Bits and pieces

It's Friday and I'm scatterbrained. This semester (most semesters) Fridays mark the end of the regular work week and the beginning of my writerly work week. Or, erm, work weekend. Trying to get my brain around the shift and my body -- namely my fingers -- into gear, always poses a bit of a struggle. So I compensate by hanging out on social media for a while. Twitter, I've discovered, is either a pit of human mind barf, or a trove of sparkling little jewels. Today, thankfully, it's a bit more on the sparkly side, though not all of these gems were garnered from Twitter.

The Sci Your Fi Team starts off by amusing me with this notion:

Ever seen an intelligent troll? Ever seen a lumbering fairy? They’re all out there somewhere.

They have to be, right? Now I've got a half-baked idea about a fat fairy rolling around in my head. Hmm. (SYF Team Twitter and Blog)

DigiReader has up two new books as part of their Free Friday Romance eBooks promotion. I don't know much about either book, but you can check them out for yourself here.

Robyn at Seven Sassy Sisters discusses how bribery is the key to success and even provides a recipe. Saddest part of this blog post: she suggests inflicting the chocolate bribery on your family, not yourself.

Allison of Allison Writes discusses Annie Dillard's craft book The Writing Life. Which reminds me that I have a copy of Ursula Le Guin's Steering the Craft that I got as a Christmas gift sitting here on my coffee table that I really want to read but for some reason haven't gotten past the introduction. Perhaps because Le Guin is very strident about you taking her lessons seriously and spacing them out.

Book Ends (a blog and a literary agency) has posted an updated publishing dictionary -- frankly, knowing these terms is a must if you intend to write and publish whether with a traditional publisher, non-traditional publisher, or self-publish.

Linda at Visiting Reality takes the cake, literally. Oh those sprinkles are something else!

And lastly, agent Kristin Nelson who has been blogging for years at Pub Rants (which is a fab resource if you've not seen it), has started a new feature of Friday vlogs where she discusses questions she commonly receives at conferences. Below is her second episode which is about the difference between young adult and middle grade literature. I really liked this vlog because I honestly had no idea how to go about making that distinction but her theory works for me. The first episode was about how one might become a literary agent and (if she sticks to the schedule) there should be another video out today, but at the time of this posting, it hasn't yet hit the web.

April intentions

It's hard to think about April with its post-thaw mud, tender green tree buds and the unspoken promise of light jacket weather when each morning I open the blinds each wondering how many inches of snow will be on my car today. But it appears that many people already are. Maybe it's just, you know, planning ahead on their parts. I hear some people have been known to do that though I can't say I ever plan much beyond that night's dinner if I can help it. Or maybe it's that we all desperately need something to look forward to in order to get through this bleak time of year. Whatever the case, there are some interesting writerly things coming your way this spring.

• Angry Robot is throwing open its doors to unagented novel queries for two weeks in late April. They did this last year and signed three new authors. They're only interested in epic fantasy and YA sf/f. More information is on their website.

• April is also the month of Script Frenzy, NaNoWriMo's dramatically inclined little cousin.

• And there's already talk going on about the A to Z blogging challenge -- and yep, it's held in April too.

Of these three, I'll probably only get involved in the A to Z challenge. I tried it last year and it went well ... for a while. But since people and their online chatter have me thinking about it ahead of time this year, I've started generating a list of topics (and, gasp, even a theme!) and hope to succeed in making all 26 posts this time around.

Grab bag of life presents this week's findings ...

Catherynne M. Valente demands better vampires.  Vampires that have actual angst, not black pudding enthusiasts.

Two lesbians raised a baby and this is what they got.

Writer Zoe Winters and the theory of the 10,000 word day.  Winters says she started writing fanfic before she started writing her own worlds -- and that writes faster and easier because you eliminate the time spent on invention. But then she did it: she set out to have a 10,000 word day, and eight hours later accomplished it.

This chick in Manhattan made $1200 a month in free food off of Match.com.  It's pretty amazing, but the through of doing that is utterly exhausting. I think that sooner rather than later I'd be like screw it, I'm not putting on another pair of heels, I'm just going to eat ramen.

A really fabulous (and interestingly difficult) holiday writing prompt from Professor Ogden -- open to students and non-students alike.

