Fat Girl in a Strange Land is now available

I'm happy to announce that the anthology Fat Girl in a Strange Land — which includes my short fantasy story "Marilee and the SOB” — has now been officially released and is available from a variety of sources in print and ebook formats, including Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Enjoy!

Coping with a cancellation – a rant

Has anyone else here had a theater performance cancelled at the very last minute? It happend to me yesterday, and I’m still a bit upset over it.

A bit of background: My mother and I usually subscribe to one theater group per season — it’s become a rather important ritual in our life. I usually spend Saturdays at her place helping her with various things, but this is a time we can spend together just to do something cultural, for fun.

We had been subscribing to the Atlantic Theater for several years, but this year, for several reasons, we decided to give them a year off and instead chose a small company called the Abingdon Theatre, which was putting on three plays that looked interesting. We enjoyed their first production (“Blame in on Beckett”) and I was looking forward to the next one, called “Lost on the Natchez Trace,” a two-man play about a confrontation between a slave auctioneer and a runaway slave.

Now, understand, my mother is a woman “of a certain age” (she doesn’t like people to know her age, and I’ll respect that) and lives in Nassau County, and so going into the city for a play isn’t a casual thing. She goes to the LIRR train station the day before to pick up a round-trip ticket, then on the day drives to the station, takes the train in, and I meet her at the theatre; afterwards, we go back to the station and I wait with her until her train is announced.

So. We get to the theatre, meet, go up in the elevator, and are greeting by a woman who tells us that the performance has been cancelled.

Excuse me?

It seems that one of the two performers called in sick 20 minutes earlier and that they don’t have any stand-ins for the two-man performance, so it’s been cancelled. They’ll be happy to reschedule us. Even for this evening’s performance if we like.

Now, I understand that people do get ill, often at the most inconvenient times — but not to have any stand-ins? “We can’t afford it,” says the woman.  

The tiny lobby was filled with people (it was a matinee, after all) trying to figure out how to handle the situation, many of whom were older people for whom rescheduling a trip to a theatre was not a smal thing.

When we got to the box office, the young women there asked if we’d like to come to the evening perfomance. Obviously that was out of the question; my mother couldn’t spend five hours hanging around Manhattan and then go at night. But I was curious. “What are the chances of that being cancelled?” I asked.

“Oh, he’ll be there,” one said confidently. Which made me even more annoyed; if the actor was down with food poisoning or some such and was puking his guts out, how could they be sure he’d be ready for the evening performance? Or if he was simply hungover or tired or whatever — then why was this performance being cancelled?

And how could any theatre company not have understudies? As Jim said later, even if they have to have somebody standing there with a script in their hand, they should have somebody there to pick up the slack. Hell, I would have been happy if they had apologized and said they were going to do a reading of the play for those who couldn’t (or chose not to) reschedule — it wouldn’t have had the full drama of the production, but at least we would have seen a performance.

My mother and I ended up going to see a movie. (We saw Woman in Black with Daniel Radcliffe, which was actually a nicely old-fashioned ghost story.) We took an alternate date in two weeks. However, I’m not sure if I want to go. I really wanted to see this play, but I also have a lot of things I need to help my mom with. It’s hard to put aside another Saturday.

And how much do I want to take the chance that we’re going to show up and be told that we’ve gone through all that trouble for nothing — again?

Observing Las Vegas, Part 2

I love talking to the cab drivers of Las Vegas — well, most of them, anyway. The good ones are outgoing, chatty, and interesting; the really good ones are opinionated and let you know exactly where they stand, mostly on local issues. They get good tips.  (Then there are the bad ones, who spend the entire ride telling you how put upon they are because people aren’t tipping them enough… They get reasonable tips, as long as their driving skills don’t leave me white-knuckled.)

During the five days I was in Vegas, at least three drivers told me that Vegas was in a financial hole. The guy who drove me to the airport was especially eloquent; he explained that one of the reasons things were worse than they used to be is because, as I said in my last blog post, the latest fashion for hotel/casinos was high glitz and high prices.

