Category: Interviews

I’m the YEAR’S BEST, mofos!

(Probably more accurate to say “I’m [the author of one of several works counted among] the YEAR’S BEST [stories within the horror genre], [my esteemed] mofos!“, but, whatevs, right?)

YearsBestHorror10-cover-llciikicdniigigoI keep forgetting to crow about this: The last story I sold to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction–“Whatever Comes After Calcutta” (link to my interview about it)–has been selected for Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year (Vol. 10).

The full table of contents is good company, and the cover art kicks ass! Keep an eye peeled in your local bookstore this summer.

Table of Contents

  • Introduction
  • Better You Believe                              Carole Johnstone       
  • Liquid Air                                           Inna Effress                
  • Holiday Romance                               Mark Morris                         
  • Furtherest                                           Kaaron Warren                      
  • Where’s the Harm?                             Rebecca Lloyd                     
  • Whatever Comes After Calcutta        David Erik Nelson           
  • A Human Stain                                   Kelly Robson                         
  • The Stories We Tell about Ghosts     A. C. Wise                            
  • Endosketal                                         Sarah Read                              
  • West of Matamoros, North of Hell    Brian Hodge                      
  • Alligator Point                                   S. P. Miskowski                     
  • Dark Warm Heart                               Rich Larson
  • There and Back Again                       Carmen Machado               
  • Shepherd’s Business                           Stephen Gallagher             
  • You Can Stay All Day                        Mira Grant                             
  • Harvest Song, Gathering Song            A. C. Wise
  • The Granfalloon                                  Orrin Grey                             
  • Fail-Safe                                              Philip Fracassi                       
  • The Starry Crown                               Marc E. Fitch                         
  • Eqalussuaq                                          Tim Major                 
  • Lost in the Dark                                  John Langan                         

Incidentally, I immediately spent the money I got for this reprint on a bunch of “folk metal” and “hauntology” music.  The former is probably self-explanatory (metal music heavily influenced by folk music of various regions—this article is a good place to start, if you’re curious).  The latter is apparently a British thing, where folks make fake soundtracks to non-existent low-budget 1980s horror films and British paranormal TV series.  My current heavy rotation faves are:

  • Blood of the Black Owl (Pacific Northwest folk metal—big Americana and Native American influences, neat soundscapes)
  • Zuriaake (Chinese folk metal)
  • Klaus Morlock/The Unseen (pretty straight hauntology—i.e., fake soundtracks for non-existent 1980s horror films/paranormal UK TV shows)
  • Thorsten Schmidt (more hauntology)   
  • Nubiferous (I’m not sure what this is–it’s like folk metal without the metal, or hauntology without the pretense.  It’s from Russia)

F&SF Interviews Dave-o about Witches, Guns, Lawyers, Ohio Militias, etc.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction interviewed me about my latest horror story, “Whatever Comes After Calcutta.”F&SFNov-Dec2017small

…when I go to sum up the story in a Big Picture way, I end up saying the same thing that I said about that election:

I totally hear where folks—angry, aggrieved, not-gonna-take-it-anymore folks—are coming from, because I totally agree with them:  They are getting screwed.  We just totally disagree on who is screwing them, or what is a sensible way to address that.

This story is about that, in a fundamental way.

I also tell an anecdote about seeing a homeless guy get ejected from a Coney in the mid-1990s, and make mention of Michigan trespassing laws, the sovereign citizen movement, my neighbors from Chennai, and Dave-o’s patented “magpie and junk drawer” speculative-fiction drafting strategy.

The Nov/Dec issue of F&SF is still on newsstands—but only for a few more days. Nab your copy soon!

Come Read a Transcription of Dave-o Babbling!

I was interviewed by Lisa Haselton for her Reviews and Interviews blog this past summer.  This was technically part of the publicity for Expiration Date, but mostly ended up being about other things.  I tell a long anecdote about “When I First Knew I Was a Writer” (i.e., “The Most Important Thing I Learned About Writing at 15-years-old”) and “My Most Interesting Writing Quirk”:

What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?

