers and magazines have massively higher audiences, which -may- just off-set this. It’s the old quantity/quality conundrum dontcha know.

Simon Owens: I’ve noticed that more and more authors are putting up their books for free online. Do you think this increases their chances at success? Are more and more publishers becoming open to this method?

Ben Granger: Music downloads were supposed to spell the death of the music industry, and of course didn’t. The success of Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen (Christ I feel like a desperate aging hepster writing that) can be purely put down to free downloads leading into multi-million sales. I see no reason why this shouldn’t follow in the book world, though I think it’s too early to tell at this stage. I would like to think it would, there’s something sweetly democratic about it. But let’s not go mad. Most stuff put out free will stay free, and largely free of readers too.

Simon Owens: Do you feel that book blogs are more open to small press titles than other mainstream review venues?

Ben Granger: Without a doubt. The bottom line is they review what they want to. I believe it was MC Hammer who once remarked of the Addams Family, they “Do what they wanna do, say what they wanna say, live how they wanna live, play how they wanna play”. A trillion considerations that mainstream reviews will take into account do not have to be done so by the bloggerati, so obviously small press titles will benefit. But it still boils down to the individual blogger’s interests in the end. They will also tend to be obsessed with reviewing and talking about just what they like, and time considerations on their life (if they’ve got a job like) will sometimes mean they’re even less likely to review what they don’t like than a mainstream reviewer. I’ve been sent several plugs from a creepy site trying to promote the virtues of incest. No thanks mate.

Simon Owens: What are some of your favorite literary genres?

Ben Granger: Impossible to say. Using “genre” in its most reductive sense, “crime”, “sci-fi”, “horror” etc. I’m not usually a fan of that lot, though I’ll like some of the best ie. PK Dick, Lovecraft, Ballard, Jake Arnott if we’re including crime etc. To be honest though I will usually read older books rather than new releases, so a new one really has to grab its teeth in my bum-cheeks for me to take interest. Bret Ellis’s Lunar Park succeeded superbly in that respect. But my reference points are in the past, I’m looking for something which approaches Celine, Greene, E. Bronte, Wilde, Parker, Orwell, Pat Hamilton or dozens of others I’ve loved.

Simon Owens: What upcoming book publications are you looking forward to the most?

Ben Granger: One of the absolute favourite books of my youth was Ripley Bogle by Robert Mcliam Wilson, an extraordinary account of a jaded, brilliant Irish down-and-out’s odyssey through London. I hear that Wilson, long missing from the literary scene, is to write a new novel called The Extremists later this year. I’m very much looking forward to that. Incidentally, I only found out about it from people posting comments on a blog post I did on Ripley Bogle. Another beautiful outcome of the medium!

Simon Owens: What are the five blogs you’d recommend to supplement the reading of your own?

Ben Granger: When it comes to literary weblogs I’m afraid I don’t usually venture out of the ‘Brit-Lit-Blogs’ of which Splinters is a part. Ready Steady Book, Buzzwords, This Space, Bookworld and Scarecrow are all good reads, and usually from writers a good deal more committed than myself. There’s your five. What more do you want? How Stalinist that makes me sound, true though. If we’re allowed just sites rather than blogs, then another five would be Lenin’s Tomb, the site of journalist Johann Hari’s site (both these representing the political polar extremes of my zig-zagging brain), Bookmunch (fine review site), openDemocracy and MorrisseySolo.

(Related posts: Interview with Scott Esposito from Conversational Reading, New Best-of anthology to hit the market, INterview with Mark Sarvas from The Elegant Variation, Interview with Dan Wickett from The Emerging Writers Network, Interview with Michael Allen from The Grumpy Old Bookman)

This interview was originally published over here

John Joseph Adams is the assistant editor at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. He reviews science fiction for Kirkus and reviews audiobooks for Publishers Weekly. His non-fiction has also appeared in: Amazing Stories, The Internet Review of Science Fiction, Locus Magazine, Locus Online, and Science Fiction Weekly. He is an affiliate member of SFWA, and served as a judge for the 2005 Audie Awards. He maintains a blog, The Slush God Speaketh.

Simon Owens: When did you first decide to become a book reviewer and what motivated you to do so?

