Hangovers

• Whoops. Yesterday got away from me. Book post later.
• Amazing book structures. (Via Leila.)
• Will Shetterly on outlines.
• FAQ for Dogs, at McSweeney’s. (Thanks, Micol!)
• Justine on romances, followed by Cassie Clare on same. And see also Justine on swearing. Which I happen to adore.
• Emma Bull’s been posting lots of great Q&As on her LJ about her forthcoming novel Territory, which those with excellent memories will recall Holly Black recommended just the other day.
• Sarah Prineas kicks off a thread on titles.
• Evolving microbes in the lab. Fascinating stuff.
• Anne interviews Alice Sebold.
• And over at the Mumpsimus, Matt does that voodoo of calling an idiotic argument an idiotic argument that he does so well.
• The magazine writer smackdown over that profile of Angelina Jolie. Amusemoi.

• Mark hosts Colleen for a giveaway of Nicola Griffith’s Always. What she said.
• Caroline Spector on the horrors of tween magazines.
• The Washington Post has a hilarious, charming interview with Annie Dillard: "A whole hell of a lot of it rhymes, though I don’t expect anyone will notice. You can add punch to a paragraph by ending with a true rhyme."
• Want this lap desk. (Via someone!)
• Melissa Marr’s debut YA fantasy novel Wicked Lovely, which I’m looking forward to, gets a rare full review in Book World on a week that’s not a children’s lit week. I hope they’re going to be doing more of that.
• My hero Maureen posts some excellent plot exercises she used in her teaching last week.
• Ysabeau on the resurgence of Frye boots.
• Roger Sutton is looking for stories from lesbians who read Nancy Garden’s Annie on My Mind during their formative years for a second look the Horn Book is doing in honor of its 25th anniversary reissue.
• Sarah Weinman looks at superhero lit for Poets & Writers, and interviews two of my favoritest people, Dave Schwartz and Shana Cohen. I’ll post about Austin Grossman’s book soon, but basically, yes, it delivers exactly what it promises and that is a very fun thing.
• J.L. Bell on why girls write in diaries and boys use journals.
• Getting rid of books in the NYT. We’ve officially run out of shelf space and lately have been unloading some books it seems unlikely we’ll ever crack, or ever crack again. I feel lighter and less in danger from teetering stacks. The freed shelf space is immediately refilled. All is right with the world.

• Some interesting objections to Scalzi’s post directed to teenagers who write here and here. See also: Justine’s thoughts (and don’t miss Jenny D’s comment) and Madeleine Robins. I tend to think we should just let teenagers be teenagers–y’know, I never believed anything an adult told me when I was younger, certainly not just because they said so. It seems to me that thinking your work is better than it is may be one of the necessary steps toward becoming a "real" writer later on, when you will switch to always believing it’s complete crap. Anyway, there are many, many things that you can only learn by figuring them out for yourself. I think this is one of them. Mailing stuff off and getting it rejected when you’re a teenager (or, perhaps worse, accepted) is really just another part of that process.
• Ed Park on Kim Stanley Robinson’s trio of novels about climate change.
• An apparently amazing speech (haven’t had a chance to listen yet) given by David Levithan at Reading Matters is available as a podcast. (Via Justine.)
• The Literary Review of Canada considers a new book about Canadian comic books. (Via Bookninja.)
• Maureen writes about food again; this time it’s Thai.
• Ruth Marcus says that girls today don’t need Nancy Drew. I’m unconvinced.

• The search for the ancient land of Kush.
• Finale of the myspace series Prom Queen.
• Jonathan Yardley reflects on Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. I remember perfectly reading this upstairs in the bedroom with the really loud window a/c unit one summer when we were staying with my grandmother.
• An essay by Shaun Tan on creativity and originality. (Via Betsy.)
• Garth at the Millions posts about genre crossing and Chabon’s latest, and Niall adds his thoughts.
• The European Space Agency is looking for volunteers to spend 17 months simulating a trip to Mars.
• Dave Moles starts a new meme (and an interesting one): Ten Things I Don’t Know About Writing.

