Thank you, ktempest, for your wonderful post about the Auction:
The Interfictions Auctions Ends Today, Help us Raise $400 More Dollars

It's a short story all in itself! Or is it a memoir? Or . . . interstitial?

Our pal, new media guru & fabulous guy Henry Jenkins, was kind enough to write an introduction, On the Pleasures of Not Belonging, to Interfictions 2 - and to allow us to post the entire intro on the IAF website. I thought I'd clip & post a brief selection to entice you to read the whole thing:

Over the course of the 20th century, however, genre categories have become ever more specialized as media industries refine techniques for monitoring and targeting particular clusters of consumers . . . . And where the market doesn't impose such specifications, we add them ourselves. Catherine Tosenberger has argued that the best fan fiction is "unpublishable" in the sense that it operates across the genre categories, aesthetic norms, and ideological constraints that shape commercial publishing. Fans self-publish in order to step outside those filters. Yet, the fan community also imposes its own categories, which help readers find the "right story" through author's notes that tell us, for example, which "ships" (relationships between specified pairs of characters) are being explored, offer a rough sense of their sexual explicitness or emotional tone, warn us about vexing themes, and so forth. . . . All of this focus on using genres to classify and shelve works assumes that we know where one genre ends and another begins and that genre works stay where we put them. Genres may be optical illusions, which come and go like mirages, depending on the ways we look at the texts in question.

* * *
You can read Jenkins' entire essay, and comment here.

And once you've done that, I hope you'll want to read Interfictions 2 in print or as an ebook. And don't forget the Auction!

The Interstitial Arts Foundation's Shameless Commerce Division (well, OK, it all goes to support a non-profit dedicated to tearing down genre boundaries, but I couldn't resist), headed by Auction Guru ktempest Bradford, is making an offer you'd be mad to refuse:

1. Browse the images of art and jewelry we’re auctioning off and pick 1 – 3 favorites. Then share these favorites on your blog or social network of your choice. Tell your friends and family why you chose the pieces. Don’t forget to include a link back to IAFAuctions.com.

2. To enter, post one comment in the AUCTION'S POST HERE (not my LJ post) for each of the places you mentioned your favorite pieces.

3. Recipients of the free books must promise to review them (honestly & without bias) on their blogs/websites.

For more details, links & instructions: Read the Fine Print in this Auction post - and while you're in there, check out all the amazing pieces coming in every day!

As you may know, I'm a co-founder, currently serving as President, of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to the support, and promotion of interstitial art: literature, music, visual and performance art found in between categories and genres – art that crosses borders.

We have just published our second anthology of original writing, Interfictions 2, edited by Delia Sherman (deliasherman) & Christopher Barzak, and we're celebrating with a multi-city chain of readings, signings, and musical collaborations.

TOMORROW (Friday) night we kick off the East Coast jam! I hope you can join me there: ( NEW YORK CITY )

This is Brian's baby: He enthralled KGB audience a few months back with a a words/music mix, and I can't wait to see what he does with the potent combo of all those Interfictions writers + his band. Here's a sample of some of Brian & band's past improv readings.

It really is art without borders.

Not in NYC? No fretting: Brian & a bunch of writers & musician pals are doing another show in Boston next Friday, Nov. 13th at Lily Pad in Cambridge!

Each week they put a new story up on the Interfictions Annex. And each week I think, Aha, this one's my favorite!

Ron Pasquariello's "The Chipper Dialogues" is so short that if I quote you all my favorite passages, I'll have almost the whole thing up here! Suffice it to say that it's a conversation, in haiku, between a man & his beloved dog. Samples:

A human in a rush.
Dog, a leash, a row of trees.
Hurry @#$%& dog.

Morning ritual –
A tree sniffed. A leg lifted.
Thus, each tree I bless.

or

To take cares away,
The prescription: Hold cute dog.
Rub belly, throw kiss.

Lo, a prescription
Take two biscuits. Feed to dog.
Call him in the morning.

If you like the story, please help spread the word about the Annex! You can also leave a comment on the IAF Blog here.

I just made my (tax-deductible) contribution to Interfictions 2, the forthcoming original anthology from the IAF. They offered a space to make your donation "in honor of" or "in memory of," and I decided to make mine in honor of Terri Windling, for her great editorial & visionary contributions to interstitial fiction over the years - especially with her 16 years of co-editing THE YEAR'S BEST FANTASY IN HORROR. In those collections, she constantly made bold choices that were not standard genre fare. She opened us all up to a wide range of styles and visions, international & sometimes radical: Kelly Link, Pagan Kennedy, Osamu Dasai, Rosario Ferré . . . .. She took a flack for it in some quarters, too. "This stuff isn't fantasy!" critics objected. It sure wasn't commercial genre fantasy. But it was fantastical, and fantastic. And an entire generation of writers grew up reading it, and being told that it was all right to stretch the boundaries of genre until it became something new.

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Donations of $200+ will be guaranteed a space on the printed Donors Page in the actual book, if we receive them by tomorrow. (Don't be thrown by the text on the donations form saying it has to be $375; that just needs updating!) Donations of any size, at any time from now through November, will be listed on our online Thank You page, along with a link to your preferred website.

You can make your own contribution here. Dedicate it to someone who's made a difference to you.

Bet you never thought you'd hear that, did you?

But the Interstitial Arts Foundation is trying to diagnose a problem we're having with donations on Click & Pledge. As you probably know, we're running a big "Crowdfund" drive to fund our next anthology, Interfictions 2. A fabulous person in Australia has been unable to make her donation online at C&P, and we think it might be the slowness of her connection: "the hang comes at the point where credit card data would be processed through a high-bit security filter."

Our trouble-shooter suggests we attempt to replicate the experiment, and asks: Do we know of anyone else with a reeeeaaallly sllllooooww connection who would try a small donation as a backup test?

While I hate to wish a bad connection on anyone, in this case I'm hoping one of you might fit the bill & be willing to give it a whirl. CLICK HERE TO HELP SPONSOR INTERFICTIONS2

And this is clearly a good time to remind you that donors of $375 or more sent by June 30 will have their names printed on the Sponsors page of the actual book! (After that, we'll try, but depends on the printer's schedule.) REally, though, any donation, large or small, is tremendously important to us. A few tax-deductible $$ thrown our way goes a long way to support interstitial fiction!

(Yes, we have access to PayPal, but for reasons I try not to understand, we prefer not to use it.)</end>

Indie SF/F/Horror publisher Night Shade Books is having their annual 50% off sale on all current & forthcoming books(4 book min) thru June 17. Coupon code 50NSB2009. Check out their catalogue - great stuff by hot authors.

New to all this? Or not so new? How about people recc. their favorite Night Shade books in the comments?

This is where I put in a plug for forthcoming anthology Eclipse 3, to which I just sold a new story, "Dulce Domum." Editor Jonathan Strahan asked me for a story about a year ago, and really encouraged me to finish something I'd had in the works for some time. I'm really proud to be in the distinguished Eclipse series; volumes 1 & 2 have includeded award nominated stories, with work by Ted Chiang, Jeffrey Ford, Nancy Kress, Margo Lanagan, Peter S. Beagle, Andy Duncan, Garth Nix, Maureen McHugh, Ysabeau Wilce, Ellen Klages, Lucius Shepard, et al . . . . a host of writers I admire. The stories are pretty interstitial - mine sure is.

Eclipse 3 is coming out in October 2009 - just in time for pre-ordering now! Here's some of the first page of the story, if you want to get a feel for it. It's the story I read most of at the Wiscon reading:

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