Our celebrity sightings have definitely tailed off since we moved to Chicago, but Laura and one of her colleagues had a good one the other day. At the same hot dog joint where they were grabbing lunch, they spotted Dennis DeYoung of Styx.

(I'd suggest that he had too much time on his hands, but Tommy Shaw took the lead vocal on that track.)

On our upcoming Egyptian vacation, we take an overnight train to Aswan. We splurged on a sleeper car, because how cool is it to ride a sleeper car in North Africa? And we plan to join the Eight Feet High Club.

There's no way on earth that I'm the world's biggest Steely Dan fan, but I like to think I'm up there in the top thousand. This may explain why I'm so stoked that, after 2006's Morph the Cat from Donald Fagen, we're about to get Circus Money from Walter Becker!



Check out the first single, "Somebody's Saturday Night", streamed from Rolling Stone:



We'll be seeing Becker and Fagen together this July at the Chicago Theater....

Epidode #53 of "ShunnCast" is now available, in which Bill combs through the dusty vaults of his cassette collection to unearth a musical gem from his missionary days that might more profitably have remained buried—"The Wenatchee Rap" by No Parking Zone.

http://www.shunn.net/podcast?id=53

See also shunncast.

Longtime readers may recall me railing against James Frey and the phenomenon of the invented memoir a couple of years ago. Rather than chilling the memoir marketplace, though, Frey was merely in the vanguard of a veritable explosion of exposed frauds that now includes such "memoirists" as Margaret B. Jones and Misha Defonseca.

The topic of these overly embroidered tales is much on my mind as, again, my memoir makes its way back into the marketplace. I feared two years ago that Frey's escapade would make a memoir more difficult to sell. Now I fear that he didn't make it difficult enough.

Nearly two months ago, Scott Simon on NPR's Weekend Edition delivered an editorial that made me stand up and pump my fist in the air. He made the interesting argument that the phony memoirist cheats in two ways: first, by weaving of his life an epic that never was; and second, by scanting the literary rigor a novel would have demanded. Listen here:

Writing and Truth in Fact and Fiction
by Scott Simon

Speaking as someone who has labored for nearly ten years to produce a book that will hold up on both counts and provoke more than skepticism and cynicism, I can only add my fervent amen.

Laura and I had a memorable weekend in Austin, Texas. We were there, of course, for the Nebula Awards Weekend, but we spent Friday evening out with local friends—expatriate New Yorkers and repatriated Texans. This was a very good thing, we later decided, since Laura was forced to deal with a terrible work crisis almost as soon as we reached our hotel and the evening out with close and sympathetic friends served as a better tonic for that than would brooding at home or making small talk with strangers.

Saturday morning we dragged our hangovers out for breakfast with our friends up from Houston. We arrived back at the Omni Austin around noon—just in time to spy Geoff Landis at the breakfast bar in the restaurant, rush up to say hello, and stumble into the middle of the Dell Magazines awards ceremony that was just getting underway. Sheila Williams was very mostly almost patient with us as she invited us to sit down right now so they could start handing out certificates. Sorry, Sheila! Sorry, Stan! Hi, Trevor!

While Laura hoofed it in search of a pedicure, I lingered to chat with Geoff, maryturzillo, Connie Willis, Nancy Kress, and Jack Skillingstead about politics and other ephemera. Next was the SFWA Business Meeting, after which I enjoyed an afternoon snackie in the bar with paulmelko, scottedelman, and Mike Marano. I spied Toby Buckell across the bar, and though he was suffering from something nasty, I managed to get close enough to him to have a long conversation about writing.

We sat with Geoff and Mary and Paul and Scott at the banquet and awards ceremony—an occasion, I agreed with Mary, which is always more enjoyable when one is not nominated. Mary was, and, sadly, did not take home the Lucite in the short story category. Michael Chabon did win, however, for his wonderful novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union, making 2008 one of the years when SFWA most certainly got it right. His acceptance speech was charming and heartfelt; he admitted that he'd started wanting a Nebula at the age of 15, and he thanked his editors for not catching on to the fact that his novel was really (if I can recall his phrasing correctly) "at its counterfactual heart a work of science fiction."

The mighty Michael Moorcock was awarded SFWA's Damon Knight Grandmaster Award, making him the 25th Grandmaster of science fiction. His acceptance speech was a dizzying tour through the multiverse of New Wave SF personalities, and made me acutely aware of my shameful failure ever to have read any Moorcock beyond Behold the Man. He was a hero to the gang I ran with in high school, so I have no excuse really, except to say that Asimov was my personal literary hero back then. But now I gotta get me some Elric and some Jerry Cornelius and so forth. That's a huge hole in my education, as shocking as the fact that I never read Heinlein until adulthood.

In the hospitality suite after the ceremony, I wanted to meet Michael Chabon but was too nervous to approach him. He's one of my two living literary idols (the other being, for different reasons, Stephen King), and I can get tongue-tied around friends I know well, let alone people whose talents awe me. Paul Melko and Laura kept pushing me, like cronies at a junior-high dance urging me to ask someone to dance. In the end, Melko seized me by the arm, dragged me over to Chabon, stuck his hand out, congratulated him, and said, "And I'd like you to meet Bill Shunn."