• Terri Windling has asked for some research help over at Emma Bull’s LJ; she’s putting together a reading list to go with an article about orphans, foundlings, changelings, bartered children, etcetera in fiction.
• Literaticat interviews publicity director for Little, Brown Books for Young Readers Elizabeth Eulberg.
• Jen Robinson thanks folks for clicking through and buying books using her amazon affiliate links; she reveals that she uses the money for books. Shaken & Stirred readers, I know you’ll be happy to learn that I use my amazon associates money to order Lush bath products (and once a fancy litter box!). Please, keep on clicking.
• Carl Zimmer has a piece in the NYT about long-lived (and otherwise) animals.
• The Urban Pantheist on disappearing bees. (Via Barb)
• Linda Nagata is offering her new YA novel online as a PDF for 5 bucks. (Via Maureen, who recommends her other work highly as being "strange strange.")
• Melvin McCosh, of the most fabulous and strange bookshop ever — his house, has passed away and is remembered in the Star-Tribune. Buying books from him was quite the experience; the first time I was ever taken to McCosh’s, I got stung 50 or so times by mosquitoes in the front yard, while playing with a friend’s daughter. But I still managed to buy a book about Charlie Chaplin, if I’m remembering correctly.
• Jennifer Egan likes Jean Thompson’s collection Throw Like a Girl in the NYT, but Callie was there first. (It’s on my stack.)
• Rachel Swirsky is collecting the names of feminist-friendly SF publications, following another eruption of head-exploding idiocy last week that I will not link to. (If you’re determined to find it, go to Hannah’s and scroll.)
• Ted wants you to give to a worthy, and infuriating, cause.
• Raymond Carver Mad Libs. (Via Maud)
• Tom Bissell on the Loch Ness Monster. (Via CAAF)

And the SBBT kicks off with:

Today’s Interviews:
Gene Yang at Finding Wonderland

• I keep forgetting to link to the shiny, shiny The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, which comes out in August and will include a couple of the Dear Aunt Gwenda columns. (Preorder now!) The cover is so pretty; you can see the more or less final version, along with some concepts that weren’t chosen at the designer’s blog (he’s also the chief designer at Payseur and Schmidt and so must have had a hand in the gorgeous design for Nicola’s memoir, and he did the fabulous cover for Liz Hand’s Generation Loss too). (Oh, and you might also be interested in his illustrations for Ted Chiang’s "The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate" for Subterranean.)
• Colleen explains her master plan (mwahaha) behind organizing the Summer Blog Blast Tour, which will be taking the kidlit-o-verse by storm next week, including this space, with a host of interviews with fabulous, fabulous authors. I’ll have fun little interviews with Cecil Castellucci, Bennett Madison, Holly Black, and Ysabeau Wilce. Master schedule linkage shortly.
• Yatterings has an interview with Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss about editing Interfictions, a new anthology of kick-ass stories also known as interstitial work.
• Maureen advises taking other writers to lunch to work out your plot. (I just married one.)
• New English children’s laureate Michael Rosen slams education policy: "There is a huge push on to create an environment – in nurseries, and reception, and year ones and year twos – where books are secondary to the process of reading. This seems oxymoronic to me. We must, must have at the heart of learning to read the pleasure that is reading."
• A fab Lizzie Borden poem over at Theresa’s Witty Staircase.
• Do as Carrie says and buy some books from Soft Skull and McSweeney’s. They need you.
• Mr. McLaren offers some thoughts on coming technology developments using pron as his prognostication tool.