This week provided my area of the country with some crazy-pants weather. Warm rain, then ice, then ten inches of snow all within 48 hours. Now, pay mind that the ten inches of snow did not fall where I live, or where I work ... it fell on the city I must drive through to get from where I live to where I work. Crazy-pants snow fell all Tuesday afternoon. It fell all evening. It fell during my drive home. It fell during the time I gratefully drove twenty miles per hour down a major highway just to stay behind the safety of the plow. Crazy-pants snow fell as the plow decided it had gone far enough in my direction, made a quick U-turn and started plowing the other of the highway. Crazy-pants snow fell as I blindly groped to stay in my lane and praised whomever came up with the concept of rumble strips. It fell as I neared the bright road-illuminating lights of civilization ... then left civilization and plunged back into the dark. Crazy-pants snow fell as I contemplated what it would be like to spend the night in a hotel, at a roadside rest stop, in the ditch. Crazy-pants snow fell as I finally reached town, got off an exit early and discovered that the city streets were pristine -- it was just the highway that was a death-trap-waiting-to-be-sprung.  Just pants. Lots and lots of pants.

But I survived. And as this fabulous Oscar the Grouch (non-disney endorsed) image tells us: Shit could be worse.

Link+Love

So there's been a delay in my regular blogging schedule. Damn you, things-that-get-in-the-way! I have about four half-written posts that I will devote attention to ... sometime in the near future. Until then, here's a long overdue Link+Love.


Sometimes I feel like the book review might be more interesting to read than the book -- or at least that's how I felt about his BookSlut review of Skinny.

What to do about listing those credentials you do or don't have on your submission cover letter.  A must read for those submitting to literary magazines. (Source, Glimmer Train.)

Allison Writes (on the road) at the Wigwam Hotel! I'm so totally amused. [note: that news is a few weeks old now, but the Wigwam Hotel pictures remain cool]

Game of Thrones meteorology style.  Winter is coming and all that jazz.

This weekend I totally wore my Red Riding Hood threadless tee while working on final edits of my Red Riding Hood short story for the Red Riding Hood themed issue of Enchanted Conversation. Window for submissions opens September 27 and closes September 30 (see posting for the specifics).  Back in the spring, Enchanted Conversation published my Rumplestiltskin story -- something I wrote specifically for their call for submissions -- but the "Garbage-to-Gold Spindle" was a humorous piece, and my Red Riding Hoods are a bit dark. Definitely eerie.  I thought about it, and unless I make the girl into a pissed off, eye rolling adolescent a la Hoodwinked, I don't know how to write a piece about a girl wandering alone in the woods not be creepy. Ah well, here's hoping the charm of my t-shirt will wear off on my fiction and the magazine will like the story in spite of it's creepiness!

While we're on the subject of fun t-shirts, threadless.com once again amuses me with their newest tee.  A nifty little map piece titled "What I know about the USA."

Friday: Link love + life

This post is exactly what the title implies: I give a bunch of love to links, hopefully make a few witty, scathing, or adoring comments about said links, and drop in a few little anecdotes about my life. You've been warned.

There's a mild bit of buzz in the sf/f community about NPR's list of 100 Top Science Fiction, Fantasy Books. To which I say, meh.  I've not read the entire list but I've read a lot of it and I'll probably read more of it (intentionally) but I'll probably die before I read all of it.  Okay, let's drop the scary mortality-thoughts b/c they totally screw with my twenty-something brain.

There was apparently an open voting period which I did not participate in but many of my friends and acquaintances did.  They complained that there was no write-in option for books that did not make the NPR short list for voting. They claimed there were obvious oversights -- Lois Bujold McMaster for one -- and that the list was skewed toward science fiction and away from fantasy (which is always hilarious in my eyes because fantasy now outsells sci-fi but sci-fi is still considered more "classic" and therefore more "literary."  Ah well, that's fine, if I live long enough I'm certain I'll see fantasy move closer toward the accepted canon anyway.  And there I go with more scary mortality-thoughts.

There's much spatting going on in internet circles about who is and isn't on that list. Me? I'm not going to engage in any spats. Perhaps you have to be a cog in machine of academic standardization before you realize that any "canon" is all arbitrary and none of it matters. Perhaps that is the greatest argument for attending grad school. One way or another, it's just a list.  Moving on.

I sprained my foot this past weekend and the resultant injury has colored my life for the past six days.

