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Randomness for 6/8

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1) Ever wonder what happened to the Star Wars Kid?

2) Corpse flower blooms in Pasadena.

3) Examining the economic struggles of the publishing industry, graph-style. Part one. Part Two. Part Three. Part Four. Part Five.

4) I guess the PMRC didn’t take up all her time. I especially like the glacier and portrait portfolios.

5) Line art and the brain. I’m going to show this to my wife when she gets a quiet moment.

6) Do YOU want to help a legendary high school funk band play a live show when the documentary about their time together in the ’70’s and their modern day reunion plays at the LA Film Festival? They’re asking for donations to cover travel costs. There’s swag, too.

7) How sad am I that this is only photoshopped? Considering that I’m laughing like an idiot over it, only a little sad. I wonder if Patrick Stewart has made peace with the fact this sort of thing is going to dog him for the rest of his days?

The as-yet untitled third Twenty Palaces book

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Over on Livejournal, I have a poll asking people what they think of a few possible titles for the book that I’ve been calling Man Bites World. Why LJ? Because they make polling easy.

If you have a LJ account (they’re free) you can vote for the title you like best. If you don’t, you can leave your thoughts in comments anonymously.

All input is appreciated.

Randomness for 6/4

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1) When someone says “Don’t touch me,” you should stop touching them.

2) Mole man’s borer misses the Baxter Building by quite a bit. Article.

3) My brother-in-law is curating and art exhibit. If you’re in NYC, check it out.

4) Diana Comet Presents…75 Years of Fabulous Writers via Sandra McDonald.

5) How did Ulysses S. Grant become a charicature? A fascinating take on a part of history that was written by the losers.

6) I don’t usually link to the Freakonomics blog (those guys sometimes seem to value iconoclasty over accuracy) but this is someone else’s research: The Visible Hand, how a presenter’s skin color affects online sales. Nothing surprising there, but it’s interesting information. Don’t read the comments.

7) Sixteen truly Geeky workstations. Personally, I’ve wanted a walkstation for a while. Also, I’d only pay 40 grand for a computer chair if it came inside a Mercedes.

Randomness for 5/31

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1) Never plan a crime through unsolicited queries.

2) The next step in the development of our robotic overlords is complete.

3) How many companies think to put ASCII art in their html codes? Warning: using View Source on that site is probably NSFW.

4) This one is for Hannah Wolf Bowen (and everyone else, too): A Batman costume… for your horse.

5) Forced perspective, using Legos. Really amazing.

6) The scale of celestial bodies.

7) A unique promotional idea. I don’t think it’s such a terrible idea, mainly because the idea is going to get her more attention than the actual actors she hired. Still, promoting your book based on pretend enjoyment doesn’t really work for me. I’d be more swayed by honest responses.

The Scalzi/Wheaton Benefit Anthology

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Check this out. John Scalzi and Wil Wheaton are putting on a benefit anthology for the Lupus Foundation of America. They’re accepting stories for a contest–with the winning story included in the antho. Entries have to be between 400-2,000 words, will earn 10c a word if accepted and have to be based on the crazy illustration posted at the link above.

Me, I’m working on a little story to submit (in my Copious Free Time) but my son (who’s 8 years old) was inspired to write a little something himself. It’s not long enough to meet even half the minimum word count, otherwise I’d submit it for him. Instead, I’ll post it here.

He doesn’t have a title for it (see? he takes after me) and I didn’t do a thing to it except type it out. Here you go:

Hi, I’m Wil. I’m the leader of the leader of Warriors with Oversized Unicorn Kittens With Wings And Extra Extra Long Spears And Infamous Clown Sweaters. We have set up a base on the top of a volcano. The Orc Warriors With Lots Of Metal And Round Hammer-Things set up a base down in the valley. They don’t go up because it’s a long walk and we don’t go down because we’re scared of heights.

Then one day I decided to go down and overcome my fears. I closed my eyes and moved down. After one second, I opened my eyes and turned to meet John, leader of The Orc Warriors With Lots Of Metal And Round Hammer-Things.

