Gwenda

• I’d read John Crowley’s dream journal in a hot minute: "Northrop Frye says that one of the components of what he calls romance (along with dark journeys to underworlds, brothers and sisters parted in youth, and pirates, is talking animals, and intense human/animal relations.  Dreams are fiction, or the reverse, or both."
• We’re in the market for a writing-and-nothing-else portable tippety-typer: Dana or Quickpad? (Or another option I don’t know about?) We went with the Neo.
• In which Pinky represents the rise of the machines. I’m betting on her for the win.
• Japanese crepe paper fairy tales.
• Jeff’s new design = excellent.
• Mr. McLaren on the unfair world of midlist authors taking on pseudonyms in order to keep publishing, and the difficulties of keeping track of who’s writing as who: "However, when authors are forced by the midlist computer-ordering death spiral to take on a pseudonym to keep writing in their chosen genre, that annoys me. It annoys me because it shouldn’t happen, and the fact that it does is the publishing industry putting a patch on a serious problem."
• Men who explain things. In science fiction, we consider this a primary pick-up strategy. (Are you hitting on me or just sharing a factoid about aardvarks in space?)
• Maud has a nice assembly of writing quotes.
• Erin on marketing and fiction: "At any rate…whether you get a bigass check from a luxury car company or not, marketability is interesting to think about from a fiction perspective. Would this story go better with Buddig ham? IKEA furniture? Pabst Blue Ribbon? A Volkswagen? Depends undergarments?" Funny, but I don’t remember anyone being upset when BMW financed those short films by major directors. I’m just surprised that Lexus thinks this will be an effective strategy.

Back, busy, etc. A couple of links for now…

Roger Sutton is funny when he’s cranky:

I just picked up Katherine Applegate’s Beach Blondes: A Summer Novel (Simon Pulse) and boy are my arms tired. This sucker is 721 paperback pages long, and first in a series to boot. I’m guessing it’s so fat for some strategic marketing reason, or perhaps I just haven’t yet gotten to the chapter "This Is Summer Speaking," in which the heroine stops the motor of the world in order to expound for fifty-seven pages on the virtues of Vera Bradley bags.

Seriously, what is it with the Vera Bradley thing? I don’t get it.

And Ben Rosenbaum* waxes smart on schedulizing:

One thing related to that: there are many sub-agencies in my consciousness. Some want to lie on the couch. Some want to write fiction for the fun of it, others in order to be praised. Some want to go hang out with friends. Others want to be left the fsck alone. My task, I have found, is not to impose the will of the more "good, productive, noble" ones on the slacker ones, but rather to broker a compromise so that they are not constantly sabotaging each other. I find this actually increases even traditionally-measured productivity. If I try to only ever write, I find myself cheating on writing time in order to read and play. If I make it my goal to have time to write, to read, and to play, the agencies tend to respect each other much more.

Well said.

*Whose forthcoming collection is hotly anticipated–is this the year of the awesome short story collection or what**?

**Plus, Maureen’s awesome-tastic collection Mothers and Other Monsters is now available for download!

• Annalee Newitz offers an insightful review of Karen Joy Fowler’s Wit’s End at io9: "Karen Joy Fowler’s unsettling, wistful new novel Wit’s End offers us a present-day world that is science fictional in the same way William Gibson’s recent present-day novels are: Her characters’ lives are so deeply bound up with technology that it’s hard to tell where human connection ends and internet connectivity begins." See also: Reuters q&a.
• CSI as science fiction. (Via Jenny D.)
• An excellent review of Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army/Daughters of the North. (Via Niall.)
• Fall in: The Fraenkel Gallery. (Via Sara Ryan.)
• Liz Hand on Toby Barlow’s Sharp Teeth in the WashPost.
• Midori has some good links about Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia.
• Travel books without the travel?
• Evil Monkey’s Guide to Kosher Imaginary Animals.