wet asphalt

Forgive me if the site is slow for a little while (barring whatever JF Quackenbush or EL Borgnine might have cooking up in their demented brains). I'm finishing a novel.

But there will be another installment of the History of Popular Fiction on the pulp era in the near future! Oh, yes.

So the Wold Newton Reading Extravaganza recently inaugurated its new website which has video from the last reading by Brian Francis Slattery and Charles Yu as well as various bonus materials and awesomeness. This weekend will be another great event featuring Cat Valente reading from her book about Prester John, The Habitation of the Blessed, along with belly dancing and burlesque! All for free, at WORD bookstore in Greenpoint. See the website linked to above for more info.

Meanwhile, Wet Asphalt will probably continue to be light until the end of the month when I might have time to breath again. Stay tuned every body!

Posting may be a little light over the next couple weeks, as I'm busy as hell, even though I have plenty I want to write about. I'll post when I can, as will, I'm sure, JF Quackenbush when he's not busy doing little things like working on his law degree...

My article on Robin Sloan has been reprinted (with permission) by the kind folks at io9, Gawker Media's Science Fiction blog.

Many of you have wondered, is JF Quackenbush just the name that Eric uses when he wants to say something vitriolic and swear at people a lot? I mean, Jason Finkas Quackenbush? That name has to be fake. I'm here to tell you yes, it is fake. It's time to stop pretending.

I first came up with the Quackenbush alter ego during my time at the Berklee School of Music in Boston. I was a lonely college student and it was late at night in the TV lounge at the dorm that I started pretending that there was someone there with me, laughing at episodes of The Adventures of Sinbad, the greatest television show in history. Soon I was trying to form a band, but no one wanted to play with me, so I pretended I was in a band with Quackenbush, who would, in my deranged imagination, wear a silly costume and call himself "Reverend Chaos". It was a heady time.

Later when I put together the web zine YankTheChain, I needed it to seem like it was more than just me, and so Quackenbush became a writer, going on insanely about talking to the ghost of Richard Nixon and hanging out with Jennifer Love Hewitt and pining away publicly for a girl at Berklee who was really also me, but in a dress. Quackenbush became a tool with which I could call myself the names I secretly felt I deserved, and delineate exactly who needed to be Neutered, Shot or Both. It was a heady time.

Finally, though, I feel as though I must cast off these trappings of my young adulthood, and stop pretending. I am JF Quackenbush, and always have been, and all indications to the contrary are so much subterfuge, for I am that clever.

Also, I am secretly Edward Champion. But you probably already knew that.

There's going to be a slow down of posting here this month as I focus on writing as well as the ordinary distractions of the holidays. There may be one or two posts, here and on the writing blog and I may finally get the Michael Moorcock interview up before the end of the year. Keep your feed-readers peeled.

If anyone's wondering why JF hasn't posted here in a while...

To make sure everyone's on the same page:

All clear?

I'm both sad and somewhat relieved to say that Wet Asphalt is no longer a literary magazine published like a blog, or a literary blogazine. That idea was a good one, even an excellent one, but without much more time and money than I have at my disposal it was never able to be what what we wanted it to be. With my compatriot Quackenbush's contributions dwindling to nil and submissions at barely a trickle, the site increasingly became my own personal blog, which was unfortunate because I already had a personal blog. To complicate things, I increasingly have more and more venues to place reviews and literary essays (ironically, thanks mostly to this site), which has made it harder to decide what I should publish here and what I should save for other places. Also other projects, not to mention my various day-job commitments, continue to take up my time.

The conclusion I ultimately came to was that it only made sense to consolidate my efforts. Wet Asphalt is now my personal blog in name as well as practice. JF Quackenbush is welcome to use it as his personal blog as well. It will still have the kind of link lists and commentary it's had for the last few months, but it will also have personal musings and non-literary content previously reserved for EricRosenfield.com. It will no longer have my essays and reviews (except for very short form and/or personal rambling sorts of reviews), though if possible I will link to where those have been published on other sites. The result will be that this site will be updated much more frequently.

EricRosenfield.com will turn into a portal, with recent Wet Asphalt and Literate Machine posts, my Del.icio.us tags, and so on.

My Live Journal will go dark. I wasn't using it much anyway.

Wet Asphalt is dead. Long live Wet Asphalt.