Friday's Interesting Links...on Saturday

What I’m Reading:

I just finished Soulless by Gail Carriger. It’s the first of her Alexia Tarabotti series and combines supernatural romance with Victorian England and a touch of steampunk. I’m planning a more lengthy review, but let me just say that I lost a few good work hours to this novel because I didn’t want to put it down. Delightful in all the right ways with enough interpersonal conflict to keep me reading and a big enough external plot to set the characters up royally. I highly recommend Soulless to anyone with a taste for adventure and love in Victorian times.

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The link pickings are a little spare this week, largely because I’ve been NaNo focused and Thanksgiving distracted, but I hope you find something of interest below.

Publishing (more…)

Stages of Readers: A Manifesto

Last night I went to see a high school performance of a play that I have now seen three times, A Servant of Two Masters. This is not a major play like Cats, and I hadn't sought it out, but coincidence or what have you led me to seeing this same play multiple times. The first time was at a community theater in Alameda, California, enough years ago that I didn't remember having seen it until the events in the play the second time were too familiar to be dismissed. The second performance was last year on a school trip (you bet I volunteered :)) to Ashland, Oregon to see a portion of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival that is ongoing there. And the third, as I mentioned, was a local high school. (to read more)

Friday's Interesting Links

What I’m reading

Fast Ships, Black Sails is, as I mentioned last week, a pirate-focused anthology that has some wonderful tales in it. This anthology spans the gambit of the past, future, and even pirates with fur over more than their chins. I could not name a favorite as I almost always found the next story as captivating as the previous, and only one story did not resonate with me at all, but it may very well be the favorite for someone else. The stories were sweet, creepy, thoughtful, and just down right strange, held together by a love of the nautical and the mystery of the pirate life. At first I thought these yarns focused only on the pirates, but there are a few, later in the book, that take the perspective of those hunting the pirates. All in all, it’s a good, broad look at different perspectives on pirates, contained in a series of fun stories by talented authors.

Submitting


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Friday's Interesting Links

What I’m reading

NaNo has started and I’ve got a lot going on so my reading has slowed down. That said, I’m currently taking in Fast Ships, Black Sails, a pirate-focused anthology that has some wonderful tales in it so far, some quite creepy, but still wonderful.

Submitting

I’ve varied between calling myself an optimistic realist and a realistic optimist most of my life with few segues into pessimism. Personally, this works for me. (more…)

Check out the additional posts over at Tales to Tide You Over as well.

Friday Interesting Links times two

Oops. I forgot to cross-post last week's Interesting Links, so those of you who missed the notice about my new blog may not have seen them.

For October 31st:
It must still be Friday because I haven’t been to sleep yet, right? World Fantasy is a wonderful experience, with interesting panels, enjoyable readings, and fascinating people to talk to (including a discussion on overuse of adjectives ). Anyway, I haven’t had much time to read email, even less time to read online materials, so the showings are a little sparse, but I think some are worth it.

Science

You don’t have to be Superman anymore to have X-Ray vision:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18036-augmented-reality-system-lets-you-see-through-walls.html

Submitting...
To read more, click: http://margaretfisk.mmfcf.com/blog/?p=722

November 6th:
It’s Friday, which means it’s time to post interesting links. However, I have not had the chance for much web reading, so the pickings are extremely slim. All right, one. I have one interesting link for you, but it’s very interesting.

Science

Native language is something absorbed before even birth, according to this study:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20091105/sc_livescience/newbornbabiescryinnativetongue

That said, I did finish reading Escapement by Jay Lake...
To read more, click: http://margaretfisk.mmfcf.com/blog/?p=725

Friday's Interesting Links, and on the move

There's no reading section this week, because I'm not done with the book I am reading, and you'll find the selection on links is a little sparse. I've had an incredibly productive week, but it took me a bit to get back into the swing of things on the Web after the Muse Online Conference, so I didn't have time to read as many links as I usually do. You might also notice that my interesting links have a new home, along with all my posts from both my Thinking and Writing blogs. I've been planning to consolidate onto my website for a while, but I was having some difficulty getting Blogger to give up the old material. As you can see, that is no longer a problem.

So, if you're reading this on Stray Thoughts, please click over to Tales to Tide You Over and visit my home. For those of you already here, welcome. I hope you enjoy your stay and check back frequently. If you haven't been here before, please click the HOME link at the top of the page to see the rest of my site.

