Hangovers

• I already love my Neo.
• Publishers Weekly hosts an interesting panel on what YA is. See also: Scalzi on the fact that YA (and I’d add middle grade to that) is where SF/F is really jumping. (And a reminder for the intrigued, that I recently made a bunch of recommendations over at Omnivoracious. And, yes, I’m very much looking forward to Little Brother and also pray for its wild success so no one will be afraid to touch the also-intensely-political book I’m presently finishing up.)
• Panda video!
• The one, the only Daniel Pinkwater is serializing his latest novel. Quoting his fabulous agent, Literaticat, who this link is via: "The Yggyssey is an epic tale of Hollywood hijinks, and the follow-up to 2007’s Neddiad. The Yggyssey will not be available in stores until 2009, but thanks to the fine folks at Houghton Mifflin, the book will be released for free online, a chapter a week until the day of the official book release."
• Pinky posts bookish dog photos. This makes me insanely happy.
• Happy Derby, y’all.

• I’d read John Crowley’s dream journal in a hot minute: "Northrop Frye says that one of the components of what he calls romance (along with dark journeys to underworlds, brothers and sisters parted in youth, and pirates, is talking animals, and intense human/animal relations.  Dreams are fiction, or the reverse, or both."
• We’re in the market for a writing-and-nothing-else portable tippety-typer: Dana or Quickpad? (Or another option I don’t know about?) We went with the Neo.
• In which Pinky represents the rise of the machines. I’m betting on her for the win.
• Japanese crepe paper fairy tales.
• Jeff’s new design = excellent.
• Mr. McLaren on the unfair world of midlist authors taking on pseudonyms in order to keep publishing, and the difficulties of keeping track of who’s writing as who: "However, when authors are forced by the midlist computer-ordering death spiral to take on a pseudonym to keep writing in their chosen genre, that annoys me. It annoys me because it shouldn’t happen, and the fact that it does is the publishing industry putting a patch on a serious problem."
• Men who explain things. In science fiction, we consider this a primary pick-up strategy. (Are you hitting on me or just sharing a factoid about aardvarks in space?)
• Maud has a nice assembly of writing quotes.
• Erin on marketing and fiction: "At any rate…whether you get a bigass check from a luxury car company or not, marketability is interesting to think about from a fiction perspective. Would this story go better with Buddig ham? IKEA furniture? Pabst Blue Ribbon? A Volkswagen? Depends undergarments?" Funny, but I don’t remember anyone being upset when BMW financed those short films by major directors. I’m just surprised that Lexus thinks this will be an effective strategy.

Back, busy, etc. A couple of links for now…

Roger Sutton is funny when he’s cranky:

I just picked up Katherine Applegate’s Beach Blondes: A Summer Novel (Simon Pulse) and boy are my arms tired. This sucker is 721 paperback pages long, and first in a series to boot. I’m guessing it’s so fat for some strategic marketing reason, or perhaps I just haven’t yet gotten to the chapter "This Is Summer Speaking," in which the heroine stops the motor of the world in order to expound for fifty-seven pages on the virtues of Vera Bradley bags.

Seriously, what is it with the Vera Bradley thing? I don’t get it.

And Ben Rosenbaum* waxes smart on schedulizing:

One thing related to that: there are many sub-agencies in my consciousness. Some want to lie on the couch. Some want to write fiction for the fun of it, others in order to be praised. Some want to go hang out with friends. Others want to be left the fsck alone. My task, I have found, is not to impose the will of the more "good, productive, noble" ones on the slacker ones, but rather to broker a compromise so that they are not constantly sabotaging each other. I find this actually increases even traditionally-measured productivity. If I try to only ever write, I find myself cheating on writing time in order to read and play. If I make it my goal to have time to write, to read, and to play, the agencies tend to respect each other much more.

Well said.

*Whose forthcoming collection is hotly anticipated–is this the year of the awesome short story collection or what**?

**Plus, Maureen’s awesome-tastic collection Mothers and Other Monsters is now available for download!

• Annalee Newitz offers an insightful review of Karen Joy Fowler’s Wit’s End at io9: "Karen Joy Fowler’s unsettling, wistful new novel Wit’s End offers us a present-day world that is science fictional in the same way William Gibson’s recent present-day novels are: Her characters’ lives are so deeply bound up with technology that it’s hard to tell where human connection ends and internet connectivity begins." See also: Reuters q&a.
• CSI as science fiction. (Via Jenny D.)
• An excellent review of Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army/Daughters of the North. (Via Niall.)
• Fall in: The Fraenkel Gallery. (Via Sara Ryan.)
• Liz Hand on Toby Barlow’s Sharp Teeth in the WashPost.
• Midori has some good links about Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia.
• Travel books without the travel?
• Evil Monkey’s Guide to Kosher Imaginary Animals.

