E-book Authors Supporting the Troops
I just read an article about something my friend Malcolm Campbell is involved in, sending download coupons for e-books to deployed troops. I thought it such a great idea that I wanted to give a little plug to the whole project here.The project started when writer Ed Patterson was chatting with a soldier in the field. The soldier mentioned the difficulty he had getting reading material for his Amazon Kindle Reader. The Kindle currently offers users t

Poems from Cyborg Chimera
Last week at the launch of the dark ‘til dawn series released by decollection in Shanghai, I was asked to read a few poems. The crowd was small (though big enough to intimidate me) and we had a good time reading together. Several of the poems I read were from my poetry collection Cyborg Chimera, recently released by Sam’s Dot Publishing. I thought it might be fun to put togethe

decollection Launches its dark ‘til dawn Collection in Shanghai
Over the weekend, decollection launched its first line of collectible art pieces, the dark ‘til dawn series of designer lamps. Each lamp is hand-painted and designed by decollection’s Peter Zhou around one of my haiku. There are 30 pieces in the collection. Each is unique, and comes accompanied by a birth certificate signed by both poet and artist.You can download this PDF catalog with pictures of each of the lamps and poems. You can get a bit of a feel for the whole series

Hit (or Miss) List, October ’09
It was a slower-than-usual reading month for me in October, but I did get to read some fun things, at least. I did not, however, make much of a dent in my Fill in the Gaps list of 100 books to be read over the next 5 years. I hope to get more of that done in November.Here’s what I’ve been reading and watching in October:Hit List • Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (Susanna Clarke) • Night and Day (Virginia Woolf) • The Lover (onstage, in Mandarin) • Some of Washington Irving’s short stories: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The Spectre Bridegroom, Mountjoy, The Pride of the Village • Back issues of The Fou

Reflections on dark ‘til dawn
There was really only one thing that ever kept me from becoming a visual artist of some sort — a decided lack of talent. I don’t have a steady hand. My fine motor skills are, well, less than fine. I have never been able to put the pictures in my mind onto the page without recourse to words. Words, it seems, are the only chance I have at producing art. I have always felt it a pitiable lack in myself, that I did not have even a shred of talent that would allow me to enter the world of visual arts.Because of this particular ineptitude that I’ve always known was mine, collaborating on the dark ‘til dawn series with Peter Zhou (周宇) of decollection has been a great plea