Shaken & Stirred

Thursday Hangovers

• Interesting slideshow at Slate: "The mismatch of technology and picture books."
• This must be the week for ouchie reviews; Peter Bergen on Morgan Spurlock's new book/docu: "Spurlock's musings read like the interminable blog of a pampered college kid on an all-expenses-paid trip around the Middle East and South Asia. The documentary is even worse, as Spurlock is constantly on camera delivering the same platitudes, a supersized display of narcissism that makes Michael Moore's on-screen preenings look like those of a Trappist monk."
• Also, in the WaPo, this fascinating story on the National Security Archive: "Blanton loves government documents. It's an acquired taste that has also been acquired by his colleagues at the archive. Over the past 23 years, they have filed more than 35,000 FOIA requests and collected more than 5 million pages of government documents. Some of the documents are mind-numbingly boring, of course, but others are nothing short of astonishing..."
• 2007 Believer Book Award short list -- excellent to see Liz Hand's Generation Loss on there.
• Feeling very steampunk.
• The people are demanding bicycle novels. (Ahem.)
• Pretty pictures.

My Sweetie, The Hero

Or the yellow bike wrangler, anyway.

There's a big, great feature column on Christopher coming up in tomorrow's local paper, but it's already up online:

"Some kid had written his name all over it in magic marker," Rowe said. "I don't think he's going to be a very effective bike thief."

...

"One thing I've learned in terms of sociology reminds me of the legendary Old West attitude toward horse thieves," Rowe said. "I'm here to tell you that if you take one of these yellow bikes and put it behind your house, your friends, your neighbors, your landlord, your girlfriend ... they are looking for an opportunity to rat you out."

Hee.

(Updated: New link with more pics! Also, you can now leave nice comments at the end of the story.)

Word Count

  Word Count 
  Originally uploaded by gwenda

Before you judge, I wrote 1900 words--and they weren't half-bad.

Blurriness should be attributed to the photographermy cameraphone. A couple more snaps at the old Flickr, including one of Puck licking the keyboard.

The Neo is my favorite thing since EVER. Proper post soon, but it works sweetly with Scrivener. A winning combination.

Also, please admire the edge of our new table!

Oh, and I have a question, for you smartypants types: Is there a special name for the center of a labyrinth?

Sheeplike

Here's my Wiscon schedule. It seems early to post it, but everybody else is, so who am I to resist? I decided to forgo reading this year, since the schedule's been so packed and other sillier reasons I won't go into.

Title: Curses! YA Villains Unite
"Evil stepmothers, mean fairies, jealous sisters, wicked enchanters and greedy kings, the fairy tale itself -- YA fantasy protagonists have more enemies than they can shake a spindle at. Let's talk about what defines a worthy opponent, which characters deserve to be defeated, and which are simply the misunderstood heroes of their own stories. "
Saturday, 2:30-3:45 P.M.
Capitol B

M: Tamora Pierce
Gwenda Bond
Cecil Castellucci
Sharyn November
P. C. Hodgell

Title: Judging the Tiptree
Sunday, 10:00-11:15 A.M.
Conference 4

M: Debbie Notkin
Gwenda Bond
Meghan McCarron

Yes

It's spring, so I've springified the design a bit. (Oh, to be able to design headers.)

ANYWAY, everything seems to be working properly EXCEPT the Read Read list over to the right -- Karen's novel seems to have broken it. I've sent a message to the Tech Support People, so keep your fingers crossed. At the moment, it's not letting me add the absolutely BRILLIANT new novel by Jincy Willet, The Writing Class. Woe.

p.s. It makes me very nervous when people are following me at Twitter, according to automatically generated e-mail messages. It seems to be happening more and more. I don't even remember my password. I don't recall my last Twitterette, but it's unlikely to be followed by another. Ditto for Goodreads -- I never update these things. I do love getting the e-mail with the Flickr friends updates though. Oh, technology, you are a wiley siren.

More YA Chitter Chatter

Here from Scalzi, and here from Dave Moles.

Televisional Aside

Last night we finally bothered to confirm our suspicion that the actor playing Dr. Lance Sweets (the psychiatrist) on Bones was Sam on Freaks and Geeks. AND there was even a hat tip to that fact during last night's episode.

If you have to replace Stephen Fry, this is a pretty good choice.