• Trashing teachers (and others) on MySpace.
• Time Out asks a bunch of publishing types about the industry, and how books get to readers–or not: "First of all, there are no prime movers in the publishing world, but rather a nexus of agents, editors and publicists who collaborate in the attempt to push a book toward the tipping point. Second, almost every person I spoke with—a mere sliver of a massive industry, I’ll admit—contradicted someone else. The interesting thing about this latter fact was that no one seemed wrong, exactly. Instead, the contradictions emphasized that while there are identifiable forces that might drive a book to success (most notably the twin peaks of an author’s talent and a publisher’s marketing skills), the industry remains a constantly shifting game of chance."
• The Great All Right/Alright Debate of 2008: Scalzi vs. Cheney. Updated: Escalation has occurred: Hamster vs. Cthulhu Dick Cheney Threatening a Hamster!
• A crown of sonnets written just for Poetry Friday (cheers!).
• Various SF discussions referenced at Niall’s.
• Lee Siegel pity reaches critical mass.
• The 2008 Locus Poll closes on April 15th.
• Nicola on the mysteries–and sweat–of writing.
• "Gender Inequity in Whoville."
• The transformation of CBGB into a shop for expensive clothes.
• Ann Hornaday on the tenured professor in cinema: "It’s a cinematic archetype as reliable as the fish out of water and the blonde in distress: the disheveled, misanthropic college professor, in the throes of writer’s block (or some other form of publish-or-perish anxiety), living in book-lined solitude as a result of divorce, death or free-floating disgust with humanity."

• As anyone who’s read Brian Francis Slattery’s Spaceman Blues knows, it’s always a good thing when he writes about music.
• Three members of the King clan–Stephen, Tabitha, and Owen–do a talk about writing for D.C. area high schoolers at the Library of Congress and the Washington Post writes about the family’s literary life. Some excellent little moments, like this one:

  There is a widespread notion that "if you sell a lot of books, you’ve got to be peddling crap," she adds, and the problem is, it’s sometimes true. There are big-name authors who "can’t write and they can’t plot."

  "But we won’t mention any names. Like James Patterson," Stephen says.

• Jane Smiley stirs up some dust with her snobby review of Jennifer Weiner’s latest. Frank Wilson at Books Inq says he wouldn’t have editedpulled the review either; spirited discussion in the comments.
• Y tu, mattresses? Is everything we touch now polluted with vile substances? Don’t answer.
• The fabulous Kevin Brockmeier will be the next guest editor for Best American Fantasy. (Congratulations, Matt!) Want a reminder what his taste is like? Some time ago, I posted the list of his 50 favorite books.
• See The Pixies documentary loudQUIETloud online free for a week.
• SAT = troubled test.
• Jessa Crispin on reader’s block. I’m all about regressing to the Christopher Pike stage.
• Ypulse reminds me to read the Magic in the Mirrorstone anthology.
• Kelley Eskridge on story and mirror neurons.

• Clearing out the bookmarks. Let’s go.
• The peace symbol turns 50.
• Where is John Hughes?
• Libba Bray waxes funny on the movie biz and a possible adaptation of her Gemma Doyle trilogy.
• Liz Hand reviews Jeff Ford’s The Shadow Year for F&SF: ""Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies," wrote the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay; "Nobody that matters, that is." Jeffrey Ford’s beautiful new novel, The Shadow Year, is an account of childhood’s kingdom under siege, a book so achingly lovely and, yes, profound, that one longs to call it a masterpiece. Only it seems a bit unfair to burden an author at mid-career with such a weight." (The other day Niall was asking somewhere in one of the reviewing conversations about who people’s favorite critics are; Liz Hand is definitely one of mine.) See also: Midori Snyder on book the same: "… contains a number of my favorite literary themes: a child’s perspective of the mysterious (and often ambiguous) world of adults; the intuitive fantasy world of children; and the echo of fairy tale rites-of-passage through dark and dangerous woods."
• Slap a pink cover on it, and it’s chick lit? Not really.
• Eric Alterman on the "death and life of the American newspaper."
• Karen Joy Fowler’s got a brand-new website, and she’s currently on tour supporting Wit’s End. Catch her if you can.
• The science behind some fairy tales.
• Markus Zusak interviewed in the Guardian:

  What advice would you give to new writers?
  Don’t be afraid to fail. I fail every day. I failed thousands of times writing The Book Thief, and that book now means everything to me. Of course, I have many doubts and fears about that book, too, but some of what I feel are the best ideas in it came to me when I was working away for apparently no result. Failure has been my best friend as a writer. It tests you, to see if you have what it takes to see it through.

