Links of Interest

Well, of interest to me, anyhow.

This one doesn’t have anything to do with writing, except in the way that everything, eventually, has to do with writing; it’s about the spread of prehistoric dairying culture as traced through ancient cheesemaking tools, and how that tracks with the development of lactose tolerance in northern and western Europe.

I can’t see hanging an entire story on those bits of knowledge, but it’s the sort of idea that tumbles around in the back of a writer’s head for an extended period of time, accreting other ideas to itself all the while, until it becomes something much bigger and shinier and definitely other.

This post by Greg van Eekhout, on the other hand (while a couple of years old at this point) is very much about writing — specifically, about the vexed question of skin color in cover art, and the work involved in getting it right.  As long as you’re over at Greg’s site, you might as well read this more recent post, as well, in which he takes on the question, “What is a writer of Dutch-Indonesian descent doing playing around with Norse myth?”  (Other than, “A damned fine job, that’s what,” which was my instant reaction, years ago, to reading his short story “Wolves Till the World Goes Down” at the Viable Paradise workshop.)