I subvocalize almost constantly. Like, this sentence I’m typing right now, I’m thinking about saying it as I’m typing it. I can feel it on my tongue. It’s the same when I’m reading (and a big part of why I’m such a slow reader). Almost every thought I have is composed as an imagined dialogue with someone. Very little of what I say is spontaneous at all. I guess, for a lot of people, their process of reading/writing as actually fairly divorced from their process of speaking/hearing. For me they’re mashed into a single thing.

A good read, I guess, if you have a deep and persistent interest about what the heck is wrong with me.

“There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House” in the July/August F&SF

It seems I’ve been talking about my novella “There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House” without being super-duper clear that it’s out on newsstands and availableMagazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/Aug 2017 for download in the July/August issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.  My bad!  The story is being met with a degree of enthusiasm that I hadn’t really expected, and that’s sorta had me spun.  So, here’s the nitty-gritty:

 

Wanna Buy a Copy?

  • The July/Aug F&SF is now in bookstores throughout the US, including most Barnes & Noble locations. 
  • To buy it online:

Wanna Help Spread the Hype?

  • Tweet (retweet it!): 
  • Facebook post (share it!):
  • Goodreads link (review it!)
  • Nebula Awards: F&SF makes every story they publish available to SFWA members on the password-protected Nebula Forums.   If you’re an SFWA member (or know some), feel free to hit them with that link and they can download and read “There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House” (and tons of other great stories) for free.

Wanna Know About How the Sausage Gets Made?

FREE READ FRIDAY: The first three chapters of EXPIRATION DATE, and more!

Looking for that perfect comic-dystopic-romantic sci-fi beach read? ExpirationDate You’re in luck: The first three chapters of my novella Expiration Date are now available online (in both slick-as-hella web versions, and some pretty damn fine looking PDFs, perfect for offline, ebook, and tablet reading—just clicking on the “Print” button to open and save the PDF for that chapter.  As an example, here’s the chapter 1 PDF.) And don’t worry, this isn’t a cheap tease: All nine chapters will be released, free to read, one each week for the rest of the summer.

If you want some inside-baseball about the novella, you can check out this interview with Gabie at Tea End blog.

FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION Interviews Me About “The Traveling Salesman Solution”

A few weeks back C.C. Finlay, who guest edited a volume of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction did a really nice interview with me–which I promptly neglected to tell any of you about. My bad!

At any rate, the interview is largely about “The Traveling Salesman Solution”–which is my story in the issue Finlay edited (still available at your local bookseller, online, and through Amazon–who offer a FREE trial subscription!) It was a nice chat and helped me realize that, among other things, the story is sort of a weird sublimated love-letter to mathematicians:

– There is a lot of math in this story.

I was a crappy math student, but I never had a math teacher I didn’t like. Mathematicians are a sorely underserved community.

For real, mathematicians are almost invariably very rad people. That I’m *terrible* at getting my head around their life’s work is an indictment of me, not them.

At any rate, you can read the rest (it’s brief!) here: Interview: David Erik Nelson on “The Traveling Salesman Solution” : The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (I give a layman’s rundown on the Traveling Salesman Problem, talk about military service and the “handicapped,” tell a seemingly random anecdote about Whole Foods–it’s *just like* hanging out with me in person, except there is no risk of me sticking you with the tab.)

If you like what you see but fear commitment, you can get a free copy of my award-winning time portal story “The New Guys Always Work Overtime,” and get a sense of whether or not I’m the sorta dude you might wanna hang out with for 12,000 words.

What’s Dave-o Talking About? @roborobb #scifi #writing

At the tail end of the summer I connected with Robo Robb via Maker Faire Detroit. He subsequently interviewed me for WXOU, which is 88.3FM in Auburn Hills, MI. I’d thought we were going to talk mostly about maker/DIY stuff, but it ended up being a really fun, wide ranging chat. Robo Robb is a really excellent, laid-back interviewer–which, compounded with my sprung sleep schedule (travel, new baby, etc.) meant that, about four minutes into the interview, I totally forgot that we were recording. When he grabbed his digital recorder off the table as we were leaving–the coffee shop had shut down and wanted to haul their tables in–I suddenly realized I had *no idea* what I’d said. So, everything at this link is gonna be news to both of us.
DISCLOSURE: This tape is long–more than an hour, as I recall–and I have a terrible, nasal Jewish Kermit the Frog voice and creaky geek laugh. It’s downright *punishing* to listen to me go on about this stuff. Also, I go pretty far afield on education policy and race in America and clockwork robot war crimes–the whole thing is a hot mess. But Robo Robb is an excellent interlocutor and solid dude. If you ever get a chance to talk with him, *jump at it!*
Interview with David Erik Nelson – Robo Robb
*thx Robb!*

