Hangovers

• The ultra-fabbest Cecil Castellucci gets the royal interview treatment at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast. (Which reminds me I need to get cracking and send her some interview q’s myself.)
• Paul Witcover cage matches BEA vs. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. Bet you can guess the winner…
• We were delighted on our way to buy dishwashing detergent last night to discover that Fresh Air had an interview with Judd Apatow and Seth Rogan. Heart. They have a new movie coming out called Knocked Up; Ann Hornaday says eh, unfortunately.
• Roxanne Connelly posts a fine remembrance of Gilmore Girls over at MediaLoper.
• The Library of Congress is going to name a national ambassador of young people’s literature with a two-year term.
• The Washington Post has an examination of the disappearing honeybee phenom.
• Doesn’t BEA make it frightfully easy to keep up with your RSS reader? I likes it.

• A profile of Brent Hartinger and his new fantasy Dreamquest.
• Was talking about intuitive writing vs. more planned stuff with Haddayr and behold! there are links of interest popping up everywhere: see Janni Simner’s post, Kris Reisz’s follow-up, and the WashPost on Michael Ondaatje’s process.
• Betsy reviews Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos (great title), which sounds intriguing.
• Slate polls some writers and most compose in good old Courier, or some variation thereon. I recently attempted composing in a different font as an experiment and turned out some terrible pages. Coincidence? I’m taking no chances: back to Courier.
• Callie on Natalie Angier’s latest, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science.
• J.L. Bell on distinctive dialogue.
• The Ratbastards, aka Velocity Press, are launching a new novella series.
• Read Roger has an excellent post and discussion on overused review phrases, jumping off a Daily Telegraph piece.
• I forgot to mention in the big huge Wiscon post that even though the dogs apparently did great at Dogtown, the delicate flower that is Emma picked up an eye irritation in both eyes (the vet says probably from cleaners and such there, possibly dust outside, etc). Pet ownership is the pricey, huh? $180 later, she’ll be just fine (in her defense, the bulk of the bill was actually for their summer flea treatments). Hopefully, Puck and Emma will make the photos page of Dogtown, at least. The sigh.
• But I’m not going to complain too much, because Terrible Mother has an amazing post about the reality of a single working mother trying to make ends meet. Seriously, one of the best posts I’ve read in a long, long time.
• Ysabeau has a thoughtful reaction to Octavian Nothing. I’m curious to know how kids are reacting to it too.
• Go party with my LBC cohorts at the BEA party tonight at Kettle of Fish in Greenwich Village.

• Madison! Tomorrow! It’s the most wonderful time of the year… I can’t wait to see all youse guys. (Except for you and you, who ain’t coming this year. Wah, I say. Wah.) Moles attempts to pre-stir up some controversy.
• Cecil and her Plain Janes get boingled! Also, she joins the hearting of Ysabeau’s Flora Segunda.
• Good omens for the first edition of Best American Fantasy; I’ve been making my way slowly through an advance copy and can report it’s full of a fabulous, diverse crop of stories.
• What happens when you become friends with the writer you most admire? (Via Maud.) In my experience, this is an entirely good thing.
• Shrunken head collection!(Via Betsy at Fuse.)
• Seven Impossible Things on China’s Un Lun Dun.
• Agent Nathan Bransford on crafting a great hook.
• Colleen’s reading Nicola Griffith’s Always and has some very interesting thoughts on it and Joss Whedon’s recent call to teach girls how to defend themselves.
• The writer’s life, rendered pictorially. (But sans nicotine here.) (Via Kameron.)

• Wah, we are suddenly totally unable to go up to Dayton tonight to hang with the fabulous Ms. Holly Black and her tour buddy Cassie Claire, but if you’re nearby, you should get thee to their reading. They’ll be at Books & Co. at 7 p.m.
• The sad news about Lloyd Alexander is everywhere. He was a giant. A few links: WashPost obit, Read Roger has thoughts from Elizabeth Law, and Terri Windling at Endicott.
• I can’t remember where I found this, but Laurel K. Hamilton pictorial hijincks. Do. Not. Miss.
• J.L. Bell on the picture book/gender study.
• Matt Cheney on Mary Ann Caws’ Glorious Eccentrics: Modernist Women Painting and Writing. I must get this book.
• Colleen on the difficulties of finding YA mysteries and where to look.
• Just got the new U.S. Orbit imprint’s initial catalogue and mission statement in the mail and found both very impressive. Plus, those are truly lovely covers they’re designing. I’m really looking forward to its launch this fall.
• Have a nice weekend, gang.