  Is there a secret to writing?
  The best ideas come to you when you’re sitting down, working. That’s when most of the breakthroughs occur – simply by doing the work. If someone wanted to be a runner, you don’t tell them to think about running, you tell them to run. And the same simple idea applies to writing, I hope.

• The next Shaun Tan book we have to look forward to is Tales from Outer Suburbia, due in October. (Via Jonathan Strahan.)
• Robots!
• Profit sharing instead of advances? Kassia has some thoughts.
• A buffalo mozzarella crisis? Now this is serious.
• The differences between comic books and picture books.
• Finally: Don’t f with Maud. She can call you all sorts of things.

• Operation Teen Book Drop is coming up on April 17. Get details on how to participate.
• Greg Frost and John Kessel are up to all sorts of audio shenanigans, apparently–for starters, check out Frost reading the inimitable JK’s "Every Angel is Terrifying." If Kessel’s new collection, The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories, isn’t on your radar, where have you been? It’s an April Booksense pick and everything.
• Michaelangelo = brainiac art. (Via the well–reviewed Jeff Ford. I’m finally reading The Shadow Year, which makes me very happy.)
• Margaret Atwood on Anne of Green Gables.
• Everybody’s talking about reviewing again. Mostly? Yawn.
• Giving names to the Does of the world.
• Colleen Lindsay offers some rules of thumb on target word counts for various genres.
• And in news of the excellent variety, I’ve recently discovered that both Kelley Eskridge and Nicola Griffith now have blogs. RSSed.

• Karen Joy Fowler’s latest, Wit’s End, gets some love from Faye Jones at the Nashville Scene: "Wit’s End may not have the built-in audience that The Jane Austen Book Club did, but it’s the kind of novel that Austen herself just might have enjoyed." I adored it too, and will be devoting a post to it here very soon. (I do have a mini-review over in the Read Read sidebar already though.)
• Quantum mechanics and Super Mario. (Apologies, but I can’t remember where I first spotted this link.)
• John and Hank Green have created a new toy: Visit the Omnictionary to play.
• My old pal Michaelangelo Matos reviews Galaxie 500/Luna frontman Dean Wareham’s new memoir, Black Postcards: A Rock and Roll Romance, for the Baltimore City Paper: "But Black Postcards is notably hard-nosed even for what is lately a crowded field, the ’90s alt-rock musician memoir. With it, Wareham joins the ranks of Petal Pusher, by Laurie Lindeen of Minneapolis rockers Zuzu’s Petals; Everything I’m Cracked Up to Be, by Boston singer/songwriter Jen Trynin; and Semisonic drummer Jacob Slichter’s So You Wanna Be a Rock and Roll Star. And just as Luna towered over the other authors’ bands, Wareham’s book is the best of this crop." Must get. Michaelangelo and I originally met and bonded over our shared Luna love. If he likes it, it’s worth reading.
• Maud defends big ideas in fiction. I couldn’t agree more. This is one of the reasons I love children’s literature and YA (especially the SF).
• CAAF says it all about the welcome cancellation of The Return of Jezebel James. Miss Guided, still rocking. Last night, there was even a Breakfast Club homage.
• Finally: MAS is such an art star. Check out the digital version of her currently-showing, kick-ass, graduating exhibition. The Jersey Shore images will get obsessively stuck in your brain. Trust me. The landscapes are also completely awesome, and the sex offender compositions disturbing. I only wish you could all see them as MAS intended.

• This snippet of (typically excellent critic) Ron Charles’ review of Tony Earley’s The Blue Star, a follow-up to Jim the Boy, triggered my spit-take reflex: At the time, I remember consulting with several reviewers around the country about how to categorize Jim the Boy. The problem concerned us because we cared so much. Was it a YA book? The juvenile jacket cover — retained, unfortunately, for this sequel — seemed aimed at middle-schoolers, but we worried about scaring off adult readers with that label, and we suspected it was too slow for teens anyhow (no rape, school shooting or bone cancer — the unholy trinity of YA lit). Wow, what an outdated view of realistic YA based seemingly on the idea of the "problem novel." Hey, reviewers, why not just review the book at hand instead of offering aside commentary on a genre you aren’t overly familiar with? And if you do offer up said views, why not couch them in less condescending terms? Just a thought.
• Lois Lowry rocks.
• The Millions has the relevant links involving the most controversial round of this year’s Tourney of Books so far. Whether you consider the booth commentary on Mark’s decision appropriate or inappropriate, it’s tough to deny that it provides enough fodder for several interesting discussions.
• Weep not for the LBC. (It’s been gone for a few months now, and no one even really noticed. A worthy effort dead of several causes, mostly lack of participation. The next generation efforts are where it’s at now.)