It used to be that people could come, get a cheap hotel room, have a steak dinner for very little, and then spend their money in the casinos and shows, he told me. Now, the prices of the rooms have gone up and the cost of a meal has skyrocketed, due to the fact that most hotel restaurants these days are independently owned and high-maintenance, many pushing fancy foods and famous chefs. So people are finding that they have to spend their money on accommodations and food, and have a lot less to drop in the casinos. As a result, the casinos need to make up the difference by charging more for rooms and bringing in more expensive outside vendors, and the cycle goes on.

The cabbie also lamented the fact that ordinary people – who used to make up a large proportion of Las Vegas’ customers – now visit casinos and walk past shops filled with extremely high-priced merchandise that they couldn’t possibly afford. This, he asserted, makes them feel bad, subverting the idea of Las Vegas as a vacation spot. 

In short, he said – as did one or two others – Las Vegas has priced itself out of its former glory days as a place for working-class and middle-class people who enjoyed gambling to go and pretend, for a short time, that they were well-off and important. The rich, he shrugged, have other places to go.

You know, in writing this I’ve just become a bit embarrassed. It’s not as if I ever really liked Las Vegas. When I first went for the Comdex trade show in 1993, it was all new and weird. My colleagues and I would go out after the show and walk along the strip, watching the volcano go off outside the Mirage, giggle at the elaborate costumes and decorations in Caesar’s Palace, and then do a bit of judicious gambling. We’d have dinner at one of several restaurants without worrying about going over our expense accounts. It was fun.

Now, it’s different. I thought perhaps it was me: that I had gotten older; that I wasn’t hanging with a large crowd of friends and colleagues; that the overwhelming size of CES and the number of evening events had made it impossible to take the time to explore the city. But when I expressed this to several colleagues – and to one of the cabdrivers – they said that no, it was different. The “fun” hotels were getting seedy. It was difficult to find a reasonably decent place to have a middling expensive meal, never mind a good cheap one. It wasn’t the same – and it wasn’t getting better.

I’m not a gambler. I’m not fond of the way Las Vegas earns its money by persuading people to pour their money into what is essentially a black hole. But because I go there once a year, and because I’ve come to like some of the folks who work there, I feel bad for them and hope things can get better.

 

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Observing Las Vegas: Part 1

Earlier this month, I spent five days wandering around Las Vegas as one of the approximately 153,000 attendees of the CES trade show. For those not involved in the tech industry (or who don't care about tech at all), this is the annual Consumer Electronics Show, which exists to help vendors promote their new and upcoming product lines to buyers, sellers, journalists and other tech professionals.

Like thousands of others, I stared at the elaborate booths and less elaborate booths, and met with vendors who tried to convince me that their new products were the best thing since the vacuum tube. I also tried to simultaneously get from point A to point B, check where my next appointment was, figure out how late I was, and examine some of the other booths around me without crashing into too many other people doing exactly the same thing.

However, one thing I like to try to notice when I go each year isn't how the tech industry is doing, but how Las Vegas itself is doing. Over the years I've been going there — first, for the Comdex industry show and now for CES — the city has undergone several phases. When I started, it was just starting its "Las Vegas is for families" phase; building hotels like New York New York and MGM that were made to appeal to both parents and kids; building amusement parks in the back of hotels (I think it was at the MGM, but I don't remember for sure)… While the gambling and other adult entertainments were still there, the newer hotels were pushing for a cleaner look.

After a while, that waned, and somebody decided that Las Vegas was the town for sophisticated high rollers. They forgot about families with kids and started building hotels that were absolutely for adults: huge, glitzy, and featured expensive shops and gilded hotels/gambling areas. The result was hotels like the Aria and the Wynn, where the shops and the restaurants are Fifth Avenue prices and higher.

Unfortunately for Vegas, it was about this time that the economy crashed. Building projects stopped dead; conventions were cancelled or cut down drastically on the number of hotel rooms needed (I remember two years ago when all the inflated hotel prices were suddenly cut in a desperate effort to stop the number of attendees who were backing out). And pushing high-class and high-cost hotels and restaurants turned out to be one of the worst-timed moves that any city could make.