• Katherine Dunn, the genius who wrote Geek Love, will be at the inferior 4+1 the week of May 11 taking questions and things. Yay!
• Another rousing endorsement for Cecil’s Beige, which I really will post about at length sometime soon.
• More writing wisdom from Joe Schreiber, much appreciated by those of us in drafty, revisiony hell: It seems to me that even if you’re just starting out — maybe especially then — this commitment to quality, page after page, seems at least as important as the amount of published material. Yes, you ought to write a lot. Yes, you want to make an impact in the reader’s consciousness. Yes, you ought to work hard and seriously and produce, produce, produce. But at the end of the day, when you have the thing that you’re going to take out into the world as a reflection of your heart, your ambition, the height of your powers — in a word, your soul — you owe it to yourself to make it the best you can be. And be sure. Because even if nobody else knows, you’ll know.
• Toni Schlesinger on the imaginary inhabitants of display apartments. (Via Jenny D.) (Note: I had to do print view to be able to get this on a background I could read.)
• So, Veronica Mars is probably dead and Kristen Bell’s a Gossip Girl. Huh. Updated: Not that the show’s been that great this season, but still sad. And what a terrible, unclassy way for the network to "inform" Rob Thomas.

• Key A-Team members Dirk Benedict, Mr. T and Dwight Schultz will be on Most Haunted attempting to contact George Peppard, their dearly departed comrade. Word is they need his help because they’ve been convicted of a crime they didn’t commit. (Via Andy Duncan.)
• Heliotrope Issue 2 is now live.
• Sign Maureen Johnson’s online petition to keep The Bermudez Triangle on the shelves in Bartlesville.
• Roger Sutton wonders about the proliferation of metafictional fairy tale retellings for kids who may never have encountered traditional versions.
• A fantastic piece in The Believer by Justine Taylor: "The Codex Seraphinianus."
• Would you live in a dome?
• The ever-wonderful Colleen gets feted with the full Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast interview treatment. Check it out.
• Really wonderful NYT piece by David Grossman.
• The award-winning Justine wishes for the eternal life of Harry Potter.
• Austin on David Hockney’s Secret Knowledge.

Well, gang, I’m packeting the rest of the week, so things will be bumpy around here. Or possibly calm as a … very calm sea. In the meantime:

• Interesting conversations here and here that I’ve more or less stayed out of (or attempted to anyway) because I don’t have time (and I’ve lost my Night Shade log-in/password). I do want to say though, that Gordon Van Gelder deserves a lot of credit for starting this discussion in the first place. Skim past any username with a Truesdale or a Francis Murphy in it to avoid getting bogged down in nonsensical flames and it’s a wide-ranging, worthwhile discussion. (It’s about whether there’s a gender bias at work at F&SF.) I say, ladies of SF, send him your stories. Please.
• Lionel Shriver on reviewing.
• Have I mentioned the Alan DeNiro dance party at the LBC yet today? Nope? Go there. Also, watch Gavin’s video games.
• Sarah Prineas has an excellent post about writing with kids (or any other distraction).
• Robot community! (Via Fuse.)
• The YA YA YAs explore the Chinese stereotypes in Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese.
• Cecil’s Beige is out and it is so FABULOUS. Buy buy buy. More as soon as I have a brain and time.

• Maureen McHugh requests more strangeness in fiction. Now that I can second.
• Graham Joyce loves Generation Loss in the Washington Post — this is the first book I’m going to read after my last packet of the semester goes in during June. I only wish I’d had the time to get to it already.
• Nicola Griffith’s beyond wonderful novel Always (the latest Aud novel) is officially out. Get reading. (Thanks to Dave for the pub date reminder.) She’s also interviewed at After Ellen. (Thanks to Melissa M for the interview link.) I so loved this book you’ll be hearing a lot more about it this summer at the LBC.

• The cool bits story generator. (Via Steph.)
• Big discussion on gender and how you "know" you’re a man or woman (if you do) over at Jed’s place. (Via somewhere I forget.)
• Email some school types to stop the banning of Maureen Johnson’s The Bermudez Triangle.
• Marshall Klimasewiski (author of The Cottagers) is over at the LBC and he wants your interstitial fic recommendations. You know what to do.
• David Byrne and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin talk brainy about music. (Via Austin.)
• The terrors of melamine.

• See everyone on the NYT bloggers vs. trad reviewers piece. I’m happy to see so many of my own fave bloggers get some recognition, but otherwise can’t bring myself to care much about the endless analysis on this one. Litblogs will be what they’re going to be, which is mostly to say that they will never be One Thing–what they are may occasionally intersect with print reviewing, but often, it may not. And that’s okay. Unless you figure out how to save print newspapers, you ain’t going to save print book reviews, at least in the short term. Professional reviewers and critics are going to have to adapt, just like newspapers are. It has nothing to do with whether people still read books or not, it has to do with whether they’re still reading newspapers.
• Maureen reminds me about that yoga class I wanted to take this year. What I want to know is whether it prevents crankiness?
• Kill a Mary Sue.
• The art of Sergey Tyukanov.
• Aqueduct Press has a lively blog.