If there was ever a writer who stood to ruin his career by declaring his love of genre fiction and not simply defending but championing it, it's Michael Chabon. Even when the bulk of his output was squarely mainstream, he hadn't lost sight of the notion that reading should be a massively entertaining proposition. On top of this, he comes across as a genuine, and genuinely nice, guy, charming in an unpretentious, gosh-wow sort of way. When he shook my hand and tried to convince me that we had met before, I almost believed him. I wanted it to be true, in fact. The highlight of a marvelous, Texas-sized weekend.

Back to Chicago early Sunday morning. Now regrouping for a quick business trip to New York later this week, and a two-week excursion to Malta, Egypt, and Jordan later next month.

---

See all my Nebula Awards Weekend photos here.

196 and still falling. I might have fallen further were it not for a weekend in Texas. Not that I regret it in any way.

This just in. New agent loves new draft of Accidental Terrorist. "I've just read the additions/revisions and I have to admit I am elated.... [Y]ou've completely rounded out the long, strange adventure and added a whole new depth to the tale."

This puppy's on its way to editors again. Thank fucking Elohim.

For those of you who were chiming in the other day about the new waterbirds that have recently appeared on the lagoon at our local park, Ella and I took some pictures yesterday. The photos aren't great, but can you identify this bird?

My virtual contribution to April's CD Mix of the Month club was Out in the Streets.

(The story so far.)

So, the company my wife works for has been redoing their web site—transparently, exposing the whole process. Every week they post updates about the project, and this week's offering is...

Engaging Imagination, with Laura Chavoen, Senior Vice President, Digital Media

Epidode #52 of "ShunnCast" is now available, in which Bill reads a restored and revised chapter from the brand-new draft of his memoir The Accidental Terrorist.

http://www.shunn.net/podcast?id=52

See also shunncast.

Walking the dog in the park this morning, we heard a woodpecker in the distance. We followed the sound into a grove where Laura spotted the little thing drilling away about fifteen feet the trunk of tall tree. We watched in amazement for several minutes.

There are new birds on the lagoon as well, swimming with the mallards and the Canada goose. I've been trying to identify them in waterfowl galleries on line, but with no success so far. They look like ducks but are about half the size of mallards. The bodies seem to be all black, the head is smaller and the neck shorter relative to the body, and the bill looks bright white.

The red-wing blackbirds have been ubiquitous for the past few weeks, but we didn't see very many of them this morning. Migrating away?

199. I'm just sayin'.

In other braggable news, my personal trainer insisted I brag to someone that I did 27 tricep pushups on my toes in tonight's session. Not all at once, though. In my first set, I did 12 on my toes and 13 on my knees. In my second set, I did 15 on my toes and 10 on my knees. This was between bouts punching and kicking the water bag and doing different sorts of crunches.

I've mentioned before that Laura and I are seeing a personal trainer to combat what I call "Chicago spread." Since starting about two months ago, I've gone from 217.5 lbs to 201.5. My all-time high two years ago, immediately after returning from Blue Heaven 2006, was 231.5. I am 2.5 lbs away from getting back to where I was on my wedding day, and I plan to keep going down from there. So expect more shouting when I'm down under 199.

And now I'm very self-conscious about talking about my workouts, so I'll stop.

I have finished the new draft of The Accidental Terrorist and sent it off to my new agent for comments.

We're on our way to New York! Well, I'm waiting in line for a shoeshine at O'Hare, but excitedly. We bought lunch anonymously for three soldiers a little while ago in a concourse restaurant. Going home makes us feel happy.

Laura and I are notorious—well, at least at our house, where everything we do is notorious—for procrastinating when there are things we need to have framed. That's why it's a miracle that, a mere month after their purchase, we've taken the prints of our photographs from Bill Wadman's 365 Portraits project [Laura] [Bill] to the framing shop. [Hi, Ken!] [Hi, Derryl!]

Wednesday evening I picked Laura up from work IN OUR NEW USED CAR and we headed north to visit the big famous framing guys. Turns out their master framer is such a master that he only works from about 10:00 to 4:30, which meant we were never going to get there when Laura could come along. So from the recesses of her brain, Laura dredged up a memory of a little art gallery/framing shop near the parking lot where we used to pick up our Zipcar. It was closing in on 8:00 pm by the time we pulled up, and though it was well past the posted hours the front door was open and the proprietor was inside painting. She welcomed us, presented us with some very interesting and attractive options for frames and mattes, and presented us with a total that was less than we'd expected. Altogether a delightful experience.

So then I whipped out the other item of mine that needed framing: a limited edition lithograph (number 1 of 50, in fact!) of a Kenn Brown work that was an incredibly generous gift from the artist himself. (The website for Mondolithic Studios, Kenn's venture with partner Chris Wren, is under construction just now, but you've definitely seen their work.) I'm embarrassed to say that it had taken me nearly four years to get the thing framed, but it's going to look unbelievably cool, and I couldn't be happier.

I keep forgetting to post that my virtual contribution to March's CD Mix of the Month club was Life Is Good, an affirmation tinged with darkness.

(The story so far.)