Twenty-two years ago, there was Making Book. It was a finalist for the 2005 Hugo Award for Best Nonfiction Book, but lost out to the dead guy. It’s been through three printings and is still available from NESFA Press.

Now:

Making Conversation, selected from TNH’s writing since 1994, will be first available at MidAmericon 2, and afterward from NESFA Press in softcover and e-book form. 222 pages, 59 essays (long and short) about time, space, genre, editing, gardening, saints, libraries, food, democracy, drink, insanity, fear, hamsters, chaos, moderation, palimpsests, fanfic, clichés, books, slush, spelling, scams, sleep, fantasy, policing, infundibula, trolls, writing, knitting, fandom, habaneros, exposition, management, Selectrics, Brooklyn, literary agents, pygmy mammoths, and the true cure for scurvy.

From “Dispatch from Staten Island” (GEnie SFRT, 1 Sep 1994):

“And this is in America, a country in which more than one normal, intelligent adult has had to spend time examining the question of whether, for the last decade and a half, I’ve been faking narcolepsy—including all the high-tech inpatient testing procedures and scary medical bills—in order to be allowed to drive up into the Bronx once a month to purchase my prescription stimulant drugs, instead of buying them from a local street vendor like normal people do.

“I think they should worry instead about how any idiot—me, for example—can walk into Rickel Home Center and buy bags of premixed quick-drying concrete without anyone so much as asking whether I know the difference between cement and Hamburger Helper. Instead, the employees ask whether I know they’re having a special on bricks. This strikes me as gross social irresponsibility. A few hours after you take them, drugs are history, but masonry can be a semi-permanent error.”

Some notices:

“If Teresa writes it, I will read it.”
—Neil Gaiman

“Teresa Nielsen Hayden is a bloody good writer.”
—David Langford

“This is a terrific book. I mean, I had no idea. It is a convulsively funny, shrewd and sharp collection of anecdotes well-told, observations well-observed and jokes hilariously cracked, all the while tracing secret histories of fandom, the ins and outs of being diagnosed narcoleptic at a time when such diagnoses were considered spurious and radical by much of the field, of the gypsy life of a con-running, APA-publishing foremother of the blogging masses whose ‘personal publishing revolution’ has its origins in the dim days of mimeographs and ditto machines.”
—Cory Doctorow, reviewing Making Book in 2002

NESFA Press. ISBN 978-1-61037-320-3. $15.00.

Onward.