Jim Macdonald writes some more about his Independent Bookstores of New England GPS Points of Interest project, over here.
Tag: other people saying interesting things
Independent Bookstores of New England
…considered as a set of Points of Interest for the TomTom GPS Navigator. It’s a project that my co-author (and, not so coincidentally as all that, husband) Jim Macdonald is working on in his spare time, and blogging about here.
When Writers Get Bored
My husband and co-author James D. Macdonald got bored the other day – he’s also an EMT, and he was sitting around the ambulance HQ waiting for somebody in their area of operations to have chest pains or run their car into a tree, but nobody did – so he wrote this.
(This also explains why, in our collaborations, he’s usually the plot wrangler and I’m the prose wrangler. The secret to picking a good collaborator is locating one who thinks that the stuff you find difficult is actually easy, and vice versa.)
The Internet is Full of Nifty Stuff
On the days when it starts to feel like the internet is nothing but insult and outrage from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, it helps to go look at some of the other things.
For example: here’s an informative post from Tumblr, giving workshop instructions on how, exactly to gird your loins (if you’re wearing long skirts, or a robe of some sort.) Note that the process not only gets the material out of the way, but also provides certain crucial areas with extra padding.
This isn’t the same thing, by the way, as simply kilting up one’s skirt, which is a simpler process, involving tucking the extra fabric into one’s belt to shorten the garment.
And here’s a report on the recent RWA (Romance Writers of America) convention, including some very cogent remarks on the need for representation in romance. Short version: Romance is the genre of happy endings, and readers who aren’t cisgendered currently-able-bodied straight white women need books that say they’re just as entitled to happy endings as anybody else.
Finally, a couple of links that are pure catnip for a word nut like me: a compendium of the blogger’s own favorite posts from three years of All Things Linguistic, and a page from which you can buy a copy of Balþos Gadedeis Aþalhaidais in Sildaleikalanda – which is to say, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, newly translated into Gothic by the scholar David Alexander Carlton.
As Katta (the Cat) says to Aþalhaids (Alice), “Weis sijum her woda in allamma” – “We’re all mad here.”
Novella vs. Novelette
(Or, novelet. The spelling varies.)
John Barnes explains the real difference, over here. The explanation comes with a link to the first episode of an actual serialized novelet, also by John Barnes. He’s a good writer and a clever guy – go read and enjoy.
Link of the Day
When it comes to the most frustrating aspect of the freelance life – to wit, actually getting paid for the work – this piece in The Toast nails it. (The comment section is full of additional spot-on commentary.)
The single most reliable and prompt payer I have ever personally dealt with was a comic-book company; they paid their freelancers every other Friday on the dot. They also got swallowed up in the Great Doom that befell the American comics industry in the mid-nineties, so go figure.
The worst? Universities, hands down.
(These are the honest companies and institutions we’re talking about here. Of the dishonest ones, we shall not speak, mostly because to do so would require the use of very bad words.)
Link of the Day
xkcd on the use of made-up words in fiction.
He’s basically right, too. Unless you’re J. R. R Tolkien, and marinated so thoroughly in philology, literature, and Indo-European linguistics that you might as well be writing your novel in Elvish or Anglo-Saxon and translating it into standard English as you go along . . . think twice before adding neologisms to your story’s vocabulary.
But if you have to do it —
Make certain that your invented words can be read and pronounced by an English speaker (if you’re writing in English for an English-speaking audience) with no more than a typical grade-school acquaintance with phonics. If you’re unsure about any of your words, get somebody else to tackle them cold and listen for what works and what doesn’t.
Compounding your new terms from Greek and Latin roots can provide your story with an erudite or technical flavor. If you don’t want overtones of the lab or the library hanging about your epic tale, consider making your new words by compounding English terms instead. And needless to say, if you’re bound and determined to use Greek and Latin elements, take the time to get them right.
And in this age of easy internet searches, it wouldn’t hurt to put each of your invented terms through Google Translate and a couple of search engines, just to make certain that you haven’t independently recreated a thundering obscenity in some language you’ve never even heard of (but which will, if you let it stand, turn out to be the native tongue of your most keen-eyed reader.)
An Early-June Miscellany
A trio of literary (more or less) links:
“Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked.” If that line has an all-too-familiar ring to it, you shouldn’t be surprised. Here’s an article from Slate on the barking-dog trope in modern fiction that will reassure you that you aren’t just hearing things that aren’t there. If it inspires you to double-check your own stories for gratuitously vocal canines, so much the better.
Which brings us to another literary animal, in this case the dead mule, as encountered in Southern literature. The dead mule is one of the genre-defining images, like unicorns and spaceships; much as the presence of a spaceship renders a story science fiction, the presence of a dead mule declares it to be Southern. I don’t know what happens when you have a spaceship and a dead mule in the same story – something by Howard Waldrop, maybe.
And finally, from the editor of Clarkesworld, a list of the most common titles for short stories submitted to the magazine.
Nifty Link of the Day
Sherwood Smith has a blog post up at the Book View Café, talking about women writing space opera (since there are still a few readers out there who, despite all the evidence, seem to believe that the possession of girlybits negates the ability to write about epic space battles.)
Full disclosure time here: I would have liked this post even if it didn’t say good things about one of mine-and-my-husband/coauthor’s own space opera novels (and its sequels), The Price of the Stars.
Three Nifty Links and a Brief Reminder
Commas are important tools in the ongoing struggle for (and sometimes between) clarity and euphony – so important that it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that, even more than most punctuation marks, commas are pretty much a local-option kind of deal. The conventions for comma usage vary from one language to another, as I learned to my sorrow back in the days when I was learning Old English and working with a lot of OE texts that had been edited by German scholars and therefore punctuated with German punctuation. (It’s a mark of where I learned a particular language and how I mostly used it that my rudiments of German are mostly stuff like “The following forms appear only in the dative plural,” while my fragmentary Spanish runs mostly along the lines of “Do you have Tylenol in drops for infants?”) Comma use also varies from one century to another, and from one writer to another – some writers prefer to deploy their commas strictly according to grammatical rule, whereas others prefer to use them according to the rhythm and the phrasing of the sentence.
Under the circumstances, it’s not surprising that some people take their commas very seriously indeed.
Over in another corner of the internet (the internet has many corners), Slate columnist Derrick Johnson strikes a blow against e-mail address snobbery when he explains why he still uses his AOL e-mail account. (Hint: because it still works just fine.)
Meanwhile, for the folklore and folk music enthusiasts among us, here’s the Vaughn Williams Memorial Library.
And finally, the reminder: the Dr. Doyle’s Editorial Services Springtime Seasonal Special closes at midnight this coming Saturday, April 11.
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