Patient presents with documentary vision

P.J. Rey and Nathan Jurgenson talk about documentary vision in this blog post, describing it as a tendency “whereby we increasingly experience the world as a potential social media document.” The stuff of daily life, in other words, is more and more becoming something we automatically consider not only recording but posting online.

Here for example, is a shot of a Stellar’s Jay wondering how long it can get me to chase it, in pursuit of only moderately sharp images:

Teasing Jay

I had a dream the other day wherein I couldn’t remember what our house on Oak Street looked like, and so I had a dig through my digital archives and found a series of shots of a yellow duplex, split down the middle but superficially like the house owned by Frank the Entropic Landlord. It’s a house that never existed, of course; we’ve never lived on Oak Street.

Within the same folder of imaginary pictures were a bunch of shots from a family wedding I hadn’t gone to, a gathering of genetic relations I haven’t seen, for the most part, in about twenty-five years. And then, as is the way of dreams, we were actually at the wedding, Kelly and I, coping with skeevy dream versions of people I’m entirely estranged from. Soon I decided “Enough of this!”–lucid dreaming is a beautiful thing–and reduced the whole thing to a bunch of digital pictures again, although this time we were looking at them on the security monitors at the wedding venue, to the great disgruntlement of the security guys.

This is how far photography has wound itself into my consciousness: I dream supercool things and then try to photograph them, and have random dream thoughts and automatically expect to have pictures verifying those non-existent memories.

Blue Magic Cover Reveal

Blue Magic will be out on April 10th, which is a mere 124 days from now, and I am excited and extremely proud to have the official go-ahead on showing you the cover art…

Lovely, mmm? This is a composite image–the portrait is by photographer Clayton Bastiani and the nebula (here’s the original) comes to us from NASA. The exquisite design is by Jamie Stafford Hill. All of this effort was pulled together by the Tor Books art department, and in particular the wonderful Irene Gallo. Thank you, team Tor! It’s a beautiful cover and really appropriate.

What I love about this cover–besides that it looks so at home with the original Indigo Springs art and that it’s gorgeous in its own right–is that the figure could be one of several of the characters from the novel… but that’s something I’ll talk about in a later post, after more of you have read it. I’m actually contemplating a Who is She? contest, to run after Blue Magic‘s available… when? Oh, April 10th, that’s right.

P.S. If you click on the image, it gets bigger.

Holiday holiday, whoa!

I am finishing up my work year early–this week, in fact–because next Monday Kelly and I are turning over the cats to the housesitter (or the housesitter to the cats; I’m not sure which) and jetting off to Italy for the entire holiday season.

Rumble is Unimpressed:
I'm coming with you, kibble bitches!

What does finishing up mean? First, and very exciting it is too: I sent a new novel off to my agent Monday!!! And I hope to be able to tell you all sorts of things about it in the very near.

I also have one last January blog post to prep for Tor.com. Meaning: it’s written, and I just have to do some coding.
Aaand I’m fine-tuning my Novel I syllabus for the spring quarter of the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. And, less this list bore you to death, I’m prepping An Unveiling. Yes, gang, tomorrow I will be posting the Blue Magic cover art.

After that it’s all minutiae, like tidying up paperwork, and writing that handful of e-mails to people that boil down to “If you want something from me this month, you need to let me know now.” If you’re reading this, and the preceding sentence might apply to you, you should remember that my brain will stop running well before Monday. Get your requests in STAT and use very small words to express ur needz. Because, really, I say I’m working this week but whenever I can get away with it I’m lying on my face on a dock covered in seagull droppings taking pictures like this:

Me, terrorizing a sea jelly.

And then going home to post the photo while washing my tights in gasoline.

Because, you know, the tights are also going to Italy!!

Italy, Italy, Italy, Italy. More specifically: Rome, Palermo, Agrigento, Modica, Siracusa, Catania, Napoli, and more Roma!

Between one thing and another, Kelly and I have been saving both vacation days and dough for this trip for a shockingly long time. I am tired and ready to experience some exciting new things… and to photograph them! In fact, since I am a mad photoposter, some may well go up before I’m back.

WiFi permitting, you can look for them here:

Tumblr: mirrors my Instagram posts, which also get Tweeted.
Flickr: I have set up an Italy album, but all it contains is the above picture of my suitcase with a cat in it. My plan is to see if I can leave a slide show running on the site before I go.
Facebook: Anything I put on Flickr ends up here.

All that said, I sincerely hope all of you have such gratifying and exciting holiday plans that checking out my trip photos is the furthest thing from your minds.

Hey, what are your gratifying and exciting holiday plans?