Five Up

A sorta weekly feature of things I co-sign: (1) Evaluating a Traditional Publisher. Kristine Kathryn Rusch takes you through some question you could ask. I generally just say "Sign where? Here? OK!" But maybe you're more discerning. (2) Neesha Meminger on From Margin to Center: Writing Characters of Color (2009) (3) The Art of Leviathan. Part one with Scott Westerfeld, part two with artist Keith Thompson. (2009) (4) Book-o-nomics: An insider look at Greenlight Bookstores ledgers and a video (2010) (5) Portlandia:...

Brand New

When procrastinating I generally turn to redesigning blogs. Ameer and I just finished redoing our music blog, The End Starts Today, and now I turn my attention to this thing here. Sure I just redid it ten months ago but sometimes you just get sick of a look right? I'm gonna miss that fun photo slider thing from the old template but 2012 is about cutting things out and paring everything back to the basics. And compartmentalizing. To...

A Reading Nightcap

BOOKS READ: Beijing Welcomes You, Tom Scocca Scalzi on Writing, John Scalzi The Search for WondLa, Tony DiTerlizzi Cross My Heart, Katie Klein Huntress, Malinda Lo The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Gothgirl, Barry Lyga The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, E.Lockhart Boy Meets Boy, David Levithan Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Seth Grahame-Smith Behemoth, Scott Westerfeld How to Start and Run a Commercial Art Gallery, Edward Winkleman Fury of the Phoenix, Cindy Pon School of Fear, Gitty Daneshvari Dragon Rider, Cornelia Funke Super...

50 Things I Love About You

It's been a bad year of reading for me. Not because I read bad books -- quite the contrary actually -- but because I didn't read enough of them. My total for the year, including a library fueled blitz last month, was twenty books. That's less than two a month. Pathetic. For a guy with a lot of time on his hands, I fell completely off the reading wagon this year. Well no more. Lilly and I are starting up fiftyfifty.me, a books and movies challenge....

Five For Fighting

A weekly feature of things I co-sign:  (1) Bark: A Blog of Literature, Culture, and Art. Everything is just good on this. (2) Forces of Nature, Acts of God, and Other Reasons a Book Can Flop. Oh, good to know. Actually, Rachel Stark's entire Trac Changes blog is quite follow worthy. (3) Days of Yore. Interviews with artists before they made it.  The one with Daniel Chun initially caught my eye. Other ones with Jennifer Egan and James Franco will catch yours. (4) Saundra Mitchell's...

Consider the Seating Chart

Have you ever had this problem? A big group of people go out to dinner, you all sit down and conversation just dies. Maybe not right away, maybe not even obviously, but the fun spirit of eating out with people is totally gone. This wasn't a problem until a few years ago. In college, you can roll to dinners with twenty plus people and spirits remain high for hours. But that's college. Who has the energy nowadays? For years, my friend and I...

High Five

A new weekly feature of things I co-sign (actually "feature" is a bit grandiose): (1) The Other Side of the Story. Most writing advice blogs lose my interest pretty quickly but Janice Hardy's is great because it's organized well and filled with tons of content. Also, Super Hero Nation, a blog specifically geared toward writing the super powered. (2) Nova Ren Suma's "What Inspires You?" blog series. I found myself coming back over and over the past month.  Also, I can't wait to read Fade Out, formerly known as Dani Noir. (3) Kirkus...

It's time now to sing out, though the story never ends

If only NaNoWriMo's winning requirement was for 525,600 words, then I could make up NaNo lyrics to Seasons of Love more accurately. "Fifty one thousand one hundred eighty one wo-rds / Fifty one thousand one hundred eighty one moments so dear" just does not have the same ring as the original. Of course, writing five hundred thousand words in a month would probably explode my mind and leave my fingers crippled. I'm still in recovery from doing 51,181...