My Top 10 List of Top 10 Lists for 2010

How meta, right? Yeah, deal with it.

10. Top 10 Classic Topless Scenes

This one is pretty self explanatory.

B(.)(.)BS.

9. Top 10 Zombie Killing Badasses

Because it’s important to rank zombie killing badasses.

8. Top 10 Reasons I Hate Year-End Top-10 Lists

Ranking things in order of how much you like them is a coping strategy of 9-year-old girls.

7. Nate Southard's Top 10 Reads of 2010

Zeltserman appeared in an issue of Needle and his book, The Caretaker of Lorne Field, makes my heart go all aflutter. I guess the other books he mentioned are pretty awesome, too.

6. The Top Ten Pictures of Christina Hendricks (Plus Five Bonus Pics!)

Lasers. Diamond bits. Frog hairs. There’s nothing finer in this whole wide world than Christina Hendricks.

5. Joe Howe's DEAD IN THE SOUTH Top 10 Halloween Movies

Any list with John Carpenter’s The Thing at the numero uno spot is aces in my book. Plus, Joe's blog is a great one to follow. He watches a lot of crappy horror movies so you don't have to.

4. Chris F. Holm's Top 10 Pimpages of 2010 at DEATH BY KILLING

Ok, so it's not EXACTLY a top 10. Who gives a crap? You?

Consistency. Hobgoblins. Little minds.

Lots of well deserved Needle love. And my boyee Steve Weddle up in the mickey-frickey hizzouse.

3. Jed Ayres Top 10 Piece of Awesomness at Crimefactory's DAY LABOR

Jed’s a big, lumbering galoot. But he knows his shit. And he knows a lot about books, too.

2. DOC HORROR'S Top 10 List Blogicide Note

Okay, so it’s not a top 10 list. So sue me. But look who got a frickin’ shout out! Me, biznatches. (I have no idea why I’m typing that Snoop Dog influenced stuff. Oh, wait. Because it’s the shizzle.)

Go give The Doctor some love. Read his blog. It's a great review site and he's one of the few reviewers out there with the balls to give a negative one (just be sweet to me forever, okay?).

1. Steve Weddle's list at Crimefactory's DAY LABOR!

And BAM! More about my favorite subject.

“This is JHJ’s zombie/post-apocalypse novel, and it’s full of brilliance. The plotting, the character development, the sorrow, the fear. This is one of those novels I read that I find myself thinking of months later, for no reason at all. JHJ’s novel Southern Gods is coming out next year from Night Shade Press, and I’m sure I’ll love that one as much, though it doesn’t seem possible. What scares me about the publishing industry is that no one has picked up This Dark Earth. I mean, it doesn’t scare me as much as the book did, but still.”

LITTLE BROTHER and Cory Doctorow on Giving Away Ebooks

Cory Doctorow is giving away his incredible YA novel LITTLE BROTHER. In a world dominated by Big Brother, it's the Little Brother's job to irritate, foil, and obfuscate.

And he's giving it away for free. You can get it here.

But more than that, I'm very impressed by his reasoning behind giving it away. As an author, it's quite thought provoking.

He says in the introduction:

Universal access to human knowledge is in our grasp, for the first time in the history of the world. This is not a bad thing. In case that's not enough for you, here's my pitch on why giving away ebooks makes sense at this time and place:

Giving away ebooks gives me artistic, moral and commercial satisfaction. The commercial question is the one that comes up most often: how can you give away free ebooks and still make money?

For me for pretty much every writer the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity (thanks to Tim O'Reilly for this great aphorism). Of all the people who failed to buy this book today, the majority did so because they never heard of it, not because someone gave them a free copy. Megahit bestsellers in science fiction sell half a million copies in a world where 175,000 attend the San Diego Comic Con alone, you've got to figure that most of the people who "like science fiction" (and related geeky stuff like comics, games, Linux, and so on) just don't really buy books. I'm more interested in getting more of that wider audience into the tent than making sure that everyone who's in the tent bought a ticket to be there.

Ebooks are verbs, not nouns. You copy them, it's in their nature. And many of those copies have a destination, a person they're intended for, a handwrought transfer from one person to another, embodying a personal recommendation between two people who trust each other enough to share bits. That's the kind of thing that authors (should) dream of, the proverbial sealing of the deal. By making my books available for free passalong, I make it easy for people who love them to help other people love them.

What's more, I don't see ebooks as a substitute for paper books for most people. It's not that the screens aren't good enough, either: if you're anything like me, you already spend every hour you can get in front of the screen, reading text. But the more computerliterate you are, the less likely you are to be reading longform works on those screens that's because computerliterate people do more things with their computers. We run IM and email and we use the browser in a million diverse ways. We have games running in the background, and endless opportunities to tinker with our music libraries. The more you do with your computer, the more likely it is that you'll be interrupted after five to seven minutes to do something else. That makes the computer extremely poorly suited to reading longform works off of, unless you have the iron selfdiscipline of a monk.

The good news (for writers) is that this means that ebooks on computers are more likely to be an enticement to buy the printed book (which is, after all, cheap, easily had, and easy to use) than a substitute for it. You can probably read just enough of the book off the screen to realize you want to be reading it on paper. So ebooks sell print books. Every writer I've heard of who's tried giving away ebooks to promote paper books has come back to do it again. That's the commercial case for doing free ebooks.

Mullholland Books features Needle Story

Over at Mullholland Books - the crime imprint of Little Brown - they're featuring a story from the Needle 2010 Winter Issue. It's "Truegood" by Sophie Littlefield.

She's a great writer, they're a great house, and we're a great mag. Go spend money on all of us.

Check it out here.

Weddle at Day Labor

So, Steve Weddle is my boy. He's a great friend and partner (in Needle) and he's said some nice stuff about THIS DARK EARTH, my unpublished post-apocalyptic zombie novel (but character driven!) at Crimefactory's blog, Day Labor.

Check it out here.

Getcha Some NEEDLE

Our best issue yet, featuring part 1 of Ray Banks' novel, WOLF TICKETS. Get it here, hot off the presses. Choose GROUND SHIPPING and code HOLIDAY305 for FREE GROUND SHIPPING. That's $7.50 for 200+ pages of great crime with free shipping. Jesus, if you don't buy this, you're a total asshole.

Huge kudos to Steve Weddle, our fearless leader, the awesome Dan O'Shea, Naomi Johnson, and the inimitable Stephen Blackmoore, without whom, NEEDLE would never see the light of day.

New fiction by Graham Powell, Matthew C. Funk, Sophie Littlefield, Graham Bowlin, Michael Gonzales, Kieran Shea, Richard Godwin, Anthony Neil Smith, Matthew Mayo, Matthew McBride, and Libby Cudmore. And featuring PART ONE of the new novel by Ray Banks -- WOLF TICKETS.

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

Went to a reading of Tom Franklin's CROOKED LETTER, CROOKED LETTER last weekend in Fayetteville. Great reading hosted by the nice folks at Nightbird Books. I've been reading Tom's POACHERS and HELL AT THE BREECH. He's gonna be a writer to be reckoned with, I'm thinking.

Ended up at a faculty member's house with wood paneling and a well stocked bar. This is what happened.

The squatty guys are the big named authors, Scott Phillips and Tom Franklin. The tall one is the dashing Jedidiah Ayres (he doesn't know who you are either), and the gorgeous cornfed one is moi.