calendula_witch and I have made another collaborative sale, short story “A Place to Come Home To” to When the Hero Comes Home, edited by Ed Greenwood and Gabrielle Harbowy, forthcoming in trade paperback and ebook from Dragonmoon Press in August of 2011.
Posted: 11:06 pm Mon January 31 2011 | Comments(1) |
7,800 words on Calamity of So Long a Life this weekend. This draft is running slower than usual, as I’ve observed before. I spend time touching back between the manuscript and the outline, updating both documents. My normal forward momentum on novel writing is not in play here. Rather, this is a more iterative process for me involving continuous re-reading, editing, and forward outlining of scenes/sections.
Quite a learning experience, too. I’m enjoying this, but the process challenges me. I have no real sense of how this is going, as I don’t have a first reader anymore, but I’ll sort it out.
Some WIP… Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: 6:10 am Mon January 31 2011 | Comments(2) |
Your Monday moment of zen.
San Francisco store front. © 2007, 2011, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Posted: 6:04 am Mon January 31 2011 | Comments(0) |
Readers, Writers, and Blogs — Sherwood Smith riffs on matociquala’s recent post on auctorial constructs. And in case you missed it, see also John Scalzi on this topic.
If you’re going to be in the Bay Area in early March, don’t forget to register for FOGcon
Yesterday’s call for Sunday photos has produced some pretty cool images: [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ] — Mostly on the LJ side of the blog. I’ll leave it open another day or so for stragglers, then post a roundup and pick my favorite(s).
More on railcar dumpers — 100+ year old film clip of one in operation. (Via mapescapacity.)
App Turns iPhone into a Smarter Camera — Hmm. Computational photography.
Ignosticism — Once again, tongodeon is all about the epistemology. This one made me think.
Fox Tries To Debunk Global Warming, Fails Miserably — This just in: conservatives wrong on major issue, confuse ideology with facts. Equally shocking, sun rises in east.
?otD: Is it “turn up the heat” or “turn down the heat”?
Posted: 6:03 am Mon January 31 2011 | Comments(0) |
It’s Sunday. Go play. That’s what I’m going to do. That, and work on Sunspin.
However, when you go play, take photos. Post a photo here of something fun and interesting from today, Sunday, January 30th. The one(s) I like the best — funny, striking, cool, artistic, whatever — I’ll use in my daily moment of zen series, plus I’ll send you a free book or two.
Not exactly a contest. More like group art. Grab your camera. Go. Stop reading this. Bye.
ETA: For those longitudinally-based chrononauts on the far side of the world or whatever, I shan’t be strict about the date thing. I just mean now-ish as opposed to a-while-ago-ish.
Posted: 7:59 am Sun January 30 2011 | Comments(12) |
Your Sunday moment of zen.
San Francisco mural. © 2007, 2011, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Posted: 7:56 am Sun January 30 2011 | Comments(1) |
A reader reviews The Solaris Book of New Fantasy — Including a positive but mixed reaction to my short story, “A Man Falls”.
Van Gogh’s Color Schemes Served as Pie Charts — Art guru James Gurney with a curious way of looking at paintings. I suppose this would be not unlike doing a wordle of an author’s stories.
Gibbous Europa — Another striking image from APOD, plus the new-to-me term “hydrobot“.
The Last Victorian Leviathan Steam Ship — An older Dark Roasted Blend piece on the Great Eastern. Your steam has been punk’d.
Mumbling While Cairo Burns — Scrivener’s Error with some interesting thoughts on Mubarak, Egypt, and the transitions of democracy.
Egypt’s Class Conflict — Juan Cole on the power structures in Egypt, with a good dose of recent Egyptian history for those wishing to get caught up.
?otD: Red law or blue law?
Posted: 7:54 am Sun January 30 2011 | Comments(1) |
Yesterday was freakishly productive. I worked a full day of Day Jobbery, wrote 4,000 words on Calamity of So Long a Life, proofed short story galleys, signed 1,000 sig sheets and mailed them back out, watched half of an episode of season two of Foyle’s War, went out in Old Town for a few hours to drink and hang out with friends at the retro arcade in Ground Kontrol, and managed to finish it all off with a top-down moonlight cruise in the Genre car with Pink Floyd blasting. Oh, and my dishwasher flooded, so I mopped the kitchen. Also did three loads of laundry.
This morning I am going to walk up and down Mt. Tabor with another friend, then spend the rest of the day writing, vegging and watching more of Foyle’s War.
Busy much?
Also, at some point I am going to need to scrounge up the series DVDs of Babylon 5. My local video store does not have them, and I don’t feel like paying ~$300 to buy something I’ll probably only ever watch once. (And no, I do not have Netflix or Netflix streaming, either one.)
Posted: 7:47 am Sat January 29 2011 | Comments(5) |
Your Saturday moment of zen.
San Francisco multiculturalism. © 2007, 2011, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Posted: 7:40 am Sat January 29 2011 | Comments(0) |
The Race for the Future — Adrienne Kress on ebooks versus paper. Both funny and thought-provoking.
Leave the libraries alone. You don’t understand their value. — First, you’d have to be someone who reads. (Via @lilithsaintcrow.)
Opportunity at Santa Maria Crater — APOD wins the Internets again.
The Fate of the Kilo Weighs Heavily on the Minds of Metrologists —
Law and the Multiverse: Superheroes, supervillains, and the law — A law blog for those so inclined. (Nicked from comments on the LJ of James Nicoll.)
Ayn Rand and the VIP-DIPers — The founder of Objectivism took advantage of Social Security and Medicare. More conservative this-is-right-for-me-but-not-for-thee-ism. I love the smell of principled consistency in the morning. (Ultimately via @MarkWaid.)
Don’t Know Much About History — Is Michele Bachmann the new Sarah Palin? I’d ask what was wrong with the old Sarah Palin, but that question answers itself.
How the Right and Left View America — Put more simply, moral clarity versus nuance. As an exercise for the reader, which position requires careful thought to maintain, and which position provides comforting certainty?
Why History Matters — Linda Chavez reports in from OppositeWorld, saying, There is no question that a double standard exists — the media is much quicker to draw attention to conservatives’ faux pas than to liberals’. If only this were true, we never would have had the Bush 43 administration in the first place, and a lot of people would be in jail today who are walking free on the $50,000-per-gig speaker circuit. I get that it’s real important to Republicans to feel victimized by the national discourse they’ve controlled for the past 20+ years, that’s how they keep their voting base inspired, but this is just silly. Conservatism: where you get to invent your own facts!
Rachel Maddow: In America Today, Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower Would Be Bernie Sanders in the U.S. Senate — But the whole of American politics has shifted so far to the right in the last 50 years that what used to be thought of as conservative, what used to be thought of as a conservative position, is now considered to be off-the-charts lefty. I’ve been saying for years that the greatest victory of the Reagan-era GOP was shifting the American political center far to the right.
?otD: Buy partisan much?
Posted: 7:38 am Sat January 29 2011 | Comments(0) |