Hangovers

• Jeff Ford on the wonderful Alberto Manguel.
• Inspired by yesterday’s ALA announcement, Colleen names her first annual "You Should Read This!" young adult book picks. Great list!
• BFSA shortlists announced. That is some novel list.
• Part 2 of Counterbalance’s DFW account.
• Le Cineclub with Lauren and Emma returns. Joie!
• Matt Cheney’s picks from 2005 for Locus.
• "This American Life" coming to Showtime.

• Carl Zimmer on new research into the effects of toxoplasma (which will be familiar to anyone who has read Peeps) on humans: There’s plenty left to do to turn these results into a full-blown explanation of parasites and personalities. For example, what is Toxoplasma releasing into brains to manipulate its hosts? And how does that substance give rise to schizophrenia in some humans? And even if the hypothesis does hold up, it would only account for some cases of schizophrenia, while the cause of others would remain undiscovered. But still…the idea that parasites are tinkering with humanity’s personality–perhaps even giving rise to cultural diversity–is taking over my head like a bad case of Toxoplasma.
• The Watcher has a ton of Veronica Mars scoop (there’s forewarning of spoilers) straight from Rob Thomas. And FINALLY we get a new episode next Wednesday, which makes me superhappy.
• Stephen King ringtones. (Via Conversational Reading.)
• Excellent DFW account at Counterbalance.
• Cynsations has an interview with the fabulous Miss Cecil Castellucci about her fabulous forthcoming book The Queen of Cool (about which I will say more very soon): So this was like January 2004. I had met Aimee Bender, who is a fabulous L.A. author, at a literary speakeasy. When I told her that I had sold my first novel, she said "Write your second one before your first one comes out." I was like, "Why?" and she was like, "Because that way you won’t freak out." She’s kind of an L.A. literary Goddess, so naturally, I trusted her, and I just got to work.
• Alan posts an amazing poem by Joan Murray and points to more. He also tries to prevent his lovely wife from telling the truth about his weird habits. (C’mon, DeNiro, let your freak flag fly.)
• Chris McLaren has a lot of cool stuff on his walls.
• William Shatner sold one of his kidney stones. (Via Paul Collins.)
• Justine on Samuel Delany’s new book About Writing. WANT. (I, of course, recommend The Green Bible.)
• Furries love Hal Duncan.
• Style goddess Lauren Cerand suggests that the ladies of the red carpet get some more adventurous taste and reveals that there’s been a huge hubbub over Reese Witherspoon’s uniboob-making frock from the Golden Globes, which was first worn by Kirsten Dunst to the same event.
• 1UP.com had kids play classic video games (such as my favorite Adventure) and recorded their responses. Hilarity ensues. (Via the Sleep Deprivation Institute.)
• Happy Saturday — despite still being sniffly and exhausted, I’m planning to pretend to be human again today and ride my bike for a bit and try to write something. You have a human day too.

• New Yorker piece on Battlestar Gallactica. (Via Niall Harrison.)
• Do you have a place that feels like home?
• Christopher got a new computer and, more importantly, sold "Another Word for Map is Faith" to F&SF. Yay!
• Sarah on Leif Garrett’s embarrassing drug arrest. (A subway ticket?)
• Excellent stunt casting on Veronica Mars — Maeby and George Michael!
• Maud Newton has written an article on Mark Twain for The American Prospect. Must purchase.
• Librarian Nancy loves Maureen McHugh. (Via Ed, who has some complaints about the framing of the rec.)
• Holly Black sez smart things on critiquing and helping takes things to the next level.
• Erin’s hot dog penguin slicer. (KDL, you must see.) (Scroll down.)

• Cynsations interviews Annette Curtis Klause about her upcoming book Freaks. There’s also an interesting discussion of the movie version of Blood and Chocolate: "They seem to have made the characters older, as well as setting the story in Eastern Europe which kind of negates the whole point of the plot–werewolves could be sitting right next to you in your high school homeroom."
• Glen Hirshberg on matters of style.
• Jessica Lee Jernigan on evolving definitions of feminism.
• Waking up = Being drunk.
• PW’s 2005 Cuffies (childrens’ bookseller faves). (Via the on-it Miss Cecil.)
• Jed Hartman has started a great little sideblog called Neology, devoted to "words I encounter that I don’t know the meanings of, and citations of interesting usage, and occasional malaprops from published sources, and so on."
• Subway library book dispensers in Sweden. Via the Sleep Deprivation Institute.
• Darby M. Dixon III announces that big things are coming: "So with a Darren Aronofsky sci-fi (?) epic (?) (The Fountain) due for release this year (?), and a new David Lynch film on the way, this year is set to be the biggest year for hipster artistic fervor ever. I am, you could say, excited. If David Foster Wallace were to this year release Infinte Jest 2: Smackin’ Some Racket, I would pretty much completely lose my shit."
• Tod Goldberg’s preferred coffee mug quotations.
• Kelly sells the rights for a possible movie version of "The Faery Handbag." Yay!
• And, behind the cut, I steal a lovely poem that Hannah Wolf Bowen posted:

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• Rowling’s husband doesn’t care about her plots. That, or anesthetist is a code of some kind.
• Booksquare pulls out some choice facts about fine Southern publishing house Algonquin.
• Syntax of Things is on top of the Frey scoop. And Jeff Ford on The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis, otherwise known as the Best Chess Novel ever. Any time people are talking about Tevis, I’m happy. READ HIM. Especially the SF stuff if you don’t think you "get" SF. (Or if you do, if you do, you should read him immediately.)
• Gnooks! Just do it when you get time: It recommends authors you’ll like based on entering an author’s name. Kind of like Pandora for writers. (Via Mr. Klima.)