Tuesday Hangovers

• You would not believe the heartache involved in obtaining new patio furniture. Target: I hate you.
• Vote for Chris Barzak in the NewNextNow Awards!
• Controversial fiction (check out the comments). See also.
• Carrie Jones begins a discussion on dialogue and class.
• Two ladies crack me up. Someone get started on the Iron Man/Spiderman/Wonder Boys mash-up stat.
• China's Pop Fiction in the NYT. Between the lines, it sounds like YA's big there too.
• The Million Writers Awards notable stories list 2007.
• Beautiful original jewelry inspired by the stories in the Interfictions anthology is being auctioned off.
• Mr. McLaren on the wonders of the hobo.
• Alan Cheuse recommends Ursula Le Guin's Lavinia, Jeanette Winterson's Stone Gods, and Joyce Carol Oates Wild Nights! (which sounds like sooo much fun) -- I only wish Sarah Hall's The Carhullan Army/Daughters of the North would have worked its way in there somehow. Speaking of which, it's available in the U.S. now.
• For those times when only feeling ridiculous will do, the Nubrella.

Blood Sport

Sally Jenkins is always good when she writes about cycling (and particularly the Tour de France), and now she proves herself insightful on horse racing too. She has an excellent column today about the tragedy of Eight Belles' death and the causes behind it:

There is no turning away from this fact: Eight Belles killed herself finishing second. She ran with the heart of a locomotive, on champagne-glass ankles for the pleasure of the crowd, the sheiks, oilmen, entrepreneurs, old money from the thousand-acre farms, the handicappers, men in bad sport coats with crumpled sheets full of betting hieroglyphics, the julep-swillers and the ladies in hats the size of boats, and the rest of the people who make up thoroughbred racing. There was no mistaking this fact, too, as she made her stretch run, and the apologists will use it to defend the sport in the coming days: She ran to please herself.

Classics & Stuff

I'm beginning to feel like a Renaissance Learning pimp (they're the parent company of the AlphaSmart Neo), but they've sponsored an interesting, in-depth look at kids' reading habits, and I'm going to link to it anyway. The Washington Post has a summary article on the findings:

Children have welcomed the Harry Potter books in recent years like free ice cream in the cafeteria, but the largest survey ever of youthful reading in the United States will reveal today that none of J.K. Rowling's phenomenally popular books has been able to dislodge the works of longtime favorites Dr. Seuss, E.B. White, Judy Blume, S.E. Hinton and Harper Lee as the most read.

Books by the five well-known U.S. authors, plus lesser-known Laura Numeroff, Katherine Paterson and Gary Paulsen, drew the most readers at every grade level in a study of 78.5 million books read by more than 3 million children who logged on to the Renaissance Learning Web site to take quizzes on books they read last year. Many works from Rowling's Potter series turned up in the top 20, but other authors also ranked high and are likely to get more attention as a result.

I don't know that I find this terribly surprising, and I'm curious what people think about. It seems to me that the big flaw is it's based on accelerated reader quiz data--which tells you what kids are reading for credit, off I'm assuming lists of acceptable books, but not what they choose themselves outside school. (If I'm wrong about how that works, someone please let me know.)

Bonus: reflections on reading are included in the full report from Daniel Handler, S.E. Hinton, and Christopher Paul Curtis.

Addition: Just skimming through the findings, especially in the top 10 percent numbers, there are more and more genre titles the older the kids get.

Friday Hangovers

• I already love my Neo.
• Publishers Weekly hosts an interesting panel on what YA is. See also: Scalzi on the fact that YA (and I'd add middle grade to that) is where SF/F is really jumping. (And a reminder for the intrigued, that I recently made a bunch of recommendations over at Omnivoracious. And, yes, I'm very much looking forward to Little Brother and also pray for its wild success so no one will be afraid to touch the also-intensely-political book I'm presently finishing up.)
• Panda video!
• The one, the only Daniel Pinkwater is serializing his latest novel. Quoting his fabulous agent, Literaticat, who this link is via: "The Yggyssey is an epic tale of Hollywood hijinks, and the follow-up to 2007's Neddiad. The Yggyssey will not be available in stores until 2009, but thanks to the fine folks at Houghton Mifflin, the book will be released for free online, a chapter a week until the day of the official book release."
• Pinky posts bookish dog photos. This makes me insanely happy.
• Happy Derby, y'all.

Remixed

Also, this cracks me up -- Arthur Levine senior editor Cheryl Klein rewrites "Baby Got Back" in a more literary style:

My homeboys tried to warn me
But that book you got makes me so horny
Ooh, Tolkien - elves!
You say you wanna get in my shelves?

Via.

