• Popping in here so as not to disappear too thoroughly, though I have been reminded that April is always my busiest month*. The work, I am doing it. (If I owe you something–a read or some other type of response–I just haven't gotten to it yet. I will. Promise.)
• So many great David Foster Wallace posts/essays/pieces around. I will read The Pale King at some point, but I don't think I'm ready yet. The tragedy still feels too fresh (and it doesn't hurt that there is no time to give it the quiet reading space I want to at the moment). And maybe I'll reread his essays again first. That said, definitely don't miss: Lev Grossman's piece on The Pale King for Time or Maria Bustillos' devastating look through the Ransom Center's archives and DFW's annotated self-help library at the Awl. (Aside: The Ransom Center is amazing.) ETA: An interview with artist Karen Green, DFW's wife, which is heartbreaking. Even more heartbreaking than the rest.
• At the Paris Review blog, Sigrid Nunez talks about Susan Sontag: "For one thing, though you hear it said about Susan that she was a very private person, she was in fact the least private person I’ve ever known. She told everyone everything: the most intimate details about her life, all about her personal history, the people she knew, famous or unfamous, what she thought of everyone and everything—she had no use for secrecy or even for discretion. And it was never as if I was her special confidante. Whatever she shared with me she shared with many others as well." (Via Maud.)
• The two wikipedia finds of the week:  Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo (via Miriam) and a catalogue of Lost work (via Ed). 
• More from the beloved and fantastic Awl: Six Writers Tell All About Covers and Blurbs. (Including the one and only Bennett Madison, who has been posting Dazzler spreads at his tumblr lately–that sounds way more offensive than it is. In reality, it is two thumbs up.)
• Speaking of tumblrs: Write Place, Write Time. You know you love ogling other people's writing environs.
• Long live WMMT, one of the best radio stations ever. Anywhere.
• An excellent post on character motivation by Charlie Jane over at i09: What If Your Characters Don't Want Anything?  (Then you probably better make them.)
• The pointy boot Mexican dance. How I love this. (Via someone on twitter, I forget who.)
• Do they really need to specify Kentucky bourbon? If so, LAST DAYS OF CIVILIZATION finally NIGH. It won't be e-books but bourbon from ELSEWHERE that signals the end. (No, it's not bourbon if it's from somewhere else–it may be legally called bourbon, but that's not the same thing, is it?) (At any rate, *cheers*.)

*Reserving the right to declare this pretty much every month, if needed.

• "How Shakespeare Invented Teenagers" at the NYT, being an excerpt from the fascinating-sounding How Shakespeare Changed Everything by Stephen Marche: "The great French scholar Philippe Ariès concluded that for most of the Medieval period “people had no idea of what we call adolescence, and the idea was a long time taking shape.” Yet our whole modern understanding of adolescence is there to be found in this play. Shakespeare essentially created this new category of humanity, and in place of the usual mix of nostalgia and loathing with which we regard adolescents (and adolescence), Shakespeare would have us look at teenagers in a spirit of wonder. He loves his teenagers even as he paints them in all their absurdity and nastiness." Putting on my list for May, when it comes out.
• The final typescript version of the last few chapters of Gone With the Wind have turned up in Connecticut at the Pequot Library (or, rather, they were there all along). The article includes a don't-miss description of the insane process Margaret Mitchell used when writing the book and the rush to get it ready for print. I'd never read about this before. A snippet: "From August 1935 to January 1936, Mitchell, with the help of John Marsh, her second husband (and best man at her marriage to the first), and some hired typists and stenographers, essentially rewrote and retyped the entire book, cutting, refining, straightening out inconsistencies and fixing historical inaccuracies. Until fairly late in the process the heroine was called Pansy, and when Mitchell changed the name to Scarlett, thank goodness, she paid 50 cents an hour to have every page mentioning Pansy retyped."
• From the Things We Already Knew Department, it turns out rejection hurts.
• My crazy last week kept me from posting some links in honor of Houdini's birthday: his last surviving stage assistant recently died at 103 (interesting tidbit: "Young then formed a dance act with Gilbert Kiamie, a New York businessman and the son of a wealthy silk lingerie magnate, and they gained international prominence for a Latin dance they created known as the rumbalero."), and a Christian Science Monitor piece by Eoin O'Carroll about why the world needs magicians ("I should probably disclose here that my mother has worked as a professional stage magician for most of my life. When I was a child, she made me take the Magician's Oath, in which I promised never to reveal the secret of a trick to a non-magician, and never to perform a trick before an audience until I was good enough not to blow the gaff.").
• The Periodic Table of Fictional Materials.
• A good piece on Jane Pratt's return.
• Sarah Pekkanen on the gender divide in children's books; the piece concludes with some wise words from the wonderful David Levithan: “Whenever a book like this comes out of nowhere and becomes so big, people take notice,” wrote David Levithan, the trilogy’s editor, in an e-mail. “But I think the biggest take-away isn’t for there to be more dystopian fiction, or more Katniss-like characters. The take-away is that when you have an author with a singular vision, you should do everything you can to let her follow that vision.”
• Wolf pup!

• Sarah Vowell’s new book, Unfamiliar Fishes, is about the history of Hawaii. Be still my heart. A favorite topic of mine and I can’t wait to read her take on it. Kirkus talks to her about the book: “Most people picture this nonexistent, barely populated dream world of palm trees swaying in the breeze or something, instead of a real place with real people and problems, as well as an overwhelming number of military installations—the archipelago’s strategic location being the main reason the U.S. annexed Hawaii in the first place. Most of the time I was researching the book, the state was so broke that public schools were closed on Fridays. I mean, Hawaii is obviously a gorgeous place with nice weather, but it still exists in the objective reality of planet Earth.”
• Niall Harrison at Strange Horizons undertakes a VIDA-style analysis of the gender breakdown of books published, reviewed and reviewers in genre magazines.
• Justine Musk on kicking the procrastination and getting started.
• Sean Beaudoin at Cyn’s on noir: “I loved them all, especially the failures. I loved the effort. I loved the swing from cool detachment to sweaty desperation, deepest black to crisp grey. I’m a sucker for a hard-boiled line, a cleft chin, a pantyhosed gam. I am transported by a failed escape, suitcases full of loot broken open on the runway, dollar bills being sucked into the propeller and chopped into hammy metaphorical bits.”
• Nora Jemisin on whether the “rule of three” applies to SFF; interesting discussion in the comments too.
• The ever-wise Sarah Rees Brennan asks what kind of online promotion works best for people. Related: My lovely agent was interviewed about her dog Moxie (complete with adorably deliciously cute pictures!) on Bobbie Pyron’s blog today, as part of the promo for Pyron’s new book, A Dog’s Way Home. I like interviews about dogs online promo! Which is really a way of saying I like valuable content that isn’t a direct shill. I do not like endless discussion of the same exact thing or buy! buy! buy! (One or two buy!s are fine, though; we all gotta pay the bills.) But, like most successful things online, promotion works best when you’re adding something to this rich gift economy–so it’s more than just promotion. If your online promo feels like the awfulest work imaginable when you’re doing it, figure out what you could be doing that would make it fun and valuable instead. This increases the odds others will also find it valuable, and means it’s not wasted time no matter the return. Voila.