• Colleen wants to know where you get your ideas.
• Catholic Church to abolish limbo. (Via Mr. Barzak.)
• Scott has a new installment of his writing advice, complete with Raymond Chandler.
• The Watcher on how to fix the Oscars.
• Spitting.
• Apparently, reading blogs before bed leads to strange interludes in dreams where your husband is berating you to, "Add Meghan McCarron and Dave Schwartz to your blogroll!" while you insist, "I already have!" Anyway, my color quiz results are as depressing as anyone’s, despite the teaser:
  

  I took the free ColorQuiz.com personality test! "Strives for a life rich in activity and experience…" Click here to read the rest of the results.

• I foolishly counted myself in to Ed’s 75 book challenge for 2006; I’ve started a little list down at the bottom of the right column to track my progress. I’ll just be putting titles and star rankings there and still plan to pull out my favorites for the Read Read list. Let’s see how long I actually stay on top of adding the books I read.
• Michelle Richmond calls attention to the Bigfoot Cultural Resurgence. Everywhere I turn these days: Bigfoot, Bigfoot, Bigfoot. I have kind of a soft spot for the big guy, based on this pseudo-scientific book about him my brother and I had when we were kids (another in the series focused on the Loch Ness Monster) and Molly Gloss’s excellent novel Wild Life.
• Why is technology so absent from many great book lists? (Via someone, I forget who though.)
• A book in a year? Or a year-long series of columns about writing a book.
• Diana Peterfreund (whose blog is charming and wonderful on a daily basis) on the experience of going through her first set of page proofs.
• Jeff VanderMeer has a host of good posts as well, but I’m pointing especially to his wife Ann’s music recommendations from 2005 and three overlooked books also from that vintage year.
• Chris McLaren is also burning up the circuits, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t point to this excellent, thoughtful post, which provoked an equally excellent, thoughtful discussion about evolution and smartness in the comments (psst: lots of Ted Chiang smartness on evolution there).
• Jessica Lee Jernigan interviews Lydia Millet about Oh Pure and Radiant Heart.
• The 200 top-selling books of 2005. (Via Conversational Reading.)

Hello, my pretties.

• Mapletree7 over at Book of the Day uses the cleverest phrase ever to describe Iain Banks’ The Bridge: "The Bridge is a psychological tour de France." Emphasis mine.
• Colleen loves Wintering by Kate Moses and relates to Sylvia Plath, overwhelmed mother and writer. (Where DOES the time go? I manage to keep myself from complaining — mostly, anyway — by thinking sympathetically about those of you with children on top of everything else. How do you find time to breathe?)
• An excellent interview with Rebecca Skloot that’s full of tips (especially for freelancers). I particularly like this part: After she has finished researching, but before she begins writing, Rebecca spends some time ruminating. She calls this process of not writing but thinking intensely about her story (both consciously and sub-consciously) “fomulgating.” It’s another concept that she got from her father, a mixture of promulgating and procrastinating and several other words they’ve long forgotten. Fomulgating, in Skloot-speak, is the “writing that happens when you’re not writing.” It’s the stewing, the fermenting, the knitting together of a story that happens when the writer is patient and in repose.
• My favorite Susan Marie Groppi waxes brilliant on Christopher’s The Voluntary State. (I’d tell you he’s working on that novel right next to me RIGHT THIS SECOND but it might jinx it.)

And that’s all for today, because I am beaten like an egg. Or something.

Happy New Year, beloved readers; may yours be filled with whatever you desire.

I only have a few straggling hangovers today because bloglines, she is down, down, down in the burning ring of fire. That’s probably to the good of my getting things done today. And once I finish up this next thing, I should have time to do some reviews of things I’ve been reading lately and fun stuff like that.

• Tom Cruise makes it into the dictionary — The Historical Dictionary of American Slang, anyway — with "jump the couch." Why do I suddenly feel a need to watch Ball of Fire? (Via #1HS.)
• More news so sad I keep forgetting to post it: Infinite Matrix follows Sci Fiction into that good night.
• Girl Genius comics! (Discovered via Jed.)
• Philip Pullman’s site has a wonderful section where he answers questions About the Writing, that’s full of gems like this: No, I was ignored. When anyone took any notice it was to point out what a twit I was, and laugh at me. This was the best possible preparation for the life of a novelist. If you have grown-ups fussing over you and encouraging you and taking an interest, you begin to think you’re important, and furthermore that you need and deserve their attention. After a while you become incapable of working without someone else motivating you. You’re much better off supplying your own energy, and writing in spite of the fact that no-one’s interested, and even learning to put up with other people’s contempt and ridicule. What do they know, anyway?
• Speaking of which, Justine’s kicked off a fabulous discussion of the 101 humiliations of being a writer. Go join.

New Year’s EVE hangovers (see below explanation of the inner workings of BondGirl Bizarro World):

• Don’t tell anyone, but it turns out Florida’s weird.
• Wired lists the 50 best robots ever. And it’s a damn fine list.
• Greg van Eekhout (change your blogrolls and bookmarks!) has posted a podcast of his excellent story "Clean City," which first appeared in the honorable Say… magazine.
• An excellent profile of Margo Lanagan in which it is revealed that she writes ten pages a day when she’s working. ::cowering in awe::
• Southern Blog Cabal member Jeff Bryant’s back on the West Coast and has a lovely post about the road to prove it.
• Elizabeth Bear weighs in on the honor in ambitious failure in writing with an AMAZING post that you should definitely read. And she has made Sapphire and Steel icons, which makes me unbelievably, geektasticly happy.
• And finally, behind the cut, find out which superhero I am. (Though, honestly, I’d prefer to remain female in a perfect Metropolis.) (Via someone, I forget who, sorry!)

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