True Things

Jenny points to wise words from Roseanne Cash, who's guest blogging at the NYT this week. I am stealing her excerpt whole cloth and even adding a chunk, because I'm lazy like that and might want to be able to find it again sometime (whole thing behind the cut):

Sometimes songs are postcards from the future. Often I have found that a song reveals something subtle but important about my own life that I was only vaguely aware of while writing, but that became clear as time went on. I wrote "Black Cadillac" six weeks before a rash of deaths began in my family. The day I finished writing it, I played the completed song to myself, as a kind of last run-through to check for rhyme scheme errors and syllable scanning, and a tidal wave of anxiety started rising in my gut. I knew I had given myself a message.

Attack

of the deadline monster!

Things will be sporadic to nonexistent around these parts for the rest of the week.

Oh, and my literary pen name is: Karen B. Rabbit. Eh.

Sunday Hangovers

• I'd read John Crowley's dream journal in a hot minute: "Northrop Frye says that one of the components of what he calls romance (along with dark journeys to underworlds, brothers and sisters parted in youth, and pirates, is talking animals, and intense human/animal relations.  Dreams are fiction, or the reverse, or both."
• We're in the market for a writing-and-nothing-else portable tippety-typer: Dana or Quickpad? (Or another option I don't know about?) We went with the Neo.
• In which Pinky represents the rise of the machines. I'm betting on her for the win.
• Japanese crepe paper fairy tales.
• Jeff's new design = excellent.
• Mr. McLaren on the unfair world of midlist authors taking on pseudonyms in order to keep publishing, and the difficulties of keeping track of who's writing as who: "However, when authors are forced by the midlist computer-ordering death spiral to take on a pseudonym to keep writing in their chosen genre, that annoys me. It annoys me because it shouldn’t happen, and the fact that it does is the publishing industry putting a patch on a serious problem."
• Men who explain things. In science fiction, we consider this a primary pick-up strategy. (Are you hitting on me or just sharing a factoid about aardvarks in space?)
• Maud has a nice assembly of writing quotes.
• Erin on marketing and fiction: "At any rate...whether you get a bigass check from a luxury car company or not, marketability is interesting to think about from a fiction perspective. Would this story go better with Buddig ham? IKEA furniture? Pabst Blue Ribbon? A Volkswagen? Depends undergarments?" Funny, but I don't remember anyone being upset when BMW financed those short films by major directors. I'm just surprised that Lexus thinks this will be an effective strategy.

A New Hope!

An excellent crop of Nebula winners:

Novel: The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon

Novella: "Fountain of Age" by Nancy Kress

Novelette: "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" by Ted Chiang

Short Story: "Always" by Karen Joy Fowler

Script: Pan's Labyrinth by Guillermo del Toro

Andre Norton Award: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling

Via Locus.

AND the election results are likewise promising.

Just Say No

The thing that really strikes me about Open Source Boob Gate* is its echoes with the previous discussions about the SF community's groping problem. What a tin-eared approach to any kind of empowerment, given the history (and ignoring the fact that the whole thing was fraught with idiocy from the get go).

The LAST thing we need in science fiction is more groping. PERIOD.

(Sorry to have been MIA, but there's a lot going on and I didn't even realize this was happening until a day or so ago. And I think that's pretty much all I have to say.)

*Good list of links at the end of this post.

Linkzilla

Back, busy, etc. A couple of links for now...

Roger Sutton is funny when he's cranky:

I just picked up Katherine Applegate's Beach Blondes: A Summer Novel (Simon Pulse) and boy are my arms tired. This sucker is 721 paperback pages long, and first in a series to boot. I'm guessing it's so fat for some strategic marketing reason, or perhaps I just haven't yet gotten to the chapter "This Is Summer Speaking," in which the heroine stops the motor of the world in order to expound for fifty-seven pages on the virtues of Vera Bradley bags.

Seriously, what is it with the Vera Bradley thing? I don't get it.

And Ben Rosenbaum* waxes smart on schedulizing:

One thing related to that: there are many sub-agencies in my consciousness. Some want to lie on the couch. Some want to write fiction for the fun of it, others in order to be praised. Some want to go hang out with friends. Others want to be left the fsck alone. My task, I have found, is not to impose the will of the more "good, productive, noble" ones on the slacker ones, but rather to broker a compromise so that they are not constantly sabotaging each other. I find this actually increases even traditionally-measured productivity. If I try to only ever write, I find myself cheating on writing time in order to read and play. If I make it my goal to have time to write, to read, and to play, the agencies tend to respect each other much more.

