- Jo Knowles posts about Holly Black's talk on worldbuilding at Vermont College last weekend (which I was SO sad to miss).
- New and excellent story by Genevieve Valentine at Lightspeed, "The Zeppelin Conductors' Society Annual Gentleman's Ball."
- In case anyone missed them, I really liked Janet Fitch's 10 Rules for Writers at Jacket Copy. Hunting the link, I also found her pep talk for NaNoWriMo: "So you have these options, but which one to go for? When in doubt, make trouble for your character. Don't let her stand on the edge of the pool, dipping her toe. Come up behind her and give her a good hard shove. That's my advice to you now. Make trouble for your character. In life we try to avoid trouble. We chew on our choices endlessly. We go to shrinks, we talk to our friends. In fiction, this is deadly. Protagonists need to screw up, act impulsively, have enemies, get into TROUBLE."
- Laura Miller on the art of book recommendations.
- Well-preserved tomb of ancient Mayan king discovered.
- Turns out the latest research shows the neurological hard-wiring between boys and girls is slight.
- Semi-related: A discussion at the Enchanted Inkpot about YA books aimed at boys that garnered lots of discussion. I'm in agreement with Janni Simner's take (see the comments on this one, too): "It's possible I'm just not seeing how many more "girl" books there are, but I'm not convinced. Especially if one just as narrowly defines "girl books" as books with female protagonists. What I see is a genre that already publishes quite a few "boy" books constantly fretting, even as it searches for more, that it's excluding boy readers. (While fewer people seem to stop to celebrate the fact that hey! There's so much SF/fantasy out there that girls are reading now, much more than a couple generations back, and way more than in the SF portion of the adult SF/fantasy genre even now.)"
- An excellent post at the Murder She Writes group blog, from Sophie Littlefield, on how every writer's journey is different.
- Tiffany Trent interviews Jenn Reese about fight scenes and martial arts. Yay.
- Joss Whedon on the Avengers movie–am getting very excited.
- Finally, two funny videos: John Green takes Snooki to grammar school via her tweets and a cute dog sings the Batman theme.