Fifty years ago, Ernest Hemingway paid his last visit to Pamplona. This year's fiestas include a tribute: photography exhibit and the 1st International Ernest Hemingway Doubles and Impersonators Contest. The winner was Tom Grizzard, who is also the 2008 winner of the Hemingway Lookalike Contest held at Sloppy Joe's Bar in Key West, Florida. He was ecstatic.

More about the tribute here:
http://www.turismo.navarra.es/eng/propuestas/san-fermines/desarrollo/hemingway.htm

And the winner:
http://www.sanfermin.com/index.php/es/actualidad/noticias/tom-grizzard-ganador-concurso-parecidos-hemigway

Hemingway used to stay at the five-star La Perla Hotel in Pamplona in a room with a balcony that overlooked the running of the bulls. These days, the room is available during the fiestas for €1,600 per night, or about US$2,200.

His articles as a reporter and most of all his novel The Sun Also Rises made the running of the bulls famous worldwide, and Pamplona now considers itself "one of the most universal festivals." The city is pleased to host international visitors (and I suppose space aliens from across the universe if they decide to attend).

But when he came the first time in 1923, he and his wife were the only English-speakers in town. He wrote about courage in this excerpt from his 1923 article for the Toronto Star Weekly on the bulls of Pamplona.

"... And if you want to keep any conception of yourself as a brave, hard, perfectly balanced, thoroughly competent man in your wife's mind never take her to a real bull fight. I used to go into the amateur fights in the morning to try to win back a small amount of her esteem but the more I discovered that bull fighting required a very great quantity of a certain type of courage of which I had an almost complete lack the more it became apparent that any admiration she might ever develop for me would have to be simply an antidote to the real admiration for [bullfighting stars] Maera and Villalta. You cannot compete with bull fighters on their own ground. If anywhere. The only way most husbands are able to keep any drag with their wives at all is that, first there are only a limited number of bull fighters, second there are only a limited number of wives who have ever seen bull fights...."

Breaking news!

I’ll be in Orlando at the International Orlando Puppet Festival, curated by Heather Henson on July 25th.  I’m performing in Tiger Tales by Chinese Theatre Works.

The whole festival looks amazing and I’m sorry to be there for only one weekend.

Comments? -- Link.

Locus magazine is reporting the very sad news that Charles Brown has passed away.  He was a major force in the industry and will be missed.

Locus publisher, editor, and co-founder Charles N. Brown, 72, died peacefully in his sleep July 12, 2009 on his way home from Readercon.

Charles Nikki Brown was born June 24, 1937 in Brooklyn NY, where he grew up. He attended the City College of New York, taking time off from 1956-59 to serve in the US Navy, and finished his degree (BS in physics and engineering) at night on the GI Bill while working as a junior engineer in the ’60s. He married twice, to Marsha Elkin (1962-69), who helped him start Locus, and to Dena Benatan (1970-77), who co-edited Locus for many years while he worked full time. He moved to San Francisco in 1972, working as a nuclear engineer until becoming a full-time SF editor in 1975. The Locus offices have been in Brown’s home in the Oakland hills since 1973.

Mirrored from SFWA | Comment

I know this idea will come as an anathema for many people, but as Rob and I get ready to move, I’m getting rid of most of my fiction.

Let me rephrase that. I’m getting rid of the book forms of most of my fiction. I realized that I moved books out here that I haven’t read since before I moved them to Portland, OR back in 1993 and that some of them probably haven’t been opened since before that.

Don’t get me wrong, these are all books that I loved, but do I need to own them still when I don’t read them? I’m using a barcode scanner and saving a list of them on LibraryThing, so if I ever miss one I can remember that I owned it and then buy a new copy, although that new copy will likely be electronic.

The ones that I’m keeping are the ones where the physical artifact has meaning. The complete collection of Narnia that my grandmother gave me? Stays.  The copy of Small Gods, which was the first book I read aloud to Rob? Likewise, that’s a keeper.

I’ve sort of been doing this for awhile with new books. I finish reading them, then mail them to my niece or nephew.*  But all the older books? Iif I haven’t opened it since I moved here, I’m shedding it and not because I don’t love them.

My question is, since I want them to go to a good home, how should I go about it?

*By the way, if you see one of your books on the list, please don’t be offended.

Comments? -- Link.

I got sort of crazy amounts of writing done over the weekend, considering that I was at a con.  Chapter 1 had given me fits, because I had some historical figures on stage.  I’d hit a roadblock because I felt like I hadn’t done enough research, so I went off, did that and came back.

But! I was still stuck.  I looked at the scene again.  The historical figures weren’t the problem at all! It was just dull. I backed up and asked myself the usual helpful question, “What does Jane want?” and then thought about ways to deny her that.  Things went much better after that.

In fact, I’ve been writing almost a chapter a day.

Here’s a snippet from the beginning of Chapter 2 of Glamour in Glass.

Jane’s discomfiture was not due to any unkindness on the part of Lord Lumley, on the contrary, it was his very solicitousness that caused her some tiny distress. He was everything that is agreeable in a dinner conversationalist, witty without being cruel, knowledgeable without being showy, and gracious in when to listen.

Comments? -- Link.