Handmade Conversations — David Erik Nelson, Geek Craft Extraordinaire

CraftFoxes–a very cool new crafting/DIY community–posted a really long interview with me, and was really nice about my rambling, evasive answers. Check it out:

What is your craft medium of choice, and why do you like it so much?
This shifts around. When I was little, I loved LEGO, Capsela and cardboard boxes. In high school, I loved weaving and ceramics, then briefly delved into figure drawing. In college I was really into ironic, swear-leaden cross-stitch, which I’d actually learned from my mom in elementary school (not the swearing, just cross-stitch itself). After that I went through a sock-animal phase and a more general sewing phase. An abortive attempt at crochet came next, followed, almost a decade later, by a successful crochet phase. I also learned to knit once, despite having no interest, because my wife wanted to learn and couldn’t decode the damn instructions in any of the books (which, I agree, are bizarrely algorithmic and technical; it’s like trying to figure out integral calculus using a textbook written in Middle English. Any time I hear some blowhard characterizing women as being “naturally” poor at math and physics, I think of how damn complicated those knitting books are, and how few male engineers I know can figure them out).

180 words, and not a one of them *actually answering the question*! The whole thing is like that, and runs upwards of 1700 words (and I skipped some questions). There’s even a picture of a very young me with a tame raccoon. If anything is indicative of what it’s like to hang out with me, this is. You’ve been warned.
Also, from now until Monday, Feb 27 CraftFoxes is giving away a copy of my book; click on over and enter to win.

On boomerangs and boomeranging (my final guest blog posts at Man Made DIY)

My last two guest blog posts are up at Man Made DIY; the first is on making your own boomerangs from scarps of cardboard (if you’re looking at this blog, you’ve probably already got the skinny on that). The other post is entirely new and starts to get at what I really like about teaching and DIY.
The Spirituality of Boomerangs: On Making Something from Nothing… — Man Made DIY | Crafts for Men — Keywords: talk, diy, craft, philosophy

In a nutshell, the cheap toy-store boomerang encompasses the core sadness of “growing up,” and highlights what we envy in the “childlike wonder” of children: As we mature, we begin to reflexively doubt that neat things are real, or really as neat as they seem, and start to assume that most of the time most things just aren’t going to work as advertised. This is our default setting as Americans: Don’t believe the hype. So, if you take a room full of people who are savvy and jaded and know enough not to believe the hype, then give them a ruler and a marker and a pair of scissors and show them how to quickly make a working boomerang out of something they were going to cram in the recycle bin, they become luminous; they’ve just made something awesome out of trash, and it clearly dawns on them that there are a whole lot of other things they could make, too. They could remake the world.

Check ’em out. Thanks!

Crafting Liberation: Confessions of an Unredeemable Direction-Follower

I’m still guest blogging at Man Made DIY this week; please feel free to check my latest post out and, if you feel so moved, chime in. Thanks!
Crafting Liberation: Confessions of an Unredeemable Direction-Follower — Man Made DIY | Crafts for Men — Keywords: recipe, talk, cooking, craft

I’m an unredeemable direction-follower. As a boy, I’d account for the meniscus when measuring water to make Ramen noodles. As a man, I was relentlessly mocked by my wife for my stove-side devotion to the succinct instructions of Mark Bittman . . . . This, obviously, is the pathology of a man terrified of failure–that I ever wrote anything at all, let alone an entire damn book (let alone several!) is itself a crippled miracle. While DIY is obviously empowering–My stove was broken, now it’s fixed; I did that!–having instructions in hand can really quickly shackle us, as it’s so easy to mistake a good way of doing X for the only way to do X. . . .