- A few quick links to close tabs.
- I always love Jennifer Crusie's writing chats with her friends–the latest one is about the difficulty of writing sex scenes in first person.
- Lisa Lutz in the Wall Street Journal on (the breaking of) writing rules: "Readers are a curious lot; they want answers. Give them a really good question and they'll keep turning the page."
- Deborah Biancotti on writing 80,000 words in a month…don't try this at home, unless you want to. If so, she has provided helpful tips.
- A great obituary of John Fairfax in the NYT: "At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13, he lit out for the Amazon jungle. At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate. To please his mother, who did not take kindly to his being a pirate, he briefly managed a mink farm, one of the few truly dull entries on his otherwise crackling résumé, which lately included a career as a professional gambler."
- Editor Amanda posts about the process of reading manuscripts over at the Strange Chemistry blog: "Because here’s the thing: we have to pick the novels that we are prepared to champion to the hilt. We can’t waver in our belief of them. These are novels that we will be closely working with for the foreseeable future – we will have to read them a number of times, to a great depth of detail, and we will have to shout about them to the whole world. We can’t take on a novel that we have any uncertainty about, because we can’t then do the best job for the author and their book. But another publisher might – what you’re uncertain about, another editor will have read and gone into raptures over. It’s all subjective." Good stuff.
- A friend just sent me a pointer to Scape, a YA SFF-focused webzine now on its third issue. It's a truly gorgeous site, and I look forward to checking out the stories. We need more YA short fiction markets.
- And last but most! exciting! of! all! What a great Nebula and Norton ballet this year. Congratulations to all the nominees–so excited to see many people (and works by those people!) that I adore on the ballot.