“Yeah, but what’s the point?” – Most common question faced by the guy who first turned a stick into a spear.
Monthly Archives: November 2011
After cleaning up from Hurricane Irene (and doing a little expansion along the way), Vermont’s famous Bartleby’s Books re-opens for Black Friday. A huge win for indie bookselling. And, across the Connecticut River, New Hampshire’s RiverRun rents a new location in the same neighborhood that will save the indie bookstore a remarkable $50k/year!
An intriguing new study on library users shows that (among other things) 50 percent of patrons report buying a book by a writer they first read in a library.
Hey, Nelson, why didn’t you identify today as Thanksgiving? And, what the hell is “Brumalia” anyway?
Well, I have been avoiding the use of moveable holidays to identify the dates in my daily reading. Also, I lament the fact that we have reduced the three-day Thanksgiving feast to a single day (yeah, yeah, I realize that a lot of people take a four-day weekend) so I thought I would honor the 30-day-long Roman feast of Brumalia instead, as a sort of protest against our truncated festivity.
Now, what have I read this morning? Continue reading
I am a writer myself, but I think discussing art with most artists is like discussing the frequency-selective light reflection of microscopic single gyroid structures with butterflies. They have it, but they don’t really understand it.
Of course, the big news in the literary world is the passing of Anne McCaffrey. The best tribute (I have read) to this amazing author is by Juliette Wade, who discusses how McCaffrey brought genre definitions into play with her Dragonriders of Pern series. Also at Wade’s Talk To YoUniverse blog: an excellent piece on how hard choices for your characters require consequences.
Melville House, one of my favorite sources for publishing news, details an intense and disappointing exchange between blogger Jeremy Duns, who outed the plagiarism of Quentin Rowan, and the latest accused plagiarist Lenore Hart. (By the way, considering that her subject is Poe, Lenore Hart must be a pseudonym, yes?)
BEST READ OF THE DAY: Josh Getzler at Hey There’s a Dead Guy gives us a truly remarkable insight into the writing process by showing us how a writer feels when he’s given the opportunity to enjoy his own writing as a reader. There is so much that can be taken from this piece (for writers and readers) that I won’t say more. Go check it out.
My favorite part of fluorescent lighting is that this is a test. Repeat, this is only a test. If it had been an actual emergency, the sound you’re hearing would be followed by news and instructions. This has been a test of the Emergency Broadcast Light Bulb.
This is my impression of 80 percent of what football commentators say [doing a Brian Regan “stupid guy” voice]:
“What make you go forward is good … and what make … what make you go backward, that’s bad.”
I was never that into comic books, but I do remember first reading the word “kismet” in a DC-Marvel crossover story.
Yes, this photo is meant to be self-deprecating. Thank you.
I know you guys (the writers … guys and gals, technically) love yourselves some good query advice. So, here’s something I read at Hey There’s A Dead Guy: Benjamin LeRoy‘s “Three Tips for Querying! (Because everybody loves a list).” And, yeah, we do love a list. Also at Dead Guy is an interesting piece about that unfortunate dust-up over FridayReads.
GalleyCat discusses the movement to create a Literature category at YouTube. I’m all for it! And… as if the Quentin Rowan scandal wasn’t bad enough, Melville House reveals yet another case of blatant plagiarism in publishing. Continue reading
What do people who don’t believe in luck say instead of “wish me luck”?
“Wish me a favorable series of deterministic events that have already been set in motion by causality outside of our awareness!”