Well said.

*Whose forthcoming collection is hotly anticipated--is this the year of the awesome short story collection or what**?

**Plus, Maureen's awesome-tastic collection Mothers and Other Monsters is now available for download!

Calling All Aspies (And Family Members)

Christopher is trying to finish an end of the semester project for his Linguistics class, looking at the speaking traits of people with Asperger's Syndrome. He has designed a quick, handy online survey and needs responses from folks with an AS diagnosis OR who live with someone with AS and are familiar with their conversational style.

Anonymous, of course, and you will earn both our undying gratitude -- anonymously -- for filling it out. Please pass on to anyone you know who fits the bill.

Monday Hangovers

• Annalee Newitz offers an insightful review of Karen Joy Fowler's Wit's End at io9: "Karen Joy Fowler's unsettling, wistful new novel Wit's End offers us a present-day world that is science fictional in the same way William Gibson's recent present-day novels are: Her characters' lives are so deeply bound up with technology that it's hard to tell where human connection ends and internet connectivity begins." See also: Reuters q&a.
• CSI as science fiction. (Via Jenny D.)
• An excellent review of Sarah Hall's The Carhullan Army/Daughters of the North. (Via Niall.)
• Fall in: The Fraenkel Gallery. (Via Sara Ryan.)
• Liz Hand on Toby Barlow's Sharp Teeth in the WashPost.
• Midori has some good links about Ursula Le Guin's Lavinia.
• Travel books without the travel?
• Evil Monkey's Guide to Kosher Imaginary Animals.

Dr. Nice

In all the crazy of last week, I missed publication day for John Kessel's new collection, The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories.

John is one of my very favorite writers--his novel Corrupting Dr. Nice (first chapter here) is on my all-time top five. He's also one of my very favorite people in the world; he was part of the small coterie that attended my and C's nuptials, and I keep a polaroid of me, Karen, Kelly, and Barb posing next to a toga-clad John* at Wiscon 2004 on the filing cabinet next to my desk. In fact, something that still makes me insanely happy is this little snippet of "It's All True," which you can read in the collection:

The wall of my apartment faded into a vision of Gwenda, my PDA. I had Gwenda programmed to look like Louise Brooks. "You've got a call from Vannicom, Ltd.," she said. "Rosethrush Vannice wants to speak with you."

My Mac is named Lulu.

Anyway, all this by way of saying that you need a copy of John's book. Stat. And Small Beer is even offering it for free download. I guarantee you'll end up wanting to own your own copy**.

*It's not every writer who would wear a toga to promote someone else's book launch!
**Some of the content has even been the center of a bona fide censorship controversy!

Elsewhere!

Over at Amazon's Omnivoracious, the indefatigable Jeff VanderMeer has kindly posted a recent interview he did with me about YA books I love--oldish, newer, and forthcoming.

As you may have noticed, I'm a bit MIA this week. We're busy and also dealing with family illness and the like, so that may be the case for a few more days. Back with posts about recent fabulous reads soon, though. Have a good weekend, everybody. I leave you with a link to a truly stupendous fan art gallery (Snape! House! Spock! Elvis!), courtesy of RLB.

Tiptree'd

Needless to say, I am VERY happy with the work we jurors did this year. Go us!

PRESS RELEASE – FOR IMMEDIATE PUBLICATION – 2008.04.14

JAMES TIPTREE JR. AWARD WINNER ANNOUNCED

A gender-exploring science fiction award is presented to Sarah Hall for The Carhullan Army (Daughters of the North)

The James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award Council is pleased to announce that the winner of the 2007 Tiptree Award is The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall (published in the United States as Daughters of the North). The British edition was published in 2007 by Faber & Faber; the American edition in 2008 by HarperCollins.

The Tiptree Award will be celebrated on May 25, 2008 at WisCon (www.wiscon.info) in Madison, Wisconsin. The winner of the Tiptree Award receives $1000 in prize money, an original artwork created specifically for the winning novel or story, and (as always) chocolate.

Each year, a panel of five jurors selects the Tiptree Award winners and compiles an Honor List of other works that they find interesting, relevant to the award, and worthy of note.  The 2007 jurors were Charlie Anders, Gwenda Bond (chair), Meghan McCarron, Geoff Ryman, and Sheree Renee Thomas.