Yes, sprained my foot not my ankle.  My ankles are surprisingly hearty, having been rolled many times during years of field hockey practice and never injured until trying to catch the bus to the train station for the 2009 AWP Conference. Odd. Anyway.  Missing the last step of the flight has caused a week of sitting, elevating, and wrapping with an Ace bandage.

The cats, btw, love the Ace bandage. They find the wrapping/unwrapping fascinating. And the tiny little metal clips beg to be batted to the floor -- and they have been, repeatedly, even though they've only left my foot for a few hours total over the past week.

Oh, and the cats think that all the pillows i'm placing on the table/desk/etc for my foot are there for them.  Of course.

Stay true.

Margaret Atwood has been announced as the 2012 AWP Conference Keynote Speaker. This makes three out of four years where the keynote speaker has straddled the lines of literary and the Other for an organization where most of the members (if not the official organization) is conflicted in its feeling toward comic books and speculative fiction.  Sure they could say that Art Spiegleman wrote in the exciting new vein of the "graphic novel" and that Michael Chabon was a literary maverick who indulged our interests in the supernatural, but inviting Margaret Atwood to be THE speaker should be a brilliant slap in the face meant to wake up those who do not believe genre can be literary.  Don't believe me? Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale just made number 22 on that top 100 all time science fiction, fantasy list from NPR.

I always find it strange that literary types claim to have "forgotten" that Vonnegut and Orwell and Le Guin and Atwood are science fiction.

I had thought about going to the 2012 AWP conference just because it will be in Chicago, a city which is within easy traveling distance and, thanks to my brief stint living in the windy city, easy for me to navigate.  Even in fucking February.  Burr.  With Atwood as the keynote ... I think I really will have to go. 

On the Odyssey Workshop blog, bestselling author Carrie Vaughn discusses how she knows when a story will be a novel or a short work.

100 Year Star Ship project + conference.  Need I say more?

I helped plan part of a bridal shower this past weekend. And frankly, I fail to see the point.  Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to have done it for my friend and really excited to make super cute flower vases, except for the part where I was carrying a giantassbox, missed the last step and fell funny on my foot/ankle resulting in much pain and limited mobility -- but that could have happened for any reason.  But I fail to see the point of bridal showers nowadays.

My friend was astonished and flattered at the gifts she got.  She didn't expect or desire the level of gifting that occurred.  She was afraid that by inviting people to both the shower and the wedding she's making them feel like they should provide two gifts. Of course, there are people who feel like they should celebrate the union of two young people and if that means purchasing Corning Ware and Pyrex sets, then so be it.  But she and her fiance are not nineteen-year-olds who've never moved away from home.  They both have places and kitchens and kitchenware of their own.  Do we need to continue the social practice of giving showers? Particularly I ask, do we really need to gather all our female relatives for three hours of small talk, mediocre food, patronizing games, and gift opening wherein we speculate voraciously over how many ribbons the bride will break thereby determining how many children she will bear in this union?

I find the whole "bridal thing" dubious.  And I am in favor of not having one should I ever find myself in the throes of imminent marriage.  Or at least I'd rather have a co-ed "open house" rather than an all-chick shower.

Goat + duct tape + Chuck Wendig.  If that was not enough to entice you (and it should be) consider clicking through to his writing advice as well as the equally crude and wondrous birth and life of a novel.

I've realized that I have to change most of what I do this semester when I go back to teaching composition.  Okay, not most of what I do, but the big projects.  Partly because the textbook was ordered for me and the textbook supports either a gender studies or a cultural studies approach rather than a genre studies with a pop culture studies flavor.  That's okay.  Attempting a gender/cultural bent will make me more marketable. It will also be good for the students. A nice dose of spinach. I'm not entirely sold, eh?   Guess it's time to cultivate multiple talents other than teaching comp.

Ira Glass on what nobody tells beginners:
 
Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo.

Miracle Whip wants to give you $25,000 for your wedding or divorce -- so long it's a Miracle Whip kind of romance.

And lastly, take a look at the night sky tonight.  The moon and Jupiter are teaming up for a particularly bright Jupiter tonight.  Oddly enough, I dreamed last night that I could see Jupiter.  Not Jupiter how it really is, but a nice little graphic of Jupiter with all its rings pasted onto the night sky.

Addendum: The Hugo Awards Ceremony will be streamed live tomorrow (Saturday) starting at 8:00 PM Pacific Time.