So what is Las Vegas like now? From my point of view, not nearly as healthy or as much fun as it was. And I'm stressing that it's from my point of view, because there are several factors that are affecting my opinion, including the hotel I stayed at, looking around the city as I drove from hotel to hotel, talking to cab drivers (one of my favorite activities in Las Vegas), observing the number of people in the casinos…

But enough for now. I'll continue on this theme later…

How do people do it?

How do people find time to blog, and Facebook, and LinkedIn, and Twitter, and everything else? Besides earning a living and maybe doing some writing on the side? Just asking…

Looks like Clockwork Phoenix 2 is in stock at both Amazon and Barnes and Noble. So if you want to read my story “Rosemary, That’s for Remembrance,” plus a bunch of other stories by some really excellent writers, you may want to take a look.

Clockwork Phoenix 2 gets PW’s approval

Clockwork Phoenix 2, which is due out this July (and which includes my story “Rosemany, That’s For Remembrance”), has received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. Judging from the reaction from the publisher, Norilana Books, this is a very Big Deal indeed. According to the reviewer, “Allen finds his groove for this second annual anthology of weird
stories, selecting 16 wonderfully evocative, well-written tales.” Mary Robinette Kowal and Saladin Ahmed (both of whom are in my writer’s group, Tabula Rasa) are mentioned specifically.

Click here to fine the Publishers Weekly review; go down to the bottom of the page.

Random thoughts

I wonder, sometimes, if we consider enough the kind of upset that this economic “downturn” has on all those who are experiencing layoffs and cutbacks and unpaid vacations and salary cuts. You listen to the news, and they talk about how an upturn is expected and less people are being laid off this month than next.

But losing a job is not something that disappears as soon as the stock market starts to recover. Somebody who loses a job — especially somebody older — may not easily fit into another position. (And “retraining” usually ends of making money only for those doing the training.) Salaries reduced are not automatically raised back to their former levels when things get better. Savings and retirement accounts that were decimated by the market and then by necessity may never be restocked.

Once an economic recovery begins, the media will invariably start acting as if everything is back to normal. But people’s lives are being changed in ways that they will not quickly recover from.

Descended From Darkness — the cover art

The folks at Apex Magazine are showing the piece of art that will be used as the cover of Descended From Darkness: Apex Magazine Vol. I, the anthology that “Waiting for Jakie” will be included in. It’s a really impressive scape from artist Vitaly S. Alexius.

Incidentally, thanks to Michael Burstein for mentioning the anthology in his  recent Livejournal entry– and thus leading me to find this sneak peak of the art on the Apex blog.

"Waiting for Jakie" included in new anthology

I’ve just found out that my story “Waiting for Jakie,” which appeared in the April issue of Apex Magazine, will also be part of the anthology Descended From Darkness: Apex Magazine Vol. 1. According to the Web site, the book is scheduled for an early December release. I’m really pleased — especially since I’ll be keeping company with so many great writers.

Here’s the Table of Contents:

“Hideki and the Gnomes” – Mark Lee Pearson

“Clockwork, Patchwork and Ravens” – Peter M. Ball

“Waiting for Jakie” – Barbara Krasnoff

“The Last Science Fiction Writer” – Jamie Todd Rubin

“The Mind of a Pig” – Ekaterina Sedia

“The Puma” – Theodora Goss

“Dark Planet” -Lavie Tidhar

“Cai and Her Ten Thousand Husbands” – Gord Sellar

“On the Shadow Side of the Beast” – Ruth Nestvold

“Starter House” – Jason Palmer

“A Night at the Empire” – Joy Marchand

“Organ Nell” – Jennifer Pelland

“PLEBISCITE AV3X” – Jason Fischer

“Shaded Streams Run Clearest” – Geoffrey W. Cole

“A Splash of Color” – William T. Vandemark

“Behold: Skowt!” – Jason Heller

“Blakenjel” – Lavie Tidhar

“I Know an Old Lady” – Nathan Rosen

“The Limb Knitter” – Steven Francis Murphy

“Scenting the Dark” – Mary Robinette Kowal

“The Nature of Blood” – George Mann

“In the Seams” – Andrew C. Porter

“These Days” – Katherine Sparrow

“Post Apocalypse” – James Walton Langolf