John Joseph Adams: I first decided to pursue book reviewing in February of 2004. Gordon and I were out having lunch one Friday afternoon and I was complaining about the rather dubious quality of certain audiobooks, after having spent my hard earned dollars on an audiobook whose performance I found wince-inducing. I went on to bemoan the fact that no one covers science fiction audiobooks; the primary source for audiobook reviews, AudioFile Magazine, hardly covers any science fiction at all, and I’ve never found their reviews to be particularly useful anyway. (I find them too short—they’re only about one hundred words—and they don’t say enough critically about the book or the performance.) So Gordon wisely suggested I pitch an audiobook column to Locus. He had recently shown me copies of Mystery Scene Magazine (the mystery equivalent of Locus), and I noted with interest that they ran audiobook reviews, so why shouldn’t Locus?

After that discussion, I wrote up a proposal and sent it off to Jenni Hall at Locus (who has since left there for greener pastures). She was the champion of the column and really got behind it, and if she wasn’t around at the time, I’m not sure it would have ever been published. So I’m quite grateful to her for that, as that column really got my freelancing career going, and I certainly wouldn’t have been able to get the PW gig if it had not been for my experience with Locus.

As to what motivated me to start reviewing—well, besides the fact that I wanted to see SF audio being reviewed, the usual writerly motivations for doing things: the desire to see my name in print, the desire to earn a little extra money, etc.

As it turns out, there already was a venue for SF audio reviews—SFFAudio, ran by Scott Danielson and Jesse Willis. Those guys do a nice job with what is basically an online fanzine (a for-the-love project), and had I known about that prior to all of this, I might not have bothered pitching a column to Locus. So I’m glad I didn’t find out about it until afterward.

SO: Do you think your editorial position at the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction made magazine editors more willing to let you review for them?

JJA: Certainly it did before, when I had no other writing credits to speak of. For instance, I know Charles Brown at Locus greatly respects Gordon, and so me being Gordon’s assistant probably had a lot to do with him giving me a shot. Prior to Locus, my only publication had been an article on post-apocalyptic SF for the brand new Internet Review of Science Fiction, and while that name carries more weight now, back then it was still an unknown quantity. So, sure, my position at F&SF surely helped out in that case.

Nowadays, I’m sure it helps out, but now that I’ve reviewed for Kirkus and Publishers Weekly, those name both probably carry more weight when it comes to reviewing. Those are two of the most respected review journals in the world, so being published there gives me mad whuffie.

SO: What’s the process for becoming a Publisher’s Weekly reviewer? Is it hard to become one?

JJA: Curiously, it was pretty easy. It wasn’t something I’d pursued on my own—I came across a job listing on the craigslist.org job board that said PW was looking for audiobook reviewers. Basically, all I had to do was send along my resume and a couple sample reviews.

At the time, I’d been published in Amazing Stories, The Internet Review of Science Fiction, Locus Magazine, Locus Online, and Science Fiction Weekly. I sent along my reviews (from Locus) of Sea of Trolls by Nancy Farmer, ‘Salem’s Lot by Stephen King (which a publicist from Simon & Schuster Audio told me was one of the best audio reviews she’d ever read), and (from Amazing Stories) The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold.

After about a week to ten days, an editor at PW got back to me, telling me that she liked my sample reviews and asked if I would be willing to write a trial review for them (which I would be paid for whether they accepted or not); naturally, I said yes. A few days later, DHL delivered The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman to my door; in the package was a note telling me I had two weeks to review the book, along with a style sheet and a bunch of sample PW reviews. They liked my review (which you can read here), and I’ve been reviewing for the regularly since. This was only back in April, so thus far I’ve only had a total of four audio reviews accepted. But I’ve got two more I’m working on now, and plan to continue for the foreseeable future.

SO: You seem to listen to a lot of audio books. I listen to them voraciously while driving my car, but I tend to prefer nonfiction because I have a hard time keeping track of novels because of the constant distractions while driving. Do you have preferences for audio book listening as compared to regular reading?

JJA: I have about a 45 min. to an hour commute to and from work every day, so I listen in the car too. I find other ways to sneak some listening in now and then, however. For instance, at F&SF, when I come into work in the morning, the first thing I usually do is walk to the post office to pick up the mail. I listen on the walk. When I come back, I sit at my desk and slit open all the day’s slush and unpack the envelopes; I listen while I do that. Later in the day, after the rejections have been written and printed out, I listen some more while I’m packing all that stuff up. Basically, any mundane or mindless task that doesn’t require listening is a great opportunity to get some audiobook reading done.

