Shaken & Stirred

Also True

A couple of weeks ago, Roseanne Cash was blogging about her songwriting process at the NYT. This week it's Suzanne Vega (who I was listening to in the car just this morning). I like this:

Many times a song will begin with a clear image in my mind, but sometimes a song can begin with a melody popping into your head. How does it come? On an instrument? With a voice? On something unearthly that is neither, maybe. It could be a clear voice that says, for example, “Men in a war, if they’ve lost a limb, still feel that limb as they did before.” I heard that line clearly in my mind and it sounded like a voice to me.

But voices and visions are scary to admit to.  And also you have to make time for them, or they go on to someone else.

Like what Cash had to say, this strikes me as equally applicable to the writing of fiction. Which I should get back to right now...

Blasty

The Summer Blog Blast Tour is coming up next week. Colleen has the schedule--I'll have fabulous interviews with Dave Schwartz on Monday and Jincy Willett on Friday.

I Heart My Town

Two fun things from this week: the first progressive bike dinner (yum) and Iron Man at the the Kentucky Theater (where they now serve wine! and where the Mighty Wurlitzer was being played!). Now if only the weather would straighten up.

Unrelated: I just ordered these shoes to go with the closet-languishing fuschia and black Betsy Johnson number I plan to wear* to the Sunday night Wiscon doings. Comfort is queen. I'm hoping they 1)fit and 2)don't look stupid. I haven't bought a pair of Docs since college, and doing so fills me with glee.

*Um, once again I missed the window to get it to an alteration shop, so I may actually have to prevail upon the kindness of one of you who can sew to do a teensy bit of stitching to remove a flower from one side and afix it in place of a missing one. Or C will have to do it. ::cue ominous music and sound of thunder::

Practicing the Geek Squeal

I'm superexcited to check out some WiiWare games.

Thursday Hangovers

• Art by Sophie Blackall on sale. (Via.)
• Thoughts on women and the lack thereof in science.
• Top 10 challenged books 2007.
• Justine on fashion.
• Ninety-year-old debut author of Bowl of Cherries Millard Kaufman gets profiled in the WashPost: "There are curious curlicues in the many lives of Millard Kaufman. For example, he once ingested cobra venom -- experimentally-- and awoke to find himself playing golf in the nude."
• Alberto Manguel on his 30,000 volume library: "My library is not a single beast but a composite of many others, a fantastic animal made up of the several libraries built and then abandoned, over and over again, throughout my life. I can’t remember a time in which I didn’t have a library of some sort. The present one is a sort of multilayered autobiography, each book holding the moment in which I opened it for the first time."
• Pinky recommends some campaign-related reading.
• The Web Habits of Highly Effective People seem to involve a suspicious-amount of NYT-home paging. (Via trend-bucker Maud.)
• J.L. Bell is having a very amusing punctuation week over at Oz and Ends. The first entry highlights underused punctuation terms.

TV is Stupid

The absolutely wonderful Miss Guided isn't coming back. Also, sad but not shocked to see Aliens in America and Canterbury's Law (which was Closeresque in its perfect semi-mindless entertainment factor and given a hint of actual depth by Juliana Margulies). Boo!

Monday Hangovers

• I've added some little book recommendations over in the sidebar (thank you, Typepad support people) and will add a couple more as soon as they roll out the bug fix that was causing them not to show up (supposedly this week).
• Also, I'm almost caught up on just about everything. So, if I owe you something, you'll get it soon.
• New Scientist thinks these five movies get the science right (or, at least, rightish). (Via.)
• I'll be reading both of these: "Both Lerer and Marcus emphasize that these works -- from picture books marinated in biblical ethics to, yes, the Harry Potter novels -- were created by human beings with diverse and often contradictory motives. What a story these authors tell, of piratical moralists stealing each other's ethical axioms and presenting them as their own, of librarians shouting that Nancy Drew mysteries were bad for education and morality. Despite this cacophony, writers have managed to produce such cherished feats of imagination as Alice and Huckleberry Finn, Charlotte's Web and Little Women, a magical train station that rescues an orphaned boy and a secret garden in which a girl learns what it means to grow up. These new books remind us that children's literature, which at the moment is flourishing and hugely influential, grows from as rich and ancient a heritage as any strand of world culture."
• Colleen points out that horse racing isn't the only sport with animal casualties, taking a look at the current plight of sled dogs.
• Stephany Aulenback is not a baby eater: "Like a recovering addict, I recognize the beast within myself. Sometimes, though, I can get carried away with my adultetarian zeal. For instance, I have found that my personal ban on eating babies now seems to extend to miniature versions of foods, as well. Baby carrots and baby lettuce have recently joined baby potatoes on my list. Many otherwise innocuous h’ors d’oeuvres have also become off-limits – I can no longer eat mini-pizza, mini-quiches, or tiny pigs in blankets. I know intellectually that those tiny guinea hens are full-grown adults but when one is placed in front of me at a banquet my visceral reaction is a desperate attraction – my hands literally quiver over my fork and knife -- followed by intense revulsion. I usually have to excuse myself in order to go throw up in the ladies room." Read the whole thing.

It's a Wiki-World and

...we just live in it.

I wrote this week's cover story for Publishers Weekly, about the impact of Wikipedia (and other online sources) on the reference book market. I hope it's as fun to read as it was to write.

Wild Reviews

The New York Times Book Review has a slew of children's book reviews this week, by all sorts of excellent reviewers (Sarah Ellis! Leonard Marcus!). I am beyond happy to see Pat Murphy's The Wild Girls get some much-deserved love.

Packet due on Monday, and so off I am to sit outside with my Neo and write some fiction. At least I have a shiny ARC of Octavian Nothing II to be my reward. w00t as they say!

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.