He threw his hammer-thing at me. He missed.

“Ha ha!” I said. “I have got you now!” I threw my extra extra long spear. It missed, too.

“Awww!” I said, and we went back to our bases.

The end.

Yeah, the illustration shows an axe rather than a hammer-thing, but I chalk that up to a misperception in the heat of battle.

Hope you guys are having a great day.

As an addendum to yesterday’s post about The Terminator

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Writer Livia Blackburne writes about the way to grab a reader’s interest. The concept of a “knowledge gap” is interesting but not useful for my process. She does a good job covering the importance of context, though. Check it out.

Randomness for 5/28

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1) Cut paper art.

2) Dawn’s Wedding Chapel.

3) Subtitles for the Asian DVD release of THE TWO TOWERS

4) Everyone loves looking at creepy dolls, right?

5) Seasonal Cake Wrecks.

6) Why the bad guys in River City Ransom say “BARF!”

7) All of today’s links came from Sherwood Smith’s Birthday thread. There are many, many more wonderful things there, including a bunch of videos that I can’t check out and can’t link to. Wish Sherwood a happy birthday (and treat yourself to one of her books, if you haven’t before), check out the other wonderful links, and maybe you can offer something yourself.

Randomness for 5/27

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1) Five reasons it’s still not cool to admit you’re a gamer.

2) Mr. Know-It-All, I just found out that one of my favorite sci-fi writers is a raging homophobe. Should I prevent my son from reading the jerk’s books? Huh. I wonder who they’re talking about?

3) Weeks ago, we borrowed Cosmos from the library to share it with our son, but he refused to even be in the same room when we started it. I’m pretty sure he thought it was high-fiber. This auto-tuned video made him change his mind.

4) Solar Water Disinfection. via Martha Wells.

5) Alcohol, a burrito, and Captain America. The “real” Cap would never be this big of an asshole.

6) I’m sure this will become a quality motion picture.

7) Best of all: The first issue of Awesome Hospital is complete online!

Quote of the day.

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“The hype never matches up with reality,” Mr. Norris said. “There’s money to be made in e-books. There’s money to be made in print books too. There’s no reason why publishers shouldn’t pursue both and just not let the hyperbole get out of control.”

— Michael Norris, senior analyst at Simba Information, a publishing consultant firm

Amazon Encore and midlist writers

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Recently, midlist mystery writer JA K*nr*th, announced proudly that he was going to publish the latest installment of his mystery series with Amazon Encore, the first “big name” (as he put it) author to switch to Amazon.com’s inhouse publisher.

Of course, many writers have been self-publishing on Amazon.com’s Kindle format, some with terrific success. K*nr*th himself feels his new contract is going to be a big deal, and that he’s going to get a strong marketing push from Amazon.

Me, I’m not so sure. For one thing, it seems as though his series was dropped by Hyperion because of flagging sales. The author himself states that his agent tried and failed to place it with a large NY publisher. So is this just a case of talking up a Plan C as though it’s been the winning strategy all along, or of finding a new, wonderful path only after exhausting the traditional choices?

It also raises questions about writerly self-promotion. From the time his first book came out, K*nr*th has been a proponent of promoting the hell out of your work, even when more experienced writers told him it was mostly a waste of time. So what does it mean that he’s… well… retreating from NY publishers to Amazon.com?

* That promotion helped drive sales of his early work, but readers weren’t enthusiastic about the books and it wasn’t sustainable.
* That promotion has very little effect and is mostly a waste of time.
* The downturn in his sales is mainly (rather than partly) to blame on the economy.
* The downturn in his sales is mainly (rather than partly) to blame on a genre slump.

Or none of those things. Or a mix of them. Whatever the cause, it makes me more dubious about hustling for readers than I ever was before. Once upon a time, reading this author’s blog made me feel like a dilettante. Now I’m thinking that I should keep doing the things I’m interested in and skip the rest.

NB: I’m using the asterisks in his name to thwart Google Alerts, because I’m not really interested in having him here. I wish him all the success in the world, but the way he talks online puts me off.