Twenty-two years ago, there was Making Book. It was a finalist for the 1995 Hugo Award for Best Nonfiction Book, but lost out to the dead guy. It's been through three printings and is still available from NESFA Press.
Now:
Making Conversation, selected from TNH's writing since 1994, will be first available at MidAmeriCon II, and afterward from NESFA Press in softcover and e-book form. 222 pages, 59 essays (long and short) about time, space, genre, editing, gardening, saints, libraries, food, democracy, drink, insanity, fear, hamsters, chaos, moderation, palimpsests, fanfic, clichés, books, slush, spelling, scams, sleep, fantasy, policing, infundibula, trolls, writing, knitting, fandom, habaneros, exposition, management, Selectrics, Brooklyn, literary agents, pygmy mammoths, and the true cure for scurvy.
Table of Contents
- Dispatch from Staten Island 11
- On Time 13
- Anatomy of a Sale: The Fortunate Fall to Tor Books 14
- Extratextual influences 19
- Brooklyn haiku 23
- Coming up on a year 25
- Time travellers 30
- Cover letters 32
- Lost fandoms 35
- Some Notes Toward Two Analyses of Auctorial Method and Voice 40
- Some of my recent theories 48
- The dubiousness of saints 50
- Burning old libraries 53
- Lamentations 57
- La cuisine de Nouvelle Zion 60
- Varieties of insanity known to affect authors 66
- Introduction to New Magics 69
- Slushkiller 73
- How did this get published? 88
- On the Getting of Agents 93
- Pygmy mammoths! 97
- Chaos is not your friend 100
- The linguistic markers of scams 105
- The culture of motivation 111
- Virtual panel participation 116
- Listening to habaneros 119
- Dinosaurs and sodomy 123
- Remembering Arthur, the Hamster of Consolation 124
- Parsimony and refinement 127
- The life expectancies of books 129
- Remarks on Some Clichés I Have (by Definition) Known Too Well 137
- Fanfic: force of nature 145
- Plants 147
- Back when IBM had balls 149
- BBC hamsters 152
- Prayer in the schools: a modest proposal 159
- A proud and lonely thing 161
- A Spelling Demonology 162
- The Trouble with Sleep 167
- P & T Chat 170
- Madison Boulder 172
- Courting fear 175
- Transnistrian Infundibulator 178
- Joanna Russ 180
- A trollish tale 182
- Knitting an infundibulum 184
- Five maneuvers for turning story into fiction 187
- The Return of the Evil Spelling Test 189
- Fruit Punch Czar 192
- Stack ranking 195
- How the big guys do it 199
- One more thing to sell to tourists 202
- But that would be wrong 203
- Trolls and their toys 1 205
- Brave new digitized world 208
- Civilization 101 210
- What incipient fascism looks like 212
- Addicted to outrage 215
- Scurvy cure 217
- Trolls and their toys 2 220
Publishing information
Original printing, xx copies, $15.00 at MidAmeriCon II, August 2016.