Shaken & Stirred

Tuesday Hangovers Et Things

• Item the first: We will be at the Decatur Book Festival this weekend. Christopher is doing a talk at the Eddie's Attic stage at 2:30 Sunday, about Sandstorm and also doing work-for-hire and the differences and similarities between that and original work; come. It'll be good. Otherwise, we'll be around and about and please do say hello.
• Blondie at Coney Island (and other photos by Bob Gruen).
• Colleen on a faaaabulous new long novelette by Connie Willis, "All About Eve" available from Subterranean. I loved it to pieces.
• Ann Patchett offers some writing advice in a new e-book, which I'll definitely be snagging. I love Patchett's nonfiction work almost as much as as her novels.
• Another couple of Flavorwire links: monstrously modified vintage cityscapes and history's ill-fated literary couples.
• A gorgeous post from Phoebe North inspired by her experience of Hurricane Irene.
• Horror movie makers talk about their own favorite scary creepfests.
• Cyn talks about themes and concerns and the making of her wonderful series that began with Tantalize. Check it out.
• Classic insults from classic actors. (Via the wily cinetrix.)
• The fine art of museum security in the WaPo.
• And, yes, yes, it's been everywhere already, but can you really watch Tom Waits Cookie Monster too many times? When you are tired of this, you are tired of life.

Excuses, Excuses

(I bet that's one of my most frequently-used post titles. Sorry!)

Been busy, of course, but also taking some space to let the new novel begin to breathe and come to life (which I think it is, although I'm still terrified of it). And I know enough to grab breathers between deadlines when I can and clear some mental space. As a result, I haven't had the extrananeous chatter brewing that leads me to post lots. But I'll be back soon with some hangovers and things.

In the meantime, I read two books I absolutely loved (well, and probably more since I have been indulging in a major post-draft book snarfing spell, before story-making mode kicked back in):

I finally managed to read Sarah Rees Brennan's The Demon's Surrender, the last in the trilogy, and it might possibly be my favorite, which is saying something. You should read all three books immediately if you haven't yet done so (and, hey, I've been recommending them for ages, so get on it). This is simply the best kind of urban fantasy; whip-smart, emotional, funny, and powerful. And what Sarah manages with point of view over the course of the series: Whoa. Reader, I swoon.

I also loved Michelle Hodkin's The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer, which I read in a kind of fugue state last week, unable to put it down. (Inconvenient!) One of my favorite debuts of the year, undoubtedly, and a book that I hope will find eager readers who love mystery and/or romance and/or horror and/or fantasy and/or contemporary or--best of all--all of those things.  I'll say no more here for now, because I also reviewed it for Locus, but: You want this one.

Feel free to drop your own recent reading recs in the comments. There is always a need for MOAR book love.

Back soon.

Friday Five

Randomness!

1. As usual, am juggling all the things. While keeping fingers crossed for other things. It's hard, though, with the weather changing from Hotter Than The Sun to Oh, Summer, You're So Nice, Come Here to not just go walkabout and ride in canoes and walk the dogs a million times in the woods and sit in the backyard drinking a nice Mulderbosch rosé and reading obsessively. Just having these impulses mostly turns out to be enough to satisfy them, and instead I've been meeting deadlines and getting back into the morning word count routine with the circus book, which has stopped being mad at me for setting it aside for a couple of months to work on something else--at least, I think it has. This weekend: some proofing to do, some interview q's to send, and a Sunday meeting of the YA Books Adult Beverages Book Club (Graceling this time around). Fun.

2. Another truly fantastic piece from Alexander Chee at the Morning News, this time on Tarot. I defy you to resist this essay after reading the first paragraph: "Like many children, I wanted to be more powerful than the world around me, and so I became interested in magic. I read novels of wizards and sorceresses, dragon-riding heroes and lost kings hidden from their enemies, raised as commoners to protect them. I went to the library and read first into the mythology section and soon found myself coming home with The Golden Bough by Sir James George Frazer. This, I did not know until I got it home, was a famous anthropological work on magic. I’d hoped it was a spell book. All I knew was that I wanted to whistle up a wind."

3. Another fabulous essay, this time at Serious Eats and about the origins of Cookies n' Cream ice cream, by local star and pastry chef of the gods Stella Parks, aka the Brave Tart. She even comes around to the infamous Baskin Robbins Clown Cone, which I'd forgotten existed (!): "Love for Clown Cones related to their rarity. Like diamonds, they existed in abundance, but tightfisted parents controlled the market. Their unwillingness to shell out four times the cost of a single scoop turned the Clown Cone (in all frankness a cheap conglomeration of icing squiggles and horror) into the most desirable of treats." Seriously, go read this. I love excellent food writing and this is. Bonus: Scary Clown Cone photos.

