In this week's news

Cross-posted from World Weaver Press as "Books & Pieces" where I'm in charge of their weekly round-up of news and factoids.

If you enjoyed Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog there’s more Dr. Horrible in the works according to wired.com! Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion will both be returning for the sequel.

This is your brain on fiction. A New York Times article highlights recent research which shows the brain functions at a different level when reading fiction than it does when doing other types of reading. Particularly that it processes sensory details like sound and smell as if it was receiving real stimuli — all the more reason for to incorporate more and more awesome sensory details in a story!

Writer Jay Ridler gives us five reasons to love short story collections.

And speaking of short story collections, there are contests going on right now on two blogs for free copies of Susan Abel Sullivan’s first collection Cursed: Wickedly Fun Stories.  Check out Fang-tastic Books and I’m a Reader, Not a Writer to find out how to enter.

Last night, the Hunger Games movie took in an estimated $20 million just from its Midnight showing according to Publisher’s Marketplace (via). Even Weather.com's lead story is Hunger Games related this morning.

The top ten sword fight scenes  ever were  given to us by io9 this week (sci-fi and fantasy only). We have only one thing to say on the topic: My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die.

World Weaver Press answered the question this week: Just what is “speculative” fiction, anyway? 

World Weaver Press author Susan Abel Sullivan stopped by the UK-based Becky’s Barmy Book Blog to give a fun little post about first realizing that she was a humor writer. On her own blog, Susan crafted an insightful post about her early love of monster movies.

Lastly, these little robot-dudes are so cool. And supposedly Amazon is going to have a whole warehouse full of them along with Walgreens and a few other American companies that already employ the inventory-finding bots.

Very uncreative

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory wants you to help them come up with a better name for what they've been calling the "Very Large Array."

The VLA is made up of several of those GIANT dish-like radio antennas -- like the ones featured in Contact or The Dish -- and is out in some part of New Mexico that I've never heard of. Although, to be honest, if it's not near-Santa Fe or near-Albuquerque then all of New Mexico is a giant question mark for me geographically.


Have to say that I totally loved Contact and I might have even loved The Dish more.  The Dish is a fabulous film that is both funny and historical -- a radio dish in small town Australia (the dish is literally located in a sheep paddock) is tapped by NASA to help track Apollo 11 and man's first steps on the moon.  And The Dish has Sam Neil in it -- who doesn't like Sam Neil characters?

Go here if you have an idea for a more interesting name than "Very Large Array" -- a name which has been on the welcome sign for years now.  I went with murmuration, the same term as is applied to a group of starlings taking off.

(All photos of the VLA come from the VLA art gallery.)

Last to Know

I finally figured out how to work back links. Although I didn't know I even had back links to this blog until doing a vanity search on my own name.

Which brings me to the fact that I soooo feel like the last to know that there was a WMU press release on my fairy tale reading last month.

I found out that I was listed here for having blogged about the AWP conference. And apparently people had left comments on that post (which they got to via the links) that I didn't see until today.

Good news: I have changed my settings so that I now get emails when people comment on the posts. That way I can respond when people ask me specific questions (like happened on the AWP post).

Other than that I'm supposedly writing a 15 page term paper (due tomorrow at 5:00 p.m.) and I'm anxiously awaiting my latest copy of Poets&Writers ... hey, I haven't checked my mail since Wednesday, maybe it's already there!