Check it out . . . my co-author, James D. Macdonald, is blogging over here.
(Full disclosure here: he’s also my husband. But it took us nearly ten years of marriage and two kids before we worked up the nerve to play “I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours” with our writing. Which was fun, but not nearly as much fun as the year we decided to go full-time freelance . . . which turned out to also be the year I had twins.)
The Washington Post now has a regular science fiction and fantasy column. (And they’re going to be getting a regular romance column soon, too.)
I’m not sure how I should feel about all this. It used to be that no good ever came of science fiction and fantasy trying to gain literary respectability. All that ever happened was that the sf and the fantasy thus produced were unpleasant mutant products that were – as the saying goes — neither flesh nor fowl nor good red herring, and the arbiters of literary respectability didn’t like them anyway.
But now it seems that establishment respectability is finding us whether we go looking for it or not. Which is fine with me, so long as sf and fantasy don’t lose their pipeline to those deep wells of don’t-give-a-damn-about-being-respectable which are the source of so much of their energy.
The liveliest art is always made on the wilder side of town.
Have a character who’s going to get arrested in downtown New York? Check out the Yelp.com review page for Manhattan Central Booking. (Yelpers will review absolutely anything, apparently.)
Remember Mary Ingalls, who went blind from scarlet fever in On The Shores of Silver Lake? Well, it probably wasn’t scarlet fever.
Also — those Norse runes? Turns out a lot of them are also written in code. And a lot of those coded messages turn out to say things like “kiss me” and “interpret these runes” . . . any day now, they’re going to find one that says, “for a good time, call Gudrun Osvifsdottir.”
And speaking of codes, the mysterious Voynich Manuscript may have been decoded at last — not by cryptanalysts, but by botanists.
Link the first: A newly-released on-line archive of images from the French Revolution, done as a partnership between Stanford University and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. There’s an article about the archive here; the bilingual, searchable archive itself is here.
Link the second: Over at John Scalzi’s blog, there’s an open comment thread going on, with writers sharing the most valuable bits of practical craft advice they’ve received or read.
Some interesting blog posts about words and related trivia:
There’s one about champagne (did you know that the big 30-liter bottle is called a Melchizedek?) and another about spies (or intelligence officers, as some of them prefer to be called.)
Or have a peevish post on reflexive pronouns (I like this one, myself.) Or one about OED citations from film scripts and transcripts (the latter for words which appear in ad-libbed dialogue, rather than in the written script.)
Then there’s this one, on the difficulty of translating book titles (Mockingjay gets translated into Spanish with a similar bird-name portmanteau word, Sinsajo, but the German translator opted for Flammender Zorn, “Flaming Fury.”) Or this one, on German idioms (eine Extrawurst verlangen, “to ask for an extra sausage,” means “to expect special treatment.”)
I could mess around on that site all day.
Why didn’t I know before now that the Oxford English Dictionary has a blog?
(Where I learn, among other things, that my birth-year new word is “noshery.” I suppose I could try again and get a different one, but that would be cheating.)
And then, from YouTube, there’s this: a song about Jólakötturinn , the Icelandic Christmas Cat (who is Not a Nice Kitty):
I think we have here an explanation for the Christmas Sweater tradition….
A couple of interesting links:
The British Museum (with help from Microsoft, who did the digitization) has released over a million images from books of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries onto the internet. A few of the highlights are here.
With the end of the year coming up, a lot of people are posting their best-reads of the year list. Science fiction author Fran Wilde has an interesting one, here. Full disclosure: my co-author and I have a story on the list.
It certainly looks like it. The Paris Review has interviewed Ursula K. LeGuin.
The interview is worth reading for a couple of different reasons . . . well, actually, at least three.
One is that the interviewer is not somebody from inside the science fiction/fantasy community, so the interview’s questions and answers aren’t the ones that a lifetime of reading interviews in Locus and similar in-group publications has trained us to expect.
Two is that the interviewer is not someone who knows a great deal about science fiction, to put it kindly, and watching LeGuin maneuver diplomatically around the resulting areas of ignorance is a pleasure to behold.
And three, this is Ursula K. LeGuin we’re talking about. She’s always interesting, no matter who’s interviewing her and for what.
As a renegade medievalist and lapsed philologist with a bad case of Tolkien’s Disease (I haven’t yet had a novel break out into appendices full of invented language, but give me time), one of the things I keep an eye out for on the web is sites maintained by and of interest to word nuts like myself.
Today’s find is All Things Linguistic, where one can find links to discussions of what is and isn’t a sandwich (ham-and-cheese yes; paninis maybe; s’mores are an edge case) and Katharine Hepburn’s accent and translating Jabberwocky. My favorite at the moment, though, is a Tumblr devoted to sample sentences — you know, those example sentences in language and grammar books that are mostly just dull but every so often seem to have been radioed in from another, stranger planet:
If there is both a direct object and an indirect object, then the indirect object precedes the direct one:
You should never have fed that fish steroids.
(To which all I can say is, Mad Science for the win!)
I can’t decide whether this article in the New York Times is more insulting to Mormons (which I am not one of) or to writers of genre fiction (which I am):
Mormons Offer Cautionary Lesson on Sunny Outlook vs. Literary Greatness
But I do know that after a while, the unquestioned assumption that science fiction, fantasy, and young adult/children’s fiction are inherently lesser literary forms gets really, really old.
It has gotten better over the years, at least a little bit. With science fiction and fantasy having taken over so much of popular culture, at least it’s no longer the case that reading and writing the stuff is grounds for labeling someone a dangerous weirdo, or a pathetic basement-dweller, or a member of the tinfoil-hat brigade.
No, these days it merely labels us as not serious.
(It’s worse if you’re female. Being a girl means you start out with negative seriousness points.)
Granted, it’s good to be no longer reflexively sneered at by the likes of the New York Times. But being reflexively patronized isn’t all that much better.
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