4. Survey says we like spoilers. I don't find this surprising at all, actually. Many of my favorite TV shows are ones I picked up in the fourth, third, or second seasons (Buffy, Gilmore Girls, Veronica Mars, respectively), and one of the unexpected benefits of this was making up the imaginary narrative that explained the things from the past the characters referenced. The actual causes always turned out to be slightly different (sometimes majorly so), but that wasn't disappointing; it was fascinating. It's a good way to learn about stories, reverse engineering them, or even just looking at the engineering as it goes if you're starting at the beginning. A good story should withstand foreknowledge. All that said: sometimes I do like a narrative surprise, but it doesn't have to be a big one, the type that spoilers reference. Often the little surprises are the best.

5. Finally, from Stephany Aulenback, a photograph of a face emerging from a storm cloud. Magic.

Tuesday Hangovers

• There have been moremoremore awesome posts about awesome ladies in fiction and the over- and misuse of the term Mary Sue following off Zoë Marriott's. Two in particular you don't want to miss (from two indisputably awesome ladies and writers), both of whom I agree with WHOLEHEARTEDLY:  Sarah Rees Brennan's "Ladies, Don't Let Anyone Tell You You're Not Awesome" and Holly Black's "Ladies Ladies Ladies." (Not really related: I want a Girl Writer chair!)
• Sara Ryan says something important: "I think often, when we try to assess our own progress — whether it’s on working out, writing, or anything else in our lives — we forget to include the weight of the bar, the bar being defined as everything else that affects our capacity to accomplish our goals."
• The Atlantic on the science of Planet of the Apes--could James Franco provoke our simian cousins so much they rise? Well, or actually not that at all, but an interesting discussion of research and genetics and ethics.
• Is the universe just a giant hologram?
• There are more Stella Gibbons novels? And they're coming back into print? Yes, please. (Heads up, American publishers.)
• Genevieve has an article about Alexander McQueen's designs in the new Weird Tales and posts about the just-closed show at the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute.
• Typewriter art by Keira Rathbone = gorgeous. (First spotted somewhere on twitter, but I can't remember from who.)
• Some good news: The latest BookStats survey shows more books being sold and more revenue across all major market categories from 2008 to 2010.

Thursday Hangovers

• D.B. Grady wrote a (worth-checking-out) piece about YA for the Atlantic that included a claim that there were a bazillionty30,000 YA novels published in 2009 as opposed to 3,000 just twelve years earlier, a figure which has now been dissected by several and found, shall we say, almost certainly inaccurate. Oh well. As J.L. Bell says in his post, not that surprising since publishing numbers are hard to come by; I'd agree and add that numbers are also often squishy or at least semi- made-up. The most interesting thing in all of this to me is the great discussion in Roger Sutton's comments with Lerner's Andrew Karre about whether publishers treat their lists as a lottery; Elizabeth Law from Egmont drops by too.
• I haven't poked around historypin yet, but it looks like it could be amazing and a great research resource besides.
• PW's Diane Roback collects some short remembrances of colorful characters from children's publishing from people in the industry. Good reading. (They are all wonderful; I particularly liked this grace note from former SLJ editor Lillian Gerhardt's remembrance of Marjorie Thayer: "At the end of a particularly hard day in her booth at an ALA conference in the early 1970s, Thayer confessed to a startled Marjorie Jones, editorial director of the Junior Library Guild, that though she might seem indestructible, she feared she might be slowing down. "Some evenings, I'm almost too tired to tell the cocktail waitress I want an extra-dry martini straight up with a twist." ")
• Jonah Lehrer  explores research on intelligence and whether smart people are getting smarter: "One frequently cited factor is the increasing complexity of entertainment, which might enhance abstract problem solving skills. (As Flynn himself noted, “The very fact that children are better and better at IQ test problems logically entails that they have learned at least that kind of problem-solving skill better, and it must have been learned somewhere.”) This suggests that, because people are now forced to make sense of Lost or the Harry Potter series or World of Warcraft, they’re also better able to handle hard logic puzzles."
• Floating island missing from Secret Garden Party festival.
• Love this post from Zoë Marriott: "You can stuff your Mary Sue where the sun don't shine."
• How many MacArthur geniuses are in publishing?
• A passel of great links from the cinetrix.
• The divine Betsy Bird considers children's fantasy post-Harry Potter.
• When Lauren recommends a book, I take note--especially when it sounds as fabulous as Serious Pleasures.