Writing

A good reminder about sanity in this gig:
http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2009/03/ten-commandments-for-happy-writer.html

YES! We are artists making point by point decisions, not computers churning out results to specification, and I'm a programmer so actually understand the work that getting those results take. It sounds very hoity-toity, and I don't mean it in the way that avoids editing, but applying a "rule" blindly can weaken the text more than using all the tools in the chest as they were intended.
http://blog.writersdigest.com/norules/2009/10/20/TheMuchMalignedAdverb.aspx

Fun comic about plot twists:
http://dresdencodak.com/2009/05/11/42-essential-3rd-act-twists/

A thought on the meta message being sent by YA fiction:
http://www.plottopunctuation.com/blog/show/32

Because we all need the reminder that our carefully edited and polished manuscripts will be edited again after acceptance:
http://kmessner.livejournal.com/126769.html

Submitting

An approach to synopsis writing with potential:
http://frohock.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/another-take-on-the-synopsis/

Some agents want to see how you found them, some want to see who you think you write like, and others want the exact opposite. It only goes to show just how different agents can be.
http://theswivet.blogspot.com/2008/08/query-dissection-kelly-gays-better-part.html

Proof that publishing runs in cycles. The "standalone" label has become powerful again. A lowdown on the state of series:
http://kidlit.com/2009/10/21/querying-with-a-series-series-in-general/

A peek into "almost there":
http://magicalwords.net/cemurphy/one-step-shy/

Science

Robots are cool, but that this is a local discovery is even better :).
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427305.600-hydrogen-muscle-silences-the-domestic-robot.html

And on the other end of the spectrum, a Bronze Age town:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18023-underwater-town-breaks-antiquity-record.html

Friday's Interesting Links

What I'm Reading

Drowned Wednesday by Garth Nix - This reads like Alice in Wonderland for a younger audience. Crazy things happen in an unreal world all tied to a human boy who has been chosen as the one to fix everything. It's fast-paced, full of reluctant choices, and holds together well. Though I enjoyed Nix's YA voice in Abhorsen, I think his MG voice is actually more my style in this particular moment because there's a true feeling of the fantastical, more so than in a constructed fantasy world where everything has a logical basis. This novel is crazy, wild, and random...and yet is not so random that I was ever lost. It's just a fun read.

Veniss Underground by Jeff Vandermeer - This book was written just for me, or so it seems, combining a mystical, philosophical cyberpunk world with a touch of the sapience question and what it means when genetic manipulation removes humanity. These are all elements that have spoken to me a time or two, or three or four. The tone of the novel is surreal, the information offered through a mist where the POV characters can only see as far as they can stretch their hands and yet still strike out as best they can to change what they don't want to admit is true. Powerful writing that's very evocative. I don't think this book is everyone's cup of tea, and there are many moods when it wouldn't have called so strongly, but if you're interested in the test of human psyche, in the way people react when thrust into extreme conditions of civilization, this is a solid contender. The novel itself becomes Living Art, something you'll understand when you read it.

Submitting

Author Sally MacKenzie describes her agent quest:
http://romanceuniversity.org/2009/10/12/the-great-agent-hunt/

Tips for live pitching:
http://abrokenlaptop.wordpress.com/2009/10/05/pitching-for-the-terrified-the-actual-pitch/
http://cba-ramblings.blogspot.com/2009/09/tell-me-story.html

This may be an old article, but Ethan Ellenberg's advice on finding the right agent still seems true based on my experience so it's worth checking out:
http://www.bksp.org/content/view/40/1/

Promoting

What authors can expect from their publishers for marketing:
http://bookendslitagency.blogspot.com/2009/10/what-do-publishers-bring-to-table.html

The last two weeks before publication:
http://editorialass.blogspot.com/2009/10/your-pub-date-minus-two-weeks.html

Publishing

Another older article from 2002 on the publishing industry and poor choices. The sad part of it is that the contents are still true today as far as I can tell, except for the reading percentage which is heading up.
http://www.bksp.org/content/view/41/1/

Measuring a career:
http://www.romantictimes.com/authors_tip.php?tip=914

Writing

The agent/author relationship demystified:
http://www.deadlinedames.com/?p=1841

A follow up on the concept that there's more to being a writer than just words:
http://alisonwells.wordpress.com/2009/10/14/5-ways-to-be-a-writer-when-you%e2%80%99re-not-writing/

This truly belongs in science by content, but is most interesting for character creation in my mind. How about those psychopaths?
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427304.000-psychopaths-are-distracted-not-coldblooded.html

A take on backstory--how, why, and when to use it.
http://pubrants.blogspot.com/2009/05/black-sheep-of-fiction-writingguest.html

The cold hard truth about writing for kids:
http://www.writing-world.com/children/myths.shtml

Science

Human/robot weirdness is not limited to humans. And they are looking at using this research to help treat autism.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427303.800-macaques-are-creeped-out-by-cyberselves.html

A new pterosaur!
http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/dn15018-pick-of-the-pictures

Imagine having one of these appear next to you:
http://www.livescience.com/animals/091013-flying-reptile.html