Guh.

That's what it sounds like when I try to breathe. As if a strep-like sore throat wasn't enough for the last two weeks (which is gone now, thankfully), I'm now suffering from the worst attack of hay fever in my entire life. It started yesterday around 2 pm at work, where I annoyed my co-workers with a prodigious amount of sneezing, and was so bad this morning that I had to call in sick. And because of the intense sinus pain and stuffiness, I only got about two hours of sleep last night, finally giving up the ghost and getting out of bed at 4:30 this morning. But, I have to say, I'm feeling quite a bit better than earlier, whether it's the cumulative effect of all the over-the-counter drugs I took or the fact that I was finally able to get a few more hours of sleep. I doubt whether I'll go into work, even for a few hours today, but I'm at least in less pain than this morning.

I had a lot of fun at the NC Literary Festival this weekend. I got to see some folks I hadn't seen in a while. One was my friend, Tripp Reade, who just won the Blumenthal Award given out by the North Carolina Writers Network, and did a reading Saturday morning from his first novel, soon to be finished. The others were John Kessel, Richard Butner, and Lewis Shiner, who I only see on the rare occasion of a convention or a reading or something. I was really glad to see Lew Shiner, since he doesn't do cons. I got him to sign my copies of a few of his books, and we chatted a bit, mostly on how almost all of his books, even the ones that came out in the last couple of years, are already out of print. And this really annoys me, because Lew is such a fantastically good writer, and he just can't seem to catch a break from the publishing world.

Which leads me to...

Why you should read Lewis Shiner:

Shiner examines the human condition in the best possible way in his writing: through personal experience. He's gone through a lot in his life: breaking his hand and no longer being able to play the guitar, divorce, uprooting himself from Texas and moving halfway across the country to North Carolina, the death of his father. And like any good writer, he uses these in his fiction, trying to answer the big questions about life by attempting to figure out his own.

Shiner came to prominence in the 80s as a reluctant member of the cyberpunks, which included William Gibson, John Shirley, Bruce Sterling, and Rudy Rucker. But his fiction soon turned toward magical realism, with Deserted Cities of the Heart and Glimpses, then went straight into mainstream with Slam and Say Goodbye. He was soon uncategorizable, which confused the hell out of book stores and his publishers, who like to pigeonhole authors into a certain genre and never let them out. But his fiction keeps getting better and better with each novel and short story.

So read his latest novel, Say Goodbye, a fictional biography of singer/songwriter Laurie Moss. Or read his latest small-press collection, Love in Vain, which contains some of the best short stories I've ever read, in any genre. Or pick up Glimpses or Slam, which were just re-released in trade paperback. Or search through used book stores for Frontera or Deserted Cities of the Heart. You'll be glad you did. Or, as my father would say: try it, you'll like it.