Hangovers

Where is the sun? Will it ever return? In the meantime, a few links.

• The revolution will not be searchable, but it will provide you with a robot chat friend.
• Janni is doing a poll about editorial experiences.
• Matt Ruff points to a series now on Hulu called Charlie Jade that sounds promising.
• Kate Elliott on beginnings, something I always find devil hard.
• Ellen Datlow on cliche (and offensive) depictions of older women in fiction.
• I'm pretty sure I've linked this before, but it was mentioned at the Millions and, really, it never gets old: Literary Pets.
• Sara Gran gives "Seven Pieces of Advice to a Young Writer."
• A great piece by Maureen Ryan on the scarcity of women writers in TVland. (Related: High five to Parks & Recreation. Also: Another good piece by Ryan on Felicia Day and "The Guild.")
• Take a look at trends in fall YA fantasy covers over at the Enchanted Inkpot.
• I loved The Magician King SO much. And I love this video for "I Wanna Be A Magician." 
• "Ancient Sea Jelly Shakes Evolutionary Tree of Animals."

Have a great weekend, my lovelies.

• Item the first: We will be at the Decatur Book Festival this weekend. Christopher is doing a talk at the Eddie's Attic stage at 2:30 Sunday, about Sandstorm and also doing work-for-hire and the differences and similarities between that and original work; come. It'll be good. Otherwise, we'll be around and about and please do say hello.
• Blondie at Coney Island (and other photos by Bob Gruen).
• Colleen on a faaaabulous new long novelette by Connie Willis, "All About Eve" available from Subterranean. I loved it to pieces.
• Ann Patchett offers some writing advice in a new e-book, which I'll definitely be snagging. I love Patchett's nonfiction work almost as much as as her novels.
• Another couple of Flavorwire links: monstrously modified vintage cityscapes and history's ill-fated literary couples.
• A gorgeous post from Phoebe North inspired by her experience of Hurricane Irene.
• Horror movie makers talk about their own favorite scary creepfests.
• Cyn talks about themes and concerns and the making of her wonderful series that began with Tantalize. Check it out.
• Classic insults from classic actors. (Via the wily cinetrix.)
• The fine art of museum security in the WaPo.
• And, yes, yes, it's been everywhere already, but can you really watch Tom Waits Cookie Monster too many times? When you are tired of this, you are tired of life.

• There have been moremoremore awesome posts about awesome ladies in fiction and the over- and misuse of the term Mary Sue following off Zoë Marriott's. Two in particular you don't want to miss (from two indisputably awesome ladies and writers), both of whom I agree with WHOLEHEARTEDLY:  Sarah Rees Brennan's "Ladies, Don't Let Anyone Tell You You're Not Awesome" and Holly Black's "Ladies Ladies Ladies." (Not really related: I want a Girl Writer chair!)
• Sara Ryan says something important: "I think often, when we try to assess our own progress — whether it’s on working out, writing, or anything else in our lives — we forget to include the weight of the bar, the bar being defined as everything else that affects our capacity to accomplish our goals."
• The Atlantic on the science of Planet of the Apes–could James Franco provoke our simian cousins so much they rise? Well, or actually not that at all, but an interesting discussion of research and genetics and ethics.
• Is the universe just a giant hologram?
• There are more Stella Gibbons novels? And they're coming back into print? Yes, please. (Heads up, American publishers.)
• Genevieve has an article about Alexander McQueen's designs in the new Weird Tales and posts about the just-closed show at the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute.
• Typewriter art by Keira Rathbone = gorgeous. (First spotted somewhere on twitter, but I can't remember from who.)
• Some good news: The latest BookStats survey shows more books being sold and more revenue across all major market categories from 2008 to 2010.

