I am honored and excited to be a part of a panel this Thursday night at the legendary Mechanics Institute Library in San Francisco. If you’re in the Bay Area, this is a great chance to come check out this incredibly cool space, as well as listen to great speakers addressing an issue that’s near to a lot of book geeks’ hearts: “Is The Book Dead?”

Here are the details, from the Library:

Thursday, December 3, 2009 2^nd floor Mechanics Institute Library, 6:30 PM (doors at 5:30)

LOCATION: Mechanics’ Institute, 57 Post Street, San Francisco

Panel: Is the Book Dead? High-Tech and the Written Word

Join us for our bi-annual Members Meeting followed by a dynamic discussion on the future of the written word, with local literary celebrities, who will debate the future of books, newspapers and printed media with the surge of the internet and merging technologies.

Moderated by Alan Kaufman, author of Matches and Jew Boy; and editor The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. Panelists: Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket), author of The Basic Eight, Watch Your Mouth, Adverbs, A Series of Unfortunate Events, a series of popular children’s’ books. Brenda Knight, Associate Publisher, Cleis Press & Viva Editions   John McMurtrie, Book Editor, San Francisco Chronicle Annalee Newitz, former culture editor at The San Francisco Bay Guardian and syndicated columnist of Techsploitation. Scott Rosenberg, author of Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters, and Dreaming in Code. Oscar Villalon, is a publisher at McSweeney’s literary journal, and the former Book Editor, San Francisco Chronicle.

So I finished my first novel last week. Which is to say, I finished the first draft of my first novel, and therefore I am not truly finished. I’ve decided to take a break from it for a few weeks and work on some short stories that I hope will turn into my second novel if I like them well enough. Of course maybe this is all just procrastination, since I am dreading plunging into the revision – partly because there is currently a major plothole in the backstory for one of my main characters. No matter how I fill in that hole I’m going to lose a detail about her history that I like.

Also, I have yet to come up with a snazzy way to sum up the novel. Currently I tell people this:

It’s your basic ninja vs. pirate story, set 150 years in the future. Also, there is a lot of robot sex.

This is not untrue, though it does gloss over pretty much all of the science and politics in the novel. But those are so hard to describe in an elevator pitch!

I am optimistic that somewhere in between drafts two and three, I will hone the perfect, sexy/accurate pitch for my novel. In the meantime, I need to get cracking on those short stories.

In other news, I posted a deceptively light rant about male nudity in science fiction on io9 – there is actually some crunchy thought in there, below the flexed abs. And I posted a deceptively heavy contemplation of the Darko Mythos, since Richard “Donnie Darko” Kelly’s latest film, The Box, opened last weekend. And I reported on a new genomics discovery that could potentially lead to talking chimps.

I’m also preparing to head down to Irvine, the city where I grew up, for a futurism conference in December called The Bio-Politics of Popular Culture. I’ll be giving a talk there called “Will Mind-Controlled, Genetically-Engineered Sexbots Want to Play Videogames?” Which is just a fancy way of asking how biotechnologies will transform the way we consume pop culture devoted to sex and violence (my two favorite flavors). More on that conference as things develop.

Just got back from the literary SF/F event World Fantasy Con in San Jose. I had a great time, and got to moderate a panel about notable books from the last year.

I also, randomly, wrote a poem about it. This whole writing poetry thing has happened to me all my life. I just can’t seem to stop doing it.

For a Fanboy

your awkward charm
which involves a half-ironic use of anachronistic colloquialisms
reminds me of the way ruffled skirts sound when they are lifted
to reveal not just the warm, young legs of a steampunk cosplayer
but also a true and ugly history

beneath your lovely, confused face
beating in the muscles of your arms
swarming through your heart like remote-controlled molecular motors
there is something
speaking silently to me

it hovers between being real and being what I want
which is why desire
is really a form of storytelling
doomed to represent truth
by reporting what is there, only clothed in the sounds of demons