I’m pretty versatile when it comes to listening to audiobooks. With my regular reading, I pretty much only read science fiction and fantasy these days; not because I don’t like other stuff, but because it’s such a challenge to try to keep up with it all, I don’t really have time to read out of the genre. For audiobooks, I like to listen to science fiction and fantasy too, though I’m much more open to other things. For instance, I almost never read non-fiction in dead-tree format, but I’ve listened to quite a bit on audio (and my first two audio reviews for PW were non-fiction titles).

I don’t really have a problem following fiction narratives on audio, though I think you can train yourself to be a better audiobook reader. I didn’t consciously do anything to improve my audio “reading” skills, but when I first started reviewing (and before that, when I listened only for pleasure), I found myself frequently rewinding the audiobook because my attention drifted or I was distracted by one of those abovementioned distractions. These days, however, I’ve noticed that I very rarely rewind at all. So I think it might just be a matter of training your brain to process the auditory narrative in an efficient way. Or something like that.

SO: Who are some of your favorite audio readers (mine are Bill Bryson, Douglas Adams, and Al Franken)?

JJA: I’ve never listened to an audiobook done by any of those guys, though I’ve heard good things about them. It’s curious to me that the three readers you chose are all authors as well.

But speaking of authors who are also good narrators, two of my favorite narrators are Neil Gaiman and Harlan Ellison. Gaiman’s performance of Coraline is absolutely top-notch, and Ellison I’ve described as reading with “a vibrant, infectious, gosh-wow! zeal.”

Other favorite narrators include: Stefan Rudnicki, Simon Prebble, Stephen Briggs, Ron McLarty, and Frank Muller, whose narration of the first four books of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series are my favorite audiobooks of all time. (Tragically, he suffered a terrible auto accident some years ago; he survived, but he still hasn’t recovered enough for him to resume his narration career—the possibility of which is “very small.”) I never got to review Muller, but I’ve reviewed all the others mentioned above in my Locus columns [1] [ 2].

SO: Do think that audio books are at a disadvantage to regular books because they have two slopes to overcome: performance and literary quality?

JJA: Definitely. The narrator of an audiobook is just as important to the overall success of the product as the author is. No matter how brilliant a novel or its author is, it will not succeed on audio if the production and/or narration is badly done. Audiobooks are also at the disadvantage that some works just don’t translate well to audio.

On the other hand, a really great narrator can turn an otherwise minor novel into something well-worth listening to. Their other disadvantage is that technology can get in the way of your enjoyment of reading. Whether you listen on an iPod (as I do) or you prefer CDs or cassettes—all of these devices have their pros and cons, and many of the cons are downright annoying.

And to tie this back to reviewing—one way in which the audiobook reviewer is at a disadvantage compared to a book reviewer is the audiobook reviewer can’t flip back through the text and re-read selected passages to reinforce his memory or to check facts. It’s very easy to do that with a paper book, but very nearly impossible to do with an audiobook.

(Related posts: Interview with Nick Mamatas, Interview with Jay Lake, Interview with Ben Peek, Interview with Alan Deniro, Interview with Chrisopher Rowe)

Good news for genre readers, there’s a new Best Of anthology called Best American Fantasy that will be released from Prime Books. The editors will be Matt Cheney, Ann VanderMeer, and Jeff VanderMeer.

From the press release:

Prime Books announces the establishment of a prestigious new anthology series, Best American Fantasy (trademark pending), guest edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, with Matthew Cheney serving as the series editor. The inaugural volume will be published in June 2007, showcasing the best North American fantasy short fiction from the preceding year. The editors will apply as wide a definition of the term “fantasy” as is necessary for the integrity and quality of Best American Fantasy—including magic realism, surrealism, postmodern experiments, and all other applicable permutations.

What excites me most about this antho is its line-up of editors. I very often agree with the tastes of Matt Cheney (Mumpsimus) and Jeff VanderMeer, and chances are I’m going to enjoy this book a lot more than the average best-of anthology.

Matthew Cheney: The Mumpsimus began in August of 2003 when I started reading science fiction and fantasy again after having not read any since the early years of college. I discovered that the field had changed in ways that interested me, because many newer writers both inside and outside the genre were interested in mixing material often seen as wholly part of either SF or wholly part of what for lack of a better phrase I’ll call the literary mainstream. I wanted a place to record some of my thoughts about what I was reading, and so I started the blog. Soon I discovered that many of my thoughts were contradictory, superficial, amorphous, absurd, and confused, but that, too, has been helpful to see.