• D.B. Grady wrote a (worth-checking-out) piece about YA for the Atlantic that included a claim that there were a bazillionty30,000 YA novels published in 2009 as opposed to 3,000 just twelve years earlier, a figure which has now been dissected by several and found, shall we say, almost certainly inaccurate. Oh well. As J.L. Bell says in his post, not that surprising since publishing numbers are hard to come by; I'd agree and add that numbers are also often squishy or at least semi- made-up. The most interesting thing in all of this to me is the great discussion in Roger Sutton's comments with Lerner's Andrew Karre about whether publishers treat their lists as a lottery; Elizabeth Law from Egmont drops by too.
• I haven't poked around historypin yet, but it looks like it could be amazing and a great research resource besides.
• PW's Diane Roback collects some short remembrances of colorful characters from children's publishing from people in the industry. Good reading. (They are all wonderful; I particularly liked this grace note from former SLJ editor Lillian Gerhardt's remembrance of Marjorie Thayer: "At the end of a particularly hard day in her booth at an ALA conference in the early 1970s, Thayer confessed to a startled Marjorie Jones, editorial director of the Junior Library Guild, that though she might seem indestructible, she feared she might be slowing down. "Some evenings, I'm almost too tired to tell the cocktail waitress I want an extra-dry martini straight up with a twist." ")
• Jonah Lehrer  explores research on intelligence and whether smart people are getting smarter: "One frequently cited factor is the increasing complexity of entertainment, which might enhance abstract problem solving skills. (As Flynn himself noted, “The very fact that children are better and better at IQ test problems logically entails that they have learned at least that kind of problem-solving skill better, and it must have been learned somewhere.”) This suggests that, because people are now forced to make sense of Lost or the Harry Potter series or World of Warcraft, they’re also better able to handle hard logic puzzles."
• Floating island missing from Secret Garden Party festival.
• Love this post from Zoë Marriott: "You can stuff your Mary Sue where the sun don't shine."
• How many MacArthur geniuses are in publishing?
• A passel of great links from the cinetrix.
• The divine Betsy Bird considers children's fantasy post-Harry Potter.
• When Lauren recommends a book, I take note–especially when it sounds as fabulous as Serious Pleasures.

• Laura Miller on The Invisible Library, which houses imaginary books referenced or described in real books, natch. I absolutely love the device of books that exist only in a particular work of fiction. Christopher just finished a new story that includes a futuristic horse race and all the horses are named for such. 
• Another typically brilliant post from Jennifer Crusie on writing, particularly romances: "The big thing that I’m always forgetting and have to relearn with every novel is that the story has to be fun. Not necessarily happy or funny but fun to read, the highs and the lows, the reader has to have a really good time suffering with the characters, even if the “really good time” means weeping helplessly."
• This essay by Ed at the Millions makes me want to read Megan Abbott immediately.
• The fabulous Kate Messner recommends some excellent non-writing-focused craft books of interest to writers. Her own new book on revision looks wonderful; I'll definitely be picking up a copy.
• An excellent post from Tess Gerritsen about the conventional wisdom of nonwhite lead characters in genre fiction being a sales curse, something she's bucking with her new book The Silent Girl. Now on my must-read list. (Via SRB.)
• Also at Murderati, an excellent post by forensic pathologist Jonathan Hayes about the role of coroners.
• The University of Chicago magazine profiles Swati Avasthi.
• Monica Edinger points to the results of a contest asking animation students to interpret Salman Rushdie's Luka and the Fire of Life. (I, too, fell hard for Midnight's Children when I read it–sophomore or junior year of h.s., I think?–and, later, Haroun.)
• And, finally, a reminder that the Summer Blog Blast Tour is in full swing. The full schedule with excerpts and links is here and today's stops are: Sarah Stevenson at Chasing Ray; Emily Howse at Bildungsroman; Ashley Hope-Perez at The Happy Nappy Bookseller; and Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich at Vivian Lee Mahony (Hip Writer Mama).

Some links, old and new:

• X-Movie: I wanted this to be so much better than it was, and the gender and racial politics were infuriatingly clueless. Commentary you should read about why it was so disappointing: from Genevieve (aside: she's the only person I've seen talk about certain elements of Xavier's characterization that bugged me mightily); from Nora; and Ta Nehisi-Coates in the NYT.
• Related: If you missed Alexander Chee's fabulous essay, "Fanboy," at the Morning News; well, read that too. Snippet: "No one ever asks me why I love the X-Men, even now, but if they had, the answer I’d give is: They were the only ones who knew how I felt. A group of people different from everyone else in the world had found each other—I envied that, and when I read the book, it was like I’d found them too. It was a story that protected me, a dream about difference that let me keep some pride when nothing else helped. I didn’t know how to even ask for what came just by reading that comic." 
• Semi-related to all this: Gendercrunching the DC reboot. Ouch.
• Not related to the prior at all! Holly recently posted some really fantastic thoughts about how hard it is to give yourself permission to reimagine and transform your creative life (and, of course, the rest of life, with the aim of letting each better support the other). 
• "We Are All Teenage Werewolves."
• I'd be remiss not to mention that Welcome to Bordertown is out! Yay! I hope this fabulous anthology brings a whole new generation of fans to the Borderlands.
• Semi-related: How much do I love Terri Windling's blog? Dog pictures, wisdom, a series of spying on artists and writers' desks.
• If you watch Game of Thrones, you really must read Regina Thorne's recaps on Heroes and Heartbreakers. LOVE THEM.
• Jenny Crusie saying very smart things about linear vs. patterned structure.

