Shaken & Stirred

MIA

I know! I know! But not for long. Promise. More posts coming sooooon. Seriously.

Empaneled

Charles Tan, aka the hardest working man in science fiction, recently hosted an email roundtable on YA speculative fiction with Malinda Lo, Tehani Wessely, Cheryl Morgan, Tarie Sabido, and yours truly. It was great fun to do, although apparently I was trying to see how many times I could use the word conversation. (Answer: LOTS.) I blame holiday madness.

The resulting conversationpanel is now live at SF Signal. Check it out if you're so inclined.

Monday Hangovers

• The wondrous Meghan McCarron has an *excellent* new story up at Tor.com, "Swift, Brutal Retaliation." You won't read another ghost story like this one anytime soon.
• Dept. of I Love This Kind of Thing: Maggie Stiefvater compares and contrasts the draft of a chapter, taking it from first version to last.
• Laini Taylor offers some questions to ask when a scene is giving you fits.
• I can't remember where I first saw this, but it's kind of amazing: "The Power of the Witch," a British documentary from 1971.
• There could have been no more perfect name for this bird than Muppet.
• A good piece on acknowledgements at the Millions; I heart acks.
• Just in case you haven't yet swooned at the beauty of Tiffany Trent's cover for The Unnaturalists: Go do so.
• The delightful Nova Ren Suma is hosting a new blog series starting tomorrow, this one on turning points. (I'll be contributing an essay for this one; just started working on it, actually.)

Happiest of New Years

...to you. (Should that be Year's? or is Years okay? the day has passed, so I'm going SANS apostrophe, because I'm a rebel that way.) I am--like everyone else--playing catch-up and swimming as fast as I can coming out of the holiday. But I'm going to go out on a limb and say this year is already looking like it's going to be verrrry interrrrresting.

More soon. *swims*

This Was A Really Good Year

In terms of reading -- I really do recommend all the books in the sidebar over there, and, as you'll see, my effort to winnow to a Top 10 resulted in a Top 17, that could just as easily have been a Top 20. But I forced myself to stop. Behind the cut tag (in reverse alphabetical order by author).

#Topper Party

So TCM had a mini-Cary Grant marathon the other day, and one of the films included was Topper (which is also available on DVD, of course). Justine and I were bandying our love for it around with Ari, who had set up a timer but never seen it... And then Justine had the marvelous idea of live tweeting a simultaneous watch party from our respective corners of the world.

I'm stealing Scott's post about the relevant details, because lazy! but also busy! Here goes:

Next week I’m going to be live-tweeting an old movie with various friends around the world (namely, @justinelavaworm, @readingincolor, and @gwenda (ed. note from G--@scottwesterfeld is the other relevant twitter handle, of course). In other words, we’ll all be putting the DVD in at the same time, watching it in sync, and tweeting VERY witty things. Or just crapping on about Cary Grant’s amazing car, more likely. Why are we doing this? Because it seemed like fun, and @readingincolor hadn’t seen it yet.

The movie is called Topper, and is a screwball comedy about dying in a car accident and then messing with your banker as a ghost. (Seriously. People laughed at some weird stuff back then.)

If you’re on the twitter machine, please feel free to join in.

Time: 8:30PM US EST
Date: Tuesday Dec 27
(Sydney Time: 12:30PM Wed Dec 28)
Hashtag: #Topper

Join in if you like. It should be fun. After all, what is twitter for if not live tweeting old movies?