I didn’t have any sense of audience other than myself for a while, and then it seemed suddenly that lots of people were paying attention, because my interests were similar enough to a few other people’s that they were interested in what I was up to. I think some people pegged me as a science fiction blogger early on and ended up being quite disappointed, but I’ve never been very good at living up to taxonomic expectations.

I don’t tend to think of the blog as a genre blog, because only a part of my reading life is spent reading genre fiction (not that I like the term “genre fiction”, but people seem to know what I mean when I use it, so I continue to do so). When possible, I try to keep The Mumpsimus unpredictable and eclectic. And because life sometimes gets busy, there are definitely fallow weeks and even months, such as right now.

(more…)

A.R.Yngve, Swedish writer/artist, discovered blogs in 2004, became addicted, and started his own blog in 2005. He published comic-strips in Sweden during the 1990s, then decided to become a writer instead. It took him a decade to find a publisher. In 2004, his young-adult SF/F novel TERRA HEXA came out in Sweden, and the sequel is due for a 2006 release. His short fiction has been published in Sweden and China (see http://yngve.bravehost.com/yngve_in_china.html).

Simon Owens: In an email to me, you labeled yourself an “ex-cartoonist.” Why is this? Have you given up on the art completely?

A.R.Yngve: Sadly, yes. I came to realize that
A) the comic-book market was in a terminal decline;
B) the Swedish market for comics was too small to begin with;
C) I was better at writing than drawing, anyway.
However, the comics experience taught me some useful things about prose-writing: To be economical, and to focus on the “climaxes” in a story.

Simon Owens: For 2006, you set your goals towards being published in China more. Is there something about the Chinese market that you find appealing?

A.R. Yngve: China is a growing market for SF, and the Chinese readers have this great curiosity about other cultures and genuine enthusiasm for the future. When you write science-fiction in the jaded West, encountering this attitude is very refreshing.

For example: I discovered the Chinese market only because a Chinese student emailed me. He had seen my novel ALIEN BEACH on my website, and asked for my permission to translate it into Chinese! (See what I mean?)

Simon Owens: How does the Swedish market for SF compare to other countries?

A.R. Yngve: In a word: TINY.

When I started writing SF novels, I did it in English because I figured Sweden was the last place in the world I’d get ANY science-fiction published. So when a Swedish publisher finally accepted my novel TERRA HEXA, I had to translate it BACK to my mother tongue! My ultimate ambition is still to get recognized “abroad”, i.e. outside Sweden.

Simon Owens: What are the five blogs everyone should be reading (besides your own)?

A.R. Yngve: -Only FIVE? Unfair, man! But OK, here’s a list that’ll get old soon:
1. http://drudgereport.com
2. http://gapingvoid.com (great cartoons)
3. http://rogerlsimon.com
4. http://saudijeans.blogspot.com (learn more about how people live in other cultures)
5. http://blog.wired.com/sterling/

Simon Owens: As someone who has published both genre and non-genre work, is there one you prefer over the other?

Benjamin Rosenbaum: In a strict sense, there isn’t any such thing as “non-genre work”. All art this side of schizophrenic scrawls and secret twin languages weaves itself in part out of ongoing conversations and conventions (just as much of it also rebels against those conversations). Art most often starts with a “yes, but…”

Genres are collections of those threads, vaguely organized according to historical conventions, as a navigational aid — whether for readers in a bookstore (genre as marketing category) or for creators trying to figure out how to tackle a problem of craft (genre as artistic tradition). Not only aren’t they boxes with hard borders, I’m actually not sure it actually means anything to talk about “mixing genres” or being “cross-genre” — the mixture is the primary artifact, after all; the genres are attempts to organize it usefully as a secondary process. It’s something of a fluke if any lump of art ever manages to be entirely composed out of the materials of one genre.

And of course there are genres at different levels of granularity: so “prose” is a genre, but so is “the novel”, and so is “the science fiction novel” and so is “the picaresque post-apocalyptic/nanotech skatepunk utopian science fiction novel”. (Or if it’s not yet a genre, it should be.)