The Carhullan Army elicited strong praise from the jurors. Gwenda Bond said, “Hall does so many things well in this book – writing female aggression in a believable way, dealing with real bodies in a way that makes sense, and getting right to the heart of the contradictions that violence brings out in people, but particularly in women in ways we still don't see explored that often. I found the writing entrancing and exactly what it needed to be for the story; lean, but well-turned.” Geoff Ryman said, “It faces up to our current grim future (something too few SF novels have done) and seems to go harder and darker into war, violence, and revolution.” Meghan McCarron said, “I found the book to be subtle and ambiguous in terms of its portrayal of the Army, and its utopia….The book became, ultimately, an examination of what it means to attain physical, violent power as defined by a male-dominated world. And it asserted that it could be claimed by anyone, regardless of physical sex, provided they were willing to pay the price.”

The book, which is Hall’s third novel, also won the 2007 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for the best work of literature (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama) from Britain or the Commonwealth written by an author of 35 or under.

The Tiptree Award Honor List is a strong part of the award’s identity and is used by many readers as a recommended reading list for the rest of the year. The 2007 Honor List is:

• "Dangerous Space" by Kelley Eskridge, in the author’s collection Dangerous Space (Aqueduct Press, 2007)
• Water Logic by Laurie Marks (Small Beer Press, 2007)
• Empress of Mijak and The Riven Kingdom by Karen Miller (HarperCollins, Australia, 2007)
• The Shadow Speaker by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu (Hyperion, 2007)
• Interfictions, edited by Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss (Interstitial Arts Foundation/Small Beer Press, 2007)
• Glasshouse by Charles Stross (Ace, 2006)
• The Margarets by Sheri S. Tepper (Harper Collins 2007)
• Y: The Last Man, written by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Pia Guerra (available in 60 issues or 10 volumes from DC/Vertigo Comics, 2002-2008)
• Flora Segunda by Ysabeau Wilce (Harcourt, 2007)

The James Tiptree Jr. Award is presented annually to a work or works that explore and expand gender roles in science fiction and fantasy. The award seeks out work that is thought-provoking, imaginative, and perhaps even infuriating. The Tiptree Award is intended to reward those women and men who are bold enough to contemplate shifts and changes in gender roles, a fundamental aspect of any society.

The James Tiptree Jr. Award was created in 1991 to honor Alice Sheldon, who wrote under the pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr. By her choice of a masculine pen name, Sheldon helped break down the imaginary barrier between “women’s writing” and “men’s writing.” Her insightful short stories were notable for their thoughtful examination of the roles of men and women in our society.

Since its inception, the Tiptree Award has been an award with an attitude. As a political statement, as a means of involving people at the grassroots level, as an excuse to eat cookies, and as an attempt to strike the proper ironic note, the award has been financed through bake sales held at science fiction conventions across the United States, as well as in England and Australia. Fundraising efforts have included auctions conducted by stand-up comic and award-winning writer Ellen Klages, the sale of t-shirts and aprons created by collage artist and silk screener Freddie Baer, and the publication of four anthologies of award winners and honor-listed stories. Three of the anthologies are in print and available from Tachyon Publications (www.tachyonpublications.com). The award has also published two cookbooks featuring recipes and anecdotes by science fiction writers and fans, available through www.tiptree.org.

In addition to presenting the Tiptree Award annually, the James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award Council occasionally presents the Fairy Godmother Award, a special award in honor of Angela Carter. Described as a “mini, mini, mini, mini MacArthur award,” the Fairy Godmother Award strikes without warning, providing a financial boost to a deserving writer in need of assistance to continue creating material that matches the goals of the Tiptree Award.

Reading for the 2008 Tiptree Award will soon begin, with jurors K. Tempest Bradford, Gavin Grant (chair), Leslie Howle, Roz Kaveney, and Catherynne M. Valente. As always, the Tiptree Award invites all to recommend works for the award. Please submit recommendations via the Tiptree Award website at www.tiptree.org.

For more information, visit the Tiptree Award website at www.tiptree.org.

Monsters of Academia (Updated)

To a greater or lesser extent, John Gardner's ideas about writing are just one of those things you eventually have to deal with in MFA school. For my critical thesis topic--the omniscient point of view--The Art of Fiction became one of my primary source books (he was a big fan), and On Becoming a Novelist worked its way in there too, since I had a point to make about the oft-misinterpreted fictive dream concept.

