1) Dance craze outlawed because it caused “broken penises.”
2) John Scalzi rants lightly about fan “ownership” of public figures.
3) Russia accuses Poland of starting WW2. How dare Poland stand up for itself! They deserved to be attacked for not acquiescing immediately! Note the last paragraph in the article about pending legislation which would make it a crime to state that the Soviet Union occupied Poland or any other Baltic state, punishable by five years in prison.
Russia=still fucked up.
4) I’ve been invited to be on a panel at Comic-Con! More details when everything gets firmed up. In the meantime, let me share the advice my editor gave me: “Be amusing, dammit.”
:-)
5) “But watching conservatives mock liberals for being PC, is like watching the morbidly obese mock Weight Watchers for its system of points.” — Ta-Nehisi Coates (I suggest reading the whole thing, including the author’s replies to comments in the thread below).
6) Oh, God. As much as I’d love to see it revived, I’m not sure I can get behind this project. I mentioned last year that the gift I bought myself when I cashed my first check from Random House were the books I needed to complete my set of Chill, first ed. But they’ve been talking about this third edition for years, and I’m not ready to blithely accept that it’s the economy that delays the game. And $25K??? I dunno. I suspect I’ll pledge my forty-five bucks, but I don’t have a lot of hope.
7) And now, to bury the lede, Child of Fire has been accepted into the Amazon Vine program. Essentially, Del Rey will send 50-75 ARCs of the novel to Amazon.com, who will distribute them to reviewers with a lot of reviews and high rankings. They get to read the book early and their reviews will appear on the Amazon.com site two weeks or so before the publication date.
Normally, reviews can’t be posted until the book drops, so that’s a good thing. Also, Amazon.com rarely takes mmpb for this program because the profits are small per unit, but a sharp gentleman in the marketing department pitched it to them and they signed on!
So, that’s really good news. :D