Ironside World Domination
Congratulate the fabulous Holly Black for her amazing book’s debut at number 5 on the NYT BESTSELLER LIST! I love it when good books take over the world.
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Tourist in an UnStrange Land
Dave Itzkoff visits MidSouth Con and the result is actually not all that awful. Too bad he didn’t go to one of the regional conventions where books are a more prominent feature, but so it goes — the characterization of fiction as an increasingly marginalized aspect of the SF scene is undeniably true, as anyone who’s been to a WorldCon or looked at the Hugo voting stats can attest.
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Tiptree-ing
I’ve been meaning to post this for a month now, but keep forgetting. I’m chairing the extremely awesome 2007 Tiptree Award jury, with my fellow jurors being Geoff Ryman, Meghan McCarron, Charlie Anders, and Sheree Thomas. Anyway, I say this because we want you to submit recommendations for "SF and fantasy published this year exploring gender roles that should be considered for the award." The nomination form is here, or you can drop me an email (Gwenda007ATGMAILDOTCOM), with recs for novels and short stories that might fit the bill.
And, yes, for those of you less familiar with the award, this includes stuff published outside the genre, so long as it has a fantastical or SF bent. (The 2006 winners are Shelley Jackson and Catherynne M. Valente, for instance — Half-Life was published as literary fiction and The Orphan’s Tales as fantasy.) Oh, and yes, children’s and YA books are absolutely eligible for consideration, so kidlit bloggers pony up any relevant titles too.
Recommend early and often, por favor.
Thursday Hangovers
- 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.
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Happy Birthday!
To the fabulous Kristin Livdahl!
(Since my whole sending people cards plan has not materialized this year, I’m going to switch to wishing everyone happy birthday here for the rest of the year. Next year: Cards!)
Experimental Video
So, my mostly-spontaneous irresponsible purchase of the day was a basic point-and-shoot digital video camera at Target. This is because sometimes I want to make fun videos, but have no way to do so (other than the LCDless, soundless digital camera). Now I am a camera-armed menace.
Anyway, I want to play around with it some this weekend, but the world, her canvas is too large. You’d just end up with a video of the dogs. So I want a theme, a topic, a word, a concept, a suggestion around which to organize this first, exploratory video. And, well, yeah, the dogs will be in it anyway, I’m sure. So, ideas? Something simple, flexible and fun is preferable.
One of our first little videos, I’m happy to report, featured Christopher flipping off a Hummer — already with the Brotherhood 2.0 homage.
(Also, on a more technical note, there’s the software that came with the thing and iMovie — I’ve never been able to figure out how to save iMovie vids so they are exportable to YouTube. Possible/impossible and how?)
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Wednesday Hangover
- 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.
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VeronicaMarsTalk
And now for what may well be one of the last times, a new VM ep:
Un-American Graffiti. Veronica (Kristen Bell) is hired by a Middle Eastern restaurant owner to find out who has been vandalizing their business with ethnic slurs. While investigating the case, Veronica and the restaurant owner are attacked in a drive-by shooting. When a drunk teenager stumbles from a bar and gets hit by a car, Keith (Enrico Colantoni) orders his deputies to conduct surprise ID checks in all the area bars. While doing his own surprise search, Keith catches Piz (Chris Lowell) and Wallace (Percy Daggs) using fake ID’s provided by Veronica. Meanwhile, Logan (Jason Dohring) decides to throw a birthday party for Parker (Julie Gonzalo). Francis Capra and Ryan Hansen also star. Dan Etheridge directed the episode written by John Enbom.
I have to say, I haven’t missed the show nearly as much as I would have wished to during the hiatus — the level of wishing related to level of goodness this season, of course.
Heroes Yammer
And tonight we have:
String Theory. Hiro and Ando find themselves five years after the destruction of New York City. People with extraordinary abilities are labeled as terrorists and are being registered, hunted, and killed. Hiro and Ando meet up with darker versions of the other heroes in preparation for a showdown with the President. This includes a darker side of Matt, a Jessica/Niki with a clear winner in their battle, a brown-haired Claire, and a man named Andy, who’s a big hearted Texan. It also features an event at an upscale gentleman’s club.
Betrayed!
Okay, so I just read Margaret Mahy’s The Changeover, after someone mentioned it on the Child Lit listserv (where I lurk, but never post) last week and made it sound supremely appealing. Wow. How have I never read her before? What an utterly delicious book — just ask Christopher, who had to stop reading this to listen to excerpts every few minutes.
I know that Jenny and Justine are fans, so then the question becomes why they did not FORCE me to read her sooner? At gunpoint, if necessary?
More later on some elements of this book in contrast to more recent teen fantasies (it holds up remarkably well, but there are some things in here — things that work, I might add — that you just don’t see today).
In the meantime, are there any other wonderful, lesser-known (to me, anyway) YA/children’s fantasy novelists I should know about that y’all are keeping from me? I should confess here that my own seams are showing — the fantasy I grew up reading was mostly of the supernatural variety for adults or from Latin America ditto (aside from the classics for younger children that everyone reads); next up are Franny Billingsley and Susan Cooper’s books, so any recommendations are welcome, even if they seem obvious to you.