So — the two main genre traditions I’m in are:

1) SF — that is, intellectually alive science fiction and fantasy and weird fiction from, I don’t know, Stanley G. Weinbaum and H. P. Lovecraft up through Sturgeon and Bester, thence Delany and Le Guin and Moorcock, and up to the cyberpunks, the singularitans, and the slipstream style monkeys; and

2) irrealist literary fiction, from Kafka and Ionesco through Calvino, Borges, Barthelme, Abe, Pirandello, and up to Aimee Bender, George Saunders, and so on.

These two traditions are in some sense twins separated at birth — they run from the same roots in the 19th century, and were sundered in the 1920s by cultural forces that split fiction into “high” and “pulp” literatures — a boundary I think is now loosening again.

Do I prefer one over the other?

As spaces to work in, no, I don’t. I like them each, and I like where they collide. Depends on my mood, and what the story’s for.

As a reader, I think the answer is pretty much the same, with mysteries and Anne Tyler and nineteenth century realists and nonfiction and mythic texts thrown into the mix; I’m an eclectic gourmand as a reader. The genre space I read in is a lot broader than the genre space I find I can effectively write in.

SO: Have you found that any of your non-genre readers have made the attempt to cross over and read some of your genre work?

BR: I don’t know if you can sort readers that way either. But I’ve definitely gotten letters from people who read “The Orange” in Harper’s and went and read all my other stuff on the net.

If I was writing novels, and having to deal with readers through the clunky marketing abstractions of the publishing industry, it might be harder. Short stories are ephemera — they get reprinted across genre lines, and once they’re Googleable (because I want my stories to end up in HTML sooner or later where everyone can see them) they’re pretty accessible to all readers, regardless of tribal affiliations.

SO: You’re someone who has engaged in meta-fiction on several occaisions. Do you think that meta-fiction makes it easier for you to converse with the reader?

BR: Sure.

…I guess you probably want more than that.

I guess I feel like metafiction is one of those expensive, shiny tools that you keep in the bottom fold-out drawer of your Black&Decker tool caddy and look at admiringly and mournfully now and then, until *just the right* problem comes along, and then you’re soooo happy that you can finally pull that overpriced, glorious sucker out and use it for the job it was intended for.

It can be brittle; it can be precious; and when disconnected from the meat of the story, it can be dead boring. Even the slightest sly-nod-to-the-reader has a tendency to deflate, distance, and defuse, so you save it for those moments when the story’s motor is otherwise likely to overheat.

So there’s something very exciting about finding a story in which a direct dialogue with the reader, or an extended reflection about story-in-story, or any of those extravagances of literature commenting on itself, actually makes sense, matters, and can bear any emotional weight.

SO: What are the five blogs everyone should be reading (besides your own)?

BR: Well, in the first place, they shouldn’t be reading mine unless they’re very patient, since I am a poor blogger, frequency-wise.

And in the second place, I don’t think I even *read* five blogs regularly, and those I read irregularly are probably a pretty idiosyncratic set.

Like everyone, I am somewhat addicted to http://www.boingboing.net. All the good fights and roll-up-your-sleeves, let’s hash-this out dialogues in my corner of speculative fiction tend to happen at Dave Moles’ http://www.chrononaut.org/log/ . Chris Barzak’s blog http://zakbar.blospot.com has been fascinating since he’s been teaching in Japan and relating the many layers of his culture shock. I intermittently find http://www.corante.com/many/ — a blog on social software — intriguing, though I mostly prefer the longer essays of one of its contributors, Clay Shirky ( http://www.shirky.com).

I honestly don’t think I can pick a fifth. Jed Hartman’s sober assessments of and thoughtful inquiries into issues moral, political, scientifictional, cultural, and orthographic? Gwenda Bond’s electic, sparkling, elan-filled, witty, sly reportage on books, politics, books, alcohol, books, bicycling, and books? Nick Mamatas’s caustic can’t-look-away cocktail of political radicalism, vitriol, Lovecraftiana, and pro wrestling? Hal Duncan’s glorious swathes of word-drunk, swaggering, intellectually toothsome rant-as-artform? Susan Groppi’s late lamented blog, with its clarity of voice and its passionate engagment tempered with irony?

I dunno.

(Actually, the web quasi-literary form I’m really addicted to is not the blog, nor the webzine, nor even the faux-news-site (long live the Onion!) but webcomix — they seem, and I know it’s sort of sacrilege for me to say this, to make best use of the medium. Currently addicted to http://www.megatokyo.com and http://www.sinfest.net, and in recovery from http://www.somethingpositive.net …)

You can find Ben’s blog over here.