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Child of Fire reviews part 16

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Behind the cut! Continue reading

Randomness for 8/10

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1) Smart phone defeats hedge row maze.

2) Star Wars and Blaxploitation–how perfectly they fit together. The spoof trailer for Blackstar Warrior. Video.

3) How to quit your job. I don’t care if it’s fake. It’s awesome.

4) How to propose to your gamer girlfriend.

5) YA Dealbreakers. I don’t mind bad covers too much if the book comes highly recommended, but I don’t much care about vampires and I absolutely don’t read supernatural stories about rock stars of any kind (this isn’t as big a deal as it used to be).

6) Real life Yakuza review a Yakuza console game. Pretty damn interesting.

Randomness for 8/8

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1) The alphabet, carved on the tips of pencils.

2) Kanye West Tweets combined with New Yorker cartoons. It’s not exactly Nietzsche Family Circus, but, um…

3) I don’t even know what to say about this news story. My initial shock at reading it has lessened as I realize this sort of thing isn’t unusual. It wouldn’t be newsworthy at all if not for the Facebook connection.

4) What a bestseller’s marketing push looks like. Someday, this will be me.

5) Amazing Lego Animation. Not for some technical razzle dazzle, but because it is so simply shot and effective. Video

6) It’s hard to believe this isn’t partly cgi in post, but this is a 3D projection onto a building, and it’s mindblowing. Video.

7) “But now, I have successfully shown that I was the best slave.” A New York high school valedictorian delivers a controversial speech against the public school system in which she excelled.

Mutual Combat

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First, the meathead ordinance has passed. Essentially, this means that officers could ticket people who are shouting, fighting, whatever as they leave a closing bar. This is good news for us, since we live in a very quiet neighborhood that has one bar nearby. People spill out of the bar singing and squabbling way too often. The city could balance their budgets on the backs of these fools.

What really caught my eye about this was this sentence in the article: “Fighting, or ‘mutual combat’ — where two parties punch and kick each other but don’t harm anyone else or cause property damage — isn’t currently against the law.”

To which I say “REALLY?” I have a hard time accepting that. The police wouldn’t arrest two dudes slugging it out in an alley as long as they didn’t break anything else, accidentally punch a bystander, or scream too loud?

Seattle: still hanging on to its frontier heritage.

Randomness for 8/3

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1) Invisibility gets closer to reality.

2) The URL says it all: http://writershouses.com/

3) Thinking of becoming a literary agent?

4) Michelle Sagara on authors meeting readers who have not read the author’s work. I have never worked in a bookstore and have no idea how to rec books, but the rest matches my thoughts very closely.

5) Glory, Glory, Howl-le-lu-ya!. This is hilarious and weird. Do you love Jesus? Well that’s fine. Do you feel moved to do *this* and post it online? Dude. Seriously. via Robin Bailey

6) Don’t be that guy. For anyone who wonders why comics are so ridiculously sexist.

7) The Nietzsche Family Circus

Randomness for 7/31

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1) First Pacey-Con squelched by private police force. SDCC just isn’t like it used to be, man.

2) Autoeroticism in America (in convenient graph form!)

3) Kermit Bale. Yes, poster, you do, in fact, have too much time on your hands.

4) What does Harvard have to teach YOU about vampires in film and literature? Take the online course and find out.

5) Captain Higgins, flatworm of power!

6) Photoshop Time portals. via Kurt Busiek

7) Job prospects for 2011 in the urban fantasy world. Pretty funny, and let’s just pretend she didn’t use the phrase “tramp stamp.”

I try not to duplicate content on my blog and twitter feed

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But I’m making an exception for this:

Tucker Carlson’s conservative news site, The Daily Caller, has been trying to make hay with the Journolist story (refresher for folks who don’t know the story: For a few years there was a private email list for left and center left professors, journalists, policy people, etc to discuss ideas in an informal, off-the-record manner. Recently, many of those emails have been made public, and conservatives have been Breitbarting quotes from them and trying to play it off as a conspiracy of the liberal media. At the forefront of the conspiracy-mongering have been Sarah Palin and The Daily Caller).

It’s driving traffic to TDC, so I guess they’re doing well with it. However, there’s nothing in the world worth the self-humiliation of posting this hilariously stupid editorial about the attractiveness of the Journolist members.