• Oh, the links, they have been piling up.
• Lorrie Moore reviews some recent memoirs: "People are telling us their personal stories and speaking to us of their private lives and even if the structure is rickety and the prose has, to borrow Dick Cavett’s phrase, “all the sparkle of a second mortgage,” we are going to hang in there because it is true. That the facts and details of these jumbled confessions are occasionally fudged and embellished, however, seems inevitable, given the limits of memory and the demands of writing. (There are many things a storyteller must add and subtract to tell a good story.)" 
• Julia Sweeney and her daughter have The Frogs and Tadpoles Conversation: But what do they do with their legs? 
• George Saunders interviewed: "I’d make the case that the whole fictional thrill has to do with this idea of the reader and the writer closely tracking, if you will. Like one of those motorcycle sidecars: when the writer leans left, the reader does too. You don’t want your reader three blocks away, unaware that you are leaning. You want her right there with you, so that even an added comma makes a difference. And I think building that motorcycle has to do with that very odd moment when the writer “imagines” his reader—i.e., imagines where the reader “is” at that precise point in the story. This is more of a feeling thing than an analytical thing, but all that is good about fiction depends on this extrapolation. Which is pretty insane, when you think of it. The writer, in order to proceed, is theoretically trying to predict where his complex skein of language and image has left his reader, who he has likely never met and who is actually thousands of readers. Yikes! Better we should do something easier, like join the circus."
• "Scientists Discover 657 Islands Sitting Under Our Noses."
• Sarah Rees Brennan's great post about the importance of difference and diversity in our stories.
• Elif Batuman asks Jonathan Franzen for weed and other amusing things.
• Great post from the fabulous Toni McGee Causey on POV.
• I gobbled up Cassie's City of Fallen Angels in one blissful day. She just keeps getting better and better, and really, writers, if you aren't reading her, you should be. I can't think of anyone better at continually raising the stakes for her characters, both internally and externally. Her spoiler/answer post is worth your time and is full of excellent thoughts: "Authors tend to torment the characters they love, not the characters they don't care about. Characters must want and love and suffer for them to feel real. Like real people, characters reveal themselves through suffering—it is under pressure that your true self comes to the forefront." (And, um, post is obviously full of spoilers, so don't read it if you haven't read the book and care about being spoiled.)
• An absolute must-read wise post from Veronica Roth on fear, anxiety and how not to let it wreck your ability to work: "Writing is about decisions. Your characters make them, but more often, you make them. You decide what you are going to say and what you are not going to say; what you believe and what you do not believe; where you want the story to go and where you do not want it to go. And I don't want to be a writer who is ruled by fear. I want to be the one who says: they may not like it, but this story is as true as possible, so I don't mind."
• So, I recently read Franny Billingsley's Chime (my review will be in an upcoming issue of Locus), and became obsessed with it (totally brilliant), and with reading all her interviews about it: Horn Book, Goodreads (by Libba Bray), and PW. You must read this book, and all these interviews are well worth reading too; I particularly liked what she had to say about geography informing mythology in the PW interview: "Once I found a geography, I could write it. I think that for some people geography is not so important, but for me, and for a lot of fantasy writers, the geography absolutely has to make sense in terms of the magical context or else you just can't go anyplace."
• A short meditation in the Guardian on the second meeting scene in Bringing Up Baby, which I'm just about to rewatch.
• What English sounds like to those who don't speak it. Wonderful.
• Zadie Smith's rules for writers. Good stuff.
• Is there anyone who doesn't adore Colson Whitehead and think he's brilliant and hilarious? Case in point: his recent essay for PW: "There are those who moan, oh, Shakespeare wouldn't have written all those wonderful plays for us to "modern update" if he'd had Angry Birds and Darklady.com. Is it so terrible, here in the 21st century? A sonnet is perfect Tumblr-length, and given the persistent debates over the authorship of his work, the bard would have benefited from modern, cutting-edge identity theft protection. The old masters didn't even have freaking penicillin. I think Nietzsche would have endured non-BCC'd e-mail dispatches in exchange for pills to de-spongify his syphilitic brain, and we can all agree Virginia Woolf could've used a scrip for serotonin reuptake inhibitors. I digress. The Internet is not to blame for your unfinished novel: you are." Read the whole thing. I'd share a lukewarm white wine in the throes of trade show despair with him anytime.
• I love it when Genevieve posts about fashion; some thoughts on royal wedding dresses. (And a most enormous full circle skirt. Twenty-five feet. Wowza.)

• 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.