Monday Hangovers - Gwenda Bond

I spent the weekend shopping and cleaning out the closet. Remarkably, both of these activities were fun.
The Guardian book blog asks whether writers really need a room of their own: "Real writers need frustration. They need embarrassment. They need cold, uncomfortable rooms, miles from a mobile signal. There should be an infestation of at least one parasite, a backlog of warnings from the Student Loans Company and just enough coffee for what Don DeLillo calls "an occasional revelation"." Student loans, check, but honestly I can write just about anywhere, especially with earphones. I am very good at blocking out Le World Around Me.
The ever stylish and genius Peter Straub has an essay at the Millions, "What About Genre, What About Horror?": "Maybe you should lock yourself up in your heart long enough to work out your actual relationship to matters like shame, loss, envy, panic, brutality, greed, insecurity, loneliness, failure, whatever you find particularly unpleasant. Because that, dimwit, is where you live, especially if you really hate the whole idea of familiarity with such crappy, low-rent feeling states."
Betsy's getting down to the wire, hitting 21-25 on her Herculean list of the top 100 children's novels.
Like Paul Collins, I'd love to go walking in the Brunels' tunnel under the Thames.
The fabulous L.K. Madigan talks about the horror of GoodReads for authors and collects the thoughts of some other writers.
Some interesting posts from Peter Miller from SXSWi at Jacket Copy, including: "Publishers are 'only innovative when they're desperate'": "Waiting my turn to talk to the critic, I overheard other gems: “Publishers are square-dancing on a sinking ship.” Jason Scott is generous with those kinds of assessments and they didn't let up even after I told him of my role in the industry. "Book people," he said, "are slow, only innovative when they are desperate."
Tansy continues her ruminations on series and standalone fantasy with a great post on "stealth worldbuilding."
At Strange Horizons, Karen Healey writes compellingly about how Margaret Mahy wrote fantasy set in her home country (or didn't, at first). (Mahy is one of my FAVORITE FAVORITE all-time FAVORITE authors, and oh how I want to see Elizabeth Knox's documentary about her!) I feel a similar disconnect to the one Karen talks about, only with the southern U.S. and Kentucky. My current work in progress is the first one I've really set in the south, at least letting that setting be important. But, then, growing up rural, I always felt myself as much a citizen of the land of books–which is to say everywhere–as the place I happened to live.
Cindy Pon on diversity in fantasy at the Enchanted Inkpot, collecting the thoughts of others as well.

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