Nevermind the usual juvenile obsession with liberals as filled with resentment and rage. The amount of time the editorialist spends talking about high school cliques is enough to get him laughed off staff of any decent news site. I don’t expect it from The Daily Caller, though.

Here’s a quick tip: Andrew Sullivan doesn’t live in San Francisco. Yes, he’s a gay man, and yes, he’s gotten older over the years, just like all of us. I’m sorry you don’t think he’s sexy any more–I suggest checking out Rentboy.com. I understand you can find some sexy young men on that site. Thanks, though, for mentioning the San Francisco waterfront, though. I wonder where that reference comes from.

Here’s another: being left or center left does not make a person an atheist. Thought you should know.

Last tip, because I don’t know how many more you can absorb: You’re a grown man. For fuck’s sake, get over the high school thing already.

God, it’s a whole new level of “pathetic.”

Randomness for 7/28

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1) Mom creates tableaus to illustrate what she imagines her sleeping baby is dreaming.

2) Via Sherwood Smith: Jane Austen’s Fight Club. (added later: Yeah, this has been going around for the past couple of days, but I’m not going to yank it just in case someone here still hasn’t had a chance to check it out.)

3) Introverts unite! (quietly).

4) Poppy Z. Brite, Tim Wildmon, and The Home Depot. I’m so tempted to send (anonymously) a copy of CoF to the AFA so they can boycott me, too. I could use the publicity.

5) Random House and Andrew Wylie clash over ebook publication.

6) How self-absorbed people behave: political columnist writes open letter to his ex on her wedding day and reacts badly when he’s criticized for it.

7) And we mourn the end of an era: No more blowing up Michael Jackson zombies with your cornapult.

Fan fiction (by me)

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Remember the Scalzi/Wheaton benefit anthology, with the fan fiction contest? You may have noticed that I posted my son’s (non)entry? Of course you do. Well, I thought I would post my losing entry.

No, the winning story hasn’t been chosen. I’m just assuming.

Anyway, I dropped my son off at the day camp and have a few extra hours to myself. Of course it’s gorgeous weather out there, but I’m going to spend it on The Buried King. I doubt I’ll have something ready to send to my agent by the end of the day, but I should be able to take a big bite out of it. Especially when I turn off my modem, as I’m about to do.

Then I get to vacuum.

Anyway, here’s the story (about 800-words worth), behind the cut. Continue reading

Mid-career writing advice

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One of the topics going around right now is advice for writers who are “mid-career.” Check out Jay Lake, Tobias Buckell, Sherwood Smith, John Scalzi, and Jessica Reisman. And that’s just skimming the surface.

First let me state this: I don’t qualify as a “mid-career” writer. I haven’t been publishing long enough, only have one book out (soon to be remedied!) and need to fail or succeed more.

However! Looking over these posts, I can’t help but wonder why advice for a mid-career writer has to be so idiosyncratic, while advice for new/trying-to-break-in authors is so general.

Yeah, I know, there are some basic things to learn. Follow guidelines. Don’t be a crazy jerk. Write better.

Those are basics, and they shouldn’t really take up a few million words of blog postings and internet articles, but they do. When I was trying to break in (yesterday? last week? seems more recent than that) I read the same things over and over again. Sure, sometimes I’d find advice that flipped the on switch for the invisible light bulb over my head, but usually it was same same same same same same same.

I dunno. Maybe I’m an unusual case, because I spent a lot of time searching out craft advice and inside tips on publishing norms. A lot. It didn’t take long for every issue of Writers Digest to seem identical to the last. I’ve abandoned several message boards and blogs because people kept having the same damn conversations over and over. It was all general, basic stuff and I was hungry for something that addressed my own particular problems.

(Digression: One thing that struck me as nutso was the length of time some people needed to absorb those basics. Some people were so resistant to instruction that they had to be told over and over how things work, and often still refused to adapt their thinking.)

Eventually, after years of learning from others, I started looking for answers inside myself. That’s when I started to really do good work. I’d internalized the basics and I knew how to put them into action. It’s not enough, not really, to make my books as good as I want them to be, but I’m not looking to other people for answers anymore.

Anyway, to sum up: Yes, mid-career writers need individualized advice that won’t apply to everyone. But new writers and writers trying to break in professionally need the same thing, once they get past a few basics.