• Did I mention I got an extension on my packet deadline to next Tuesday evening? So yeah, that’s why the sparseness. However, expect to be flooded like nobody’s business at the end of next week, when I am driven crazy by my needy animules and running the household solo while Christopher is off rompily critiquing at Syc Hill in the mountains of North Carolina. Although I am already making secret plans to go see the Pirates movie, and then Waitress to cleanse my brain of it. I’m also planning to clean out the closet — look out, world!
• Colleen read Always, and she got it and loved it. Yay. This is the best part of writing about books on the Web. It makes me happy. I must confess that I couldn’t wait and have been reading the Griffith memoir and experiencing the fabulous box all week, so a post on that soon. It is The Coolest Thing Ever.
• Teddy Bear military robot! So, someone in DoD saw the movie version of Screamers too, huh? (But, at least this robot looks like an actual robot and not like a vacuum cleaner; I prefer my robots humanoid and science fictional, unlike SOME PEOPLE.) (Via Ysabeau.)
• "My Book Deal Ruined My Life." Then, please, by all means throw your obnoxious selves off a bridge or something. Also, whoever had the idea for this story, please follow suit.
• J.L. Bell condenses the kids’ take on BEA.
• Do a good deed if you have extra scratch; help out Michelle at Scholar’s Blog, who just got downsized.
• We all know what happens if a butterfly flaps its wings on the other side of the world or Ando gets killed, but what if you disappear Paris Hilton from the Internerd?
• The immortalized death throes of dinos. (Via Eat Our Brains.)
• Patrick Brown’s wife Edan Lepucki posts over at The Millions about the Oprah vs. McCarthy nonevent interview, and hers is pretty much the only take I’ve seen that mentions the uber-creepy moment early on when Oprah ventured into serious territory about the lack of women in his fiction and he basically shrugged it off. See also: Jennifer Weiner’s take.

• John August on writing novels versus scripts. (Via Erin.)
• Goats vs. Kudzu. (Via Jenny D.)
• Some interesting conversation about the value of critiques and online workshops and etc.: first at Rachel Swirsky’s blog, and then in a follow-up post by Sarah Prineas.
• I’m just really, really thankful I didn’t miss this amazing discussion of didacticism and passion and politics in the comments at Read Roger’s because it happened during Wiscon. Particularly thoughtful comments from Tobin Anderson, "Ruth" and Roger himself. Go read it.
• I heart Rufus Wainwright; so does the NYT.
• Susan Beth Pfeffer, of Life How We Knew It fame, has a new blog. (Via Fuse.)
• Ice and water library.

• First and foremost: YAY! The Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards for Excellence in Children’s Literature winners and honor books have been released and Octavian Nothing took home best fiction, but more importantly my MFA advisor, the brilliant Tim Wynne-Jones, got one of the two honor slots for Rex Zero and the End of the World. Yay!
• Bookninja has Ray Bradbury saying something nutty about Farenheit 451 not being about censorship.
• Austin uses a comment by Zadie Smith on the intersection between writing and personality as a jumping off point for his own thoughts on the subject.
• Betsy’s best children’s novels you’ve never read list. Must locate copy of The Winged Girl of Knossos. Library not helping.
• Quills finalists and, hey, they actually are way better this year.
• Southern gothic haunted mansion goodness in the NYT. Is a bright purple jacket on a man a dead giveaway of a certain predilection for the mystical? Discuss.

I have all these posts fluttering around to write once packet the final (of this semester) is over, which is a week from today. Assuming all goes according to plan. This means, though, that since I’ve spent the last couple of weeks revising, I have to bust it and do 1500 words a day or so of new material for the next six days. (Yes, I have enough to turn in already, but I’d really rather turn in 50 new messy messy pages of stuff he hasn’t seen, so I get direction on where to go with them, than stuff that is now where it needs to be due to revision and just get the nod on it — it really is strange to do a draft this way, but working so far, so…) I also appear to have a bit of Scratchy Throat & Tiny Men Inside Temples Crud that no doubt came courtesy of Wiscon, but I’m pretending I don’t, other than sleeping in until nearly 11 today and still being in my pajamas.  Christopher leaves for Syc Hill this time next week, so he’s under the deadline gun too. This will be a fun week, no?

I am getting together an ordering page for Say… what’s the combination? that contributors can link to — and contributor and subscriber copies and such will be en route soon, but it may take a week or so longer than it should. Yes, we know we suck at this admin stuff, which is why the next issue is Say… is that the end?, ahem.

• Erin at Rarely Likable on The Park Book by Charlotte Zolotow.
• John Hodgman on Kim Deitch.
• Hidden edges and writing. (Via Maud.)
• I’ve stayed out of the bloggers vs. "real" reviews kerfluffle more or less, because I think it is idiotic. This, however, might just push me off the edge because it is SOOOOO idiotic that it can’t pass without comment.
• "The Math Behind Beauty." (Via Jenny D.)
• Christopher made the local paper with his activism; he’s the second green shirt riding in the pack. (He asked me to clarify that he’s also mentioned in the article.)