I won't bore you with talk about that. But running down some things, I came across a couple of links that might be of interest. (Jeff Ford, you studied with Gardner, right?*)

Anyway, I like this passage from Stewart O'Nan's "Notes from the Underground," on how seeing the various drafts of Grendel taught him to revise:

I'd heard how hard writers worked at revising, but here was concrete and heartening proof.  I'd been impatient with my work because my early drafts lacked depth and precision; now I realized I had completely misjudged them, and misjudged the effort required to write well.  It was not brilliance or facility that was necessary, but the determination to bear and even enjoy the dull process of wading into one's own bad prose again, one more time, and then once again, with the utmost concentration and taste, looking for opportunities to mine deeper, clues to what these people wanted and needed. I went back to my desk, applied myself with this in mind, and discovered that I was again writing on another level, a level that even now I'm happy to reach.

More fun is a Baltimore City Paper piece about Gardner's infamous feud with John Barth:

As the class proceeds, Gardner proceeds to take the gloves off. Suddenly he is attacking his host, Barth, whom he tags as a "secondary" writer--someone who writes fiction about fiction. And chief among Barth's offenses, just in case the students were thinking of buying it, is Giles Goat-Boy, which Gardner tells them is "arch, extravagantly self-indulgent, clumsily allegorical, pedantic, tiresomely and pretentiously advance-guard, and like much of our 'new fiction', puerilely obscene."

A few days later, the argument is recounted in The Sun, in an article portentously titled "Two Literary Lions Tangle." Barth fires off a letter to The Sun, acknowledging that he "registered, very briefly, some of my objections to [Gardner's] eloquently expressed literary opinions because that is what seminars--indeed universities--are for." But as the letter proceeds, it sounds as though Barth believes he's entitled to a rebuttal. What follows is a biting, if somewhat tongue-in-cheek, evaluation of his colleague's recently published On Moral Fiction as "an intellectually immoral, self-serving, finally demalogical attack on his contemporaries, many of whom (in my opinion) are immensely more talented than himself."

It's hard to disagree with the take of Liz Rosenberg (caught between them at the time):

When asked how significant, in the end, she thought this battle was, Rosenberg thinks carefully before answering. "I don't know," she says finally. "There was an experimental phase in writing, which has died down to some degree, but maybe that battle untethered the way for greater freedom in writing." She does express some regret for the passing of an era when two major writers cared passionately enough to fight about the principles of their art. "Since then, battles have become purely personal and a lot less ideological," she says.

More high-minded feuds, please.

*Updated: Jeff reminds me why I was thinking that -- well, besides that it's true. A couple of years ago, he posted his introduction to the Fantasy Masterwords edition of Grendel:

I got to see first hand how he approached the craft of fiction. I'd bring him my short stories, and he would go to work on them, spending as much time as was necessary to show me the gaffs, what repairs were possible, where the fatal flaws lay, and discuss writing strategies that would help me to circumvent the same problems in the future. A meeting could take up to two hours. Rehabilitating a single awkward sentence was as important as understanding the entire structure of a story, and a story's structure was discussed as if it were a kind of music. If there was a line of students waiting to see him outside his door, they would have to wait until he was finished, but they always waited, because they knew that when it was their turn, he would do the same for each of them.

Sunday Hangovers (Updated)

• Trashing teachers (and others) on MySpace.
• Time Out asks a bunch of publishing types about the industry, and how books get to readers--or not: "First of all, there are no prime movers in the publishing world, but rather a nexus of agents, editors and publicists who collaborate in the attempt to push a book toward the tipping point. Second, almost every person I spoke with—a mere sliver of a massive industry, I’ll admit—contradicted someone else. The interesting thing about this latter fact was that no one seemed wrong, exactly. Instead, the contradictions emphasized that while there are identifiable forces that might drive a book to success (most notably the twin peaks of an author’s talent and a publisher’s marketing skills), the industry remains a constantly shifting game of chance."
• The Great All Right/Alright Debate of 2008: Scalzi vs. Cheney. Updated: Escalation has occurred: Hamster vs. Cthulhu Dick Cheney Threatening a Hamster!
• A crown of sonnets written just for Poetry Friday (cheers!).
• Various SF discussions referenced at Niall's.
• Lee Siegel pity reaches critical mass.
• The 2008 Locus Poll closes on April 15th.
• Nicola on the mysteries--and sweat--of writing.
• "Gender Inequity in Whoville."
• The transformation of CBGB into a shop for expensive clothes.
• Ann Hornaday on the tenured professor in cinema: "It's a cinematic archetype as reliable as the fish out of water and the blonde in distress: the disheveled, misanthropic college professor, in the throes of writer's block (or some other form of publish-or-perish anxiety), living in book-lined solitude as a result of divorce, death or free-floating disgust with humanity."